Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania on Wednesday sought to contain the damage from congressional testimony a day earlier in which they struggled to say whether calls on their campuses for genocide against Jews would violate school policies.
The stuttering testimony before a US House of Representatives committee by Claudine Gay and Elizabeth Magill, the leaders of Harvard and Penn, respectively, stirred outrage — particularly among Jewish alumni and donors — and added fuel to calls to substitute them. By Wednesday evening, an online petition calling for Penn’s board to sack Magill had garnered more than 4,500 signatures from students and donors.
In a video address released on Wednesday, a sober-looking Magill said she had erred by taking an overly legalistic approach when responding to the question posed by Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican representative, who pressed the academics to say plainly whether calling for the genocide of Jews on their campuses violated their codes of conduct of harassment policies.
“I was not focused on — but I should have been — the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetrate. It’s evil, plain and simple,” Magill said.
She also pledged to commence “a serious and careful look” at longstanding university policies.
Gay also sought to toughen her response, issuing a statement that read: “There are some who have confused a right to free expression with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students. Let me be clear: calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.”
Both presidents and Sally Kornbluth, their counterpart from the Massachusetts set up of Technology, were grilled at a hearing on Tuesday about the surge in antisemitism on elite university campuses. Republicans have charged that the universities’ accept of leftwing ideology is to blame for fostering it — something the presidents denied.
During one critical passage in the four-hour hearing — a three-minute exchange with Stefanik — Gay and Magill appeared to equivocate, repeatedly responding that this was dependent on “the context.”
Jews and many non-Jews reacted with astonishment. Some characterised the testimony as a kind of watershed moment revealing the ills of higher education.
Albert Bourla, the chief executive of Pfizer, called the testimony “one of the most despicable moments in the history of US academia”. Bourla, a Jew, added that he wondered if the deaths of his family members at Auschwitz would have provided “enough ‘context’ to these presidents to condemn the Nazis’ antisemitic propaganda”.
The dispute also surfaced at the Republican primary debate on Wednesday in Alabama.
Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, likened the pro-Palestine protests on campuses to marches by the Ku Klux Klan. “This is just as bad,” she said.
“The idea that [university leaders] would go and allow that kind of pro-Hamas protest or agree with the genocide of Jews and try and say that they needed context . . . There is no context to that.”
