Three female presidents of American universities have inadvertently revealed, without even realizing it, their adherence to the brown plague of antisemitism. When questioned by a congressional committee, they shamelessly asserted that condemning calls for the genocide of Jews "depended on the context." The most significant moment of their interview can be found on YouTube. ^[1] .

Let's briefly recall these remarks. To the question, "Does calling for the genocide of Jews constitute a form of harassment that violates your university's code of conduct, yes or no?", posed repeatedly by Republican New York State Representative Elise Stefanik, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sally Kornbluth, replied, "It can be a form of harassment, depending on the context." Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, also gave an evasive answer before adding, " If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment ." This, of course, drew the response that one would have to commit genocide to violate the university's code of conduct. As for Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, having undoubtedly appreciated the formulation that "it depends on the context" put forward by her two colleagues, she used it herself, twice. It must be said that all three had been coached before their hearing by the same lawyer, who provided them with the same talking points ^[2]. The parliamentarian's conclusion was a firm call for the resignation of the three chairwomen.

How can one not be stunned (as they say these days) by such remarks? What is the backbone of these people? Where did they come from? What is their level of education? These are the questions one might ask at first glance. These three university officials then "apologized," and Le Monde , ever the conciliatory one, highlighted their "backpedaling." The first, Liz Magill, had the dignity to quickly submit her resignation; it must be said that her continued employment would have automatically meant the loss of a $100 million private grant for the university; in the United States, the dollar remains king when it comes to ensuring the morality of the academic hierarchy! The second, Claudine Gay, waited several weeks to do the same, and as I write these lines, the third, Sally Kornbluth, has not yet done so… but the affair is far from over, and I doubt she'll last long in her sinecure.

The case of the latter is perhaps somewhat different from that of the other presidents: she has only held this position since January 2023, she is not a professor of political science or law like the other two, but she comes from a background in cancer biology research. Furthermore, she cannot be held responsible for the missteps of her predecessors, who disinvited several prestigious speakers whose words might have "offended some listeners": all of this is explained in Eric Rasmusen's remarkable article on Heterodox Stem ^[3] , which highlights the inconsistent application of the concept of freedom of expression, invoked to avoid condemning calls for genocide but ignored when it comes to banning the word " nigger " or penalizing "misgendering." Yet Kornbluth does not confront her contradictions: in the name of "freedom of expression", she does not condemn calls for the genocide of Jews, but she does nothing against MIT apparatchiks proclaiming "that calling a transgender person by their original name can be considered an act of violence".

One of the reasons they presented in their "apologies" is their "commitment to freedom of expression," protected by the First Amendment of the American Constitution. Freedom of expression, what crimes are committed in your name! The loss of moral bearings of these academics is extremely alarming. Certainly, they must all resign, as demanded by the Republican congresswoman who asked the questions, and they should be sentenced at the very least to a "citizenship course" instilling in them universal humanist values. These ideologues promoted to the rank of "university president" pretended not to have understood it, by attaching themselves more to the letter than to the spirit, one of them justifying herself a posteriori by the fact that "she was focused on the fact that, in the American Constitution, one cannot be punished just for words."

Yes, these are just words: so words do not carry ideas, and have no role in inciting acts? What, then, was the role of Mein Kampf in the rise of Nazism? Certainly, the First Amendment rests on an absolutization of liberty against the risks of control by the State, which is the great enemy in American culture, where individual liberty is the cardinal value. There is virtually no legal regulation of public speech, and it is in accordance with this ideology that the three female presidents responded, remarkably illustrating the aberrations of this constitutional principle, which Nathalie Heinich contrasted with the positive effects of regulation in French legal culture ^[4] .

This “defensive” stance should not deceive us: these individuals have publicly uttered statements capable of justifying genocidal practices, and that is far more serious. Several attacks on the safety of Jewish students at American universities, threatened by Hamas apologists who conflate a terrorist movement with the Palestinian people, have already occurred without eliciting the slightest appropriate response from their leaders. If these three presidents were summoned before Congress, it was precisely because serious incidents had taken place on campuses; Jewish students under threat had to rush home to avoid harassment—more than just verbal. And such incidents were not confined to these few elite universities: many others were also affected. Let us recall the antisemitic excesses exhibited by the administration of Stanford University, so well described by Carine Azzopardi ^[5] !

As for the American press's coverage of these hearings, it too is unacceptable, just like the statements made. The New York Times , once again, went too far by first running the headline on December 5th ^[6] , " Republicans Try to Put Harvard, MIT and Penn on the Defensive About Antisemitism ," implying that the evil Republicans, supposedly sexist and racist, had tried to destabilize these three valiant presidents, one of whom combined her status as a woman (oppressed, supposedly oppressed) with that of being Black (racialized, supposedly racialized). The attack was cautiously corrected the next day, admitting that these individuals had "dodged" the awkward questions ^[7] : " College Presidents Under Fire After Dodging Questions About Antisemitism ." But the article's subtitle remains strange: they only "appeared" to evade these questions ...

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Some nosy individuals have been investigating Claudine Gay's scientific work. What they discovered is not unpleasant, but shh… We mustn't say anything! Le Monde wrote that it was the "conservative" media who dared to continue the toppling of the statue ^[8] … As if denouncing scientific fraud committed by a Black woman were reserved for conservatives and forbidden to progressives, even though said conservatives took advantage of the situation to condemn her ^[9] … Well, no! Plagiarism has no color ^[10] And especially no political color. Because it is plagiarism we are talking about. The Harvard Crimson , a student-run academic journal, meticulously analyzed line by line ^[11] certain passages from Claudine Gay's publications or dissertation. The most amusing instance of plagiarism is found in the acknowledgments section of her dissertation, defended in 1997, where she copied word for word what another doctoral student had written the previous year… Not even enough imagination to find a few sincere (or at least seemingly sincere) words to thank her family and her boss in the obligatory flowerpot section! Beyond this laughable anecdote, a whole cohort of her colleagues still managed to downplay the plagiarism by using some of the classic euphemisms for plagiarism ^[12] , saying, for example, " [that it was] not a severe infraction " or that " [she] didn't use some quotation marks in the right place ." Since Al Capone fell for tax fraud, perhaps she fell more for scientific misconduct than for anti-Semitism?

Beyond the plagiarism scandal, an American journalist, Christopher Caldwell, examined Claudine Gay's scientific career and asserts that "the most astonishing thing was not the resignation of the Harvard president, but her appointment when she was merely a mediocre academic ^[13] ." I lack the expertise to analyze her scientific work, but it seems likely, in any case, that her appointment, which was very recent and dated from July 2023, "reflects a cult of diversity imposed by the administration," as this journalist puts it. In the field of science, "wokism" is attempting to implement its ideology, with difficulty. Several Anglo-Saxon newspapers promote the acronym DEI: diversity, equity, inclusion. Behind these noble objectives, alas, lie some rather bizarre behaviors.

It all depends on what we mean by words. In science, who could be against diversity in terms of the origin of articles or the nationality and gender of reviewers? Who could argue against fairness? Who doesn't want to include as many scientists as possible in the dissemination of knowledge? But that's not the most important thing! What matters above all is the quality of the articles, the relevance of the analyses they contain, the scientific merit, the advancement of knowledge ^[14] It is absurd to ask a prospective author or reviewer , as many journals now do, what their ethnicity is, what their "gender" is, whether they have a disability, and whether the authors they cite in support of their work are equally divided between men and women. Authors will soon be asked to indicate their sexual orientation or hair color in order to favor blondes who, as everyone knows, are intellectually handicapped.

Sally Kornbluth is no better than Claudine Gay in terms of scientific integrity, but it seems no one has realized this until now… Sally Kornbluth, the name rang a bell, but what? Good heavens, of course! She was Vice Dean for Research Affairs at Duke University in North Carolina, and she staunchly supported those notorious fraudsters Anil Potti and Joseph Nevins in the case of the signatures predictive of cancer response to anticancer drugs. I wrote an article about it a few years ago ^[15] , which I reprinted in a recent book ^[16] . Kornbluth, to save face and her own skin, deliberately lied twice: in 2010 by claiming that the NCI investigation, whose findings she had concealed with the help of her associate Michael Cuffe, vice dean for medical affairs, had "cleared" Potti and Nevins, when this was false, as everyone realized when the report was revealed by Keith Baggerly and Kevin Coombes, statisticians at the MD Anderson Cancer Center ^[17] ; and in 2015 when she claimed that no whistleblower had reported the suspicions of fraud, when a student in the laboratory, Bradford Perez, had done so as early as 2008, as evidenced by email exchanges ^[18] … It is certain that this double lie predisposed her to rise through the ranks and become president of a prestigious university!

Should we be surprised that a plagiarist and a liar found themselves in the highest ranks of two of the most prestigious American universities? And that, poorly advised by a manifestly incompetent legal coach , they unwittingly descended into the most abject anti-Semitism? I leave it to my readers to decide… We should examine the recruitment methods for presidents of major American universities; the French model, which I naively believed to be universal, consists of electing, indirectly (that is, by an elected board of directors), a president chosen from among the university's faculty: he knows his colleagues, has a general idea of ​​what each one does, is steeped in the culture of the university where he teaches, has noted its specific characteristics, the distribution of its "components," etc. He is thus in the thick of it, and his recognized charisma and his desire to work for the common good are appreciated, and during this election he becomes the primum inter pares who will certainly not be unanimous (that's a good thing!) but will benefit during his term from a consensus which will allow all members to progress and flourish, in support or in respectful opposition.

What we see in the United States seems very different to me. The presidency of a major university is a profession in itself. The president is not first among his peers: he is recruited by what passes for a board of trustees, not preferentially from among local academics, but from among national luminaries—now with a good dose of DEI ( diversity, equity, inclusion ) to be very much in line with the woke trend . I was struck by the fact that the celebrated geneticist Clarence Cook Little ^[19] (1888-1971) was able to serve successively as president of the universities of Maine and Michigan, more than 1,000 km apart, despite having taught at neither. The second example of this kind of migration is that of Sally Kornbluth, moving from the position of vice dean at Duke University (North Carolina) to the presidency of MIT (Massachusetts), two universities also 1,000 km apart. In both cases, these presidents were appointed for their national celebrity and supposed charisma, or as management professionals, certainly not for their intimate knowledge of the university, its culture, and its problems (nor for their defense of integrity, as seen in Kornbluth's case).

A third "migrant" president has also recently made headlines: Marc Tessier-Lavigne, president of Stanford University from 2016 to 2023, after having served as president of Rockefeller University from 2011 to 2016. Here again, he appears as a "professional" president, despite his distinguished career as an academic and industrial researcher. And like Claudine Gay, he fell due to issues of scientific integrity: falsifications were found in several of his articles from the 2000s; it seems he did not commit them himself, but the lack of oversight of co-authors implicated him: he was the primary author, the corresponding author of these articles. And as with Gay, it was students from his university who revealed the scientific misconduct that forced his resignation. Then there's Kornbluth, who, like Gay, combines an acquiescence to antisemitism with a serious breach of scientific integrity; she seems to have escaped punishment so far: perhaps the case is too old? But I remain hopeful, because the Duke University affair, which I followed very closely for personal scientific reasons (I was working on the same subject as Nevins' group), still sticks in my craw…

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An anecdote from the 1950s to end on a more amusing note: when Clark Kerr, president of the University of California, Berkeley, handed over his position to Charles E. Odegaard, he offered him "the green fruits of his experience" by declaring that the three administrative problems that a president had to solve on a campus were " sex for the students, athletics for the alumni and parking for the faculty ^[20] ".

I would like to thank Nathalie Heinich and François Rastier for their critical and constructive review of the first part of the manuscript.