I have yet to watch the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn testify before Congress on the matter of campus antisemitism. But it does not look very good.
This clip is pretty damning:
The blowback has been strong and bipartisan.
Here is The New York Times:
Harvard, M.I.T. and the University of Pennsylvania on Thursday faced threats from donors, demands that their presidents resign and a congressional investigation as repercussions mounted over the universities’ responses to antisemitism on campus.
At Penn, university trustees discussed the future of Elizabeth Magill, its president, whose congressional testimony on Tuesday set off a furor when she dodged the question of whether she would discipline students for calling for the genocide of Jews.
Her answers and similar comments by Claudine Gay of Harvard and Sally Kornbluth of M.I.T. at a House committee meeting set off accusations that they were doing little to protect their own students. All three said they had taken action against antisemitism, but critics argued they had not done enough or were even fostering antisemitism on their campuses.
In response, a House committee opened an investigation into the three institutions as its chairwoman criticized the schools for failing to tackle the “rampant antisemitism” on their campuses after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza.
Representative Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who leads the Committee on Education and the Workforce, said the inquiry would examine “the learning environments” at Harvard, M.I.T. and Penn, as well as disciplinary procedures. She warned that the panel would “not hesitate” to issue subpoenas.
“The disgusting targeting and harassment of Jewish students is not limited to these institutions, and other universities should expect investigations as well, as their litany of similar failures has not gone unnoticed,” Ms. Foxx said in a statement.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, said all three presidents should leave their posts. “You cannot call for the genocide of Jews, the genocide of any group of people, and not say that that’s harassment,” she told Fox News.
And Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, denounced the university leaders at the National Menorah Lighting in Washington.
“Seeing the presidents of some of our most elite universities literally unable to denounce calling for the genocide of Jews as antisemitic — that lack of moral clarity is simply unacceptable,” said Mr. Emhoff, who is Jewish.
For Ms. Magill, pressure has been building within Penn’s community, too. The advisory board at Wharton, Penn’s business school, told Ms. Magill in a letter this week that “the university requires new leadership with immediate effect.”
And the hedge fund manager Ross L. Stevens said that he would pull back a donation, worth approximately $100 million, to fund the Stevens Center for Innovation in Finance.
Read the rest here.
Here is the Second Gentleman’s speech:
Here some tweets that caught my attention:
Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey:
PA Governor Josh Shapiro didn’t tweet, but he said this.
For the politician, words don’t have meanings, they have uses. These academics learned that lesson if they weren’t already familiar with it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/opinion/university-presidents-antisemitism.html