An Impossible Demand

The cancelers-cum-defenders of free speech have picked up the sword by the sharp end.

Meme that circulated in 2019 when Harvard rescinded the admission of Kyle Kashuv.

The fallout of the catastrophic performance by three college presidents in front of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing about antisemitism on college campuses last week, previously sung, continues apace. Elizabeth “Smirky” Magill is no longer leading Penn. Claudine Gay has survived attempts to remove her thus far but the additional scrutiny has exposed her as a serial plagiarist. Moreover, it was revealed that the New York Post was working on a story to that effect in October, and Harvard sicced one of the top defamation firms in the country on them.

The irony is that the argument the presidents made to Congress was correct in principle. Because of the First Amendment, whether a hypothetical call for the genocide of the Jews is actionable according to law or policy does depend on context. Heather Mac Donald:

[I]t was their one correct stance during the entire hearing debacle that put them in peril. However woodenly they asserted their alleged reason for not shutting down the pro-Hamas demonstrations, that reason should have been controlling. Speech should be protected unless it crosses the line into direct threats to individuals or incitement to imminent violence.

The problem was that, thanks to their abominable track record, nobody believes that these administrators give a bag of beans about principle. Seth Forman:

Gay has presided over a Harvard University whose “race-conscious admissions policies” were found by the Supreme Court to “violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment”; mandates Title IX training for students in which “fatphobia” and “cisheterosexism” are deemed forms of “violence,” and in which “using the wrong pronouns” constitutes “abuse”; removed renowned law professor Ronald Sullivan for representing disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein; suspended MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient Roland Fryer for alleged "unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature" after he produced groundbreaking research finding no evidence of racial bias in police shootings; allowed professor Carole Hooven to be chased into retirement by a DEI bureaucrat after Hooven told Fox News that humans have only two sexes; came in last out of 248 colleges on the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s free speech index; dropped the SAT requirement for undergraduate admissions; and finally, refused to condemn antisemitic statements of student groups or prevent the harassment of Jewish students.

David Harsanyi:

Indeed, free speech is treated very much like plagiarism at places like Harvard. There are different sets of rules for different people. When a Cornell professor tells a crowd that the wanton murder of Jewish babies is an “exhilarating and energizing” event, he has an incontrovertible right to free speech without consequence. When the conservative Parkland survivor’s invitation to attend Harvard gets rescinded over slurs sent in private texts written when he was 16, not so much. This is a microcosm of the modern-day college experience.

Julia Schaletzky:

The discussion around free speech by campus presidents is misleading because the issue is not the law itself. Rather, college administrators have been weaponizing the First Amendment when it suits them, and blatantly disregarding it when it doesn’t…. The rule of law requires that laws are enforced equally against all, so that we are not governed by the whims of the powerful but by a shared set of norms and rules that apply equally. Unfortunately, in the self-governing world of academic institutions, the rule of law is easily abandoned by like-minded ideologues working together to bring about what they call “social change,” which apparently requires that one group’s idea of the good must monopolize the entire space and mission of the university.

Yascha Mounk:

Stricter codes governing free speech won’t help students from minority groups who don’t enjoy the backing of university administrators in future. We have every reason to expect these officials to continue to apply those laws unevenly, chilling the speech of anybody who offends against campus orthodoxy while giving broad latitude to students who tout popular progressive causes to intimidate their enemies with impunity.

Congressman Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) excoriated Gay’s testimony. “Harvard ranks last out of 248 universities for support of free speech. But when it comes to denouncing antisemitism, suddenly the university has anxieties about the First Amendment. It rings hollow.” Harvard subsequently canceled an event at which Auchincloss was supposed to speak.

The legal and policy objections are worth raising. I would bring up a cultural one: the institutions, and not just the universities, have labored to establish safe, inclusive environments. This is not entirely cynical, and connected to the domination of these institutions by women. The longtime dominance of those institutions by men called for a correction to parity. But we are obviously overcorrected at this point. Harvard’s president is a featherweight academic whose slight record is marred by theft. Carole Hooven is a PhD in Biological Anthropology who was chased out of Harvard for coming to conclusions that threatened the progressive extremists. The environment is so safe and inclusive as to be hostile to merit and open inquiry.

I have noted the similarities between Critical Race Theory and Aryanism before. Aryanism was able to find common cause with political Islam. It’s unsurprising that CRT would do likewise. Pamela Paresky wrote about this in early 2021, in an article titled Critical Race Theory and the ‘Hyper-White’ Jew:

CRT relies on narratives of greed, appropriation, unmerited privilege, and hidden power — themes strikingly reminiscent of familiar anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.

To make matters worse, the expectation of solidarity between social justice allies allows anti-Zionists to use the latent antisemitic themes of CRT to propagate a false narrative about Israel without opposition from within the movement. This magnifies the existing anti-Jewish nature of the social justice project.

I sometimes wonder if God put us Jews on the planet to wreck bad political paradigms, starting with pharonic Egypt. We are as much an anathema to CRT and its associated DEI bureaucracy as we were to Aryanism. A difference is that postliberal, identitarian progressivism cannot openly embrace Jew-hatred. They have to reframe it as a kind of justice. This is why we’re hearing certain parties now attempting to claim that intifada refers to something besides violence against Jews.

It does not. I once dated a woman who needed a medic to remove a piece of glass that was embedded in her scalp by a bomb blast in Tel Aviv. That was intifada. Calls to “globalize the intifada,” such as were invoked at Columbia University this week (Happy Hanukah!), are exhortations to commit violence against Jews everywhere. (Such demonstrations were banned at Columbia only days earlier. Evidently the university has no intention of enforcing the bans.)

The “from the river to the sea” collocation is likewise a call for genocide against the Jews. Nobody pretended to harbor other interpretations until after October 7, when progressives started chanting it in sickening numbers. If tiki torch-bearing white men set up on a university quad and called to globalize Charlottesville, nobody would be exercising hermeneutics about it, they’d just have them all arrested. Why the Jews should have to put up with analogous thuggery is unclear to us.

From a constitutional standpoint, such invocations are protected speech until they migrate to “let’s genocide that guy there.” But the universities have punished so many, for so long, with so much severity, for such lesser breaches of decorum, that to invoke the First Amendment in their defense is a nonstarter. The institutions are in effect demanding that Jews grant an outrageous indulgence: to willingly exempt themselves from the culture of safety and inclusion so that the institutions are not obliged to employ their enforcement mechanisms on themselves.

The reply at least from this Jew is no. Unwind this culture, or fall on your sword in its defense. Either tear down the DEI bureaucracy, repair everyone whom it damaged, and revert to policies that comport with the Bill of Rights, or expel or fire everyone clamoring for violence against Jews even if they are the dearest institutional darlings.

Either course will shrink the institutions. But shrinkage is what one would want, regarding a tumor.

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