Ivy League double standards on free speech

America’s elite universities face a reckoning on free speech.

Bill Ackman, a long-time donor to Harvard University, has called on the university’s board of directors to dismiss Claudine Gay as President following her testimony to Congress last week, in which she equivocated on whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated the university’s harassment policies.

“In her short tenure as President, Claudine Gay has done more damage to the reputation of Harvard University than any individual in our nearly 500-year history,” wrote Ackman on Twitter (X). Ackman, an American billionaire hedge fund manager who graduated from Harvard in 1988 with a degree in social studies, highlighted “her failure to condemn the most vile and barbaric terrorism the world has ever seen”.

At least 70 members of Congress, including two Democrats, now back Ackman’s call for Gay to resign. The President of UPenn, Elizabeth Magill, who also testified on Tuesday, resigned over the weekend after a senior donor withdrew a $100m contribution to the university.

“Taking the fifth”, in American crime film cliché, is to admit you might be guilty of something. In the eyes of many Americans, those who testified last week stand guilty of “taking the first”: using the First Amendment’s free speech protections to avoid taking a moral stance on antisemitism. 

The Presidents of Harvard, MIT and UPenn all offered technically correct explanations of how First Amendment rules should apply on their campuses, given according to the best legal advice. But within the wider debate about the health of American academia, their comments were incendiary.

“When Harvard et al. have no prior credible commitment to academic freedom, institutional neutrality and viewpoint diversity, the born-again appeal to principle seems incriminating”, noted psychologist Stephen Pinker, who teaches at Harvard.

In recent years, the litmus test on campus free speech was whether an institution could stomach Charles Murray, a bête noire on the academic left for his work into ethnicity and class.

When invited to speak at Harvard in 2017, one professor of African American studies told the student newspaper, The Crimson, that “the question of free speech on campus” was “more-or-less equivalent to the question of the rights of white men and conservatives to disrespect, insult, bait, and degrade everyone else.”

Another, who served as dean of the college’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the time, said that they “didn’t look to Charles Murray as an exemplar of rigorous data science.” Her name was Professor Claudine Gay.

Murray joined the online fracas this weekend to demand Harvard and MIT prove their allegiance to the First Amendment by inviting him again.

But criticism has come from the mainstream, too. Campus antisemitism, noted former Harvard President Larry Summers in an interview with CNN last week, “cannot be separated from the broader issues of political diversity, the broader issues of identity politics” within universities.

Summers worked as an economic adviser to Bill Clinton. He joined Jonathan Haidt, a former John Kerry speechwriter, and others who warn that urgent reform is needed.

What might such reform look like? For some, such as UPenn law professor Claire O. Finkelstein, the protection of Jewish people on campus requires more, not fewer restrictions on speech.

For others, such as journalist Bari Weiss, last week’s testimonies provide an opportunity to dismantle what they see as the root cause of declining trust in elite universities – the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) system of laws, in-house hiring practices and bureaucratic mandates that have made free speech so hard to adjudicate fairly.

There has been a clear shift in tone this past week. The forces campaigning against campus radicalism in US university management look as though they might be starting to win.

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