Free speech has been replaced by institutional stupidity at Harvard, UPenn

On Tuesday the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT were called before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce to answer for how their pristine institutions had devolved into hotbeds of anti-semitism.

The whole debacle is a remarkable display of elite higher education’s fall from grace — and how their years-long abandonment of free speech has allowed radicalism and anti-semitism to fester on campus.

Where free speech dies, institutional stupidity takes its place.

The hearing comes after Jewish students were mobbed by pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Harvard and protesters were heard chanting for an “Intifada revolution” on UPenn’s campus this weekend — leading the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to investigate both schools for Title VI discrimination violations.

“Antisemitism is a symptom of ignorance, and the cure for ignorance is knowledge,” testified Harvard president Claudine Gay, who was dragged for initially failing to condemn Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel. “Harvard must model what it means to preserve free expression while combating prejudice.

“We are taking on that hard, long-term work with the intention and intensity that it requires,” she added.

Gay is right. Dialogue is critical to combating ignorance. But sadly, it seems she only recognized the importance of free expression after it came to bite her institution in the bank account.

Although Gay claimed in her testimony that “The free exchange of ideas is the foundation upon which Harvard is built,” that’s plainly not been the case.

When the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) released its campus free speech rankings earlier this year, Harvard came in a dismal last place — scoring 0 out of a possible 100 points.

Debate clearly has not been robust on that Ivy League campus. And, as such, ignorance has flourished. When competing ideas can’t compete in civil discourse, they’re driven underground to fester.

Students retreat into echo chambers where their beliefs go unchecked, and they are readily swept down radical rabbit holes in which Zoomer TikTokers are inexplicably celebrating the philosophy of Osama bin Laden.

In the face of international conflict, those students have resurfaced and shown themselves for what they’ve become: elite college students celebrating the rape and murder of innocent civilians in the name of “decolonization” and “progressivism.”

And, while I’m glad to see administrators are finally realizing that free speech is critical to fostering a well-informed community, I fear it’s too little too late. The campus radicals have shown their faces — and they’re getting the attention they crave.

Activist students have always been desperate to champion the next chic cause. They gathered to mourn the election of Donald Trump. They demonstrated for Black Lives Matter. They protested Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal.

But, every time these students raised their fists for a progressive cause, their professors and administrators came to their support — canceling classes to accommodate student protesters (as UPenn professors did the day after Trump’s election), sending campus-wide emails of solidarity (as UC Santa Cruz did following the Rittenhouse verdict) and even stepping in on behalf of student protesters interrupting events (as a Stanford DEI dean did earlier this year).

Are you really speaking truth to power when administrators are cheering you along? There’s precisely nothing edgy about that.

Young radicals want to push the envelope. And, when their professors and authority figures are themselves young radicals who never grew up, the next generation will grasp for the next frontier.

Today’s professors are no longer predominantly stodgy, bow-tie wearing classical liberals. They’re critical theorists with nose piercings and a distaste for Western values.

Denigrating the Founding Fathers and wearing Che Guevara T-shirts isn’t radical anymore. Desperate transgressors need to dig deeper in search of an edgy cause — and they’ve found one in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Today’s campus radicals have stooped so low that they’re celebrating the words of Osama bin Laden and the murder of civilians in Israel.

Harvard, Penn and other elite campuses must contend with the radicalism they’ve fostered on their campuses. Now that they’re finally paying the price with donors pulling their dollars, perhaps they will.

But, as much as these university presidents might like to sweep the issue under the rug, a knee-jerk re-commitment to free speech can’t instantaneously remedy the polarization that’s flourished in its absence.