It should have been a “Have you left no sense of decency?” moment. Instead the leadership of America’s most elite universities (I wouldn’t have been allowed to set foot with my lazy ass high school grades) got rolled by the idiot right-winger Elise Stefanik.
“There will be tectonic consequences of this hearing, and it will be an earthquake in higher education,” Stefanik gloated.
Yesterday, embattled U Penn president Liz Magill resigned.
Stefanik pulled this coup by staging confrontations in a way that ensured the creation of viral moments. These seemed to show academics refusing to denounce speech calling for genocide. Of course, the university presidents were rightly pointing out that gutting the free speech rights of their students over contested slogans is unwise. OK but sorry have you ever met a demagogue? I guess not at the Harvard holiday party. It’s almost as if demogogues care less about the truth than their political agenda. The university presidents should have come prepared with “have you no decency, sir?” level talking points, not “it depends.” The impact on elite higher education will be tragic. Look at Florida under DeSantis. That grimy little bug person will never be President, which is evidence of the existence of God, but man, is he destroying higher ed in Florida. I interviewed a criminal justice professor in Florida who is legally not allowed to talk about race. (He had the right attitude, which is “they can go fuck themselves.”)
Stefanik just today had another coup, this time against Harvard’s president Claudine Gay. Someone inside Harvard has leaked a memo from Gay.
“If Harvard stands by her now that this document is public, Harvard is finished,’ huffed erstwhile free speech crusader Christina Hoff Summers on Twitter. I braced for it. Maybe Gay had like posed with a machine gun and “kill whitey” sign when she herself was a college sophomore.
No it’s a totally tepid memo from 2020 celebrating the increased awareness of criminal justice and racial equity, as well as a tepid call for diversity hires. I guess I too must part ways with the elite institution of which I am president.
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Perhaps as a sort of national denial about the mass atrocities we’re committing in Gaza (or an utter indifference to them), popular culture has decided that what college kids say is the defining crisis of our time.
I hate-watch “Real Time with Bill Maher” and he just like straight up says things like “The college kids love Hamas.” He uses “Hamas” and “Palestinians” interchangeably. Whatever guest he has on smirks along about how the college kids will shoot you if you’re not a trans Black lesbian asexual indigenous poly queer—but are totally cool with anti-Semitism.
The thing that’s really crazy is that there have actually been very few documented incidents of anti-Semitic speech, much less violent action, at elite universities. I’m sorry “from the river to the sea” is not “Jews will not replace us.” I myself, would not use it because of all the baggage. But is it more likely that college sophomores were drawn to the slogan because they want to wipe Israelis off the face of the earth? Or that it’s a fucking slogan that rhymes? Do I think tearing down the posters was smart? No— but can we agree that getting doxed, blasted on right-wing media, and having your NYU scholarship pulled is enough punishment for an 18-year-old for tearing down a poster?
But if you consume a certain kind of popular culture—ranging, say, from Maher’s show to The New York Times—you’d think Harvard students were lobbing Molotov cocktails at their Jewish peers. This neat rhetorical trick is pulled off with shameless obfuscation. It will keep media scholars busy for a long time (if media studies departments still exist in 4 years).
Take this New York Times story, an accounting of the confrontation between Stefanik and Magill (again, the congressional equivalent of a video game K.O. I hate how bad academics are at politics).
“As Fury Erupts Over Campus Antisemitism, Conservatives Seize the Moment” The New York Times announces. This, by the way, is an article in a special category called “anti-Semitism on US campuses.”
The validation [conservatives] have sought seemed to finally arrive this fall, as campuses convulsed with protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and hostile, sometimes violent, rhetoric toward Jews. It came to a head last week on Capitol Hill, as the presidents of three elite universities struggled to answer a question about whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate school rules, and Republicans asserted that outbreaks of campus antisemitism were a symptom of the radical ideas they had long warned about. On Saturday, amid the fallout, one of those presidents, M. Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned.
“What I’m describing is a grave danger inherent in assenting to the race-based ideology of the radical left,” said Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, at the hearing, adding, “Institutional antisemitism and hate are among the poison fruits of your institution’s cultures.”
You can read this story backwards and forwards 100 times and not find a single incident of anti-semitic speech by leftists on campus. What you do find in the story is a reference to “replacement” theory, the right-wing belief that liberals, including Jews, are puppeteering the replacement of white Americans with immigrants to weaken the Great White Race (call me about your superior culture when you stop dying of obesity and fentanyl).
There are vague references to celebration of Hamas, which a few boneheads did — then apologized for — before the details of the attack were widely known. But the way the story is written suggests, as a given, not only that virulent anti-semitism seethes at America’s elite universities but that it creates a physically dangerous environment for Jewish students.
First of all, I think that is profoundly unfair to Jewish students. Terrorizing people (a generation with widespread anxiety disorders, to boot) is one of the most unethical things you can do. You need fear to stay safe, yes, but in the absence of actual danger fear becomes life-ruining anxiety.
And it is insane—the stuff of catastrophic social panics, like YES, McCarthyism—to stamp out speech so aggressively. Magill’s troubles started before the October attack, when she allowed a Palestinian Writes festival to take place on campus.
Instead of apologizing as a horrid campaign of donors bled out the University, the fancy academic should have followed the route of the Florida criminal justice prof and said, “Go fuck yourselves.”
This is probably a cop-out. But while everyone was freaking out about wokeness killing free speech in the back of my mind I was always like "The problem..... is ... free will ... employyyyment!" I was .... 25 yrs old when I huddled with another female employee at the "progressive" journalism outlet that had a "crying room" for women when another woman was like, "CA has free will employment. This creep we work for can fire us at any time for any reason."
It is long past time we stop referring to Harvard/Yale/Stanford/etc as "elite" universities. They have no claim to the title, unless you're one who is obsessed with money and power.