RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ivy-league-mask-falls-antisemitism-higher-education-4592d0c0?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The furor over antisemitism on campus is a rare and welcome example of accountability at American universities. But it won’t amount to much if the only result is the resignation of a couple of university presidents.

The great benefit of last week’s performance by three elite-school presidents before Congress is that it tore the mask off the intellectual and political corruption of much of the American academy. The world was appalled by the equivocation of the academic leaders when asked if advocating genocide against Jews violated their codes of conduct. But the episode merely revealed the value system that has become endemic at too many prestigious schools.

The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania hid behind concerns about free speech. But as everyone paying attention knows, these schools don’t protect speech they disagree with. They punish it.

Harvard President Claudine Gay has presided over the ouster of professors for speech that violated progressive orthodoxy. As Elise Stefanik wrote on these pages on Friday, Harvard’s Title IX training says using the wrong pronouns qualifies as abuse. Harvard was 248th out of 248, and Penn was 247th, in the annual college ranking by the free-speech Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

But because Jews in Israel are seen in the progressive canon as white oppressors and colonizers, it’s not a clear campus violation to call for murdering Jews because it depends on the context.

The three presidents have apologized for or moderated their comments before Congress, but that was only after the political consequences became clear. Believe what they said the first time. That is what their institutions now stand for.

https://wokecapital.org/ivy-league-antisemitism-who-didnt-know/

Over the past couple of days, we have read a great deal about the presidents of the Ivy League schools who went to Washington and embarrassed themselves and their universities.  Much of what we’ve read has reflected justified incredulity, understandable anger and frustration that the presidents of these highly respected universities would believe that the appropriateness of calls for genocide depends on the “context” in which those calls are made.  Some of the commentary has taken the opposite tack, suggesting that the Ivy presidents were justified in defending free speech while lamenting that they did not do so more consistently.  In both cases – theoretically diametrically opposed – the common denominator is callousness and apathy in the face of antisemitism.  Either the universities in question are tolerating antisemitism when they shouldn’t, or they are tolerating antisemitism when they do not tolerate any other discrimination.  In both cases, the antisemites win.

For our money, the most interesting aspect of the entire episode is how completely unsurprising any of it is.  The presidents of Ivy League schools – Harvard and UPenn, in particular – are unconcerned about antisemitism?  Indeed, they clearly and palpably treat Jews and hatred of them differently and less seriously than they do other people and other hatreds?

Honestly, who didn’t know?

The simple fact of the matter is that much of the Ivy League – and again, Harvard and Penn, in particular – are both historical practitioners of traditional antisemitism and the incubators of the newer, ideologically identitarian antisemitism. That their presidents couldn’t or wouldn’t take a stand one way or another against Jew-hatred should come as a surprise to no one.  To do so would be to disavow their institutional heritage and, more to the point, the ideology around which they’ve built their institutional present and future.

Consider, for example, the following passages from a 2006 review of the book The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton by Jerome Karabel.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-bans-cisheterosexism-but-shrugs-at-antisemitism-95a2c5d7?mod=opinion_trendingnow_article_pos3

What constitutes bullying and harassment at Harvard? A mandatory Title IX training last year warned all undergraduate students that “cisheterosexism,” “fatphobia” and “using the wrong pronouns” qualified as “abuse” and perpetuated “violence” on campus.

But when I asked Harvard President Claudine Gay at a congressional hearing whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated the university’s rules on bullying and harassment, she answered: “It depends on the context.” Pressed further, she said it would qualify “when it crosses into conduct.” I received similar answers from the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania.

This lack of moral clarity is shocking. If only it were surprising. In the months since Oct. 7, the mainstreaming of anti-Jewish hate has been on full display at the poisoned Ivy League and other so-called elite schools, as has the gutless lack of response from university leaders. When 34 Harvard student groups signed a statement that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” Ms. Gay and other Harvard leaders were silent for days.

Since then, we have heard reports of Jewish students being spat on, verbally accosted and, in a widely circulated video, physically assaulted. We’ve seen students march chanting “There is only one solution: Intifada revolution,” a call for violence against Israel. They follow that with a chant of “Globalize the Intifada,” implying that the hatred of Israel is a hatred of Jews everywhere, including on campus.

The Penn, Harvard and MIT presidents’ refusal to identify these calls for violence as policy violations is revealing, and their attempt to justify it with feigned concern for free speech is insulting. Just this year, Harvard placed dead last among 248 universities on the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s College Free Speech Rankings, receiving the only score of zero out of 100.

Where was Harvard’s concern for free speech when it disinvited feminist philosopher Devin Buckley from a colloquium on campus last year because of her views on transgender issues? Where was its concern for free speech in 2020 when it revoked conservative activist Kyle Kashuv’s acceptance because of social media posts he made as a 16-year-old, or in 2017 when it revoked admission for 10 incoming freshmen who shared offensive memes on Facebook?

Apparently the same outrage doesn’t apply to students sharing antisemitic memes on Slack today, as Bill Ackman noted in his letter to Harvard last month.

While this hypocrisy is being exposed now, it has been festering for years. The failure to call out and punish those demanding the genocide of Jewish people is the consequence of decades of appeasement of radicalism and watering down of principle at our most hallowed institutions of higher education, which were founded as bastions of moral clarity and the pursuit of truth.

https://www.jns.org/the-problem-is-bigger-than-three-college-presidents/?_se=cGhpbGlwdGVzdGFzQHNhcG8ucHQ%3D&utm_

It was a very bad week for the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania. But as much as the discomfort and job security of the trio of academic bureaucrats put on the spot by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) during a congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses is a focus of interest, no one should think what they now say or what happens to them is of critical importance.

On the contrary, the viral video of their appalling testimony is merely a symptom of the problem plaguing America’s educational establishment and the rest of society. It is the toxic ideologies that have created these three pathetic examples of university leaders without a moral compass that we should be worried about, not their individual fates. As long as the schools they lead, and as long as most other such institutions—whether considered among the country’s “elite” schools or not—remain captured by the woke mindset that has made critical race theory and intersectionality the prevailing orthodoxy, antisemitism there will be a given.

To The New York Times and others on the left, the predicaments of Harvard’s Claudine Gay, MIT’s Sally Kornbluth and Penn’s Liz Magill were a “prosecutorial trap”—one into which they fell headlong.

The question of genocide

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/university-presidents-abhorrent-hypocrisy-on-anti-jewish-speech/

All of a sudden, America’s elite universities have started to sound like John Stuart Mill. Asked yesterday by Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) whether students who call for “intifada” or shout “from the river to the sea” were acting “contrary to Harvard’s code of conduct,” Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, struck a notably enlightened pose. Such “hateful, reckless, offensive speech,” Gay insisted, was “abhorrent” to her personally, and “at odds with the values of Harvard.” But she could not in good conscience move to do anything about it, given Harvard’s “commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.”

Ah.

The first problem with Gay’s answer (which was not fixed by a subsequent clean-up attempt) is that it is a brazen lie. Harvard does not, in fact, “embrace a commitment to free expression.” It does not tolerate views that its speech police consider to be “objectionable, offensive, hateful.” And, as the plain language of its own policies makes clear, it does not endure opinions that are contrary to its “values.” There is, of course, a strong case to be made for the university as an incubator of all ideas. Were Harvard known for a consistent liberalism, it might be able to defend the indulgence of students who chant “intifada” at their peers. But Harvard is not known for any such thing. On the contrary: Harvard is known for sanctioning scholars, for revoking acceptances, for disinviting academics, and for having created an environment in which students feel unable to share their beliefs. Per the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), Harvard’s score in the Free Speech Rankings is an “abysmal” “0.00 out of a possible 100.00.” In its latest evaluation, FIRE accorded Harvard a “-10.69,” which, the outfit recorded, is “more than six standard deviations below the average and more than two standard deviations below the second-to-last school in the rankings, its Ivy League counterpart, the University of Pennsylvania.”

Pressed by lawmakers, the president of Penn, M. Elizabeth Magill, was equally keen to wax lyrical about the joys of permissive deliberation. Judging whether or not to crack down on those who demand the genocide of Jews, Magill proposed, is “a context-dependent decision.” “If the speech becomes conduct,” she concluded, “it can be harassment.” This, too, is a defensible standard. Indeed, this is the standard that has been applied by the Supreme Court in the ruling that currently governs the limits of free expression, Brandenburg v. Ohio. But it is not Penn’s standard. Per FIRE, Penn has a “very poor” record on speech, ranking 247th out of 248. Worse still, FIRE reports, one’s experience at Penn is heavily dependent upon one’s political bent. For “liberals,” the school is ranked 32nd in the country. For “conservatives,” it sits at 220th. How’s that for “context-dependent”?

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/what-is-campus-life-like-for-a-jewish?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2From Glenn Loury

Almost daily, we see images and read news stories about the effect of the Gaza War on college campuses. The dynamics of those stories vary from campus to campus—every university has its own particular student culture and its own administrative response. For an outsider, it can be difficult to understand the complex social dynamics at work beneath the protests and rallies. The opposing demonstrators and counter-demonstrators know each other and may even consider each other friends. They have classes together, live in the same dorms, and eat in the same dining halls. And yet, when the placards are raised and the chants begin, they often level accusations at each other that would seem to make friendship, or even peaceful coexistence, impossible going forward.

My intern, Maya Rackoff, is a student at Brown, where I teach. She is a proud and open Jewish Zionist, an identification that, at this famously liberal school, comes with a social price, despite the fact that she is deeply sympathetic to the plight of ordinary Palestinians. I wanted to know how she is navigating campus life now that her beliefs and identity are at the forefront of world events, and students like her often feel demonized and scapegoated. She wrote this essay in response. It offers an insider’s account of one of the many ways that the Gaza War is altering life here in the US.

A Sense of Paralysis for Jewish Zionist Students

by Maya Rackoff

I am a junior at Brown University majoring in history. I’m originally from New York City, where I grew up immersed in the Upper West Side Jewish community. At Brown, I’ve become very involved in our Hillel, the primary center for Jewish student engagement on college campuses.

I am truly scared about the rise in antisemitism on college campuses, and I worry about my safety whenever I am in the Hillel building. Before October 7, I walked around the building with ease. Now, the building is monitored by more security guards than ever, and I worry each time I see someone unfamiliar. I especially fear the days when there are pro-Palestinian rallies on our main green, in which hundreds of students verbally intimidate Zionist and Israeli students.