Rutgers University Promises Changes After Investigation of Campus Antisemitism
“It’s a good thing that the university is acknowledging that since Oct. 7 it’s been a tremendously difficult experience for Jews on campus”
Some faculty members at Rutgers recently adopted a BDS resolution. Changes are clearly needed here.
Forward reports:
Rutgers is latest university to settle Dept. of Education antisemitism investigation
Rutgers University said it would implement campuswide anti-harassment training to settle a Department of Education investigation into student complaints of antisemitism and discrimination.
The department’s Office of Civil Rights said Rutgers had received more than 400 complaints of discrimination based on shared ancestry or national origin between July 2023 and June 2024. Of those, 293 came from Jews and Israelis on campus, and 147 from Palestinian, Arab, South Asian and Muslim students.
Announcing the settlement Thursday, the department said it had “identified compliance concerns” with Rutgers’ handling of the complaints, which included a swastika drawn on a student’s door, a social media post encouraging violence against an Israeli student, and eggs thrown at the Jewish studies building and members of AEPi, a historically Jewish fraternity.
Rutgers is the latest of several universities to settle Title VI complaints, which Jewish students, faculty and off-campus organizations have filed against scores of universities since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. The education department reached similar agreements with five University of California campuses last month.
Jonathan Holloway, president of Rutgers, was among several university leaders called to testify before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last year as protests and debates over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict roiled college campuses. Speaking ahead of his testimony, Jewish members of Rutgers’ faculty said the environment on campus had become “chaotic and intimidating.”
Arab and Muslim students had parallel complaints. The education department announcement says that pro-Palestinian students were doxxed and that a Palestinian memorial was removed from a public display area when other flyers were not.
David Greenberg, a Rutgers history professor who helps coordinate a group of Jewish faculty, said the settlement did not make clear enough the status of university investigations into allegations that its code of conduct had been violated.
“It’s a good thing that the university is acknowledging that since Oct. 7 it’s been a tremendously difficult experience for Jews on campus,” Greenberg, who is a member of the Forward’s governing board, said in an interview, Of the complaints, he added, “it seems that there should be much more public disclosure of how they were resolved.”
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Comments
Call me paranoid, but those reported numbers of discriminatory complaints seem a bit off to me.
I don’t recall reading a bunch of news about Muslim students being barricaded off from access to uni buildings, publicly harassed to condemn their own nations if foreign born, having to walk through illegal encampments full of anti Muslim signage to cross campus, or hordes of students (and non students) demonstrating on campus dressed in religion specific manners chanting “Death to” some grouping of Muslims.
It’s almost as if anti-Israel and anti-Jew demonstrators are making up stories of harassment to counter the bad press they’ve noticed they are getting for their ACTUAL harassment has caused.
The late great Norm Macdonald one quipped…..
“I’m worried that one day a Muslim will set off a nuke bomb in the US and kill millions. Can you imagine the anti-Muslim backlash and discrimination that would result?”
Don’t expect any significant changes. They will make some cosmetic changes and re-name some offices, but it will be as effective as putting lipstick on a pig.
Note that I “offended” Muslims and Jews in equal amounts by using a pig in my analogy. I bet I know which group will report me to the Bias Report Team (aka Stasi).
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