'Progressive' antisemites won't be punished, but everyone else will

Last Saturday, Liz Magill resigned as president of the University of Pennsylvania. Four days earlier she had testified before Congress about campus antisemitism. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s code of conduct? “It is a context-dependent decision,” Magill equivocated. Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman launched a campaign calling for Magill to step down, along with the presidents of Harvard and MIT, who testified alongside her. Their reluctance to condemn revealed a double standard. That double standard, like the titillation of a scandal, has distracted from the bigger mistake. Universities should not police the content of expression on their campuses.

Enjoy the latest local, national and international news.

Enjoy the latest local, national and international news.

Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.

Don't have an account? Create Account

In 2019, I invited a member of Penn’s law school to give a lecture at Queen’s University, where I teach. Some students at my law school launched a petition to prevent the talk. To their credit, administrators at Queen’s did not heed the call, even though the professor I invited, Amy Wax, had become a controversial academic figure. In 2017, she championed “bourgeois culture” in an opinion essay in the Philadelphia Inquirer (with Larry Alexander of the University of San Diego). The piece suggested that the breakdown of post-Second World War norms was producing social decay. Some cultures are less able than others, it argued, to prepare people to be productive citizens. Students and professors........

© National Post