By CHRIS CHURCHILL NYTimes News Service
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U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik posed a simple question to the presidents of three prominent schools of higher education: Would calling for the genocide of Jews violate each university’s code of conduct?

University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, Harvard President Claudine Gay and MIT President Sally Kornbluth each had a surprisingly difficult time formulating a coherent answer, and, when pressed by Stefanik, all more or less gave legalistic responses that tiptoed around full condemnations of genocide.

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“If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment,” Magill said during the Tuesday hearing.

Now, I didn’t go to an Ivy League school so I may not be as smart as Magill and the others, but …

What the heck? Are we to believe that a Penn or Harvard student would need to attempt some sort of genocidal, violent act to run afoul of the school’s conduct policies?

What happened to basic civility? What happened to campus safe spaces and making all students feel welcome? Do such things not apply to Jewish students?

The blowback to the hearing was swift and bipartisan, with Stefanik earning praise, explicitly or implicitly, from unlikely corners. With an effective bit of political theater, the North Country Republican had exposed something dark.

What’s particularly dumbfounding about the responses is that genocide against Jews isn’t theoretical or unimaginable. It literally happened within recent memory. It’s both a fresh horror and a historical throughline. Condemning it should be easy.

Magill, Gay and Kornbluth have spent the days since apologizing and attempting to clarify — damage control, in other words.

Magill even released a video in which she looked like a hostage being forced to mouth words from a cue card. She noted “the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetrate.”

Gay, meanwhile, issued a statement that said, among other things: “Let me be clear: Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.”

Will they, though? Given the scenes recently on campuses around the country, we might wonder if that’s true, which is why Congress held the hearing on collegiate antisemitism in the first place. (In related news, the U.S. Department of Education is investigating Union College in Schenectady after Jewish students filed a discrimination complaint.)

Don’t equate this with a First Amendment question. Yes, every student should feel free to protest the Israeli government and how the country is conducting its response to the Hamas terrorism. Condemnation of Israel’s policies and concern about the plight of Palestinians are not necessarily antisemitic, of course, and even ugly, horrific or violence-endorsing speech is generally protected against governmental interference.

But that doesn’t mean that hateful language comes without consequences. We’re talking about codes of conduct, remember, and we know that calling for the harm of nearly any other minority group would not be tolerated under the rules in place at most schools.

It would be one thing if colleges were true bastions of free speech and consistently took a hands-off approach to discriminatory rhetoric. But that hasn’t been the direction of travel. Many schools have become increasingly intolerant of free debate and expression, with some even releasing lists of everyday words that students and staffers should not say.

Yet hateful language directed at Jewish students is tolerated? The double standard and lack of consistency are striking.

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