The backlash and debate over the ridiculously inept responses by the presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania regarding anti-Semitic demonstrations on their campus touches on too many ethics issues for me to organize coherently right now, especially since I have been inundated by emails and phone calls from many people with diverse and perceptive thoughts about the matter. I’m going to devote this post to individual items related to the college leaders’ disgrace.

1. A core ethics conflict is the question of when campus demonstrations and speech cross a line into speech that undermines the educational mission of a school. A college is not required by the Constitution to permit all speech; the Supreme Court has been clear that when speech begins to interfere with the educational functions of a school, it can be disciplined and curtailed. The problem all three school presidents encountered is that their universities’ past record of restricting (or allowing to be restricted) conservative speech and speakers on campus made their stand appear to be that anti-Semitic speech on campus was tolerable even when it creates a hostile living and studying environment for Jewish students. As the prosecutorial Congresswoman pointed out while grilling the three women, racist sloganeering on campus would be swiftly shut down as harassment on their campuses. How can the double standard be justified? Answer: it can’t be.

2. It was unfortunate that Harvard’s president wasn’t asked the necessary follow-up question when she carefully stated that the demonstrations in support of Hamas and genocide against Jews did not comport with Harvard’s “values.” I would have asked, “Why is Harvard failing to communicate and teach those values? In what ways does your university currently attempt to imbue those values in students at least to the extent that it strives to indoctrinate them in leftist ideology?”

3. There is a legitimate problem with enforcing speech standards on campus. I have had many discussions about this over the past several days. The university administrators are clearly not to be trusted to undertake the task of deciding what kind of speech pose a threat to students and the school’s educational mission. Promoting genocide, and racism should be easy calls, but a school with the biases and proclivities of Harvard is going to declare that opposing critical race theory, affirmative action or DEI cant is the equivalent of racism.

4. That dilemma is admirably examined in the substack essay by two FIRE stalwarts titled “President Magill: Giving admins even more power over free speech at Penn is a terrible idea.” I recommend reading it all. Especially useful are these links from the essay:

• FIRE Legal Director Will Creeley offers one of our best resources to explain what speech is protected on campus in As campuses reel, a reminder of the First Amendment’s boundaries (Nov. 3)
• Ilya Shaprio’s Where Free Speech Ends and Lawbreaking Begins in the Free Press (Greg disagrees with Ilya on what cancel culture is, but probably a bit less than Ilya thinks) (Nov. 27)
• Also in the Free Press, Even Antisemites Deserve Free Speech, from FIRE senior fellow Nadine Strossen and former FIRE fellow Pamela Paresky (Oct. 18)
• In New York magazine, Jonathan Chait writes The College Presidents Were Right About Campus Antisemitism: Schools should regulate conduct, not speech (Dec. 7)
• FIRE’s statement on President Magill’s video, Penn President Liz Magill signals profoundly misguided willingness to abandon free expression (Dec. 6)
• From FIRE’s Executive Vice President Nico Perrino, FIRE to Congress, university presidents: Don’t expand censorship. End it. (Dec. 6)

5. It appears that Penn’s president McGill, who arguably performed even worse under Rep. Elise Stefanik’s questioning than Harvard’s Claudine Gay, is toast: losing a 100,000,000 donation will have that effect. Good.

6. Over at PJ Media, conservative pundit David Strom predicts that Harvard will jettison Gay before the New Year. He’s wrong. Harvard trapped itself: in choosing a new president, it doubled down on wokism and chose a career diversity/equity/inclusion activist and zealot who is also black. Just as Joe Biden can’t dump Kamala Harris after trumpeting the “historic achievement” of a black, female VP, Harvard will not dare to make its first black president the first head of the school to be forced out so quickly. I sympathize with Gay; in another era, she might have been effective and uncontroversial. In this era, however, Harvard had set itself up to be exposed by and derided for its extreme ideological biases.

7. Harvard hasn’t lost a 100 million dollar donor (yet), but the resignation on Harvard’s newly-formed anti-Semitism advisory committee will, as the saying goes, “leave a mark.” Rabbi David Wolpe, a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Divinity School, issued this remarkable statement on Twitter/”X”…

Resigning, a Hanukkah Message: As of today I have resigned from the antisemitism advisory committee at Harvard. Without rehashing all of the obvious reasons that have been endlessly adumbrated online, and with great respect for the members of the committee, the short explanation is that both events on campus and the painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped.  Still, there are several points worth making. I believe Claudine Gay to be both a kind and thoughtful person.  Most of the students here wish only to get an education and a job, not prosecute ideological agendas, and there are many, many honorable, thoughtful and good people at the institution.  Harvard is still a repository of extraordinary minds and important research.

However, the system at Harvard along with the ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil. Ignoring Jewish suffering is evil.  Belittling or denying the Jewish experience, including unspeakable atrocities, is a vast and continuing catastrophe.  Denying Israel the self-determination as a Jewish nation accorded unthinkingly to others is endemic, and evil.

Battling that combination of ideologies is the work of more than a committee or a single university.  It is not going to be changed by hiring or firing a single person, or posting on X, or yelling at people who don’t post as you wish when you wish, as though posting is the summation of one’s moral character.  This is the task of educating a generation, and also a vast unlearning. Part of the problem is a simple herd mentality – people screaming slogans whose meaning and implication they know nothing of, or not wishing to be disliked by taking an unpopular position.  Some of it is the desire to achieve social status by being the sole or greatest victim.  Some of it is simple, old fashioned Jew hatred, that ugly arrow in the quiver of dark hearts for millenia.            In this generation, outside of Israel, we are called to be Maccabees of a different order. We do not fight the actual battle but we search for the cruse of oil left behind.  Remember the oil was to last one night, but lasted eight – which means there were seven nights of miracle.  But of course the first night was the greatest miracle — because the motivation to light the initial candle, to ensure the continuity and vitality of tradition in each generation, that is the supreme miracle.  Dispute but also create. Build the institutions you value, don’t merely attack those you denigrate.  We are at a moment when the toxicity of intellectual slovenliness has been laid bare for all to see. Time to kindle the first candle.  Create that miracle for us and all Israel — Blessing to you and Hag Urim Sameach.