The thing we kept thinking during the hearings in Congress on antisemitism in the Ivy League is that the right president of Harvard would be Congresswoman Elise Stefanik. Her questioning of the current presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn in respect of whether calling for the genocide of Jews is against their campus rules will become a congressional classic. Each of the presidents refused to say yes, resorting instead to pettifogging.

What a smug, self-serving moment the Ivy League presidents delivered. Their students will be ashamed of them, and their fecklessness will be remembered — and satirized — for generations. Perhaps some undergraduate is already writing a board game called “Hypocrisy,” in which the eight pieces are presidents of an Ivy League school and the goal is for each player to finish his presidency without once defending the Jews against partisans of Hamas.

Ms. Stefanik, one of her generation’s most distinguished graduates of Harvard, began with Sally Kornbluth of MIT. “Dr. Kornbluth,” Ms. Stefanik asked, “at MIT does calling for the genocide of Jews violate MIT’s code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and  harrassment? Yes or no.” Ms. Kornbluth answered with doubletalk: “If targeted at individuals, not making public statements,” was how she hedged what amounts to “no.”

It was no accident that the witnesses were from MIT, Penn, and Harvard. Penn had hosted a literary festival celebrating antisemitism. MIT recently refrained from suspending students who blocked Jews from a common area on campus for fear they’d lose their visas to stay in America. Harvard has recently been ranked as the most antisemitic campus in America. Yet not one of the three was prepared to answer Ms. Stefanik’s question straightforwardly.

“A context-dependent decision,” is the Ivy-League lingo used by Penn’s Elizabeth Magill. Americans are gobsmacked by this kind of equivocation, slapping their knees with mirth while watching the video. Even the Anti-Defamation League was outraged. “Let’s be crystal clear,” said its Jonathan Greenblatt. “There is NO ‘context’ in which calling for the genocide of Jews is OK. These leaders’ lack of moral clarity in response to this line of questioning is shameful.”

Ms. Stefanik and her allies in the House have made it hard to see how these presidents will be able to stay in office. Perhaps the university presidents are being cautioned by their lawyers. Yet no less a defender of free speech and foe of antisemitism than Alan Dershowitz notes in our pages that the First Amendment requires a balancing on campuses between “conflicting rights — to free speech and to a safe environment.”

Mr. Dershowitz warns that universities “will not be able to defend against the claim” that they are “applying a double standard to Jews as contrasted with other minorities.” Imagine the outrage, he writes, were a Ku Klux Klan group on campus permitted to advance arguments like “the lynching of African Americans was justified.” Mr. Dershowitz calls that a case of “constitutionally protected speech that no university would tolerate.”

Which brings us back to Elise Stefanik. She has long since emerged as a formidable figure with an instinct for leadership. In January 2021, she was fired from a Harvard advisory board at the Kennedy School for what appeared to be — though Harvard denied it — political reasons. Ms. Stefanik has gone on to distinction as chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, which makes her the fourth ranking leader in the House.

We don’t have any illusions that Harvard — a Democratic Party aligned institution — would turn around and pick Ms. Stefanik as its president, even as support sags for the current president, Claudine Gay. President Gay flunked her appearance before Congress. So much so that even such a liberal lion as Laurence Tribe, as our Matt Rice reports, said he sided with Ms. Stefanik against Ms. Gay, who today walked back her comments to Congress. 

Ms. Stefanik laments that “three middle schoolers across America” could answer the questions the presidents flubbed. What, though, does it say “that these presidents of universities could not answer it?” she asks. Ms. Stefanik doesn’t call the distinguished presidents antisemites. She does warn that antisemitism “has rotted out our ivory towers and these intellectual institutions who do not understand moral clarity.” Harvard would be lucky to get her.

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Correction: Laurence is the spelling of the first name of Professor Tribe. The spelling was given incorrectly in the bulldog.