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You’ve almost certainly now seen or heard about the congressional hearing with elite university presidents (Harvard, Penn, MIT) coldly arguing the need for context and invoking technical criteria when asked whether it would violate the university’s code of conduct to call for the extermination of Jews. The viral clip is genuinely jarring.
When I watched it I found myself asking not why are these administrators such terrible anti-Semites but how did you three possibly find yourself in this situation giving these answers?
Let’s start with some important stage-setting. First, the clip was posted by Rep. Elise Stefanik, a consistently odious and mendacious weasel who represents a district in Upstate New York. Stefanik is very much that person you’ll see melodramatically huffing and puffing in a congressional hearing demanding yes or no answers to gotcha questions that don’t have yes or no answers. And yet here … well, even for a weasel with gotcha questions, she seemed to have gotten them.
If you watch the answer from the three university presidents, each was more or less awkwardly groping toward the same response: to know whether a call for “the genocide of Jews” would violate university policy would depend on the context and more specifically whether the speech had become “conduct” and whether it was targeted at specific individuals. These are certainly valid criteria for policies on harassment and bullying. But presumably calling for the extermination of any discrete group would be inherently threatening to every member of that group and intentionally so.
So how did this happen, how did these three come up with the same catastrophically bad set of answers as Penn President Liz Magill acknowledged in an apology video released a day later? (As I wrote this, news broke that Claudine Gay, President of Harvard, also issued an apology.) I told my wife a couple days ago the exchange would make some sense if it was immediately preceded by a discussion of the role of targeting and the speech/conduct distinction in university harassment policies and then Stefanik used this as an opening for her gotcha questions. Admittedly, I hadn’t found time to go back and watch the whole hearing to see if something like this was the case. But this morning I found out that Times columnist Michele Goldberg did do this. And there was something at least somewhat like this. Here’s the relevant excerpt from Goldberg’s piece in today’s Times.
But while it might seem hard to believe that there’s any context that could make the responses of the college presidents OK, watching the whole hearing at least makes them more understandable. In the questioning before the now infamous exchange, you can see the trap Stefanik laid.
“You understand that the use of the term ‘intifada’ in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that?” she asked Gay.
Gay responded that such language was “abhorrent.” Stefanik then badgered her to admit that students chanting about intifada were calling for genocide, and asked angrily whether that was against Harvard’s code of conduct. “Will admissions offers be rescinded or any disciplinary action be taken against students or applicants who say, ‘From the river to the sea’ or ‘intifada,’ advocating for the murder of Jews?” Gay repeated that such “hateful, reckless, offensive speech is personally abhorrent to me,” but said action would be taken only “when speech crosses into conduct.”
So later in the hearing, when Stefanik again started questioning Gay, Kornbluth and Magill about whether it was permissible for students to call for the genocide of the Jews, she was referring, it seemed clear, to common pro-Palestinian rhetoric and trying to get the university presidents to commit to disciplining those who use it. Doing so would be an egregious violation of free speech. After all, even if you’re disgusted by slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” their meaning is contested in a way that, say, “Gas the Jews” is not. Finding themselves in a no-win situation, the university presidents resorted to bloodless bureaucratic contortions, and walked into a public relations disaster.
I don’t think this closes the book on broader question of double standards in a university context. The bobbled responses are related to a framework of social justice politics that isn’t inimical to Jews but simply doesn’t have an obvious place for them. But it does provide some helpful context in explaining how this messaging trainwreck came to pass.
I do think that double standard exists. But it’s a complicated one, one in which Jews and their allies simultaneously have made Anti-Semitism, labeled as such, wholly verboten and have a robust institutional network of groups aimed at identifying it and shunning it, and yet also find demonizing rhetoric about Jews evaluating on the basis of whether and what Jews might have done to deserve being demonized. Both things manage to be kind of true at the same time.
In recent years many academic institutions have adopted a ways of navigating speech questions that put the subjective experience of individuals and particular groups at the center of the question. But that framework is inherently problematic and unlimited, though coming up with “objective” standards is inherently difficult and at some level not entirely possible. There’s no question that many Jewish college students raised in a communal Jewish environment find calls for “intifada revolution” deeply and genuinely threatening. But the best situational definition of intifada refers to a violent uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Indeed, the First Intifada, which is generally dated from 1987 to 1993 mostly consisted of rock throwing and what we might call rioting. While certainly not “non-violent” it had much less violence that what came after it during Hamas’s armed campaign to derail the Oslo Accords and even more so during the much more violent terror campaigns of the Second Intifada. Most Palestinian factions decided that it would be crazy and folly to get into a contest of violence with the IDF and at first even Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad agreed to abide by these limits.
While groups like Hamas certainly use the word with a strong eliminationist meaning it is simply not the case that the term consistently or usually or mostly refers to genocide. It’s just not. Stefanik’s basic equation was and is simply false and the university presidents were maladroit enough to fall into her trap.
The standard of subjective experience is not a workable one. If we’re going to use it we should apply it consistently across the board. And there is a good deal of evidence it’s not consistently applied with respect to Jews on college campuses. But a better approach would be to reconsider the standard itself.