Last Tuesday’s congressional hearing on campus antisemitism, in which Republican lawmakers interrogated Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, and the University of Pennsylvania’s president, Elizabeth Magill, represented the appearance on the national stage of the political interference state legislatures have been bringing to bear on colleges for the last several years. (Magill has since resigned.) As is typical of congressional hearings, there was a lot histrionic grandstanding from the politicians and a lot of noncommittal circumlocution from those testifying.
Two plain truths emerged: First, many politicians misunderstand academic freedom, or pretend to do so, and if left unchallenged, might prove perfectly capable of McCarthyite interventions more repressive than anything seen in half a century or more. Second, elite-college leaders are unequipped to address the perception, held by much of the public and by many within their own institutions, that they tolerate an egregious double standard when it comes to academic freedom, one that punishes conservatives and consecrates the left. Each side sees the other as hypocritical; each side is to some extent correct about that.
That the hearing was political theater was announced almost formally by Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, the Republican chair of the committee, who began the proceedings this way: “Today, each of you will have a chance to answer to and atone for the many specific instances of vitriolic, hate-filled antisemitism on your respective campuses that have denied students the safe learning environment they’re due.” This was not going to be neutral.
Foxx then stated what might as well have been the official thesis of the hearing: “What I’m describing is a grave danger inherent in assenting to the race-based ideology of the radical left.” Even worse: “Institutional antisemitism and hate are among the poisoned fruits of your institution’s cultures.”
Grave charges, and prefaced by Foxx with remarks about what one might have taken to be a different question altogether — the general atmosphere for expressive freedom on elite campuses. Harvard, Foxx noted, is at the very bottom of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s campus free-speech rankings; the University of Pennsylvania is right behind it. (MIT, Foxx allowed, is “in the middle of the pack.”) Why did Foxx imagine that those figures mattered? After all, by her own account, the hearing was convened because there’s too much expression on campus, at least of one kind.
What might at first look like a logical contradiction was, of course, a highly considered rhetorical tactic. The point was not just to insist that antisemitic “vitriol” was ubiquitous, but that its ubiquity was evidence of a specific exception to a campus culture in which, otherwise, there are so many things one cannot say. “Sadly, college campuses have descended from coveted citadels of intellectual freedom to illiberal sewers of intolerance and bigotry,” as the South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson put it breathlessly. “Diversity and inclusion,” he continued, “are a George Orwell 1984 implementation … The solution for close-minded intolerance is obvious: to liberate academia from denial of free speech, respecting the First Amendment.”
On its face, the invocation of the First Amendment in the course of a campaign to punish disfavored political speech is either confused or dishonest. But the larger strategy had less to do with free speech, antisemitism, or even Israel than with the political capital Republicans hope to gain by underscoring the inconsistencies of what they see as academe’s official attitudes about diversity and expression. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, an Oregon Democrat, tried to call the Republicans’ bluff: “The main point of this hearing should be to identify bipartisan solutions to combat antisemitism, not an excuse to attack higher education, liberal-arts education, or important diversity, equity, or inclusion work that’s happening at colleges and universities across the country.”
But attacks on higher education continued, in part because adducing inconsistencies by university leaders is so easy to do. Rep. Tim Walberg, a Republican from Michigan, reiterated Foxx’s earlier point that Harvard was ranked last for free speech by FIRE and then charged that “Harvard’s commitment to free speech is pretty selective.” He invoked Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist who resigned from Harvard after enduring what she has characterized as a campaign of harassment and ostracism over her belief that sex is strictly binary. “In what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech,” Walberg said, “but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?”
Gay’s response was anodyne but vague; she did not address the specifics of Hooven’s case. Some version of the line of questioning continued. Rep. Glenn Grothman, a Republican from Wisconsin, asked about the lack of political diversity on Harvard’s faculty — only 2 percent of faculty members, he said, had a favorable impression of Donald Trump. Then he asked about diversity statements. “Could a scientist ever get cut from consideration for a job because they had the wrong view of diversity?” Gay couldn’t say “no,” and she didn’t. He followed up: “Has Harvard ever made a faculty job contingent on a strong diversity statement?” The politically expedient answer, again, would have been “no,” but that wasn’t Gay’s answer. “We look at everything a faculty member will bring to our campus,” she said. “Academic brilliance and excitement and ability to teach —.” Grothman cut her off and turned to Magill, whom he called, unfortunately, “the gal from Penn.”
The star, or villain, of the afternoon was Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York infamous for denying that Trump lost the 2020 election. Stefanik first appeared about an hour and half in; her posture of manic aggression had at least the virtue of waking people up. “I assume,” she demanded of Gay, “you’re familiar with the term ‘intifada,’ correct?” (Gay, warily: “I have heard that term, yes.”) Like other Republicans, Stefanik emphasized the appearance of a political double standard on free speech. “Isn’t it true that Harvard previously rescinded multiple offers of admission for applicants and accepted freshmen for sharing offensive memes, racist statements, sometimes as young as 16 — did Harvard not rescind those offers of admission?” Stefanik was referring to an incident from 2017; Gay pointed out that she wasn’t an administrator then.
Stefanik was undeterred: “You’re also aware that a Winthrop House faculty dean was let go over who he chose to legally represent, correct? That was while you were dean.” Here Stefanik meant Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a Harvard law professor who was removed as faculty dean of an undergraduate dormitory after joining Harvey Weinstein’s legal team. Gay disputed Stefanik’s version of the facts, though refused to elucidate them. (For what it’s worth, the Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy’s characterization of the Sullivan affair in our pages concurred with Stefanik’s.) The congresswoman’s overall message was clear: Speech at Harvard is likely to get you in trouble, unless the speech is “intifada, intifada.”
