I heard about the controversy—on Twitter and in text threads—before I saw the clips myself. Earlier this month, in a four-hour hearing before the U.S. House Committee on Education, Harvard president Claudine Gay, University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill, and M.I.T. president Sally Kornbluth responded to a line of questioning from G.O.P. Rep. Elise Stefanik about students calling for genocide against the Jewish people. Their responses, which have now reverberated across the internet and the world, were in many ways a rage-inducing display of over-lawyered, inhumane, rhetorical evasion. Why are you making an easy thing look so hard? I wondered. Just say that calls for genocide against Jews or any group are bad!

But looking past that sensational moment of equivocation, Stefanik’s question was in some ways a perfect political snare. The New York Republican didn’t simply ask whether genocide is wrong, but whether calling for genocide “violates your code of conduct.” Perhaps sensing a trap, the presidents fell back into a defensive, legalistic crouch. Most of us watching the clips, inundated with news reports about the horrors unfolding in the Middle East, were looking for an unambiguous rejection of hatred. But it never arrived.