Subject: Re: Higher Education: The Mission Is Money
Yes, these university leaders did walk into a trap. A trap set by a not-so-clever Republican who used rhetorical techniques they should have seen coming from the moment the invite to appear before the committee arrived. You would think PR firms specializing in coaching leaders through such fraught circumstances would have a list of do's/don'ts in bullet form tattooed inside the eyelids of their client. Rules like:

* DON'T accept the terminology used in the question
* DO clarify all controversial terms referenced in the question BEFORE returning the core answer
* DON'T attempt to answer a compound question involving controversial terminology AND hypotheticals
* DO answer with brief concrete answers with clarified vocabulary

First, Stefanik did not ask them if speech calling for genocide was illegal, only if it would constitute a violation of each school's code of conduct. Each could have answered very concisely without hypotheticals or getting drawn into debates about what OTHER combinations of words such as "from the river to the sea" mapped through three layers of history, meaning by the speaker and meaning interpreted by the listener might wind up being interpreted as "genocide."

I think all three became tangled in their own mind thinking language like "from the river to the sea" was in some circles "code" for pushing Israelis out of Israel (at a minimum) and doing it by violence and wholesale slaughter. They can THINK that internally and "what-if" it all day in their head but that wasn't the question posed. They should have stuck with the word "genocide", clarified terms, and answered the question on their clarified terms.

* genocide is the deliberate, systemic killing of a group of people who are not acting in the context of a declared war based upon racial, ethnic, religious, tribal or sovereign criteria
* a call for genocide is different than a call to combat an "enemy" under recognized terms of war with opponents who agree to fight as recognized forces outside the context of civilian areas
* explicit calls by a student or faculty member within my university for a genocide of another people would harm the environment of respect and intellectual rigor expected by our community and would violate our code of conduct
* debates over other terms and slogans that might be interpreted as genocide are obviously in the mind of the speaker and the listener and cannot / should not be decided by simple blanket statements

They didn't do that. Instead, they outsmarted themselves, further muddled an issue already causing strife across the United States and possibly widened a wedge among non-conservatives that could likely tip America even further to the authoritarian right.


WTH