The Campus Anti-Semitism Report Card

I get a lot of mail, especially e-mail. Some of it, I always read. Some of it, I read sometimes or just partially. A fair amount, there just being so many hours in the day, I delete without reading. But I got, unsolicited, something in my inbox this week that was so eye-opening that I resolved not only to read it all (which I did, and without getting up from my chair even once), but also to share it with you all this week. It is the first annual ADL Campus Anti-Semitism Report Card, available to all by clicking here. It was not pleasant reading.

Like all eye-opening surveys built on careful research, it is filled with little details and tiny facts that, considered entirely on their own, would sound banal or even petty. You could say the same, I suppose, of a single brick from the Taj Mahal or the Parthenon: it’s only just a brick if you consider it entirely on its own, but nothing like that when considered in the larger context of the structure of which it has survived as a single, tiny part. Obviously, not every college and university in the nation was included in the study. (That would have been too gargantuan an undertaking even for an organization as well equipped to undertake such things as the ADL.) So, instead, a sampling of eight-five of the nation’s schools were chosen for study, some because they have an especially large number of Jews in their student body and others because they are widely considered—or at least up to now have traditionally  been considered—to be our nation’s finest, most desirable institutions of higher learning. When considered against the fact that there are just shy of 4000 degree-granting institutions of higher learning in the United States (click here for corroboration of that number), the number sounds low. But when the actual roster of schools included in the study is considered, that number sounds reasonable: if I had been challenged personally to make up a list of the schools that are the best-known and most popular in the Jewish community, more or less every single school that would have been on my list appears in the survey, as do also the college I myself attended and those from which two of my children got their degrees. So waving the survey away as not broad enough in scope would be, in my opinion, a huge error of judgment. As noted, you won’t enjoy your time spent reading. No normal person would. But this is something every American should read—and not just every Jewish American either. This is the social fabric of our country we’re analyzing here, the institutions that train our young people to take their place as productive citizens. To put it another way, what percentage of members of Congress in twenty-five years will be people who are in or who soon will be in college in the United States? Surely not 100%, but I’m guessing that a serious majority of our nation’s leaders in a quarter-century will be people enrolled as undergraduates in our nation’s colleges and universities in the 2020s. If they are poisoned as undergraduates with prejudice and bigotry, and if they are trained to see nothing abnormal in hating Jews or Judaism, then we are in, I fear, for a very rough ride. And be “we,” I don’t mean just we Jews. I mean we Americans, we who imagine ourselves to live in the world’s most enlightened democracy, in a nation where the civil rights of the citizenry are not only universally respected, but understood to serve, each in its own way, as the foundational principles upon which the republic rests.

Like all complex documents, this one gives up its secrets slowly. But there are also shortcuts to be taken: the ADL has actually awarded letter grades to the surveyed institutions based on their efforts to create a safe environment for Jewish students and to combat anti-Semitism on campus. A quick survey yields some surprising results and some expected ones. Some of our most prestigious institutions were awarded D’s: Cornell, Columbia, Barnard, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, Brown, Northwestern, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania. So were many others. But the list of schools awarded F’s is also interesting: some obvious institutions (Harvard, Tufts, Stanford, Swarthmore, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Chicago) and some that came as a surprise to me (SUNY Purchase, for example, or the University of Virginia at Charlottesville).

Of course, these letters grades—both the high one and the failing ones—have to be approached with caution. The ADL site itself offers the following advice: “Just because a school has received a letter grade A or B…does not mean that the school does not have an antisemitism problem. It also does not mean that the school is in compliance with existing legal frameworks, including but not limited to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Similarly, just because a school has received a C or D does not mean that the school is failing to support its Jewish students. For example, some schools received lower grades relative to others due to the severity and prevalence of incidents on campus, administrative policies notwithstanding.) In other words, the grade is meant to address two simple questions that are merely two sides of the same coin: how safe would a young Jewish person be as an undergraduate or graduate student in the college in question and how rational a choice would that institution be for high school seniors having to decide now where to attend university.

Looking more carefully at the survey leads to some interesting results. Let’s consider Princeton, for example, which has always been considered one of America’s finest institutions of higher learning. When you consider Jewish life on campus, every box is checked off: active Hillel, active Chabad, kosher dining hall, Jewish studies courses, pro-Israel activities permitted, Jewish religious services held on campus, etc. Then, when you consider the school’s policies, it also sounds wonderful: Princeton publicly condemns anti-Semitic incidents when they occur, has a clear process for reporting anti-Semitic incidents, maintains an advisory council specifically charged with monitoring anti-Semitism on campus, etc. So that sounds ideal too. So how could such an ideal institution end up with a D? Well, that’s a different column, the one that takes note of the fact that the school has tolerated severe anti-Semitic and anti-Israel incidents, has permitted hostile anti-Israel student government activity, has not censured anti-Zionist student groups, and tolerates anti-Semitic guest speakers on campus. In other words, Princeton seems to have all the right councils and advisory boards in place, plus they seem not to tolerate but to foster Jewish student life. But when it comes to protecting those Jews from predatory groups whose rhetoric is clearly meant to intimidate Jewish students and to humiliate those who dare speak out as Jews or as pro-Israel advocates, the school seems to fall seriously short of its own theoretical agenda. Yet it also bears noting that things are improving: the school originally got an F, but was upgraded to a D just a few weeks ago.

The other schools I investigated were similar in many ways: all had formal policies in place decrying anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic bullying and all tolerated overt Jewish activity on campus under the aegis of the local Hillel or Chabad House. But again and again they fell down on the actual application of those policies when such decisions might anger the extreme leftist students bent on denouncing Israel and condemning any who disagree as murderers and torturers.  The University of Chicago, for example, earned its F not by not formally condemning anti-Semitism or by not permitting kosher dining or on-campus religious services, but by tolerating extreme anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric on campus—rhetoric that is threatening, intimidating, and insulting to Jewish students—and not feeling obligated to deal with the matter forcefully or conclusively. To make believe that Jewish students can walk past signs condemning IDF soldiers as terrorists or see “bring home the hostage” posters vandalized but left in place by the university without feeling—to say the very least—unwelcome is just the kind of fantastical thinking that seems to be the norm in the nation’s colleges. When the president of Harvard couldn’t quite bring herself to say that calling for the annihilation of the Jewish people (i.e., the murder of every single Jewish person alive, which was Hitler’s goal as well) was not quite severe enough to warrant intervention by the Harvard administration, that weakness of moral character cost her her job. That certainly worked for me. But applying that standard to tuition-paying undergraduates seems to be the problem here: we will not see real progress until the nation’s schools can bring themselves to understand that bullying and threatening the safety of Jewish students who are not willing to condemn Israel and, in effect, join their own enemies in calling for the destruction of the Jewish state, should result, if not in the offending student being arrested, then at least with that student’s expulsion from the school. That would certainly happen if violent rhetoric were to be levelled against Black students or Latino ones, or against gay students or against Asians. But somehow violent anti-Jewish rhetoric gets a pass in the groves of academe that no other kind of prejudicial language ever would.

I strongly recommend my readers to visit the ADL site and spend time with the Anti-Semitism Report Card. (The link is above in the first paragraph.) You won’t enjoy your time there, that I can promise you. But it will remind you, as it did me, that all is not lost, that we have allies and friends, that there remains the possibility of the nation’s schools taking strong, meaningful action on behalf of Jewish students. We’re nowhere near there now, regretfully. But we could get there—I truly do believe that. And perusing the ADL’s Report Card, in addition to horrifying me, also made me feel (even I can’t explain this) slightly hopeful. What has been ruined by inattention, moral laziness, and political ineptitude, is surely fixable if the will is there to do right and to do good. Why wouldn’t it be?