We had a community gathering a few nights ago at one of our local synagogues and over 900 people attended. It was very moving. One of the speakers was a 26 year-old Northeastern employee who is Israeli and works for NE Hillel, and had only been in Boston for a year. Her entire family is still in Israel. Hearing her speak truly brought the entire community to tears., myself included.
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The various deans of the schools at Columbia University, and the president of Barnard, had released statements this week, e.g.:
https://barnard.edu/news/message-barnard-community
For years, there has been competing student activism, centered around the question of de-investment â so they were trying to set a tone of moderating everyoneâs responses.
There were a lot of worries that competing campus protests planned for yesterday would escalate, but closing the campus to the public might have helped:
Of course, I fear that in the days to come, the rapidly deteriorating situation in Gaza will keep passions roused. So this will continue to impact the mood on university campuses.
Youâre right that on campus security may be an ongoing issue.
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The vast majority of Harvard students were also outraged by those statements as well.
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More consequences for Harvard.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/13/business/harvard-idan-ofer-board/index.html
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I wonder if some schools have decided that official silence at the moment is advisable for school security reasons.
Well I noted that Rutgers put out a wonderful email immediately. Rumor has it that there were events on campus that prompted this, but my daughter did not hear of them (my colleague did).
I asked the UNC parent group if anything was done, and the answer was no. This prompted parents to email the chancellor and demand some form of communication, which he did (this could have been planned already, who knows). There is now a response from UNC denouncing violence. It is not as specific as Rutgers, but it is something as opposed to silence.
There was also a heated debate in the UNC parent group, which I was trying to avoid. My original question was asking for a yes/no about whether the school put out a response. I was thanked for starting the discussion.
The original question from the OP asked if the response from schools influence whether you feel comfortable. I feel extremely comfortable with my daughter attending Rutgers and was very pleased with their communication. UNCs response was more guarded, denouncing violence overall. It did discuss rights under the First Amendment while at the same time saying that violence will not be tolerated. The response from UNC did not surprise me at all and it would not influence my decision to send her again. She had a great education, did not feel unsafe, and felt that the campus was welcoming to all.
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I will provide the perspective of a university employee who knows how the sausage gets made and sees the responses from community members to statements put out by university leadership.
Put bluntly, in these situations, no one is satisfied with any statement the university makes. So the best you can hope for is minimizing the amount of extreme blowbackâand hoping that no one else on campus does something that draws significant negative attention (see Harvard) and forces you to address that, as well.
I will also say that many of the responses from community members make clear that they donât read the statements released. For example, Iâve seen and heard many responses to our universityâs statement full of righteous indignation that the initial Hamas attacks werenât described as terrorism. In factâŠthe statement did call them terrorist attacks! But so many people come to these situations with priors that simply canât be overcome.
Beyond that sort of simple refusal/failure to engage with the text, itâs impossible not to see these statements through personal lenses. I am Jewish but not a supporter of Israeli government policies, and I felt our universityâs statement wasâŠehânot as full-throatedly pro-Israel as some, not as sympathetic to people in Gaza as others. Other Jewish members of our community are outraged that the statement wasnât more explicitly pro-Israel. A colleague who is Palestinian and has family there is outraged that the statement did not sufficiently recognize the dire situation of Palestinian civilians.
Universities are places where a million perspectives bloom. Thatâs the point! The president can represent an âofficialâ position, but that does not/cannot/should not be interpreted to mean that the university enforces that position. Students have a right to protest. Faculty have a right to express their perspectives. The expectation that a university be in lock-step on any issue is not grounded in reality.
None of this is meant as a plea for the plight of the poor university presidentâours gets paid a whole lot of money to handle these situations! Rather, itâs meant to shift expectations of what a university can and should do in situations like these. I really wish weâd focus less on official statements and more on the work a university can do to thoughtfully engage with troubling topics, to help students develop empathy and critical thinking skills, and to be part of advancing solutions.
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I thought that Ben Sasse had an appropriate response.
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Gift link. NYT article about Stanford
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Thanks for sharing. Thatâs a great piece and it really hits home as to what is going on at many campuses. Look at the Reddit sites for a college you are curious about and youâll see the raw discussions taking place that show the reality.
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Both Ben Sasse at UF and Claudine Gay at Harvard are new leaders of their respective colleges.
Itâs quite a contrast in their reactions and statements to the attack against Israel. Claudine initially does nothing after the Harvard group statements, gets called out by Larry Summers, and fumbles a couple of times before coming out with a reasonable statement condemning the attack. Itâs a poor start to her role as President.
Ben Sasse comes out with a strong and forceful statement condemning the attack. Itâs not what I would call perfect, as Israel should be cautioned from going overboard in its reaction, but it was far better than what Claudine Gay did.
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One reason may be that the University of Florida has the highest number of Jewish students of any public university in the nation.
The number of Jewish students at a college shouldnât be the reason that a college president does or doesnât condemn public hate speech by 30 student groups supporting a massacre.
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More than speaking out against Israel, they were speaking out in support of the Hamas massacre, speaking out in support of Hamasâ openly stated goal, the destruction of Israel, the only Jewish state in the world.
In the '30s and here in the US until Pearl Harbor, there were antisemitic Nazis in the Allied countries, who openly supported Nazism and its goals. No surprise that we have an analogous element here, today. The only surprise is the failure of our young people to see the connection between days such as 9/11, the Madrid attacks, the London attacks, the Paris Charlie Hebdo attacks.
I cannot blame employers for not wanting to hire those who not only cannot recognize the true evil of Hamasâ massacre of Israeli civilians, but instead trumpet their support of it.
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In a word, yes. Several schools are now off the list. It shouldnât that hard to unequivocally without ifs, ands or buts, condemn terrorism. Blaming the victim is never a good look.
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I agree completely.
Freedom of speech doesnât mean freedom from the consequences of your speech.
But the solution to bad speech is more speech, which is why I appreciated Ben Sasseâs condemnation of moral equivalency of Israel and Hamas (or worse) at other institutions, while still defending free speech, while also being 100% committed to the safety of Jewish students. There are many interests to balance.
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