Anti-Semitism Hearing Highlights Ivy League Hypocrisy on Free Speech
6th December 2023
The presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT appeared before Congress on Tuesday to discuss the rising anti-Semitism on their campuses. It did not go well for them.
Faced with hostile questions from the Republican-controlled House Committee on Education and the Workforce, whose members include Harvard alumna Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), the presidents struggled to explain why their institutions—which have repeatedly denounced, disinvited, and punished professors for airing conservative views—suddenly discovered the value of free speech when students and faculty began defending Hamas.
“In what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?” Rep. Tim Walberg (R., Mich.) asked Harvard president Claudine Gay. The school’s diversity administrators had thrown a fit when Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, stated on Fox News that there are only two sexes, causing such a firestorm that she had to take a leave of absence. Gay didn’t answer the question.