To Campus Presidents: You Can Stop This Madness Now
Enforce the already existing rules ..
As campuses gear back up post-break, a good time to revisit this piece, published in November, before the disastrous Congressional testimony of the three university presidents—which rightly predicted the slew of lawsuits now underway. Feel free to borrow or adapt and send to every university president to whom it is relevant.
Dear Presidents of Elite Universities,
You have a crisis on your hands. Jewish students are not merely facing a threatening atmosphere of repeated angry rallies celebrating their mass murder and calling for more (“Intifada!”), openly celebrating the terrorist entity Hamas (with social media images of homicidal hang gliders), but in many cases they are facing direct threats and even physical assaults, finding themselves having to hide on your campuses, be barricaded inside libraries, school buildings, dorms, being escorted to safety by campus police, to say nothing of the vandalism and anti-Jewish graffiti popping up everywhere. But it is not merely the Jews who are victims here–it is also the large majority of your other students who are paying exorbitant sums for the education you provide, whose education is being badly disrupted by the nearly ceaseless rallies and demonstrations and “occupations” occurring on your campuses, and it is your brands as well that are being sorely damaged. It is hard not to imagine that there will be some serious lawsuits coming your way, which nobody wants. Numerous Title VI cases have already been filed; several class-action lawsuits are pending in Canada and the US; things are about to get ugly.
But you can stop this all now — in time for final exams — if you have the courage and political confidence and will. It is simple:
(1) ENFORCE YOUR ALREADY EXISTING CAMPUS CONDUCT (AND ‘HONOR’) CODES.
(2) SUSPEND or EXPEL ANY STUDENTS WHO VIOLATE THEM.
It is not sufficient merely to suspend the student organizations (such as Students for Justice in Palestine) that several brave universities have already done; you must suspend the students themselves who violate your already existing rules.
It is that simple. Stop selectively enforcing your rules, doing of which may well both reveal an unacceptable institutional bias and actually be illegal, and enforce them consistently. And lest you think there are “free speech” issues at stake–“free speech” issues that you would never invoke were the targets of campus rallies, intimidation, violence, hostility any other identity group besides Jews, as most of you have had no trouble “taking sides” and making various political pronouncements over the past several years–please read the important article by leading attorney Mark Goldfeder that I have linked to below.
You can stop this outrageous madness–and save not only your cherished brands but higher education itself–which is now collapsing underneath the brown-shirt thuggery that you are permitting to fester on your campuses.
NOW–not tomorrow, not next week–but NOW.
Thank you for your consideration.
Andrew Pessin
https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/the-way-out-of-the-campus-conundrum-is-clear/