Free Speech Issues on College Campuses
Current Events
Earlier this month, Harvard University president Dr. Claudine Gay resigned from her position in response to public outcry against alleged anti-semitism, marking the end of the shortest Harvard presidential term in history. Her resignation follows the controversy over last month’s congressional hearing, which asked questions regarding official university policies on denouncing antisemitism. Gay follows University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill who resigned in late December, while MIT’s Sally Kornbluth is the only one of the three questioned who remains standing. Leading the charge against them is the House Education and Workforce Committee, whose chairwoman, Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx, plans to broaden the investigations to target diversity, equity, and inclusion (D.E.I) programs, among others. The Committee’s ultimate goal is to combat what Foxx labels the “hostile takeover” of America’s universities by left-leaning administrators, whose partisan policies allow for issues like antisemitism to proliferate while ideological diversity in higher education continues to narrow.
A Brief History
In 1964, graduate student Mario Savio headed the pivotal sequence of protests at the University of California, Berkeley that would come to be known as the Free Speech Movement. Ever since, university policies that restrict free speech among students have come to be known as unconstitutional, barring few exceptions in which the speech is assessed to effectively provoke immediate, violent action. Despite this strong basis for the protection of free speech among students, university officials are held to a notably more conservative standard as representatives of institutions that receive public funding. In compliance with Supreme Court rulings, as well as nondiscrimination measures in which Congress has the power to act, the figureheads of universities are bound to a high degree of obedience.
The Contemporary Debate
The House committee’s investigation of antisemitism mounts as opinions on the war in Palestine continue to divide American college campuses. On Monday, Harvard turned over 1,032 pages of publicly-available documents tracking their response to various instances of antisemitism to the committee, which were deemed insufficient the same day that they were received. Rep. Foxx has stated that a subpoena may be necessary if the university continually fails to comply.
The current inquiry into antisemitism has been linked by many critics to a Republican-backed witch hunt of left-wing measures at the university level, from the affirmative action policies which were struck down by the Supreme Court in early 2023 to the current D.E.I. policies and critical race theory teachings that are under fire for ideological favoritism. That the three chosen to testify in December are some of the first female presidents of their respective institutions, all with fewer than two years of tenure under their belts, is yet another fact commonly cited by their supporters.
Proponents of the House committee’s action, however, fear that a growing majority of college campuses have come to restrict viewpoint diversity in favor of gender and racial diversity. The original House resolution, which called for the condemnation of antisemitism in the US and abroad, garnered 311 “aye” votes, with only 14 “nays.”
Some of Harvard’s most generous donors have withdrawn their support, mounting pressure for the university to condemn its former president’s statements before Congress. Others, like prominent legal scholar Lawrence Tribe, stand opposed to the removal as an act of congressional “micromanaging,” but also do not condone the “hesitant, formulaic, and bizarrely evasive” responses of the presidents at their hearing.
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