At last December’s Congressional hearing on campus antisemitism, three university presidents drew widespread condemnation for their legalistic answers to questions about whether their speech policies allowed “calling for the genocide of Jews.”
But amid questions about whether phrases like “From the river to the sea” were permitted was another line of questioning: How many conservatives do you have on your faculty?
When each president replied that their universities did not gather such data, the congressman who posed the question, Representative Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, was scathing.
Universities, he said, have been overrun with “intolerance and bigotry.” And the root cause, he said, was “blatant discrimination” against conservatives — something that they might want to “look into” next time they ask for government funding.
The warning was not new. About two and a half months earlier, the committee’s chair, Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, had suggested that America’s universities fix themselves — or else.
“Have institutions, including the university system,” she wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Examiner, “been so thoroughly captured by anti-American and illiberal ideology that the government must step in to restore viewpoint diversity, free thought and free expression?”
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