A Harvard event was moved off-campus after Massachusetts Congressman Jake Auchincloss criticized president for comments on antisemitism
An event at Harvard involving Massachusetts Congressman Jake Auchincloss was moved off-campus a day after the Harvard alum criticized the university’s president for her controversial Congressional testimony about antisemitism.
Democratic U.S. Reps. Auchincloss and Seth Moulton, both from the Bay State and both Harvard alums, issued a joint statement after Harvard President Claudine Gay was questioned on Capitol Hill about rising antisemitism on college campuses. Gay refused to characterize calls for the genocide of Jews as a breach of Harvard’s code of conduct.
“Harvard ranks last out of 248 universities for support of free speech,” Auchincloss and Moulton said in the joint statement. “But when it comes to denouncing antisemitism, suddenly the university has anxieties about the First Amendment. It rings hollow.”
A day after that joint statement, an event on Harvard’s campus involving Auchincloss and California Congressman Ro Khanna was moved off-campus.
“I don’t know the details of why it got moved,” Auchincloss said on Wednesday on “Fox & Friends.” “I think it probably speaks more to the bureaucracy at Harvard’s campus than it does to any intentional effort to cancel us.
“But what I think is more important here is that unfortunately, this is distracting from the substance of the conversation that we had,” he added. “This was Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat, and me talking to a conservative student group about U.S. economic competition with China. And that is exactly what universities like Harvard should be incubating, is these forums where people get together, they talk about complicated ideas. They do so from multiple different perspectives, and they engage thoughtfully, in-person, not on Twitter, with one another.
“And the substance of that conversation, unfortunately, has been overshadowed by the controversy over cancellation,” Auchincloss said.
Harvard put out a statement about moving the event off-campus.
“The student group listed as a sponsor neglected to follow the policies and procedures outlined in our Student Organization Resource Guide for hosting an event on campus so an alternative location had to be identified,” Harvard said in a statement, as reported by Fox News.
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Auchincloss was asked why he has been criticizing the Harvard president.
“Hypocrisy,” he responded. “Harvard University has spent the last five years with cancel culture as the dominant norm on its campus.
“And now that antisemitism has flared up, it has decided to embrace free speech principles, and it does ring hollow,” he added. “Now, I hope that this is a fork in the road for the university. I hope that it now decides to double down on its commitment to free and open discourse, to pluralism, to viewpoint diversity, so that it can truly be a university that pursues truth, which is what’s on its shield.”
Harvard’s board on Tuesday announced that it’s keeping Gay as the campus president.
“I’m not going to second guess the Board of Overseers,” Auchincloss said. “They’ve made their decision, but now they own their decision.
“In a couple years time, I think we all want to see that they don’t rank 248 out of 248 for free speech on campus,” he added. “They need to move that ranking up, and they need to embrace a true pluralistic, open discourse on Harvard’s campus. And if they don’t, the whole board now owns that.”