Randall Kennedy on Harvard Protests, Antisemitism, and the Meaning of Free Speech
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 6 May 2024
⏱️ 18 minutes
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Summary
In December, the presidents of three universities were summoned to Congress for hearings about whether a climate of antisemitism exists on campuses. Politicians like Elise Stefanik made headlines, and two of the presidents, including Harvard’s Claudine Gay, were soon out of their posts. The Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy wrote an essay for the London Review of Books about the reverberations of those events. “Folks were out to get Claudine Gay from the get-go,” he thinks, “and were going to use any openings with which to do that”—for reasons that had little to do with protecting Jews. Kennedy tells David Remnick about a lawsuit against Harvard that would equate opposition to Zionism with antisemitism, and render a range of thinkers (including many Jews) unteachable. And “this,” Kennedy asserts, “is very dangerous.”
This segment is part of the New Yorker Radio Hour’s episode devoted to the protests and the speech issues that college campuses have raised.
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| 1:12.6 | This is the political scene, and I'm David Remnick. |
| 1:19.4 | This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and we're spending the entire hour |
| 1:24.0 | talking about the eruption of protest on college campuses across the country. |
| 1:28.7 | We're focusing in particular on Harvard University, where much of the turmoil began. |
| 1:34.2 | In December, Harvard's president, along with two other college leaders, were summoned to |
| 1:38.8 | Congress to hearings about whether a climate of anti-Semitism exists on campus. This has become a real issue. |
| 1:46.6 | Some on the right, Elise Stefonic and Ron DeSantis, among others, |
| 1:50.4 | have seized on some distinctly ugly instances |
| 1:53.6 | and then, as some have argued, exploited the situation, |
| 1:57.7 | making fighting anti-Semitism a distinctly partisan political cause. |
| 2:02.3 | I spoke earlier in the program with Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard president, who said |
| 2:07.0 | that the way the university presidents conducted themselves in the hearings was, and this is |
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