"Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university's code of conduct?"
This question was posed directly, one at a time, to the university presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT at a congressional hearing in December 2023 by New York representative Elise Stefanik. To the bewilderment of most, each response was "Depends on the context." Two of those presidents would later lose their jobs for reasons that included that embarrassing appearance on Capitol Hill. It was clear that they had rehearsed their lines with an expensive legal firm, but it was still a strange occasion. And it was an event that alerted the rest of America that something strange was happening within the country's best higher education institutions... Two months earlier, Hamas carried out an attack on Israeli civilians, killing over 1,200 people. That was followed by several weeks of unruly pro-Palestine demonstrations on American campuses.
Stefanik, herself, is a Harvard alumna. In this book, she identifies a trend in Ivy League schools toward anti-intellectualism, emotional temper tantrums, moral bankruptcy, freedom suppression, global elitism, foreign financing, and diminished diversity in political ideology. Some American colleges rightly protected free speech while enforcing laws against assault and vandalism. Perhaps there is a way to defend liberty and restore health to the top universities again.