In testimonies before Congress last week, the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology personally and vehemently condemned rising antisemitism and antisemitic speech on their campuses. But their responses to a representative's question about demonstrators calling for the genocide of Jews in campus protests has ignited a sharp backlash and bipartisan demands for their resignation, that just over a week out from the remarks have only seemed to ramp up.
Last week's contentious and viral moment from the five-hour-long House Education and the Workforce Committee hearing titled "Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism" saw Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, N.Y., a Harvard alum, questioning a panel of Ivy League presidents about whether "calling for the genocide of Jews" violates each universities' code of conduct. While the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology personally and vehemently condemned rising antisemitism and antisemitic speech on their campuses, their responses to Stefanik's grilling have ignited a sharp backlash and bipartisan demands for their resignation.
“It is a context-dependent decision,” UPenn President Liz Magill responded near the end of their tense exchange, to which Stefanik fired back, “Calling for the genocide of Jews is dependent on the context? That is not bullying or harassment? This is the easiest question to answer ‘yes,’ Ms. Magill.”
Harvard President Claudine Gay answered the question in kind, telling Stefanik, “When speech crosses into conduct, we take action.” MIT President Sally Kornbluth echoed that standpoint and asserted that such language would only be “investigated as harassment if pervasive and severe.”
Stefanik demanded the college leaders also declare whether chants of "intifada," an Arabic word meaning uprising that many Jews see as a call for violence against them, violate their universities' codes of conduct. While the university leaders again personally condemned the word and rebuked its use, Magill and Gay said that chants of it rising to the level of inciting violence or violating policy is more complicated an answer.
"Legally, their responses were correct. I think everyone who watched that testimony, however, thought the answers were clearly lacking," Alex Morey, a First Amendment attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told Salon. The First Amendment, Morey said, protects "true threats or discriminatory harassment or incitement," which rise to higher legal bars than saying "intifada" or "from the river to the sea," a phrase that many Palestinians and supportive protestors see as a call for Palestinian liberation while many Jews associate it with calls for genocide.
While it may seem "nonsensical" to say that calls for genocide are protected speech, the protection is there for "good reason" because people disagree about what genocide means, Morey explained, noting that many Americans don't fully understand the scope of what the First Amendment protects.
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The massive fallout since the hearing suggests many Americans might not agree with it either. Notable alum have questioned the leadership of the university presidents — who have each led their institution for less than two years. Donors have threatened to pull their funding and encouraged others to follow suit. and public officials have called for their terminations. The blowback has also ignited a debate about free speech on U.S. campuses in the face of the ongoing crisis in the Middle East and the role of universities in balancing the protected right with the concerns of students and faculty about the presence of antisemitic speech in on-campus protests. On Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted to call for the resignation of Gay and Kornbluth.
"From a free speech perspective, we were going, 'Oh my god. Consider the source,' Morey told Salon of her organization's reaction to the hearings. "These are the same presidents that are censoring all kinds of speech on their campus all the time, and now they're citing the First Amendment and saying, 'Gosh, this is a context-dependent question.'"
Morey, who also serves as FIRE's director of campus rights advocacy, noted that Harvard, MIT and Penn have repeatedly scored low on the organization's campus free speech rankings, with the 2024 report showing Harvard ranking the lowest with an "abysmal" score out of more than 250 schools and Penn ranking just above the Cambridge-based university.
MIT, though scoring "average" and falling toward the middle of the ranking, is among the "bad actors," Morey said, citing the school's reneging of a 2021 invitation for a geophysicist to give a lecture after he voiced criticism of affirmative action and diversity programs.
"On these college and university campuses, we have had administrators sometimes unilaterally making decisions about whether or not they think a certain political statement is punishable," Morey told Salon. "So do you want someone like Liz McGill or Claudia Gay making the decision about which side here — when it comes to Israel-Palestine — is really calling for genocide, which side should be punished? In practice, that is, how these policies have to be enforced."
In the two months since Oct. 7, when militant group Hamas carried out a deadly attack in Israel that, per its government, killed 1,200 Israelis, university presidents have attempted to balance the right to free speech of Pro-Palestinian student protestors — many of whom decry Israel's retaliatory invasion of Gaza that has killed about 18,000 Palestinians, according to the Hama-run Gaza Ministry of Health, as a genocide — with concerns from students that the language those demonstrators use is antisemitic.
But such a balance, which fears of violence in the face of rising antisemitism and anti-Arab harassment make more complicated, is hard to strike, according to Jacqueline Pfeffer Merrill, the director of the Bipartisan Policy Center's Campus Free Expression Project.
"The university president has the tricky task of fostering a diversity of viewpoints and also stewarding a sense of community so that people feel that they have a shared place in the academic enterprise of the university, and I think managing that diversity and plurality while also creating a shared sense of participating in the educational mission is challenging," she told Salon before last week's hearing.
The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights has opened a slate of Title VI shared ancestry inquiries into U.S. colleges in response to complaints about antisemitic and Islamophobic harassment on the campuses since Oct. 7. Harvard and Penn are among a dozen universities currently under investigation.
"These are very fraught issues. There's no one answer that suits the mission of every campus. And no matter what a president does, some people are going to be dissatisfied," Pfeffer Merrill added, noting that the president bears the responsibility of setting the tone and assuring the institution pursues the academic mission, values student safety and maintains a sense of "wide open inquiry and expression."
Many critics of the leaders' answers to Rep. Stefanik's questioning believed they failed in fulfilling that responsibility.
Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, said he found Magill's responses, "unacceptable" and told reporters last Wednesday that she "failed" to "speak and act with moral clarity," according to The New York Times. Ross Stevens, a hedge fund manager started pulling a donation valued at around $100 million from Penn, while petitions circulated calling for the three presidents' resignations. One public petition for Magill, who resigned Saturday after issuing an apology on Wednesday, garnered over 26,000 signatures.
Stefanik, the House GOP conference chair, announced Thursday that the committee would be launching congressional probes "with the full force of subpoena power" of Harvard, MIT, Penn and other universities "to hold these schools accountable for their failure on the global stage."
By Friday more than 70 members of Congress, including the New York Republican, had also signed a letter demanding the three presidents' firing. When Magill did resign, Stefanik celebrated and called on Gay, who apologized for her remarks last Thursday after issuing a clarifying statement, and MIT's Kornbluth to follow suit.
Bill Ackman, a billionaire and Harvard alum, echoed those calls in a scathing letter to members of Harvard's Governing Boards, accusing Gay of "[squelching] speech she disfavors while defending and thereby amplifying vile and threatening hate speech," and urging the board to terminate her.
This backlash is the "conflagration" of a long history in the politics of higher education, according to Amy Binder, a sociology professor at John Hopkins University researching education and politics, who likened the outrage to a bonfire that's had fuel, kindling and newspaper added to it for years.
On the political right, various actors and organizations have long been "obsessed" with the notion that higher education is a place that indoctrinates students with progressive views and foments bias against conservatives, she explained, pointing to conservative writer William F. Buckley's 1951 book "God and Man at Yale" as an origin point. On the other hand, the left has often accused higher education of "paying lip service" to issues of diversity and inclusion and attempting to "buy off progressive concerns by putting things in committee."
"There's just a lot of mistrust surrounding higher education so that when an issue like this blows up, the various sides are ready to just engage and engage very visibly and vocally," Binder told Salon.
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Stefanik's probing appeared to be in service of a broader political aim, Binder added, saying that her question was framed as "a gotcha" for the leaders rather than a genuine inquiry.
"When you are posing a yes or no question to somebody and you expect a yes or no answer, you're really not asking for somebody to engage with you on a question or to be nuanced about an answer, but rather to really play into the hands of the questioner," Binder told Salon.
Others, like Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., have also drawn attention to the hypocrisy in Stefanik and other Republicans' seemingly sudden concern for hate speech.
“Where does Elise Stefanik get off lecturing anybody about antisemitism, when she’s the hugest supporter of Donald Trump, who traffics in antisemitism all the time?” Raskin asked during an interview with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi per The Hill. He said that she didn't "utter a peep of protest" when Trump invited to dinner Kanye West and white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who Raskin said believes Oct. 7 to be an Israeli propaganda move.
“The Republican Party is filled with people who are entangled with antisemitism like that and yet somehow she gets on our high horse and lectures a Jewish college president from MIT,” Raskin, who is critical of the university leaders' responses, added.
Some, however, have also come to the president's defense. More than 700 faculty at Harvard rallied behind Gay amid the mounting pressure for her to resign, signing a letter urging leadership to "defend the independence of the university and resist political pressures," including calls for Gay's removal. The 24-page document included the signature of liberal Harvard legal scholar Laurence Tribe, who criticized Gay's testimony last week, a signal that the controversy may be more nuanced than presented.
Despite the increased pressure from big-name critics, the Harvard Corporation announced Tuesday that Gay would remain the university's president in a statement declaring its unanimous support for her. The MIT Corporation rallied behind Kornbluth in a statement released last week, and Kornbluth has not indicated any plans to step down.
"Standing strong for values like open inquiry and academic freedom even in the face of the inevitable pressures that will come from legislators, from donors, from Twitter, from students and faculty" is what university leadership and governing boards are supposed to do, Morey told Salon, adding that they should prioritize furthering that core mission and know "when it's not their place to make a political statement."
Open inquiry, according to Pfeffer Merrill, is a "threatened value" on college campuses against a backdrop where politicians, notable figures and even students are better rewarded for using social media to "call out" others.
"In our democracy, we make decisions by having conversations about ideas. It's not by the loudest voice, by violence, by even simple majority vote, but by having the difficult conversations about ideas and policies that are central to our time," she told Salon, acknowledging that elevated tensions in the current moment make it harder for those conversations to happen. "When people have very deep disagreements, that's what should be happening on a college campus," Pfeffer Merrill added. "It's a success when people are able to start having those conversations, however fraught and difficult and even painful they are."
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