A lot of the fracas around Presidentgate, when Republican members of Congress questioned—some might say bullied—the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn about their speech policies, centered on how the Presidents answered questions about hypothetical calls for the genocide of Jews. Their answers ultimately led to the resignation of Penn President Liz Magill as well as of the head of Penn’s Board of Trustees. Harvard’s President Claudine Gay squeaked through after scrutiny by the university’s board of Overseers. It was after Magill walked back her “it depends” answer, and issued a video calling for censorship of calls for genocide, that I decided that she should go—and she did. In my view, nobody should run a University who favors serious curbs on the First Amendment.
Much of the arguments then and now involved whether calls for genocide of the Jews should be permitted—permitted under both the universities’ speech codes and, I suppose, the First Amendment. I don’t know about the speech codes of those three schools, which, according to the Presidents, largely do conform to the courts’ interpretation of the First Amendment. And, as I said at the time, using the First Amendment standard one would have to answer the question, “Do your speech codes prohibit calling for the genocide of Jews?” by saying “it depends.” That is the correct answer, but the Republican bullies didn’t like it, yelling and demanding a “yes or no” answer. But such an answer isn’t feasible for many First Amendment questions, which often do depend on how and when speech is uttered.
The problem in Congress, I’ve added, came not from these correct answers (though Magill retracted hers, which was a big mistake), but from the arrant hypocrisy exercised by these schools, so that minor infractions of speech were punished while calls for genocide of the Jews—at least in the “river to the sea” mantra—were fine. It doesn’t look good to suddenly adopt strict First-Amendment principles right at the time when they involve criticism of Jews.
Also acceptable would be more explicit calls for genocide—under most circumstances. My solution (and Steve Pinker’s) was to enact both a Chicago-style First Amendment speech code and a policy of institutional neutrality. (Steve had three other suggestions, too.)
I was glad to see, then, that the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) laid out the legal issues behind calls for genocide on campus, and concluded, as you can see below, that yes, most calls for genocide are protected speech under the First Amendment. The exceptions are things that you’ll already know if you’re a free-speech maven.
Click to read (or listen). The piece is by Aaron Terr, FIRE’s director of public advocacy, and Matthew Harwood, FIRE’s vice president of communications. I’m certain that they consulted with FIRE’s legal experts as well, so I’d take this as a pretty definitive view.
Excerpts from the short article are indented, and my own text is flush left.
FIRE agrees that the issue at the hearings was not free speech, but double standards, and that Magill abandoned free speech entirely in her apologia (bolding and headings are mine, FIRE’s words are indented):
Many of those pressuring universities to punish anti-Semitic speech are rightly calling out these institutions for having double standards — policing microaggressions while letting enthusiastic support for Hamas go unpunished. They’ve correctly identified the problem, but are pursuing the wrong solution. The right solution is to eliminate all speech codes and protect free speech consistently — not to censor consistently.
Nonetheless, Magill has chosen to open the door to more censorship — and it’s a decision that will reverberate across our nation’s campuses and have consequences for the very Jewish students and faculty she rightly wants to protect in this turbulent moment. While it may not be intuitive at first blush, there are good reasons why both the First Amendment and most colleges’ free speech promises generally protect even “calls for genocide.”
What does the First Amendment allow about this issue?
Harvard, Penn, and MIT are private institutions, but they commit — on paper, though often not in practice — to protecting free speech, so their students and faculty reasonably expect to benefit from First Amendment standards.
And the First Amendment protects advocacy of violence, so long as it doesn’t cross the line into unprotected conduct or speech like incitement or true threats. These narrow, well-defined exceptions protect individuals from immediate threats to their physical safety, without risking a widespread crackdown on dissenting or unpopular speech.
The Supreme Court defined incitement in the landmark case of Brandenburg v. Ohio. The justices held that the First Amendment protected speech at a Ku Klux Klan rally — complete with a burning cross — where armed Klansmen used slurs against black and Jewish people, called for “revengeance” if the government “continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race,” and announced a march on Congress on the Fourth of July.
Ergo, the Presidents were correct in saying that some time—indeed, most of the time, as you see below—it’s okay under the First Amendment not just to imply genocide (“from the river to the sea. . “) but to explicitly call for genocide. You can read more about Branderburg v. Ohio here, a case that set out the limits on calls for violence.
What legal curbs are there on calls for violence? There are a few, but as far as I know none of the campus calls for violence, implicit or explicit, have crossed these boundaries.
The Court made clear that speech promoting unlawful action loses First Amendment protection only if it is directed to and likely to produce imminent lawless action. That’s a necessarily high bar, designed to protect a great deal of charged political expression by capturing only that speech that is all but inseparable from the unlawful action that directly follows it. Quoting an earlier decision, the Court reiterated that “mere abstract teaching . . . of the moral propriety or even moral necessity for a resort to force and violence, is not the same as preparing a group for violent action and steeling it to such action.”
The First Amendment also makes an exception for true threats — statements that communicate to another person or group a serious expression of intent to cause them unlawful physical harm.
Advocacy of genocide or violence remains protected speech, unless it meets one of these exceptions in the particular circumstances in which it’s uttered. So, the First Amendment would generally protect, for example, students peacefully marching across the quad chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” even if the chant were interpreted as supporting the ethnic cleansing or genocide of Israelis.
But as FIRE’s Legal Director Will Creeley recently explained, if the slogan were “directed at a specific Jewish student by a student or group moving threateningly towards him, during a protest that has turned violent and unstable, it may arguably constitute a true threat.” Moreover, “a campus speaker’s exhortations to a willing audience to attack a passerby might lawfully face punishment as incitement.”
I’ve seen none of these violations so far, but we now have a list the exceptions that fell under the “it depends” answers of the three university presidents. And there’s one more form of calls for genocide that is not protected speech—speech that amounts to harassment. Bolding is mine:
Whether a call for genocide amounts to harassment also depends on context. Harassment is a pattern of unwanted behavior targeted at specific individuals, which may or may not include speech. Under the Supreme Court’s standard for discriminatory harassment in the educational context, the conduct must be targeted, unwelcome, and “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit.” The Department of Education has emphasized that harassment “must include something beyond the mere expression of views, words, symbols or thoughts that some person finds offensive.”
But to be clear: Calling for genocide or violence could rise to the level of harassment. For example, if students repeatedly gathered outside a Jewish student’s dorm room and loudly called for Israel to be wiped off the map, that would almost certainly satisfy the Supreme Court’s standard. The issue is not so much the content of the speech — it’s the targeted, extreme, repetitive, unwanted nature of it, which crosses the line into harassing conduct.
Some of my colleagues at the University of Chicago still object to calls for genocide of the Jews that are considered protected speech under the criteria above. “What,” they ask, “do calls for genocide really accomplish?” This is a question asked and answered by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty (a must-read that you can read for free here). FIRE gives another answer: the “slippery slope” one, which I find reasonable. Another one is the “outing the baddies” answer: allowing people to utter even detestable speech enables you to identify those who hold odious views, people who could not be identified were they ordered to keep silent. Finally, there’s also the “sharpen your arguments” answer: you can only formulate your best response to such hatred if you encounter it in its most blatant and convincingly expressed form. The article explains:
But why protect even calls for genocide?
It’s completely understandable for people to pose this question. After all, the vast majority of us agree that genocide is evil and horrific. But most everyone also agrees in the abstract that “hate” is bad. While a ban on advocating genocide or mass killing may be somewhat more specific than a general ban on “hate speech,” it ultimately suffers from the same problems of vagueness and subjectivity.
As we’ve seen in the debate over the Israel-Hamas war, people can’t even agree on what constitutes genocide or advocacy of genocide. (It’s thankfully rare for someone to say explicitly, “We should murder all the Jews.”) When questioning the college presidents, Rep. Elise Stefanik equated calls for “intifada” with advocating genocide, but others say the term merely refers to a mass uprising seeking liberation from Israel. Meanwhile, many claim Israel’s invasion of Gaza, which has killed of thousands of civilians, is a genocide, while Israel’s supporters call it self-defense.
The right to engage in any of this speech would be subject to the whims and biases of whoever happens to be enforcing the ban on “genocide” advocacy. And the result would be stunted debate and discussion about the Israel-Hamas war and other highly consequential geopolitical conflicts.
Indeed. As someone pointed out, the Sixties claim that “violence is speech” has now morphed into the claim that “speech is violence”, and there aren’t many controversial issues I can think of that can’t be characterized as “hate speech”—even as hateful as calls for genocide of the Jews. And who shall be the arbiter of what speech is to be banned? That was a salient point raised by both Mill and Hitchens. After all, aren’t calls to abolish affirmative action hateful to minorities, and a form of bigotry?
But won’t calls for genocide of the Jews create a campus climate of intimidation? Is it not antisemitic action? No, I don’t think so—not so long as those calls are not used to promote imminent lawless violence (no, action a few days later doesn’t count); don’t constitute harassment against individuals; or don’t create such a climate of hostility on campus that students can’t participate in the proper mission of a university: teaching, learning, and doing research. I haven’t yet come across an example on this campus, or on other campuses, involving calls for genocide that rise to this impermissible level. But I hasten to add that at other schools there are indeed lawsuits pending arguing that various speech and actions by universities, or failure to act when a climate of hostility is in place, have created an atmosphere of antisemitism that impedes learning. Two examples are suits against the University of Pennsylvania or the University of California.
I’m not saying, then, that Universities cannot be complicit in creating a campus climate that deprives students of educational opportunities. What I’m saying is that I’m unaware that any of that complicity involves calls for genocide of the Jews—this topic of this post. As always, I believe that all universities should have a code of conduct like ours: one that conforms to the First Amendment as the courts have interpreted it. So yes, if a group of, say, Students for Justice in Palestine were to call for genocide of the Jews without transgressing the legal boundaries noted above, that would be okay by me. Likewise for calls for genocide against Palestinians or African-Americans. I find such speech reprehensible and hateful, but that’s not the issue.
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FIRE has spread its message of free speech further, and emailed a list of other op-eds that its members wrote about the “genocide” issue. What’s below is from an announcement they sent out today:
Critics were right to blast university presidents for their hypocritical defenses of free speech. But the solution to their moral cowardice isn’t censorship — it’s free speech.We took our message everywhere: TV, radio, and our nation’s biggest newspapers. Here’s a taste of our most prominent hits:
- HBO: FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff appeared on “Real Time with Bill Maher” to discuss his and Rikki Schlott’s new book, “The Canceling of the American Mind.” But with the events in Congress last week, the conversation took many turns. Watch the interview here.
- CNN: Executive Vice President Nico Perrino was in-studio with Jake Tapper for this insightful segment on defending free speech under the most difficult of circumstances. Then, Director of Campus Rights Advocacy Alex Morey provided expert testimony for this report on why context matters when determining what’s protected (and unprotected) speech.
- The LA Times: Legal Director Will Creeley wrote a great op-ed with UCLA Law’s Eugene Volokh on why neither Congress nor college presidents should police free speech on campus.
- The Boston Globe: Nico’s second big hit of the week is an op-ed covering why colleges should not use this moment to usher in a new era of restrictive speech codes.
- The New York Post: Senior Writer and Editor Angel Eduardo and Director of Engagement and Mobilization Connor Murnane discuss Harvard’s history of squelching free speech.
- X, formerly known as Twitter: Greg and Nico hosted a wide-ranging X Space conversation that covered the current campus crisis and fielded questions from the public. You can listen to the replay here.
I believe that schools should be neutral on political issues and that calls for genocide are free speech. At the same time, though, calls for genocide are so extreme–perhaps as extreme as can be–that I feel university presidents should condemn them and argue that they have no place at an educational institution, since they are, above all, ignorant.
But official condemnation violates political neutrality. And if you allow condemnation of that, where does one draw the line?
I am for free speech and expression, and strongly support viewpoint diversity on campuses. However, if university presidents and universities can’t condemn calls for genocide, I feel they have no moral compass and I think that’s wrong. I don’t think condemning genocide is political.
I am against absolutist stances in about any area. To me, absolutism is equated with zealotry.
They can condemn it personally, but not officially. (My own view is because of the confusion between official and personal statements, high university officials, like newspaper reporters, should not express any personal opinions, but keep it to themselves. I guess you are asserting that the President of the University of Chicago has no moral compass.
I think you are wrong, and claiming that a qualified First Amendment stand is “absolutist” is also wrong. It’s not absolutist, for crying out loud (did you read my piece?) and so it’s not zealotry.
This is a good piece that everyone should read. Universities should adopt the First Amendment concept of free speech. This would simplify things dramatically, as they would no longer have dueling standards. Nor would they need to keep revisiting the meaning of their own standards. Use the First Amendment. The line between protected speech and criminal incitement has been determined by the courts. If an incident without precedent arises, the courts will act again and will adjust the line accordingly.
I deeply sympathize with those who are afraid because of this horrible antisemitic speech. Who is not moved by this video of a distraught student at the University of Washington: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zwK4-X0Czk? Jews everywhere are afraid and are hiding their Jewishness.
But the remedy for horrible, defamatory, genocidal—but entirely legal—speech is better speech by people with better minds and better hearts. Sadly, since universities have been overtaken by far left authoritarians, people with better minds and better hearts are nowhere to be found. Professors and students (individuals, not department heads) need to step forward and be counted. Yours are the better minds we’re waiting for.
It is true that free speech should be countered with more free speech. But the fact is that there is no free speech if it is not aimed at Jews. Substitute blacks or transgender people or any other group and you get fired. Remember the Oberlin Hockey coach, etc. Or Dorian Abbott. The problem is the hypocrisy of the University Presidents.
Does anybody believe DEI is going away?
I agree with Barry on the double standard. Sure, you can say reprehensible things but if they’re said about certain groups you may very well lose your job. I feel speech is more restricted today than at any time in my life.
To our host, thank you for including the link to Hitchen’s speech on the matter. “Pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass”. Oh, how I miss the Hitch
In a similar vein . . .
https://ifunny.co/picture/how-do-you-sleep-at-night-knowing-that-there-are-ApTxQ7QY6
Absolutely superb analysis and post, Prof. Coyne. Thank you!
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Yes, universal adoption of the Kalvern principles at colleges is the only viable way to avoid the slippery slope problem of semantics and the subjectivity of even what might constitute genocidal speech. I also agree that it’s very helpful to know who your enemies are by allowing them to tell you rather than trying to censor them into anonymity. That seems to be more of a tactically useful and pragmatic argument than one based on principle but so be it.
On a related matter, Senator Tom Cotton, who evidently has a sense of humor, has introduced a bill described (by Inside Higher Ed) as follows:
“Republican senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas wants to levy a 6 percent tax on 10 universities’ endowments to support Israel and Ukraine and fund border security efforts. The one-time tax, proposed Tuesday as part of the Woke Endowment Security Tax Act, would raise about $15.47 billion, according to a news release from Cotton’s office.
According to the release, the 10 universities subject to the tax would be: Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Stanford University, Washington University in St. Louis and Yale University.”
The Intaxifada
I’m spending one of my precious comment allotment to Like this.
Not that it matters but in case you want to know:
Typo in paragraph 1: Claudia for Claudine
Typo in paragraph 4: p9licy
Substantively, I think the three presidents failed by not first acknowledging their previous inconsistencies on issuing statements. Had they first acknowledged that they haven’t been neutral in the past but had realized due to the war, that institutional neutrality is the wisest policy, they then could’ve said it’s not their business to make pronouncements unless the calls are directed at individuals on campus or are immediate calls for imminent violence. In other words, “it depends.” It’s that they didn’t first come clean on what everybody knows: the bar is pretty low for condemning calls for violence against other groups (e.g., I don’t think anybody believes calls to lynch all blacks would be permitted on most any campus, certainly not theirs).
Yes, they were bullied, not unlike Rufo’s egomaniacal, authoritarian, letter-of-the law demands that Claudine be severely berated and punished for plagiarism. Yes, she did it, and some of the instances rise about minor, in my opinion. But the public theatrics and gottchas are contrary to the spirit of learning, high discourse, and dignity, which I believe to be bedrocks of professional pride in one’s work and field. It’s the authoritarian demand for punishment and shaming that strikes me as similar to Congress’s bullying of the presidents. Congress and Rufo have a point. They are also using force to bring the symbols of elite wokeness to their knees.
I’ve fixed the errors, thanks. By the way, I never endorsed any demands by Rufo that Gay be berated and punished, and it was my OPINION, after the Penn President walked back her statement, that she should be let go. I rarely call for a firing of anybody.
To be clear, I know you didn’t. (I was expressing my opinions as they are forming. Even though this is your “living room,” I don’t expect any interaction from you, Ceiling Cat. I use your daily writings to clarify my own thoughts by interacting with some topics and sometimes others who comment here. Thanks for your posts.)
(Part 2. OTS, it looks as if plagiarism has been detected now in 5/11 of Claudine’s papers. Even Coleman Hughes is calling it fraud:
https://x.com/coldxman/status/1735011159466475747?s=20
Personally, speaking of opinions, I’m beginning to think Claudine should resign or address this publicly, and not in legalese, in order for me to respect her as a scholar or leader of any sort. What she said the other day defending the integrity of her scholarship is insufficient. I understand pride for one’s work. But not being willing to admit errors? I know she was likely counseled not to admit anything, especially if she already had the assurance the Board would protect her (I’m speculating), and that there are much bigger things for us to worry about as a nation than her copy-and-paste errors. But I’m losing respect for her by the day. I know I’m being influenced by Rufo to some extent since he is relentless in pushing her failings. But I do expect more leadership and honesty from peers, much less leaders.
If I recall correctly, Dershowitz, in a video, recounted a story wherein Claudine told Ronald Sullivan, who had been dismissed from his post of faculty dean of Winthrop House, that deans need to be “pastoral.” Sullivan had defended Harvey Weinstein, which led to students asking for safety.
I’d imagine then that Claudine sees her own role as president as one of providing pastoral care to Harvard. But there is nothing less pastoral than lacking integrity. If my sense of what she thinks the job really is is correct, no wonder we are where we are. From the looks of it, Harvard made a huge mistake in promoting her. She really isn’t cut out for the job. But we’ll see what happens. Maybe I’m wrong.)
John McWhorter put this well (from Twitter):
“What we’re seeing is just how *ordinary* a scholar Gay has been. Her main commitment has never been to research and writing. It’s a kind of “let’s just get on with it” text-grabbing typical of . 1 newbies, 2 people less than deeply focused on writing conventions and 3 in a hurry. Scholars do it all the time, though not usually ones beyond a certain, well, gravitas. Her only 11 real papers is thus unsurprising.”
I’ve seen similar text-chunk grabbing from weaker students who aren’t really generating thoughts of their own. Anyone destined for academic success would not do it, mostly because it wouldn’t occur to them to do it that way, they’re thinking their own thoughts and that’s how they write.
Reading all this dispassionate (stuff) about violence and free speech, I wonder how many threats you all have received and how often. I wonder if you have ever experienced a physical attack or an attack displaced from you, directed at family or friends. If so, what did you do? How did you react? If the threats are continuing what do you expect in the way of protection?
What is your solution? Cite the 1st amendment and institutional neutrality, dust off your hands and walk away?
I’d like to see the level of violence drastically reduced — I don’t like living in a country where I wonder if I or my family will be alive at the end of the day. I don’t see your arguments as an effective way to curb violence. Quite the opposite.
I’ve had two death threats (reported to the FBI) and several other physical threats, not all of which I’ve publicized here. I was beat up in about 10th grade for being a Jew by a group of bullying older students. I have been harassed repeatedly by a single mentally unstable personfrom this area, who used to leave horrible messages on my phone in the middle of the night. He was reported to the cops. Good enough for you? Or do I need to be threatened more often to have credibility about writing?
The short answer is that you should be able shoot the actor but not silence the speaker.
The First Amendment doesn’t immunize people who make direct threats of violence or, obviously, who carry out violence while shouting “Allahu Akbar!”
Canada bars the inciting of hate against a definable group, the advocacy of genocide, and the promotion of antisemitism through Holocaust denial. There is no evidence that these laws have curbed actual violent crimes. All we have done is weaponized “niceness”: it’s not nice to say things like that. So we are going to put you in jail.
The unintended (or perhaps intended) consequence is that it is not clear what political speech is permitted. The Indian Residential Schools have been legally certified for propaganda purposes by our own government against our own people as genocide, as has the disturbing propensity of indigenous men to murder indigenous women been called settler genocide. So any kind of contentious speech about government indigenous policy can be (and is) condemned by partisans as advocating genocide. Saying “transwomen aren’t women” is decried by the Prime Minister as hate speech. These examples probably aren’t illegal but you might have to spend your life savings to defend yourself if the police came knocking.
This is the view from a country that does police noxious speech. Don’t go there is my advice.
I’m sympathetic to the argument Jerry makes here. But I’m not fully convinced. A university is a community of scholars that should tolerate differences of opinion and wide debate, even on ideas that people find offensive. But calling for violence against other members of that community seems to me to cross a line, even if the call for violence is in the abstract and not directed at individuals.
As Jerry explains, the American courts’ interpretation of the 1st Amendment prohibits calls for violence only if “likely to produce imminent lawless action”. That’s a fair enough test for public speech in general. It would seem reasonable to me, though, if universities adopted a somewhat stricter standard: members of that university should not call for violence against other members of that university, even in the abstract. (This standard might perhaps be justifiable by Title VI of the Civil Right Act.)
If I were a Jewish student choosing my classes for the next academic period, I would not want to take a class from a professor who was publically calling for my death. I wouldn’t want to take a class in a department that fostered a culture of exclusion and lethally-oriented rhetoric toward different student groups. First amendment and FIRE may well be right but humans who hate usually have a very hard time being fair to the types of people they loathe. And listening to them stoking hate in my classmates would be sheer torture.
The threshold for acceptable behavior at a university should be different than what is legally allowed in public spaces generally.
Civility and decorum are what allows people to engage in the free exchange of ideas. I understand that the university cannot jail someone for calling for the death of all Jews, but they ought to be able to be able to force them off campus for disruptive and disrespectful behavior.
That this rarely happens seems to me an indication that much of the staff and administration very much agree with the basic revolutionary goals of the protesters.
I also think such groups rarely try to moderate their behavior over time. Quite the opposite.
Max, do acceptable limitations on time, place, and purpose (I think they are called) already allowed in the interpretations of the First Amendment cover the differences between a university campus (indoors and out) and a guy standing on a soapbox on a public sidewalk? (Or for that matter, a gal with her own printing press.) The university is a workplace, even if it weren’t engaging in the free exchange of ideas but just buckling down to the task of writing bureaucratic regulations or building houses. A person in a workplace has certain enforceable expectations from his employer (or, in this case, teachers to whom he pays tuition) that a person walking along a sidewalk doesn’t.
So the First Amendment can’t absolutely apply to universities. As you say, they have not the state enforcement apparatus that would allow them to violate it — they can’t even confine a miscreant student to his dorm for 90 days, much less send him to jail. And in addition they have the legal obligations of all workplaces to their employees, students, and public visitors. I wonder if that’s where there is room for discussion.
(We have a couple of lawsuits pending in Canada to determine if public universities are, or aren’t, beyond the reach of Charter protections on freedom of expression. So my remarks are entirely about the American situation.)
I have limited knowledge of the law on this subject. My opinions come from having attended a university where the code of conduct was taken very seriously. It included standards of dress, which I suppose are less common than they used to be, as well as a long list of expected and prohibited behaviors.
By requesting admission to the program, one agreed to abide by the code. People who repeatedly broke the rules were ejected.
It never occurred to me or anyone else to defend a disciplinary infraction by claiming that the behavior was not illegal.
Of course, many students at the good colleges attended excellent primary or prep schools, but even those of courser origins emerged upon graduation as literate, decently mannered and well presented young people with a good basic knowledge set. You could put them right into an industrial or business workplace and expect them to quickly adapt and thrive.
That seems to me to be one of the primary useful functions of a university, and the thing that gives one’s degree value.
In principle, I would agree.
But imagine if the same question had been asked with the word “blacks” instead of “Jews”: “Is calling for the genocide of all the BLACKS acceptable?”
Imagine somebody had answered “it depends on the context”.
Imagine now the reaction of Claudine Gay.
She would have been outraged, shouting against systemic racism and white supremacy.
Double standard: a racist disgusting double standard, this is the problem.
And this is why I prefer the… how did you call them? “Republican bullies”? Yes, I prefer the Republican bullies than the woke leftists like Claudine Gay. Claudine Gay should be fired.
BTW, Claudine Gay is also behind the student admission programs in Harvard based on race (recently declared illegal by the supreme court) and the cancellation of the professor Roland Fryer
You don’t know how Claudine Gay might have answered, and you’re calling for her firing based on this hypothetical?
As for Republican bullies that you prefer, the biggest is Donald Trump. I presume you like him.
And no, the race-based admissions of Harvard has been going for some time, but Gay has been President for six months or so.