How Colleges Should Address Anti-Semitism
10 min read
After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, and during Israel’s ongoing military response in Gaza, activists organized anti-Israel protests on dozens of college campuses. Amid rallies, encampments on quads, and occupations of campus buildings, anti-Semitism surged. Some groups expressed solidarity with Hamas. Some individuals tore down posters urging the safe return of hostages. Some student activists harassed, intimidated, and vilified their Jewish peers, or attempted to restrict the movements of suspected Zionists. In response, several institutions, including Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania, created task forces to study anti-Semitism on their campuses. Now those task forces have begun to release reports with findings and recommendations.
Stanford found anti-Semitism to be “widespread.” Harvard reported that Jews and Israelis faced “shunning, harassment, and intimidation.” Columbia found that they “have been the object of racist epithets and graffiti, anti-Semitic tropes, and confrontational and unwelcome questions.” All of the task forces explored how to protect Jews from discrimination, harassment, and barriers to educational access, while also honoring commitments to free speech. Most schools urged expanding diversity, equity, and inclusion frameworks to encompass and benefit Jews.
But Stanford rejected that approach, arguing that DEI is itself “fundamentally flawed.” Instead, its task force recommended treating all students equally and helping them to forge a culture that encourages constructive disagreement. Alone among the reports, the Stanford recommendations offer its campus and other institutions that heed its advice a path to a better future.
DEI ideology, programs, and bureaucracies have powerfully shaped campus life over the past decade. They can encompass identity-based recruiting of students and faculty, bias training, trigger warnings, policing of “microaggressions,” the notion that love of the written word is “white supremacy culture,” race- or ethnicity-based graduation ceremonies, and more. Core to the approach: the notion that colleges should treat students differently depending on their race, gender, and more, rather than regarding everyone strictly as individuals.
Jews have not typically been beneficiaries of campus DEI protections and initiatives, despite millenia of discrimination and a disproportionate rate of hate-crime victimization even today. The DEI framework grew out of civil-rights efforts primarily aimed at integrating Black Americans into higher education. Jews were already demographically overrepresented on campus as the diversity mission evolved to encompass Hispanic, Asian, and Indigenous students. “Some Jewish and Israeli students have assumed that they could find information and assistance in DEI offices when experiencing bias or exclusion,” Columbia’s task force reported. “They were very disappointed when they were told that their experiences fell outside the purview of DEI.”
The particular task-force proposals to expand DEI protections to Jewish students are presented as prospective solutions to anti-Semitism on campus, but in each case, I am skeptical that they would be effective.
San Diego State’s task force favors new “training related to antisemitism” during orientation, an “Equity-Minded Campus Community Training program,” and “Inclusive Leadership Awareness Training” for student leaders. And it recommends a Jewish graduation celebration and Jewish Heritage Month programming. A separate graduation for Jews seems as likely to reinforce the pernicious conceit that Jews are an “other” as to reassure them about their place on campus.
Harvard’s task force focused on “short-term actionable items,” including the suggestion that its DEI office should feature examples of anti-Semitism in anti-harassment trainings and that anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bias should be part of orientations that discuss oppression and injustice. But the task force doesn’t engage with research, some of it published at Harvard, finding that DEI training is often ineffective or counterproductive. Using campus training sessions to counter anti-Semitism in particular is largely unstudied, yet the task force does not suggest experiments to assess its efficacy. They treat it as a solution that ought to be implemented.
UPenn’s task force offers a DEI-adjacent approach that seems more likely to help Jews. “When many peer colleges and universities observed restrictive Jewish admission quotas in the 1920s and beyond, Penn warmly embraced Jewish students and their families,” its report stated. It argued that Penn should hire more faculty and staff for its Jewish-studies program and “strengthen outreach and recruiting” of Jewish students.
Perhaps those measures would improve the climate for Jews at Penn. Having more co-religionists no doubt makes religious observance easier. And all Jews, religiously observant or not, could benefit from belonging to a campus where more students can articulate the significance of Jewish traditions and offer nuanced understandings of, say, the relationship between Israel and American Jews. But just 2.4 percent of the U.S. population is Jewish, so addressing campus anti-Semitism more broadly requires solutions that work even on campuses with small Jewish populations.
And Columbia, where about 22 percent of undergraduates are Jewish, has a significant anti-Semitism problem despite being the Ivy League institution where Jews are best represented.
Columbia’s task force has released two reports. The first, focused on rules for demonstrations, recommends limiting protests to designated areas and not allowing them to take place in academic buildings, libraries, dining halls, or dorms. It urges more consistent efforts “to stop unauthorized protests as they occur” and to punish rule violations, while ensuring that all have the ability to speak regardless of viewpoint.
The report also identifies an inconsistency in how speech is adjudicated at Columbia. It notes that when members of a protected class say that particular words or phrases interfere with their ability to learn, the general practice at Columbia has been to defer to their perspective. But when Jewish or Israeli students make such complaints, according to the report, “the response has been different, defending the intentions and free speech rights of the speakers.” The report says that “to comply with the law,” the inconsistency has to stop: Columbia cannot discriminate based on characteristics such as race and ethnicity when it adjudicates disputes about slogans spoken during protests or in campus discourse. The task force might have added that consistently deferring to student complaints about speech is obviously untenable––the sort of conclusion that illustrates the clear unsustainability of DEI as it has often functioned in recent years.
Columbia’s second report, released Friday, details student experiences of anti-Semitism and recommends DEI interventions including anti-bias and inclusion training and workshops about anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, implicit bias, stereotyping, and bystander intervention. The task force also noted, “We need to promote a richer ethic of pluralism, which would encourage greater tolerance of and respect for differences in religion, culture, and national origin.” It urges that student groups be open to everyone to avert identity-based discrimination, with no exclusions based on viewpoint unless it relates directly to a given club’s mission.
It makes some sense that so many task forces and Jewish organizations want to reform DEI so that it better serves Jews, given that Jews as a group are clearly victims of historic discrimination in higher education. In the podcast Gatecrashers, a history of Jews in the Ivy League, Mark Oppenheimer explains how efforts to admit fewer Jews in the first half of the 20th century caused colleges to create features of elite admissions that remain in place today, including interviews of applicants and preferences for legacies and geographic diversity. Columbia opened a second campus in Brooklyn partly to segregate Jews from other students. Jews at Princeton were regularly discriminated against when trying to join its eating clubs. Harvard and Yale, among others, had quotas limiting how many Jews they would admit.
But DEI isn’t what changed all that. As Oppenheimer notes, after World War II, factors including horror at the Holocaust, the launch of Sputnik, and waxing civil-rights and antidiscrimination efforts hastened progress toward equal treatment of Jews.
By the 1980s and ’90s, many Jews felt comfortably part of the Ivy League mainstream. Although anti-Semitism never fully disappeared, Jews were on campus in sufficient numbers to feel represented and understood whether they were religious or secular. This was a triumph of American integration. And notably, it predated the mainstreaming of DEI ideology and bureaucracies––the confident pluralism of that time was sufficient for what some Jews look back on as a golden era on campus. Around 2000, when I was an undergraduate, one could imagine that the trend toward less bigotry and more acceptance of Jews on campus would continue.
Today, that sounds impossibly naive. “In a reversal of past trends, younger Americans are more likely to endorse anti-Jewish tropes,” the Anti-Defamation League reported earlier this year. There is insufficient evidence to conclude that DEI ideology somehow caused rising anti-Semitism in young people. Still, the cohorts most exposed to DEI ideology and training, Gen Z and Millennials, rank as least inoculated against the resurgence of this ancient bigotry in the ADL’s data. And this fraught moment for Jewish students is coinciding with fewer Jews on some selective campuses.
In the final episode of Gatecrashers, Oppenheimer explains that “there are still plenty of Jews at Harvard and other Ivy League campuses, but peak ‘Jew in the Ivy League’ is clearly in the past.”
Selective institutions are recruiting more international students in a world where the Jewish population is tiny. Geographic diversity remains a priority, and Jewish applicants are concentrated in a few urban areas. Finally, as Jews attained success and mainstream acceptance in America, and distance from the generations that first immigrated here, cultural incentives to strive to get into places like Harvard have diminished, Oppenheimer argues. Jews are presently attending a broader range of institutions than ever before.
This decline in numbers on elite campuses, compared with the recent past, makes it all the more tempting for advocates for Jews to pursue new standing as beneficiaries of DEI, with its emphasis on minoritized and marginalized groups. Efforts to treat Jews better within the existing, well-staffed framework for managing identity strikes many as easier than pushing for a new approach.
But Jews may never get equal treatment under the DEI framework, in part because some of the educators who staff DEI bureaucracies regard Jews as white or white-adjacent or “colonizers” or “oppressors.” At Columbia, for example, initial efforts to treat Jews more like other oppressed groups included a DEI-style session on campus anti-Semitism where administrators were caught texting one another skeptical and disparaging messages about the event.
And even if DEI bureaucracies did start treating Jews the same as students of color or the LGBTQ community (to use the identity groupings common in DEI ideology), that would still put Jews in ongoing competition for relative victim status among ostensibly marginalized groups, aggrieving all involved and fueling the pernicious conceit of Jews as one of them, not one of us.
Only Stanford’s task force argued that DEI is not a viable solution to anti-Semitism. Its report probed DEI’s premises, critiqued its most misleading orthodoxies, flagged its failures, and ultimately proposed a more rigorous, less discriminatory alternative: “a culture of pluralism and tolerance” that helps “individuals from all backgrounds, including Jews and Israelis, who are not currently protected, and indeed are disadvantaged, by DEI.”
Interviews with faculty and students at Stanford informed the task force’s conclusions. The report noted that many complained about DEI and appealed for Jews to receive “equal recognition and treatment” under the framework. The task force agreed that, morally and legally, Jews were owed equal treatment and urged that “in the short term … Jews and Israelis be added to the panoply of identities recognized by DEI programs.” Yet the task force was reluctant to urge that Jews be permanently included in the framework, because they found the DEI approach to be “fundamentally flawed.” Campus discourse should be characterized by “respectful listening, evidence-based argument, and discussion based on logic, reason, and appreciation for moral complexity and ambiguity,” the report argued. DEI programs, however, “tend to propagate oversimplified histories and promulgate ideologies about social justice,” they found, reinforcing stereotypes based on a group’s perceived status as oppressed or oppressor.
Hence the call to end DEI as it now exists and the othering it propagates. In the long run, the task force argued, Stanford should forge a culture where disagreement is expressed “without devolving into personal animus, political intolerance, or social exclusion.” The idea isn’t to ignore differences, but to attain an authentic understanding of them and their complexity.
The task force recommends “confident pluralism,” citing Danielle Allen of Harvard, who argues in a critique of DEI that individuals and institutions should be committed to basic human rights, “able and eager to engage productively” with a wide range of perspectives and backgrounds, and skilled at learning from disagreements. The best feature of this alternative to DEI may be the way it alters incentives. College DEI programs often grant benefits to identity groups based on their perceived marginalization, pitting some of America’s most privileged young people against one another in a perverse, zero-sum competition. Confident pluralism would give everyone a stake in conserving equal rights and lessens the impulse for faculty and undergraduates to present themselves as victims.
The more the unrigorous, discriminatory, prejudicial, and counterproductive aspects of the DEI framework are explored, the more promising it sounds to shift to a system that treats all individuals equally. Everyone would benefit from that system’s success. Stanford should adopt the recommendations of its task force. And any college with an anti-Semitism problem should study its work.
