Mick Hartley

Bret Stephens in the NYT on those Ivy League presidents and their defence of free speech on the matter of calls for Jewish genocide:

I have some sympathy for the three presidents following their stumbling performance. None have been in their jobs for long. They all expressed abhorrence for antisemitism during more than three hours of testimony. And they are clearly struggling with how to balance respect for free expression on campus with opposition to hate speech. When Magill later posted a video trying to clarify her remarks, she had the broken look of someone who thought she was about to be sacked.

But the deep problem with their testimonies was not fundamentally about calls for genocide or free speech. It was about double standards — itself a form of antisemitism, but one that can be harder to detect.

The double standard is this: Colleges and universities that for years have been notably censorious when it comes to free speech seem to have suddenly discovered its virtues only now, when the speech in question tends to be especially hurtful to Jews.

The point came across at different moments in the hearing. Representative Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican, observed that Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist, had been hounded out of Harvard (though not fired outright) for her views on sex categories. “In what world,” Walberg asked, “is a call for violence against Jews protected speech but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?” Gay offered no real answer. Representative Donald Norcross, a New Jersey Democrat, asked Magill if she would permit a hypothetical conference of 25 racists to go forward at Penn — given that in September, under the banner of free expression, she had allowed a conference that included speakers she herself had condemned as antisemitic to take place at the school. She could not bring herself to answer yes….

At Yale, the law professor Amy Chua was relieved of some teaching duties and ostracized by students and the administration on blatantly pretextual grounds while her original sin, as The Times reported in 2021, was her praise for Brett Kavanaugh. Yet when Zareena Grewal, an associate professor of American studies at Yale, tweeted on Oct. 7 that Israeli “is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle,” Yale defended her by saying Grewal’s comments “represent her own views.”

The word for all this is hypocrisy….