Epic hypocrisy pushes US unis down a slippery slope
There’s little regard for free speech when it comes to topics other than contempt for Jews.
The tragic terrorist attacks in Israel in October have exacted unlikely collateral damage: three of the top American universities have been exposed as beholden to totalitarian ideologies antithetical to the founding principles of the US, which helps fund them. The repercussions will fall beyond Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, accelerating the decline of institutions that once commanded nearly universal respect for their dedication to excellence.
Called to give evidence last week before a US congressional committee that was investigating the extent of anti-Semitism on college campuses after mass protests had erupted in favour of Palestinians, three elite university presidents disgraced themselves, unable to condemn unequivocally calls on campus for genocide of Jews.
Penn president Liz Magill fell on her sword days later, but Harvard’s Claudine Gay and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth appear to have survived for now, although Gay has become embroiled in a plagiarism scandal that will likely topple her too.
It wasn’t their lack of compassion that ultimately should have smashed their reputations but their epic levels of hypocrisy.
Technically the three presidents were correct to argue calls for genocide against Jews or any other group, for that matter, probably wouldn’t be illegal speech, however morally odious, according to US law.
The first amendment of the US constitution protects highly offensive, even violent speech that almost certainly would fall foul of section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act in Australia. In 1969 the US Supreme Court sided with the free speech of the Ku Klux Klan to urge violence against black Americans, provided it was “in the abstract” and not likely to cause imminent violence. And in 1978 US federal courts supported the right of a neo-Nazi group to march through the small Illinois town of Skokie, inhabited mainly by Jews who had survived the Holocaust.
“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the first amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable,” Supreme Court justice William Brennan wrote after the decision.
But the facts show they give scant regard to these lofty principles of free speech when it comes to other topics except contempt for Jews. Indeed, Gay, widely celebrated as Harvard’s first black president, was quick to issue a statement in mid-2020 following the death of George Floyd, saying she “watched in pain and horror the events unfolding across the nation this week, triggered by the callous and depraved actions of a white police officer”, but not a peep from her following the October 7 massacre in Israel.
In rallying behind Gay, an accused plagiarist with an objectively skimpy publication record for someone in her lofty position, Harvard’s hypocrisy has been the most striking of the three.
Yet former Harvard president and US Treasury secretary Larry Summers, a distinguished academic, was forced to step down in 2006 for suggesting men and women might have different aptitudes on average for the hard sciences or advanced mathematics.
Since then evidence has mounted, of which the educated US public is now well aware, that elite US institutions have become aggressive devotees of the twin cults of Covid-19 and diversity, equity and inclusion – dogmas antithetical to free speech and tolerance that deal viciously with nonbelievers.
“In what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?” Republican congressman Tim Walberg asked Gay during her testimony.
Walberg pointed out that Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist, had been forced to take leave from Harvard after stating on cable news that there were only two sexes.
Meanwhile, perfectly healthy students still are forced to take Covid-19 boosters at US universities, despite the now well-documented risks, especially for young men, while academics who refuse to boost are sacked.
In 2021 MIT, renowned for its economics and engineering schools, cancelled a talk by University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot because of his “outrageous” views on diversity, equity and inclusion. And the University of Pennsylvania still is trying to sack law professor Amy Wax for allegedly being racist and sexist in class.
Distinguished law professor Ronald Sullivan was forced out of a senior administrative post at Harvard after he worked on the defence team for disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.
That’s something in an earlier era law professors often did for the intellectual stimulation and because our legal system can’t function unless lawyers are willing to represent even unpopular people.
Examples confirming the obvious disdain for free speech at elite universities goes on and on.
Earlier this year, Harvard was ranked last among 248 US universities for enabling free speech on campus, according to a survey of more than 55,000 undergraduates conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Meanwhile, a 2021 survey by student publication The Harvard Crimson found 3 per cent of its faculty identified as conservative. It obviously didn’t include Gay.
At the same time, mediocrity is embraced. According to The New York Times last week, nearly 80 per cent of grades given to Yale University undergraduates were an A or A-minus, compared with about 67 per cent a decade ago.
The damage to these institutions has accelerated the decline of universities more generally. Even before the events of last week, Americans’ confidence in higher education had been falling: 36 per cent told Gallup they had confidence in US higher education in July, down from 48 per cent in 2018 and 57 per cent in 2015.
Universities’ rampant politicisation will accelerate a trend among big employers in the US, including Google, Ernst and Young, IBM and General Motors, to scrap routine requirements for university degrees for employees.
Pennsylvania, one of the most populous US states, scrapped university degree requirements for almost all state government jobs in March. Alaska has done the same. As university fees continue to outpace inflation, pressure will grow to scrap these arbitrary barriers to jobs. In fact, economists have long argued that the higher education sector could easily expand beyond an optimal size, as it encouraged more and more students to fork out huge sums for ever more degrees, leading to an education arms race that benefits ultimately only the sector itself.
In short, education has become consumption, not investment. A four-year degree means little if everyone else has one, too. New universities – such as the University of Austin, established in 2021 by historian Niall Ferguson, journalist Bari Weiss, academic Pano Kanelos and others – explicitly devoted to principles that universities once were assumed to adhere to have begun to emerge across the US.
Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that billionaire Elon Musk was seeking to copy them, reportedly canvassing a new university to teach science and engineering in the Lone Star State.
What’s clear from the past few weeks is the traditional, bureaucratic, elite university has definitely passed the peak of its influence and public esteem. The decline, pushed further by the obsessive embrace of vicious dogmas, no doubt will be slow, given the power of inertia in education, employment and culture, but the direction is clear.
The new institutions that emerge should be careful to avoid the same fate and keep an open mind, where excellence is prized well above politics, skin colour, sex and gender.
