Op-ed authored by Brandeis Center Director of Corporate Initiatives Rory Lancman, published in The Hill on 12/18/23 The scenes of Jewish students experiencing antisemitism on college campuses are frightening. But colleges are also workplaces, and the antisemitism that Jewish staff and faculty are experiencing is no less frightening for its intensity, their inability to avoid it and their greater and more particularized fear of retaliation. The agency charged with enforcing federal anti-discrimination laws in defense of college employees, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and similar human rights commissions in the states and localities, must rise to the occasion to protect Jewish staff and faculty on college campuses, and indeed all Jewish workers in every employment setting. On campuses, college staff, particularly faculty, are more exposed to antisemitic abuse than students because they teach and maintain offices and office hours at fixed places and times. Their social media presence is an important part of their job, not just a hobby or extension of their social lives that can be turned off. Their scholarship — publications and speaking engagements — requires them to put themselves out there for the world to see. They cannot just “keep their heads down” as easily as Jewish students can (an odious solution to antisemitism as it is). And when college employees are victims of antisemitism, they, like all workers, must balance their demands for protection and redress with the very real threat of retaliation against their careers and livelihoods. The college staff and faculty employment ecosystem is a small one. Most college employees lack tenure, and even tenure is a tenuous defense against ostracization in a profession where rewards and punishments — faculty leadership appointments, publishing and conferencing opportunities, and academic collaboration — are doled out largely subjectively. Every college campus where Jewish students have endured frightening and degrading public expressions of rank antisemitism — speeches and symbolism and collective action supporting Jewish genocide and glorifying Jews being raped, kidnapped and murdered — is also a workplace where Jewish staff and faculty have endured the same. And worse. Since the October 7 massacre in Israel, I have counseled Jewish staff and faculty who’ve had their offices defaced, their classroom lectures disrupted, their online evaluations rigged, their previously renowned scholarship attacked, their academic displays taken down and their online spaces overrun with antisemitic invective. One Jewish professor was called out by name and falsely “accused” of having served in the Israel Defense Forces in a rant delivered by another professor in the latter’s class; shortly thereafter the bulletin board outside her office was vandalized. And Israeli staff and faculty working on American campuses are bearing some of the worst instances of workplace antisemitism. Some have taken a leave of absence or quit their positions outright. There is no workplace in America where such antisemitism should be tolerated, including when that workplace is a college campus. But normal workplace antidiscrimination norms aren’t being applied at colleges, and the EEOC has not adopted the same widely accepted definition of antisemitism as is being used when the victim is a student, not an employee. Simply put, the EEOC needs to join this fight immediately. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the primary federal statute that protects Jewish college students from antisemitism and is enforced administratively by the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Education. OCR has opened investigations at over a dozen college campuses in defense of students. Federal law, in the form of a presidential executive order, requires OCR in evaluating antisemitism complaints to consider the definition of antisemitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, a consortium of 35 national governments representing almost all the world’s Jewish population. The IHRA definition is widely embraced by America’s Jewish community and by hundreds of governments and nonprofit organizations in the U.S. and around the world, including in the Biden White House’s recently released U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. The IHRA definition focuses attention on certain historically antisemitic tropes about Jewish control and manipulation of the media, economy and government; Holocaust denial; and the demonization, delegitimization and application of double standards to the Jewish state of Israel (e.g., “Delegitimizing the state of Israel and in doing so denying the Jewish people their equal right to self-determination”). But it is the next section of the Civil Rights Act — Title VII — that is the prime federal antidiscrimination law protecting Jewish employees based on their religious beliefs, their ethnicity and, if those Jews are or were Israeli citizens, their national origin. Title VII is enforced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the EEOC has not yet explicitly embraced IHRA. It should — quickly. Even still, Title VII is a powerful statute that already gives the EEOC important tools to protect Jewish employees on college campuses. For example, to its great credit, the EEOC has proposed guidance on enforcing Title VII’s prohibition on workplace harassment that recognizes, as many courts already have, that certain symbols and phrases are so shocking — so degrading and evocative of hatred and violence — that even a single instance of their use in the workplace can establish an unlawfully discriminatory hostile environment. The EEOC guidance offers as examples the noose, the swastika and the “n word.” Is not the flag of Hamas and the depiction of Hamas terrorists paragliding into southern Israel on their way to murder Jewish children the swastikas of our time? The chant of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a call for extinguishing the Jewish state (and the Jews living there, if necessary) a degradation of Jewish identity, freedom and equality, if not an outright call to genocide?
Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education (JAFE) member and UC Berkeley grad student Hannah Schlacter also featured. 12/17/23
Published 12/15/23 by Insider Higher Ed; Story by Jessica Blake A survey of about 2,000 Jewish students across the country found their perceptions of antisemitism varied from one campus to another. A new report by Brandeis University says Jewish students’ perceptions of campus climate vary “dramatically” from institution to institution. The report, released Thursday by the university’s Maurice and Marilyn Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, is based on a survey of Jewish students at colleges and universities across the country and was designed to determine which campuses were “hot spots of antisemitism” since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. Participants were asked about their views on the level of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hostility on their campuses as well as their overall degree of concern about antisemitism. Each institution was then assigned a quartile ranking based on the results. As many as 83 percent of students at institutions in the top quartile for hostility reported some or much concern about antisemitism, compared to relatively few—55 percent—students in the lowest quartile. The survey sampled about 2,000 undergraduate students who had applied to participate in Birthright Israel, a heritage trip to Jerusalem for young adults of Jewish background. The respondents’ levels of religious and/or cultural education in primary and secondary school varied, and so did their opinions of the Israeli government. The sample population also spanned 51 colleges and universities of diverse size, location, selectivity and estimated Jewish population. Ken Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, voiced concern about the limitations of the survey and the students’ ties to Birthright Israel. “This isn’t representative of all Jewish students,” he said. Reports of antisemitism on college campuses and tensions on campuses related to the Israel-Hamas war have been a topic of heated discussion across the country since the conflict broke out in Israel on Oct. 7. Many college leaders have been widely criticized for their responses to Jewish students’ complaints of antisemitic incidents and hostility toward them on campuses. However, efforts to track students’ perceptions of antisemitism on campuses have been relatively limited. The Anti-Defamation League released findings from a similar survey in November. In addition to bolstering the volume of existing data on college antisemitism, Leonard Saxe, a professor of contemporary Jewish studies at Brandeis and co-author of the report, said he hopes the findings broaden the scope of campus climate coverage by national media. So far, public attention has mostly focused on elite private universities in the Northeast. “The universities that had been in the headlines … are not necessarily representative of what’s going on across the board,” Saxe said. He noted that at some colleges, such as Tulane University in New Orleans, there have been serious incidents of antisemitism and even assaults on Jewish students at protests, yet survey results show that Tulane students perceive the institution as one with a comparatively low level of hostility. “If you read newspapers, you would think that every single campus in the country is on fire,” he said. “But there are some campuses, even campuses that had serious incidents, where students don’t feel the level of harassment and being targeted that they do at other campuses.” “We think that that tells us that there may be things that campuses can do to address the problem,” Saxe added. Julia Jassey, CEO and co-founder of Jewish on Campus—a student-driven national organization, believes the data will be validating for many students. “It seems quite in line with the stories that we’re hearing and with the experiences that are being highlighted,” Jassey said. “While the antisemitic hostility is varying, the experience overwhelmingly among students across various campuses is that antisemitism is a real and growing problem.” She added that the most commonly perceived occurrences of antisemitism are no longer those of traditional tropes about the Jewish community but are in the context of the war and critiques of Israel as a nation. Across all four categories of institutions, from those with the highest to lowest levels of overall antisemitism, at least 63 percent of students reported a sense of anti-Israel hostility on campus, compared to at least 49 percent who agreed there was hostility against Jews. And survey data showed that concerns about anti-Israel hostility were not limited to Jewish students who had self-declared favorable views of the Israeli government. Among the 44 percent of respondents who had unfavorable views of the Israeli government, 45 percent were very concerned about antisemitism related to criticism of Israel. Other trends include students at institutions in all four categories expressing more concern about hostility emanating from people on the political left than the right and reporting incidents involving peers more than faculty and administrators. Jassey believes knowledge of such trends will better equip university leaders to respond. “It both highlights the variation between different campuses … but also shows that a lot of these trends are overarching across lots of campuses,” she said. The report also notes that antisemitism is “far more prevalent” now than it was in 2016, when Brandeis conducted a similar study. Pamela Nadell, director of the Jewish studies program at American University, said her research confirms similar trends, and she noted events such as a physically combative 2018 rally involving pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students at New York University or when the Williams College student government declined official recognition of a newly formed pro-Israel student group in 2019. “We can’t look at what is happening on the college campus without understanding that it’s part of a wider phenomenon in the United States,” said Nadell, who testified at the Dec. 5 congressional hearing about college leaders’ responses to antisemitism. “If we needed more evidence to prove that, we would just look at the fact that in May 2023, the White House issued the National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism.” Alyza Lewin, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a Jewish civil rights group, worries that the variations in rankings across campuses may give some college administrators the false impression that antisemitism is not a growing problem on their campus. “It would behoove all university administrators to realize that anti-Semitism is spreading like wildfire across campuses in the US,” Lewin said in an email. Corey Saylor, research and advocacy director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said there is little, if any, parallel research or comparable tracking of incidents of Islamophobia on college campuses. Saylor said that although it is a topic of interest at his organization and likely many others, it’s a project CAIR doesn’t have the bandwidth to complete. “My department handles both research and individual advocacy cases,” he said. “My team’s monthly caseload went up 678 percent” in October and November, compared to earlier this year. However, Saylor said that anecdotally he’s hearing a general trend that students who participate in rallies and protests “on behalf of Palestinian humanity” feel unprotected by campus administration and are concerned about being doxed, or having their personal information revealed online, and targeted. He believes the public narrative about antisemitism on college campuses is pushing university administrators to prioritize addressing antisemitism over other forms of bias. “Antisemitism needs to be dealt with. It’s atrocious,” Saylor said. “But that reality does not lessen the atrociousness of other forms of bias, such as anti-Arab bigotry or Islamophobia.”
Published 12/14/23 in New York Times; Story by Vimal Patel Before the Israel-Hamas war, universities were already engulfed in debates over what kinds of speech are acceptable. The toppling of the University of Pennsylvania’s president, Elizabeth Magill — four days after her testimony before Congress on whether to punish students if they called for genocide — was a victory for those who believe that pro-Palestinian protesters have gone too far in their speech. To many Jews, protest slogans like “intifada revolution” and “from the river to the sea” are antisemitic and threatening — and proof of a double standard. Universities, they say, have ignored their fears and pleas for security, while creating a battalion of administrators who are devoted to diversity and equity programs and are quick to protect their students. “Their moral blindness when it comes to antisemitism is especially concerning when it appears to conflict so dramatically with their approach to bias and hate against other groups,” Kenneth Marcus, the head of the Brandeis Center, a Jewish civil rights group, said before Ms. Magill’s resignation. For many longtime observers of the campus speech wars, however, this moment is a dire one for freedom of expression. Ms. Magill’s troubles, after all, did not start with the hearing, but with a Palestinian writers’ conference that was held on campus in September. Donors to Penn asked her to cancel the event, which they said included antisemitic speakers, but she declined on the grounds of free speech. “What just happened is, they canceled Liz Magill,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, an education historian at Penn who writes about free speech. “They reinforced cancel culture. What this means is there’s going to be yet more fear and anxiety around what you can say, and how, and that can’t be good for the university.” Penn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors characterized the recent attacks on universities as distortions that threaten the ability of students and faculty to teach, study and discuss Israel and Palestine. “These attacks strike at the heart of the mission of an educational institution: to foster open, critical, and rigorous research and teaching that can produce knowledge for the public good in a democratic society,” the association said in a statement posted on Saturday. Penn and Harvard are not bound by the First Amendment, but they each have committed to offering the same protection. On Tuesday, Harvard’s governing board said it stood behind the university’s president, Claudine Gay, who had come under fire after testifying alongside Ms. Magill. “We champion open discourse and academic freedom,” the board said in a statement. Critics are quick to point out, however, that universities have not always done so consistently. For instance, in 2021 a department at M.I.T. called off a public lecture by Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago geophysicist, because he had publicly opposed some aspects of affirmative action. Law students at Stanford heckled a conservative federal judge who had worked against gay marriage and transgender rights. At Penn, conservatives condemned an effort to punish Amy Wax, a tenured law professor, for a series of actions she took, including some that are protected by academic freedom, like bringing a white supremacist to speak to her class. Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard who opposes cracking down on free expression, said that speech by itself, however ugly, should not be punished. But, he said, universities have not made the best case for themselves as champions of unfettered debate. “The problem with the university presidents saying that calls for genocide are not punishable is that they have such a risible record of defending free speech in the past that they don’t have a leg to stand on,” Dr. Pinker said in an interview. The question is what happens from here. At Penn, there is already a debate about changing speech codes. The board of advisers at the university’s Wharton business school — who helped lead the charge against Ms. Magill — recently recommended in a letter that Penn amend the university’s code of conduct. Among the proposals: Students and faculty will not “engage in hate speech, whether veiled or explicit, that incites violence.” Nor will they “use language that threatens the physical safety of community members.” And anyone who violates the standards would be “subject to immediate discipline.” But a number of observers warn that further restrictions on speech are not the right solution. Jonathan Friedman, a director at PEN America, a free-expression advocacy group, said the Wharton proposal was vague and would threaten to ban a wide range of speech. It would be unenforceable, he wrote, and would probably backfire. Dr. Pinker argued in a recent essay that forbidding antisemitic speech would not improve the situation. He said that universities should adopt clear policies, which “might start with the First Amendment,” but then draw a line at behavior that gets in the way of a university’s educational mission. So carrying placards would be OK, he said, but not heckling or vandalism — which is already the standard at many universities. Also forbidden would be gauntlets of intimidating protesters who confront students walking to classes. Still, to Dr. Pinker the issues are larger than just speech codes. He argued that a university that was truly committed to free speech would reset its campus culture to be more accepting of differing opinions. That would include, he said, “viewpoint diversity” in hiring, as well as institutional neutrality on issues of the day. Harvard announced last month that as part of its response to antisemitism, the university would “more fully integrate antisemitism into the work” of its Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging. But rather than expanding the purview of diversity and equity programs, Dr. Pinker has called for the opposite. He argues that these programs, which he thinks should be curbed, enforce “a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers.” Scott Bok, who resigned as chairman of Penn’s board when Ms. Magill resigned, disputed that the school had become “too woke,” and he defended the need for diversity efforts. The Penn that he attended in the 1980s, he remembered, did not have many Black, Asian or Latino students. “We should not turn back to that world,” he wrote this week in an opinion article in The Philadelphia Inquirer. For Professor Zimmerman, a true commitment to free speech issues means that universities — and their critics — must accept that language will sometimes offend. Despite the uproar, Ms. Magill’s comments at the congressional hearing were correct, he said. In deciding whether to discipline a student who calls for genocide, context matters. When it comes to free speech, “there’s no other way to put it — either you believe in it or you don’t,” Professor Zimmerman said. “And if you believe in it, it means protection for heinous things that people say, unless they’re posing an immediate and direct threat to other people.”
On November 20, 2023, Yale’s Buckley Institute podcast “Pod and Man at Yale” interviewed Brandeis Center Chairman Kenneth L. Marcus, who discussed the record levels of campus anti-Semitism – even before the October 7 Hamas massacre. Regarding the weeks following the attacks, Chairman Marcus states: “Certainly, the volume of intake [for legal help requests to the Brandeis Center on campus anti-Semitism] increased by much more than tenfold from those record levels…So this situation now is not just historic, record-setting, and unprecedented within certainly our lifetimes, but it is exponentially higher than the record level that we had reached in the period leading up to October 7.” There used to be a period of time when people would ask Marcus: “What are the hotspot campuses that are having problems that you need to focus on” and he could give them an answer. Nowadays he says: “There really is no campus where we would be surprised to find problems, because the situation, the degree of anti-Semitism on college campuses, has reached a far greater saturation level.” Although we are in a dark time, Marcus ends with a positive message to Jewish students: “We are not alone. There are friends and allies to be found. It is, I believe, in our hands, it is not too late.” The podcast also interviewed two Yale undergraduates, Aaron Schorr ‘24 and Mitchell Dubin ’25 for this episode. Schorr and Dubin spoke about what it is like to be a Jewish student at Yale, particularly since the October 7 Hamas attack, and their personal experiences on campus.
Published 12/14/23 by The Algemeiner; Story by Dion J. Pierre The administration of US President Joe Biden has once again delayed issuing new federal regulations that would apply the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism to civil rights investigations, a measure that lawmakers and advocates have said would help protect Jewish students from anti-Zionist discrimination and harassment. The proposed guidelines, based on a directive given in Dec. 2019 by then-President Donald Trump in response to rising anti-Zionist hatred on college campuses, will not be instituted until at least Dec. 2024, after the next presidential election, according to a copy of the proposed rule on the website of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The IHRA definition of antisemitism — which has been adopted by dozens of governments and hundreds of civic institutions around the world — includes examples of anti-Israel bias, such as “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” “denying the Jewish people their right to self determination,” and “applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” The US Education Department had initially pledged to issue new regulations in Sept. 2020, but later said it would happen in Jan. 2021. After Biden was sworn in on Jan. 20 of that year, the administration indicated that it had embraced the IHRA working definition but delayed codifying civil rights protections based on it until Dec. 2022. Since then, the department has continued to postpone the date of implementation. Kenneth Marcus, a former assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department, told The Algemeiner that the new guidance’s delay is disappointing and may be driven by politics. Anti-Israel activists in the US, especially in the Arab and Muslim communities, have criticized Biden over his vocal and material support for Israel’s war against Hamas since the Palestinian terror group’s Oct. 7 massacre. Many have said they will not vote for him next November. “It may way well be that the Biden White House lacks the political resolve to act forcefully in response to antisemitism, given political considerations involving the Arab and Muslim communities,” said Marcus, the current chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights. “To the extent that the Biden administration is not moving forward on needed regulations, it simply underscores the need for Congress to raise their game. It already has been apparent for recent weeks that the House of Representatives is picking up the slack and moving forward on issues that could have been more effectively handled by the administration.” Marcus added that the legislative branch of government “does have a crucial to play” and can act now by passing the Antisemitism Awareness Act, a bill supported by both parties that would mandate the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws protecting Jewish Americans. Lawmakers have other options too, he said, pointing to “continued, forceful oversight, such as the promised congressional investigations regarding the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania.” Marcus acknowledged that the Biden administration has taken important action to address campus antisemitism, recently ruling in April, for example, that discrimination motivated by anti-Zionism contravenes Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. But, he added, delaying the regulations again sends “the wrong message to the higher education community at the worst of all possible times, as antisemitism reaches historical levels on college campuses.” College campuses across the West have been hubs of such antisemitism since Oct. 7, with students and faculty both demonizing Israel and rationalizing Hamas’ terror onslaught. Incidents of harassment and even violence against Jewish students have also increased. As a result, Jewish students have expressed feeling unsafe and unprotected on campuses. In some cases, Jewish communities on campuses have been forced to endure threats of rape and mass slaughter. A recent poll, released by Hillel International, found that 37 percent of Jewish college students have felt the need to hide their Jewish identity on campus since Hamas’ Oct. 7 onslaught, in which some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were murdered and 240 others taken as hostages into Gaza. The survey also found that 35 percent of respondents said there have been acts of hate or violence against Jews on campus. A majority of those surveyed said they were unsatisfied with their university’s response to those incidents. “These regulations are what the administration has promised to do,” Marcus said. “It’s astonishing that they haven’t been able to issue them, and given the high profile that campus antisemitism has had in recent weeks, this should be the top priority for the Office for Civil Rights.”
Published by Politico on 12/5/23; Story by Bianca Quilantan Few members of the GOP conference will likely be able to resist the opportunity to needle some of the nation’s elite schools. The strife that’s consumed college campuses over the Israel-Hamas war is about to culminate in a classic Washington ritual: a public shaming. Tensions over the nearly two-month-old conflict have ballooned into plenty of street protests, and few venues have drawn more media and political attention than rising antisemitism on the quad. And on Tuesday, the weight of Republican scrutiny will have clear targets as the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology testify on Capitol Hill. The political glare being brought by House Education and the Workforce Chair Virginia Foxx comes at an awkward moment at the beginning of Claudine Gay’s tenure as Harvard’s first Black woman leader. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), a Harvard alum, is calling on Gay to resign less than three months into the job. And alongside Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Stefanik led a letter of seven GOP Harvard alumni lawmakers demanding Gay disavow campus student groups who blame Israel for Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. Foxx has blasted campus demonstrations as “morally reprehensible.” The North Carolina Republican has vowed to demand accountability from campus leaders, and few members of the GOP conference will be able to resist the opportunity to needle some of the nation’s elite schools. “They’ll want to show they have a task force, they have an action plan,” Miriam Elman, executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, a nonprofit that trains college faculty and administrators to combat antisemitism, said of the university presidents. “Let’s hold their feet to the fire and make sure that there really is followthrough.” Republicans say they want the hearing to be bipartisan. “We want these college presidents again to explain to us why they have not spoken out more forcefully against terrorism, against antisemitism,” Foxx said in an interview with Fox News, adding that lawmakers at the hearing want to “look at a host of issues related to postsecondary education.” Democrats are expected to criticize their Republican colleagues for setting up an opportunity to pile onto the intense scrutiny the university presidents already face. And they expect GOP lawmakers to steer some of the conversation into bashing diversity programs, and hammering the presidents over claims that foreign influence is responsible for campus antisemitism. Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), a Harvard alum and top Democrat on the House education panel, has criticized Republicans for “fueling divisive and baseless culture wars” amid substantive concerns about antisemitism and Islamophobia. Here’s what to know about Tuesday’s showdown: Harvard and UPenn under investigation UPenn was among the first groups of schools the Education Department launched an investigation into in November. The complaint filed against the university alleges that the school has created a “hostile environment for its Jewish students” and argues that the response from the school’s president, Liz Magill, has been inadequate. The complaint cited the school’s participation in a “Palestine Writes Festival” in September, which the Brandeis Center, which advocates for the civil rights of Jewish people, said invited speakers with a history of using antisemitic rhetoric, and spurred antisemitic graffiti and a Penn student’s “violent attack on Penn’s Hillel.” About two weeks later — after the Oct. 7 attacks — students held rallies in support of Hamas’ actions. According to the complaint, the rallies chanted statements such as “There is only one solution: intifada resolution” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Some staff also reported getting antisemitic emails threatening violence. At Harvard, an alumnus filed a complaint with the Education Department last month, according to Fox News, alleging Harvard discriminated against Jewish students on the basis of national origin. The investigation is in response to an Oct. 18 incident at the Harvard Business School where students participated in a “die-in” in support of Palestinians and where students on opposing sides of the conflict clashed, according to people familiar with the investigation. Gay, in response to the incident, said the school does “not condone — and will not ignore — antisemitism, Islamophobia, acts of harassment or intimidation, or threats of violence.” She also said the incident was being investigated by the FBI and the Harvard University Police Department. MIT is not being investigated, but some lawmakers, including Cruz, have expressed disappointment in the Education Department for not yet investigating a protest that allegedly blocked Jewish students from getting to class. Education Department officials have cautioned that just because a school is under investigation does not mean it has broken the law. The department has said it will update the list of investigations weekly. Scrutinizing colleges’ foreign ties Republicans are expected to hammer campus leaders on Tuesday over claims that foreign influence is responsible for campus antisemitism. Lawmakers have signaled that they want to use the hearing to spur momentum for the DETERRENT Act. The legislation — H.R. 5933, the Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions (DETERRENT) Act — would tighten college foreign gift reporting requirements under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act. Under the law, colleges are required to report foreign gifts and contracts valued at more than $250,000. The bill, however, would lower that reporting threshold to $50,000, with some stricter $0 thresholds for “countries and entities of concern.” It would also prohibit institutions from entering into contracts with “foreign entities of concern or countries of concern” unless they receive a waiver from the department. Three Democrats on the committee supported the legislation, which is slated to be taken up for a floor vote as soon as Wednesday. This legislation ties into this hearing because of a report released in November that draws a correlation between foreign funds and “heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry, and free expression.” The report, which has been cited mostly by Republican lawmakers and met with skepticism from some Democrats, was brought up at an earlier hearing about campus antisemitism. Some lawmakers have also gone as far as accusing institutions, including MIT, of being more lenient on foreign students after protests that have resulted in suspensions. “Jewish students at MIT are saying they are afraid to be at school, that they do not feel safe,” Cruz said in a November interview. “And, absurdly, the administration of MIT, they said, they’re not going to respond by expelling the antisemitic protesters who are stopping other students from going to class. Why? Because if they did, they would lose their student visas and have to go back home. In other words, because they are foreigners, they are not Americans who are violently threatening other students, this university is giving them special status and saying, please continue.” What Jewish and Muslim advocacy groups expect Jewish advocacy groups already see hauling the presidents of the elite colleges to Capitol Hill as a victory for their students. “The very fact that the hearing is going to take place is as important as anything that actually happens at the hearing,” said Kenneth Marcus, who led the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights under the George W. Bush and Trump administrations and now leads the Brandeis Center. The center has filed several complaints against institutions on behalf of Jewish students. “This sends a really strong message that Congress is watching very closely what universities do when it comes to addressing antisemitism,” he said. Arab and Muslim groups, on the other hand, say the hearing will likely misconstrue criticism of Israel as antisemitism. “They’re going to attempt to get these university presidents to adopt that conflation, and that’s going to cause further harm for the Arab and Palestinian students,” said Abed Ayoub, executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “We’ve already seen how students are getting targeted,” he added. “We anticipate that the House members are unjustly going to push against Palestinian and Arab student groups … And it’s going to be the civil attack on our community and our students, and it’s going to set some very dangerous precedent, and rhetoric is going to be coming out of ignorance.”
Published 12/7/23 in Insider Higher Ed; Story by Katherine Knott After Republicans grilled three university presidents on Capitol Hill, experts weigh in on the broader implications for public opinion and the politics of colleges and universities. The failure of three college presidents to clearly say Tuesday that calling for the genocide of Jewish people violated their campus policies quickly went viral on social media—galling alumni, free speech experts and advocates in the Jewish community alike. Even the White House chimed in, one day after the contentious four-hour hearing before the House Education and Workforce Committee. “It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country,” Andrew Bates, deputy press secretary for the White House, said in a statement. “Any statements that advocate for the systematic murder of Jews are dangerous and revolting—and we should all stand firmly against them, on the side of human dignity and the most basic values that unite us as Americans.” By the end of Wednesday, Harvard University president Claudine Gay, one of the panelists, sought to clarify her comments. In a statement, Gay said that some have confused a right to free expression with condoning calls for violence against Jewish students. “Let me be clear: Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account,” she said. University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, who also testified and has faced criticism from the commonwealth’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, also released a video statement Wednesday evening clarifying that calling for the genocide of Jewish people is harassment or intimidation. She pledged to re-evaluate the university’s policies on free speech. “In that moment, I was focused on our university’s long-standing policies aligned with the U.S. Constitution, which say that speech alone is not punishable,” she said of her testimony. “I was not focused on—but I should have been—on the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetrate. It’s evil, plain and simple.” The high-profile hearing featured sharp criticisms and fiery exchanges over how Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have responded to campus protests in support of the Palestinian people and their free speech policies. House Republicans also used their platform to air conservative grievances about higher education more broadly. As the metaphorical smoke cleared, we wanted to know what the remarkable hearing—which has already spurred more calls for the three presidents to resign—could mean for higher education writ large. Colleges and universities have faced growing skepticism among the American public over the past several years. Just 36 percent of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup poll released this summer. Meanwhile, higher education has increasingly come under political attack from conservatives who say colleges and universities aren’t worth the federal investment and are too uniformly liberal to be in touch with everyday Americans. Inside Higher Ed asked more than a dozen leaders, advocates and scholars the same question: What impact will the hearing have on public opinion and the politics of higher education going forward? Their responses, provided by phone or email, have been edited for clarity and concision. Kenneth Marcus, founder of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law I had thought that the main impact of the meeting was the fact that it was held and that it would signal to the higher education world that Congress is focused on this issue. That may still be the case. But the fact is that some of what transpired really is going to have some impact. The inability of the university leaders to speak with moral clarity about calls for genocide is shocking to a lot of people. The double standards that were discussed regarding antisemitism versus other forms of discrimination also has people talking. I think that members of Congress likely came out of this meeting believing that they really hit a nerve and that this is an issue on which they should continue to focus their attention. I think that this can have an impact on both prospective legislation and also oversight. Many in the Jewish community saw some of their concerns substantiated, perhaps worse than they had expected. Whether there will be ramifications for any of these leaders in their home institutions, I don’t know. But it is certainly raising greater public awareness of the extent of the problem. For those people who thought that the issue was largely one of discrimination versus free speech, I think there’s an increasing awareness that we’re not just talking about free speech but also violence, assault and harassment.