It doesn’t say much in favor of rejoicing in someone else’s evil. Unless a collective benefit is derived from this evil. In this case, regretting the personal costs for the affected person, perhaps it is justified to celebrate the misfortune for another. That is why we are happy with the forced resignation of the chancellor of the University of Pennsylvania, Liz Magill, and that her counterparts from Harvard and MIT, Claudine Gay and Sally Kornbluth, are on a tightrope.
It was the turn of the three ladies to face the world that they and their predecessors in their positions have helped to build with proven diligence. They appeared in the United States Congress to answer, among other questions, whether calls to Jewish genocide or other slogans by university students and professors on their campuses were in line with freedom of expression or if, on the contrary, they violated the code of conduct required in an academic environment and had to be pursued.
They answered impeccably. They took refuge in the greatness of free speech, in the need to add context to any lurid statement, or in the indisputable truth that threatening words can only become a crime when they are accompanied by the certain possibility that they will become acts His answers were academically formidable. But it was of no use to them. Magill is already out. And Gay and Kornbluth have been so weakened that they will have to update their resumes with the next breath of air. And we are happy about it.
Because the American universities first, the British ones later, and after them those in continental Europe, have been cutting back for years, with the complicity of their management teams, not only freedom of expression, but also freedom of thought. They allowed themselves to be kidnapped by the tyranny of the most radicalized students who militate in the woke culture and facilitated the virus of censorship, self-censorship and cancellation to infect the Campuses.
For example, professors, lecturers and ideas that do not fit into the flood of gender ideology have been silenced without the authorities of the aforementioned universities having dared to break a spear in favor of freedom of expression or in defense of the centers of higher education as true temples of free thought and provocation. They have supported by passive, if not by active, the most provocative silence.
And now it’s the turn of these ladies to ingest the syrup that they first made others taste. If in order to appease the woke bully it was necessary to expose oneself in networks or to face the ridicule of postmodern left-wing totalitarianism – something they have not done, neither they, nor their predecessors -, now they know what it is to be seen – them with another type of group that also doesn’t like to hear what things are said on campus. The big financial donors of Jewish descent have had enough of withdrawing or threatening to do so their financial contributions to those universities so that the female rectors have all their arguments and excuses in their way.
It didn’t do them any good to be right. Because what they don’t have is credibility. Neither they nor their institutions. It’s no use looking for the protection of freedom of expression at your convenience: now yes, now no. It is not valid to open the umbrella of the university to take refuge from the sectarian rain when it is only done to solely defend the students and teachers of a certain ideology.
The US is a long way off, some may think. Not so much. In Spanish universities, and of course Catalan universities in a very prominent place, many ideas have not been able to express themselves freely for some time. And like in the US, here too the university leaders play to minimize the seriousness of the silences.
It behooves us all to observe what happens when freedom of expression is not always taken seriously. Because the exceptions allow sooner or later someone to impose on you the medication that you thought was only valid for others. That’s why we are happy about the trance of the three Yankee rectors even if they are right, the same reason as so many whom they and others before them have appeased first.
To experience in one’s own flesh what we happily judge harshly in others. Perhaps there is no better life lesson than this to gain in generosity and indulgence. To learn to count to one hundred before excommunicating the other. Let’s see if we scare anyone else.
