I will admit it: despite paying too much for my subscription to The Philadelphia Inquirer, I only infrequently read hard-left columnist Will Bunch’s stuff, but Christine Flowers pointed it out to me this morning. The distinguished Mr Bunch, whose Inky bio states that he “the national columnist — with some strong opinions about what’s happening in America around social injustice, income inequality and the government,” waxed wroth that University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill will shortly be Penn’s former President:

Liz Magill’s ouster at Penn will help the worst people take down free speech, higher ed

Critics celebrating the scalping of Penn’s president won’t stop there. Free speech, and college itself, are in grave danger.

by Will Bunch | Sunday, December 10, 2023 | 11:44 AM EST

A band of raiders never stops at just one scalp. Just minutes after the University of Pennsylvania’s president Liz Magill pulled the plug on her stormy 17-month tenure, under intense pressure for her handling of antisemitism questions on Capitol Hill, her chief inquisitor — GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York — was back on the battlefield calling for more.

“One down. Two to go,” a clearly ebullient Stefanik posted on X/Twitter, urging on her dream of an academic Saturday Night Massacre that would also take down the two college leaders who testified last week along with Magill — MIT’s Sally Kornbluth and Claudine Gay of Harvard, which, in a controversy with more ironies than a Jane Austen novel, happens to be Stefanik’s alma mater.

I’m old enough to remember, back in the days of quill pens and parchment print-on-paper only newspapers how columnists were limited to roughly 750 words, but Mr Bunch’s rant was 1,663 words long, so prepare for it if you click on the embedded link!

But what Stefanik promised on Saturday night, and what her allies are cheering on, goes well beyond a few high-profile resignations. She promised the current crisis — over what constitutes antisemitism on college campuses, and how administrators like Magill have been handling it — will lead to more congressional hearings on “all facets of their institutions’ negligent perpetration of antisemitism including administrative, faculty, and overall leadership and governance.”

This one’s pretty long, so I’ve moved the bulk of the article below the fold.

Is Mr Bunch suggesting that we shouldn’t be concerned about antiSemitism on campus? I’m fairly certain that if the questions were about racism or criticism of homosexuality or transgenderism, he would be all for investigating that!

It is somewhat interesting how the columnist, who wants the supposedly professional media to attack Donald Trump’s campaign mercilessly, rather than stick to an unbiased news format, writing:

Right now, Ground Zero is the horrific conflict in the Middle East, where bombing by Israel in response to a violent Hamas terror attack on Oct. 7 is killing thousands of children, yet too many newsrooms adopt a passive voice to describe the bloodshed or who is to blame for attacks. It can be hard at times to distinguish what is real — “Explosion at Gaza refugee camp leaves massive crater” was the BBC headline for an Israeli bombing that killed or wounded scores of civilians — and what is satire. The Onion’s take — “The Onion Stands With Israel Because It Seems Like You Get In Less Trouble That Way” — felt more honest and heartful than many serious news headlines.

What worries me even more, frankly, is how the push not to offend with Middle East news coverage is emblematic of a bigger trend of newsroom timidity and even rank cowardice that also permeates domestic news coverage, at a moment when right-wing extremists are controlling the U.S. House and are on track to regain the White House and full governmental control in a chaotic election year.

Mr Bunch wants us all to believe that he is for freedom of speech, but he was appalled when billionaire Elon Musk was — at the time — trying to buy Twitter and end its censorship of conservatives:

The Philadelphia-educated Musk’s scheme to buy Twitter with a combination of his obscene wealth and other people’s money, take the social media site that’s most beloved by the world’s intelligentsia private, and declare himself a hero of the brand of “free speech” that tends to be freest for privileged white men, hasn’t turned out like he’d planned. It’s not just that the love Musk has taken from conservatives for his plans to remake Twitter (and, among other things, bring back the banned Donald Trump) has not been equal to the enmity from so many others who don’t want their social media Musk-ed up.

Back to the original:

This weekend, Magill’s resignation — urged on by some of Penn’s billionaire donors withholding massive donations, amid intense criticism from both political parties including the Biden White House — has been the lead national story everywhere. It’s bumped back coverage of Israel’s intensifying strikes on Gaza that have killed hundreds every day while taking out top Palestinian scholars and journalists, as well as holy sites. And it’s drowned out the Biden administration’s international pariah move of vetoing a UN ceasefire resolution backed by 13 out of 15 Security Council members. No wonder some folks prefer to keep the focus on a college campus 11,000 miles west of this carnage.

And here we see it: Mr Bunch doesn’t want Hamas and the ‘Palestinians’ to lose too badly. Oh, they’ve already lost, no doubt about that, but the Inquirer’s columnist wants Hamas to survive, which can mean only one thing: more attacks on Israel once they rearm and regroup. After all, they’ve already told us, very explicitly, that that is what they will do.

Magill’s legalistic, bloodless, deer-in-the-headlights response to incessant probing by Stefanik and other lawmakers was not good — not just because she blew a chance to condemn the never-ending horror of antisemitism but also because it was a weak defense of free speech on campus. I’m not writing to express any regret over her departure. It seemed to me she governed Penn like a candle in the wind, wanting to defend academic freedom but then betraying those values, as when the university tried to ban a film presenting legitimate criticisms of Israel’s policies and then threatened to punish students for showing it anyway.

So, Mr Bunch has admitted that Dr Magill’s “response” to Representative Elise Stefanik’s “incessant probing” was a pathetic one. Yet his own newspaper reported that Presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard University and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with Dr Magill, all used the word “context” to answer the simple question as to whether calling for genocide of Jewish people violates their college’s rules or code of conduct. It’s difficult to believe that the three college presidents didn’t put their heads together before the hearing to agree on that wording, just like it’s difficult to believe that, without some prior collusion, that all three, two PhDs and an attorney, would all foul up their answers, in the same way, with the same idiocy. It’s difficult to believe that even one of them would have been that stupid, but all three?

Stefanik’s relentless questioning didn’t focus on actions at Penn — like October’s antisemitic graffiti on campus — but on words, and especially protesters’ use of the term “intifada,” which marchers see as a call for liberation but Israel’s staunchest defenders claim is an invitation to pogrom. No doubt the term is controversial and offensive to some, but Magill was actually right to insist there’s a line between speech and action.

One wonders: would Mr Bunch similarly say that it’s right to insist that there’s a line between speech and action if, rather than the word “intifada”, which the very hyperlink that the columnist used refers to the second “intifada” as “as marking the end of the 1990s era negotiating process and ushering in a new, darker era in Israeli-Palestinian relations,” and, say, people claiming that black Americans are inferior or unwelcome, or that homosexuals were perverts who ought to be killed?

If I submitted an article to Mr Bunch’s newspaper which referred to the former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Will Thomas as Will Thomas, not ‘Lia,’ and used the masculine pronouns and honorifics to refer to him, wouldn’t the Inky reject it out of hand? We already know that such would happen, as we previously reported that the newspaper deleted all reader comments on an article about Mr Thomas.

There’s that free speech about which Mr Bunch wrote!

I’ve quoted far more of Mr Bunch’s column than I’d like, so I’m going to skip down to his last paragraph:

Instead of jumping on the Magill scrum, let’s praise the courage of those defending our First Amendment rights. In a saga packed with irony, nothing would be more ironic than allowing a manipulated definition of “antisemitism” to shut down learning and inquiry, which are so central to the great Jewish traditions.

What a wonderful platitude, but we all know that even the most civil and moderate debate on whether blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, or transgenderism is a mental disease would not be allowed, not at Penn, not in the Inky’s newsroom. Remember, that Stan Wischnowski was fired resigned as senior vice-president and executive editor of the Inquirer, following a newsroom protest reminiscent of the rebellion of the #woke at The New York Times that got OpEd section editor James Bennet fired to resign following his decision to allow a sitting United States Senator to publish an OpEd piece the #woke^[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading didn’t like, after the headline “Buildings Matter, Too” was used in an article on the loss of historic architecture in the riots over the death of drug-addled convicted felon George Floyd in Minneapolis. Would the newspaper ever entertain publication of an article which suggested that Mr Floyd wasn’t murdered, or that he deserved what he got?

Let’s tell the truth here: while we have legal freedom of speech in the United States, some subjects are simply closed to debate, the subjects I mentioned in previous paragraphs. While we could debate them in a closed, small forum, any wider discussion of them would get the ‘wrong’ side excoriated, mocked, and possibly attacked and fired.

Drs Magill, Gay, and Kornbluth exercised their freedom of speech, but the freedom of speech entails the freedom of others to listen, and if they do not like that which they heard, they have every right to hold the speakers accountable.