Three American university presidents have strangely revealed, without even realizing it, their adherence to the brown plague of anti-Semitism. Questioned by a parliamentary committee, they shamelessly asserted that the condemnation of the call for the genocide of the Jews “depends on the context.” The most important moment of their interview can be found on YouTube1.
Let us briefly recall these remarks. When asked repeatedly by a Republican elected official from New York State, Elise Stefanik, “Is calling for the genocide of Jews a form of harassment that violates your university’s rules of conduct, yes or no?”, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sally Kornbluth, responded: “It can be a form of harassment, depending on the context”; Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, also responded evasively before adding: “ If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harrassment ". She of course drew the response that it was therefore necessary to commit genocide to violate the university's code of conduct... As for Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, having doubtless appreciated the formulation that "it depended on the context" put forward by her two colleagues, she used it in turn, twice. It must be said that all three had been coached before their hearing by the same lawyer, who provided them with the same "talking points2 " The parliamentarian's conclusion was a firm call for the resignation of the three presidents.
How can one not be hallucinated (as they say now) by such remarks? What is the backbone of these people? Where do they come from? What is their level of culture? These are the questions that one can ask oneself at first glance. These three university officials then "apologized" and Le Monde, always soothing, highlighted their "backpedaling". The first, Liz Magill, had the dignity to quickly present her resignation; it must be said that her retention ipso facto entailed for the university the loss of a private subsidy of 100 million dollars; in the United States, the dollar remains king to ensure the morality of the university hierarchy! The second, Claudine Gay, waited several weeks to do the same and, at the time of writing, the third, Sally Kornbluth, has not yet done so... but the affair is far from over and I doubt that she will make old bones in her perk.
The latter's case is perhaps a little different from that of the other presidents: she has only held this position since January 2023, she is not a professor of political science or law like the other two, but she comes from research in cancer biology. On the other hand, she cannot be held responsible for the mistakes of the presidents who preceded her, who disinvited several prestigious speakers whose words could have "offended certain listeners": all this is explained in Eric Rasmusen's remarkable article on Heterodox Stem3, which highlights the variable use of the reference to freedom of expression, invoked to avoid condemning a call for genocide but ignored when it comes to banning the word " nigga " or to penalize "misgendering." Yet Kornbluth does not face her contradictions: in the name of "freedom of expression," she does not condemn calls for genocide of Jews, but she does nothing against MIT apparatchiks proclaiming "that calling a transgender person by their original first name can be considered an act of violence."
One of the reasons they presented in their "apologies" is their "commitment to freedom of expression," protected by the First Amendment of the American Constitution. Freedom of expression, what crimes are committed in your name! The loss of moral bearings of these academics is extremely alarming. Certainly, they must all resign, as demanded by the Republican congresswoman who asked the questions, and they should be sentenced at the very least to a "citizenship course" instilling in them universal humanist values. These ideologues promoted to the rank of "university president" pretended not to have understood it, by attaching themselves more to the letter than to the spirit, one of them justifying herself a posteriori by the fact that "she was focused on the fact that, in the American Constitution, one cannot be punished just for words."
Yes, they are only words: words would therefore not carry ideas, and would they have no role in inciting people to commit acts? What then was the role of Mein Kampf in the rise of Nazism? Certainly, the First Amendment is based on an absolutization of freedom against the risks of control by the State, which is the great enemy in American culture, of which individual freedom is the cardinal value. There is virtually no legal regulation of public speech, and it is in accordance with this ideology that the three presidents responded, remarkably illustrating the aberrations of this constitutional principle, that Nathalie Heinich opposed to the positive effects of regulation in French legal culture4.
This “defensive” attitude should not fool us: these people have publicly made statements that could justify genocidal practices, and this is much more serious. Several attacks on the security of Jewish students at American universities, threatened by Hamas supporters who confuse a terrorist movement with the Palestinian people, have already taken place without provoking the slightest appropriate reaction from their leaders. If these three presidents were heard by Congress, it is because serious events had taken place on campus; Jewish students who were threatened had to return home in a hurry to avoid being harassed – more than verbally. And such events had not only occurred in these few elite universities: many others have been the scene. Let us recall the anti-Semitic excesses displayed by the administration of Stanford University, so well described by Carine Azzopardi5 !
As for the treatment of these hearings by the American press, it is also unacceptable, as are the remarks made. New York Times has, once again, done very well by first heading, on December 56, who are " Republicans Try to Put Harvard, MIT and Penn on the Defensive About Anti-Semitism ", implying that the evil Republicans, necessarily sexist and racist, had tried to destabilize these three valiant presidents, one of whom combined her status as a woman (oppressed, necessarily oppressed) with that of a Black woman (racialized, necessarily racialized). The shot was prudently corrected the next day, admitting that these people had "dodged" the awkward questions7 : " College Presidents Under Fire After Dodging Questions About Anti-Semitism " But the subtitle of the article remains strange: they only "seemed" to evade these questions ([they] appeared to evade questions) ...
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Some wicked curious people have looked into Claudine Gay's scientific activity. What they discovered is not sad, but shh... You mustn't say it! Le Monde wrote that it was the "conservative" media that dared to continue the unbolting of the statue8…As if the denunciation of scientific fraud committed by a black woman was reserved for conservatives and forbidden to progressives, even if said conservatives took advantage of it to overwhelm her9… Well, no! Plagiarism has no color10. And especially not of political color. Because it is plagiarism that is involved. The Harvard Crimson, an academic journal published by students, has painstakingly dissected line by line11 some writings from publications or from Claudine Gay's thesis. The funniest of these plagiarisms is in the acknowledgements section of her thesis, defended in 1997, where she copies word for word what another PhD student had written the previous year... Not even enough imagination to find a few sincere terms (or ones that seem so) to thank her family and her boss in the obligatory flowerpot section! Beyond the laughable anecdote, there was still a whole cohort of her colleagues to minimize the plagiarism by using some of the euphemisms classically used to name plagiarism12, saying for example " [that it was] not a serious offense " or " [she] didn't use some quotation marks in the right place "As Al Capone fell for tax evasion, perhaps she fell more for scientific misconduct than for anti-Semitism?
Beyond the plagiarism affair, an American journalist, Christopher Caldwell, looked into Claudine Gay's scientific career and asserts that "the most astonishing thing was not the resignation of the president of Harvard, but her appointment when she was only a mediocre academic."13 "I do not have the necessary expertise to analyze his scientific work, but it seems likely, in any case, that his appointment, which was very recent and dated from July 2023, "reflects a cult of diversity imposed by the administration", as this journalist says. In the field of science, wokeism is trying to implement its ideology, with difficulty. Several Anglo-Saxon newspapers promote the acronym DEI: diversity, equity, inclusion. Behind these noble objectives, unfortunately, lie behaviors that are at the very least bizarre.
It all depends on what you put behind the words. In science, who could be against diversity in terms of the origin of articles or the nationality and gender of reviewers? Who could campaign against fairness? Who does not want to include the greatest number of scientists in the dissemination of knowledge? But that is not the most important thing! What matters above all is the quality of the articles, the relevance of the analyses made in them, the scientific merit, the progress of knowledge.14. It is absurd to ask an author or a Reviewer expected, as many newspapers now do, what ethnicity he belongs to, what his "gender" is, whether he is disabled, and whether the authors he cites in support of his work are evenly distributed between men and women. Authors will soon be asked to indicate their sexual orientation or the color of their hair in order to favor blondes who, as everyone knows, are intellectually disabled.
Sally Kornbluth is no more valuable than Claudine Gay in terms of scientific integrity, but it seems that no one has noticed it until now… Sally Kornbluth, the name rang a bell, but what? Oh my goodness, of course! She was the associate dean for research affairs at Duke University in North Carolina, and she staunchly supported those patent fraudsters Anil Potti and Joseph Nevins in the affair of predictive signatures of cancer response to anticancer drugs. I wrote about it a few years ago15 which I took up in a recent book16. Kornbluth, to save face and her skin, deliberately lied twice: in 2010 by claiming that the NCI investigation, the conclusions of which she had concealed with the help of her crony Michael Cuffe, vice dean for medical affairs, had "cleared" Potti and Nevins, when this was false, as everyone realized when the report was revealed by Keith Baggerly and Kevin Coombes, statisticians of the MD Anderson Cancer Center17 ; and in 2015 when she claimed that no whistleblower had reported suspicions of fraud, while a student in the laboratory, Bradford Perez, had done so in 2008, the email exchanges bear witness to this18… It is certain that this double lie predisposed her to rise in rank and become president of a prestigious university!
Should we be surprised that a plagiarist and a liar find themselves in the highest hierarchy of two of the most prestigious American universities? And that, badly advised by a coach obviously incompetent legal system, they have fallen into the most abject anti-Semitism without even realizing it? I will let my readers choose... We should look at the method of recruiting the presidents of the major American universities; the French model, which I naively believed to be universal, consists of electing at the second level (that is to say by an elected board of directors) a president chosen from among the university's teachers: he knows his colleagues, knows approximately what each one does, he is steeped in the culture of the university in which he teaches, he has noted its specificities, the distribution of its "components", etc. He is thus in the thick of it, and his recognized charisma, his willingness to work for the common good are appreciated, and he becomes during this election the first among parents which will certainly not be unanimous (that's a good thing!) but will benefit during its mandate from a consensus which will allow all members to progress and flourish, in support or in respectful opposition.
What we see in the United States seems very different to me. The presidency of a major university is a profession in itself. The president is not the first among equals: he is recruited by what serves as a board of trustees, not preferentially from among local academics, but from among national glories – now with a good dose of DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) to be in the direction of the wind Woke. I was struck by the fact that the famous geneticist Clarence Cook Little19 (1888-1971) was able to be successively president of the universities of Maine and Michigan, more than 1 km apart, while he had not taught at either. The second example of this kind of migration is that of Sally Kornbluth, who went from the rank of vice-dean of Duke University (North Carolina) to the presidency of MIT (Massachusetts), two universities also 000 km apart. In both cases, these presidents were appointed for their national celebrity and their supposed charisma, or as management professionals, certainly not for their intimate knowledge of the university, its culture and its problems (nor for their defense of integrity, as we saw with Kornbluth).
A third "migrant" president has also recently made headlines: Marc Tessier-Lavigne, president of Stanford University from 2016 to 2023 after having been president of Rockefeller University from 2011 to 2016. Here again, he appears to be a "professional" president, despite his magnificent career as an academic and industrial researcher. And like Claudine Gay, he fell for reasons related to scientific integrity: in several of his articles from the 2000s, falsifications were found; it seems that he did not commit them himself, but the lack of control over the co-signatories engaged his responsibility: he was the main author, the corresponding author of these articles. And as for Gay, it was students at his university who revealed the scientific misconduct that forced him to resign. Kornbluth remains, who, like Gay, combines acquiescence to anti-Semitism with a serious breach of scientific integrity; she seems to have been spared until now: is the affair perhaps too old? But I remain confident, because the Duke University affair, which I followed very closely for personal scientific reasons (I was working on the same subject as Nevins' group), has stuck in my craw...
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An anecdote from the 1950s to end on a more amusing note: When Clark Kerr, president of the University of California at Berkeley, gave way to Charles E. Odegaard, he offered him "the unripe fruits of his experience" by declaring that the three administrative problems a president had to solve on a campus were " sex for the students, athletics for the alumni and parking for the faculty20 ».
I would like to thank Nathalie Heinich and François Rastier for their critical and constructive review of the first part of the manuscript.
