11 months ago
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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