As you probably heard, Elizabeth Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, has now resigned over the antisemitism Q&A backlash. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) has responded by saying, “One down. Two to go,” referring to the presidents of Harvard and MIT who were also there that day for the questioning. This is one of those viral public episodes that we are all generally stupider for having been in any proximity to. No one has acquitted themselves well here. At least we now have the bad people clarifying who they are.
I want to just share a few thoughts on this topic in no particular order.
- I don’t know all the details. But this episode didn’t come in a vacuum for Magill. There had been a series of antisemitism vs Islamophobia-type dustups at Penn of late. And the general impression was that she had managed to offend or at least not satisfy either side with her responses. That’s not passing any judgement on her. It’s just noting that her position was likely already tenuous. This likely is the final straw in her case. That doesn’t mean it’s fair or that it was deserved. It’s just context for understanding what happened and why, at least based on what I know now, I don’t think we shouldn’t be expecting the same at the other two schools.
- These episodes are good reminders that lots of things can be true at once. There is a wave of antisemitism in the country right now. It’s an issue on campuses. I do not think the three presidents’ restrained, bureaucratic responses to Stefanik’s question signaled any tolerance of antisemitism, let alone for the genocide of Jews. But their inability to answer clearly was tied, in part, to a blindness to antisemitism in the social justice framework regnant at many universities. But what we’re seeing right now is not about antisemitism. This is an openly political attack on elite higher education, one of the easiest gambits in the right-wing populist playbook. It abuses and cheapens a serious issue to use it as a cudgel to score political and culture war points. These people do not give two fucks about antisemitism. Or if they do, they must not think it’s a big problem at the moment or they wouldn’t be playing games with it like this.
- Bill Ackman is another of those billionaire hedge funders who keep popping up in our politics. Like a minute ago he was a big player on the “free speech” crusade. He’s managed to turn on a dime to become the chief cheerleader for blackballing college students who go to the wrong campus protest. He was a rabblerouser pushing for Magill’s firing. Along the way, and presumably because he’s a foe of prejudice of every sort, he made a crudely racist remark about Harvard President Claudine Gay, calling her a “DEI” hire. Last night he tweeted that he’d make a deal with MIT: If they’d can their president he wouldn’t send them a public letter too, as he had with Harvard. The guy’s just a comically arrogant punk. All his nonsense is pure noise. But he’s a reminder that the only un-cancelable group in our society is billionaires.
- Having defended elite higher education, let me step back to note that the world is spinning apart at the moment. There are two big wars raging at the fraying seams of the global state system. The world generally seems to be coming undone. Students upset about words at some of the safest and most expensive schools in the world — and adults on the outside upset on their behalf — should not be our top national concern. Over the weekend in New York City two men accidentally bumped into each other. One of the two men reacted by saying, “Fucking Jew!” and punched the other man in the face. The 66-year-old Jewish man was injured but declined medical attention. A couple days earlier a man fired off a shotgun outside a synagogue in Albany to cries of “Free Palestine!” These are parts of a wave of antisemitic incidents in New York City in the last two months. We don’t need to resort to stereotypes about pampered rich kids at fancy schools to appreciate that incidents like these happening to ordinary people and involving physical violence are more pressing matters of public concern than debates over permissible speech at a few universities. They’re all important. But let’s get the balance right.
- The Times reported over the weekend that Magill and Harvard President Claudine Gay were both prepped for their testimony by teams from the powerhouse law firm of WilmerHale. If you’re going to appear before Congress don’t work with WilmerHale. These teams are not, or at least are not supposed to be, made up of lawyers only. They also include communications professionals. But the imprint of lawyers was certainly the dominant one in the eventual testimony. That’s a particular failure since these presidents weren’t actually facing legal jeopardy. There is an aspect of this however that I have not seen much discussed. Each of these three presidents seemed remarkably out of touch with contemporary American politics. Rep. Stefanik led all three into a trap. Ideally their preparation should have better prepared them for that. But this was perhaps the most predictable trap one could imagine in the current political moment. Prep shouldn’t have been necessary to see it coming. Being insulated from the storm and stress of the political moment may be a virtue in a math or english professor. But in a university president it’s not. These are public and inherently political positions. There’s no particular takeaway to this observation. But it’s a key one.
- The last two months in the United States has seen more antisemitic incidents, mostly vandalism and threats but in some cases of low-level violence like the incident described above, than at any time in decades. It is my strong impression, though I haven’t done any quantitive analysis, that there have been more instances of vandalism — like swastikas on synagogues — than analogous Islamophobic incidents. But during this period one Palestinian boy was murdered and three Palestinians college students were shot — one apparently suffering permanent paralysis — in what police strongly believe were hate crimes. I’ve heard some people say the press hasn’t paid attention to these cases. I don’t think that’s true. But I’m certain that if this had been a murdered Jewish boy and three Jewish college students shot the public response would have been much greater. Deafening really.
- Because Jews and a population of predominantly Arab Muslims are in violent conflict in Israel/Palestine people tend to place antisemitism and Islamophobia in a kind of perverse competition. One can’t be mentioned without shortchanging the other. The last two months have also been reminders of the often platitudinous nature of the rhetoric of “allyship” in the progressive world. Two groups can both legitimately be targets of discrimination and menace and yet not be allies, at least not always. And not simply because of mystification or false consciousness but because real interests are in conflict. Arab-Americans and Muslim Americans are currently experiencing a white hot anger at the Biden administration over its support for Israel in Gaza, a fact that is developing into a real challenge to Biden’s reelection prospects. Meanwhile many Jews have experienced the last two months as one big nationwide trust fall in which their putative allies let them fall flat on their backs at their moment of peak vulnerability. The world isn’t a monochrome of victims and victimizers. In the real world people are often victims and victimizers at once, both individuals and communities. And yet with all this, regardless of how much their interests can be set at odds, Jews and Muslim-Americans and/or Arab-Americans are top targets whenever right-wing populist and authoritarian politicians get power. And the current political moment, with the chaos the Israel-Hamas war is sowing in the Democratic coalition, is bringing that prospect significantly closer.