The Ivy League Built Their Wokey "Microaggressions" Mush House

If they have to live in it now, ain't that too bad. Maybe they should have built something else.

Much has been and will be written about the testimony a couple of days ago by the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT when asked about how they had responded, or failed to respond, to student advocates calling for the genocide (that is, murder to the point of extinction) of Jews. When asked if that behavior violated their campus code of conduct, not one of the presidents could say a simple “yes.”

They’ve been taking plenty of heat for it. The liberal Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, openly questioned whether the President of Penn, Liz Magill, should remain in her job. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

A day after M. Elizabeth Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, testified at a congressional hearing about campus antisemitism, the state’s…governor said she had “failed” to “speak and act with moral clarity” and made an implicit call for her removal.

In her remarks, Magill did not directly answer pointed questions about whether students’ calling for the genocide of Jews violated Penn’s code of conduct. Gov. Shapiro told reporters on Wednesday that Magill’s evasiveness was “absolutely shameful” and “unacceptable,” adding that Penn’s Board of Trustees “has a serious decision they need to make.”

Like a slick politician whose overnight polling has headed south after a campaign gaffe, Ms. Magill did a quick two-step the next day:

Late on Wednesday, Magill issued a video statement about her comments. “In that moment, I was focused on our university’s longstanding policies, aligned with the U.S. Constitution, which say that speech alone is not punishable,” Magill said. “I was not focused on, but I should have been, the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetrate.”

Note two things here. First, Ms. Magill was quick to seek cover under the Constitution, whose proscriptions, as she certainly knows, do not extend to private universities (or private anything); and second, that she still didn’t say that calling for the extermination of Jews violated any University rule.

Still, rather than immediately joining the earned chorus of catcalls, I want to pause for a moment to — how shall I say this? — put the university presidents’ comments in context (since putting anti-Semitism “in context” seems to be all the rage these days).

Remember this episode from Yale just two years ago:

[A]dministrators pressured second year law student Trent Colbert to apologize for an email in which he referred to his apartment as a “trap house” [on the theory that “trap house” rhymed with “crack house” and “therefore” could be offensive to blacks]. The law school’s diversity director Yaseen Eldik, also described Colbert’s membership in the conservative Federalist Society as “triggering,” according to leaked audio obtained by the Free Beacon.

Yes, a jocular reference to your place as a trap house gets you called into the Star Chamber to be mugged by Yale’s diversity police, but echoing Adolf Eichmann gets you………………nothing. Hey, look, when killing Jews is the subject, free speech suddenly becomes ever so popular.

The Free Press (Bari Weiss’s outfit) fleshes out more “context,” starting appropriately enough with academia’s longstanding if pathetic burlesque of the concept of “safety.” The Free Press article is titled, “Safety first on campus. Except for Jews.”

Safety first. 

That’s the approach taken by university administrators these days. On campuses across the country, “safety first” has birthed a whole new moral framework—one that treats rhetorical “microaggressions” as acts of violence.     

It’s safety first when it comes to edgy Halloween costumes. It’s safety first when a professor writes an email in which she says, “Black Lives Matter but also, Everyone’s Life Matters.” And it’s safety first when a professor fails too many students in his class. 

But when it comes to threats and calls for genocide against the Jews, it’s a different story. Not safety first, but anything goes. 

Just so. But here’s the kicker, ladies and gentlemen: On a university campus, pretty much anything should go, unless it’s a direct threat or criminal incitement. The main problem with campus life now is not the rampant growth of thinly disguised (and sometimes not so thinly disguised) Nazism, disgusting and dangerous as that is. The main problem consists of these authoritarian “better-not-be-on-the-wrong-side” codes of conduct themselves. As we now see, and should have seen long ago, these are a compendium of selectively enforced rules and threats, not to advance education but to stifle it. To stifle it and — not coincidentally — to stifle the speech that would stand up to Nazism and every other sick and perverted idea that increasingly calls the shots in academia.

Want to say that Jews stink? Fine — say it and defend it. Want to say that America is a racist blight on the world? Fine — say it and defend it. Want to say that blacks are lazy and shiftless? Fine — say it and defend it. Want to say that whites are brutal and soulless? Fine — say it and defend it.

What has happened here is more than just that the highest level of academia — the heads of some of the best universities in the Western world — have been exposed for coddling murderous hatred of Jews. What has happened is that they’ve been delightfully impaled on the horns of the dilemma they built. When you replace free speech and free debate with “codes of conduct” rigged for indoctrinating young minds with The Approved Ideas, you might get The Approved Ideas for a while. But following them, in one form or another, will be the Brownshirts you’ve been in bed with all along. And then — too late — you’ll realize that the whole notion of Approved Ideas is actually the death rattle of, to start with, thought itself.