Ivy League board member highlights danger of campus free speech hypocrisy: ‘Genocide starts with words’

A board member for two Ivy League schools highlighted the danger of campus free speech hypocrisy as elite institutions grapple with the fallout of disastrous testimony by three university presidents before Congress last week.

Harley Lippman, who serves on boards at Yale and Columbia, pulled no punches in his criticism of the elite university presidents in an interview with the Washington Examiner. The presidents refused to say whether calling for the genocide of Jewish people violates school policy, emphasizing the need to put the various statements in the proper context.

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“Genocide starts with words,” Lippman said as he warned that the world must not let go of what he described as an extraordinary testimony.

“No, it’s a lack of courage, a lack of moral clarity,” Lippman said. “It’s a lack of decency. It’s this woke, extreme leftist distortion of history where they want to demonize Jews in Israel. That’s what this is about.”

“They have a responsibility, and they have Jewish students who are frightened and don’t feel safe on campus, and they are completely ignoring the rights of this minority,” Lippman said, reiterating that “words do matter.”

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“The damage is done,” Lippman said, calling House testimony revealing of the level of antisemitism central to the attitude of academic elites who have gotten away with hypocrisy for years by living off their reputation which provides them a “veneer of exclusion.”

Lippman told the Washington Examiner that the university presidents who testified before the House are “showing their intellectual disdain” in refusing to say whether calling for the genocide of Jewish people violates school policy, and that they would not have reacted the same way if another minority group was targeted.