Falling off the moral tightrope
Top academics disappoint their donors and betray the truth
Really, how hard can it be?
When people act monstrously – killing, raping, beheading, kidnapping – how hard can it be to condemn them? When a victimized nation responds by destroying the terrorists and their implements of savagery, how challenging can it be to understand its actions? When innocents are caught in the crossfire, set up as targets by the terrorists as they hide behind them, is it really that tough to make the leap to blame the savages?
Apparently, for some university leaders it’s too tough. Instead, they have tried to walk razor-thin tightropes, much like ethically challenged politicians. Fearful of offending the defenders of Hamas on their campuses in the wake of the October 7th savagery, they equivocated, they parsed, they danced and did all they could to avoid pinning the blame where it belongs. After that, at a Dec. 6 hearing in Congress, they danced anew when asked whether they should punish students who call for even deadlier attacks, indeed for a renewed genocide of Jews.
At the University of Pennsylvania, MIT and Harvard, leaders failed in their responsibilities to the truth and to all that’s morally right. As The New York Times recounted, the lawyerly response of Penn President Elizabeth Magill was especially blockheaded. Rep. Elise Stefanik asked: “Calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment?”
Magill, a lawyer who joined Penn just last year, equivocated: “If it is directed and severe, pervasive, it is harassment.” The congresswoman responded: “So the answer is yes.” And then Magill danced: “It is a context-dependent decision, congresswoman.” To which, Stefanik exclaimed: “That’s your testimony today? Calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context?”
The heads of Harvard and MIT similarly pirouetted when asked the same series of questions. Claudine Gay echoed the idea that it “depends on the context” whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s conduct rules. And MIT’s Sally Kornbluth at first astonishingly replied, “I have not heard calling for the genocide of Jews on our campus,” whereupon Stefanik pressed: “But you’ve heard chants for intifada.” To that, Kornbluth admitted: “I’ve heard chants which can be antisemitic depending on the context when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people.”
Were these academics, whose commitment to free speech seemingly has few limits, just caught in a rhetorical trap by a clever politician? Certainly, that was the tenor of a couple apologies that followed the hearing (once the heat was turned up on the university heads by fleeing donors and others). Gay said in the interview that she had become “caught up” in the volley of questions by Stefanik, and “should have had the presence of mind” during the exchange to “return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard and will never go unchallenged.”
For her part, Magill afterward said that a call for the genocide of Jews would, indeed, be considered harassment or intimidation. In her response – tepid compared with Gay’s -- she also called for a review of Penn’s policies, saying they have long been guided by the U.S. Constitution but need to be “clarified and evaluated.”
On the one hand, one is tempted to sympathize with the academics. Their large constituencies of Palestinians and pro-Palestinian students and faculty have been making a thunderous noise. In fact, Magill was caught up in a firestorm in late September when, at first, she hemmed and hawed about an on-campus conference that featured notorious antisemites (equivocation that triggered a flood of donor withdrawals that has only grown since). Since then, Philadelphia has been the scene of much pro-Hamas activity and Magill and her colleagues have tried to avoid taking sides.
But wouldn’t it be better – from the viewpoint of moral clarity – if she and her colleagues did take sides? Wouldn’t it be better if the historians, political scientists and ethicists on their campuses provided students with a clear-eyed and thorough view of Israeli-Palestinian affairs, beginning with revulsion at the October 7th depravity?
Yes, academics and others must acknowledge that there are victims on both sides of the Israeli-Arab gulf and that neither side has clean hands (though in the latest retaliation by Israel in Gaza, Hamas is ultimately to blame for the thousands of deaths, in part by tunneling under residences and hospitals and by using innocent Palestinians as shields). And, yes, the bloody history going back more than a century needs to be fully understood and clearly taught (it’s anything but the “colonialism” that some academics absurdly espouse, though it is a matter of two peoples with legitimate claims to the land).
But the ignorance about the conflict among young people is appalling — and universities have failed in their core responsibility, and that is to educate.
Young people, especially liberals, seem to be siding disproportionately with the Palestinians in this war. This sensibility flies in the face of the horrors of October 7th, even those lately coming to light involving sadistic sexual violence against women. It also disregards the existential threat posed against Israel by Hamas and its allies, as well as their tyranny over innocent Palestinians in Gaza, some of whom have no use for the group that has dominated them since at least 2009.
So, why is this? Let’s explore. First, there’s Israel’s military strength, sufficient to destroy or damage some 98,000 buildings in Gaza, reducing thousands of homes to rubble and killing several thousand Palestinians (even if the Hamas-controlled estimates can’t be believed). The visuals on CNN and elsewhere have been devastating, leaving the impression that Israelis – once regarded as the underdogs in the Middle East – have become the heartless destroyers.
Beyond that, there’s the TikTok effect. As reported by The Washington Post, former social media executive Jeff Morris Jr. observed that the numbers of pro-Palestinian videos on the Chinese-owned platform – and views of them -- vastly outnumber pro-Israel ones. Over the past three years, videos with the hashtag “#standwithpalestine” had 2.9 billion views on the platform, while “#standwithisrael” videos had only about 200 million. “Israel is losing the TikTok war,” Morris wrote on X.
A Quinnipiac University Poll found that in the month after Hamas’s October 7th atrocities, young voters’ sympathies flipped from Israelis to Palestinians as Israel pounded Gaza with airstrikes, the Post reported. Among voters from 18 to 34, 52% said they were more sympathetic to Palestinians, while just 29% sided with Israelis.
And such numbers were borne out by another poll, which also pointed up a sharp generational divide. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, roughly half of Americans 18 to 24 years old think Hamas’s October attack was justified by grievances of the Palestinians, according to a Harvard Harris Poll. By contrast, just 9% of people aged 65 and older feel the same.
The WSJ reported that pro-Palestinian demonstrators on campuses say they see the world as divided between the oppressed and their oppressors. Many suffering populations fall into the former category to these young people, ranging from low-income families being evicted from their homes to Black and brown people who brutalized by police and to migrants turned away from safe haven at the border. Palestinians fighting to take their land from the Israelis are just another iteration of that, according to the students quoted by the paper.
“Gaza is not a two-sided war,” said one 21-year-old student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “What is happening is the resistance of the oppressed against their oppressor.”
If their teachers see the conflict in this simplistic way, and if they can’t muster up enough gumption to be outraged by calls for genocide, is it any wonder that the young people follow suit? The teaching process begins with a clear understanding of the sides and the stakes involved.
Despite their clarifications and apologies, it’s not at all clear that leaders at some of our most esteemed institutions really do understand that. Painfully, they are getting a quick and costly education in these issues.