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University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill and Board of Trustees Chair Scott Bok have stepped down from their positions, leading some to think the acceptance of anti-Semitism on America’s college campuses is starting to change. But is change really in the air, or are they merely the sacrificial lambs to appease the mob? NorthJersey.com columnist Mike Kelly appeared on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program to discuss why the mood in academia is that anti-Semitism is tolerable, if not encouraged.
“(If s)omeone ask(s) you a question, ‘Is genocide against the Jews anti-Semitic?’, that is such an easy question to answer,” Kelly told Berman and Larry Mendte, sitting in for Riedel. “But what I think was going on there… the next question would be, ‘So why are you allowing people on your campus to say that and not disciplining them?’ and that’s where the rubber meets the road with most colleges. People are saying things… and many colleges today are just sitting back and saying, well academic freedom, people are allowed to say whatever they want.”
Kelly expanded on his explanation: “If someone got out there and started spouting Ku Klux Klan (or) Nazi stuff, they’d be disciplined or shouted own or somehow handled by these campuses, but there’s a double standard, and I think we saw it on display, and when… ordinary families in America are paying 70 and 80 grand a year to send their kids to some of these private schools, they’re… saying, ‘What are we paying for?’, and this is what they saw on national TV.”
That “wink-wink” attitude, Kelly says, is why Magill is now the ex-president at Penn. “There are no guard rails set up about what you can and can not do… there’s got to be ground rules to this, and I think calling for genocide of the Jews is something I think we can all agree on, that’s not a good thing to be saying, and that’s not something that ought to be allowed on a legitimate college campus… and I think telling somebody not to say that is not a violation of freedom of speech.”
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