Cancel culture comes for the university presidents who have long enabled it

By: Rachel Marsden

PARIS — Ivy League university presidents sure picked the wrong time and issue to pretend to be free speech absolutists. As a result, the cancel culture that they’ve long tolerated on their campuses has now come for them.

“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,” said University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill in a video posted online, just days before ultimately being pressured by donors, politicians, and business leaders, to resign alongside the Board of Trustees’ chair.

The move came in the wake of Magill’s testimony at a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism during which she and the presidents of Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) whether, hypothetically, “calling for the genocide of Jews” would be a violation of school rules.

Both Magill and Harvard President Claudine Gay said that policy violations occur when speech translates into conduct. MIT’s President Sally Kornbluth said that the scenario, if it were to actually materialize, would be “investigated as harassment if pervasive and severe.”

Somehow the lot of them just couldn’t bring themselves to crack down on free speech when they were on the hot seat. Suddenly, they were intent on playing the role of radical defenders of liberty — up to the point of shrugging off calls for genocide — when, in reality, elite American universities have long become politically correct liberticidal safe spaces.

Most of the radical speech allowed on campuses doesn’t ruffle feathers of prominent lobby groups or deep- pocketed donors, though. Routinely banning non-establishment right-wing speakers from campus while celebrating leftists, as top universities have been doing for years, is seen as just good tradition. After all, historically important social movements, from civil rights to feminism, are virtually synonymous with campus activism. So radical leftism is not only an establishment fixture at universities, but is also part of the American establishment’s lore. It’s hardly going to raise eyebrows among donors to these educational institutions that campus leftists are being leftist.

Similarly, last year, Stanford University hosted a group of Ukrainian Azov Battalion members, hailed as heroes. Because the prevailing cancel culture isn’t against their side, but rather against Russia’s.

“The regiment has also received criticism for its symbol, which bears a resemblance to the wolfsangel, a symbol used by the Nazi party,” wrote the Stanford Daily.

It’s a bit more radical than that, actually. Canada’s military trainers had wondered whether they should even keep training Azov fighters against Russia as far back as 2017, and its Joint Task Force Ukraine produced a briefing acknowledging Azov’s links to Nazi ideology, as the Ottawa Citizen reported.

Why is it that ideological descendants of actual genocide can be feted on campus while responding to a hypothetical question about potential future genocidal campus rhetoric has led to resignations of those who now plead guilty to having committed the crime of “misspeaking”?

That’s an easy one. It depends who has the deeper pockets and greater influence, backed by establishment status quo. On all those fronts, Ukraine currently has a blank cheque. So it’s not like the move requires any kind of bravery. The same goes for all the nonsense that universities have long indulged around gender and identity. You’re a gal who wants to call yourself a dude and go around griping about those who refuse to indulge you? Hey, no worries, “man.” If anyone has a problem with it, there’s a harassment policy to back you up. Because all of this is totally acceptable by the establishment mainstream now. It isn’t even edgy. It’s the right-wingers who are today’s counterculture punks. Which is why they’re marginalized.

So the system creates a sort of facade of free speech within limits that are establishment-endorsed. Anyone mistaking that for actual unfettered free speech only finds out otherwise when it’s too late.

Apparently these university presidents have been deluding themselves and mistakenly figured that at the height of a heated conflict between Palestine and Israel that’s reverberating around the world in the form of protests on both sides, they could now serve as the unbiased gatekeepers of free debate and controversial discourse. They thought wrong.

It’s not like they didn’t have plenty of warning that someday the brand of cancel culture they indulge in could come for them. In the 2024 College Free Speech Rankings, published in September by the two-decade-old Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Harvard ranked at the very bottom of the largest-ever survey of 248 campuses, with a “free speech climate” of “abysmal.” The University of Pennsylvania ranked just ahead at 247, while MIT ranks as “average” in the 136th spot.

In any case, it seems like a few of these faux defenders of speech may have some time on their hands to reflect on the role they played in laying the groundwork for their own professional demise.

COPYRIGHT 2023 RACHEL MARSDEN