Universities Continue To Pay Free Speech Double Standard
‘Universities can enforce their existing speech restrictions evenly. Or they can start applying their newfound embrace of free speech across the board, and not just for anti-Semites and terrorist sympathizers. Until they decide, the Ivy League’s most prominent philanthropic alumni will continue to vote with their checkbooks.’
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered the following remarks today on the Senate floor regarding anti-Semitism on college campuses:
“On Saturday, years of moral rot and intellectual decay began to catch up with America’s most elite universities.
“The President of the University of Pennsylvania resigned four days after failing to state whether calls for genocide against Jews constituted bullying or harassment under her institution’s conduct policy.
“In the face of an alarming wave of vile anti-Semitism – including death threats – on college campuses, the heads of Penn, Harvard, and MIT did everything they could to avoid condemning one of the world’s oldest forms of hatred.
“Of course, Ivy League administrators’ lack of moral clarity is not a recent development.
“For more than two months now, universities across the country have been engaged in an embarrassing public cycle of equivocations and apologies.
“And for years, elite institutions have sheltered despicable anti-Semites under the guise of academic freedom and let them poison a generation of young minds with hateful postmodern ideologies.
“The especially alarming part of the Penn, Harvard, and MIT testimony last week was just how brazenly their cynical embrace of free speech contradicted their response to supposed slights against leftist orthodoxy.
“Today’s elite college campuses are hardly bastions of free speech. The Ivy League’s enforcement of speech restrictions against a laundry list of wrong-think and ‘microaggressions’ would make censors in Pyongyang blush.
“There’s room to punish faculty for inviting guest speakers with objectionable views or assigning controversial class readings, as Penn’s president did last year.
“There’s room to revoke invitations for academic panelists and de-platform visiting lecturers who fail to tow the elite liberal line on social issues, as Harvard has done repeatedly.
“But apparently, there might not be room in the Ivy League’s extensive speech restrictions to take action against calls for genocide against Jews. As Harvard’s president told our House colleagues, it would, ‘depend [ ] on the context’.
“Some current – and now former – leaders of America’s most elite echo chambers would like us to believe they have a deep and abiding commitment to intellectual diversity and the freedom of speech. But they’re not fooling anybody.
“In fact, Harvard ranks dead last in a leading watchdog ranking of campus free speech – its speech climate rated, ‘abysmal.’ How’s that for context?
“It’s rather simple. Universities can enforce their existing speech restrictions evenly. Or they can start applying their newfound embrace of free speech across the board, and not just for anti-Semites and terrorist sympathizers.
“Until they decide, the Ivy League’s most prominent philanthropic alumni will continue to vote with their checkbooks. Harvard alone is reportedly facing more than a billion dollars in canceled donations over its president’s astounding failure. Even with their gargantuan, tax-free endowment, that’s real money.
“And until universities commit to protecting innocent Jews on campus, bright young students might just vote with their feet.”
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