Harvard President Claudine Gay Is A 'Free Speech' Hypocrite | Bobby Burack
The presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania refused to declare “calls for genocide of Jewish people” a violation of “campus rules on harassment" during a House Education Committee hearing last week.
Harvard’s Claudine Gay cited her respect for "free speech" as grounds to allow antisemitic protests on campus.
I agree with Gay that the students should be able to express some of those opinions on campus.
I have been consistent in that Americans should be able to express destructive opinions so long as they are not inciting or committing violence, the latter under which calls for genocide falls.
However, Gay has not been consistent in that stance. In fact, her appreciation for free speech is utterly new-found.
The 2024 College Free Speech Rankings found that no university in the country values free speech less than Harvard, under Gay's leadership.
The practice grades colleges based on openness, tolerance, self-expression, administrative support for free speech, and campus speech policies.
Harvard earned a zero.
Related: Harvard president 'definitely' plagiarized in peer-reviewed academic papers, scholars say: report
A subsequent New York Post report found that there have been nine reported attempts in the last five years of Harvard punishing students, student groups, scholars, and speakers for speech protected under First Amendment standards.
Seven resulted in sanctions.
This week, a story from 2017 resurfaced in which Claudine Gay revoked at least 10 offers of admission to students who participated in a private group chat called “Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens.”
Had the students just called for the extermination of Jews, they would have been able to attend Harvard.
Gay also introduced a program at the university that teaches students that "fatphobia" and "cisheterosexism" are forms of "violence" that Harvard will not tolerate
Got that?
According to Gay, your cisheterosexism is more violent than calls for the genocide of Jews.
As are old tweets you may have posted in your teen years.
In 2019, Harvard rescinded an offer of admission to Parkland, Fla. school shooting survivor and gun rights activist Kyle Kashuv after users online dug up old posts in which he used a "racial slur" when he was 16 years old.
A report from USA Today this week also documented how Harvard has disinvited speakers to campus after learning they had the “wrong” opinions on gender issues, such as claiming that the female gender cannot be worn like a mask.
Claudine Gay is not a champion of free speech. Not in the slightest. Nor is Harvard a place where diverse opinions can be had, heard, and debated.
Gay and Harvard only cite "free speech" now because they happen to agree with the students organizing rallies in support of Hamas.
Or, at the very least, they are willing to tolerate that point of view.
I discussed the why of Harvard's hypocrisy last week on Will Cain's podcast on Fox News Audio. It all goes back to bucketing story subjects into two groups: oppressed and oppressor.
Simply put, elite universities groom their leaders and students to view society via the Hierarchy of Victimhood.
Institutions like Harvard side with whichever group ranks higher on the pyramid. Spoiler: white men rank lower than everyone.
In this case, Jews rank lower on the pyramid than Palestinians, using the argument of colonization.
Thereby, Gay permits students to "hate" Jews on campus under the guise of "free speech," but declared solidarity with BLM in 2020 the official stance of Harvard.
At Harvard, your right to speak is contingent upon your speech aligning with groups that Claudine Gay has subjectively determined are victims.
And Jews aren't high enough on her list. Perhaps they aren't even on it at all.