We Brought Down the House
OVERVIEW
We brought down the House. As in “we brought the House of Representatives down on the political corruption of universities.” Well, not the whole House. One committee. And then they brought down the politically corrupt house of cards on which elite universities are based. “Wait,” you say, “YOU did that?” Me: “Well, kinda. Not just us. But we (I and my collaborators) seem to have played a nontrivial role in these events.”
This is that story, with receipts.
Our Role
My team (working with the Network Contagion Research Institute, hence NCRI) had been working on a report regarding how foreign funding of American institutions of higher education (hence “colleges” or “universities”), much of it reported with little or no transparency, is associated with the political corruption of those institutions. The full report was posted on November 6, and can be found here; and an excellent Bari Weiss report on it (far less technical and far more easy to read) can be found here.
Key findings:
U.S. colleges received over $13billion in foreign funding from 2014-2019. We wrote “over” because previously unreported funding is in a more or less constant state of being uncovered and exposed. I am working on a longer report for submission to a peer reviewed journal in which that funding is actually closer to $18billion, and even that number is probably not final.
Speech intolerance—manifesting as campaigns to investigate, censor, demote, suspend, or terminate speakers and scholars—was higher at institutions that received funding from foreign regimes
Although this is not in that report, in the draft paper for peer review, we found a similar pattern for disinvitations: Universities receiving foreign funding had more disinvitations of speakers than did those not receiving foreign funding.
Antisemitism. At institutions receiving foreign funding:
Students reported greater exposure to antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric.
There were higher levels of antisemitic incidents reported on their campuses.
This relationship of foreign funding to campus antisemitism was stronger when the donors were Middle Eastern regimes rather than other regimes.
As Bari Weiss put it in her report:
Many are rightly questioning how it got this bad. How did university leaders come to eulogize, rather than put a stop to, campus hate rallies and antisemitic intimidation? Why are campus leaders now papering over antisemitism? How could institutions supposedly committed to liberal values be such hotbeds of antisemitism and anti-Israel activism?
In large part, it is a story of the power of ideas—in this case, terrible ones—and how rapidly they can spread. But it is also a story of an influence campaign by actors far outside of the university campus aimed at pouring fuel on a fire already raging inside.
We’ve known for some time about the links between anti-Israel campus agitators, like Students for Justice in Palestine, and shady off-campus anti-Israel activist networks.
But thanks to the work of the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a nonprofit research center, we now have a clearer picture of the financial forces at play at a higher, institutional level.
The House Committee on Education and The Workforce
Our report and the synopsis by Bari Weiss came out on November 6. The day after we released our report, on November 7th, this committee (hence, HCEW) issued this press release stating that they planned to hold hearings on campus antisemitism.
On November 8, HCEW issued a press release quoting the Bari Weiss report in full and highlighting our report. From their press release:
In Case You Missed It, Bari Weiss’s recent article highlights new reporting from the Network Contagion Research Institute which found that over 200 American colleges and universities received $13 billion in undisclosed1 contributions from foreign regimes which has helped fuel antisemitism on college campuses.
Today, the Education and the Workforce Committee will vote on the DETERRENT Act, legislation that will stop foreign adversaries from targeting our nation’s education systems bringing much-needed transparency to foreign gifts and contracts.
Late that day, they issue this press release:
WASHINGTON – Today, the Education and the Workforce Committee passed H.R. 5993, the Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions (DETERRENT) Act, legislation that brings clarity to foreign gift reporting requirements for colleges and universities and protects American education from malicious foreign influence.
On the passage of H.R. 5933, Chairwoman Foxx said: “Greater accountability in foreign gift reporting at colleges and universities is desperately needed. A new and shocking report from Network Contagion Research Institute found that at least 200 institutions withheld information on $13 billion in contributions from foreign regimes. Many of these contributions can be linked back to our adversaries like the Chinese Communist Party and Iran who are actively working to undermine America’s interests. The DETERRENT Act brings much needed transparency to the financial ties that our universities have with foreign entities. This bill will keep our adversaries at bay and hold our institutions to a higher standard.”
Even if our report did not, singlehandedly, Bring Down the House, at minimum, it provided some jet fuel fanning the flames.
Bringing Down the House
On December 5th, the Presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT testified before this committee. Two of the issues they addressed were how they handle issues of antisemitism and what did and did not constitute protected speech on their campuses.
This video is on their testimony about antisemitic speech:
When Representative Stefanik pressed them on whether calling for genocide of Jews constituted a violation of their university’s code of conduct, it evoked robotic bureaucrat-speak that evaded answering the question, with responses that were neither “yes” nor “no.” “Context matters” was the universal refrain. There was massive public outrage at their “context matters” response. As many others have pointed out, however, this response is actually technically correct. The official rules at most universities formally protect even advocating virulent views or violence, as long as those views are not intended to incite violence directed at a specific person (you cannot say “go kill Joe,” though you can advocate for war, revolution, violent protest, or pretty much anything vile and malicious). As long as your speech does not target, bully, or harass a particular person, the principle is that it is protected (you cannot go up to some student and chant racist epithets at them, and then follow them as they walk away and you keep it up; that is harassment and it is prohibited by their codes of conduct).
So they were technically correct, despite the public outrage. And it is more than technically correct. Providing very broad protections for speech is actually the right policy and the only way to ensure that universities can be places that forthrightly grapple with controversial issues.
The problem, then, was not that they articulated the wrong principle. This far less viral video of the same Presidents being questioned by Representative Tom Walberg captures the problem:
Walberg (around 3:30 in): “In what universe, President Gay (Harvard) are calls for violence against Jews protected speech but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?” I do not provide Gay’s answer here because she did not answer the question. Listen for yourself. Whether she didn’t answer the question because she did not understand it versus she understood it completely and purposely evaded answering, is anyone’s guess.
The problem, then, was not that they were wrong to say “context matters.” It was that they were disingenuous at best and liars at worst. As Yascha Mounk put it in this Atlantic essay:
When pressed by Stefanik, the presidents kept claiming a supposedly ironclad commitment to free speech as the reason they would not be able to punish calls for a genocide of Jews. But each of their institutions has failed lamentably to protect their own scholars’ free speech—by canceling lectures by visiting academics, pushing out heterodox faculty members, and trying to revoke the tenure of professors who have voiced views far less hateful than advocating genocide.
Harvard and Penn have dismal records protecting speech and academic freedom, ranking last and next-to-last respectively in FIRE’s college free speech rankings (and MIT, though not quite as bad, has its own ugly little history). You do not get these sort of abysmal rankings (“abysmal” is literally how FIRE described Harvard, Penn was merely “very poor”) without having many examples of failing to protect legitimate speech. However, to give a flavor of the three U’s utter failure to uphold the “long as its not harassment, its protected” side of the “context matters” principle, I present one example from each:
Harvard. The head of the Evolutionary Biology Department’s DEI committee led a campaign that created a hostile work environment for Carole Hooven (at the time, a professor there). Why? Because Hooven argued that sex is biological and binary, and that it probably is reasonable to refer to “pregnant women” (rather than, e.g., “pregnant people”). Hooven left Harvard and tells her story here in the peer reviewed journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.
If you find Lewis’s tweet, you will see two revealing things:
A lot of pushback from nonacademics
Resounding support from most academics who replied. Now you understand how this could create a hostile environment for Hooven.
(If you are on social media, I urge you to leave Lewis alone. This is all enough revenge, even if does not affect her directly. Just take the win).
From Hooven’s abstract:
The public attack by the task force director runs contrary to Harvard’s stated academic freedom principles, yet no disciplinary action was taken, nor did any university administrators publicly support my right to express my views in an environment free of harassment. Unfortunately, what happened to me is not unusual, and an increasing number of scholars face restrictions imposed by formal sanctions or the creation of hostile work environments. In this article, I describe what happened to me, discuss why clear talk about the science of sex and gender is increasingly met with hostility on college campuses, why administrators are largely failing in their responsibilities to protect scholars and their rights to express their views, and what we can do to remedy the situation.
Penn. Magill (then President) testified before Congress that “context matters” because, unless speech constitutes harassment of an individual person, it cannot be restricted. As she was testifying, Penn’s investigation of Amy Wax marched on, an investigation to determine whether her tenure should be revoked and she should be fired. I wrote about that in a detailed essay here, but Wax never harassed anyone, although she did purvey ideas many considered racist (such as the U.S. should restrict immigration to Europeans). But “restrict immigration to Europeans” is nowhere near as awful as “gas the Jews.” So if “gas the Jews” is protected speech based on the “context matters” principle (which it should be), Penn’s proclamations about how it takes a principled stand on protecting even virulent speech cannot be taken seriously.
MIT. The most famous MIT incident was its deplatforming of Dorian Abbot. Abbot had been invited to give a prestigious public lecture on his area of expertise, exoplanets (planets outside our solar system). “Why?” you ask. “Did they discover that he made up data? Sexually harass his grad studens?” No. He was deplatformed for the unforgiveable sin of criticizing diversity, equity and inclusion in a Newsweek editorial.
Aftermath
I have been working for over 10 years on exposing the political corruption rampant throughout the social sciences. Most of the time it felt like I was howling, alone, in a windowless cell, in the desert.
But now? From the right, you have this thing of beauty by Andrew Sullivan:
The critics who keep pointing out “double standards” when it comes to the inflammatory speech of pro-Palestinian students miss the point. These are not double standards. There is a single standard: It is fine to malign, abuse and denigrate “oppressors” and forbidden to do so against the “oppressed.”
But its not just the right. Prominent members of the liberal (as opposed to the illiberal) left are now publicly proclaiming things like this (Mounk in the Atlantic again):
Who can doubt that they would have been more forthright in condemning calls for the murder of trans people or the lynching of Black Americans, for example, when their own institutions have disinvited speakers for the crime of opposing affirmative action or have pushed out professors for believing that biological sex is real?
And here is Fareed Zakaria, CNN host, killing it:
When one thinks of America’s greatest strengths, the kind of assets the world looks at with admiration and envy, America’s elite universities would have long been at he top of that list. But the American public has been losing faith in these universities – and with good reason.
Three university presidents came under fire this week for their vague and indecisive answers when asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their institution’s code of conduct. But to understand their performance we have to understand the shift that has taken place at elite universities, which have gone from centers of excellence to institutions pushing political agendas.
He continues:
American universities have been neglecting excellence in order to pursue a variety of agendas — many of them clustered around diversity and inclusion. It started with the best of intentions. Colleges wanted to make sure young people of all backgrounds had access to higher education and felt comfortable on campus. But those good intentions have morphed into a dogmatic ideology and turned these universities into places where the pervasive goals are political and social engineering, not academic merit.
As the evidence produced for the recent Supreme Court case on affirmative action showed, universities have systematically downplayed the merit-based criteria for admissions in favor of racial quotas. Some universities’ response to this ruling seems to be that they will go further down this path, eliminating the requirement for any standardized test like the SAT.
and:
What we saw in the House hearing this week was the inevitable result of decades of the politicization of universities. America’s top colleges are no longer seen as bastions of excellence but as partisan outfits, which means they will keep getting buffeted by these political storms as they emerge. They should abandon this long misadventure
Of course, the right in general is having a field day with all this, but the political corruption of academia is not fundamentally a left/right issue. It is a scientific issue, an educational issue, and an issue about the nature of an institution that I would like to believe should be playing a fundamental role in sustaining, protecting, and advancing liberal democratic principles in the U.S. Yes, I realize this itself is a political position, but its not a partisan political position because liberal democratic principles around speech and academic freedom are maximally inclusive. All other political principles boil down to “free speech for me but not for thee.” Hell, in the Soviet Union in 1936, you were completely free to state how much you adored Stalin.
This is not the end. The politicization of universities has not ended. The forces leading to their relentless erosion of free speech are still in place. The bigotries toward those considered members of “oppressor groups,” which are inherent to the ideologies they embrace, are not going away anytime soon.
But even getting the “context matters” principle on the public record was a major accomplishment for HCEW (and perhaps our paper, indirectly). Because if “gas the Jews” is legitimate on campus as long as it does not constitute harassing a particular individual, it just got significantly more difficult for the Campus Speech Police (or, more precisely, grad student mobs, the DEI office or the bias response team) to silence dissent on pretty much everything else.
Footnote
Undisclosed contributions. This correctly describes our report when we initially released it. However, university foreign funding reporting requirements are so non-transparent, that we quickly realized that we actually could not readily distinguish between undisclosed funding and disclosed funding. The final version of the report, linked herein, refers primarily to funding rather than undisclosed funding. My team (which includes a forensic accountant) is still working on this.
Wow, excellent article and excellent job Lee!
Excellent piece