Heather Mac Donald
@HMDatMI
Conservatives are missing the real scandal in the congressional testimony from the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT.
It isn’t their inability to condemn calls for genocide against Jews: it is their outrageous double standard on academic freedom and protected speech.
1:55 PM · Dec 11, 2023
Heather Mac Donald
Right Deed, Wrong Reason
The firing of Penn president Liz Magill, along with the embattled status of her peers at MIT and Harvard, owes to an irony: they are being condemned not for their many abuses of free speech but for their one correct articulation of it.
Dec 11 2023
Liz Magill was forced to resign Saturday as president of the University of Pennsylvania—by all indications because, at a congressional hearing, she could not bring herself to declare that calls for the genocide of Jews are punishable speech. She would more justly have lost her job for being a bald-faced hypocrite when it comes to campus free expression. The future of higher education depends on which of these motives governs such decisions in the future.
Magill was part of a triumvirate of college presidents who testified before a House committee last week. Magill, Harvard president Claudine Gay, and MIT president Sally Kornbluth had been called to discuss the anti-Israel hatred embroiling their universities since the October 7 terror attacks on Israel. To call their performance robotic would insult robots. When asked a repeated question after their first evasion did not satisfy the questioner, these intellectual role models repeated their first evasion verbatim, maybe adding a cryptic non sequitur. ...
In other words, though Penn had heretofore chosen to abide by constitutional norms (though as a private institution, it was not mandated to do so), it would now put those norms aside to ensure that students feel “safe.”
The presidents’ refusal to declare hypothetical calls for the genocide of Jews punishable conduct has been portrayed as the greatest scandal of the hearing. It was not.
The real scandal was the presidents’ duplicity in citing a “commitment to free expression” as the reason why they needed to give “wide berth to . . . views that are objectionable,” as Gay put it. ...
Read entire article at City Journal