{I} t has been well established at this point that the performances of the presidents of three elite American institutions of higher education who testified in front of the House Education and Workforce Committee on Tuesday — Harvard University’s Claudine Gay, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sally Kornbluth, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill — were shameful. Much has and will be made of the presidents’ newfound deference to free expression, of the smirk Magill wore on her face when telling Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) that whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” constitutes bullying or harassment is “context-dependent,” and of Gay’s refusal to answer the same question after being given ample opportunities to do so.
Gone largely unaddressed in most coverage was the presidents’ downplaying of antisemitism as a unique issue on college campuses and one distinct from other forms of hatred or other ills plaguing higher education. In Gay’s opening statement, she said the October 7 attack on Israel had been followed by a rising tide of antisemitism — and Islamophobia. As part of her plan for combating antisemitism on her campus, she said, she will “implement a robust program of education and training for students, faculty, and staff on antisemitism and Islamophobia” (emphasis added). Harvard Business School, she bragged to the committee, has launched a working group on antisemitism — and Islamophobia and anti-Arabism. She “will continue to mobilize [her] full authority as president to confront antisemitism,” she said, as well as “Islamophobia and other forms of hate.”
Kornbluth touted a new initiative at MIT called “Standing Together Against Hate.” The program will, she said, “emphasize both education and community-building, especially in our residence halls.” “In addition to fighting antisemitism,” she continued, “it will address Islamophobia — also on the rise, and also underreported.” In her remarks, Magill said she has “created a presidential commission on countering hate and building community to empower our campus leaders to address antisemitism, Islamophobia, and hate in all forms.”
What we heard from the presidents in their opening statements, and what we’ve seen from President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and countless others on the left, is the minimization of antisemitism, the refusal to condemn the hatred of Jews without also mentioning Islamophobia. (It is important to add that there is no reason to believe that the scale of Islamophobia in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel is anywhere near that of antisemitism, despite a few tragic attacks against Muslim Americans.) These supposed leaders could not stay on topic even during a hearing dedicated to the issue of antisemitism, and only antisemitism, within higher education. God forbid hatred against Jews is enough to merit condemnation alone.
The worst moment in this display of progressive racial essentialism — which implies that bigotry against Jews is simply not as much of a problem as hatred against other minority groups because Jews, according to doctrines of intersectionality and critical race theory, are white — came when Ranking Member Bobby Scott (D., Va.) asked the panel whether antisemitism is the only problem on campus in a hearing focused on the problem of antisemitism on campus. The panelists’ ears perked up. Immediately, without delay, each one said no. “It’s not just antisemitism; it’s Islamophobia and hostility to individuals who are visibly Arab or Muslim or Palestinian,” Gay said, adding that students of color more broadly and LGBTQ-identifying students also face challenges, implying that the quite noticeable spike in antisemitism — we’ve all seen the videos — is not a unique challenge.
It might be easy to chalk up the refusal to reckon singularly with antisemitism to the latent antisemitism of those testifying, but that would not be accurate. In fact, Representative Kevin Kiley (R., Calif.) said as much when questioning Gay, acknowledging that he did not believe her to be a hateful person but one beholden to hateful constituencies in the preservation of her institutional power. These educational leaders, having come up through academic systems and soaked in DEI-infused rhetoric, repeating all the right words in order to climb the career ladder, are now and always have been just following the orders of the left-wing culture warriors on whose approval they depend for professional success.
But, despite the likelihood that Gay, Kornbluth, and Magill harbor no personal ill will toward the Jewish people — Kornbluth herself is Jewish, though that is no inoculation against antisemitism — they have so absorbed academic progressivism that not one of them hesitated for a second before confirming Scott’s suspicion that, to them, antisemitism may not be as big a problem as the Jews are making it out to be.
These three women have spent nearly their entire lives within elite academia. They are clearly intelligent individuals, in some form or another, despite having made themselves look otherwise on Tuesday; they clearly understand the way of thinking, speaking, and acting necessary to advance in the ivory tower, to the point at which they repeat it without pause. In fact, one of the only points at which any of the witnesses appeared to have to think at all came when Representative Bob Good (R., Va.) asked Magill whether it is dishonest to equate antisemitism with Islamophobia given the fact that no groups have marched across Penn’s campus calling for the slaughter of Muslims. Magill retreated to the all-lives-matter-ism that she and her colleagues have recently become so skilled at deploying, before Good repeated his question and the Penn president was forced to admit that she “is not aware of any such instances.”
It is quite evident — considering how comfortable these academic elites are to downplay the threat of antisemitism, to “whatabout” regarding Islamophobia, and to change the subject to anything social-justice related — that they are not making a conscious decision to allow evil to flourish on their campuses. They are simply retreating into the language of a striving social-justice “meritocracy” that brings with it its own shibboleths, inuring its adherents to a worldview in which antisemitism simply does not exist on the same plane as other forms of hatred.