As anger erupts over anti-Semitism on campus, conservatives are seizing the moment

For years, conservatives have struggled to convince American voters that the left-wing view of higher education is not only wrong but dangerous. Universities and their students, they have argued, are increasingly trapped by stifling ideologies – political correctness in one decade, domination of ‘social justice’ in another, ‘woke-ism’ most recently – that should not be allowed to are dismissed as academic fads or innocent zeal.

The affirmation they sought finally seemed to arrive this fall, as campuses convulsed with protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and hostile, sometimes violent, rhetoric toward Jews. Things came to a head on Capitol Hill last week, when the presidents of three elite universities struggled to answer a question about whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate school rules, and Republicans claimed that outbreaks of anti-Semitism on campus were a symptom of the radical ideas they had long warned about. On Saturday, amid the fallout, one of those presidents, M. Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned.

For Republicans, the rise of anti-Semitic speech and the timid responses of some academic leaders presented a long-sought opportunity to flip the political script and portray liberals or their institutions as hateful and intolerant. “What I am describing is a serious danger inherent in endorsing the race-based ideology of the radical left,” Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, said at the hearing, adding: “Institutional anti-Semitism and hatred are among the poisonous fruits of the cultures of your institution.”

The strength of the criticism was underscored by the number of Democrats who joined the attack.

The three university presidents were denounced by a spokesperson for President Biden. He received support from other Democratic officials, such as Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who joined calls for Ms. Magill’s resignation. Some prominent business leaders with liberal leanings said they had not understood what was really happening in higher education.

“For a long time I’ve said that anti-Semitism, especially on the American left, wasn’t as bad as people made it out to be,” Sam Altman, head of the artificial intelligence firm OpenAI and a major Democratic donor, wrote about X. “I’d like to just to say that I was completely wrong.

Just as celebratory gatherings in the wake of October’s Hamas disasters have separated Jewish progressives from some of their own longtime allies, anti-Israel protests on campus in recent weeks have driven a wedge into the broader Democratic Party. They have turned prominent politicians and executives against institutions where they are more accustomed to sending their children or giving farewell speeches.

It has even broken the #MeToo case, as prominent liberal women, like former Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg, wonder why advocacy groups and institutions dedicated to women’s rights were so slow to speak out when evidence emerged that Hamas attackers on October 7 rape as a weapon of war.

During the presidential election campaign, where Republican candidates this summer largely scaled back their criticism of woke-ism in college after discovering its limited appeal to a broader political audience, the issue returned to the forefront last Wednesday.

“If you think Israel has no right to exist, that’s anti-Semitic,” said Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, who suggested she would try to impose new federal rules around anti-Israel speech if elected president . “We will change the definition so that every government, every school, has to recognize the definition for what it is.”

The Republican counterattacks come after several years in which prominent conservatives began to embrace their own anti-Semitic, race-based ideology: the so-called replacement theory, which holds that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to replace and disempower white Americans. partly by encouraging unfettered immigration. The theory has contributed to several mass shootings in the United States in recent years, even as echoes of its central tenets become increasingly common in mainstream Republican politics. While Ms. Haley attacked anti-Semitism on the Republican stage last week, another candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, declared that the replacement theory was a “fundamental statement of the Democratic Party platform.”

But for many on the right, the careful, evasive answers from three university presidents at Tuesday’s hearing — Ms. Magill, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — stood in stark contrast to those institutions’ long pandering to the left . -sensitivities around race and gender.

All three institutions have in recent years punished or censored statements or behavior that angered the left. In 2019, Harvard revoked a deanship from Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a Black law professor, after students protested his joining the legal team of former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. In 2021, MIT canceled a planned scientific lecture by stellar geophysicist Dorian Abbot, pointing to his criticism of affirmative action. The University of Pennsylvania law school is seeking to impose sanctions on a tenured professor there, Amy Wax, citing, among other things, student complaints about her comments about the academic performance of students of color.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which advocates for freedom of expression in American society, ranks hundreds of colleges for their protection of student rights and open research. Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania are at the bottom.

“The same administrators who now cloaked themselves in the mantle of free speech were more than willing to censor all kinds of unpopular things on their campuses,” said Alex Morey, the foundation’s director of campus rights advocacy. “It’s such complete hypocrisy.”

Controversies surrounding anti-Semitism could fuel further Republican efforts to defund and restrict public universities, especially where the Republican Party dominates state legislatures. A leading Republican presidential candidate, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, gained support among conservatives with relentless attacks on diversity programs and the teaching of left-wing theories of racism at public universities in Florida. All told, more than two dozen states have passed or considered bills this year that would restrict diversity, equity and inclusion programs or identity-based hiring practices, according to a tally kept by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Jay P. Greene, a senior scholar at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said anti-Semitic and anti-Israel protests on campuses — and the legal responses from college presidents at last week’s hearing — were akin to what he called the “Zoom ‘ mentioned. moment” during the pandemic, when some parents listened carefully for the first time to what their children were learning at school and concluded that it was “of insufficient quality and radical in content.”

“One of the things we have struggled with, those of us who want to reform higher education, is convincing people that there is a problem,” added Dr. Greene added. “Historically, they look around and say, ‘Huh, this seems fine to me.’ All they see now is that things are not going well.”

If Tuesday’s hearing drove a perfect wedge into the Democratic coalition, that seemed partly intentional. The most intense questioning was led by Rep. Elise Stefanik, the moderate MAGA Republican of New York, who faced criticism in 2021 for campaign ads that played on “great replacement”-style themes.

Ms. Stefanik is both a Harvard graduate and a critic: Several years ago, following complaints from students, Harvard removed Ms. Stefanik from the board of the Institute of Politics over her repeated false statements about the 2020 election results. She accused her alma mater of ‘ to go to the left’. And last week, she exacted a measure of revenge.

Now, Republicans in the House of Representatives have launched an investigation into disciplinary procedures and learning at the three institutions, which will unfold in the coming months.

Both Dr. Gay of Harvard and Ms. Magill of Penn apologized for their answers during the hearing.

“At that moment, I was focused on our university’s long-standing policy, in line with the U.S. Constitution, which states that merely speaking is not a crime,” Ms. Magill said in a video days before her resignation. “I wasn’t focused on the irrefutable fact, but I should have been, that a call for genocide against Jewish people is a call for the most terrible violence that human beings can commit. It is evil – plain and simple.”

“I’m sorry,” said Dr. Gay in an interview with The Harvard Crimson. “Words are important.”

At MIT, the board of directors released a statement endorsing Dr. Kornbluth, saying she had “full and unconditional support” and had “done an excellent job leading our community, including in addressing anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and other forms of hatred.”

Mrs Stefanik, in an interview predicted Friday with The New York Sun that all three university presidents would be forced to resign.

“There will be tectonic ramifications from this hearing, and it will be an earthquake in higher education,” she said.