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She came under fire for their dry responses to a line of questioning from Republican representative Stefanik, who asked whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate the college’s code of conduct.

But the premise of the question was nonsense[1], as Peter Beinart has made clear. The premise being „intifada“ meaning „an attempt at genocide of jews“ when it actually means „uprising“.

It was acutally about silencing the Pro-Palestinian support at American universities in light of wealthy donors threatening to cut funding.

[1] https://twitter.com/hahauenstein/status/1734608990628348303/

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I watched the testimony. I’m left leaning these days (mostly because the right went batshit crazy), but I hold a lot of conservative values (which are reflected in the moderate left too so nbd).

I found her testimony to be insipid and not worthy of someone who has the position of leader and president.

She should have clearly stated “if someone calls for violence or genocide of any people, that is against harvards code” (and if that’s not true then amend the code please). It should have been a lay-up.

Instead she kept saying “it depends on the context” which sounds like politician speech for dodging accountability. That’s fine for most people, but is this what we want from society’s leaders?

If there were questions about “intifada”, she should have said something like “I don’t speak that language, so I can’t tell you what it means, but calls for genocide are not okay”.

> I found her testimony to be insipid and not worthy of someone who has the position of leader and president.

How much leeway do you give her for being out of her element? That's part of the point of these hearings, to put people under extreme pressure and play gotcha.

A harvard president gets no leeway in this context; they are expected to be absolutely perfect, handling gotchas with aplomb. She was just not qualified for this.

I don’t consider this to be out of element for a president.

She tried to outplay the gotcha game, which is why she did poorly.

Instead she should have come in and said “At Harvard this is what we believe - …”.

Being able to state the values of your organization is core skill for the president and leader of the school. It should be down pat, a solid set of words that ring true and inspire. If you can’t do that, then let’s find someone who can. That’s the difference between leaders and managers.

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