BY DANIEL A. SEGAL

The presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and MIT did a famously terrible job responding to Representative Elise Stefanik’s questions at the congressional hearing on “antisemitism on college campuses” this past December. But so far, their failure has been treated either as a case of incompetence in the realm of public relations or (whether cynically or not) as evidence that higher education and the “woke left” are soft on antisemitism. What has not been said is that the presidents’ gravest failure was something else entirely: it was that they did not fulfill—and by all evidence, did not even try to fulfill—the defining responsibility of educators and intellectuals, which is “to speak the truth and expose lies,” as Noam Chomsky wrote in his 1967 essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.”   Evading this responsibility is hardly specific to these three presidents, however; it is, very differently, a pervasive failure of senior administrators in higher education at this moment, especially at our most prestigious institutions.

As is well known by now, Stefanik repeatedly asked the presidents if “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated the code of conduct of their respective universities, citing chants like intifada as the evidentiary basis of her question. The key but controversial truth that the presidents failed to tell in responding to Stefanik goes beyond the specific, albeit important, point that intifada (translation: “uprising”) is not a call for genocide against Jews (or anyone else); the key truth the presidents would not—dared not—speak is that anti-Zionism is distinct from antisemitism. There are many ways to say this but let us insist on these two.

First: Zionism is a project of state-making, that is, of establishing a sovereign state; opposing Zionism is thus opposition to a state-making project and to the state this project has produced. But Judaism is a religion and Jews are a people; neither is a state. And criticisms of a state-making project and a state are just that, not an attack on a religion or a people. Put bluntly, the crucial truth the presidents failed to speak is this: “Representative Stefanik, you may strongly oppose both anti-Zionism and antisemitism, but it is a conceptual error to conflate them.”

Second: Zionism as a state-making project is specifically the project of making a sovereign state for Jews—and not for Jews among others but a state especially for Jews. To be fully clear here, this means a state that privileges Jews and subordinates non-Jews: a Jewish supremacist state in short. Moreover, from the moment, at the turn of the twentieth century, that the Zionist movement selected historic Palestine as the geographical site for its state, Zionism has been a project of establishing a Jewish supremacist state at the expense of Palestinians, taking their land and trampling their rights and lives. That Palestinians and their allies are anti-Zionist thus makes as much sense as the fact that Jews and their allies oppose antisemitism. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, but Zionism is anti-Palestinianism—precisely as Edward Said argued in his still urgent 1979 essay, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims.”   Put succinctly: anti-Zionism in the struggle for Palestinian freedom and equality is opposition to a state and state oppression, not to Jews or Judaism. To insist otherwise is a propaganda trick in the service of oppression.

It is these impolitic truths that the presidents failed to speak—thus ceding to Representative Stefanik the profoundly dishonest grounds of her bullying questions.

It is undoubtedly true that had any or even all of the three presidents attempted to respond as I have argued they should have—that is, as educators and intellectuals—they would have had little to no success in the context of the hearing. But this is precisely because they and their presidential peers have for years accepted rather than educated-back to the intellectually dishonest conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, making the task of doing so now a herculean one.

Take the example of Penn’s president. Back in September, Liz Magill failed to refute the baseless claims that many of the authors at the Palestine Writes Literature Festival had a track-record of antisemitic speech. She invoked academic freedom to explain why the festival would be allowed to proceed at Penn but left that defense empty of content, invoking abstract rules rather than speaking the truth and shutting down lies. The honesty and education that was needed at the hearing in December is something Magill—and other college and university presidents—would have needed to have been doing all along. By the time of the hearing, Magill and the two presidents with her were already in a terrible position for answering Stefanik’s questions and defending academic freedom. The presidential trainwreck at the hearing was, in short, long in the making and collective.

We in higher education are in a fine mess at this time in no small part because we have a cadre of presidents and senior administrators who serve power and money, rather than being able and willing to educate-back to power and money. If this seems a harsh conclusion, consider the testimony, a confession really, of one of the longest-serving college presidents in the United States, Leon Botstein of Bard College. When asked last summer by the New York Times why he (and several other presidents, including those of Harvard and MIT) had pursued Jeffrey Epstein for donations after his 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution, Botstein gave this candid response: “People do not understand what this job [of college president] is”—meaning how much it is about fundraising—adding, “you cannot pick and choose, because among the very rich is a higher percentage of unpleasant and not very attractive people.” .

Cozying up to ”not very attractive people,” inclusive of child rapists, as long as they are “the very rich,” and holding steadfast to Zionist propaganda, are alike in being job qualifications for college and university presidencies in our time. We can hardly expect that those who attain these offices on such thoroughly corrupt terms will be suited to defending academic freedom and the very mission of higher education. There is thus no good reason to blame the three presidents who testified in December. It is rather that all of them need to go—meaning the entire cadre of credentialed achievers who hold elite presidencies.

Here, two final points regarding what, as a matter of practical politics, is to be done. First, ridding our institutions of the current cohort of presidents will by no means be easy. But the increasing number of egregious administrative attacks on academic freedom and speech rights (such as these at Indiana University and this at Barnard College) provides us a crucial window of opportunity to dispatch many sitting presidents. The means to carry this out include faculty votes of “no confidence,” institutional censures by the AAUP on a timely basis, and—as escalated actions—challenging reaccreditation of our own institutions and conducting carefully crafted grade strikes.

Second, driving out patently unfit presidents will be for naught if those who are dispatched are then replaced with others of their ilk. What fundamentally is needed is broad systemic, or multifaceted, change to afford higher education substantially increased autonomy from money and power—while also rendering it newly accountable to society on a democratic basis. In terms of this urgent if daunting project of remaking higher education, replacing sitting presidents can make a significant contribution but only if we also demand that their successors be colleagues with a demonstrated track record of meeting the core responsibility of educators and intellectuals: once again, in Chomsky’s deceptively simple formulation, “to speak the truth and expose lies.”

Daniel A. Segal is Jean M. Pitzer Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and professor emeritus of history at Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges. His scholarship ranges from Jane Austen (with Richard Handler) to racial discourses to theorizing states and non-states in world history. He is a past president of the Claremont Colleges AAUP chapter, a member of the Academic Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace, and a member of the coordinating committee of TIAA-Divest!, which organizes to rid faculty retirement funds of fossil fuel investments.