The leaders of two major U.S. universities remain under pressure from donors, activists and members of Congress more than a week after a contentious Capitol Hill hearing in which they were accused of failing to protect Jewish students from antisemitism on campus.
Public ire is particularly focused on their failure to declare that their university policies would necessarily prohibit calls for subjecting Jews to genocide as a response to the Israel-Hamas war.
Harvard President Claudine Gay and MIT President Sally Kornbluth remained in their jobs as of Wednesday, despite calls for their resignations. A third participant in the hearing was Liz Magill, then president of the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned after the hearing, as did the chairman of the university’s board of directors.
Calls for the removal of Gay and Kornbluth have continued from influential figures, most prominently several members of Congress, who on Tuesday introduced a resolution condemning them.
Put forward by Republican Representative Elise Stefanik, who was the presidents’ primary antagonist during last week’s hearing, the resolution was co-sponsored by one of her fellow Republicans, as well as two Democrats.
The resolution mentions all three women by name and “strongly condemns” them for their “failure to clearly state that calls for the genocide of Jews constitute harassment and violate their institutions’ codes of conduct.” On Wednesday, the House passed the resolution by a vote of 303-126, with 84 Democrats and nearly all Republicans in favor.
Antisemitism rises
The controversy arises as the conflict between Israel and Hamas continues to claim more lives, and divisions over the conduct of the war deepen in the U.S.
On October 7, fighters affiliated with the Palestinian group Hamas stormed into southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, slaughtering at least 1,200 people including civilians and children, and conducting a large number of well-documented atrocities. The group took an estimated 240 hostages back into Gaza, only some of whom have since been released.
In the days that followed, Israel responded with a massive bombardment of Gaza, and later, a ground invasion of the territory. While Israel claims that its goal is the destruction of Hamas, the assault has taken a terrible toll on the civilian population of Gaza, killing thousands, including thousands of children, and reducing entire neighborhoods to rubble.
In the weeks since, there has been a documented rise in hate crimes against both Jews and Arabs in the United States, but activism on university campuses appears to have been more frequently inclined toward anti-Jewish rhetoric and activity.
The Anti-Defamation League has documented more than 400 acts of antisemitism on college campuses since October 7. Along with the ADL, Hillel International reported that a survey found that 73% of Jewish college students said they had experienced or witnessed antisemitism on campus since the beginning of the academic year, more than twice the rate from a year ago.
Many critics
Colleges and universities across the country have come under fire for their responses to the war and the protests on their own campuses. However, the attention has been most closely focused on Harvard, MIT and Penn in the past week because of last week’s high-profile hearing in Congress.
At the hearing, the university presidents all attempted to give nuanced answers to questions from Stefanik about whether calls for genocide of Jews constitute harassment or other violations of the universities’ codes of conduct.
In general, they said that such determinations require that the context in which the statement is made be considered. Each of them declined to affirm that calls for genocide are always violations of their codes of conduct.
Legalistic arguments
At several points, the presidents appeared to refer to language in a Supreme Court ruling from 1999 that determined that behavior crosses the line into peer-on-peer harassment in an educational setting when it is “so severe, pervasive and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit.”
At other points in the discussion, they appeared to argue that speech must be protected up to the point at which it crosses into “conduct,” when it potentially becomes punishable.
Reliance on the principles of freedom of expression as a defense played poorly with many of the presidents’ critics, who pointed out that Harvard, MIT and Penn have all enacted rules that, in other contexts, sharply restrict speech that does not rise to the level of harassment as defined by the court.
Even the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a free-speech organization that believes that calls for genocide, while they may be abhorrent, should be protected, had little sympathy for the university presidents.
“At these institutions … and at other private and even public schools like them around the country, it has been so in vogue for the last five years, a decade, maybe even more, to really clamp down on all kinds of unpopular speech,” said Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy for FIRE.
“Now they're saying, ‘The First Amendment, we care about it so much on campus.’ I mean, nonsense. They don't,” Morey told VOA.
Lack of moral clarity
To others, the presidents’ refusal to declare that calls for genocide are clearly out of bounds on campus was evidence of unfitness to lead.
Harley Lippman, who serves on advisory boards at Columbia University’s School of Public and International Affairs and Yale University’s School of Management, told VOA that Gay, Kornbluth and Magill should not be in university leadership roles.
“They're incredibly qualified in the academic world. They are not qualified to lead universities. There is an absence of good leadership,” he said.
“You need to have moral clarity,” Lippman said. “You need to stand up for the basics of right or wrong, the basics of a democracy. Democracies have to protect [their] minorities, all of them. … Calling for the murder of a group of people is wrong. Period.”
Wrong venue
Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Presidents, told VOA that a highly politicized congressional hearing is not the proper venue for making decisions about how universities police conduct on their campuses, and that lawmakers in Washington are not the ones who ought to be deciding who leads institutions of higher learning.
“Congressional hearings have a place, perhaps, but what we saw was nothing productive,” Mulvey said. “It was completely counterproductive and ill-advised in trying to address these problems.”
She particularly objected to Stefanik, who posted, “One down. Two to go,” on the social media website X after McGill’s resignation.
“The idea that a sitting congresswoman feels it's her responsibility, or that she's entitled to determine who runs a university is outrageous,” Mulvey said.
Robin Guess contributed to this report.
