Antisemitism and Free Speech on Campus

David Moshman
Academe Blog

Excerpt: Discussions about campus matters related to Gaza, including posts on this blog, have focused on free speech issues associated with campus protests. Let me shift the focus. Universities should indeed support freedom of speech, but their primary function is to seek and communicate the truth, including the truth about Gaza, and their primary concern should be protecting the freedom to teach and do research about Gaza.

Hurubie Meko
New York Times

Excerpt: Columbia University placed three administrators on leave this week, a university spokesman said on Saturday. The moves came a little more than a week after images emerged showing the school officials sharing disparaging text messages during a panel discussion about antisemitism on campus.

Maggie Hicks
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: This month, Raz Segal learned that he’d been offered a job to run the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota’s flagship. It was an exciting career move for Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University.

Five days later, Minnesota withdrew the offer. The problem, according to key players involved in the search, was Segal’s opinion of the Israel-Hamas war — namely an October 13 article he wrote arguing that Israel’s ongoing attacks on the Gaza strip were a “textbook case of genocide.”

Haley Strack
National Review

Excerpt: The University of Michigan and the City University of New York (CUNY) failed to properly assess whether anti-Israel campus protests made for hostile environments for students, faculty, and staff, the Department of Education said on Monday.

“OCR found no evidence that the university complied with its Title VI requirements to assess whether incidents individually or cumulatively created a hostile environment for students, faculty, or staff, and if so, to take steps reasonably calculated to end the hostile environment, remedy its effects, and prevent its recurrence,” the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which investigated 75 complaints against the University of Michigan and nine against CUNY, said.

Ryan Ansloan
FIRE

Excerpt: Over the last academic year, the University of Pennsylvania has experienced fierce protests, congressional hearings, and outcry from students, faculty, and donors that resulted in the shortest tenure of a president in the history of the private, Ivy League university. Now, in the shadow of that turmoil, Penn seems prepared to abandon its storied commitment to free expression.

Alyssa Lukpat and Nicholas Hatcher
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: A new round of pro-Palestinian demonstrations swept the University of California, Los Angeles, where 25 protesters were arrested after setting up an encampment, the latest outburst of campus tensions over the Israel-Hamas war.