On this week’s second edition of The Editors, Noah is stepping in again for Rich. The panelists discuss the abhorrent congressional testimony from Ivy League presidents on antisemitism, and Madeleine Kearns sees their abrupt about-face as “disingenuous.”
“I think it would be naïve, but you could take the view that, ‘Okay, well, it’s better late than never. They’re now committed to a broader understanding of free speech. Let’s see how well they apply it going forward to all sorts of relatively mainstream views.’”
“But of course . . .” she says, “that isn’t what’s actually going on here. It’s just completely disingenuous.”
She references Buckley’s book, God and Man at Yale, reminding listeners that he believed “it’s not possible to have pure, complete academic freedom. And not least because part of a university’s job is moral formation, character formation.”
Harvard, she says, will take a stand on other values it is instilling in its students, but “what you have here is that . . . certainly from the perspective of the elites, antisemitism is more tolerable than racism, it’s more tolerable than their definition of transphobia.”
These university presidents have found that “this is not a sustainable position, because the backlash is significant,” Maddy says, and “there are a lot of Jews . . . who are willing to support universities and are generous towards universities who will not put up with this.”
Unfortunately, these presidents are only making changes “in response to that pressure and only that pressure . . . and it’s depressing, but it does kind of expose the moral bankruptcy of the whole project.”