The Fish Rots from the Bottom Up

By now, I trust you have heard about the congressional testimony given by the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this Tuesday on the subject of campus antisemitism. Brought to Washington, D.C., to account for the explosion of violent, outright eliminationist antisemitic rhetoric across their campuses — across almost all elite campuses nationwide, really — their testimony was a stunningly unexpected act of inadvertent self-immolation in front of a national audience. There might have been actual words coming out of the mouths of Claudine Gay (Harvard), Liz Magill (Penn), and Sally Kornbluth (MIT), but they quickly became superfluous; all three of them would have done better that day by sitting down before the committee and proceeding to projectile vomit all over each other for four and a half hours instead.

The testimony is actually well worth watching, particularly Representative Elise Stefanik’s grilling of both Gay and Magill. The damning banality of their coldly lawyered, repetitive non-responsiveness, as well as their blank inability to muster any recognizable human emotion other than contempt, played as an indictment of the entire educational aristocracy. They kept robotically reciting the same pat (and disingenuous) lines about the ill-defined dividing line “where speech becomes conduct” and fell back on obviously rehearsed blandishments instead of condemning antisemitism or acknowledging any history of double-standards on campus. (“That type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me” was Gay’s frequent word-for-word refrain, which made it thuddingly obvious that it was a carefully lawyered statement.)

But because you don’t have five and a half hours to set aside, I will summarize as best I can: While all the college presidents present at Tuesday’s hearing dutifully avowed that they, personally, find that speech to be abhorrent, they refused to say it crossed a line into violence or threats. In other words, they stubbornly refused to concede on-camera under Stefanik’s questioning that calling for the extinction of Israel or celebrating the massacre and rape of Jews in any way impedes the safety or well-being of Jewish students on campus.

And a brief note here about Elise Stefanik: As the GOP representative from New York’s “north country” and a junior member of the party’s notoriously sclerotic House leadership team, Stefanik has never rated particularly highly for me as a politician (even though I suspect she ranks extremely high on Donald Trump’s vice-presidential shortlist). But Stefanik — Harvard Class of ’06 — came prepared, clearly not only from political but personal experience as well. Her anger was wholly unfeigned, because she lived through Harvard in the mid 2000s (this was during both the Iraq War and the Second Intifada). She’s seen this up close. Rather than monologuing or ranting, as satisfying (and typical for Congress) as that might have been, she instead prosecuted — asking Gay and Magill one blunt question after another, allowing their (non-) answers to hang themselves. Despite the ferocity of her tone, it was a masterful performance in its restraint precisely because she forced the university presidents to disgrace themselves in their own words, and not merely hers.

By Wednesday, the frantic damage-control efforts had begun. Claudine Gay, realizing after one night that she had befouled herself on national television, released an official statement saying, “Let me be clear: Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.” (It has not gone unnoticed that these words, or anything resembling them, failed to pass her lips during the multiple opportunities she was offered to speak them during the hearing.)

As disgraceful as Gay’s cow-eyed responses to Elise Stefanik were, she certainly made out better than haplessly smirking University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, who may be cleaning out her office by the time this post is published. Stefanik asked her, point-blank: “Ms. Magill, at Penn, does calling for genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct? Yes or no.” As Stefanik helpfully pointed out, this is perhaps the easiest softball question a university president could be asked. And so, with her face locked in a condescending grimace, Magill proceeded to whiff three straight times in a row, conceding only that “if the speech turns into conduct it can be harrassment,” and that it was “a context-dependent decision.”

If one wants to put it that way, then Magill’s continuing position as president of the university is also context-dependent; yesterday, attorneys for wealthy alumnus Ross Stevens sent a letter to Penn formally withdrawing a $100 million dollar grant to the university over Magill’s testimony. Later that afternoon, the Wharton School of Business’s Board of Advisors (who, one suspects, stood to benefit from that grant) issued a statement calling for the school to change leadership with “immediate effect.” It is difficult to see how she can remain in that context.

It was rancidly telling that Magill’s last desperate move to save her job and repair the University of Pennsylvania’s massive reputational damage was to promise an updated speech code on Thursday in a videotaped statement. I am wildly skeptical of its value. My colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty writes this morning in favor of tightened speech codes on campus. His is a well-reasoned argument: that universities (now so more than ever in an age of socially delayed adulthood) are acting in loco parentis and, as such, require enforceable codes of conduct to form their students properly.

Correct as far as it goes, but my analysis is far blunter: Codes of conduct are only as good as those who enforce them, personnel is always policy, and who watches “the watchers” in this case? After all, we have a pretty good idea of who’s been minding the store and making enforcement decisions in DEI offices across America up until this point; a “new policy” will not alter that, it will merely be either ignored or selectively enforced, and likely to the further detriment of conservatives whenever possible. (The Soviet Union’s constitution was the “freest in all the world,” as the Soviets themselves liked to boast. The reality was somewhat less so.) I instead generally agree with organizations such as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and caution that any system that requires its enforcers to be angels will eventually be overtaken by the devils among them. And there are so, so many devils presently lurking in academia.

With that in mind, I would like to leave the final word here to Rabbi David Wolpe, who resigned yesterday from Harvard’s antisemitism advisory committee — itself an act of notable pessimism. In a somber thread on Twitter, he explained his reasoning carefully: No one administrative change or tweak can cure a systemic problem, and the system at Harvard (as well as other elite institutions) is one “that works only along axes of oppression,” coding Jews as white and thus automatic hate objects in the context of Israel and Palestine. “Battling that combination of ideologies is the work of more than a committee or a single university. It is not going to be changed by hiring or firing a single person . . . This is the task of educating a generation, and also a vast unlearning.” The old aphorism that “a fish rots from the head down” gets it exactly backwards in this case: When it comes to America’s elite educational institutions, the fish has long been rotting from the bottom up, and that is where the rot is deeply, tenaciously entrenched.

To note this is, I fear, to give a counsel of despair. Regardless of whether Liz Magill or Claudine Gay are cashiered within the hour, what will remain behind are the abiding monocultures of the universities they lead. Faculty, countless DEI administrators, graduate students, and bumptious ill-formed undergraduates alike are what actually shape the culture of an educational institution, far more than any handbook or notional set of rules. And they have been drinking deep draughts from the well of identitarian and oppression-hierarchy grievance since their youths. Habits learned at that age are rarely, if ever, unlearned. Absent seismic reform — the likes of which would probably only go hand-in-hand with some other vast convulsion in American society that none of us wish to live through — the problem of campus antisemitism is not going away, or even arguably ameliorating any time soon. The “great unlearning,” if it ever comes, will take generations, not years.

Update, December 9, 4:03 p.m.: Liz Magill has officially resigned as president of the University of Pennsylvania. The University of Pennsylvania faculty, administrative class, and student body yet remain.