Republican New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik went viral after grilling the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania, each of whom refused to answer “yes or no” to her free speech vs. hate speech questions at a congressional hearing. Stefanik, frustrated by their reluctance, hotly suggested that the presidents should resign.
[NOTE: Stefanik asked multiple times: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate the rules or code of conduct” on campus and “does that constitute bullying or harassment?” Each university president replied repeatedly that it would depend on the “context.”]
Many donors including billionaire Harvard alum Bill Ackman have voiced outrage over the testimony, which he called “despicable.” Note: Rep. Stefanik is an alum of Harvard, too.
The day after the congressional hearing, UPenn President Liz Magill made the video below explaining her response at the congressional hearing.
Turn on the replies, cowards @Penn
— Carly Atchison (@CarlyAtch) December 7, 2023
Stefanik called Magill’s video a “pathetic PR clean up attempt… to try to fix the moral depravity of the answers under oath yesterday. And there was not even an apology.”
Harvard President Dr. Claudine Gay also issued a statement, meant to clarify her testimony:
Statement from President Gay: There are some who have confused a right to free expression with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students. Let me be clear: Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic…
— Harvard University (@Harvard) December 6, 2023
But not all public opinion, especially among legal scholars, supported Stefanik’s rhetorical strategy.
Political analyst Jay Michaelson, for example, is reacting differently. In his op-ed piece in The Daily Beast, ‘Elise Stefanik’s Calculated Demagoguery on Antisemitism and Free Speech,’ Michaelson wrote of the hearing: “the congresswoman exploited Jewish pain for political gain, and tried to blur the lines between offensive speech and harassment.”
Michaelson, who holds a J.D. from Yale, a Ph.D. in Jewish Thought from Hebrew University, and nondenominational rabbinic ordination, claims “now Stefanik is practicing cancel culture on steroids.”
Michaelson cites a 2021 interview in which Stefanik complained of a “petition pressuring the dean of the Harvard Kennedy School to remove me from the bipartisan board of Harvard Institute of Politics,” due to her objecting to electors from four states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and Wisconsin) in the 2020 election.
“This is how cancel culture works,” she said then on the podcast, noting that she was the only person on the board who had voted for Trump.
