Combating Antisemitism on College Campuses

Disastrous congressional testimony by the presidents of three "elite" universities highlights the rot in our institutions of higher education.

It was a busy week, during which I had articles published on: a biography of Justice Antonin Scalia’s pre-Supreme Court years; a new book about the Supreme Court during the Second World War; and an important case about a potential tax on unrealized capital gains that was argued this week. But of course the big news was the House Education Committee hearing into campus antisemitism where the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania managed to further damage the public’s already low confidence in higher education.

What struck me about their testimony is just how lacking in judgment and leadership it was. Very expensive legal advisers (the same firm that advised Georgetown on my investigation) coached them—maybe overcoached them—but ultimately we saw a combination of (1) the insular elite-ed bubble, such that they just didn’t understand how to communicate with people in a different orbit, or even the nature of the assignment, which they treated as (2) a litigation deposition instead of a public hearing, trying to talk a lot without saying anything, and coming off as robotic and bureaucratic, and fundamentally (3) a lack of any core values (beyond perhaps DEI tropes of victimhood and safetyism). That’s not gonna fly with 80% of Americans.

I’ve been doing a fair bit of media on this event and broader subject, including both CNN and Fox News yesterday. There was a way that Penn’s Liz Magill especially, as a constitutional lawyer, could’ve addressed the speech/conduct distinction (and time/place/manner regulations) without appearing neutral on the question of whether it’s ever appropriate to call for genocide. And then her attempt to clean up that failed performance drew the exact opposite lesson, implying that what was needed was stricter speech code that prohibited more “hate speech.” It’s not surprising that she ultimately lost her job over this episode, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. A lot of institutions have a lot of work to do to fix systemic issues that are much deeper than any particular university officials.