Faced with hostile questions from the Republican-controlled House Committee on Education and the Workforce, whose members include Harvard alumna Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), the presidents struggled to explain why their institutions—which have repeatedly denounced, disinvited, and punished professors for airing conservative views—suddenly discovered the value of free speech when students and faculty began defending Hamas.
“In what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?” Rep. Tim Walberg (R., Mich.) asked Harvard president Claudine Gay. The school’s diversity administrators had thrown a fit when Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, stated on Fox News that there are only two sexes, causing such a firestorm that she had to take a leave of absence. Gay didn’t answer the question.
The exchange captured the tenor of the contentious hearing, “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Anti-Semitism,” which was unusually well-attended and widely viewed on social media. Along with Penn president Liz Magill and MIT president Sally Kornbluth, Gay repeatedly argued that calls for “intifada,” no matter how hateful or offensive, were protected by academic freedom. Each time they did, the committee would throw those words back in their faces, rattling off all the ways in which the schools had suppressed free speech and created an ideological monoculture.
[Good. As I’ve pointed out on Twitter, these same vicious ideologues would pillory students for using the wrong pronouns, and would consider misgendering to be ‘violence.’ Their ugly hypocrisy, anti-Semitism, and ideological radicalism needs to be exposed over and over again — and then defunded entirely. — Ed]
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