Dartmouth Advertises for Jews While Columbia Task Force Pushes Hiring Zionist Professors

Mamdani: “Antisemitism has become a code word....Antisemitism is about disciplining us”

“If Jewish life is an important part of your college search, Dartmouth is a really great place to go,” says a social media posting from Dartmouth Admissions.

There’s a lot of action on the story of Ivy League universities attempting to course-correct in response to various pressures from Congress, the Trump administration, and concerned alumni, parents, students, donors, trustees, and faculty. This report includes mentions of developments at Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown, among other institutions.

At Columbia, the Columbia University Task Force on Antisemitism—cochaired by Ester Fuchs, Nicholas Lemann, and David Schizer—yesterday released its fourth report, this one on “The Classroom Experience at Columbia: Protecting the Academic Freedom of Faculty and Students.”

Some highlights: “Intellectual Diversity on the Middle East: We heard from many students that an academic perspective that treats Zionism as legitimate is underrepresented in Columbia’s course offerings, compared to a perspective that treats it as illegitimate. The University should work quickly to add more intellectual diversity to these offerings. Columbia would benefit from full-time tenure line faculty expertise in Middle East history, politics, political economy and policy that is not explicitly anti-Zionist. We recommend the University address this imbalance through the establishment of new chairs at a senior level in Middle East history, politics, political economy and policy.” Later on, the report says that Zionism isn’t just “underrepresented,” it’s absent: “Columbia lacks full-time tenure line faculty expertise in Middle East history, politics, political economy, and policy that is not explicitly anti-Zionist. This is an important gap in the University’s academic capacity, which should be addressed through the establishment of new chairs at a senior level in Middle East history, politics, political economy and policy. Columbia is missing an opportunity for leadership here; correcting that should be an urgent priority.”

“No Boycotts: Academic freedom entails openness to scholars and students from other countries. As such, boycotts of faculty, students, researchers, or scholars from other countries are not consistent with academic freedom.”

“Since a fundamental mission of a university is to educate students, their rights must be protected. From the beginning, academic freedom has been understood as pertaining to students as well as faculty members; in the terminology of the German inventors of the concept as we know it, its two key components are lehrfreiheit and lernfreiheit, the freedom to teach and the freedom to learn. These freedoms are equally important. The power imbalance between instructors and students makes it imperative that a great university guard against singling out or unfairly treating students in academic settings because of their identity or their views. Classes should not stray from openminded intellectual exploration into indoctrination—even, or especially, in service of what the professor believes to be a morally urgent cause.”

The report speaks of the need “to avoid a politicized classroom,” quoting the Columbia Faculty Handbook: “Faculty should confine their classes to the subject matter covered by their courses and not use them to advocate any political or social cause.”

The report also describes some things that have occurred at Columbia: “The most flagrant recent violation of academic freedom at Columbia came when a group of student protesters entered an in-progress class taught by a visiting Israeli professor—one of a limited number available to students who did not want to study the Middle East only from an anti-Zionist perspective—and attempted to prevent it from proceeding. Students in the class reported the student protesters appeared to have targeted the class precisely because it was designed to study Zionism, rather than merely to condemn it—and because of the national origin of the teacher.”

And: “one Israeli student was told, ‘You must know a lot about settler colonialism. How do you feel about that?” Another, a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), like the vast majority of Columbia’s Israeli students (Israel requires most of its citizens to serve in the military), told us she was called an occupier. Such events occurred even prior to Oct. 7. An Israeli student who served in the IDF attended a class, which included discussions about the conflict. The student said when the IDF was discussed it was presented as an army of murderers. The instructor pointed at the student (in front of the class) and said since she had a combat role in the IDF, she should be considered as one of the murderers. Another—Jewish, not Israeli—student reported being told: ‘It’s such a shame that your people survived in order to commit mass genocide.’”

The task force report says, “These are fundamentally not teaching behaviors that arise from scholarly values. True academic freedom would prevent them, not protect them.”

Also, “We heard about an especially egregious incident in a required introductory course at the Mailman School of Public Health, which more than 400 entering students were required to take. The teacher told the students three of the school’s major donors, who were Jewish, had made their gifts with the aim of ‘laundering blood money.’”

Also, “We heard about a student with an exam scheduled on Yom Kippur, which is the holiest day of the year for religiously observant Jewish students. When the student asked the director of the program for an accommodation, the student reportedly was encouraged to take a leave of absence instead of missing exams and classes because of holidays—even though University policy requires instructors to accommodate religious observance in this situation.”

Also, “many Jewish and Israeli students told us about teachers who introduced a harsh moral condemnation of the state of Israel into a class where that is not obviously pertinent to the topic being taught.” For example, “An introductory class on astronomy began with a unit on ‘Astronomy in Palestine,’ in which, as the class’s syllabus put it, ‘as we watch genocide unfold in Gaza, it is also important to tell the story of Palestinians outside of being the subjects of a military occupation.’ A student reported that during a vocabulary exercise in an introductory Arabic class, the teacher proposed this sentence: ‘The Zionist lobby is the most supportive of Joe Biden.’ A student told us in a class on feminism, the professor opened the first session by announcing it had been 100 days since Israel began waging war on Gaza. We heard similar reports, where harsh condemnations of Israel were made a central element of classes in ways that blindsided Jewish and Israeli students, in a class on photography, a class on architecture, a class on nonprofit management, a class on film, a music humanities class, and a Spanish class.”