Some thoughts on yesterday's Congressional hearing appearance by the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT.
Today, President Gay of Harvard released a "clarifying" statement and President Magill of UPenn released a video also "clarifying" her remarks. Magill looks like she is in a hostage video; visibly an unhappy camper.(1) Clearly they, and more importantly, their Boards, know how disastrous the testimony was. The truth is whatever "clarifying" remarks the presidents make, they are just trying to survive for the moment. They'll give lip service to free speech and intellectual freedom when necessary but their entire academic careers demonstrate they do not believe in it. You can't when what you really believe in is equity, intersectionality, the primacy of group identity, and the categories of Oppressed and Oppressor.
While Rep. Stefanik's question about Jews and genocide provided an illuminating insight into how the witnesses think, more illuminating would have been to ask followup questions, substituting "Palestinians", "Whites", and "Blacks" for Jews.(2) It certainly would have flummoxed the witnesses. Whatever they would have said in response, their actual beliefs are that for Palestinians and Blacks, calls for genocide would require their schools to take disciplinary action because those two groups are Oppressed, while they would search for context to avoid taking action regarding Jews or Whites.(3)
In her testimony President Gay's asserted that "antisemitism is a symptom of ignorance". She's wrong. The antisemitism we see on her campus is a deliberate product of our educational system, including that of Harvard. It is a deliberate outgrowth of the race essentialism fervently embraced, practiced, and taught by Harvard and other elite institutions. On the other hand, I can accept that today's Harvard education is geared towards creating and cultivating ignorance. It is why our elite educational institutions have become so dangerous to the future of this country.
Or, as filmmaker Eli Steele wrote today about those pushing this ideology:
[They] have spent the last several decades gaslighting us that our nation is systemically racist. They created articles, books, TV shows and films to overwhelm us with poetic truths. When we objected, they denied us straight answers and instead subjected us to racial trainings of every kind. They lied to us that this was the difficult work, the difficult conversations that was needed to be done in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion. New allies that agreed to put race before humanity were rewarded with cheap lawn signs that virtue signaled their goodness to their neighbors. In the meanwhile, these Leftists leaders rode their grift along with the exploitation of white guilt to dizzying heights, including the presidencies of Harvard, MIT, and Penn. Why then would we expect them to react with integrity and morals when the true and undeniable evil of antisemitism emerged before their very eyes? After all, they long ago met the devil at the crossroads and sacrificed their humanity for racial essentialism and that is the moral rot that we saw on full display yesterday.
In recent days we saw another example of this moral rot. Ibram Kendi, speaking to an audience at an Netflix event celebrating the release of his special on that outlet, remarked that "Whiteness prevents white people from connecting to humanity”(4), remarks received with great applause by his mostly white audience. Think how demeaning, racist, and inhumane those remarks are. What they really demonstrate is how Kendi's obsession with race prevents him from connecting with humanity by reducing everything to race. He simply does not recognize people as people. That a race obsessed intellectual mediocrity like Kendi has been showered with millions in funding and given a Netflix special allowing him wide visibility to spread his poison is an indictment of our elite institutions. As an added insult to the Jewish community, Boston University granted him tenure as Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities, with BU boasting "The position has been held only once before by the late Elie Wiesel from 1976 to his retirement in 2013".
And to show the interlocking nature of relationships among these elite institutions, Kendi's brother-in-law, who also runs Kendi's Foundation, plays a key role in censorship at YouTube, a subsidiary of Google.(5)
Why are the most prominent outbreaks of antisemitism taking place at our elite educational institutions and in cities governed for decades by Progressives?
Why do those participating in the protests embrace the same constellation of equity and intersectionality causes?
Why, for that matter, did the worst of the George Floyd riots of 2020 take place in cities governed for decades by Progressives?
I'll close by linking to a recent article by David Polansky on "Antisemitism and the Discourse of Privilege", which starts with this observation:
Political and cultural realignments are funny things: they have enormously consequential effects, yet being largely immaterial themselves, they can go unnoticed for long periods of time until the right event reveals them quite suddenly. The Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7th were such an event.
And ends with this advice:
[It would] be vastly preferable to begin the process of recovering an appreciation for moderate if imperfect liberalism. In the meantime, I have a more modest suggestion aimed at fellow Jews but applicable to all: be cautious of seeking special protections that require you to demean yourself. As David Mamet would put it, in the end, you will get nothing, and people will begin to act cruelly toward you.
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(1) In the case of Magill, Governor Shapiro (D) of Pennsylvania issued a statement slamming her:
Leaders have a responsibility to speak and act with moral clarity, and Liz Magill failed to meet that simple test. That was an unacceptable statement from the president of Penn. Frankly, I thought her comments were absolutely shameful.
Shapiro called on UPenn's Board to meet soon to determine whether Magill's testimony, "represents the views and values of the University of Pennsylvania”.
(2) While Stefanik's question and the responses got the most publicity, Rep Burgess Owens (R-Utah) statement and the response to his questions was even more revealing.
(3) The craziness of the witness response to Stefanik's question is illustrated by the fact that Harvard instructs undergrads that they may be subject to disciplinary action for statements characterized as "sizeism", "fatphobia", "cisheterosexism" and "ableism" (are these really things??), and for failing to use preferred pronouns.
(4) And Jews are a subset of Whites in this discourse.
(5) Macharia Edmonds is YouTube Global Content Policy Lead, a role where his duties include:
- Partner with Policy Enforcement Leads, Intelligence Analysts and Product Managers to develop scalable and inclusive policies
- Present policy proposals to Senior Leadership including Trust & Safety VP and YouTube CEO
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