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GELFAND’S WORLD - Last week, a House committee hosted three university presidents, one from Harvard, one from Penn, and one from my alma mater, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). At that hearing, congresswoman Elise Stefanik asked each president whether it would be a violation of the institution's code of conduct to call for the extermination of Jews. Besides being irritating and frustrating to watch, the interaction, which you can see on video here, is interesting because it shows three people giving honest answers -- without dodging or hedging -- to what turns out to be a "gotcha" question. It's a loaded question because there is a difference between providing a personal opinion to a friend or as political speech in a public space, vs. an in-your-face act of threat or intimidation.
In response, Stefanik has demanded that all three of the presidents resign. I should point out that when you listen to the questions and the answers, you will recognize what the university presidents were saying -- that if the speech is personal or is part of other actions, then yes, it can be a violation of the university's rules. When Stefanik demanded that the presidents give a yes or no answer to a broad and open-ended question about anyone ever making such a statement, the proper answer has to be that it depends. To give this answer, that it depends on the context is, I would argue, exactly correct.
Let's imagine possible scenarios:
1) In the graduate dormitory, five Arabs are sitting around the breakfast table and discussing the latest Middle East fighting. One says to his friends, "We should have gotten rid of the Jews back in 1930, when we had a chance."
2) A radical left protester at a student rally makes an impassioned speech calling for West Bank and Gazan Arabs to have full equality with Israelis in a single nation governed by a single Parliament, thereby implying, however implicitly, that he supports the end of Israel as a nation. One might infer that the result of such an action, were it ever to occur, could be genocidal to the Jews of the former Israel.
3) A person of any origin or nationality grabs a Jew on campus, shakes him, and angrily yells threats while he pounds on him.
I think we can agree that the last possibility (3) is clearly out of order, as it entails a real threat, real violence, and personal abuse. Any of these three would be, by itself, in violation of most university's rules, and the physical violence is a criminal act by itself.
I suspect that most of us would agree that the first example of friends talking at breakfast (1) is not a violation of the rules. It is just an opinion -- one that most of us would find ugly, but probably fairly common among large groups of people. It is a view that the west has been opposing for many decades, with only partial and intermittent success. In short, if we are going to accept foreigners (and their tuition payments) into our graduate programs, we have to consider that they won't always be in agreement with standard American viewpoints. This statement would, however, be a violation of the rules if made in a threatening or harassing way to a Jewish student with the intent to intimidate.
But here's the crux of this debate: If this statement were made simply as a statement of opinion in a public forum, it would be protected speech.
The second of the three scenarios -- a public speech about imperialism in an open forum -- is intended to represent the more common sort of opinion that students will hear from time to time. Such speeches often include criticism of the United States itself, along with a collection of familiar terms including colonialism, empire, cultural appropriation, and the like. I include it here because it is the sort of thing that you will hear on campus if the university considers itself to be an oasis for freedom of thought within the wider community, just as you will see it on the internet if you follow a broad range of political opinion.
When you consider that all three of these scenarios probably take place in most major research universities over the course of a year, and each one requires a different answer to Stefanik's question, then we should also conclude that the answers given by the three presidents were correct. It all depends.
But here is what congresswoman Elise Stefanik said in a Tweet:
"Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn REFUSE to say whether "calling for the genocide of Jews" is bullying and harassment according to their codes of conduct. Even going so far to say that it needs to turn to "action" first. As in committing genocide. THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE AND ANTISEMITIC. They must all resign immediately today."
It is perhaps not surprising that Stefanik outright lies when she conflates "action" with "committing genocide." There are plenty of things that a student could do that would lead to punishment or even expulsion, such as example (3) above, and none of them requires raising an army and constructing concentration camps. Real life harassment of another student -- or even of a dean or the university president -- would be enough.
And when asked to respond to Stefanik's open-ended question, which requires a nuanced answer if any answer is to be given, the three presidents did in fact give the right answer. It depends on the context. The ability to recognize the existence of freedom of thought ought to be part of a university president's job description.
At least one critic complained that the presidents were smirking at Stefanik after being presented with the question. In viewing the recording, I don't think I see smirking, but I do see one or two smiles, and I don't think that those smiles represent contempt for the defenders of minorities. I think they were smiles that involuntarily crop up when you are put in a situation which -- you suddenly realize -- is designed to have no acceptable answer. The three presidents (now only two) are smart, accomplished people who can recognize a "gotcha" question.
There was really no way out of this trap that would be acceptable to all listeners. One quasi-acceptable answer is to lie, and to state that every possible remark about genocide is against the rules and will be dealt with sternly. This is clearly inaccurate and worse yet, kind of stupid. And believe me, saying something stupid does not go unrecognized among MIT students and faculty. And it was probably totally obvious to the presidents that the honest and accurate answer -- "It depends" -- was going to get a phony, contrived response from the congresswoman.
An aside: The right wing in this country has declared war against academics because universities are the last places that defend freedom of thought and expression. And one of the problems for right wingers is the existence of tenure, which protects faculty members for what they say outside of their university jobs. We can interpret the current screaming match as just another part of that fight, where thought crimes by faculty and administrators would be an excuse to violate tenure protections.
That's pretty much the end of this discussion, in that you are either for freedom of thought in this country or you are not. My experience is that many people say they are for freedom of speech, but there is that one thing that goes too far and needs to be prohibited. It might be advocating socialism, or it might be the American Nazi Party, or it might be supporting viewpoints commonly stated in some Arab countries. I suspect that you will recognize this pattern among your own acquaintances. (For Elise Stefanik and her coworkers, the one thing you can't say is that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and that Joe Biden is the lawfully elected president. Perhaps the university presidents should have responded to her question by asking, "Did Donald Trump lose the election in 2020?" That response could have been accompanied by a real smirk.)
And then there is Stefanik's background. She is a graduate of Harvard. (Really.) Look it up. She earned a degree with a major in government in the class of 2006. Was this performance some kind of late-in-life revenge against the system?
There is one question that I don't have to ask: Did Stefanik understand that she was asking a stupid question when she demanded a Yes or No answer? Of course, she did. You don't get through your freshman year at Harvard or MIT without learning that some things are complicated, or that your professors and classmates are not amused by you trying to play semantic games with them.
Here's another issue. Stefanik is tweeting that all three presidents should resign immediately for responding to her question in an antisemitic way. This includes Sally Kornbluth, the new president at MIT. I would suggest that Kornbluth, as a Jew herself, is fully aware of the history and potential of antisemitism, just as (unlike Stefanik) she understands the bedrock principles of American democracy.
In looking through other comments about this controversy, there were a couple that I found amusing and even reassuring. The best comes from Paul Campos, himself a professor at a law school who contributes to the website called Lawyers Guns & Money. You can find his comments here and here. Campos points out that the university presidents gave the right answer to Stefanik's question, despite Stefanik's contrived outrage.
Josh Marshall, the publisher of the website Talking Points Memo, made the following comment about Stefanik:
" Let’s start with some important stage-setting. First, the clip was posted by Rep. Elise Stefanik, a consistently odious and mendacious weasel who represents a district in Upstate New York. Stefanik is very much that person you’ll see melodramatically huffing and puffing in a congressional hearing demanding yes or no answers to gotcha questions that don’t have yes or no answers. And yet here … well, even for a weasel with gotcha questions, she seemed to have gotten them."
In other words (as Marshall makes clear in another passage), the presidents should have been better prepared to deal with somebody who lies and twists your words. It's a legitimate point.
Fareed Zakaria, commenting in CNN, argues that some American universities have gone too far in trying to protect minority feelings, and need to make clear that freedom of speech is entirely protected:
"Having gone so far down the ideological path, these universities and these presidents cannot make the case clearly that at the center of a university is the free expression of ideas and that while harassment and intimidation would not be tolerated, offensive speech would and should be protected. As CNN’s Van Jones has eloquently said, the point of college is to keep you physically safe but intellectually unsafe, to force you to confront ideas that you disagree with passionately."
This is an important point to make -- that universities should be physically safe but intellectually challenging (i.e.: unsafe). You can watch the exchange with Van Jones here.
One last point. My experience at MIT was that it was an oasis of free speech and open thought at a moment in American history (the Viet Nam War) where the society was split among those who supported Lyndon Johnson's policies, those who opposed the war and getting drafted into it, and another group of radicals who criticized all things American. The foremost Academic opponent of the war and of American policies was Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor. There were also faculty who supported the war. The students, both undergraduate and graduate, were also split along the same lines, although I think that more were of the "don't draft me" group.
But I don't recall any concerted move to fire Chomsky for being an opponent of the government.
And here's the important point. I remember that the MIT administration treated students with respect. We were adults until proven differently. And the administration did not seem to think that we needed to be protected from political ideas, any more than we needed to be protected from those who would deny the fact of evolution or nowadays, the reality of global warming. We were free to draw our own conclusions, but those who would try to espouse such views (then or now) would inevitably be faced with factual and logical criticism by their peers.
For this reason, I was interested to see whether the MIT community would stand behind president Sally Kornbluth, just as it defended Chomsky's right to hold his views back then, and contrary to the way the president of Penn was left to hang and ultimately to resign. And here is what happened. The MIT governing board gave its "full and unreserved support" to its president, which you can see here. This is an important declaration because it says that freedom is a real thing at least somewhere in the United States.
Perhaps we are just looking back at what Voltaire said in a different century: "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected].)
