As pressure mounted
The tension between free speech and discouraging genocide continues.
Harvard University’s president apologized as pressure mounted for the University of Pennsylvania’s president to resign over their testimony at a congressional hearing on antisemitism that critics from the White House on down say failed to show that they would stand up to antisemitism on campus.
“Their” testimony meaning Harvard’s and U Penn’s. I thought at first that was some weird random gender neutral wording but then managed to figure it out.
In an interview Thursday with The Crimson student newspaper, Harvard President Claudine Gay said she got caught up in a heated exchange at the House committee hearing and failed to properly denounce threats of violence against Jewish students.
Gay told The Crimson she was sorry, saying she “got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures.”
“What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged,” Gay said.
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Universities across the U.S. have been accused of failing to protect Jewish students amid reports of growing antisemitism following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. The three presidents were called before the committee to answer those accusations, but their lawyerly answers drew renewed blowback from opponents.
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The episode has marred Gay’s early tenure at Harvard — she became president in July — and sowed discord at the Ivy League campus. On Thursday, Rabbi David Wolpe resigned from a new committee on antisemitism created by Gay.
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Wolpe said “events on campus and the painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped.” A statement from Gay thanked Wolpe for his work, saying he helped deepen her understanding “of the unacceptable presence of antisemitism here at Harvard.”
See: Tom Lehrer’s “National Brotherhood Week.”
Maybe they were using a random gender generator?
I was just watching the video on YouTube last night. Quite a coincidental mention.
Parsing lives on.
Gay regrets she was not clever enough at the moment not to answer the question asked of her (“Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment?”) in a way that seemed more defensible.
Also, good on her press staff for stopping her before she ratcheted down the group definition any further.
Here is a link to Nick Cohen’s ‘Writing from London’ on universities, free speech and the plight of Jewish students.
https://open.substack.com/pub/nickcohen/p/playing-the-far-rights-game-academics?r=1orca&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Papito:
There are limits to what a university should be willing to intervene on. Harassment is targeted at specific groups and individuals on campus. A student who calls for bombing Israel (or Palestine for that matter) is not harassing students on campus from that lineage. and it’s reasonable for her to recognize that. She has a duty to her students, not to the world writ large.
What I could read of Nick Cohen’s perspective on the matter seems reasonable. It would be one thing if we had already been living in a system where a student calling for violence against, genocide of, or even singling out a particular group were not seen as violating harassment codes. But we’ve been living in a system where not kowtowing to claims such as whiteness is oppression, speech must be policed for microaggressions, and men in skirts are women, is adjudged a form of violence severe enough to warrant expulsion if not arrest. Saying, once these norms have been established that advocating genocide against Jews is maybe an okay kind of speech is, in that system, singling out Jews for a special lack of care. You can’t have the university get all up in arms because someone says “chairman” or “brown bag” or “webmaster,” but shrug its shoulders at “Kill all the Jews.”
Sums it up quite nicely, think.
Excellent point.
As usual I think the logic of ”punching up” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Anyone who disputes that white people are racist by virtue of existing, or that Eddie Izzard really is a ”woman”, is seen as punching down, and hence a legitimate target, whereas those who call for violence against ”TERFs” or the genocide of Jews are punching up, and therefore holding the moral high ground. And who is seen as punching up depends entirely on who shouts loudest, is able to assemble the largest mob etc. Once people have determined that it is legitimate to ”punch a Nazi”, it never takes long before the definition of ”Nazi” is changed to include anyone who disagrees with them on anything, including calls to finish what Hitler started.
The is no question that the logic chopping of the college presidents is inexcusable; but they are neither capable nor responsible for law enforcement. Incitement to murder (eg: “kill the Jews”) is a felony. Where are the police and prosecutors? [for Brits, it is both a federal felony and a felony in most states]
According to a piece in today’s Sunday Times, Magill has now resigned as president of the University of Pennsylvania.