Why Congressional Testimony by Harvard, Penn and MIT Presidents Has Received Near Universal Condemnation
12/11/23 – – Last week, the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology traveled to Washington D.C. to testify in front of the House Education and Workforce Committee.
They should have stayed home.
Questioned about the disruption on campus since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the highly respected academic leaders damaged the reputations of the institutions they represent and placed their own careers in jeopardy.
Let’s go to school on these disastrous performances.
Context vs. Clarity
Penn’s Elizabeth Magill (who has already resigned along with her board chair), Harvard’s Claudine Gay, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT were asked by New York Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik if student’s calling for genocide of Jews are in violation of their schools’ codes of conduct. The presidents rejected Representative Stefanik’s request to respond with “yes” or “no” answers:
Magill: “It is a context-dependent decision.”
Gay: “It depends on the context.”
Kornbluth: “That would be investigated as harassment if pervasive and severe.”
Of course, demanding “yes” or “no” answers is a rhetorical devise used by politicians, reporters and trial lawyers not to get information but to corral respondents into a desired narrative. Academics are especially reluctant to offer simple answers, and a Congressional hearing is not a classroom or symposium. But sophisticated public figures like Magill, Gay and Kornbluth should have the instincts and/or training to know when clarity — moral and rhetorical — is called for.
Even though each president condemned antisemitism along with Islamophobia in no uncertain terms, they waffled on the proper response to calls for genocide. Given the horrific events of October 7 and the speed with which students, professors and guest lecturers who express ideas counter to prevailing orthodoxies have been silenced or expelled from elite college campuses, their legalese came off as shockingly cold and hypocritical.
Near Universal Condemnation
Some of the harshest criticism of the college presidents’ testimony has come from the left.
Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe told the Harvard Crimson, “I’m no fan of Representative Stefanik, but I’m with her here . . . Claudine Gay’s hesitant, formulaic, and bizarrely evasive answers were deeply troubling to me and many of my colleagues, students, and friends.”
Former Harvard President Larry Summers in a Bloomberg TV interview commented: “This is as difficult a moment for elite higher education as any moment since the Vietnam War. Perhaps more difficult.”
And former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, also a Harvard grad, said this on CNN “State of the Union” Sunday: “Well, I was shocked by the tone-deafness of those comments. And I think they got bad legal advice in putting together what they were going to say.”
Leading and Losing with Legalese
If anybody should know about bad legal advice, it’s Mr. Gore.
Back in 1997, while he was serving as Bill Clinton’s vice president, Gore solicited campaign funds using the phone in his White House office (a federal office building) in violation of the crystal clear language of Section 607 of Title 18 of the U.S. Criminal Code. He didn’t dispute the charges, but defended his actions, explaining that his legal advisors had informed him there was “no controlling legal authority” interpreting the meaning of the law. He used the phrase “no controlling legal authority,” understood by lawyers but not the general public, seven times during a press conference.
George W. Bush referred to this legalese over and over again during his successful campaign for President in 2000 to paint Gore as a corrupt, dishonest politician.
Could it be that the college presidents grilled by Representative Stefanik were also given bad legal advice?
Yes, according to New York Times reporter Lauren Hirsch, who wrote on December 9:
“It turns out that one of America’s best known white-shoe law firms, WilmerHale, was intricately involved. Two of the school presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Elizabeth Magill of Penn, prepared separately for the congressional testimony with teams from WilmerHale, according to two people familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified because the preparation process is confidential.”
Preparing for Testimony — Style and Substance
It is tempting — especially for crisis counselors and communication trainers who are not attorneys — to blame the lawyers who prepped the college presidents. Pundits are all over social media platforms pointing their fingers at tone-deaf barristers who fail to recognize the differences between a court room and the court of public opinion. And it is generally true that attorneys and communication specialists have very different expertise.
I’ve found that the best preparation for the unique, treacherous experience of appearing before a contentious Congressional panel is provided by attorney/communicator teams. Having been a member of those teams, it’s essential to understand the following:
- Generally, the purpose of a Congressional hearing is not fact finding or problem solving. That’s unfortunate, but true. Your testimony will be requested (or demanded) to support one side of a political debate or the other, and you will most likely be in the crosshairs of one side of the aisle.
- The questioning by the members of the committee you’re appearing before is not intended to enlighten or inform. If a member even gets beyond his or her statement to a pose a question, you will not be given sufficient time to answer it, or you’ll be asked to answer “yes” or “no.”
- Questions and sometimes insults by the members opposed to you and/or your views are intended to produce a damning sound bite that can be used by the media on one side of the political spectrum or the other. (The college presidents’ debacle is a rare example of both sides criticizing the testimony.)
If you think that’s bad, here’s the hardest part of preparation: Under fire, you have to keep your cool, show no disrespect for the elected officials, and resist the urge to make their often ill-informed or unfair questions and statements look stupid. When necessary, respectfully correct the record with facts and then shut up.
These rules of engagement are particularly difficult for people in senior positions not accustomed to being challenged. During training, it’s important (and sometimes job-threatening) to push clients to get them battle-ready. If this is not done, leaders used to being revered, not reviled, default to arrogance and deflection, falling right into the questioner’s trap, producing a cringeworthy sound bite exuding elitism and detachment.
Did WilmerHale go over all this with their clients? We’ll probably never know (unless one of the embattled or unemployed college presidents writes a memoir). And here’s the most important point I want to make: No amount of training will help a presenter unwilling to communicate with moral clarity and honesty.
It is unrealistic to think that preparation, no matter how skillful, will make an indefensible policy or position look reasonable. I believe that what we saw last week during the testimony of the Harvard, Penn and MIT presidents was a reflection of the difficulty they are having as leaders coping with the inconsistency of their policies and the coarsening of their campus cultures in a time of dramatic societal change.
Those are much bigger problems to solve, with or without the help of attorneys or PR gurus, before they come to Washington again.
UPDATE: 1/2/24 – – Harvard President Claudine Gay has resigned.
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/02/1222516898/harvard-university-president-claudine-gay-resigns
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