Firing college presidents and kicking out antisemites won’t solve the problem

The latent antisemitism bubbling just under the surface of our culture in America has become increasingly obvious since the Oct. 7 terror attack in Israel. We need to use this moment to rip the band-aid off — let the antisemites speak freely, as I wrote in my first column for The Hill in October — rather than criminalize the speech.

But in the face of blatant hypocrisy surrounding the issue of societal “safety,” particularly on college campuses, many want to fight cancelation fire with fire. It won’t work.

This issue came to the forefront when three college presidents took centerstage before Congress, and their overly coached, equivocating answers on antisemitism, to questioning from Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) in particular, went viral. Stafanik’s underlying point was that those “calling for the genocide of Jews” on campuses should be more than condemned, they should be punished — maybe kicked out of school. The college leaders wouldn’t give a straight answer.

After their failed appearance, there was bipartisan support for these top administrators to be pushed out. When University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill was forced to resign, Stefanik tweeted, “One done. Two to go,” and urged Harvard and MIT to “do the right thing” and get rid of their presidents too. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) told Fox News that all the administrators should resign too, over their “abhorrent” statements.

Getting rid of these leaders won’t solve the problem — and it’s a futile exercise anyway. Harvard President Claudine Gay has now been hit with several legitimate accusations of academic plagiarism, but the response from the press has been largely to protect her rather than engage on the merits. CNN published a news story last week about how Gay “made history” as the first person of color to lead Harvard, and explaining why she was “destined to reach the pinnacle of higher education.” The New York Times piece on Harvard standing by Gay inaccurately asserted she had been “cleared” of misconduct, and actually spun what happened by writing, “not all instances of potential plagiarism are equal, particularly when they do not reflect any intention to deceive, some scholars said,” notably without citing any actual scholars who made this point. (On Friday, Gay quietly “corrected” two articles she had published, adding citations.)

But if Gay goes out like Magill, the root of the problem remains, because these university leaders are the symptom and not the cause. In fact, you could make the argument that keeping them in their positions makes the failures of elite institutions more glaring, as their unimpressive and mediocre personas now lay bare for all to see. Keeping them as the figureheads of academia’s rot illuminates the issue, as opposed to allowing these universities to swap presidents and present a false veil of change.

Meanwhile, with all this righteous furor, it should come as no surprise that we now get the targeting of “free speech” as at issue here.

“The value of free speech has been elevated to a near-sacred level on university campuses,” wrote University of Pennsylvania law professor Claire Finkelstein in the Washington Post earlier this month. “The crisis of antisemitism in our universities mirrors the crisis in our democracy. Isn’t it time for university presidents to rethink the role that open expression and academic freedom play in the educational mission of their institutions?”

In a word — no. This, too, is precisely the wrong solution. But again, these instincts are not surprising given the current cultural landscape. We have seen the rise of anti-speech activism by those on the left, armed with new censorious tools to clamp down on points of view through social media companies. We lived through the Trump era, when words and ideas were not just “wrong” or “stupid,” but deemed “dangerous.”

So it shouldn’t be surprising that we see this extension. But while I find it odious to hear phrases like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” or “globalize the intifada” — and agree that these are calls to, at the bare minimum, justify violence against the Israeli government and certainly are not peaceful — they are just words. They are hate speech. But they are still protected.

And there is absolutely no reason to single out Jews as unique victims on campuses, just like there’s no reason to do that for any other group. If a student is harassed on campus, that is surely against the code of conduct — their religious (or racial) identity should have no bearing on the penalty.

Fox News reported over the weekend about the Harvard “affinity celebrations for graduates,” which listed events for Black graduates, Latinx, LGBTQ+, those with disabilities and more. The story framed the exclusion of “Jewish” students from their own unique “affinity celebration” as another example of Harvard’s mistreatment of Jews on campus.

But the rise of immutable characteristics in our cultural discourse — alternately, the elevation of identity — is the insidious development. Ensuring Jews now get their own graduation celebration is antithetical to the mission of eliminating the DEI stranglehold on our society.

This should be a moment where we reevaluate the existence of these divisive selective spaces that masquerade as “safe spaces.” They aren’t safe, for some, anyway. But life is not safe, and the only way to fight back against the misguided concept of safe spaces is by tearing them down, and not building new ones for those of us who happen to be Jewish.

Superficial victories may feel satisfying in the moment, but to repudiate “safe space” culture, we need to expose it for the fraudulence that it is. And adopting the same tactics of anti-speech activists will just make them double down. The only way to deescalate the safe space instincts in our culture is to refuse to play the game.

Steve Krakauer, a NewsNation contributor, is the author of “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People” and editor and host of the Fourth Watch newsletter and podcast.