The Red Line

Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned this month, for good reasons. Foremost was her inability to muster a straightforward answer when asked in Congress whether Harvard should condemn calls for the genocide of the Jewish people.

There are other good reasons and one glaring exception. First the reasons. Over her career, she indulged, if not encouraged, the left-wing cancel culture at Harvard. On her watch, the college’s free-speech ranking dropped to last place among 248 colleges surveyed. Her resume of scholarly research is short and, apparently, riddled with instances of plagiarism.

Now the exception. She has been attacked most vociferously – and wrongly – for indulging alleged antisemitism on campus. Of this charge, she was not guilty; she was simply incompetent in her inability to defend the free speech rights of pro-Palestinian students and distinguish them from antisemitism.

Wealthy Jewish financiers and national politicians have attacked university presidents for not restricting supposedly antisemitic speech on campus. Yet, previously, the attackers have condemned college leaders for restrictions on campus free speech.

Bill Ackman wants Harvard’s Claudine Gay fired. Marc Rowan has succeeded in ousting UPenn President Elizabeth Magill. U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik has gloated “one down [Magill], two [Gay and MIT President Kornbluth] to go.”

In an ironic example, Ackman’s extreme actions - demanding Gay’s ouster and doxing and trying to blacklist pro-Palestinian students - have served to resurrect a key element of free speech and academic freedom at Harvard, namely that the institution should not cave to the demands of outsiders, no matter how wealthy or powerful.

Yet, the overriding irony of Ackman’s actions is that they constitute the same effort to restrict on-campus speech that many alumni have criticized in recent years. Doxing and blacklisting are surely efforts to punish and silence speech.