There was a moment during the House committee hearing on anti-semitism on college campuses on December 5 when I knew now-former Harvard President Dr. Claudine Gay was finished. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York), who rose to the top of Republican House leadership by being a professional troll, asked Dr. Gay a question that seemed to have a straightforward answer:
"At Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?"
This feels like an obvious answer to any of us. “Yes.” That’s not how Dr. Gay answered.
"It can be, depending on the context,” she answered.
Regardless of whatever came up later with the accusations of plagiarism against Dr. Gay, this answer alone should have cost her her job. By saying “it can be,” it implies that the answer is “no, with exceptions,” rather than “yes.” There is no “context” in which the common person would find calling for the genocide of Jews to be anything less than bullying or harassment, or generally acceptable at all. Since her comments, some have tried to explain the nuance to me.
“It’s not bullying or harassment if it’s a joke between friends,” one person said.
Yes, it is, if a third party overheard it and felt that way. Progressives believed “words are violence” before, and declared anti-trans and racist jokes to be harassment (which I agree with), what’s so different now?
“What if a professor is teaching about it in class?” another suggested.
Then it’s not “calling” for the genocide, it’s talking about it. I don’t think it’s defensible for a professor to advocate for the genocide of Jews in a class, and I’m not sure how one works that into a genuine lesson or lecture.
And that’s context Dr. Gay can provide in a follow-up question or a rambling answer after the easy “Yes,” which is the only soundbite Stefanik or the media cares about.
One of my favorite episodes of The West Wing was the one in which a conservative member of the U.S. Supreme Court died and President Jed Bartlett, a Democrat, is tasked with replacing him and faces a Republican-controlled Senate. Barlett and his staff want a liberal judge Evelyn Baker Lang (Glenn Close) to have the seat. In a scene with Barlett staffers Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) and Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff), Lang goes over how she would handle a confirmation hearing. She explains how she would diffuse Republican attacks on her record, even identifying each Senator individually and their weaknesses. Ultimately she ended up on the Supreme Court as the first woman Chief Justice.
In one of my political science classes in college, the scene was used to explain the banality of congressional hearings. What is supposed to be a means for Congress to use their Constitutional power of oversight, have instead become opportunities for elected officials to grandstand, especially in the television age. This isn’t a new thing. The infamous anti-communist Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee used congressional hearings as a means of intimidation against alleged Communists and an effort to win votes of anti-Communist constituents back home.
Last month’s hearing was, just like McCarthy’s and HUAC’s, an effort to intimidate academics in left-leaning institutions. It needn’t have been. In the days and weeks after the October 7th attacks in Israel, antisemitism, as well as Islamophobia, became a widespread concern, and college campuses are just one place where hate reared its ugly head. It played into the right’s hands perfectly. Right-wingers have been chomping at the bit to come after higher education, which they accuse of being leftist indoctrination factories. Chris Rufo, who famously triggered a moral panic against Critical Race Theory in schools before becoming a favorite ally of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, even admitted as much. There is no excuse for Dr. Gay, and her fellow academic presidents, to have fumbled the hearings so badly.
My answer to Stefanik’s question would not be so academic. It would simply be “yes,” with a hint of shade.
“Harvard University has no tolerance for those who call for genocide. We are not Mar-a-Largo.”
Stefanik is an ardent Donald Trump fangirl. Trump himself has dined with rabid antisemites like Kanye West and Nick Fuentes. He called neonazis who marched chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 “very fine people.” He insinuated that Jews weren’t “thankful enough” for his pro-Israel stance. Stefanik has absolutely no moral high ground to complain about antisemitism, and that is where Dr. Gay and other college presidents who appeared before the committee should have gone with their answers.
Right-wing culture warriors are often successful because they go after people and institutions that have no widespread support; elite academia, suburban school boards, and Hollywood. Liberals go after ones that do have widespread support: police, and military.
You will ask what Dr. Gay could’ve done if Stefanik responded to her by listing examples; phrases and words that some consider “calls for genocide” that have gone unpunished on campus: “from the river to the sea” or “intifada.”
Well, the smart response there is to throw it back on her party, who have for years complained about “cancel culture” and policing free speech on campus:
“Congresswoman, we live in a time when college campuses are under fire for policing speech. In my short time at Harvard, I have listened to those concerns. It is easy for us to stop calls for genocide when they are explicit, it is much harder when those calls are implied or up for interpretation, as they are in those cases, and when we are told to err on the side of free speech. To some people, those are calls for genocide, to others they are not because they don’t use the word ‘genocide’ or explicitly call for the extermination of a people. To police that speech would be to engage in what you call ‘cancel culture,’ which we have been told not to engage in.”
Such a response would highlight the hypocrisy of the right. This group is so adamant about unregulated free speech when it comes to hate speech against other groups, why suddenly are they for cancel culture now? The “free speech” argument cuts both ways and pointing it out would have been Dr. Gay’s checkmate move.
Academics are not well-liked in the public sphere. They represent elitism, wealth, and arrogance. Working-class and non-college-educated Americans see them as a threat to their culture, and, rightly or wrongly, view academia as a cabal of elitists sneering down on them. Right-wing culture warriors are often successful because they go after people and institutions that have no widespread support; elite academia, suburban school boards, and Hollywood. Liberals go after ones that do have widespread support: police, and military.
During the McCarthy hearings, the senator’s grandstanding backfired only once he went after the military. Hauling the United States Army in front of the committee, accusing them of harboring communists, McCarthy asked Army lawyer Joseph Welch about one of his associates, a 33-year-old lawyer named Fred Fisher who had an association as a law student to a left-wing organization. Accusing Fisher of being a communist, McCarthy demanded his firing and Welch laid into McCarthy in front of the cameras, calling his insinuations “reckless” and “cruel” and defending Fisher’s honor. Welch uttered the now-famous line at McCarthy: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” The tide turned against a humiliated McCarthy, who was censured by the Senate just two months later.
Three years later, McCarthy drank himself to death.
The reason is simple. People like the military. They, along with law enforcement, are hard to malign because of their role in keeping society safe and orderly. Once you target then, from the left or the right, the population moves against you.
Academics do not have that kind of public support. Republicans knew what they were doing dragging these university presidents before a hearing, and Dr. Gay, a black female in a position of power, was their primary target. Once Dr. Gay made her comments, she lost what little if any, public sympathy she had. Then it was easy for bad-faith grifters like Rufo to target her over the plagiarism allegations and force her out. Liberals and leftists believe that they are in the middle of a battle over the future of the country, one in which the concepts of fairness, equality, and freedom how they define it are under siege by those determined to take the country back to a time where anyone who isn’t a white male Christian is subservient. If that is true, and I believe there is a lot of truth in it, then you need to control better the message and the public-facing figures on your side. You need sympathetic figures selling an attractive message. You don’t need “eggheads” engaging in academic debates about the semantics of genocide. Now it’s clear Dr. Gay and her colleagues were engaging with Stefanik and the other Republicans in good faith, but that’s the problem, Republicans didn’t hold the hearing in good faith; few congressional hearings are done in good faith. Stefanik wanted a soundbite and she got it.
What happened to Dr. Gay on the whole wasn’t fair. She got canned for doing something that any white man would probably skate, but you’ve probably heard by now “Life’s not fair.” That’s even more true in politics and the left needs to wake up to this reality.