Kenneth Roth’s Reward for Slandering Israel The former head of Human Rights Watch will move to Harvard, underlining how foolish policy gets made. By Dominic Green
Should Kenneth Roth, recently retired executive director of Human Rights Watch, receive a fellowship at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government? In late July, the Kennedy School’s dean, Doug Elmendorf, rejected Mr. Roth’s nomination as a one-year fellow at its Carr Center for Human Rights. Last week Mr. Elmendorf reversed course following protests from students, faculty, the editorial board of the Boston Globe and the Nation magazine.
Mr. Roth claims that he had been “canceled” and that “academic freedom” was at stake. This is an inversion of the truth. Candidacies for tenure and fellowships often fail to go the administrative distance—and a refusal always offends. Mr. Roth’s plaint of victimhood received global coverage when it should’ve fallen on deaf ears: Only weeks after he heard that the Harvard fellowship wouldn’t be confirmed, Mr. Roth accepted a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. Bouncing from one Ivy League college to another isn’t cancellation.
Academic freedom is a nebulous concept. Legally, it overlaps with free speech, but it is also ethical and cultural, a matter of values. The freedom to speak openly in a professional field is essential to the growth of knowledge. But such an expansive notion can easily slide into taking liberties—freedom to rant about your intellectual hobbyhorses, freedom from debates that might correct your errors and so on. If there is a crisis of free speech on campus today, Mr. Roth isn’t its victim. If anything, he and Human Rights Watch are among its instigators.
The only voices that are systemically silenced or absent on campus today are conservatives in general, and pro-Israel voices in particular. The academic hunt for supporters of Israel is an attack on America’s free market of ideas reminiscent of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Student supporters of the BDS movement (boycott, divestment and sanctions) disrupt pro-Israel speakers on the rare occasions they come to campus. Rather than encourage open debate, faculty incite its foreclosure. Administrators turn a blind eye to an organized campaign of calumny against Israel as an “apartheid” state, which frequently spills into physical violence against Jewish students.
In 2021, Human Rights Watch became the first global human-rights organization to accuse Israel of “the crime of apartheid.” This is a modern blood libel, an abuse of legal and historical fact. Its promoters aim to place the Jewish state beyond the pale as a preliminary to its destruction. In 2009 Robert Bernstein—a founder of Human Rights Watch’s precursor, Helsinki Watch, and its chairman for 20 years—wrote that Mr. Roth had exchanged the group’s Cold War mission to “pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters” for an obsessive bias against Israel, which aided those who wish to make it “a pariah state.”
Mr. Roth’s private opinions are no less intemperate. In 2006 he characterized Israel’s “eye for an eye” approach to its war with Hezbollah as “the morality of some more primitive moment.” The Anti-Defamation League called this “a classic anti-Semitic stereotype.” After Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that Israel must be “wiped off the map,” Mr. Roth claimed in 2012 that this and similar statements weren’t incitement to genocide, only “advocacy.”
Mr. Roth claims his run-in with Harvard was due to “donor-driven censorship” by wealthy supporters of Israel, though he admits to having no proof. He demands “transparency” about the Kennedy School’s appointments process. No harm in that. We might learn whether Mr. Roth’s fellowship came through the usual committee process or if it was offered personally. The Carr Center’s executive director, Sushma Raman, previously disbursed funds at two long-term funders of Human Rights Watch, the Ford Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
Mr. Roth’s right to speak isn’t in doubt. His record as a successful fundraiser may suit him well for a fellowship at the business school. His record as a propagandist against Israel—professionally at Human Rights Watch and privately as a Twitter warrior—might fit him for one of the lesser humanities departments. This record doesn’t make him a serious candidate for the Kennedy School, the world’s leading school of public policy.
This isn’t merely an academic question. Public-policy schools like Harvard’s are part of the revolving door between government, academia and the private sector. This circulation of money and personnel can produce absurdities such as the University of Pennsylvania’s Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, whose only notable output since its opening in 2018 has been the classified documents that its founder left in his office there. More usually, though, these schools function as think tanks, facilitating valuable exchanges between academic theorists and real-world practitioners.
The Carr Center is “distinctive,” its faculty director, Mathias Risse, said in its 2021-22 report, because it is a “two-way street.” When nongovernmental organizations colonize the academic end of the street, they can influence the traffic on the Acela corridor and seed their ideas and personnel at the other end, in government. When universities become intellectual laundries for NGO activism, foolish ideas make bad policy.
Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
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