This website has repeatedly noted the efforts of The Philadelphia Inquirer to paint over the abysmal failures of Presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard University, Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and especially Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania in their utterly and completely boneheaded testimony before a House Education Subcommittee. Well, another day, and another tactic, somewhat along the lines of a defense attorney with an obviously guilty client throwing all kinds of [insert slang term for feces here] against the wall, hoping to see something stick.

Did gender shape the grilling of the ‘gal from Penn’ and other university presidents?

Some wonder whether male college presidents would have been questioned as aggressively.

by Zoe Greenberg and Susan Snyder | Friday, December 15, 2023 | 5:00 AM EST

As the minutes counted down during the congressional hearings last week on antisemitism on college campuses, U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman interrupted Harvard president Claudine Gay.

“I’ll give you one more question because I want to go to the gal from Penn,” said Grothman (R., Wis.), referring to University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill.

Within hours, the three female university presidents who testified before the Committee on Education and the Workforce were roundly criticized, including by the White House and the governor of Pennsylvania. Magill resigned four days later. In the days since, the questions raised at the hearings continued to reverberate beyond academia: How should hate speech be handled on college campuses and what role, if any, should donors play in determining school policy?

Others asked another question: Would the same criticism have been leveled had those presidents been men?

Well, wahhh! The complaint seems to be, “You beat up a girl!”

Yet it ought to be clear: those three august universities hired those presidents because their Boards of Trustees believed they could handle the jobs. Are we not supposed to expect women to perform at top levels when given top jobs?

The story continues to note that only 30% of “elite university presidents” are women, as though wondering why all three university presidents called to testify were women. A fourth, Columbia University’s recently inaugurated President, Nemat Talaat Shafik, Baroness Shafik, was also invited, but declined due to a scheduling conflict.

Asked why these particular presidents were selected, a spokesman for the committee directed The Inquirer to a Jewish Insider story in which chair Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.) said the schools had been chosen because they were “at the center of the rise in antisemitic protests.”

“The consideration of a university president’s gender played absolutely no role in the committee’s selection process for the hearing,” the committee spokesperson said.

So, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, led by a woman, invited four university presidents, all of whom were women, and people are wondering whether they were picked because they were women, so they could more easily be picked on?

To be sure, scholars said, an alternate reality may have produced identical results. University presidents, male and female, have long been subject to congressional ire, and the most aggressive questioner at the hearing was a woman, U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York. But that doesn’t mean gender bias was absent.

In other words, Representative Stefanik treated the three female university presidents as she’d treat anyone else. From Wikipedia:

Stefanik graduated from the Albany Academy for Girls and enrolled at Harvard College, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in government in 2006. She was elected vice president of the Harvard Institute of Politics in 2004. At Harvard, she received an honorable mention for the Women’s Leadership Award, an endowed student award for leadership and contributing toward the advancement of women.

Does this sound like a woman going after other women more aggressively than she would men, or a woman who holds other women equally accountable with men for the jobs they hold and the actions they take?

Back to the Inky:

Once the university presidents accepted the invitation to testify, they likely spent hours with their lawyers, conferring over the best language to use, (Andrea Press, a professor of sociology and media studies at the University of Virginia) said. The law firm WilmerHale prepared both Gay and Magill and also met with MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth. At the hearing, they seemed careful to present themselves in ways that might deflect criticisms often lobbed at women in authority, dressing neutrally and trying to “sound calm and rational and as unemotional as possible,” Press said.

They “likely spent hours”? They “seemed careful”? That’s not reporting, but speculation by Dr Press.

Yet that perceived strategy ran headfirst into Stefanik’s push for an outraged response to what she described as calls for genocide of Jews on college campuses.

“That kind of speech perhaps demands an emotional response,” Press said, “which they may be more unwilling to give as female public figures of great authority.”

Perhaps I should give reporters Zoe Greenberg and Susan Snyder a bit of a break here; they’re reporting the words and conclusions of a sociology professor, and not saying this stuff themselves. It’s Dr Press telling us that Presidents Gay, Kornbluth, and Magill were trying to look like demure little women rather than the powerful university presidents they are, or were, in Dr Magill’s case.

But I can criticize the reporters for this one:

Some also wondered whether the ensuing donor backlash, featuring mostly male mega-donors, was influenced by the gender of those in charge. Bill Ackman, a billionaire Harvard donor who has furiously criticized the university for not taking his advice, seemed to say as much, arguing recently that Gay was hired for DEI reasons and that she and other presidents “find themselves in a role that they would likely not have obtained were it not for a fat finger on the scale.”

Uhhh, Mr Ackman, along with most, but not all, of the “mostly male mega-donors” is Jewish, which reporters Greenberg and Snyder did not mention. With the question concerning anti-Semitism on campuses, why question the fact that he’s male rather than noting that, being Jewish, anti-Semitism is going to be a matter of personal and professional concern to him? Harvard is seeing many reports of regular donors cutting off the school, and securing donations is one of a college president’s most important jobs. If Dr Gay and her testimony have caused a multi-million dollar donation loss, then she has failed in her job. That’s got nothing to do with her being a woman; it has to do with being as dumb as a box of rocks.

I have no problem with women holding top jobs, but I expect everyone who has a job to be accountable for his job performance. Whining that someone is picking on a girl just doesn’t cut it.