Antisemitism and Free Speech on Campus

Eugene Volokh
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason

Excerpt: Loggins sued Stanford for race and religious discrimination and related claims, on the theory that "Stanford would not have investigated his class sessions, suspended him, publicly announced its investigation and his suspension, or refused to extend his contract '[b]ut for the fact that [Dr. Loggins] [is] black, Muslim and spoke out against Israeli policies that violated the Geneva Convention[.]'" But the court concluded that Loggins hadn't alleged sufficient evidence that Stanford's treatment was motivated by his race or religion.

Alyssa Lukpat
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: A federal judge ruled the University of California, Los Angeles, must ensure equal access to campus for Jewish students after some alleged in a lawsuit they were blocked by protesters at this spring’s pro-Palestinian encampments.

Alyssa Lukpat
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: A federal judge ruled the University of California, Los Angeles, must ensure equal access to campus for Jewish students after some alleged in a lawsuit they were blocked by protesters at this spring’s pro-Palestinian encampments.

Glenn C. Altschuler and David Wippman
The Hill

Excerpt: Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has spawned hundreds of campus protests and a series of widely publicized incidents that left many Jewish students feeling unsafe. These include an online threat to assault Jewish students at Cornell University; a Jewish counter-protester whose nose was broken while he was trying to stop the burning of an Israeli flag at Tulane; pro-Palestinian students pounding on the doors of Cooper Union library with Jewish students inside; the violent occupation of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University; and statements by student organizations at Harvard and faculty members at Yale, Columbia and Cornell appearing to justify Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks.

How accurate are claims that campus antisemitism is pervasive? The reality is more complicated than critics admit, and the result is often a mismatch between problems that actually exist and the responses that are emerging.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: The chancellor of Florida’s state university system has launched a review of public university courses for “antisemitism or anti-Israeli bias” following controversy this summer over a textbook and quiz questions allegedly used at Florida International University.

Randy Fine, a Republican member of the Florida House, who is Jewish and who served alongside the chancellor and calls him a friend, said the statewide review “absolutely” came from an incident at Florida International University this summer. “When we learned that Florida universities were using a factually inaccurate, openly antisemitic textbook, we realized there was a problem that had to be addressed,” Fine told Inside Higher Ed Thursday.

Emma Camp
Reason Magazine

Excerpt: Last week, officials ordered several public universities in Florida to examine courses for "antisemitism or anti-Israeli bias," reported The Chronicle.

The directive, issued on Friday, ordered the leaders of 12 public universities in the State University System of Florida to provide the system's board of governors with a list of "related instructional materials" for any course whose description or syllabus contains the keywords Israel, Israeli, Palestine, Palestinian, Middle East, Zionism, Zionist, Judaism, Jewish, and Jews.