Liz Magill Is Out at Penn. It’s a Start
Penn and other universities like it have a free-speech problem. Worse, they have a problem telling right from wrong. Even before Hamas’s Oct. 7 pogrom, Penn sponsored the Palestine Writes Literature Festival. In an Oct. 16 letter to Ms. Magill, I called this an “antisemitic burning man festival” that featured abhorrent speech. Yet I don’t advocate the suppression of speech no matter how vile. I’m fairly close to being an absolutist on free speech and have long supported the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and Heterodox Academy, two nonpartisan organizations dedicated to fostering open debate on campus.
Alumni donors like me don’t object to free speech. What we can’t abide is the extremely asymmetric application of free-speech principles. For years these schools, Penn prominently included, have actively suppressed ideas disagreeable to the progressive worldview of their administrations, faculties and hard-core student activists. Now that those groups are talking about wiping Israel off the map, these college presidents are wrapping themselves in the First Amendment.
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The best solution to this problem is free speech for all, including those spouting things I find deeply offensive. The distant second-best solution is symmetric enforcement of speech restrictions not driven by an administration’s own ideology. Unacceptable is the current status quo of free speech for those chanting slogans that amount to “death to the Jews” but not for those committing alleged microaggressions against the politically favored.
The free-speech problem is perhaps solvable. Reacquiring the ability to distinguish right from wrong will be a bigger challenge. Penn and other colleges issued equivocating statements after Oct. 7 that drew false equivalences between Israel and Hamas. After sadistic terrorists killed 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals—torturing, raping and parading the mutilated corpses of women and children—these universities didn’t call out the terrorism. Rather, they seemed to call for perspective and balance.
To be blunt, you either keep your trap shut about the issues of the day or you prepare to be judged on your every utterance. Many schools decided years ago that they wanted to comment on events both major and minor. Calling for perspective and balance on an atrocity that warrants neither reveals their long-held preferences. Hamas’s barbarism didn’t create these preferences. The Dec. 5 hearing simply, and broadly, exposed them to the public. Thankfully, it seems the public isn’t on board.
The American professoriate leans heavily Democratic. On elite campuses it’s nearly unanimous. Conservatives, libertarians and classical liberals who work in higher education report high levels of self-censorship. Students write essays arguing positions they don’t hold simply to please their progressive professors. Doing otherwise would damage their transcripts. Rational discourse on an issue like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict simply isn’t allowed. Only the academic postmodern progressive lens is tolerated. This wasn’t the case when I was a student in the 1980s.
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Israel has built a successful, prosperous, democratic, law-abiding, diverse society out of the desert while under near constant attack from much larger enemies and terrorists. In contrast, Palestinian leaders have rejected generous peace offers for 75 years and kept their subjects in squalor to generate the next generation of jihadists. Even if one disagrees with these truths, nothing on earth justifies the medieval barbarism of Oct. 7. Yet despite the obvious right and wrong, elite university orthodoxy holds that prosperous societies must be evil and failed societies must be oppressed and therefore good.
The multiple gross failures of the University of Pennsylvania and other schools after Oct. 7 weren’t tactical errors or failures of execution. They were an outgrowth of a much broader philosophy that views merit and prosperity as proof of guilt. No society could long survive such a philosophy.
It will take a lot more than one university president losing her job and a few donors withholding contributions to fix the systemic problems at our elite institutions. But when the stakes are this important, you have to start somewhere.
Mr. Asness is managing and founding principal of AQR Capital Management
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