Ahead of school year, US Jews skeptical campuses can prevent repeat of hostilities

NEW YORK — Summer break didn’t stop vandals from spray-painting inverted red triangles on campus buildings at Barnard College at Columbia University in July. And while the painted triangles — the symbol that the Hamas terror organization uses to identify targets — will have been scrubbed before the fall semester begins on September 3, the message that Jews and Zionists aren’t welcome will linger, said Julia Jassey, CEO of Jewish on Campus.

“Schools like Columbia seem to have difficulty differentiating between what’s political speech and what’s safety,” Jassey said. “When students scream ‘Globalize the Intifada’ or spraypaint red triangles, it’s not an issue of politics anymore. It’s an issue of violence.”

Last year, amid widespread anti-Israel and antisemitic vitriol and violence, Columbia University students violently took over Hamilton Hall, UCLA protesters screamed “Beat that fucking Jew,” and a Yale professor described the October 7 Hamas onslaught as “such an extraordinary day.”

Many university leaders didn’t adequately respond to the lawlessness gripping their campuses in the 2023-24 academic year, according to a number of Jewish advocacy organizations, free speech organizations, and antisemitism task forces.

And now with the first day of classes just weeks away, these same organizations caution that more tumult awaits if university leaders don’t start implementing concrete measures to address everything from free speech to student conduct codes. Their concerns are not unfounded. Many of the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel groups have already signaled that they intend to disrupt campus life and continue encampments.

“Unless things change quickly I have zero doubt that things will go back to where they were last year,” said Laura Shaw Frank, director of the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) Center for Education Advocacy.

Columbia University’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which occupied the campus quad with an encampment and demonstrated during alumni weekend, took to Instagram to announce that it would be back.

“We recommit to continue strategic, targeted attacks on all aspects of university life. There will be no business as usual during genocide,” read the social media post.

In open mutiny, a group called NYU Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine has issued a statement saying that if a number of its demands are not met — including the granting of amnesty for all students, staff and faculty facing disciplinary action for protesting against Israel — its members will refuse to perform “various forms of our labor.”

Plans for enforcing codes of conduct

At Stanford University, where students occupied the president’s office last spring to protest against Israel, Dr. Jeffrey R. Koseff and Dr. Larry Diamond, the co-chairs of Stanford University’s Subcommittee on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, are bracing themselves for another rocky year.

“If students start shouting ‘Free Palestine’ or ‘From the River to the Sea’ in the middle of the convocation that welcomes students, are we going to smile and say, ‘Well, free speech,’ or are we going to enforce the rules?” said Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Educators nationwide share the concern that students don’t understand what the First Amendment protects and when sanctions can be imposed for conduct violations, said Connor Murnane, campus advocacy chief of staff at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

“The path forward is simple. Universities need to educate students about free speech on day one. Administrations have captive audiences; they can set the stage and say, ‘Here’s how it’s going to unfold.’ They can allow protests to take place that don’t disrupt the school, and if they do, then no one is shocked when time, place, manner is enforced.”

Murnane will visit Northern Arizona University in the first half of the fall semester to give a lecture about the history and boundaries of free speech, and the University of Wisconsin Madison plans to use FIRE’s orientation materials this year. Additionally, UNC Asheville plans to have FIRE co-lead some sessions about free speech.

Encampments and face masks

On dozens of university campuses last academic year, pro-Palestinian students erected encampments — many of which barred Jewish and Israeli students from entering, thereby blocking their access to significant portions of the grounds.

Banning such encampments isn’t a free speech violation, according to FIRE director of campus rights advocacy Lindsie Rank, a graduate of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Law, Media & Communication dual-degree program, through which she earned a JD and a master’s in mass communication with a focus on First Amendment law.

“Public colleges and universities can usually ban encampments without violating the First Amendment, so long as the ban serves a reasonable purpose, enforcement is consistent and viewpoint-neutral, and students maintain other avenues for expressing themselves. Universities can’t disproportionately punish students just because administrators don’t agree with the viewpoint being expressed at the encampment,” Rank said in a report on a FIRE poll that found 72% of Americans favored punishing protesters who participated in the encampments.

And while some universities, such as the University of Pennsylvania, now explicitly ban encampments, it remains unclear who will remove them if they are erected, at what point local police might be brought in, and what sanctions, if any, students and staff will face if they participate in them.

The new guidelines stipulate that all events held at Penn are “presumed to be private” and that “amplified sound” on the College Green can only take place between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. The guidelines also specify that amplified sound is prohibited during periods such as reading days and final exams.

Although Penn made a decision about encampments, questions remain about whether virtual spaces are subject to the same rules as physical spaces and whether protesters can cover their faces with keffiyehs and balaclavas. The Penn task force on antisemitism wonders how the school will verify whether someone is a legitimate member of the Penn community and how to regulate the presence of those who are unaffiliated with Penn from participating in protests.

At Northeastern University, an unauthorized encampment lasted on the school’s Boston campus for 48 hours until local law enforcement was called in. Asked about its fall semester preparations, the Northeastern University Media Relations office pointed to its FAQ page “Safe Campuses, Civil Discourse,” which states that similar unauthorized protests would again be dismantled.

However, aside from a handful of universities, there hasn’t been much preparation for another round of encampments and protests, Jassey said.

“We haven’t seen much from universities yet. We haven’t seen many that are proactive. We had hoped that heading into the school year that universities would be better prepared than last year. They need specific plans and they need to consult with the Jewish community [about those plans] because they are the ones who are impacted,” Jassey said.

For example, in California a federal judge had to order UCLA to submit a plan by the second week of August over how to protect Jewish students on campus after an encampment there used checkpoints, wristbands and barriers to block Jewish students from entering the area. The court order comes after a federal judge ordered the school to design a plan to protect Jewish students after three Jewish students sued in June.

At Columbia University it remains unclear what concrete steps campus leaders are taking to avoid a repeat of last academic year.

Samantha Slater, the university spokesperson, did not respond to specific questions regarding Columbia University’s plans for the fall semester. Instead, Slater referred The Times of Israel to a community-wide email President Minouche Shafik sent on July 24, which listed five areas of improvement for the fall: “Faculty Engagement,” “Staff Engagement,” “Student Engagement,” “Rules,” and “Student Orientation and Dialogue Across Difference Programming.” However, the email provided no specifics on how this would be achieved.

For Columbia business professor Assaf Zeevi this doesn’t come close to addressing the problem.

“I appreciate the efforts of the Columbia administration to foster dialogue and educate students about antisemitism,” Zeevi said. “However, I am very concerned about the fall semester. The Columbia administration is apparently working with the University Senate in the hopes of improving the situation in the fall.

“I fully appreciate the Senate members, but one has to keep in mind that some of the faculty members who serve in the Senate were very active in creating a discriminatory environment, including ‘protecting’ the encampment and standing outside Hamilton Hall when students broke in,” he said.

Define antisemitism

Because it’s likely anti-Israel protests will continue this semester, Jewish advocacy groups such as the AJC and the nonprofit Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) said universities must unequivocally denounce antisemitism.

“If you don’t name it, you can’t fight it,” said CAM CEO Sacha Roytman-Dratwa. “The IHRA definition lays the foundation of what antisemitism is; if that definition of antisemitism had been embedded in universities from day one then maybe we wouldn’t have seen what we did last year.”

Likewise, the Orthodox Union’s Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus (OU-JLIC) wants universities to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

“Universities need to review and update their school’s curriculum to root out antisemitic, anti-Zionist, and anti-Western values propaganda and professors,” said Joseph Katz, national director of marketing and communications for OU-JLIC.

By contrast, the Penn antisemitism task force doesn’t recommend adopting the IHRA definition, describing it as a “controversial definition” that “might inhibit rather than advance our commitment to combating it.” Instead, its antisemitism task force said antisemitism can be defined as “the expression or manifestation of hatred, violence, hostility, or discrimination against Jews because they are Jews.”

The Stanford antisemitism report also suggested that rather than adopt the IHRA definition, the administration ask two questions when trying to determine whether something is antisemitic. One, “Does the objectionable act employ antisemitic sentiment in its substance?” and two, “Does the objectionable act rely on antisemitic logic in its structure?” according to the report.

Above all, advocacy groups said universities must both be clear and consistent regarding what consequences students will face should they violate school conduct this academic year.

“The price to be paid for violating student conduct codes needs to be greater than spending four hours picking tomatoes on the university farm. It needs to send a clear message; the penalties need to act as a deterrent. You punish to change behavior and culture,” Stanford’s Diamond said.

Columbia’s Zeevi agreed.

The business school professor said he finds it especially troubling that the “university is apparently negotiating, or mediating, with the leaders of the student organizations that repeatedly broke university rules… Negotiating with the students rather than enforcing the rules will likely result in similar behaviors in the fall.”

Spotty enforcement for rulebreakers

About 3,200 people, not all of them students, were arrested at colleges and universities last spring, according to the Associated Press. Most of the arrests occurred during the final weeks of the semester when students and outside activists erected anti-Israel encampments.

While scores of unresolved cases remain, most students saw their charges dismissed. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg dropped criminal charges for 31 of the 46 people initially arrested on trespassing charges after breaking into and occupying Hamilton Hall at Columbia University last May.

A recent lawsuit brought by current and former Jewish students at Harvard University accused the Ivy League school of letting its campus become a bastion of antisemitism. This week, without ruling on the merits, US District Judge Richard Stearns said that the plaintiffs plausibly alleged that Harvard’s response to on-campus incidents was inadequate, and that “the facts as pled show that Harvard failed its Jewish students.”

Changing campus culture through the enforcement of conduct codes is just one tool universities have to help prevent the unrest of last academic year. That’s why more universities, including Columbia University, Washington University in St. Louis, and UCLA, will continue or augment their “Dialogue Across Difference” programs. The programs are designed to promote understanding and respect for different viewpoints.

“Universities need to give space for students to ask tough questions and learn how to focus on long-term ideas and issues. They should be bringing Israeli and Palestinian voices together where the intent isn’t to demolish the other speaker but to ask good questions,” said Shanie Reichman, director of strategic initiatives at the Israel Policy Forum program IPF Atid.

For example, Reichman and Agora Initiative president and co-founder Khalil Sayegh visited Northwestern University last year to talk about what a two-state solution could look like. While it was not part of a “Dialogue Across Difference” program, it followed a similar model.

Even with the likelihood of a rocky start this fall, Diamond, the co-chair of Stanford University’s Subcommittee on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, said he remains optimistic that campuses will eventually return to being places of learning and engagement.

“One thing I found as the arc of protests stretched out over the course of the academic year was that there is a substantial majority of faculty, and probably a majority of students, Jewish and non-Jewish, who overall were deeply troubled last year by the degradation of the climate and culture of the university,” Diamond said. “I think there will be a return to tolerance and open-mindedness, a return to the core values of the university.”

With contributions from Times of Israel staff and Agencies.