BY JOHN K. WILSON
The presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT testified on Capitol Hill on December 5, 2023, at a hearing on “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism,” and the bipartisan political backlash with demands for their resignations is unprecedented in the history of higher education, including the forced resignation of Penn president Liz Magill after rich donors threatened to withhold money. Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, claimed: “The presidents of some of our most elite universities were unable to denounce calling for the genocide of Jews as antisemitic.”
None of these attacks were true, and the three presidents who testified strongly denounced antisemitism. As the AAUP chapter at Penn noted in a statement, these presidents deserve criticism, but only for their failure to speak out in defense of free speech against these political demands for censorship and the threats made to faculty and students.
A New York Times news story began: “Support for the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and M.I.T. seemed to erode quickly on Wednesday, after they appeared to evade what seemed like a rather simple question during a contentious congressional hearing: Would they discipline students calling for the genocide of Jews?”
It is a particularly odd sentence because there is no evidence of any students on these campuses chanting for “genocide of Jews.” These presidents were instead being asked to respond to a fabrication–not a hypothetical, but a false claim that uttering the words “intifada” or “from the river to the sea” is the same as calling for genocide of the Jews. Rep. Elise Stefanik actually asked, “Will admissions offers be rescinded or any disciplinary action be taken against students or applicants who say, ‘From the river to the sea’ or ‘intifada,’ advocating for the murder of Jews?”
It would be a shocking violation of free speech and academic freedom if any college president announced that certain words are forbidden on campus, such as “intifada” or “from the river to the sea.” Yet that is precisely what Stefanik demanded, and what these presidents are being condemned for failing to do.
University of Chicago professor Jerry Coyne, a harsh critic of pro-Palestinian protestors but a strong advocate of free speech, noted: “Calling for genocide of Jews, or saying stuff like ‘gas the Jews’ is, in fact, nearly always speech that is legal under the First Amendment. The only time it isn’t is when it constitutes personal harassment of someone, creates a hostile atmosphere in the workplace, or is meant to incite imminent and predictable violence.”
Harassment needs to be proven rather than presumed, and using common political slogans cannot be assumed to mean support for mass murder. Punishing political positions that someone deems to be “genocide” is incredibly dangerous to everyone’s free speech. After all, there are many people who (wrongly) claim that Israel’s attack on Gaza is “genocide” against Palestinians. So should anyone who supports the Israeli attack against Hamas be found guilty of harassment because Palestinians feel this way? That could easily happen if harassment is redefined to prohibit offensive political opinions.
The hearing was part of a larger attack on free speech. After the hearing, the House of Representatives voted 311-14 on a resolution that all anti-Zionism is antisemitism and all elected officials must fight it. In her opening statement as chair of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) declared at the hearing, “rabid antisemitism and the university are two ideas that cannot be cleaved from one another,” blaming antisemitism on “anti-racism, anti-colonialism, critical race theory, DEI, intersectionality” and claiming that “this value system taught in universities is absolutely foreign to 99 percent of Americans.”
Foxx also claimed (without any evidence) that “Harvard also, not coincidentally but causally, was ground zero for antisemitism.” And what was that cause? Foxx had complained in the immediate preceding sentence, “Even the Harvard Divinity School has a page devoted to ‘Social and Racial Justice.’” Foxx never explained how a webpage on social justice could cause “institutional antisemitism.” In reality, this webpage doesn’t even exist. If you search for “Harvard Divinity School” and “Social and Racial Justice,” you simply get a subject page with a list of news articles, including an essay by a Divinity School professor denouncing “Black antisemitism.”
According to Foxx, antisemitism was also caused by courses about the history of racism: “A prime example of this ideology at work is at Harvard where classes are taught such as ‘DPI-385: Race and Racism in the Making of the United States as a Global Power.’” That class is taught by Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard, who told me, “the history of antisemitism against Jewish Americans and Jewish immigrants in the United States is included in the course content, as part of the required reading.” In Foxx’s Orwellian delusion, a class about racism that teaches the terrible history of antisemitism in America is the cause of antisemitism.
Rep. Foxx announced that Harvard, MIT, and Penn will face a Congressional investigation with subpoenas because of the “absolutely unacceptable” responses of the presidents in the hearing. Politicians such as Rep. Steve Scalise and Rep. Stefanik demanded their immediate resignations. And this political intimidation has been effective. Penn President Liz Magill posted a video apology promising to immediately make “a serious and careful look at our policies” in order to restrict free speech.
We need to reject political demands for repression of free speech, and refute the excuse that the hypocrisy of colleges in failing to fully protect academic freedom in the past can somehow justify this wave of censorship against critics of Israel.
John K. Wilson is the author of eight books, including “Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies” and the forthcoming book, “The Attack on Academia.”
