Last week, the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT testified before Congress. In a clip widely shared by the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, the presidents backpedaled and offered a series of legalistic defenses when asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their respective bullying and harassment policies.
You might not expect Stefanik, a once-moderate Republican who became a loyal Trump supporter, to garner much sympathy from liberals. But there was initially an intensively negative reaction to the presidents from nearly everyone save the left wing. That included people who I’d normally consider to be partisan Democrats who rarely criticize their own “team” — indeed, even the White House condemned the presidents. By the weekend, Liz Magill, the president of Penn, resigned under pressure from Ackman and the board.
Part of the problem for Magill, Harvard president Claudine Gay and MIT president Sally Kornbluth is that you could criticize them from several different directions: because they didn’t sufficiently condemn anti-Semitism, because they didn’t sufficiently defend free speech, and because the hearing was a PR disaster. That can lead to some weird coalitions — such as between people who want to see additional consideration for Jewish students within university speech codes and DEI frameworks, and others who want to see those frameworks dismantled.