The most disastrous congressional testimony of the past year was delivered, perhaps surprisingly, by the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania last week. All three presidents attempted to answer questions about their institutions’ speech policies, in response to inadequate responses to growing campus antisemitism in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war. The presidents did make statements at the start of the hearings condemning antisemitism. But they also should have known that it’s decontextualized moments, not the totality of hours of testimony, that tend to go viral. And instead of responding to questions about calls for genocide with clear denunciations, they instead offered up stiff replies, moderate defenses of free speech, and legalistic statements about their own abhorrence of certain terms. They walked into carefully laid traps—traps that should have been visible in advance, even from ivory towers.

That’s the headline, anyway: that this blowup is about liberal hypocrisy, and that this spectacular, visible failure raises the question of whether Jewish students can feel safe on campus. But as important as these concerns are, this story is less about hypocrisy or safety than power: Fundamentally, it’s about education-hostile conservatives who resent not having as much power as they once did, about what they’re doing to get it, and about what they plan to do with it.

There is a reason this is happening now. Broad right-wing attacks on higher education, of which these hearings are a part, stem from decades of ever-more-diverse student bodies that have produced more diversity among professors and administrators than ever before. This diversity of human beings has led to a much wider diversity of views, experiences, and, yes, speech. That has, in turn, been met with a right-wing effort to undermine institutions of higher learning, shut down speech those conservatives dislike, and call into question the broader liberal project of pluralism, free expression, and intellectual inquiry. In this particular instance, it feels like it has gone through the looking glass, because conservatives have latched onto a legitimate issue that many liberals and moderates care about—antisemitism—and are cannily exploiting it, using the language of liberalism to push a profoundly illiberal agenda.

It seems relevant to mention here that all three of the presidents who testified were women. This is fairly unusual. Sally Kornbluth is only the second woman to hold that role at MIT. Claudine Gay is the second woman to preside over Harvard, and the first Black American to do so. UPenn has a longer history of gender diversity in its top role, but only about 30 percent of the presidents of America’s major research universities are women, and those low numbers have shown incredible growth recently: Just a few years ago, it was less than a quarter.

This rise reflects the radical increase in the numbers of female college students, and then of women with college degrees making their way into the top echelons of campus life. The proportion of students of color has also gone up dramatically in the past few decades. As a greater diversity of students have graduated, and as some have stayed in the academy and found work as professors and administrators, campus cultures have changed, too. We see this in departments and student majors (gender studies, ethnic studies, etc.) and in campus organizations (pro-choice groups, LGBTQ groups, racial and religious affinity groups, etc.). We also see it in coursework, as the literary canon expands well beyond dead white men. In response, some conservatives like to complain that colleges have abandoned their grounding in Enlightenment values when in fact what happened is an extension of those same values (inquiry into the unknown and less-known, the pursuit and expansion of knowledge, a refusal to atrophy).

I minored in women’s and gender studies as an undergraduate at New York University; as a law student at the same institution, I took courses in feminist jurisprudence and women’s rights in Islamic law. A decade and a half later, I returned to NYU to teach an undergraduate course on gender and journalism. Which is to say, I am a product of this shift, a beneficiary of it, and a........

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