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jakeluppin · 11 months ago

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A long but good read on antisemitism at universities and what could/should be done on campuses. Really good, especially for those of us in academia. Full article below, but a few highlights I wanted to share:

Many students today have little exposure to ideological diversity on campus, and most agree on most politically fraught topics, such as abortion or transgender rights, said Eitan Hersh, a professor of political science at Tufts University. Since issues in the Middle East are so divisive, even among groups that otherwise tend to align politically, students don’t know how to talk about them. They are “not equipped to know how to deal with that,” Hersh said.

“Students have been entirely left alone to sort this out for themselves with zero institutional support, with zero attempts to organize any kind of rational discussion or conversation about the issue,” [Tyler Austin Harper, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College] said. “It’s not a big surprise that they’re floundering when adults have been too cowardly to do their jobs.”

A pro-Palestinian demonstrator asked [Jared Levy, an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Texas at Austin] how he could defend Israel. “I sat there in the rain for an hour and a half talking to students about why I supported Israel,” Levy said. He talked about the importance of a Jewish homeland, about his conviction that Hamas was a terrorist organization, and that Israel had made mistakes but had a right to defend itself. Some of the students with the pro- Palestinian group, he said, didn’t understand what Hamas was and had just been told by friends or social media that Israel was committing genocide and was an apartheid state.

“A lot of students have been eager to engage in dialogue and weren’t just here to yell in my face,” Levy said. At the local Hillel, a Jewish campus-life organization with chapters on many campuses, he said they’ve discussed organizing a “neutral- ground dialogue.” But despite Levy’s success in engaging with students one on one, he doesn’t feel the campus is ready for group discussions. “We came to the conclusion that things need to cool down first,” he said.

A Jewish student’s nose is broken in a melee sparked by attempts to burn an Israeli flag. Messages declaring “Glory to our Martyrs” and “Divestment From Zionist Genocide Now” are projected onto the façade of a campus building. Jewish students huddle inside a campus library while protesters shouting “Free Palestine” bang on the glass walls.

With each new headline and video snippet that goes viral, the pressure on colleges to respond forcefully and quickly to incidents of antisemitism is building. So too is the pressure to resist calls from politicians, donors, and alumni to crack down on protesters in ways that stifle protected speech.

College leaders, who’ve been lambasted over the past few months for failing to tackle antisemitism with the same ardor they’ve confronted other forms of prejudice and hate, are having to make quick judgment calls under the harsh glare of the national spotlight and the war between Israel and Hamas.

The questions are complicated, and backlash is certain. What counts as antisemitism? How can campuses help Jewish students feel safe? And perhaps of greatest consequence for colleges, where is the line between protected speech and prohibited harassment, and how should students who cross it be disciplined?

College leaders today “face tremendous pressures from competing groups of students, faculty, alumni, and administrators,” said Ethan Katz, associate professor of history and Jewish studies at the University of California at Berkeley, one of several universities facing lawsuits over alleged antisemitism. “The number and intensity of those pressures is pretty widely underestimated by the public.”

The Chronicle spoke with more than 20 scholars, free-speech experts, faculty members, and students — all of whom echoed a similar message: Battling antisemitism is one of the most pressing challenges facing campus leaders today, and it is also one of the most difficult.

Many colleges have taken a typically academic approach to the situation, forming or expanding task forces on antisemitism, and often, Islamophobia. To protect students who feel threatened, these groups have proposed tightening security, clarifying reporting procedures, and improving mental-health supports. They’re examining speech codes and student-conduct policies to ensure they’re being applied evenly and fairly. The task forces themselves are proving controversial, especially when it comes to who should be appointed to them.

When campus leaders are called on to intervene in a dispute, the terrain can turn treacherous. If they discipline pro-Palestinian protesters over chants many consider antisemitic, they’re accused of trampling free-speech rights. If they defend the right to demonstrate, they’re accused of failing to protect Jewish students from antisemitism. Impartial stances are attacked as weak, sparking debates about whether campus leaders should comment at all.

In Utah, Gov. Spencer Cox has made it clear he doesn’t want the leaders of public colleges speaking out about the Israel-Hamas war, or any other current events. “I do not care what your position is on Israel and Palestine. I don’t,” he said on December 1 after the Utah Board of Higher Education passed a resolution requiring colleges and their leaders to remain neutral on such topics. The board also called on colleges to spell out the protections and limitations of their speech policies.

Punishing protesters has only stoked anger on some campuses. When the president of George Washington University, Ellen M. Granberg, denounced pro-Palestinian messages projected onto the library in late October as antisemitic and the university suspended the group responsible, Students for Justice in Palestine, demonstrators formed a new coalition. Declaring that “the student movement won’t be silenced,” they marched to the president’s home.

Tightening restrictions on when and where students could protest has often resulted in even rowdier clashes. At the entrance to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known as Lobby 7, pro-Palestinian protesters went ahead with a demonstration in November even after the area was left off a list of approved sites that the administration released the night before the planned event. Students clashed, some were suspended, and outrage followed.

In early December, that anger erupted on the national stage, when three university presidents testifying before a House congressional hearing on antisemitism appeared to waffle on a question about whether students should be punished for calling for the genocide of Jewish people. The backlash led to the resignation of one of the presidents, the University of Pennsylvania’s Elizabeth Magill, and was a factor in the resignation of another, Harvard University’s Claudine Gay.

Nationally, colleges have been accused of doing too little, too late. Between October 7 — when Hamas militants attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking 240 hostage — and December 7, the Anti-Defamation League recorded more than 2,000 antisemitic incidents in the United States, compared with 465 during that period in 2022. At the same time, the free-expression group PEN America points out that there’s been a significant uptick in harassment of Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian students since the Israel-Hamas war broke out. Students have reported being called terrorists and having hijabs pulled off. Some politicians, including former President Donald J. Trump, have called for international students to forfeit their visas for participating in pro-Palestinian rallies. Three Palestinian American students were shot and injured — one seriously — on November 25 in Burlington, Vt., during their Thanksgiving break.

Pressure is building on colleges, and it’s coming from both Republicans and Democrats. Republicans have seized on rising antisemitism as evidence that the culture of higher education has dangerously liberal leanings. They’ve accused colleges of more aggressively enforcing speech and harassment codes when Black or Hispanic students accuse people of being racist and looking the other way when hateful, or even violent, speech is hurled at Jewish students.

More than two dozen colleges are under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education over complaints of antisemitism or Islamophobia. The vast majority of the investigations began after the October 7 Hamas attacks. The Education Department reminded colleges in November of their legal obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to “take immediate and appropriate action to respond to harassment that creates a hostile environment.” That extends to discrimination against people based on shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics, including Jewish, Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian students.

Students complaining of antisemitism have sued several universities, including the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California system and its Berkeley campus, New York University, and Carnegie Mellon University.

Eyal Yakoby, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania who spoke at a news conference before the House hearing, is one of two students who sued his university, calling it an “incubation lab for virulent anti-Jewish hatred, harassment, and discrimination.” The lawsuit contends that Jewish students have been subjected to antisemitic chants, slurs, and graffiti, including a spray-painted swastika in an academic building.

Yakoby says the university has ignored his complaints, while aggressively disciplining those who harass other minority groups. “When it comes to the protection of Penn’s Jewish students,” the lawsuit states, “the rules do not apply.”

Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union joined a pro-Palestinian group in suing Florida higher-education officials and Gov. Ron DeSantis after the Republican governor ordered public colleges in the state to “deactivate” campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, and Chancellor Ray Rodrigues of the State University System of Florida conveyed that message to system presidents. That order, the plaintiffs said, violated the First Amendment.

Threats are also coming from state politicians, including Democrats. On December 9, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York said in a letter that a call for genocide made on a public-college campus would violate state and federal law, as well as codes of conduct. Colleges that failed to discipline students for engaging in such behavior, she wrote, would face “aggressive enforcement action.”

To Jeffrey Melnick, an American-studies professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston whose research interests include Black-Jewish relations, reports of antisemitism have turned into a “moral panic”: They have roots in a real situation but have been heightened out of fear. Colleges need to carefully distinguish, he says, between true instances of antisemitism and those he believes shouldn’t be considered antisemitism, such as chanting “Intifada revolution.”

If phrases like that make Jewish students uncomfortable, colleges need to help them understand their history and what they mean to the Palestinian movement, said Melnick, who is Jewish.

“Our main job as university instructors is ‘teaching the conflicts,’” he said. “You don’t shy away from them. You say: ‘This is complicated. A lot of people feel really invested in this, and now we need to kind of drill down and figure out what it all means.’”

While antisemitism needs to be confronted, Melnick said, the “panic” is distracting from the continuing violence in Gaza as well as other forms of hate on campuses. When college presidents are called on to condemn antisemitism and “no questions are asked” about how they’re handling Islamophobia, he said, “that silence speaks really loudly to me.”

Kenneth S. Stern, now director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, in 2004 drafted what became known as the “working definition” of antisemitism as a way to help data collectors identify trends in such incidents. Stern identifies antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” He goes on to say, “Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

The definition also provides examples of antisemitic acts, including “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination,” “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis,” and “holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.”

Though other definitions of antisemitism exist, Stern’s is one of the most widely accepted, having been adopted by the U.S. Department of State and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. In 2019 then-President Trump required all federal agencies, including the Education Department, to use Stern’s definition when assessing violations to Title VI.

The move drew widespread criticism, especially from Stern, who considered it an attack on free speech. Using the definition in Title VI enforcement has a “chilling effect” on administrators, who may try to over-correct speech violations out of fear of being sued, he told The Chronicle.

Such controversies have surfaced repeatedly in recent months. Chants like “Globalize the Intifada” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” have become staples of pro-Palestinian protests.

Rep. Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, demanded a yes or no answer during the House hearing in December about whether calling for genocide — which she’d earlier equated with such pro-Palestinian chants — would warrant discipline. None of the presidents pointed out that the meanings of those phrases, and whether or not they’re antisemitic, are contested. The impression they left in those deer-in- the-headlights moments, when they all insisted that context was important, was that they wouldn’t immediately condemn actual, explicit calls for the elimination of the Jewish people.

Many Jews and their supporters do see the chants as calling for violence, the destruction of Israel, and the genocide of Jewish people across the world. But to many of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators, including students, the calls are for the liberation of Palestinians and the return of land they believe belongs to them.

Problems arise when definitions of antisemitism, such as Stern’s, are used as speech codes, said Will Creeley, legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a free-speech advocacy group. Many of the examples listed under Stern’s definition are protected speech under the First Amendment, as are pro-Palestinian chants, even some cases when one calls for “horrific acts, including genocide.” Other acts, especially ones that are true threats or incitements to violence, go beyond the bounds of the First Amendment, Creeley said.

“To impose a blanket ban on certain sentiments or phrases,” he added, “would imperil a great deal of constitutionally protected expression.”

In an initial hearing on antisemitism, in November, House Republicans spent much of the time blasting campus offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion, accusing them of dividing students and fomenting hatred, especially against Jewish students. Some argued that such offices actually encourage anti-Jewish sentiments by dividing groups of people into oppressors and oppressed and failing to see Jews, whom many regard as relatively privileged white people, as among those oppressed. In the second hearing, with the college presidents, Republican representatives repeatedly raised questions about whether Harvard was disciplining students for racist acts but not antisemitic ones.

A recent article on Jewish Insider.com described deep rifts within the current and former leadership of prominent Jewish communal organizations about whether campus diversity offices can be partners in combating antisemitism. Two former longtime heads of the Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee argued that those offices and the infrastructure they support only worsen problems for Jews. Leaders of those organizations have recently urged members to work with diversity offices to better incorporate Jewish concerns into the DEI structure.

Meanwhile, lawmakers have taken advantage of the spotlight on antisemitism to intensify attacks on campus diversity offices. U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Republican from Texas, introduced a bill in December that would strip federal funding for any university that requires students to write diversity statements, blaming them for the spread of antisemitism on college campuses.

“Make no mistake — the DEI bureaucracy is directly responsible for a toxic campus culture that separates everyone into oppressor vs. oppressed,” he said in a news release announcing the legislation, which also bans diversity statements as a condition of employment.

Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, calls such critiques “an orchestrated attempt to discredit and dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in higher education.” She added that “these attempts by individuals, well-funded organizations, and legislators who have leveled such criticisms and misrepresentations stand in opposition to higher education’s efforts to create more diverse and inclusive campuses and experiences for all students.”

Many diversity offices, Granberry Russell said, provide opportunities for cross- cultural dialogues and encourage students from various racial and cultural groups to collaborate on community-service and other projects.

Georgina Dodge, vice president for diversity and inclusion at the University of Maryland at College Park, said her office is working closely with a task force on antisemitism and Islamophobia created in November at the main campus in College Park.

“Within our department, we have a unit dedicated to supporting any member of our community who has experienced hate or bias, which includes antisemitism,” Dodge wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “This has been a key element of our work for years, and recent events have only underscored the importance of this kind of care on our campuses.”

Granberry Russell agrees. “What is evident today is that there is much more work ahead,” she wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “But to ignore the work, and the evidence-based research that informs the work, of offices specifically designed to respond to the needs of a diverse campus, and to conclude that such offices” contribute to antisemitism is “ill-informed and short-sighted.”

Some, however, question whether diversity offices are equipped to handle the complexities of antisemitism and Islamophobia, especially at a time when their work is under siege from right-wing groups that have succeeded in getting many banned.

“Antisemitism doesn’t fit with what is generally DEI’s focus today — on structural issues of equity and inclusion,” said Berkeley’s Katz, who’s also faculty director for the UC flagship’s Center for Jewish Studies. In 2019, he co-founded the university’s Antisemitism Education Initiative, which has worked closely with campus groups, including the university’s DEI office, to educate people about the roots and different forms of anti-Jewish bias and hatred. That kind of close cooperation with diversity offices, he said, is somewhat of a rarity across higher education, as well as corporations.

“It’s clearly very difficult for DEI professionals to figure out what to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Katz said. “When attacks are coming from white nationalists shouting ‘Jews will not replace us,’” in Charlottesville, Va., “it’s much easier to wrap your head around it and get on board.” But when the hostile language is coming from the left, and the terminology is disputed, the connections to hatred and exclusion might be harder for diversity officers to grasp without additional training and education, Katz said.

Colleges have failed to help students navigate “one of the most complicated geopolitical issues in the 21st century,” said Tyler Austin Harper, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College who frequently writes about issues involving politics, culture, and race.

Part of an administrator’s job is encouraging open debate about complicated topics, he said. Rather than censoring student speech, colleges should be encouraging faculty members to model how to have conversations with people who disagree with them.

“Students have been entirely left alone to sort this out for themselves with zero institutional support, with zero attempts to organize any kind of rational discussion or conversation about the issue,” Harper said. “It’s not a big surprise that they’re floundering when adults have been too cowardly to do their jobs.”

That’s assuming that students are ready to have those conversations. “A lot of campuses are struggling with what to do now,” said Todd Green, director of campus partnerships at Interfaith America, which works to promote greater understanding among people of different religious backgrounds. “Do you try to bring students together now, or wait?”

In a different time, his group might have suggested bringing people from different faiths together in a room to try to find some common ground. To many, though, the issues at a time of daily bloodshed are too fraught, the emotions too raw. People from opposite sides may be shouting at each other, but there’s little talking, Green said.

Interfaith America, he added, “isn’t traditionally a crisis-response group. But we’re in the midst of a crisis that, in my years of higher education, is the most tense it’s ever been on campuses — even compared with post 9/11. In this moment, it’s very difficult to bring students together to try to build relationships.”

Some students, like Jared Levy, an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, are doing their best to connect. Levy went to a Jewish boarding school in New York City, where his parents are both rabbis. In November, hundreds of UT students walked out of class to join in a large pro-Palestinian demonstration. Levy, with an Israeli flag pinned on his backpack, noticed a small group of Jewish students standing quietly off to the side. “People are being very cautious. You don’t want to be the next student to get punched in the face,” Levy said, referring to an incident at Tulane University where a Jewish student was smacked with a megaphone during a tussle over an Israeli flag.

A pro-Palestinian demonstrator asked him how he could defend Israel. “I sat there in the rain for an hour and a half talking to students about why I supported Israel,” Levy said. He talked about the importance of a Jewish homeland, about his conviction that Hamas was a terrorist organization, and that Israel had made mistakes but had a right to defend itself. Some of the students with the pro- Palestinian group, he said, didn’t understand what Hamas was and had just been told by friends or social media that Israel was committing genocide and was an apartheid state.

Other students, like Katie Halushka, a Jewish senior at George Washington University, also wouldn’t be comfortable participating in an open forum or other type of civil discourse. While she hasn’t felt threatened much on campus, even after Students for Justice in Palestine projected messages on a campus building, she’s still tried to avoid talking about the war out of fear that it could permanently sever some of her relationships.

“It’s been sort of a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation,” Halushka said. “If you say anything, someone will be upset with you.”

A popular move among college administrators has been to establish advisory groups to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia. They are typically made up of faculty members, experts, and sometimes students.

Most of the groups, often called task forces, lack the authority to make changes or respond directly to incident reports, but they meet multiple times a week to evaluate campus policies and climate.

Following its creation in early November, Columbia University’s 15-person Task Force on Antisemitism first met in full in mid-December. Columbia has been one of the most tumultuous campuses in recent months, with several tense rallies, dueling faculty statements, and clashes between students. It’s one of the colleges under investigation by the Department of Education for incidents of alleged antisemitism and Islamophobia. The university also banned two pro-Palestinian groups — Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace — saying the groups held “unauthorized” events that included “threatening rhetoric and intimidation.” The following week, 400 students and 200 faculty members protested the suspensions.

One of the group’s main goals is to evaluate the university’s policies on free speech and demonstrations, said Nicholas Lemann, a co-chair of the task force. When Columbia suspended the student groups, many on campus were unclear whether it was on the grounds of an existing campus policy or if the administration had created a new one. Once the group understands the specifics of the policies, Lemann said, they’ll recommend how to revise them.

He also hopes the group can study the root cause of discomfort among Jewish students, evaluate where antisemitism is present in classrooms, and include lessons on antisemitism in orientation programs for incoming freshmen.

“This is not an easy moment at our campus and many other campuses,” Lemann said. “But I do think that our charge from the president and the way we have been working so far makes me optimistic that we can produce something useful.”

Some task forces have had a rockier start, though. Ari Kelman recently resigned as co-chair of a Stanford University subcommittee on antisemitism, bias, and communication, after some controversy about his writings on the difficulties of defining antisemitism.

David Wolpe, a rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, arrived at Harvard University’s Divinity School as a visiting scholar planning to do research and teach a class on Jewish spirituality. But since October 7, combating antisemitism has become his “full-time job.”

Amid a whirlwind of complaints over her response to the war and a highly publicized statement from a coalition of student groups solely blaming Israel for “all unfolding violence,” Gay, who was then Harvard’s president, called Wolpe asking for help. She was “clearly shaken,” Wolpe said, and he agreed to join a new advisory panel to help her respond to antisemitism on campus.

Wolpe’s inbox has since been filled with reports of antisemitism at Harvard, and he’s spent much of his time talking with administrators, donors, and alumni about the problem. But following Gay’s testimony during the House hearing this month, Wolpe met a breaking point. In a now-viral X thread, he announced his resignation from the panel.

While Wolpe anticipated that the university would make changes to campus, he said it wasn’t moving fast enough to discipline students, define antisemitism, enforce current regulations, or begin “serious education about Judaism and antisemitism.” Gay’s testimony was the final straw. “I saw what was going on as a five-alarm fire,” Wolpe said. “The way it was being treated was a sort of slow- burning flame.”

The focus, he said, should be on creating civil discourse and communication. Many campuses have become “screaming echo-chambers” where students find it impossible to have a conversation with someone whose view is different from their own, he said.

“If you can’t model civil discourse at Harvard University, where do you expect it?” Wolpe said.

There’s no sign that the political, cultural, and legal pressures on colleges over their handling of antisemitism will let up anytime soon. In addition to investigating the responses to antisemitism at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce has set up an email address to report antisemitism on college campuses.

Wealthy donors will continue to flex their muscle, and faculty groups will continue to push back. The president of the American Association of University Professors, Irene Mulvey, issued a statement on December 12 saying that universities are obliged to protect both student safety and free expression. “We must not allow partisan actors to exploit this moment to demand further control over university curriculum and policy in order to shape American higher education to a political agenda,” she wrote.

Student protests continued to reverberate as the semester came to a close. Many of the demonstrators’ tactics have become increasingly disruptive — sit-ins, occupying buildings past normal hours of operation, and directly targeting campus programs and partnerships with Israel.

Colleges have ramped up their consequences as well. On December 11, 41 Brown University students were arrested after holding a pro-Palestinian sit-in at a university building and refusing to leave before 6 p.m. The next day, Rutgers University suspended a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine on its New Brunswick campus for “disrupting classes, a program, meals, and students studying” and “allegations of vandalism,” according to a letter an administrator sent the organization. The student group accused the university of applying a “racist double standard” and attempting to silence Palestinian voices. Rutgers is the first public college to suspend the group.

As war continues to rage in the Gaza Strip, those who are pleading for a free exchange on campus of even sharply divergent opinions worry it may never come. Melnick, the professor from the University of Massachusetts at Boston, said that despite his “annoyingly optimistic” nature, he’s never seen the campus climate as grim as it has been over the past few months. And, with no easy solutions, some fear the turmoil could deepen in the new year.

An incident at Syracuse University in December underscored just how fraught things have become. Even a seemingly innocuous event — in this case an advertised study session before finals — can become a flashpoint. Students were gathered in the student center on December 14, three days after the university’s chancellor had released a statement saying that calling for the genocide of any group of people would violate the university’s conduct code. One student had taped a flier to her laptop that read “globalize the Intifada.” Some students complained they felt threatened. A campus administrator asked the student to remove it and she refused, a video posted on Instagram showed. The administrator told her the word called for genocide, and constituted harassment. She told him the word meant uprising and did not call for genocide.

A campus spokeswoman said other students had similar fliers that they were told to put away in their notebooks or book bags and that when they didn’t, they were told such refusal violated the student-conduct code. It’ll be up to the university’s Community Standards office to determine what, if any, punishment they’ll face.

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