What MIT President Kornbluth Should Do

I believe she's really for free speech, not Hamas, but she needs to prove it

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s President, Sally Kornbluth, has been criticized for her answers at a Congressional hearing recently:

Congresswoman Stefanik: Dr. Kornbluth, at MIT, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate MIT’s code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment? Yes or no?  

President Kornbluth: If targeted at individuals not making public statements. 

Congresswoman Stefanik: Yes or no, calling for the genocide of Jews does not constitute bullying and harassment? 

President Kornbluth: I have not heard calling for the genocide for Jews on our campus.

Congresswoman Stefanik: But you've heard chants for Intifada. 

President Kornbluth: I've heard chants which can be antisemitic depending on the context when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people. 

Congresswoman Stefanik: So those would not be, according to the MIT's code of conduct or rules.

President Kornbluth: That would be investigated as harassment if pervasive and severe. 

As you can see, President Kornbluth said that calls for genocide would not violate MIT’s code of conduct, as did President Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and President Gay of Harvard. Good for President Kornbluth! She is supporting free speech not just when it is easy, but when the going gets rough. If you support free speech, you must support speech which you think is completely wrong.

The only problem with her answers is that she weakened a little at the end and said that possibly this kind of political speech might be investigated if it was “pervasive and severe”. If MIT students want to say that the Jews in Israel should all be killed, or that the October 7 rape and baby killing exhilarated them, that is their right. That political position is abominable, but the whole idea of free speech is that we tolerate false views.

A university should not suppress speech, even speech that supports rape and murder. It’s horrible to think that there exist people who think like that, but for most Americans it’s also horrible to think that there are people who support killing babies a month before they’re born or support BLM rioters destroying buildings. Conservatives do not call for punishing people who express such views. They know that it’s better to be able to identify such people rather than making them stew in silence. Also, those people may think conservatives are just as bad when they call for bans on sex change operations or bans on abortion. We should agree to listen to each other, and to each do our best to convince the undecided middle. That is the marketplace of ideas.

The problem is that most college presidents are hypocrites. They support free speech for their side but not the other side. What should we think when we see a college president who calls for free speech for anti-semites but persecutes people who say that most geniuses are male, or that blacks have higher crime rates? It’s not uncommon to see university leaders joining Twitter mobs against their own professors.

This is obviously the case with Harvard President Gay and Penn President Magill. Gay, while Dean at Harvard, drove a sexual harassment case against black economist Roland Fryer, who had published a study that did not follow the party line on race and police brutality. He was suspended from his position for two years and had his research lab shut down on shaky evidence, not that he had touched or propositioned anybody, but that he had made off-color jokes in the presence of ladies. A famous half-hour documentary was produced about this persecution.

Magill, while President at Penn, has presided over the persecution of Jewish law professor Amy Wax. Magill, a fellow law professor, stood by without comment, without the slightest defence of free speech, while Penn Law School Dean Ted Ruger initiated an investigation and condemnation of Professor Wax. Ruger called for “major sanctions” because “her statements are antithetical to the University’s mission to foster a diverse and inclusive community,” and he suspects, though though he has no evidence except her political statements, that she discriminates against black students and women. What kind of statements? Ones like “All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy. The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment.” For Magill, free speech requires toleration of calls to kill Jews, but not toleration of Jews who say that American culture is better suited to an advanced economy than Sioux Indian culture.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth is not like Gay and Magill. Kornbluth only became president a year ago, and so far she has not tried to drive out any dissident MIT professors, or even any obnoxious students. Indeed, she has endorsed a new statement supporting free speech, one similar to the Chicago Principles, that the MIT faculty approved just before she arrived. She is a scientist, a scholar of the biology of cancer, not of political science, like Gay, or of law, like Magill. She has said she supports free speech, and we should give her the benefit of the doubt.

MIT, however, did have a free speech problem before Kornbluth arrived in January 2023, and it still has a free speech problem, even if it is caused by overhang from the past. President Kornbluth must show that she takes free speech seriously. She can’t do that simply by advocating free speech for genocide supporters, since it’s those people who are responsible for MIT’s poor speech climate. She must show that when she says Jewish students' fears and discomfort are a necessary part of free speech, it is really free speech that she supports, not Hamas. She started strong when she said she would suspend pro-Hamas demonstrators who arrogantly flouted university rules by blocking corridors, but then she backed off and said she won’t suspend them because some of them are foreigners who might lose their visas. Their status is in limbo right now, and everyone is watching to see whether rulebreakers get any punishment at all.

Also, when Kornbluth tells Republican Congressmen that speech is not violence, she also should tell that to her own employees, the Diversity-Equity-Inclusion apparatchiks at MIT. MIT says in an official training course required of all faculty that calling a transgender person by their birth name is "considered an act of violence". That was not written by President Kornbluth, but if she doesn’t repudiate it, she has no right to say that MIT must tolerate rallies in support of rape and murder, or that Jewish students shouldn’t be so sensitive about what someone says about them.

Finally, President Kornbluth can do something about MIT’s shameful past, as well as its troubled present. Dorian Abbot was famously disinvited from giving a prestigious lecture at MIT because he wrote a Newsweek op-ed opposing the Diversity-Equity-and-Inclusion (DEI) movement. Michael Pompeo was disinvited from speaking at MIT because as President Trump’s Secretary of State he might say something displeasing to the Communist Chinese government. Father Daniel Moloney was aummarily fired as Catholic chaplain at MIT because he said we shouldn’t rush to judgement over George Floyd’s death when we didn’t know all the details and it might not have been motivated by racism. MIT is surely not proud of these episodes, which have hurt MIT’s reputation severely, but no MIT official has ever apologized. Sally Kornbluth should.