So soon into the fall semester, and campus protest season is already in full swing. In fact, even to call it a “season” is to err. So constant, so widespread are the protests and “sit-ins” and “occupations” of this building or that quad, it’s a wonder anyone on campuses has time to learn anything. On the first anniversary of Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 slaughter of Israeli citizens, this month in particular is likely to see even more turmoil engulf our institutions of purportedly higher education: As in the interim since the attacks on Israel and the months of violent American campus protests that followed, leftist student agitators have only continued to champion their latest cause du jour (“disinvestment” or “Free Palestine” for some, terrorism for most), and university administrators have continued to dither and wail about what to do about it.
Antisemitism is a clear and growing problem on campus, as it is more broadly. And while the feckless academics helming our postsecondary education system are not to blame for it specifically, they are most certainly culpable for the circumstances in which they now find themselves. By letting a minority of loud, extremist zealots within the student body, faculty, and bureaucracy dictate the tenor, focus, and policy regime of campus life — for more than a decade, certainly, but particularly since the death of George Floyd in 2020 — university honchos meet this current crisis utterly unequipped.
In relinquishing command of university behavior and harassment codes to identarian, intersectionality-driven diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, mandarins, administrators have kneecapped their ability to establish cogent, fair standards of conduct that can be enforced in times of need. In continually catering to the craziest, most petulant segment of the student population, university officials have devalued their authority to the point of nonexistence. This leaves students of all stripes, including the agitators, with little trust in nor fear of the powers that be, further limiting the ability of university administrators to act effectively. Add in the paucity of ability and backbone customary of those in chancellors’ suites, and the stage is set.
While there is well-deserved derision at hand for a cadre of so-called elites hoisted by their own petards, the plight on campus now and in the likely near future is serious. This spring, several universities required police intervention to quell campus protests and riots, including the University of Southern California, UCLA, Arizona State, Ohio State, Columbia, and the City University of New York, among others. This semester has already seen a statue spray-painted at Columbia and an administration building vandalized at Cornell. These two schools are notable for previous anti-Jewish actions this year: At Cornell, a student was arrested for death threats against Jewish students, and at Columbia, a Jewish assistant professor was actually prohibited by the university from going on campus while anti-Jewish students were occupying, and trashing, a university building on the grounds that the university could not ensure his safety.
The example of Columbia is useful for illustrating the various administrative failures outlined above. In the spring, as recapped by the New York Post, “More than 100 protesters, part of a Gaza Solidarity Encampment on a campus green, were taken into custody after [the university president] called on the NYPD to enter university grounds. About two weeks later, hundreds of cops were allowed on campus again to haul away more than 100 protesters from Hamilton Hall.” The university issued regrets in both instances for calling in law enforcement — again, it was during this time it admitted an inability to uphold its most basic of responsibilities, ensuring the safety of students and faculty, by prohibiting a Jewish professor from doing his job — and Columbia President Minouche Shafik resigned a few months later amid internal denunciations for her handling of the situation. Fast forward to this fall term, and according to information provided by the university to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, of the 40 students arrested in the first incident, only two remain suspended, with the rest in good standing and some on “disciplinary probation.” Of the 84 students who had been arrested or disciplined for the second police incident, just five remain suspended, and some have even had charges dropped. And last month, at a welcome event, Columbia’s new interim president, Katrina Armstrong, apologized to students for anyone who felt “hurt” by the campus clearing out the vandals.
A similar situation played out at Harvard, where after waiting two weeks to shut down an encampment on the yard, the university referred 68 participants to disciplinary action. According to the House Education and the Workforce Committee, none remain suspended, while 52 are in good standing for this semester, and only 15 are on probation (one is on leave).
As the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf recounts, at UCLA, three Jewish students had to sue their school after masked and armed vigilante student protesters barricaded access to the campus quad as part of a “pro-Palestine” action after the university allowed the encampment to remain for more than a week (there was eventually violence between protesters and counterprotesters). UCLA countered the action and was joined in amicus by the Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UCLA group, alleging they were the ones wronged. In August, federal Judge Mark C. Scarsi issued an injunction on behalf of the Jewish students, writing that they “were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.” He further called this “abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.” UCLA initially appealed the ruling and then dropped it, presumably chafing at its obligation to clear out obstructions and encampments that render its academic offerings inaccessible to students, even Jewish ones.
Time and again, the pattern with these colleges, especially those with a history of belligerent student action, is consistent: A group of militant student protesters engages in action that is obviously and expressly against the code or rules of the university; the university prevaricates, refuses to act, or otherwise allows it to continue until a boiling point is reached; after which some quick lip-service to discipline measures are begun, which are invariably dropped or swept under the rug; finally, the university apologizes to and mollifies the offending students, not the bystanders or victims of the campus obstruction (or in this case explicitly anti-Jewish provocations).
This is, if you will remember, the exact sequence of events that played out at campuses across the nation following the riots that accompanied the death of George Floyd. The “anti-racist” protest movement that expanded and deepened much of the DEI stranglehold in university administrations has set the action plan for how universities respond to student protest behavior and concomitant demands. The major difference, however, is now the targets of the youthful ire du jour are other members of the student body, faculty, and the university itself. Along with their general anti-Jewishness, which directly threatens Jewish students and faculty on campus, one of the favorite pinatas for these leftist protesters to attack are universities’ investment portfolios, many of which have ties to or direct investment links with Israel. This time, universities are unable to follow the DEI appeasement playbook in the same manner as years past (although several schools have attempted to do just that, as we have seen, with disastrous results).
The aftermath of Oct. 7 forced a change, finally, in how schools respond to campus belligerency. One of the first clear signs was that following the initial Hamas terrorist attacks, many universities did not issue their typical, morally self-righteous, virtue-signaling statement of stance that has become so commonplace since the Trump era. On the one hand, this was a salutary development. Institutions purportedly committed to free inquiry should not be issuing ideologically tilted statements of belief on virtually any issue. On the other hand, the fact that the one cause universities could not find it in themselves to moralize over was the slaughter of innocent Jewish civilians was unmistakably telling. And it prompted a much-deserved backlash from alumni and the public at large, some of which I wrote about in these pages earlier this year.
But the thornier problem universities have been forced to grapple with is that their intersectionality-focused paradigm of diversity, equity, and inclusion is incompatible with consistent and fair treatment of all students, religions, and creeds. An identitarian program that separates all people into groups of oppression and privilege on every issue and instance while also requiring total Manichean agreement on each of these fault lines is not only incompatible with any semblance of viewpoint diversity or free inquiry, but it is incompatible with itself — a fact that has been learned recently by several of its adherents.
The University of Michigan Black Student Union recently announced its withdrawal from the main anti-Israel group on campus due to “rampant anti-blackness festering within it” that has become “too pervasive to overcome.” Or, as Aaron Pomerantz and Jill Jacobson point out, when “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — infamous for crying over continued U.S. support of the Iron Dome, Israel’s anti-missile defense system — was repudiated by the Democratic Socialists of America for ‘Zionist collusion’ by hosting an antisemitism summit.”
Instead, several high-profile colleges have announced a return to institutional neutrality — that is not taking public stances on major newsworthy political and social issues. Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier told students over the summer in plain terms that the university would not divest from Israel, banish provocative speakers, or issue statements in support or condemnation of Israeli or Palestinian causes. Similar issuances have been made at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell.
“The chaos on campuses is because there’s lack of clarity on these principles,” Diermeier said in an interview with the New York Times. Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, has repeatedly emphasized this clarity problem is coming from inside the house. As he reiterated recently, “Speech conflicts are being created on campus.” Much noise has been made, for example, over the permissibility of “From the river to the sea” chants in speech codes at universities such as Vanderbilt, which are often more focused on ideas of “harm” and feelings than they are bright-line constitutional delineations. This opacity between what speech is allowed and what is not is further exacerbated by the existing DEI shibboleths in place.
As Lukianoff writes, “People need to remember that all the problems we’re seeing today have largely been caused by administrators who were on campus five, 10, and 20 years ago, when everything started to go really south for viewpoint diversity, freedom of speech, and academic freedom. The culprits are often the very same people who run the bias-related incident programs, draft the speech codes, and enforce the punishments of students, professors, and student journalists for their First Amendment-protected speech. … There’s really no way that you can hope to repurpose or expand DEI bureaucracies to protect the rights of American Jews because anti-Semitism is common to so many different groups; applying intersectionality to anti-Semitism just results in a much more potent anti-Semitism.”
Laws have been introduced and passed in various states prohibiting the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in hiring and promoting faculty and staff, mandatory DEI training, and identity-based preferences in hiring and admissions, and even outright bans on DEI offices and administrators. A total of 14 states have passed laws barring one or more of these practices for universities that receive public dollars, including Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Idaho, North Carolina, North Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah.
Yet even as states attempt to force their hand, academics remain committed to the cause. An analysis from Heterodox Academy’s Nate Tenhundfeld last month found almost a quarter of job postings, 24.5%, for full-time professors required either a diversity statement or to address their diversity commitment in other application materials — an increase from the 19% an (admittedly less expansive) American Enterprise Institute survey found in the fall of 2020. As John Tomasi, president of Heterodox Academy, explained, “Diversity statements have gone beyond implicit pressure, and have [at times] been used as blatant litmus tests for ideology.”
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A separate forthcoming study of faculty found exactly this, as Lukianoff notes: “23% of participants agreed both that diversity, equity, and inclusion are important variables to consider in faculty hiring, and that DEI statements are subtle political litmus tests.” And this is being continually reinforced via other academic avenues: My former bosses Frederick M. Hess and Jay P. Greene found in an August study: “Of the 99 academic associations examined, 81% have issued at least one official position on race or affirmative action, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas conflict, immigration, or climate change. These statements almost uniformly reflect progressive orthodoxy.”
A turn away from DEI-focused codes and standards, which without fail have supported one, social justice-oriented viewpoint to the prohibition of others, and back toward institutional neutrality and standards of constitutionally informed strictures on protected speech is the way forward — paired with a firm commitment to punishing bad actors and wrongdoers. Codifying the Supreme Court’s definition of discriminatory harassment, which protects speech while protecting students, would go a long way to aid the cause of Jewish students on campus, as well as those who wish to protest peacefully on behalf of the Palestinians.
J. Grant Addison is the deputy editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
