By Ellen Wang ’25 and Belén Yudess ’25
Editor-in-Chief and Copy Editor
French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy gave a talk on Nov. 5 in the Hampton Room titled “Populism on the Left and Right” at a joint event sponsored by the Scripps Humanities Institute, European Union Center, and Claremont Hillel. The event intended to “explore [Lévy’s] insights on global conflicts and democracy” through a moderated discussion by Pomona College professors Mietek P. Bodusyński and Oona Eisenstadt.
Lévy’s event as part of a North American college campus tour shocked many Scripps students and faculty due to his condemnation of survivors and support of perpetrators of sexual violence. Most notably, Lévy gained attention for his defense of director Roman Polanski, who was convicted in California for the rape of a 13-year-old girl in 1977.
In response to the decision to host Lévy at Scripps, Cassidy Bensko ’25 said, “You have the freedom of speech to be a rape apologist wherever you want, but like, why are you bringing that to historically women’s college?”
The Scripps Humanities Institute, EU Center, and Hillel did not respond for comment.
Additionally, Lévy has faced public backlash for statements that a woman’s decision to wear any type of veil or face covering is a “sign of inferiority,” and, specifically in regards to Muslim women, “an invitation to rape.”
An anonymous Scripps Advocate commented on the organization’s shared concern regarding this event and how Lévy’s presence on campus may affect the campus community.
“It was shocking to me, because I would have thought that the people hosting this event would have done a little more research into who they were bringing in,” she said. “It definitely sends a message of whether we are welcoming to survivors … Because I feel like up until now, the community we’ve cultivated on campus definitely is in that direction, but it’s very questionable when something like this happens.”
Following the news, Scripps Advocates contacted Vice President of Student Affairs and Dean of Students Dr. Sha Bradley on Nov. 1 to discuss possibly canceling the event. Bradley referred Advocates to Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty Dr. Mary Hatcher-Skeers. On Nov. 4, Skeers responded to the organization’s email explaining the college’s rationale for allowing the event.
“Mary Hatcher’s Skeers email acknowledged that while there may be concerns for the speaker’s views and past comments, they uphold the “academic freedom” of the host organizations to hold the event,” said an additional anonymous Scripps Advocate.
The Scripps Advocates member noted how the administration’s disregard for Lévy’s past imbued a sense of doubt. “It gives me less faith in our administration to do what’s right and put the community first,” she said. “It’s disappointing because it was a complete shutdown of our concerns without further opportunity to discuss or meet about our frustrations, but we acknowledge the fact that we comparatively voiced our concerns late.”
According to her email response to Advocates, Hatcher-Skeers reasoned that the college’s decision to host Lévy, despite his previous statements, aimed to “uphold academic freedom” on campus.
After the Elizabeth Hubert Malott Public Affairs Program asked Washington Post columnist George F. Will to speak at Scripps in 2014, he was disinvited following a Washington Post column in which he described survivors as craving a “coveted status,” and compared trigger warnings to censorship.
Former Scripps President Lori-Bettison Vargas affirmed this decision in a letter to the Scripps community. “Sexual assault is not a conservative or liberal issue. And it is too important to be trivialized in a political debate or wrapped into a celebrity controversy,” Bettison-Varga said. “For that reason, after Mr. Will authored a column questioning the validity of a specific sexual assault case that reflects similar experiences reported by Scripps students, we decided not to finalize the speaker agreement.”
Bensko echoed Vargas’ words from 2014, highlighting the implications of hosting Lévy. “I don’t know if it’s some perverse stab at supporting freedom of expression, to say that it is free speech to bring someone who has outwardly supported rapists and sexual assaulters to a women’s college campus, as if women need to be told again … that their bodies are not their own.”
Shivom Parihar CM ’28 expressed similar feelings about colleges’ responsibilities to maintain certain societal boundaries. “I’m not saying platforming someone is necessarily an endorsement, but I do think platforming someone is at the very least saying that … they should have a voice in the conversation, and I think this does cross the line of people who should have a voice in the conversation.”
During his talk, Lévy mentioned recent experience with censorship, referring to the electronic newsletter Shelf Awareness’ decision to dismiss an advertisement for his newest book, Israel Alone.
Bensko illuminated the blatant hypocrisy behind Lévy’s claim and the recent censorship occurring across the Claremont Colleges, specifically the suspension of 12 Pomona students in response to the Oct. 7 takeover of Carnegie Hall.
“I’m proud of the institution I go to because of my peers and the faculty members that work really hard to make being an intellectual retain its meaning,” Bensko said. “I found it to be honestly insulting to Scripps students.. when he’s a pseudo-intellectual media celebrity who’s built his career out of scandal mongering, and he came and talked a whole bunch about free speech and how he specifically was being censored, and by censored, he meant not being picked up by a single advertising agency, which I find to be deeply ironic, considering that there are … 12 students at Pomona that have been suspended without any sort of [Judicial] Board hearing.”
Aside from Lévy’s perspectives on survivors and women, his invitation surprised some community members due to his lack of scholarly credibility.
“I am surprised that Scripps would have someone like Lévy invited as a philosopher,” said Professor of Spanish, Latin American and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures Marina Perez de Mendiola. “He.. unfailingly advocate[s] for systematic military intervention in non-Western countries.”
Bensko shared a similar sentiment regarding Lévy’s reputation. “From talking to Francophile faculty and friends, I realized that this guy is pretty widely dismissed in France because of allegations of plagiarism, of using ghost writers, but also because of Islamophobic [comments and] his defense of child rapist Roman Polanski [and] the director of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.”
As she assessed the room, Bensko observed a lack of Scripps students in attendance, a fact she correlated with how challenging it was to find information and register for the event.
“It wasn’t on the [Scripps Humanities Institute] Instagram, even though they had an event happening the exact same day that they did publicize for.. and the only email I received was from Monday, the day before, which would have been after the RSVP closed,” she said. “I definitely didn’t recognize a lot of the people in the room, which was something that I found to be a bit odd. So it makes me wonder who the event was really for, because if they were making an event for Scripps students, I imagine that they wouldn’t bring a rape apologist in.”
Another qualm with the event was concerning the purpose and subject matter of Lévy’s talk, which was promoted as a discussion around “global politics and democracy.”
“[They] failed to mention in any sort of advertising that this was an extension of his highly politicized book tour for his book Israel Alone,” Bensko said. “It’s honestly cowardly that the Humanities Institute wasn’t at least willing to say what they were doing.. bringing this deeply problematic pseudo intellectual onto campus without any sort of transparency or making that information available to the student body, who, I think, if they had known who he was, would have been deeply critical.”
Lévy spent a considerable amount of time fielding questions surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict. In response to one of the questions, Lévy said, “there may be, again, social inequalities [in Israel], there may be class struggle, as the Marxists would say, but there is no apartheid between [Arabs and Muslims] and the Jews.”
The United Nations International Court of Justice found Israel responsible for apartheid on July 19.
Bensko commented on the perceived dishonesty embedded within Lévy’s discourse and how his statements felt contradictory to the supposed purpose of the Humanities Institute’s speaker series: “Can We Escape the Echo Chamber?”
“‘[Can We Escape] the Echo Chamber’ is the name of the series and yet it felt deeply ideological.. he was saying things that were absolutely not true,” she said. “But he was in a room full of people who had clearly been… selectively advertised to agree with him. I didn’t feel as though there was really any room for dissent or it felt like the event was de facto not open to Scripps students.”
Correction: The article was edited to include that the host organizations did not respond for comment.
Photo Courtesy: Frances Walton ’26
