Published by The Chronicle on 5/22/2025 That Jew-hatred has infested college campuses is the fundamental premise of the Trump administration’s sprawling assault on the sector. The Biden administration shared this conviction — in the wake of the 2023 congressional hearings on campus antisemitism, Biden ramped up “actions to counter antisemitism on college campuses and protect Jewish communities,” in the words of a White House fact sheet — as do 54 percent of Republicans and 40 percent of Democrats, according to fresh polling from New America. Is it true? And if it’s true, what should be done about it? We wanted to hear from people with a wide range of opinions on this fraught subject. We sat down on Zoom with Amir Goldberg, a sociologist at Stanford University’s business school; Kenneth L. Marcus, president of the Jewish advocacy organization the Brandeis Center and former assistant secretary of education for civil rights in the first Trump administration; Barbara Risman, a sociologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago; and Bruce Robbins, an English professor at Columbia University. (Risman, who was traveling in Europe, had to leave early to catch a train.) Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Len Gutkin: Barbara and Amir, I’ll start with you because you’ve written an essay in our pages, which we titled “Trump Doesn’t Give a Damn About Jews.” In that essay, you tend to agree with the characterization of the campus protests since 10/7 as, at least in many instances, antisemitic. But in your view, a federal task force designed to target antisemitism is a bad idea. Barbara Risman: What I saw after 10/7 that disturbed me was that the faculty who were vocal and who put political statements on a variety of department websites refused to see or admit any damage that might have been done to Israelis or to people who care about Israelis. I repeatedly asked: In your statements of concern for Palestinian students, can we also include a concern for Israeli students and Jews? And I was routinely told no. That was simply not going to happen. The language began to sound to me as if Zionism was being used as a slur word, and that Jews that considered the state of Israel had a right to exist were being characterized as if they were white colonial settlers. I found that terrifically disturbing. Amir Goldberg: Both of us are sociologists, but I’m at a business school. Business schools tend to be less political. What I experienced was mostly in the American Sociological Association. Very shortly after the October 7 events, there was a movement amongst sociologists to come up with various declarations. So there was a declaration on Palestine that emerged probably several days afterwards. The language of genocide and the complete disregard to the lives of Israelis, or even any reference to the violence in southern Israel on October 7, really appalled me. I say this from a position of huge criticism of the Israeli government, and at this moment in time, profound dismay and disgust at the war crimes that the Israeli government is committing in Gaza. But two things can be correct. Hamas is genocidal, and you can be critical of Israel’s policies and describe them as criminal. But it appeared to me that there was complete disregard of Israelis as humans. There was later a resolution [“Resolution for Justice in Palestine”] that was passed in the American Sociological Association that was both intellectually dishonest and had antisemitic tropes in it, and I was just profoundly appalled by the inability of my colleagues, who are presumably scholars and intellectuals, to convey complexity to their students, instead parroting these simplistic and shallow perceptions. Frankly, I was quite appalled by the antisemitism that for many years I denied existed in academia. Risman: I too am terribly critical of Israel, and if that policy had been written slightly differently, I could have been behind it. But it totally disregarded the lives of Israelis and also the right of Israel to even exist. Gutkin: In spite of your severe criticisms of academic culture, you’re very skeptical that something like a government task force is the way to address this. Why? Risman: You have a problem, but you have a solution that is not appropriate to the problem. The problem has to be dealt with by university administrators and through faculty governments. For the government to come in and try to control academic freedom and faculty governance and undercut the ability of universities to exist or even do science is so disproportionate. Using antisemitism as the reason for a kind of autocratic attempt to take over academic institutions is part of a several-pronged attack on higher education. I’m appalled that a real concern that does exist is being misused as an excuse for trying to undercut academic integrity and institutional freedom. Gutkin: Ken, how do you respond to the charge that the federal antisemitism task force is using antisemitism pretextually, as a way of advancing policies that don’t have much to do with discrimination? Kenneth L. Marcus: It’s hard to deny that many college campuses have seen serious increases in antisemitism in recent years. There are a few questions that can be asked. One is whether it is appropriate for the federal government to be addressing hate and bias incidents on college campuses. I believe it is now the 75th anniversary of Sweatt v. Painter, the Supreme Court case that established the right of African Americans to attend American public universities. Prior to that date, I suppose one saw arguments that the law had no place in higher education and that there should be deference to college administrators. But we now have 75 years of history that shows that there is a need to address civil-rights violations in schools. When it comes to the recent incidents dealt with by that task force, there have been people arguing that it’s one thing to address civil rights on college campuses, but what the Trump team is doing is something else. They point to the fact that some of the documents coming out of the Trump administration have addressed what appear to be extraneous issues, like viewpoint diversity. It seems to me that the second Trump administration, just like the first, has demonstrated a concern about antisemitism in a lot of different ways. One example would be that the settlements of claims against major law firms like Paul Weiss have included provisions in which the law firms have been required to do pro bono work addressing antisemitism. Those were not cases that involved antisemitism in the first place, and yet the law firms were required to address antisemitism because this was a significant concern of the administration. If antisemitism were merely a pretext for the Trump task force, then you would not see the White House addressing antisemitism even on matters where it’s not obviously related. The reason that we’re seeing university-based settlements addressing matters beyond antisemitism is a perception within the Trump administration that the Jew-hatred on college campuses is not an isolated phenomenon, but that it arises from a variety of pathologies within higher education, including the capture of university faculty by an extreme and homogeneous political group. You could argue about whether the particular measures required by the task force are appropriate or inappropriate, but they are clearly not pretextual. They are based on identified and documented concerns about antisemitism. Gutkin: Amir and Barbara, how do you respond to Ken’s argument that this isn’t pretextual — that the Trump administration does, in fact, give a damn about the Jews. Goldberg: I haven’t seen evidence that the Trump administration gives a damn about anything except the Trump administration’s members’ economic interests. So I am very concerned about using antisemitism as a cudgel to achieve other goals. The Trump administration has done nothing to address, and Trump himself has done nothing to address, antisemitic tropes. He himself echoed some of these antisemitic tropes. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Jewish lasers is one example. “There are really good people on both sides,” as Trump said about Charlottesville. Musk’s Nazi salute, his making light of that. I see no evidence that they care about any of these. The fact that I feel that there’s antisemitism on campuses does not suggest that all pro-Palestinian expressions are antisemitic. Definitely not. I categorically reject that characterization. But the tragedy of this moment is that it is being exploited by dishonest and radical actors, both in the Trump administration and amongst the more militant radical activists on the pro-Palestinian side. I find both of these abhorrent. Gutkin: Ken, how would you respond specifically to the claim that the Trump administration, or Trumpism more generally, is at least somewhat welcoming to right-wing varieties of antisemitism? Marcus: In general, I have not found it helpful to assess government policies based on the motivations of those who established them. If we enforced only those civil-rights statutes that were passed by members of Congress with benign intention, we would not have much in the way of civil rights. There are famous examples of civil-rights provisions that were passed for dubious reasons, such as the bar on sexual discrimination in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was largely passed as a result of an intent to tank the entire bill. If we wait for good measures in Washington to be adopted for good reasons, we’ll be waiting for a long time. Ad hominem attacks on government officials are a distraction and don’t have much logical weight. From my interactions with current members of the Trump administration, I have encountered a number who not only profess sincere concern about antisemitism, but who have also sacrificed a substantial income in order to serve in the federal government now, in no small part because they want to contribute to addressing the antisemitism that they believe has gotten out of hand. Gutkin: Bruce, you’ve been skeptical of the charge that post-10/7 campus culture has been marred by antisemitism. That’s consistent with your analysis of campus politics around Israel and Palestine for quite a while. In 2017, you wrote, “In the context of American universities, the antisemite is a convenient fiction, and most antisemitism is more or less phantasmatic.” Bruce Robbins: I agree very strongly with Amir about the genuine concern of the Trump administration for the welfare of the Jews and for antisemitism. I am very much against not just government interference in what gets said but also university administrations silencing faculty speech. I don’t think government should do it, and I don’t think university administrations should do it either. I’m a Jew too, and I have experienced antisemitism personally, physically, unlike the students on campus who have found speech offensive or have felt that their safety was threatened. When we talk about damage, we should be very clear what we’re saying. There was real damage on October 7 against Israelis when Hamas attacked civilians, something which I am never, never in favor of. There is nothing like that kind of damage against Jewish students or Israelis on Columbia campuses. I just have not seen anything like that. There was a Passover Seder celebrated at the Columbia encampment. There were Passover Seders celebrated at other encampments. There were chanting Hebrew prayers. This is just not antisemitism. There are a couple of crazy people who will say crazy things. There have been a couple of incidents that happened outside the gates, but there’s no evidence that they were perpetrated by Columbia students. So, yeah, I think it’s phantasmatic. I think that it’s a very convenient fiction that there is a crisis of antisemitism on campuses. There is a lot of antisemitism in America. There always has been. I don’t think there’s any more of it on university campuses — certainly not on Columbia’s campus — than there is anywhere else. And I certainly don’t think that the to-do that’s being made, the task forces, have done anything to diminish it. On the contrary, they’ve probably done something to increase it. If indeed there is any kind of increase, even in just speech which is offensive but doesn’t cause real damage, it’s probably first of all, a result of what Israel is doing in Gaza, whatever word you want to attach to that, it’s not going to make people feel friendlier toward us Jews. The kind of crackdown on campus against Palestinian protest by university administrators is having the same effect. Gutkin: What about anti-Israeli prejudice, to the extent that Israelis are protected by Title VI. I was reading the Harvard antisemitism task-force report this morning, and one of the things that jumped out at me was that it seemed like a lot of Israeli students were reporting a sense that they were being shunned. So one student reports at orientation having another student turn away from him in mid-conversation and walk off when he learns that he’s Israeli. Another says, “We’re treated unlike people from any other country.” A third says, “Nobody treats Russians differently because of what Russia is doing. And Chinese students never get blamed for the Chinese government’s actions.” Robbins: I have no doubt that episodes of shunning are happening. I actually know of some episodes of shunning against Russians because of the war in Ukraine. I haven’t heard about episodes about China. The big difference, of course, is the fact that the U.S. is supporting the violence that is being responded to. The feelings are going to be a lot stronger when you know that it’s your tax dollars that are supporting the damage. Gutkin: Amir, I assume from your accent that you’re from Israel. Goldberg: Yeah, I was born in Israel. Gutkin: How have you perceived this issue of shunning, as an Israeli? Goldberg: I perceive it as a real problem. I agree with some of the things that Bruce said earlier, but his last comment is difficult to digest. So what, we’re now going to come up with various excuses as to why it’s appropriate to be racist? Or let’s not call it racism. The term “racism” has become, in the post-civil-rights era, the way in which Americans accuse the other political side of the gravest of all moral transgressions. But it’s definitely discrimination on the basis of some sort of national-identity attribute that is not chosen. If we start coming up with excuses as to why it could be appropriate — “it’s my tax dollars” — we totally lose the plot. So I vehemently disagree with that point. People have the right to be who they are as a function of choices that they did not make but that were genealogically made for them, irrespective of the decisions of the governments that administer the political entities to which they belong. I personally experienced passive Israelophobia — I think that’s a correct description of the problem. I’ve heard from colleagues that as my name has come up in various contexts, people have said, “Let’s not invite him. He’s a Zionist,” whatever that means. One of my colleagues, a professor at Stanford, wrote in a tweet shortly after October 7 something to the effect of, “So Zionists feel afraid on campus. Good. It’s time that they felt afraid.” This is a professor! I’ve heard from many students, undergraduates, that in order to attend a party they need to say “fuck Israel” or some other expletive. That they are systematically denied from a variety of forums. That other students do not want to date them unless they denounce Israel and Zionism. So I think it’s wrong to do it to Russian students. I think it’s wrong to do it to Chinese students. By the way, America is currently controlled by a controversial government that is seen as authoritarian and violent throughout the world. It would be equally inappropriate and discriminatory to do the same to American students on European campuses. It’s a profound slippery slope to come up with post-hoc justifications. Robbins: I’m sorry, Amir, this is going to sound a little callous, but the idea that you might not get invited to a party because of things that the Israeli government is doing — my heart bleeds for you. If this is the kind of damage we’re talking about while tens of thousands of people are being killed, you should really reconsider the scale of your moral response. My formative experience was the war in Vietnam. During the war in Vietnam, America was bombing Vietnam and killing tens of thousands of civilians. All around the world, there was anti-American feeling. That seemed legitimate. I am an American. It was aimed at me and all my fellow Americans. It was not racism. It was a reaction to what America was doing in Vietnam. Try that on. It’s not personal, it’s not identity. It’s you being sucked in, maybe unfairly, to terrible things that the government that represents you is doing. I’m one of these crazy, pathological, militant radical faculty members who should be shut down. Why? Because I believe in democracy and equality. That means I don’t believe that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state with second-class citizens. I believe it has a right to exist as a democratic state. If it chooses to be a democratic state and offer equal rights to everybody within its borders, I’m for it. Otherwise, I’m a crazy, pathological, militant, radical extremist. American values: Democracy and equality. Gutkin: If Chinese students were not being invited to parties and so on because they come from a definitionally nondemocratic state, would that not strike you as a concerning development on campus? Robbins: It would be concerning. I agree. I mean, you don’t want to jump to the conclusion that people, because they’re Chinese, support what is being done to the Uyghurs, what was done at Tiananmen, what’s being done in Tibet. You just don’t want to jump to those conclusions. Some of them do, and some of them don’t. And I personally draw no conclusions about any Chinese person I meet. Goldberg: Should I conclude from your comments, Bruce, that if someone who, say, lost a friend or a family member to Islamist terrorism, and then goes and accuses, out of a sincere sense of rage and loss, students of the Arab diaspora of being terrorists, that they’re legitimized in the same way that you suggested? Or should I belittle their sense of dismay if they’re not invited to a party? Would that be the correct conclusion? Robbins: I’m belittling the whole zone of discourse that you were occupying: feeling slighted, feeling not invited, feeling people don’t like me. There is something so incongruous between that and what is being done by the Netanyahu government in Gaza. They have not allowed food shipments for two months. People are starving. There’s a way of speaking which I can’t stay silent about. You said Hamas is committing genocide. You did not use the word genocide to describe what the Israelis are doing. So we’ve got 50,000 dead people minimum over here, and we’ve got 1,200 over there, and the word genocide gets attached to one but doesn’t get attached to the other. You don’t think there’s a bit of a double standard there? Goldberg: We can debate on what constitutes genocide, and we can also debate about what constitutes racism, if we want. We can have a scholarly debate on the criteria of defining either. Robbins: I’m very happy to do that, by the way. Goldberg: I’m not a scholar of genocide. Robbins: I can see that. Goldberg: I do not feel I have the intellectual authority to engage in that debate. Clearly, a lot of people in this debate see themselves as experts even if the field doesn’t recognize them as experts. Back to your first point, does shunning people from parties help the Palestinians who are being butchered in Gaza? No, it doesn’t. Are we in the business of comparing who has been paying the highest cost? I find that a completely useless debate. One can accept two truths that are not antithetical to one another. One can be critical of what the Israeli government is doing. One can describe its policies as genocidal. I find that a perfectly legitimate debate. One can act politically to sever American political support of Israel and its war apparatus — all of these are politically legitimate positions. At the same time, to discriminate against people as a function of who they are is simply un-American. Evan Goldstein: Let me get Ken in here on this. You’ve been listening to Bruce and Amir talk about shunning. As a former head of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Education during the first Trump administration, how does shunning intersect with civil-rights law? Marcus: It is really saddening and disconcerting to hear some of what passes for civilized discourse in higher education today. As to your question, we hear routinely from Israelis, Israeli Americans, and people who are described as Zionist, about any number of different forms of exclusion. Some of them are physically assaulted. They’re often marginalized or excluded, sometimes from organizations. They may face efforts to impeach or remove them from student government. They simply do not have access to all of the educational benefits and opportunities that go to other students. One can try to minimize the feelings of those students, but the fact is that at many colleges and universities, the opportunity to network and develop connections and relationships is a part of what one gets from the campus experience. We hear from Israeli students that if they sit down at a cafeteria table, other students leave, not because of anything they’ve said but simply because they are Israeli. This doesn’t happen to other groups. In some cases, these rise to the level of actionable offenses under federal civil-rights laws. In other instances, they do not. It shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter whether in each instance the offense a student is facing rises to the level of a genocide or not. We don’t raise that standard for any group other than the Jews. No institution can look at what is happening to Israeli students and say, “It’s not genocide, so we will simply let it go.” This is, at a minimum, utterly inconsistent with the standards and values that these universities profess, and yet they allow it to persist and pretend that it has something to do with politics or geopolitics or someone’s perception of a particular government of a particular country. Then we hear surprise from campuses when there is a furious response from Washington, D.C. Well, there would be a furious response by anyone who is paying attention to the way in which Israeli students are being treated at many colleges and universities. In many cases, this is a civil-rights matter. In some cases, it’s a matter of criminal law. We should acknowledge that there is a crisis happening, and if universities do not clean up their own campuses on their own and voluntarily, there are government officials in Washington, D.C., who will clean it up for them. Robbins: Yesterday, on the campus of New York University, there was a certain cleanup happening. Namely, the valedictorian at the Gallatin School used the word “genocide” in the speech that he gave at commencement. NYU cleaned that up by saying, “You can’t have your degree.” Who is suffering here? Ken, you were just saying this doesn’t happen to any other group. It is happening much more systematically to anybody supporting the Palestinian cause than to anyone who supports the Israeli cause. It is the people who support the Palestinian cause who are actually suffering the consequences right now from university administrations as well, of course, from ICE and from the federal government. Marcus: Bruce, you have to realize that the accounts that you’ve given of NYU and of other incidents during this conversation vary considerably from the publicly reported accounts. Now, it may be that you are correct in that the newspapers are wrong. But the reported accounts indicate that this speaker had an approved speech written, had agreed to give that speech, and then gave different remarks instead. He is being subjected to potential disciplinary action for having lied, in the words of an administrator, about what he would say. That’s different than the way you’ve described it. I do think it is appropriate for universities to develop oversight of their graduations and to hold students accountable for the commitments and promises that they make. Robbins: What are the chances if he had said in advance that he wanted to say something about the genocide in Gaza that he would have been allowed to talk? Zero. So his speech has been silenced. And what you were talking about is the systematic silencing of free speech. That is what happens when speech codes are imported onto campuses in the guise of civil rights. And that is an enterprise in which you have been one of the most important operatives. Marcus: What you’re describing is a misrepresentation. The silencing that we’re seeing on college campuses is not that kind of silencing. What we’re seeing is that Jewish students and other students who have controversial views, especially if they support Israel or if they support conservative causes, are unable to speak. They’re simply not given platforms. Gutkin: Ken, do you worry about tensions between antidiscrimination law and free speech more generally around Palestine and Israel? Marcus: Around all issues. That’s always been an issue of concern. We should be concerned both about harassment and discrimination on the basis of identity and also suppression of speech. There are books that have been written about alleged suppression of speech as a result of Title IX, as a result of issues involving race, so on and so forth. One should always be concerned about that. But we should be especially concerned about double standards when it comes to speech and double standards when it comes to the protection of groups on campus. Gutkin: Let me turn to one of the most controversial things that the Trump administration has done with respect to college campuses, which is the attempted deportations of noncitizen students who have been involved to one degree or another with pro-Palestinian activism. Several of those students have since been released from ICE detention. At least one of them seems to have done no more than write an op-ed for her campus paper. That’s Rümeysa Öztürk at Tufts. Another, the most infamous and the first, is a green-card-holder named Mahmoud Khalil, who’s still in detention. Is this what you signed up for, Ken? Marcus: You ask if it’s what I signed up for — I’m not a member of the current administration. Gutkin: Fair. Marcus: I’m also not an immigration lawyer, and I’m reluctant to go too far beyond my expertise. Some of these individuals are alleged to have falsified applications. Some of them are alleged to have provided various forms of support for Hamas or other organizations designated by the U.S. Department of State as terrorist organizations. Some of them have been subject to a certification by the secretary of state that he believes that their continued presence is inconsistent with the foreign policy of the United States. I don’t know all of the facts. I would hope that we’re talking about people who’ve done more than write an op-ed. When one enters the United States to study, one should follow the rules of the colleges and universities and the laws of the state and the federal government. And if one doesn’t, then they should be shown the door. Gutkin: So in Öztürk’s case, at least, the secretary of state certainly tried to imply that there was all sorts of other evidence beyond this op-ed, but the judge didn’t see any. Do you trust Marco Rubio? Marcus: I think that the question is not so much whether the court trusts Secretary Rubio, but whether it must, as a matter of law, defer to the determination of the executive branch of government. Goldstein: I wonder if each of you can sketch your vision of the ideal path that universities should be taking at this time. What’s a college that’s getting it right? Robbins: I don’t have a great answer to that very good question. I frequently think back to 1968. And it seems to me that, on the whole, administrators were more judicious in their application of the letter of the law. So even when it was possible to really clamp down hard because rules had been violated, they decided, for instance, not to call the cops right away. We’re going to give people leeway to express themselves. This is not an absolute thing, obviously; it’s just good judgment, prudence. Goldstein: Amir, if the president of Stanford asked you for advice, what would you say? Goldberg: The first thing they need to do is come up with a set of ironclad criteria by which to evaluate what is within or outside the boundaries of legitimate speech. That should be applied consistently, whether this relates to pro-Palestinian activism, pro-Israeli activism, anti-Trump activism, anti-China activism. I think the predicament that universities are caught in at the moment is because of their inconsistency leading up to the October 7 moment. This is an existential threat to the viability of universities. The ethos of freedom of speech is being vehemently attacked by the Trump administration. Antisemitism is being used as an excuse. As a Jew, I feel objectified and abused, being usurped into this abhorrent project. Marcus: Respectfully, I think my new friends Bruce and Amir are both wrong. So let me give a different perspective with respect to antisemitism. It’s simple: Universities should comply with the laws of the federal government and the states in which they operate and should give substance to the mission and values that they are committed to. This will differ within each institution, but they tend to be, by and large, fairly similar. To comply with minimum standards does require a ruthless elimination of double standards. We may disagree about what the double standards are in particular cases, but I think Bruce, Amir, and I agree that double standards are a problem and should be sought out and eliminated. University leaders who want to avoid the legal problems that their peers have found themselves in should look to some of the good work that’s being done by other university administrators to refine time, place or manner restrictions to ensure the orderly operations of their institutions. Some institutions have developed rules to prevent masked harassment but ensure that religious and medical uses of masks are permitted. There have been a number of reforms at Harvard and NYU in the wake of litigation. There are lots of things that are being done that make sense and that are a good step. Gutkin: I think that wraps it up. These are obviously difficult topics, so we appreciate your being willing to talk about it with us. Robbins: I spared you the story of how I was found guilty. Goldstein: Was this about having your class in the encampment? Robbins: That was it. Goldstein: I do want to know about this! Robbins: So, Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act allowed me to be found guilty of discrimination and harassment because when I was teaching a course on atrocity, and the syllabus from January had said on April 22 we would be talking about atrocity in Gaza. On April 22 there was an encampment talking about atrocity in Gaza. I invited the class to go to the encampment. I said, anybody who doesn’t feel like it, of course, don’t come, and there will be no penalty. And we went — some of us went, some of us didn’t — and some anonymous people brought charges against me for discriminating and harassing them because of this, and I was found guilty. Gutkin: As I understand it, the charges were brought by two Israeli students. Robbins: I don’t know that. Gutkin: My understanding was that the accusation was that you discriminated against Israeli students based on comments in The New York Times. Robbins The charges are anonymous. Other students had identified these two as veterans of the IDF. I did not do that because I did not know. I couldn’t trust the students who told me that they were IDF. How would I know that? I would have to say I was misrepresented in the Times article as having said something that I could not possibly have known. Gutkin: OK, I’ve just Googled it. The Times writer writes: Two of his students, who he believes were former members of the Israeli military, did not show up for that lesson. “I was planning on making it as comfortable as I could,” he said. “But I think the feeling in the class was not running in their favor, and that may be why they didn’t show up.” Do you want to dispute that characterization? Robbins: I didn’t know that they were Israeli. There were no signs that they were Israeli. I certainly didn’t know that they were IDF. I do think that the sentiment in the class was running against what was going on in Gaza. There was a strong feeling on the part of the students who were speaking up most. What would I dispute or not? Gutkin: Well, the way that The Times frames it is that the feeling in the class was not running in their favor — these two Israeli students. Robbins: If they were Israeli students. Gutkin The Times makes it sound as if you were sure that they were. So I had just inferred that the basis of the complaint had to do with this statement, though I don’t know that. Robbins: I did an hour-and-a-half training with a lawyer representing Columbia who never actually brought that up. So I don’t know exactly what they were thinking. Goldstein: Amir, if you had been a student and the professor wanted to hold class in an encampment, would you feel like that was altering the terms upon which you were pursuing an education? Goldberg: I don’t want to answer from the perspective of a hypothetical Israeli student. I just think it is inappropriate for a university professor to impose their ideological position. I would not expect my students to join me in class at a Black Lives Matter event. As professors, we cannot exploit our authority in the classroom to promote either our ideological positions or to use it as a form of moral cleansing. Are we devoid of ideology? Obviously not. We’re human. We are ideological actors. But we need to think heavily about how to create an inclusive environment, how to refrain from taking positions on issues that are not pertinent to the discussion. I don’t know what the class was about, Bruce. Robbins: It was about atrocity. We spent two weeks in Auschwitz. If there were any Nazis in the class, they would have been very, very uncomfortable when we were talking about Auschwitz. Goldberg: OK, fine. I understand the irony. Robbins: Don’t ask me to be neutral on that subject. Goldberg: I teach classes that relate to issues of racial discrimination, for example, in employment. These are touchy subjects, issues that lead people to feel very uncomfortable, regardless of what you say. I see my charge as also facilitating a conversation whereby people who have a diversity of positions, a diversity of backgrounds, feel comfortable engaging. Clearly, you failed to do that and you need to ask yourself why. My goal is to try to minimize the imposition of my authority as an ideological actor in the classroom. I surely fail consistently all the time as well, so I understand the difficulty of the position.