For years, conservatives have tried to convince American voters that the leftward tilt of higher education is not only wrong but dangerous. Universities and their students, they argued, are increasingly gripped by suffocating ideologies—political correctness in one decade, the ascendancy of “social justice” in another, “wokeness” more recently—that should not be dismissed as academic fads or harmless zealotry. .
The validation they sought finally appeared to arrive this fall, as college campuses were rocked by protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and hostile, sometimes violent, rhetoric toward Jews. It came to a head last week on Capitol Hill, as the presidents of three elite universities tried to answer a question about whether “calling for the genocide of the Jews” would violate school rules, and Republicans argued that outbursts of anti-Semitism on campus were symptomatic of the radical ideas they had long warned against. On Saturday, amid the crisis, one of those presidents, M. Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned.
For Republicans, the rise of anti-Semitic rhetoric and the timid responses of some academic leaders presented a long-sought opportunity to flip the political script and brand liberals or their institutions as hateful and bigoted. “What I am describing is a grave danger inherent in accepting the racial ideology of the radical left,” Representative Virginia Foxx, R-North Carolina, said at the hearing, adding: “Institutional anti-Semitism and hatred are among the poisons. fruits of your institution’s cultures’.
The strength of the criticism was underscored by how many Democrats joined the attack.
The three college presidents were denounced by a spokesman for President Biden. He was echoed by other Democratic officials, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who has joined calls for Ms. Magill to be fired. Some prominent liberal-leaning businessmen said they didn’t understand what was really going on in higher education.
“For a long time I have said that anti-Semitism, particularly on the American left, is not as bad as people have made it out to be,” Sam Altman, head of artificial intelligence firm OpenAI and a major Democratic donor, wrote on X. “I would just like to state that I was completely wrong.”
Just as celebratory rallies in the wake of the Hamas rampage in October divided Jewish progressives from some of their longtime allies, anti-Israel campus protests in recent weeks have driven a wedge into the Democratic Party more broadly. They have turned prominent politicians and executives against institutions where they are more likely to send their children or give commencement addresses.
It has even broken into the #MeToo case, as prominent liberal women such as former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg question why advocacy groups and institutions dedicated to women’s rights have been slow to speak out as evidence emerged that the Hamas attackers on 7 October. rape as a weapon of war.
On the campaign trail, where Republican contenders largely scaled back their criticism of the college revival this summer after finding it had limited resonance with a wider political audience, the issue returned to the fore in last Wednesday’s debate.
“If you don’t believe Israel has a right to exist, that’s anti-Semitic,” said Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, who suggested she would seek to impose new federal rules on anti-Israel speech if elected president. “We’re going to change the definition so that every government, every school, has to recognize the definition of what it is.”
The Republican counterattacks come after several years in which prominent conservatives began to espouse an anti-Semitic, racial ideology of their own: the so-called replacement theory, which holds that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to replace and weaken the white Americans. in part by encouraging seamless immigration. The theory has helped inspire several mass shootings in the United States in recent years, even as echoes of its central tenets are becoming more commonplace in mainstream Republican politics. Last week, as Ms Haley attacked anti-Semitism on the Republican stage, another candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, said the replacement theory was a “core statement of the Democratic Party’s platform”.
But for many on the right, the cautious, hesitant responses of three college presidents at Tuesday’s hearing — Ms. Magill, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth — stood in stark contrast to her long-standing relish for left of these institutions. – wing sensitivities around race and gender.
All three institutions have in recent years punished or censored speech or behavior that provoked outrage from the left. In 2019, Harvard revoked the deanship of Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a Black law professor, after students protested his inclusion on the legal team of former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. In 2021, MIT canceled a scheduled scientific lecture by star geophysicist Dorian Abbot, highlighting his criticism of affirmative action. The University of Pennsylvania law school is seeking to sanction a tenured professor there, Amy Wax, citing student complaints about her comments about the academic performance of students of color, among other challenges.
The Foundation for Civil Rights and Expression, which advocates for free speech in American society, ranks hundreds of colleges for protecting student rights and open research. Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania are at the bottom.
“The same administrators who are now cloaked in the mantle of free speech have been very willing to censor all kinds of unpopular things on their campuses,” said Alex Morey, director of the campus advocacy foundation. “It’s such utter hypocrisy.”
Controversies surrounding anti-Semitism may fuel further Republican efforts to defund and restrict public universities, particularly where the GOP dominates state legislatures. A leading Republican presidential candidate, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, has won a following among conservatives with relentless attacks on diversity programs and the teaching of leftist theories of racism at Florida’s public universities. In all, more than 20 states this year have passed or considered bills that restrict diversity, equity and inclusion programs or identity-based hiring practices, according to a count kept by The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Jay P. Greene, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said anti-Semitic and anti-Israel protests on college campuses — and university presidents’ advocacy responses to last week’s hearing — were similar to what he called ” Zoom”. moment’ during the pandemic, when some parents listened closely for the first time to what their children were learning at school and concluded that it was ‘inferior in quality and radical in content’.
“One of the things that those of us who want to reform higher education have struggled with is convincing people that there is a problem,” Dr. Green added. “Historically, they look around and say, ‘Huh, that looks good.’ All they see right now is that things are not good.”
If Tuesday’s hearing drove a perfect wedge into the Democratic coalition, it seemed partly by design. The most intense questioning came from Rep. Elise Stefanik, the moderate Republican MAGA of New York, who in 2021 criticized campaign ads that played on “super replacement”-type themes.
Ms. Stefanik is both a Harvard graduate and critic: Several years ago, after complaints from students, Harvard removed Ms. Stefanik from the board of its Institute of Politics because of her repeated misrepresentations about the results of the 2020 election. her alma mater for “wake caving left.” And last week, he got a measure of revenge.
Now, House Republicans have launched an investigation into disciplinary processes and learning at the three institutions, which will unfold in the coming months.
Both Harvard’s Dr. Gay and Penn’s Ms. Magill apologized for their responses at the hearing.
“At that time, I focused on our university’s long-standing policies that align with the US Constitution, which says that speech alone is not punishable,” Ms. Magill said in a video days before the resignation. her. “I did not focus, but I should have, on the indisputable fact that a call for the genocide of the Jews is a call for some of the most terrible violence that human beings can commit. It’s bad — plain and simple.’
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Gay said in an interview with The Harvard Crimson. “Words matter.”
At MIT, the board issued a statement supporting Dr. Kornbluth, saying he had her “full and unreserved support” and “she has done an outstanding job in leading our community, including tackling anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and other forms of hate.”
Ms. Stefanik, in an interview Friday with The New York Sun, predicted that all three college presidents would be forced to resign.
“There will be tectonic consequences of this hearing and it will be an earthquake in higher education,” he said.