The New Yorker Radio Hour - Israel, Gaza, and the Turmoil at One American University

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

From Cambridge to Los Angeles and at dozens of schools in between, campuses are roiled by protest against American financial and military support for Israel’s war in Gaza—and by university actions, including mass arrests, to suppress the protesters. There hasn’t been a college protest movement as widespread since the Vietnam War. Apart from the violence in the Middle East, the protests also engage crucial issues of speech and academic freedom in the context of America’s culture war. David Remnick looks at the turmoil and its reverberations through the lens of one campus, Harvard University, where much of the furor began. He speaks with a protester whose statement justifying the October 7th Hamas attack became a political flashpoint; two student journalists who covered the resignation of the university’s president Claudine Gay; the law-school professor Randall Kennedy; and the former Harvard president Lawrence Summers.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For six months on this program, we've been dealing with the massacre of October 7th and the war on Gaza and its horrific human consequences. With so much death and suffering on the ground, it would be a mistake to let our interest in and our debates about domestic protests somehow overwhelm our attention. Yet you'd have to go back to the Vietnam War era to see a protest movement as widespread as what's happening now from coast to coast. The scenes of arrests are familiar from that era, but some of the dynamics of what's happening now on campuses.

Protests against Israel's prolonged bombing of Gaza and counter-protest denouncing Hamas and calling for the release of hostages, the charges of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and doxing, student against students sometimes. Well, in some important ways, this is quite different from what we saw during Vietnam. In 1968, students, you know, are mad at, I don't know, at McNamara or, you know, LBJ. For the administration. That's right. They're mad at the grown-ups. They're mad at adults. It's outward-looking.

I talked the other day with Randall Kennedy, a professor at the Harvard Law School. What you have going on now, you have people who are no longer. speaking to one another. You have a situation in which somebody goes down a hall and sees a colleague walking down the hall and they turn around because they don't want to say anything to the colleague. Right. Because if we talk about this, all bets are off. So this is... And I should interrupt and say that that is not limited to anyone and includes Jewish friends who are having a hard time talk to each other.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, you have here a various sorts of clashes. Their identities are deeply invested in this. And so what's going on in campus today, it's not an abstraction. It's a person who was once your friend. And so the emotions that are on campus today, there's more rawness than I've seen. I mean, this is my 40th year. as a legal academic, I have seen nothing like what has transpired this year. So today we're going to focus on just one emblematic campus, Harvard University, where much of the unrest began. I'll talk more with law professor Randall Kennedy and also former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, and with these two reporters. Hi, I'm Tilly Robinson. And I'm Neil Shaw, and together we cover the administration of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Arts and sciences. They're reporters for the Crimson. That's the newspaper put out by Harvard students that's

independent of the university. Robinson and Shaw have been covering the protests from the very start. You know, I wonder how you interpret this. We want what seems to be sometimes contradictory things on a college campus like Harvard. Students should have free speech, including protests, of course, but at the same time, they have to have the ability to learn without being harassed or subject to any kind of prejudice or threats. What has actually been happening on the Harvard campus? You know, these contradictory moments where two groups of people interpreted something very differently

marked a lot of the campus tensions throughout the entire fall semester pretty much, right? The phrase, quote, from the river to the sea, many of the pro-Palestine activists on campus saw this as political rhetoric, whereas many of the more pro-Israel activists on campus saw this as, you know, hate against Israel. Those contradictions are kind of key to understanding all of this because oftentimes when you speak with kind of pro-Palestine activists

who have been accused of doing hateful things, they don't always seem to interpret it as such. How do you mean? You know, people who have been accused of spreading hateful rhetoric, they often don't feel as if it is hateful rhetoric because to them this is, you know, political speech being used to further their activist cause as opposed to then actually having hatred for, you know, Jewish students on campus. Yeah, I think adding on to that a bit, I would say that while there have been unambiguously hateful incidents, both against Jewish students and against Muslim or Arab students or pro-Palestine activists, it's not clear to what extent those represent a systemic problem.

And it's also true that a number of Jewish students have helped lead pro-Palestine protests. So I think that's something where it has been a tense time. And students have tried to have dialogue over and negotiate differences in how they see the world, even as they respond to tragedies and crimes overseas. And there is no one narrative. And in some respects, I think Harvard's campus has actually been comparable to or even calmer than that of many other universities that are also experiencing protests and that are also experiencing pressure as they try to navigate this moment. Now let's talk about the congressional hearing with former president Claudine Gay and the subsequent plagiarism charges, which eventually led to her resignation. The charges were pushed by Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist, and Rufo has said the following. My primary objective is to eliminate the DEI bureaucracy in every institution in America and to restore truth rather than racialist ideology as the guiding principle.

of America. That's Christopher Rufo. How does that relate to this whole affair at Harvard? You're right. So the initial allegations of plagiarism against Claudine Gay were not made in an anonymous complaint submitted directly to the university. Rather, they were reported on by Christopher Rufo and a journalist by the name of Christopher Brune. They were largely being pushed forward in, you know, conservative publications. And then, since then there have been four anonymous complaints. one against gay, and then three against, you know, other black women at Harvard who have been studying race. The beauty of what Chris Rufo's doing, if we can call it that, is we don't have to speculate as to his motivations. Right.

Because he's so on the record constantly about his motivations. Right. I mean, I think it's when we look at, you know, the initial plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay, which he played a role in releasing, he said in a tweet, quote, that he saved the Claudine Gay plagiarism. over the past week, waiting for the precise moment of maximum impact. And so he very clearly saw the plagiarism allegations, whatever their substance, as a way to undermine her presidency. And that comes in the context of his campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on college campuses, against the use of affirmative action in hiring and admissions, and against disciplines that academically study race and social justice, which he refers to frequently

as grievance disciplines. For instance, when Rufo reported on the most recent plagiarism complaint, the most recent anonymous plagiarism complaint against Harvard sociology professor Christina Cross, he tweeted, quote, let's not ignore the pattern. This is the fourth black female CRT slash DEI scholar to be accused of plagiarism at Harvard. We need further research, including a control group of more rigorous fields, but initial reports suggest that the grievance disciplines are rife with fraud. Right? So I guess, you know, what he's suggesting is what he's suggesting is black professors are particularly susceptible to this. What people on campus are saying, by contrast, is that he's obviously targeting black professors and administrators in a way that is racist. Right. Now, the right in the U.S., this has been going on for decades, really, the right in the U.S. seems to describe Harvard and universities like it as liberal bastions, even radical. bastions, particularly in the humanities, full of left-wing students and professors who don't allow open conversation and debate. How accurate or not is that from your point of view as students,

much less reporters? Well, I study computer science, so I'll let Tilly take that one. Okay, Tilly? All right. Well, I guess I'll say if you... Tilly, what do you study? Social studies. That's Harvard's interdisciplinary degree across several social sciences. For me, mostly government history and economics. But, you know, the Crimson conducts an annual survey of faculty at Harvard, and repeatedly we find that Harvard's faculty are overwhelmingly liberal. On the other hand, I think the question of the state of free speech at Harvard is something that, like everything we've been discussing today, is contested. I personally have never felt unfree to speak, but the foundation for individual rights and expression has ranked Harvard last in their rankings of free speech on university. campuses in America. The faculty we've spoken to almost uniformly call this an exaggeration.

On the other hand, again, everyone we've talked to does say there are real problems with free speech on campus. And some attribute that to a culture of self-censorship or of students being reluctant to stay things in front of certain faculty members or in front of their peers. On the other hand, other people and other faculty have located the larger threat to academic freedom in the question of how outside figures, including donors and politicians in the federal government, are approaching matters at Harvard. And they say that they're concerned that that sort of outside pressure will lead to the suppression of certain viewpoints on campus. So there's a mix in terms of how much people think, how much people chalk up Harvard's problems to internal issues versus external

forces. And lastly, from your point of view, what do you think the media across the country is getting wrong in all of its coverage of everything we've been talking about? I think that the thing that's under-emphasized is that student protesters and others are responding to real substantive things in the world, right? You know, we still have people holding vigils after the bombing of Al-Shafa Hospital. And similarly, there's still hostage posters that get taped up around Harvard Yard, right? And student protesters aren't just concerned because they feel that their voices are being suppressed on campus or because they feel their peers are threatening them. they're concerned because of the immense violence that happened in Israel in October 7th and that has been happening in Gaza in the month since.

And I think that when the media narrative shifts to focus on universities, it does engage really important questions of student safety, of academic freedom, and of the purpose of higher education in America. But I think I worry that sometimes that becomes a distraction from the actual events that are playing out in the Middle East and that sometimes the motivations for campus protest and for campus discourse are under-emphasized in coverage. Tilly Robinson and Neil Shaw are reporters for the Crimson, the Harvard Student Newspaper. They're both sophomores.

A week ago, protesters began occupying Harvard Yard at the center of the campus. They demanded that the university divest from Israel, among other actions. Administrators have threatened those students with sanctions, but so far, they've held back. from closing the encampments by force. I wanted to talk with one of those protesters, and I was put in touch with a leader of a pro-Palestinian group on campus. She asked to speak anonymously, citing concerns for her safety.

She was among the students who signed a distinctly hardline statement that blamed Israel entirely for the Hamas October 7th attack. Harvard Auto-Ov-occupied Palestine has three key demands that are really at our core of this movement, of the encampment at large, and those are for the university that we attend, being as students and student workers and affiliates of Harvard University, which is the largest, richest and wealthiest university in the country with an endowment of $51 billion is the financier of Israel and the occupation in Palestine.

And I think at its core, our main focus is to amplify our demands of getting our university to disclose its investments in Israeli genocide and companies that are promoting that, and as well as divesting from all of such investments in reinvesting in Palestinian cultures and academia, and then finally dropping all the charges and all the disciplinary cases against students that have been organizing along this front. What do you expect to see happen in the demonstrations at Harvard and Columbia and all across the nation going forward? I think students are going very strong, and students are very active.

adamant that they will not allow their university that they attend and give money to and work for to benefit and profit off of genocide and slaughter and murder happening over in Palestine. What has been really inspiring for me as an organizing as Harvard is to see how students all over the country are facing ramped up and repression from their universities, including at Harvard University, I think nearly 40 students received emails from the administrative board, saying that they would be potentially be faced with disciplinary charges for the university's disciplinary procedure process. And students will not let this repression stop them. And the students intend to continue until our demands are met and heard and met.

And we look forward to speaking with administration and making sure all those demands are met. You signed a statement with other student groups just after the October 7th attack by Hamas. And it celebrated the attack and laid the blame for the violence entirely on Israel. There's no mention of murdered Israelis or hostages. And that struck many people as deeply, deeply problematic and anti-Semitic. Is there anything about that statement you would reconsider? That letter and that statement that I still stand by and that many of the organizations including PSC and Afro still stand by, obviously no one likes the taste of blood. you know, I think that no one celebrates generally the loss of life or violence for just violence's sake.

But it acknowledges that the root cause of all this violence, for anyone that feels compelled to see violence in our world, we have to acknowledge the root cause of the violence. And the root cause of the violence goes back to 75 years ago, the forcible explosion of 750,000 Palestinians from the land they have lived in. centuries. It only follows naturally that any and all violence that has occurred in Palestine, and occupied Palestine since then, falls from that. Look, as you know, and I know, the history here is complicated and deep. It is not a simple matter

that the expulsion and the exile of Palestinians followed a war in which a number of Arab surrounding Arab countries prosecuted a war after a partition plan was passed. It was the UN. But what I'm asking you is when you don't acknowledge the killing of 1,200 Israelis, when you don't acknowledge of the taking of hostages as anything other than having a root cause, do you understand why people might see that as cold-hearted and anti-Semitic? And if we don't agree that it's in any way of anti-Semitic, I think, Harvard specifically, we've seen a really beautiful coalition of people from all backgrounds. And this coalition includes many, many students of Jewish backgrounds and of Jewish faith.

And what we're doing and what we can control is what happens at our university. And I think our demands for Kenya's the university are most salient right now. If those demands are not met and graduation comes and goes and classes are over, will everybody stay on campus demonstrating or will they go home? Regardless of what happens, obviously it's inevitable that summer comes around. But I think that we're learning a lot of lessons and moving really quickly and applying a lot of pressure now to get demands met immediately and then to continue to apply pressure if needed or if we feel need to be assessed back when we come back in the fall.

That's one of the student organizers of the occupation of Harvard Yard. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour and we'll continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. protests swept American campuses immediately after the October 7th massacre and the launch of the war in Gaza. And soon, accusations of anti-Semitism led to congressional hearings attacking university presidents. A Muslim valedictorian was forbidden to speak at graduation by the University of Southern California, which cited public safety. Then many administrators, starting with Columbia as president, began calling police to clear protests by force. and that has really escalated in the past two weeks with more than 1,500 arrests on campuses

across the country. So along with the enormous death toll in Gaza, now approaching 35,000, the campus protests also involve a distinct but fundamental American issue, freedom of speech. I wanted to get a couple of views from inside Harvard University. First, Lawrence Summers. Summers is a prominent economist, and he was president of Harvard University. university, controversially at times, for five years. But he's also widely known as a critic of Harvard, who sees the school as having drifted too far to the left. Let's begin with the historical parallel. When students were protesting the Vietnam War in 1968, some said things that were quite outrageous, preposterously kind slogans about Ho Chi Menzay, but the vast majority,

the vast majority, were on their feet and protesting because they were outraged about a war that they considered a horrific mistake. How is that different from now? I think most people at Harvard would feel that the decision and the way it was done to calling the police at Harvard in ways that led to violence against the protesters was a historical error. that did grave damage. We're talking about 1969 at Harvard. On our campus. So far be it from me to take the position that no one should be marching

or protesting against various aspects of Israeli policy. Marching and using chance that carry the clear implication that Israel as a Jewish state should cease to exist, I think is a very problematic act, not necessarily an act that should be prohibited, but certainly an act that should be condemned. Now, by the way, to say that speech is anti-Semitic is not to say that the speech should be banned. But it does seem to me that it is the obligation of leaders of an institution to set a moral tone. I also think there's a difference. There's a kind of double standard in what is going on today, vis-a-vis Israel, that I don't think was an important aspect of the Vietnam experience.

The Vietnam experience was the major foreign policy of the United States of America. On even the least sympathetic view of Israel as a violator of human rights, it is not the only violator of human rights. in the world. It is not the largest violator of human rights in the world when there is complete indifference. The United States is funding a lot of them. Human rights abuses. I'm sorry, David. What I'm saying is, I think you know the answer to that is that some of it has to do with policy complicity and funding of Israel militarily and otherwise, that there's a sense of connection between the United States and Israel, that there is not between some of the other states

that you're talking about. I think that part of what gives force to the concern about anti-Semitism is the very strong sense that Israel is being singled out. And Israel is the only Jewish state, and anti-Semitism is a 3,000-year curse, and Harvard and other major universities

do have long histories of complicity with anti-Semitism. So the president of Harvard, MIT, and University of Pennsylvania testified at a House Committee hearing on anti-Semitism in December. We all remember that. Representative Stefonic grilled them relentlessly. Two of them soon resigned. including Harvard's president Claudine Gay. So what was your reaction, watching Claudine Gay?

At what point did you start to feel concerned? Those kinds of hearings are a kind of performance art and a kind of unfair performance art because the congresspeople can interrupt their physically, eight feet higher than the witnesses, and one doesn't get a real chance to explain one's view. That said, I recognized immediately that it was very poor performance art. Frankly, my frustration and anger was more directed at those who had taken responsibility

for the preparation of the presidents as much as the presidents themselves. You're referring to PR people, lawyers in particular, in the way they prep the president? Part of the problem was that lawyers who conceptualized congressional testimony as they would conceptualize the deposition and failed to recognize the public aspect, controlled the preparation and established principles that were legalistically accurate but were cosmically unsuitable. to the moment. How would you have responded in front of somebody like Congresswoman Stefonic to that crucial

question? How would it have been different than the way Claudine Gay responded? How should she have responded? David, I'm going to stay away from that question for a moment because I think I would not have been in the situation President Gay was. Why is that? Because if 35 student groups at Harvard had basically said Israel deserved October 7th, I would have three hours later issued a press release saying that this was entirely repugnant speech

that did not reflect the values of the Harvard community and called on them to withdraw that speech. David, it's a real mistake to focus on the words at the congressional hearing rather than the context that brought us to that moment and in many ways is still with us on college campuses. So you don't think Representative Stefonic was in any way targeting President Gay? Of course she was. Of course she was being a politician looking to dramatize an event to make a simplistic point. But that opening was created by the failure of universities to stand up in a reasonable way for broad values.

Now, as you know, the hearings were followed by something else. Christopher Rufo, a right-wing activist, is intent, intent on attacking what he sees as elite left-wing universities and colleges and has been investigating plagiarism instances among faculty and administrators. And he went after Claudine Gay. What did you think of that? Because that seemed to be the straw that broke the camels back here. That's what led Claudine Gay to have to leave her post.

Look, I think there's an element of ugly, malicious persecution in what Christopher Rufo has done. So I have condemned Chris Rufo. I have condemned Bill Ackman, who has echoed certain things that are said. Bill Ackman is a prominent hedge fund manager and Harvard donor. Ackman called on people to renounce any financial support of Harvard, and I rejected those calls. How would you compare the congressional technology? testimony and behavior of Claudine Gay, when she was president of Harvard, to President

Shafique at Columbia, who took an entirely different approach to her congressional testimony and thereby causing a large part of the faculty to be enraged that she somehow touted to Representative Stefaniac and just did everything that she could to not get fired. How do you interpret her approach? I think there's sort of a middle ground in a lot of this. On the one hand, when Harvard is not willing to answer the question, how many students have been punished? I find it wildly unreasonable, since it seems to me to be a reasonable question and that it's not invasive of privacy to talk about how many students have received a given kind of punishment. On the other hand, when President Shafik, and I don't know all the reasons and I don't know all the considerations,

spoke about individual disciplinary cases of faculty in a public setting, I found that to be a quite surprising choice. She seemed to make up her mind in the moment. Did you confirm he was still the chair? I need to confirm that with you. Well, let me ask you this. Will you make the commitment to remove him as chair? I think that would be, I think I would, yes. That was something that I would have been very hesitant about doing. Again, I don't know what the full context of the situation was.

In general, it does seem to me that academic freedom does not include freedom from criticism. I think there is a tendency on the part of some to suppose that somehow the fact that there's academic freedom is a reason why presidents and others on university campuses can't be sharply critical of a range of different speech or a range of different faculty activity. Larry, you've said that Harvard has stepped away

from merit and excellence in favor of identity politics. You feel, generally speaking, that the school has drifted too far to the left. That's your view. That sentiment is also behind a lot of the conservative push in Congress and among people like Christopher Rufo. They want to make this into a hot-button political issue. And what I hear you saying, Larry,

is that to some extent, or maybe to a great extent, you agree with them? I think it is very regrettable that on Ivy League campuses today, you cannot take a course in American history where you are exposed to a narrative about principally the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Revolutionary War period. You mean to tell me that someone like Jill Lippur, historian like that, she's not teaching these kinds of things at Harvard?

When I was president, which is before Jill Lepur arrived, and at that point, I asked the History Department quite explicitly, do you offer a course about the American Revolutionary War period? And my successor, Drew Fowler, said, in a way we do, Larry, but I don't think you'll think it responds to your concern. We offer a course on the American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the Guatemalan Revolution in comparative perspective. I think a lot of people at Harvard would dispute you on this, no?

If you look at the extent of the study of Marx in the curriculum, at leading universities and you look at alternative, more libertarian perspectives, there is a vast disproportion that is there. So I think if you teach a negative history of our country, I think it has problematic consequences down the road. and as I look at what's happening on many campuses this spring, I'm not sure things are moving in the right direction. Larry Summers, thank you. I appreciate your time.

Thank you. Larry Summers was president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006, and he remains a professor there. He also directs a center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. We'll continue our program on campus protests at Harvard and Beyond on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and we're spending the entire hour talking about

the eruption of protest on college campuses across the country. We're focusing in particular on Harvard University, where much of the turmoil began. In December, Harvard's president, along with two other college leaders, were summoned to Congress to hearings about whether a climate of anti-Semitism exists on campus. This has become a real issue. Some on the right, Elise Stefonic and Ron DeSantis, among others, have seized on some distinctly ugly instances, and then, as some have argued, exploited the situation, making fighting anti-Semitism a distinctly partisan political cause. I spoke earlier in the program with Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard president, who said that the way the university presidents conducted themselves in the hearings was, and this is

his word, a disaster. So I put this question to Randall Kennedy. Kennedy is a longtime professor at Harvard Law School, and he wrote to my mind a brilliant essay on the subject in the London Review of Books. I thought the college presidents responded, like I'm used to seeing academics respond. They listened. They were very painstaking. They made careful distinctions. Some people said that, well, they acted in a lawyerly way, and of course that was meant

to be a put-down. I view it differently. I'm a lawyer. Now, immediately people said, well, these people, these college presidents are naive. Shouldn't they have known that this was, you know, mere political drama? Well, you know, they stayed within their role. They'll have the politicians to act in their role. If, you know, if they wanted to be demagogues, fine. Go be a demagogue. I guess, Randy, what the critique was, the sympathetic critique, was that these college presidents were prepped unto a fairly well by, in fact, one law firm so far as I know. And the best approach would have been because they're not in a deposition, they're in a political theater, whether you like it or not, to begin the answer by expressing outrage against the obvious and then a more nuanced answer and then another expression of outrage.

you've put the truth, the nuance truth, in between two slices of theater. David, I have now read the transcript several times. And Claudine Gay said on several occasions, I abhor the rhetoric of the students. I abhor the rhetoric of the demonstrators. She said that over and over. And then her tormentors would come back in order to get the precise, you know, 20 seconds that they wanted. I got to give Elise Stefaniac and her colleagues credit.

They were very dogged. They were very persistent. And I think that people, frankly, have a misimpression of what went down at the congressional hearing. I want to go backwards a little bit. Why were they sitting in Congress in the first place? Why did Claudine Gay find herself in front of Elise Stefani? Oh, I think for a variety of things. I mean, the immediate cause was the Hamas attack.

the response by students which suggested to many an indifference to the horror or maybe even an embrace of the horror. And then there was the feeling that the university authorities had not responded to those students. And I think that one of the things that really had a lot of punch was when people at Harvard, like the former president of Harvard, Larry Summers, said, listen, A couple years ago, when there were the outrages with respect to the police, you know, the George Floyd moment, college presidents, you know, reacted pronto. There was a lot of motion behind their reaction. Why not now? Randy, I spoke earlier on the program with one of the student organizers involved in a statement about October 7th. How did you react to that statement and its lack of condemnation for Hamas's October 7 attack? Yeah. First, I read about the student open letter, and my reaction was very negative.

Very soon thereafter, I read the critique of Claudine Gay. And here, I must say, I was a little bit mystified. You know, I'd say within a day, there was the allegation that she had not responded quickly enough? Well, what's quickly enough? It would be one thing if some time had gone by and there was an objection, but the objection came very quickly. And I thought, and I thought, and I thought too quickly. What are you suggesting? I'm suggesting that folks were out to get Claudine Gay from the get-go, and we're going to use any openings with which to do that. But President Chafeeke of Columbia came in and expressed her outrage over and over and over again

and got rid of any, you know, trace of being in a deposition. She knew she was in a political theater. But on the other hand, she adjudicated in real time the fate of some of her professors during the hearing. I'm very glad that you mentioned that. Compare Claudeyne Gay and the other presidents in the fall to the testimony of the people from Columbia. The people, the president of Columbia, the law professor,

the members of the Board of Trustees in Columbia, in my view, their testimony was humiliating. for people in academia. I thought it was absolutely terrible. They clearly were willing to say anything that they thought that the Congress people wanted to hear. Wasn't the right answer? Not to tilt things, but wasn't the right answer to say, Congressman, I will definitely look into those statements, but we will adjudicate our faculty decisions on our own. That's That's what academic freedom is all about, and that's what running a university is about, and the congresswoman from upstate New York doesn't get to do it.

That would have been a nice statement. But to get back to Claudine Gay, I would say this. In her testimony, one thing that she did do was to stay true to her role, and that is something that the president of Columbia did not do. What then accounts for those student groups and their initial reaction to October 7th, which I have to say as a journalist, but also as a Jew who has been around for a while? I'm not insensitive to these manifestations, but nor do I yell anti-Semitism as a general condition at every moment. So what accounted for that reaction? You mean their inattentiveness to the horror of the Hamas attack? That's one way of putting it.

Okay. I don't know. I don't know. Let me say this. A few years ago, there were people who said that our alma mater, Princeton University, and other liberal elite institutions, that they were systematically racist. That was just a few years ago. They were wrong.

And just like the allegations now are wrong, and I link them because I think that there is a similar dynamic at work. In both instances, you have terrible things that happen to minority groups that have a baleful history of oppression. And in both instances, you have groups that use what's at hand to protect themselves and to advance their interests. In both instances, as far as I'm concerned, what you have is the use of mao-mowing, you have the use of guilt-tripping, you have the use of an exaggeration of actual racism or actual anti-Semitism. So you have the creation of microaggressions. Just like today, you have the inflation of anti-Semitism. So now, if you criticize Zionism, that is anti-Semitism.

I think there's a usefulness in comparing the George Floyd moment and what happened at universities and this moment, the October 7th moment. I wonder how you assess, almost in a scholarly way, why Claudine Gay resigned or was forced to resign. You had the accusations of plagiarism. You had the heated debate about October 7th in the war in Gaza. You had politics on campus. And you also had big money getting involved in this. You had Bill Ackman and others saying, I'm going to pull my money out and I'm going to put pressure on the people who really run Harvard,

which is a very small number. How do you assess that? Well, I think you just named. Very important factors. The money factor very important. I mean, after all, what is it that college presidents do? One of their most important functions is raising money and lots of it. And who do they raise the money from?

Well, you know, they raise the money from their alums, but they also raise money from people who have very deep pockets and make very big bequests. You know, again, I want to emphasize there was a sector of the professoriate that was intensely resentful, did not like at all the diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging ethos that she embraced and voiced. And then you had... Would you say that was a racist corner? Some. Some racist. some sexist, some not.

I'm not, you know, not everybody who takes that position is racist or sexist. As a professor of law as well as an observer, is there a legal definition of what types of actions or speech constitute anti-Semitism or racism and speech that needs, for one of a better word, policing on the campus of a place like Harvard? No. It's the answer. Is there a legal definition for racist speech? No, there's not a legal definition for racist speech. So how do you juggle the imperatives between, on the one hand, freedom of speech, which is a very complicated discussion these days, and on the other hand, the need for an

environment at a university of, I hate this word, safety, but safety to a free inquiry and freedom of thought. Now I'm going to say something and I'm not, I'm being puckish. It all depends. So for instance, let's take the safety. When I hear safety, I think of physical safety. Am I worried about somebody, you know, beaning me in the head? The word safety now has, again, been very much influential.

You know, I can say, you've said something, David, that really bothers me deeply. It makes me anxious. And now I feel unsafe. So, I mean, one of the things that we're grappling with, and it's not just in the universities, our culture, Harvard University has been sued by a group of students. And one of their claims is that Harvard University, is in violation of federal law because Harvard University has allowed the creation of an environment that oppresses Jewish students. And then you're reading their complaint and they say, well, and, you know, what are the particulars? They say, well, Harvard University tolerates anti-Semitism. What is anti-Semitism? They have a sentence in there that says, well, if you

say that you're against Zionism. If you question the legitimacy of Zionism, that is anti-Semitism. If that lawsuit prevails, I take it that means that it would be unlawful for Harvard University to allow the teaching of a viewpoint that is anti-Zionist. I mean, this is very dangerous. Which includes Hana Arendt and many others before the rise of the state of Israel. Think of the thinkers that would

be outlawed if that in fact was to become law. Randall Kennedy, thank you so much. Thank you. Randall Kennedy, Professor of Law at Harvard University. As I think these conversations in the past hour have made clear,

the campus protests are immensely complicated, and we've tried in The New Yorker to get at these issues, to get at them clearly, from Emma Green and Andrew Morance's coverage of the Columbia demonstrations to Louis Menan's recent essay called Academic Freedom Under Fire. And you can find all of this coverage at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards. This episode This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Alicia Zuckerman.

With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccan. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.