The academics’ and women’s groups’ silence is deafening

The presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania have embarrassed themselves and stained the good names and reputations of their institutions. Their lawyer-written public relations clarification of their testimony in the recent hearings on campus antisemitism was simply offensive.

Nothing will ever wipe the smirk off Penn President Liz Magill’s face, or the unseemly dodge and bob of Harvard President Claudine Gay. At least Magill was shamed into finally doing the right thing. But what about Harvard? Every day Gay stays on the job, the failure to fire her brings disgrace upon all those who hired her.

It is as if these high-ranking academics had never heard of the Holocaust, antisemitism or threats to their Jewish students. One got the sense that this was an abstract academic exercise that they had to participate in while sitting in their sunroom, sipping tea and eating a scone. Their disdain for history and contemporary realities was palpable.

I write these words as neither a graduate of either institution nor as a casual observer. I am the only child of two Holocaust survivors. And I am grateful on such occasions as this that my parents are deceased and don’t have to see what academia is becoming.

My late father, who taught for years at the University of Michigan, would be appalled that this is who leads America’s great universities. My late mother would be in utter disbelief.

That same “it can’t be” applies to international organizations who have made the same decision regarding in particular the crimes against women that Hamas committed on Oct. 7. Their silence and refusal to address these unimaginable atrocities head-on is deafening.

Rape, the cutting off of breasts and the mutilation of genitalia, are but examples of what Hamas terrorists did to women, Israeli and non-Israeli alike. The actions of Hamas are war crimes and must be so understood. The crimes committed against women, regardless of their age, represent the worst of the worst. One need not see the videos to understand that this met every test created by international law and rightly emphasized by international women’s organizations.

Except this time, when the crime is against Israel, the very organizations whose sole purpose is to draw attention to crimes against women have chosen, metaphorically, to exercise their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.

The silence of complicity is deafening; the impact on the victims is devastating. Spend time with sexual assault survivors of both sexes, as I have, and the one word that runs through every conversation is “abandonment.”

The abandonment of the victims is precisely what these organizations have done. It is akin to complicity and enabling. No, the organizations did not enable the actual rapes and no they were not complicit in the mutilation. But they are, most certainly, complicit in protecting the perpetrators and guilty of enabling future heinous, unimaginable similar crimes. 

That deadly combination of complicity and enabling is what directly contributed to crimes committed by Catholic priests and team doctors at USA Gymnastics, Michigan State University, Ohio State University and the University of Michigan. This I learned while researching and writing about the enablers at these hallowed institutions. In all these instances, the perpetrators acted with immunity and impunity because they were protected by complicit enablers who chose to protect the institution directly, perpetrator indirectly, while abandoning the victim.

That triangle — enabler-perpetrator-victim — reappears in the determined silence and damning acquiescence of the very organizations whose sole purpose is to protect women.

Amos N. Guiora is professor of law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah. He is involved with the Bystander Initiative.