BY HANK REICHMAN
Kenneth Stern is the director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, which works to increase the serious study of human hatred, and ways to combat it. Before that he directed the Justus and Karin Rosenberg Foundation and before that he was for 25 years director of the American Jewish Committee’s division on antisemitism and extremism. While at AJC he was the lead drafter of the text of what is now known as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. In its 2022 statement, “Legislative Threats to Academic Freedom: Redefinitions of Antisemitism and Racism,” AAUP’s Committee A quoted Stern’s statement before Congress that the definition “was never intended as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus.” Stern’s 2020 book, The Conflict over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate, called out efforts by both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli groups to stifle debate and scholarship.
On March 27, Stern testified before the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions hearing on “Antisemitic Disruptions on Campus: Ensuring Safe Learning Environments for All Students.” Stern’s extensive written testimony is well worth reading in full and is available here. He also graciously shared with me notes from his oral testimony and permission to use these and his formal submission in presenting his views.
Stern began his testimony by emphasizing five key points (elaborated a bit more fully in the written submission):
1) Students – including Jewish students — have a right not to be victims of true threats, harassment, intimidation, bullying or discrimination, let alone assault. They, however, should expect to hear ideas that cut them to their core.
2) Attempts to affect the campus that aren’t grounded in protection of free speech and academic freedom are not likely to work. Anything that smacks of a hate speech code will backfire.
3) Recent threats against funding without a full investigation and an opportunity to be heard are not only likely illegal, but horrible policy.
4) Arresting students should be a last resort, not a first impulse, especially for technical violations of rules.
5) The campus environment can be improved with programs and courses. If we bludgeon the campus into submission we risk destroying an institution which has made America the envy of the world.
Stern continued by noting that his 2020 book was motivated by his concern that campus tensions surrounding the conflict “threaten higher education, as each side tries to silence the other. Pro-Palestinian activists sometimes use a heckler’s veto, promote academic boycotts, and sometimes exclude Zionists from social spaces – which is almost always McCarthy-like and sometimes clearly antisemitic. But I’m more worried about the use of law to silence pro-Palestinian speech.”
For some time, Stern pointed out, some pro-Israel groups have sought government support for efforts to silence their critics:
If you look back at the material used to support the Antisemitism Awareness Act (AAA) when it was passed by the Senate in 2016, proponents cited examples about how antisemitism was being treated differently than other forms of perceived campus bigotry. One case cited was the suspension of a Marquette professor for an alleged anti-gay blog post, the other the stopping of the showing of the film American Sniper, because it was alleged to be anti-Muslim. Obviously, both instances were ones where free speech and/or academic freedom were violated. The AAA proponents effectively said violate those principles for us too, a message I found and still find deeply troubling. If one is going to have a principle about speech, it has to apply to speech one doesn’t like too. That doesn’t mean ignore the speech (which can be countered, exposed and/or organized against), but rather it means not to use laws or interventions like a heckler’s veto to chill or stop it.
Is anti-Zionism necessarily antisemitism? Here’s what Stern told the senators:
I am a liberal Zionist. I believe in Israel’s right to exist, and a link to Israel is important to my Jewish identity. That’s true for the majority of American Jews.
But there is a growing number of Jews, particularly younger ones, whose Judaism leads them to embrace an anti-Zionist position. They can’t justify the existence of a Jewish state, especially with its implications for Palestinians, with the Jewish commands about repairing the world and how to treat the stranger.
I disagree with these young Jews about Zionism, but I’m not going to call them antisemites. I certainly don’t want the government to do this, to effectively come down on one side or the other of a deep, and sometimes visceral, communal divide. As I documented in my book, this internal Jewish question – whether a particular view of Zionism and Israel is required to be inside the tent – is contentious. . . .
I also ask you to keep in mind that while most of the cases of harassment of Jewish students have targeted pro-Israel ones, anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian Jewish students have also been harassed, either as part of harassment of pro-Palestinian activists in general, or specifically targeting them as Jews, in which they are seen as “kapos” or “traitors,” and sometimes treated like such.
Turning to the Trump administration’s recent revocations of funding and other threats in order to, allegedly, combat campus antisemitism, Stern testified:
I’m alarmed at the recent efforts to tackle antisemitism with brute force and threat.
Let me be clear – I’ve been a strong proponent of Title VI as A (as opposed to THE ONLY) remedy for campus antisemitism. [However, . . . ]
The new policy of threatening funding without going through the process of a good faith investigation and due process may seem to some as taking campus antisemitism seriously, but it will harm Jewish students – in fact all of us – in both the short and long run. And it may well legally backfire. . . .
[L]ook at what happened at Columbia. The university was seemingly bullied into submission, without due process, and in a way that will clearly exacerbate tensions on campus (not only between groups with opposing politics, but also between faculty and the administration). This will also make the future harder for Jewish students. Change will be seen by many as not as resulting from anything other than raw power.
What will the threatened cuts do? We know some of what they’ll accomplish. They’ll likely impact research on cancer, diabetes, and other initiatives. Cures may be delayed. Students’ work will likely be disrupted – including that of Jewish students. In this environment of threat, the best and brightest from around the world, who wanted to learn in the US and maybe stay and contribute, will now likely go elsewhere.
Columbia’s agreement last Friday to many of the administration’s demands, especially those that signaled that government can dictate putting an academic department in receivership, has and will have disastrous effects. The long-established idea of faculty governance of higher education now seems under assault. . . .
And of course foreign students will likely go elsewhere after the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder, because, according to the administration, he supposedly distributed “pro-Hamas propaganda.” Are we that weak as a country that one student – one who didn’t hide his identity behind a mask (as some protestors do for fear they will be targeted for protected speech, or to escape punishment for criminal acts) – allegedly handed out such propaganda, and this is “a threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.” Seriously? The United States’ national security and foreign policy is threatened by a former student allegedly distributing a leaflet?
Aren’t we, as a country, strong enough to hear people advocate things with which we strongly disagree, even find deeply hateful or offensive? Isn’t it countries like Russia and Iran and China we point to, rather than America, where just expressing an opinion may get you in trouble with the law, chilling others from expressing that same opinion too?
Isn’t there a fundamental difference between advocating for a despicable group or idea, and actually violating the law, such as giving actual material support for terrorism, for example? . . .
Are we again losing sight of the distinction between actual harassment and true threats, on one
hand, and advocacy on the other?
Stern went on to suggest to the senators constructive ways in which campus tensions over Israel and Palestine — indeed, over many controversial issues — might be more successfully managed than by an exclusive focus on time, place and manner restrictions and disciplinary processes, offering, as he did in his book, some concrete examples of how campuses might “use their most important tool — education.”
In his written testimony (summarized as well orally), Stern offered this conclusion:
There is no question that tensions on campus have escalated since the attacks of October 7, 2023 to today. Pro-Israel students on some campuses where Gaza protests have occurred are understandably stressed, because their classmates have loudly expressed political views that pro-Israel Jewish students likely find detestable and deeply disturbing. But let’s not forget the doxing of pro-Palestinian students (which include Jews among them) and the escalating effort to use law to suppress and punish their speech, threatening all of ours.
True threats, intimidation, assaults, bullying and such, disruption of classes, obstruction of freedom of movement are things that should not happen, and it’s reasonable, in fact necessary, for university leadership to act against them.
My greatest worry is that we’re seeing a confluence of four things:
1) A desire to silence political speech because of the discomfort of many pro-Israel Jewish students.
2) The gutting of the Department of Education and OCR, when complaints about antisemitism are pending.
3) A failure to consider that it isn’t only pro-Israel Jewish students who are having difficulties on campus. It’s also anti-Zionist Jewish students, Muslim students, Arab and Palestinian students, immigrant students, and so many more.
4) Most significantly, I worry about the failure of due process and the threats against universities, including stripping funding and demanding that departments are put in receivership.
We’re not going to improve the campus for Jews, or anyone else, by bullying and threatening. In fact we’ll not only harm Jews in this hyper partisan environment, we’ll also be mirroring what some pro-Palestinian protestors are doing: demanding that there’s only one fair way to see the political moment.
We owe it to ourselves as a society built on free speech and academic freedom to do better.
We cannot burn down the house in order to save it.
Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and chair of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019. His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021; a second edition came out this month.
