David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We're spending the entire hour talking about the eruption of protests on college campuses across the country. We're focusing in particular on Harvard University where much of the turmoil began. In December, Harvard's president, along with two other college leaders, were summoned to Congress to hearings about whether a climate of antisemitism exists on campus. This has become a real issue.

Some on the right, Elise Stefanik and Ron DeSantis among others have seized on some distinctly ugly instances, and then, as some have argued, exploited the situation, making fighting antisemitism a distinctly partisan political cause. I spoke earlier in the program with Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard president, who said that the way the university presidents conducted themselves in the hearings was, and this is his word, a disaster. I put this question to Randall Kennedy. Kennedy is a longtime professor at Harvard Law School and he wrote to my mind a brilliant essay on the subject in the London Review of Books.

Randall Kennedy: I thought the college presidents responded like I'm used to seeing academics respond. They listened, they were very painstaking, they made careful distinctions. Some people said that they acted in a lawyerly way, and of course, that was meant to be a put-down. I view it differently. I'm a lawyer. Now immediately people said, "Wow, these people, these college presidents are naive. Shouldn't they have known that this was a mere political drama?" "Well, they stayed within their role. They allowed the politicians to act in their role. If they wanted to be demagogues, fine, go be a demagogue."

David Remnick: I guess, Randy, what the critique was, the sympathetic critique, was that these college presidents were prepped unto fairly well by, in fact, one law firm, so far as I know. The best approach would've been because they're not in a deposition, they're in a political theater, whether you like it or not, to begin the answer by expressing outrage against the obvious and then a more nuanced answer, and then another expression of outrage. You've put the truth, the nuanced truth, in between two slices of theater.

Randall Kennedy: David, I have now read the transcript several times, and Claudine Gay said, on several occasions, "I abhor the rhetoric of the students. I abhor the rhetoric of the demonstrators." She said that over and over, and then her tormenters would come back in order to get the precise 20 seconds that they wanted. I got to give Elise Stefanik and her colleagues credit, they were very dogged, they were very persistent, and I think that people frankly have a misimpression of what went down at the Congressional hearing.

David Remnick: I want to go backwards a little bit. Why were they sitting in Congress in the first place? Why did Claudine Gay find herself in front of Elise Stefanik?

Randall Kennedy: Oh, I think for a variety of things. The immediate cause was the Hamas attack, the response by students which suggested to many a indifference to the horror or maybe even an embrace of the horror. Then there was the feeling that the university authorities had not responded to those students. I think that one of the things that really had a lot of punch was when people at Harvard, like the former president of Harvard Larry Summers said, "Listen, a couple of years ago when there were the outrages with respect to the police, the George Floyd moment, college presidents reacted pronto. There was a lot of motion behind their reaction. Why not now?

David Remnick: Randy, I spoke earlier in the program with one of the student organizers involved in a statement about October 7th. How did you react to that statement and its lack of condemnation for Hamas's October 7th attack?

Randall Kennedy: Yes. First, I read about the student open letter and my reaction was very negative. Very soon thereafter, I read the critique of Claudine Gay. Here, I must say I was a little bit mystified. I'd say within a day, there was the allegation that she had not responded quickly enough. What's quickly enough? It would be one thing if some time had gone by and there was an objection, but the objection came very quickly and I thought too quickly.

David Remnick: What are you suggesting?

Randall Kennedy: I'm suggesting that folks were out to get Claudine gay from the get-go and were going to use any openings with which to do that.

David Remnick: But President Shafik of Columbia came in and expressed her outrage over and over and over again, and got rid of any trace of being in a deposition. She knew she was in a political theater, but on the other hand, she adjudicated in real time the fate of some of her professors during the hearing.

Randall Kennedy: I'm very glad that you mentioned that. Compare Claudine Gay and the other presidents in the fall to the testimony of the people from Columbia. The people, the president of Columbia, the law professor, the members of the board of trustees at Columbia, in my view, their testimony was humiliating for people in academia. I thought it was absolutely terrible. They clearly were willing to say anything that they thought that the Congress people wanted to hear.

David Remnick: Not to tilt things, but wasn't the right answer to say, "Congressman, I will definitely look into those statements, but we will adjudicate our faculty decisions on our own." That's what academic freedom is all about and that's what running a university is about, and the congresswoman from upstate New York doesn't get to do it.

Randall Kennedy: That would've been a nice statement. To get back to Claudine Gay, I would say this, in her testimony, one thing that she did do was to stay true to her role. That is something that the president of Columbia did not do.

David Remnick: What then accounts for those student groups and their initial reaction to October 7th, which I have to say as a journalist but also as a Jew who has been around for a while, I'm not insensitive to these manifestations, but nor do I yell antisemitism as a general condition at every moment, what accounted for that reaction?

Randall Kennedy: You mean their inattentiveness to the horror of the Hamas attack?

David Remnick: That's one way of putting it, I guess.

Randall Kennedy: Okay. I don't know. I don't know. Let me say this, a few years ago, there were people who said that our alma mater, Princeton University, and other liberal elite institutions that they were systematically racist. That was just a few years ago. They were wrong. Just like the allegations now are wrong, and I link them because I think that there is a similar dynamic at work. In both instances, you have terrible things that happen to minority groups that have a baleful history of oppression.

In both instances, you have groups that use what's at hand to protect themselves and to advance their interests. In both instances, as far as I'm concerned, what you have is the use of mau-mauing, you have the use of guilt-tripping, you have the use of an exaggeration of actual racism or actual antisemitism, so you have the creation of microaggressions. Just like today, you have the inflation of antisemitism. Now, if you criticize Zionism, that is antisemitism. I think there's a usefulness in comparing the George Floyd moment and what happened at universities and this moment, the October 7th moment.

David Remnick: I wonder how you assess almost in a scholarly way, why Claudine Gay resigned or was forced to resign. You had the accusations of plagiarism, you had the heated debate about October 7th and the war in Gaza. You had politics on campus, and you also had big money getting involved in this. You had Bill Ackman and others saying I'm going to pull my money out and I'm going to put pressure on the people who really run Harvard, which is a very small number. How do you assess that?

Randall Kennedy: Well, I think you just named very important factors. The money factor, very important. After all, what is it that college presidents do? One of their most important functions is raising money and lots of it. Who do they raise the money from? Well, they raise the money from their alums, but they also raise money from people who have very deep pockets and make very big bequests. Again, I want to emphasize there was a sector of the professoriate that was intensely resentful, did not like at all the diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging ethos that she embraced and voiced, and then you had--

David Remnick: Would you say that was a racist corner?

Randall Kennedy: Some, some racist, some sexist, some not. Not everybody who takes that position is racist or sexist.

David Remnick: As a professor of law as well as an observer, is there a legal definition of what types of actions or speech constitute antisemitism or racism and speech that needs, for want of a better word, policing on the campus of a place like Harvard?

Randall Kennedy: No, it's the answer. Is there a legal definition for racist speech? No, there's not a legal definition for racist speech.

David Remnick: How do you juggle the imperatives between on the one hand freedom of speech, which is a very complicated discussion these days, and on the other hand, the need for an environment at a university of, I hate this word safety, but safety to a free inquiry and freedom of thought.

Randall Kennedy: Now, I'm going to say something and I'm being puckish. It all depends. For instance, let's take the safety. When I hear safety, I think of physical safety. Am I worried about somebody beaning me in the head? The word safety now has again been very much inflated. I can say, "You've said something, David, that really bothers me deeply. It makes me anxious and now I feel unsafe." One of the things that we're grappling with, and it's not just in the universities, our culture, Harvard University has been sued by a group of students.

One of their claims is that Harvard University is in violation of federal law because Harvard University has allowed the creation of an environment that oppresses Jewish students. Then you're reading their complaint and what are the particulars? They say, "Well, Harvard University tolerates antisemitism." What is antisemitism? They have a sentence in there that says, "Well, if you say that you are against Zionism if you question the legitimacy of Zionism, that is antisemitism." If that lawsuit prevails, I take it that means that it would be unlawful for Harvard University to allow the teaching of a viewpoint that is anti-Zionist. This is very dangerous but--

David Remnick: Which includes Hannah Arendt and many others before the rise of the state of Israel.

Randall Kennedy: Yes. Think of the thinkers that would be outlawed if that in fact was to become law.

David Remnick: Randall Kennedy, thank you so much.

Randall Kennedy: Thank you.

David Remnick: Randall Kennedy, professor of law at Harvard University.

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