The Briefing Room
General Category => Health/Education => Topic started by: mystery-ak on December 11, 2023, 07:24:22 pm
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650+ Harvard Faculty Support University President Claudine Gay After Disastrous Antisemitism Hearing
Amy Furr 11 Dec 2023
More than 650 Harvard faculty members signed a letter urging leadership not to fire university president Claudine Gay after her testimony at a congressional hearing regarding antisemitism.
The letter was written and addressed to the Harvard Corporation after blowback and calls for Gay to resign following her testimony on Tuesday, the Harvard Crimson reported Sunday.
The report said:
Addressing the Corporation, they wrote they “urge you in the strongest possible terms to defend the independence of the university and to resist political pressures that are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom, including calls for the removal of President Claudine Gay.”
“The critical work of defending a culture of free inquiry in our diverse community cannot proceed if we let its shape be dictated by outside forces,” they added.
more
https://www.breitbart.com/education/2023/12/11/650-harvard-faculty-support-university-president-claudine-gay-after-disastrous-antisemitism-hearing/
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Let's see what Harvard's donors' money will have to say.
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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 (https://www.city-journal.org/article/right-deed-wrong-reason)