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On the bird site (or is it the letter site now?) I'm seeing increasing calls to oust Harvard President Claudine Gay. Famously, during her recent Congressional testimony she was asked this question:
"Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?"
Her memeworthy reply was: "It can be, depending on the context".
This of course, is pretty weak sauce considering that Harvard is ranked dead last out of 245 institutions for Freedom of Expression according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. It would appear to an outside observer that Harvard's standards of what is acceptable speech vary greatly depending on who is doing the speaking.
Bill Ackman, billionaire and Harvard alum, didn't pull any punches tweeting "Resign in Disgrace".
Predictably the scandal has caused people to dig into Ms. Gay's academic work, and accusations were made that she plagiarized parts of her thesis. Nevertheless, many have come to her defense with more than 650 Harvard faculty signing a letter of support for Dr. Gay, who became the institution's first black President earlier this year.
It would appear that Harvard is in a no-win situation.
If they fire Dr. Gay, they will have fired a black, female President and will enrage the social justice left who constitute the vast majority of Harvard's students and staff.
If they don't fire her, they will have proven that Harvard has no consistent free speech principles and, furthermore, that calls for genocide are acceptable as long as they are against the appropriate targets.
There is perhaps a third option, in which Dr. Gay cracks down hard on anti-Semitic speech and makes an example of a few students or staff who crossed the line, thus blaming it on a few bad apples and going back to the status quo.
Whatever happens, I think that Harvard's reputation has been damaged by this incident. There is an opportunity for another school in the elite ranks to set itself apart as the "sane" alternative and perhaps capture Harvard's crown at the top of the academic food chain.
As always, I believe that donations to elite institutions are harmful and the donors should be laughed at, taxed, and shamed.
It was a manipulative question. It’s akin to, “does calling for the rape of women violate Harvard’s rules on domestic assault?” Of course it wouldn’t, because inappropriate statements against the values of Harvard are not in the category of domestic assault, but a different category of infraction. In the same way, bullying and harassment are targeted actions against individuals or groups of individuals, and not every infraction is in the category of harassment. So Gay’s answer was correct, and also morally correct. The pressure of billionaire Jews and the World Jewish Congress to make people lie in front of Congress is a horrible look. Calling for the genocide of Jews would be against norms of every major university in America, but that doesn’t mean that it constitutes “harassment” any more than it constitutes tax fraud. Not to mention, it’s a new type of crime that hadn’t had time to be adjudicated. (“Miss Gay, does calling for Armenians to eat so many hot dogs that they internally implode violate Harvard’s rules on harassment?”)
It’s a manipulative question because it’s designed to elicit a certain answer, sure. That said…
The ‘spirit of the first amendment’ defense (as invoked by Harvard, Penn, etc) is invalid because it does not apply to criticism of favored groups like transgender and black people, or when it comes to controversial topics like HBD. As FIRE has extensively documented, lawful conservative or reactionary speech clearly does violate Harvard’s code of conduct enough for the administration to take (extensive, in the case of BLM) action. In addition, most American universities’ approach to Title IX policy since the Obama administration has been to build an entire infrastructure of kangaroo courts that explicitly exist to prosecute and punish students for alleged behavior that does not amount to an ‘official’ crime as investigated and charged by the police and justice system.
On this basis it is therefore fair to ask why these colleges retreat to the ‘spirit of the first amendment’ defense with regards to Israel/Palestine when merely adhering to constitutional and legislative standards clearly isn’t sufficient for them in other cases.
If what you’re saying is true, there should be a case of someone being disciplined or fired specifically on the grounds of bullying and harassment for making an anti-black or anti-gay comment entirely outside a teacher-student context [eg, in a professor’s own self-published work]. I do not know of any case of this happening, but if you know of a case then it would prove your argument.
Carol Hooven was, as far as I can tell, forced to retire from teaching at Harvard within the last two years for making the controversial statement that there are two sexes while promoting her book about testosterone and its effects.
Actually, this proved the exact opposite. Hooven was never disciplined by the university at all, and instead was “boycotted” by graduate students.
https://www.goacta.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Carole-Hooven-transcript.pdf
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