This column is not another entry in the canon about free speech on university campuses. There are plenty of those – both excellent and terrible – that you can read elsewhere. For now, I’d like to focus on our collective understanding of the meaning of words. Specifically one word. Agreeing on what words mean can be difficult. This should not be one of those times.

Over the last few days, many very smart people and a few bad-faith actors have engaged in hysterics about some otherwise mundane responses given during a congressional hearing.

On Tuesday, the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania testified in front of the House Education and Workforce Committee. Universities across the country have been the sites of a slew of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, as well as some gross displays of anti-Semitism since the Oct. 7 terror attacks against Israel. As such, university leaders are especially susceptible to the kind of thing we saw on Tuesday.

The hearing yielded several moments in which the witnesses gave what critics say were unsatisfactory or even unacceptable responses. One exchange in particular seems to have received the lion’s share of attention.

Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Harvard graduate who sits on the committee, asked the presidents if calling for the genocide of Jews constitutes “harassment.” Here is how that went:

STEFANIK: This is the easiest question to answer “Yes,” Ms. Magill!

[…]

ELIZABETH MAGILL: If the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment.

STEFANIK: Conduct meaning committing the act of genocide?… I gonna give you one more opportunity for the world to see your answer. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s code of conduct when it comes to bullying and harassment? Yes or no.

MAGILL: It can be harassment.

[…]

STEFANIK: Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying or harassment? Yes or no.

CLAUDINE GAY: It can be, depending on the context.

Stefanik is not a dummy and she knows what “harassment” means. In the Hall of Performative Outrage in Committee Hearings, her theatrics are a solid entry.

Multiple cable news channels have replayed the presidents’ responses, often without actually analyzing what was being said. The video is supposed to speak for itself.

Words. What do they mean?

Colloquially speaking, to harass someone is to persistently bother that person. That being the case, “calling for the genocide of Jews” is not – however vile – in and of itself, “harassment.”

This is hardly controversial. And yet there has been an unhinged collective freakout across the political spectrum fueled by baby-brained logic that takes the following form:

Calling for genocide is bad.

Harassment is bad.

Therefore, calling for genocide is harassment. 

But that’s not how that works.

It is worth noting that Magill and Gay offered correct responses about UPenn’s and Harvard’s codes of conduct, i.e., “it can be.”

Criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor Ken White offered some legal analysis of the situation on his Substack on Thursday. He also examined Harvard’s policy in light of the “controversy.”

“The university presidents were completely right. Whether calling for the genocide of the Jews, or any other group, violates a school’s policy depends on the context,” he wrote in a post titled, “Stop Demanding Dumb Answers To Hard Questions.”

White, who noted that university policies on harassment closely align with the definition outlined by Title IX – a federal civil rights law – described several scenarios and explained whether they would meet the threshold for harassment:

Going to a campus chapter of Hillel and chanting “kill all Jews” is probably so severe, objectively offensive, and destructive of students’ educational experience that it violates the standard.

If four students are talking politics in a dorm room, and one (by dramatic convention, a sophomore) says “we should just wipe all the Palestinians out,” and one of the four repeats that to someone else later, and that person is horrified, that is almost certainly not severe or pervasive or contextually destructive of the educational experience enough to qualify.

If a professor uses the Israel-Palestinian conflict to discuss whether armed revolution is morally or legally justified, and presents the argument that armed revolution by Palestinians is justified, that almost certainly doesn’t violate the standard, although some people argue that it inherently calls for the genocide of the Jews.

If a professor reads out sentiments expressed by different groups in a discussion of the war in Israel, and sentiment one the professor mentions is “kill the Jews,” that does not qualify. If you think that’s a silly example, you’re wrong.

If one student makes a point of saying “all Jews should die” to a classmate every time they meet to express a sentiment about Israel, that’s probably severe and pervasive enough to qualify.

If a student says, at a rally about Palestinian rights, “they want to kill all the Palestinians, but I say they should kill all the Jews first,” the context probably means that’s not severe, pervasive, or destructive of the educational experience enough, since it’s expressly conditional and political.

White also had some harsh words for those who piled on the university presidents.

“Stefanik and every politician or loudmouth who wants you to hate and distrust college education and Palestinians pounced on it,” he said. “And many of you fell for it.”

What’s more, Stefanik’s committee announced on Thursday it is opening a “formal investigation” – complete with subpoena power – into Harvard, MIT, and UPenn over what it called “institutional and personal failures.”

It is quite possible the committee planned to launch an investigation all along, regardless of what transpired during Tuesday’s hearing. Stefanik’s line of questioning – based on the false premise that calling for genocide is automatically harassment – was a calculated move to make the witnesses look like out-of-touch ivory tower academics who are soft on anti-Semitism. That premise also allows Stefanik to keep casting herself as a champion for free speech, as she has done many times. By deeming speech she finds offensive as “harassment,” it ceases to be mere speech and morphs into something worthy of punishment.

This is all very cynical, of course. But when it comes to matters such as Israel, terrorism, and war, it becomes depressingly easy for people to lose their entire minds – and not just the definition of words.

The post No, Calling For Genocide Is Not Automatically ‘Harassment’ first appeared on Mediaite.

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