In an America where just about every solid social or political meaning has melted with a late-capitalist liquescence that would have taken even Karl Marx’s breath away, an event is rarely interpreted in its actual context. Like the protagonist of the satirical 1920s Soviet play, The Suicide, whose declared intention of taking his own life is immediately followed by numerous groups requesting that he kindly kill himself on their behalf, singular events are seized upon simultaneously by competing groups as proof of one or another’s assumptions.
The college presidents’ clownishly ambiguous and infirm replies were predictably met with howls of execration. For conservatives, this was an instance where, at last, as a headline in the Wall Street Journal put it, “The Ivy League mask falls”, and the so-called woke project of replacing the academic discipline of the humanities with the enforcement of “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI), as the progressive war cry goes, was revealed as the destruction of civilised standards and values that, in conservative eyes, it is. For liberals, the hearing was a cynical stunt. As a New York Times headline stated, “As fury erupts over campus anti-Semitism, conservatives seize the moment”, with the article concluding that, among other things, Stefanik was taking sweet revenge on Harvard, her alma mater, because it removed her from the board of its Institute of Politics for supporting Trump’s false claims of a stolen election in 2020.
Social media has the effect of reducing language to mere words, empty of context and intention. That is what happened at the hearing. The formative circumstances here, which made the presidents’ replies logical and rational, if not immediately morally coherent, were evidence of the revolution in mores that has occurred since Trump’s election in 2016.
Trump’s catering to the racial and cultural prejudices of his white working-class base, accompanied by bouts of authoritarian blustering, created an equally illiberal response on the part of American progressives, who are to the left of increasingly silent American liberals. The former US president’s appeals to prejudice fostered, on the left, a general policing of social attitudes, particularly around “harmful” speech. Such policing found its fullest expression at the nation’s universities, where many offices devoted to the enforcement of DEI guidelines sprang up. Nowhere, however, were the new DEI guardians more empowered than at private American universities that, unlike America’s publicly funded colleges, are not bound by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.
Over several years, one professor after another, mostly at private institutions of higher learning, was accused of saying something that a student or students claimed caused them mental and emotional harm. Such complaints often resulted in a DEI officer – working in a university’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action – filing a formal charge of “discriminatory harassment” and beginning a formal investigation. For language to be considered discriminatory harassment, it must, to quote the Supreme Court’s legal definition of the term, be “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it can be said to deprive the victim… of access to the educational opportunities or benefits provided by the school”. By shrewdly referring to the universities’ “rules on bullying and harassment”, Stefanik abruptly focused the presidents’ attention on the technical language of academic enforcement, and they directed their answers precisely to that language. Kornbluth, the MIT president, quoted virtually verbatim the legal definition of discriminatory harassment.
In the event a university does find a professor guilty of discriminatory harassment and takes punitive action, the professor can threaten to cross over to the parallel universe of actual American law, where they could then sue on various grounds of discrimination themselves. As a result, private American higher education institutions have been quietly paying significant sums of money out in negotiated settlements for years. In many instances, DEI investigators are the bane of university lawyers.
Considering the issues of legal jeopardy and conservative accusations of a war on free speech, those three university presidents were no doubt grateful for the opportunity to demonstrate that they do not suppress free speech on their campuses. Here was the proof they had not: even the most disturbing pro-Palestinian slogans were protected so long as those uttering them did not cross over into actionable conduct. But in creating a vacuum of legal terminology, a moral emptiness in which, after all, DEI often thrives, the presidents robotically missed the opportunity to speak clearly and definitively about the actual issue of campus anti-Semitism. It was muddled language for muddled times, and the muddled and muddling right-wing Republicans are having themselves a feast. (...)
The whole thing was like the Marx Brothers meeting the psychiatric experiment The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, the account in which three patients think they’re Christ: Stefanik, every bit the polished Ivy Leaguer, trimmed her political sails right past the real issues at stake, and as the polished Ivy League presidents – far too polished to ever publicly countenance an anti-Semitic sentiment – looked right past what Stefanik was actually saying to their own public relations. Currently the outcome is unfolding along the lines of the new social justice algorithm. As I write, Magill, the white president has resigned; Gay, the black president, has so far survived efforts to remove her; and Kornbluth, the Jewish president, has emerged unscathed from charges that she was enabling anti-Semitism.
Only the media, it seems, is obsessed with the incident, especially with Harvard, since much of the elite media is composed of Ivy League graduates – especially Harvard. Not much attention, if any at all, has been paid to the countless pro-Palestinian demonstrations at smaller state schools. And who, after all, but someone who self-flatteringly treasures Harvard as the perfect symbol of status and achievement could think that Stefanik was animated by revenge for being shunned by Harvard rather than by cold political calculation? The rest of the country – for whom Harvard is, if they have any sense of the place at all, either an expensive finishing school dedicated to the high-minded production of high-functioning sociopaths or a perpetual rash on the ageing skin of American meritocracy – really couldn’t care less about what happens there.
The true significance of the congressional hearing lies beyond the ships-passing-in-the-night myopias of either the three presidents or their inquisitor. It lies in the perpetual scrimmage among America’s social groups for status and power, of which the woke revolution is the latest iteration.
by Lee Siegel, New Statesman | Read more:
Image: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images[ed. No kidding. How did none of them just simply say "It's complicated but using the term genocide is inflamatory and not at all helpful. Of course we're against that in any form". But no. How much do these people get paid, anyway?]
