“One down. Two to go. This forced resignation of the president of @Penn is the bare minimum of what is required.”

That’s the kind of language you might expect from the Minister of Truth in a socialist dictatorship. It’s from Elise Stefanik, a Congresswoman from New York. The offense for which Stefanik and many others are seeking to remove three university presidents is the failure to regard advocacy of genocide unconditionally as harassment.

This is classic cancel culture, but it’s rarely been so mainstream before. The cancel mob has significant representation in Congress. Major media sites are slanting their articles to support the campaign. For example, the loaded language in a recent CNN article says “She [Harvard president Gay] and other university presidents failed to explicitly say calls for genocide of Jewish people constituted bullying and harassment on campus.” Even that degree of advocacy of free speech, in CNN’s terminology, is a “failure.”

Bullying and harassment are actions directed at specific people. Approaching an individual one-on-one and saying “You and your kind should all be killed” could well be harassment, and if done repeatedly it definitely is. Advocacy of a position, however vile, isn’t harassment as such. When Ayatollah Khomeini screamed “Death to America!” he showed how despicable he was, but he wasn’t “harassing” or “bullying” me. The university presidents were correct in saying that such statements aren’t categorically a form of harassment.

Broadening the definition of harassment is especially troublesome because other concepts, such as genocide, are also subject to broadening. Some people on college campuses regard support of Israel as advocacy of genocide. Given an opportunity, you can be sure that they’ll take advantage of any expansion of the definition. Stefanik engaged in this kind of broadening. She wasn’t talking about the kind of explicit calls for extermination that Hitler made, but statements like “From the river to the sea.”

Harvard is in an especially bad position, rated by FIRE as the worst institute of higher education in America for free and open discussion. Sacking its president for what she said would make it even worse, even if it’s a president who has stood by without trying to fix the problem.

President Gay was arrogant even in her attempted apology, saying, “I failed to convey what is my truth.” (By the way, why is that CNN article about Gay headed with a large picture of an unidentified white woman?) No one owns the truth, not even a university president. Aside from that, she should have known from experience that the worst thing you can do when facing a cancel mob is to apologize. But sacking her would push Harvard’s rating still lower. Fortunately, hundreds of Harvard faculty have come to her defense on this point.

In a Reason article, Jacob Sullum comments:

Stefanik had made it clear that “calling for the genocide of Jews” was shorthand for celebrating Hamas-style “resistance,” advocating “globalized intifada,” aspiring to liberation of Palestine “from the river to the sea,” or chanting “there is only one solution: intifada, revolution.” So if Magill et al. agreed that “calling for the genocide of Jews” always qualifies as punishable harassment, they would be committed to penalizing students for speech that is clearly protected by their schools’ official policies as well as the First Amendment.

The people who found the October 7 massacre “exhilarating” deserve to be blasted in the strongest terms, but just saying that is not harassment, and college disciplinary organizations shouldn’t treat it as such. Unfortunately, many people are so enraged that they want to give colleges more power to bring arbitrary charges against students, faculty, and staff. They want to expand cancel culture, even though it’s likely to bite them next time around.