Conservatives see opening over campus antisemitism
Some in GOP have long aimed ire at colleges
For years, conservatives have struggled to persuade American voters that the leftwing tilt of higher education is not only wrong but dangerous. Universities and their students, they’ve argued, have been increasingly clenched by suffocating ideologies — political correctness in one decade, overweening “social justice” in another, “woke-ism” most recently — that shouldn’t be dismissed as academic fads or harmless zeal.
The validation they have sought seemed to finally arrive this fall, as campuses convulsed with protests against Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip and hostile, sometimes violent, rhetoric toward Jews. It came to a head last week on Capitol Hill, as the presidents of three elite universities struggled to answer a question about whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate school rules, and Republicans asserted that outbreaks of campus antisemitism were a symptom of the radical ideas they had long warned about. On Saturday, amid the fallout, one of those presidents, M. Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned.
For Republicans, the rise of antisemitic speech and the timid responses of some academic leaders presented a long-sought opportunity to flip the political script and cast liberals or their institutions as hateful and intolerant. “What I’m describing is a grave danger inherent in assenting to the race-based ideology of the radical left,” said Representative Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican, at the hearing, adding, “Institutional antisemitism and hate are among the poison fruits of your institution’s cultures.”
The potency of the critique was underscored by how many Democrats joined the attack.
The three college presidents were denounced by a spokesperson for President Biden. He was echoed by other Democratic officials, including Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, who joined calls for Magill’s firing. Some prominent business leaders with liberal leanings said they had failed to understand what was really happening in higher education.
“For a long time i said that antisemitism, particularly on the American left, was not as bad as people claimed,” wrote Sam Altman, head of the artificial intelligence firm OpenAI and a major Democratic donor, on X, formerly known as Twitter. “I’d like to just state that I was totally wrong.”
Just as celebratory rallies in the aftermath of Hamas’s October rampage have split Jewish progressives from some of their own longtime allies, anti-Israel protests on campus in recent weeks have driven a wedge into the Democratic Party more broadly. They have turned prominent politicians and executives against institutions where they are more accustomed to send their children or deliver commencement addresses.
It has even fractured the #MeToo cause, as prominent liberal women, such as former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, question why advocacy groups and institutions dedicated to women’s rights were so slow to speak as evidence emerged that the Hamas attackers on Oct. 7 wielded rape as a weapon of war.
On the presidential campaign trail, where Republican contenders largely phased out their critiques of college wokeism this summer after finding it had limited appeal to a broader political audience, the issue came back to the fore at Wednesday’s debate.
“If you don’t think that Israel has a right to exist, that is antisemitic,” said Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, who suggested she would seek to impose new federal rules around anti-Israel statements if elected president. “We will change the definition so that every government, every school, has to acknowledge the definition for what it is.”
The Republican counterattacks come after several years in which prominent conservatives began to embrace an antisemitic, race-based ideology of their own: so-called replacement theory, which holds that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to replace and disempower white Americans, in part by encouraging unfettered immigration.
The theory has helped inspire several mass shootings in the United States in recent years, even as echoes of its central tenets become more common in mainstream Republican politics. Last week, while Haley attacked antisemitism on the Republican stage, another candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, declared replacement theory to be a “basic statement of the Democratic Party’s platform.”
Yet for many on the right, the careful, evasive answers from three college presidents at Tuesday’s hearing — Magill, Claudine Gay of Harvard University,
and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — were in stark contrast to those institutions’ long indulgence of left-wing sensitivities around race and gender.
All three institutions have in recent years punished or censored speech or conduct that drew anger from the left. In 2019, Harvard revoked a deanship held by Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a Black law professor, after students protested his joining the legal team of former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. In 2021, MIT canceled a planned scientific lecture by star geophysicist Dorian Abbot, pointing to his criticism of affirmative action. The University of Pennsylvania’s law school is seeking to impose sanctions on a tenured professor there, Amy Wax, citing student complaints about her remarks regarding the academic performance of students of color, among other provocations.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which advocates for free speech in American society, ranks hundreds of colleges for their protection of students’ rights and open inquiry. Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania sit at the bottom.
“The same administrators now cloaking themselves in the mantle of free speech have been all too willing to censor all kinds of unpopular stuff on their campuses,” said Alex Morey, the foundation’s director of campus rights advocacy. “It is such utter hypocrisy.”
Controversies around antisemitism may fuel further Republican efforts to defund and restrict public universities.