Why College Presidents Don’t Stand Up to Political Thugs

The performance by public school system chiefs in front of the Republican bullies was impressive. It shows that the way to handle Elise Stefanik and such is the same way you handled Joseph McCarthy in the end–you stood up to him and used the same tactics. Nothing else can work, as the cowardly university presidents have demonstrated.

Wednesday’s hearing was the latest in the House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s effort to scrutinize antisemitism on campuses and, along the way, castigate academic leaders. At earlier hearings, university presidents opted for strategies of conciliatory genuflection or drab, lawyerly answers. Both approaches largely backfired, stirring outrage on those presidents’ campuses and often beyond.

Both approaches were largely discarded on Wednesday.

“This convening, for too many people across America in education, feels like the ultimate gotcha moment,” David C. Banks, the New York City schools chancellor, said toward the hearing’s end. “It doesn’t sound like people who are actually trying to solve for something that I believe we should be doing everything we can to solve for.”

By then during the two-hour, Republican-led proceeding, Mr. Banks had seemingly put his law degree to use. He had pointedly debunked some claims: “We have found no evidence that that actually happened.” He acerbically dismissed a lawmaker’s pronouncement: “I’m sorry you feel that way.” And he suggested that maybe Congress was not always as pure as proclaimed: “We’ve had members of Congress who have made antisemitic statements.”

Down the witness table, Enikia Ford Morthel, the schools superintendent in Berkeley, Calif., corrected a congressman from her home state, seemed unbothered by the members’ pressure to discuss personnel matters in a way that would defy California law on employee confidentiality, and all but diagramed a rambling question about discipline she said had left her “confused.”

The tactics represented a sharp departure from the norms of Capitol Hill, where legislators generally handle the browbeating during made-for-television hearings.

So why the difference? This is key:

But local schools superintendents also have far different mandates from presidents of major universities. Superintendents only rarely command national profiles, with their most important audiences practically in their backyards. Presidents of universities like Columbia and Harvard must contend with sprawling networks that routinely include emboldened faculty members, wealthy donors, powerful trustees and undaunted students.

The reason that college presidents have been so bad on this issue is that they have completely abnegated all leadership and handed it over to the donors. Donors run college campuses now. That is true for both public and private colleges, which is telling. One big reason it happens at a college like mine (the founder of CVS is our daddy), supposedly, is the terrible state funding. This is true as far as it goes. The Rhode Island legislature is horrible on higher education funding, down there with states such as Louisiana and Mississippi. So OK, you say you need to fundraise to run the university. Well, maybe. But that doesn’t explain Columbia in any way, shape, or form.

In any case, the people who run higher education today are the wealthy, with all the character traits of rich people–bullies, right-wingers, fanatic believers in their own correctness despite being shown to be stupid over and over again. And on Israel, you have the other issue where a lot of wealthy Jewish donors might be OK with some lefty ideas on a lot of issues, but are very, very not OK with the campus protests.

So basically, college presidents are controlled by the donors and they aren’t going to stand up to Stefanik because it would cost them their job, even though it will probably cost them their job anyway, as happened at Harvard and presumably will happen at Columbia.

Running a giant public school district has its own issues, lord knows. But it doesn’t have that one and in this specific context, it makes a big difference.