When it Comes to Antisemitism on our College Campuses, I’ve Seen Firsthand That Double Standards Are the Standard

I wrote here last week about the shameful performance of three university presidents from Harvard, Penn, and MIT, who, instead of demonstrating a clear commitment to protecting their Jewish students and enforcing their own respective codes of conduct, chose to hide behind legal definitions of free speech to justify their deplorable refusal to address the malignant antisemitism on their campuses.  Their testimony revealed the deep moral and intellectual rot on America’s campuses.  This delusion at the highest levels of academia threatens our entire country.

This is something I encountered during my tenure as Secretary of State.  As our nation’s most senior diplomat, I felt it was my responsibility to communicate directly to the American people the dangers posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).  I also knew that China exerted real and dangerous influence over our academic institutions, with hundreds of thousands of Chinese students studying here under the watchful eye of the CCP and enormous donations flowing from the CCP’s pockets into the endowments of major universities every year in order to manipulate our research and build inroads into cutting-edge technologies.

To communicate this threat to colleges and universities, I wanted to go to one of America’s most prestigious academic institutions and give a speech outlining these dangers.  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was our first choice of location.  Initially, MIT agreed to host the talk.  Just a few weeks out from our agreed-upon date, though, MIT backtracked on this commitment without warning.  Its reason for doing so?  Then-President Rafael Reif said the risk of offending MIT’s Chinese students was too great.  Of course, its real reason was to avoid offending the Chinese Communist Party, with which it had cultivated a lucrative relationship. Among other links, MIT had recently received an undisclosed amount of funding from SenseTime, one of the largest facial recognition software companies in China, whose products had been used by the CCP to trap the country’s Uyghur population in open-air prisons as part of their ongoing genocidal tactics.  MIT would not allow the speech of America’s Secretary of State to avoid offending a foreign and hostile government (the CCP); but just a few years later, it has allowed vile antisemitism to pervade its campus under the cover of allowing free speech. 

This same double standard has sadly been on display across other American campuses since the Hamas attacks on October 7th, with antisemitic incidents rising in the face of administrative inaction. Some of these attacks have even crossed the line into the endangerment of Jewish students, which makes the university presidents’ weak, underhanded claims of defending free speech all the more galling.

These are the same universities, after all, that have spent years compiling ever-expanding lists of microaggressions and building massive Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices to police speech on their campuses.  Harvard employs over 2,600 more administrators than undergraduate students; this bureaucratic bloat has developed primarily in the last decade, almost entirely due to the growth of jobs “focused on advancing diversity, equity and inclusion.”  Universities like Penn, Harvard, and MIT cannot proclaim their devotion to free speech while maintaining an entire bureaucratic apparatus dedicated to routinely suppressing conservative speech – or really any speech in conflict with the radical, progressive worldview that dominates their campus cultures.   

Furthermore, the actual function of these equity and inclusion apparatchiks is not primarily punitive.  Rather, their mission is to control campus culture through a host of training and programs for students and faculty, often beginning with freshman orientation.  One training program hosted by Harvard University, for instance, made clear that using the wrong pronouns when addressing someone on campus constitutes abuse and is an “attempt to limit a person’s sense of self based on identity.”  Under Harvard President Claudine Gay, failing to refer to someone by their preferred pronouns contributes to a culture of harassment and bullying, but calling to “Free Palestine from the river to the sea” – which would require the mass murder of 7 million Israeli Jews – is considered free speech.

I am proud to be a part of the faculty at Liberty University.  Their support of Israel and clarity on rejecting antisemitism has been well documented from its very founding.  But they have also managed to remain committed to free speech since their founding as well, hosting the likes of Senator Ted Kennedy, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Bishop Desmond Tutu to speak on campus.

Our universities have become so blindly devoted to a radical, Marxist worldview that they have lost the ability to teach our children the difference between right and wrong.  Historically, rising antisemitism has been an indicator that a culture has lost its moral compass, and we would do well to remember that the first German institutions to embrace Nazi ideology enthusiastically – in particular, its vile antisemitism – were the cultural elite at its vaunted universities.  We must not allow our own universities to commit these same sins today.  Instead, we should seek political diversity among faculties rather than submission to a single progressive ideology, and we should encourage donors and board members to continue to hold university leadership accountable when it fails to protect its students from antisemitic attacks.