Many university presidents and professors are hypocrites, but they usually conceal it. Sometimes, we get a chance to see how dishonest they are. For example, congress recently questioned the presidents of three of our most respected universities, Penn, Harvard, and MIT, about campus threats to kill all Jews.
Congress is also concerned about violence, and The Department of Education is currently investigating violence on college campuses, including Penn and Harvard.
Representative Stefanik asked Penn’s president, Liz Magill, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct? Yes or no?”
Ms. Magill repeatedly refused to give a yes or no answer. When she realized that Representative Stefanik would keep pushing, she said that whether a threatening student would be punished is “a context-dependent decision.”
Stefanik asked Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president whether similar speech would violate Harvard’s policies. She took the same position, “It depends on the context,”
In other words, in some contexts it’s acceptable to threaten to murder millions of Jews, plus, of course, any Jews on campus.
Their positions were so evil that Democratic and Republican lawmakers plus many other people demanded they resign or get fired. Similar demands were made about the MIT president.
Penn’s president resigned. The others survived. They publicly apologized, but they were just playing politics. It worked. Instead of being ashamed of their president, hundreds of Harvard professors signed a petition supporting her:
“We urge you in the strongest possible terms to defend the independence of the university and to resist political pressures that are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom.”
They were lying. The faculties of Harvard, Penn, MIT, and many other universities have contempt for academic freedom and our constitution’s first amendment. They have shown it many times, but I’ll discuss only one extreme example.
The Harvard faculty and administration forced out Dr. Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biology lecturer, for telling the truth: There are only two sexes. Thinking you are the opposite sex does not change your gender. She said:
“The facts are that there are… two sexes…there are male and female, and those sexes are designated by the kinds of gametes we produce…The ideology seems to be that biology really isn’t as important as how somebody feels about themselves or feels their sex to be, but we can treat people with respect and respect their gender identities and use their preferred pronouns, so understanding the facts about biology doesn’t prevent us from treating people with respect.”
Surgery can change genitalia, but – despite some charlatan’s claims – a transgender female cannot have a baby. Surgeons may ultimately succeed, but for they can’t do it now.
Please note that there is nothing political about Dr. Hooven’s position. She said, “Understanding the facts about biology doesn’t prevent us from treating people with respect.” She was doing her job: teaching students evolutionary biological facts. But teaching facts that conflict with ultra-liberal ideology is unacceptable at Harvard.
The Director of The Diversity and Inclusion Task Force for her department wrote: “I am appalled and frustrated by the transphobic and harmful remarks made by a member of my dept.”
Her attack was widely publicized and severely criticized. Instead of accepting that her position was an extreme violation of academic freedom, many professors and administrators supported her. They attacked Dr. Hooven so viciously that she resigned. In most places, telling the truth about biology is immeasurably better than demanding the death of millions of Jews, but not at Harvard.
Insisting that people’s beliefs about their sex are more important than their bodies has hurt our society in many ways. For example, a few male athletes have competed in female events and won championships. Since males are bigger and stronger than females, it’s obviously unfair to females. Liberals often insist that they want everyone “to have a level playing field,” but they support this extremely unfair competition.
Letting males compete as females has also traumatized many females. They have been forced to share locker rooms and change clothes with biological males. How can anyone think it is acceptable to force teenaged, virginal girls to change clothes in front of biological boys?
Male criminals have demanded that they be sent to female prisons. Some of them were just pretending to be females because they impregnated other inmates.
I selected Harvard’s forcing out Carole Hooven because:
- It’s such an extreme example of academic hypocrisy.
- Harvard is America’s most prestigious university.
Most of America’s top universities are dominated by liberals. Of course, the conservative media attack their hypocrisy. Unfortunately, the conservative universities are just as hypocritical.
For example, if a known atheist applied for a teaching position at a religious university, he would almost certainly be rejected. If a professor said he had serious doubts about the existence of God, he would be severely punished.
The sad fact is that universities (and most other organizations) are run by biased people. No matter what they say, they don’t believe in academic freedom for anyone who disagrees with their ideology.
If biased people run most organizations, why am I castigating university presidents and professors? Universities have a different mission than the others: They should teach students how to think, how to acquire and evaluate information. Insisting that they must blindly follow any ideology defeats the universities’ purpose, their reason for existing.
Our constitution was written by realists. Because they knew that people will try to suppress dissent, they added the Bill of Rights. They wanted us to be able to get all the information we need to make good decisions.
You may think that I’m advocating the same sort of suppression the first amendment forbids. If you do, you don’t understand the first amendment. The Supreme Court has repeatedly said that it protects most hate speech but inciting violence is not protected. That is, the first amendment does not let you make statements which are likely to cause violence.
That’s exactly what has happened. The Anti-Defamation league reported 2,031 incidents between October 7 and December 7, a 337% increase over the same period in 2022. There were 40 incidents of physical violence.
The first amendment does not allow anyone to demand another Holocaust. The murder of millions of Jews didn’t begin with concentration camps and gas chambers. It began with the sort of anti-Semitic rhetoric and violent incidents that congress was investigating, and the university presidents, faculty and trustees have ignored or allowed.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Santayana’s words always make sense, but they apply extremely well to today’s anti-Semitism.
All universities – conservative or liberal, religious or secular – should respect our constitution and do their job: They should provide students accurate and objective information and develop the skills and open-mindedness they need to evaluate and acquire additional information. That is, they should help students to learn how to think and make rational decisions.
Alas, they have failed to do their job. Our country and the rest of the world are paying for their failure, and the costs will keep growing as their closed-minded and biased students become leaders and voters.
