Dem
51
GOP
49
At this point, surely all readers know that the United States House Committee on Education and the Workforce, with Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) taking a leading role (despite not being part of the Committee's leadership), summoned Harvard president Claudine Gay, MIT president Sally Kornbluth and Penn president Liz Magill to the Hill to be grilled about antisemitism on campus. All three women struggled with questions about whether it was OK for students to call for genocide against Jews, and there was enormous backlash. Magill has already been compelled to resign, while Kornbluth and Gay are hanging by a thread.
We've gotten a bunch of e-mails about this situation, and we'll tell you a few things that would largely only be known to professional academics. To start, we are not excusing the three presidents' clumsy testimony, but we can explain exactly why it happened: They fell victim to a trap set for them by House Republicans.
The first thing that is important to understand is that managing free speech on campus is really, really tricky. There is a vast amount of case law that makes clear that campuses, particularly college campuses, are required to give extremely broad latitude to the free speech rights of students and faculty. And because universities have very deep pockets, any misstep is sure to produce a big lawsuit, even if the lawsuit is a long shot. So, university leadership learns to tread lightly.
On top of that, university presidents (and chancellors, and provosts, and rectors, and whatever other titles are used for the person at the top of the heap) are answerable to a lot of different stakeholders, often with wildly contrary interests. The people who manage the university (usually called a "board" or "regents" or "overseers") want the school's image to stay squeaky clean, while raking in as much cash (donations), awards and glory as is possible. The student body, to a greater or lesser extent, tends to be absolutist on free speech, excepting that their absolutism often starts to break down when it comes to ideas they don't agree with. In other words, "Cornel West should be able to come on campus and say whatever he wants, but not Ben Shapiro." Or, "Ben Shapiro should be able to come on campus and say whatever he wants, but not Cornel West." Faculty, including the all-important faculty senates, are between the two extremes, but closer to the "free speech is absolute" end of the spectrum, on the whole.
You have to be at least somewhat capable of juggling these various interest groups, or you don't get promoted to the big chair. But, more often than not, university presidents are not great at it, since it's not what they're trained for (university presidents are almost always former professors), it's not the main thing they are hired for, and it's not an easy task even if you're Solomon. Even worse, and this is where the trap comes in, university presidents are not experienced givers of testimony. That's doubly true when it comes to the glaring lights of Capitol Hill, in a context where speed and simplicity are demanded by committee members (like Stefanik), and yet nuance and subtlety are what is actually required to answer the questions.
In short, it was nearly impossible that the three presidents could have succeeded during their trip to the Hill, despite all three of them being brilliant and accomplished to the point of having risen to leadership of three of America's preeminent universities. That said, it wasn't their testimony, per se, that was their downfall. As we have written before, the #1 job of a university president is to be Chief Fundraiser. And the moment we knew that Magill was a dead woman walking was when we saw this headline on Saturday: "Penn loses $100 million donation over antisemitism hearing." No university president is more valuable to their school than $100 million. And so, Penn's leadership threw Magill under the bus. They will now hire someone with impeccable credentials when it comes to standing against antisemitism, and then the new president will beg that $100 million donor to reconsider their donation.
So, that's the subtext of what's going on with the universities. Now, how about the Committee? If you believe nothing else, believe this: The members of the Committee majority, starting with Stefanik, have no interest in combating antisemitism on campus, or making the lives of Jewish students easier. It is not a secret that Republicans are hostile to higher education in general, and to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in particular. The current situation is only loosely connected to DEI, but nonetheless, House Republicans believe this is an opportunity to score some points, and to impose themselves on universities in various ways (for example, tying federal funding to certain GOP expectations, like "no use of affirmative action" or "no use of stem cells"). Stefanik herself has been crowing, following Magill's downfall, "one down, two to go." If one's goal is to "take down" university presidents, then one is clearly not focused on solving any actual problems. Stefanik, a Harvard alumna, may care more about revenge, having been kicked off a Harvard advisory board in 2021 for her baseless claims of voter fraud.
And that, in the end, might be what saves Gay, in particular, and possibly Kornbluth, as well. Harvard's Board of Overseers is not happy with their president, and with the damage done by her clumsy testimony in Washington. It does not help that, among all of America's universities, Harvard might have the very worst track record of antisemitism, given the school's longtime policy of limiting Jewish admissions (no longer in effect, of course). At the same time, the Board is very reluctant to give Stefanik a "win," in part because they don't like the Representative and the way she conducts her business, and in part because they don't want to set the precedent that when Washington says "jump," Harvard says "How high?" We'll know how it turns out within the week; if Gay is still on the job at this time next Tuesday, she'll have weathered the storm. (Z)