EDUCATION
‘I’ve never seen a worse hearing’: College
presidents debacle meets PR blame game
Who got paid to give advice on one of the most
disastrous public relations moments in modern memory?
By HAILEY
FUCHS and MICHAEL STRATFORD
12/22/2023
05:00 AM EST
The
appearance of three elite university presidents on Capitol Hill this month to
testify about campus antisemitism was a flamboyant debacle — prompting a
national backlash and repercussions that forced at least one resignation and
demands for more.
In certain
circles of Washington and New York, the conversation is turning toward a less
visible dimension of the controversy: Who got paid to give advice on one of the
most disastrous public relations moments in modern memory?
The answer,
in part, is that the university leaders were being advised by some of the most
prominent legal and communications experts in the field of “crisis
communications.” Now, the crisis communicators are in a PR crisis of their own:
Rather than communicating, they are hunkering down in the storm. They’ve
declined to comment publicly, even as critics say they share culpability for an
episode that devastated the reputations of their clients.
University
of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill is out of her job. MIT President Sally
Kornbluth, meanwhile, has withstood calls for her firing. So has Harvard
President Claudine Gay, though she’s been engulfed by a plagiarism scandal that
has only intensified in the wake of the hearing.
The Harvard
and Penn presidents turned to attorneys at the prominent law firm WilmerHale —
including Jamie Gorelick, the former deputy attorney general turned Ivanka
Trump and Jared Kushner lawyer — to prepare them for the hearing held by the
House Education and the Workforce Committee. WilmerHale also had “some
communication” with MIT in the lead-up to the hearing, according to a person
familiar with the preparations.
Harvard was
represented by crisis communications doyenne Risa Heller, and Penn was
represented by PR adviser Susan Lagana of top D.C. firm Invariant. The head of
Harvard’s more powerful governing body, former Commerce Secretary Penny
Pritzker, recruited the PR giant Edelman, which is run by a longtime friend of
the Democratic mega-donor, to help with the college’s general response to the
war but not preparation for the hearing.
The
presidents had met privately the day before the hearing with the committee
chair to get a sense of what to expect. If anything — judging by discursive,
equivocating and legalistic answers they gave to whether calling for genocide
of Jews would draw punitive measures on their campuses — the expensive
preparation may have even contributed to their difficulties.
What’s also
notable is how the advisers have taken flight when the going got rough.
Heller, for
instance, earlier this year cooperated extensively with a mostly favorable New
York magazine profile of her practice, entitled “Get Me Risa Heller!” But
Heller is hard to get on the record lately. The New York based consultant, a
former staff member of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, declined to
comment.
Others
involved in the preparation followed suit. It is not yet publicly known how
much the universities spent on crisis communications during the episode.
What they
got in return, in the eyes of critics, was the worst advice money can buy.
The debacle
was so spectacular, so memorable, that it continues to echo in a festival of
recriminations around Washington. Those involved are trying to distance
themselves from the radioactive mess. Some competitors appear to be trying to
boost business off of it. An employee of another big law firm said rivals are
trying to find unhappy officials affiliated with the universities to poach them
from WilmerHale.
Longtime
lobbyist Bruce Mehlman, known for his analyses of macro trends in politics and
policy, said he plans to include the mess in his year-end takeaways.
“The
university presidents’ testimony really demonstrated how fraught apolitical
entities’ forays into politics can be,” Mehlman said.
There is,
however, background chatter from sources favorable to them that the problem was
not their advice but the university presidents’ failure to follow it.
Someone
close to the hearing preparation for one of the university presidents defended
the team’s training, during which the leader was instructed to lead with
“empathy and values” and stay away from legal jargon. Another person familiar
with the preparation for the universities argued that Penn President Liz
Magill’s answers in response to Rep. Elise Stefanik’s (R-N.Y.) questioning did
not reflect the guidance she received; Magill announced her resignation days
later. The people were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to
discuss the preparations.
“I’ve never
seen a worse hearing in 30 years of watching Congress really closely,” said
Republican lobbyist Sam Geduldig. “Either the Ivy League clients were
hopelessly obtuse or WilmerHale’s prep was malpractice, or both.”
WilmerHale
declined to comment. Spokespeople for Harvard and Penn declined to comment for
this article; an MIT spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Invariant’s Lagana didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Richard
Edelman, the leader of the PR giant, said his firm was recruited to the project
by Pritzker, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation and former Commerce
Secretary under President Barack Obama. The two are longtime friends from
Chicago. Edelman, a graduate of Harvard’s college and business school, said he
was in Cambridge two weeks ago to personally assist in the fallout after the
hearing. He declined to comment further.
An early
decision point for the presidents was whether to accept Republicans’ invitation
to testify before the education committee on a hearing about their response to
a rise in antisemitism, which was already being pilloried by lawmakers as weak
and insufficient. The universities were informed they had a day to respond and
appear voluntarily — or potentially be subpoenaed.
Others
invited did not accept the invitation. Columbia University’s president, for
example, declined to appear, citing scheduling conflicts.
Both
Harvard and Penn were advised by at least one higher education association to
avoid voluntarily testifying given the ongoing Education Department
investigations into antisemitism on their campuses, according to a lobbyist
familiar with the deliberations.
The moment
that quickly proliferated on social media from the five-hour hearing was
questioning from Stefanik, in which the New York Republican asked the
university leaders whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their
universities’ codes of conduct. They each responded with qualified and
conditional answers, telling Stefanik that it would depend on the context of
the statements.
High-profile
Washington hearings that have the potential to become politically contentious
usually involve some sort of mock hearing with the witnesses and their
advisers. The team will plan for possible critical questions or lines of
attack, and the witnesses may be hammered by people who they have not yet met.
If they are available, former members of Congress — with experience in the
hearing room — may ask the questions.
“The
preparation and the result is tantamount to kind of political malpractice,”
said a lobbyist in the higher education space, granted anonymity to discuss
sensitive matters. “They did not do the things nor posture their response to
what was [coming] for that hearing in any way to adequately prepare.”
Even amid
the bipartisan momentum that had built earlier this year around banning TikTok,
the chief executive officer of that social media app left Capitol Hill largely
unscathed after his testimony before House lawmakers in March. A lobbyist with
knowledge of those meeting preparations emphasized that the TikTok hearing
lacked the same kind of breakthrough viral moment, “the definition of success,
I think, when you are Daniel in a lion’s den.”
This
lobbyist, granted anonymity to speak freely about private discussions, said the
university presidents’ hearing before the education committee demonstrated why
preparations to handle congressional panels require people with a political
background. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, maintains a number of former
lawmakers among its registered lobbyists, according to federal disclosures.
At the
antisemitism hearing, the university presidents appeared to tiptoe around
offending liberals instead of offending the rest of the political spectrum,
said Mehlman, a veteran lobbyist in Washington. It was the crescendo of
so-called “woke-lash” that has plagued 2023, he said, a year that included both
the Disney-DeSantis fight and the Bud Light backlash.
“It seems
to me they prepared for a legal proceeding and found themselves in a political
environment bringing a knife to a gunfight,” Mehlman said. “A congressional
hearing is political theater, not a legal proceeding, and you need to really
prepare witnesses for the sorts of political zingers and traps that most
witnesses are sure to face.”
The
university presidents had arrived to testify in a Washington in which they
increasingly have few friends on either side of the aisle. Republicans for
decades have lamented the progressive tilt of university campuses, and those
concerns have translated into even sharper hostility toward the institutions
since the Trump administration.
GOP
lawmakers successfully slapped a tax on wealthy university endowments in their
2017 tax law, and Republicans have since signaled they want to further target
institutions they view as “woke” indoctrination mills.
Elite
universities’ relationship with Democrats has frayed, too. There’s bipartisan
interest in Congress, for example, in scrutinizing and imposing new
restrictions on the foreign funding that pours into campuses.
Other
reliable federal streams of funding are also at risk. Just as the university
presidents were testifying, House Democrats were finalizing a deal with
Republicans that would strip federal student loan eligibility from wealthy
universities like Harvard, Penn and MIT to pay for an expansion of Pell grants
for short-term job training programs, such as welding courses.
The
fractious hearing came at a time when college presidents “are walking an
incredible tightrope” when it comes to policing hate speech on their campuses,
said Peter Lake, a law professor who directs Stetson University’s Center for
Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy.
Many
universities, including private institutions, follow what the Supreme Court has
said about hate speech, which is that it’s generally permissible unless it
rises to the level of a true threat against others. Yet the legal complexities
and nuances of those boundaries may not be well understood or liked by the
public.
“If
President Gay unabashedly said that we’ll censor hate speech that makes people
subjectively feel threatened, that statement could be used against Harvard in a
case down the road by free speech advocacy groups, and she knows that,” Lake
said.
“When
you’re sitting in a Congressional hearing, from a legal point of view, it’s
sort of ‘win today, lose tomorrow’ — or ‘lose today, win tomorrow,’” he said.
Lanny
Davis, a former White House special counsel for the Clinton administration,
speculated that someone must have coached Magill to rely on the phrase that
caused her trouble — “context-dependent.” It’s a contrast from what he has told
his own client, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, to forget the legal language
and speak conversationally.
Davis
emphasized he did not wish to criticize WilmerHale, but said he suspects the
lawyers in the room dominated the preparations, instead of communications
aides.
“They
didn’t use the sentences that I have used with congressional witnesses, which
is forget about everything I told you … use common English,” he said. “Their
performance suggests that they weren’t told to do that.”
Daniel
Lippman contributed to this report.
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