I keep seeing news stories about the three university presidents and the fallout from their testimony on antisemitism last month.
The continuous arguing in the news from each side of the political aisle only adds to the unhelpful and increasingly deafening cultural noise.
In early December, the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) testified before the House Education and Workforce Committee regarding the handling of antisemitism on each of the institutions’ campuses.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, of New York, grilled the panel of presidents, calling on them to publicly condemn acts of antisemitism. The panel’s responses didn’t satisfy the congresswoman nor, apparently, their respective universities as it led to an ongoing backlash and, ultimately, the resignations of both the Harvard and UPenn presidents.
In interviews and on social media, Stefanik considered those resignations a victory and vowed to continue to “expose the rot in our most ‘prestigious’ higher education institutions.”
The problem is, neither sides of the table were doing anything useful at that hearing, nor were they acting in any kind of admirable or respectable way. Both sides only managed to demonstrate what’s wrong with higher education and politics.
The three presidents all have decades of experience, degrees from places like Stanford, Cambridge and Harvard, and Ph.Ds in a variety of impressive fields and are the leaders, the figureheads and, in instances like this one, the spokespersons for the universities they lead. Answering the congresswoman’s questions should have been something the presidents could’ve done in their sleep. But they didn’t, they sidestepped, deflected and offered what sounded like inauthentic, pre-written responses.
Their statements were evidence that we’ve corporatized and public relation-ed our institutions to death. We’ve limited ourselves to the point that three highly intelligent, highly educated and successful women couldn’t answer a simple question and opted for the noncommittal, milquetoast safe ground of PR speak. That is a big problem. These women, being experts in their fields or at least in higher education, could’ve answered Stefanik’s questions with all of their power, education and experience behind them. Instead, they deferred to the murky and lifeless interpretation of a university handbook.
On the other hand, Stefanik’s questions and overall performance at the hearing was clearly just that, a performance. While the presidents’ responses were a waste of everyone’s time, the questions asked were equally unnecessary. Stefanik, with her endless political grandstanding and self-righteous tone, was doing the same thing every politician does: signal to a base. She was more interested in letting her colleagues know how tough she was than getting to the bottom of the issue.
After the hearings, she called the women’s responses “pathetic and morally bankrupt,” going on to refer to them as antisemitic themselves for the way they didn’t defend against the accusations. More hyperbole. Even if I believed that she believed those women were actually antisemitic, that’s not what the hearing was about. The hearing was a grand gesture of politics as usual: find a way to make the other side look bad and your side look good. Unfortunately, she got that but really, both sides looked as disappointing as always.
Stefanik may have exposed something, but it wasn’t antisemitism, it was the tired, ineffective and dangerously low standards we’ve set for our leaders. That hearing, whatever it was, could’ve been a teachable moment. But don’t let social media and the national news fool you, it was really just more of the same.
-Michael Williamson is a reporter for the Journal-Tribune.