It’s not just Harvard’s president who is backpedaling today after an embarrassing spectacle on Capitol Hill yesterday. This afternoon University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill is doing the same. Just so it’s fresh, here’s a bit of the exchange between Rep. Stefanik and President Magill yesterday.

There were a lot of things Magill could have said yesterday. She tried to suggest that even speech which calls for genocide is protected so long as it doesn’t lead to violence. That may even be what the school’s policy actually says, but with her out of place smile, she wound up looking like someone who found the whole topic amusing rather than worrisome. Clearly that did not go over well:

“It should not be hard to condemn genocide, genocide against Jews, genocide against anyone else,” Governor Shapiro said on Wednesday in a meeting with reporters. “I’ve said many times, leaders have a responsibility to speak and act with moral clarity, and Liz Magill failed to meet that simple test.”

“There should be no nuance to that — she needed to give a one-word answer,” he added.

By Wednesday afternoon, a petition calling for Ms. Magill’s resignation had grown to more than 3,000 signatures. Marc Rowan, the chief of Apollo Global Management and the board chair at the Wharton School of Business at Penn, asked the board of trustees to rescind their support for Ms. Magill.

“How much damage to our reputation are we willing to accept?” he wrote in a letter to the trustees.

This afternoon a much more somber Magill tried to revise and extend her remarks. “I was not focused on, but I should have been, the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetrate,” she said. She added, “It’s evil, plain and simple.”

“In my view it would be harassment or intimidation,” she said. In theory something she personally views as harassment might not be deemed so under the school’s policies. But she’s certainly doing her best to place herself on the other side of that divide, at least emotionally. Here’s the video:

A Video Message from President Liz Magill pic.twitter.com/GlPE3QZU4P

— Penn (@Penn) December 6, 2023

So is this a better answer? As a matter of PR I think this would have been a much better response than the one she made yesterday. There is a rise in anti-Semitism on campus and around the world in general, some of which has already spilled over into threats and violence. Taking that seriously instead of smugly trying to lawyer your way through the question would have been a lot smarter. There is in fact a line where calling for violence against a specific group on campus (such as the intifada, which clearly targets Jews) does become harassment and even incitement.

But as a matter of policy, I agree with FIRE that free speech should be protected as broadly as possible. Even obnoxious statements like “From the river to the sea” which can be interpreted as a call for eradicating Israel (that’s exactly how it’s used by Hamas), shouldn’t simply be forbidden by a new speech code.

Speech codes depend for their existence on double standards.

The solution is not to expand the use of speech codes so that they apply in more cases. It's to eliminate the codes and defend free speech for all.

No hypocrisy. No double standards. https://t.co/TmRTbpKgQ1

— Nico Perrino (@NicoPerrino) December 6, 2023

Speech codes to protect people’s feelings will only give people on the left more leverage to silence speech they disagree with. What’s really needed, and Rep. Stefanik tried to point this out yesterday, is equal application of the rules to everyone. As it is now, the speech codes exist to protect the left from speech or microaggressions they don’t like. People like President Magill have no intention of applying those same rules to offensive speech by the left. The double standard is intolerable but it’s also the nature of the beast.

A friendly reminder from FIRE's co-founder Alan Charles Kors:

Speech codes depend on the exercise of double standards.

They would not last a second if applied equally across the board! 🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/UrLAxQROIK

— FIRE (@TheFIREorg) December 6, 2023

Magill had a fine line to walk yesterday and did a pretty poor job of it. The fact that she’s backpedaling now suggests she’s hearing from people who weren’t impressed.