If you wanted to sum up the near parodic state of liberal academia in the US, the response of the then president of Pennsylvania University, Elizabeth McGill, to a question about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated its rules on harassment, would do the job nicely. “It’s a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman”, she said. This is a lawyer’s answer – and Dr McGill is a lawyer – to a question that called for an unequivocal response. Elizabeth McGill fell right into the elephant trap laid for her by a Republican congresswoman, Elise Stefanik. She has now resigned.
The heads of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT were appearing in a five hour Congressional hearing this week into the protests at leading American universities about the situation in Gaza which featured protesters calling for intifada – a clip of those protests was played at the start of the hearing – which has made Jewish students and teachers understandably fearful and upset.
Dr Claudine Gay, the head of Harvard, was criticised for her apparently weaselly response to the same question about whether protesters’ calls for genocide constituted a violation of Harvard’s code of conduct – she too said it depended on context – but later apologised in a student newspaper for the distress her answer gave. So, she’s not going anywhere. She’s been given the support of the Harvard Corporation, or governing body. Meanwhile, Elizabeth McGill has gone – and it may be that the threat of donor withdrawals if she didn’t helped. Critics also disliked the university heads dutifully condemning Islamophobia as well as anti-Semitism, though the former seems far less problematic than the latter.
Although the questioning of the heads of these elite universities was of questionable value, it did reveal some interesting aspects of the culture in them
But did the campus protests call for the genocide of Jews? It’s worth asking the question. The protesters called for “Intifada”, and it’s a safe bet that most of them chanted the slogan with as much careful thought as student demonstrators here in the 1980s used to call, “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Out, Out, Out!” Similarly, youthful activists at the Gaza demonstrations here have chanted “From the River to the Sea” without the smallest idea of which river and what sea. But “intifada” is not, I think, translatable as “genocide”. It means something more like “uprising”, which may indeed take the form of violence against Jews (which Hamas obviously does practice), but is not in itself the attempt to annihilate a people in whole or in part, which is the definition of genocide.
Yet it was precisely this question that wasn’t clarified at the outset of the hearing, which meant that Congresswoman Stefanik could get away with grilling the heads of the universities about whether “calling for genocide of Jews” was against their code of conduct – to which the obvious answer would have been that, if true, it wasn’t just the code of conduct it violated, but the moral code.
Yet although the questioning of the heads of these elite universities was of questionable value, it did reveal some interesting aspects of the culture in them. One Republican, Tim Walberg, from Michigan reminded Claudine Gay that one survey of Harvard students suggested that 70 per cent of Harvard students would consider it acceptable to shout down a speaker. Dr Gay thought that wasn’t ok. Walberg also pointed out that two academics had lost their position in the university because of their views on abortion and marriage, and on trans issues respectively. What this suggests is that the real problem at American universities isn’t, at least primarily, anti-Semitism. It’s our old friend cancel culture. And that has, if anything, only aggravated the tensions now.
