And just like that, ‘context’ suddenly didn’t matter nearly as much as Claudine Gay claimed. After embarrassing herself yesterday in congressional testimony, the president of Harvard suddenly discovered that “speech crosses into conduct” was a laughable double standard when it comes to pro-Hamas speech on campuses that routinely suppress speech that dissents from progressive orthodoxy.

In case you missed it, John wrote a comprehensive post about the testimony of Gay, Penn president Liz Magill, and MIT president Sally Kornbluth. Both Republicans and Democrats grilled the trio about the explosion of pro-terrorism demonstrations on their campuses and the glaring double standards in enforcing speech codes. Their testimony turned into such a public-relations disaster that Harvard felt compelled to issue a new statement from Gay that essentially contradicts what she told Congress a day earlier.

Watch the Stefanik grilling of Gay yesterday and compare it to this statement issued in its aftermath:

At today’s hearing, Harvard’s President shamefully refused to say whether the calling for the mass violence and genocide of the Jewish people is considered harassment or bullying according to Harvard’s own code of conduct.

Claudine Gay should resign immediately. pic.twitter.com/gjzmTHUcec

— Rep. Elise Stefanik (@RepStefanik) December 5, 2023

Gay steadfastly refused to declare pro-intifada and pro-genocide speech such as “from the river to the sea” out of bounds yesterday. She — or more likely, Harvard’s PR department — is singing a different tune today:

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 group are vile, they have no place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.

“Some”? Gay herself kept ‘confusing’ the two yesterday. Until a few hours ago, Harvard did nothing to enforce the policy that Gay or her PR department now declare, and did nothing to punish students who called for genocide of Jews in on-campus demonstrations. As members of Congress including Stefanik pointed out, these schools had no compunction about refraining from punishing speech before it turned into action when students and applicants said things they found disagreeable. Gay acknowledged that Harvard had punished students and rescinded acceptances over the posting of messages and memes on social media.

And let’s not forget that these same schools enforce transgender ideology with a vengeance. The use on campus of an offending pronoun, a reference to a non-preferred gender, or so-called “deadnaming” are routinely treated as punishable actions, even though (a) they are speech, and (b) don’t come close to overtly promoting genocide.

So when can we expect Harvard to start expelling the pro-genocide students on their campuses? Don’t hold your breath. As William Jacobson astutely diagnoses in his essay today for the James G. Martin Center, the Ivy League has gone all-in on attacking Western civilization in favor of what it sees as those who can dismantle it. Hamas’ genocide of Israel and the Jews is a proxy for the destruction they want to see accomplished globally:

The chief concern of those who support DEI ideology is the destruction of that supposed power structure so that we can have social justice and equity. This belief system has metastasized into open antisemitism.

Yet the problem is even deeper than expressions of antisemitism. What the mobs are against, at the core, is Western civilization, with its distinctive characteristics of individual liberty, limited government, and capitalism. They are intent on tearing our system down and have made common cause with Islamicists who desire a world with only one religion, which they would enforce through Sharia law. This is what many now call the Red-Green alliance. …

The war on historical truth perpetrated by the “settler-colonial” narrative is fundamental to anti-Western and antisemitic racialized activism, which, by its ideology, much be spread to every aspect of campus life.

Jacobson, who blogs at Legal Insurrection as well, nails it here — but I’d add a caveat. The progressive Left and especially the Queer movement has allied with Islamicists not out of any sense of conviction, but mainly because they see the Islamicists as having the power to ‘decolonize’ the West. It’s the same reason that the Left aligned itself with Stalin in the 1940s and and 1950s, and why they aligned themselves with Mao and the Castros to this day. It has little to do with ideological alignment; the term “Queers for Palestine” is absurd in that sense. But it makes perfect sense when one grasps that Academia has embraced nothing but nihilism and has been indoctrinating several generations of America into that hateful mindset. They therefore gravitate to power, especially murderous and nihilistic power, to achieve the destruction of the Western civilization they despise.

It’s not for nothing that the Left turned the murderous Che Guevara into a fashion icon. Why should we be surprised to see them do that to Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar?

Jacobson also gets the cure largely correct as well — financial pressure, although this doesn’t go far enough either:

Finally, the biggest source of pressure should be federal and state funding. Although the federal government has no constitutional role to play in higher education, it has become a gigantic player, directing billions of dollars into college and university budgets. School officials have become dependent on that stream of money to keep their extensive operations afloat. States also contribute vast sums to public universities. If federal and state politicians were to assert their control over the budget and declare that funding would end for any colleges that continue operating DEI bureaucracies spreading the toxic ideas of group “privilege” and “oppression,” that would accomplish a great deal.

Yes, absolutely yes, but the effort has to be more comprehensive. As I wrote in October, we have to “decolonize Academia” entirely by ending all federal funding for it. That includes all student loan support, all grants, all research funding, everything. As Jacobson notes, the federal has no legitimate role in education at all. To make that withdrawal dependent on policy like DEI and pedagogy such as CRT is to reinforce a federal role that is completely illegitimate in the first place. By ending all federal subsidies, I argued at the time, schools would be forced to compete on value for students with complete price transparency:

This violates no rights. It doesn’t dictate speech codes to college campuses, another point on which conservatives should know better than to impose. Not a single thing will change, except that we will finally kick the financial struts out from underneath a persistent parasite that has finally come close to achieving its goal of killing its host.

Colleges and universities can still operate how they wish, as they should. But they will no longer have an income stream from federally backed student loans, and that means they will no longer be able to afford to operate with impunity. When the student loans stop, the student stream will as well — and it will suddenly matter who’s on the payroll, and just how much tuition they can charge in a market where pricing signals have been fully restored.

That in itself will provide a certain amount of clarity. This will benefit schools in the long run too, even if they object in the short run. By cutting off all federal funds, the mountain of mandates on colleges will largely disappear as well, allowing for the dismissal of the administrator class in Academia. It will also force new and streamlined administrations to focus on the disciplines clearly needed in society: STEM certainly, medicine, the law, and other specialties. The rest of the nonsense will dry up and blow away as students who pay their own way through college won’t waste that money on progressive indoctrination disciplines that will leave them with a worthless four-year degree.

States could fill the gap to an extent, but even that’s iffy in these times of overextended state budgets. Both state and private schools would have to learn to survive on tuition income alone, and that would mean a large-scale rethinking of curriculum by necessity. The activist disciplines would almost certainly have to go soonest, along with the demagogues running them. More students would simply choose to learn trades rather than pay outrageous tuitions for degrees that are worthless for improving income potential, a pricing signal that federally guaranteed student loans obscure entirely.

Stefanik and Gay have provided us a small taste of what such transparency and accountability can accomplish. It’s long past time to kill off the parasite on Western society before it can kill the host, and return education to its proper mission.