What a life! First I defend the speech rights of pro-Palestinian student who may well favor the elimination of Israel, and now I’m back again at Vanderbilt University, where, according to both the student newspaper and the Jewish paper The Algemeiner, students have rejected precisely one out of 11 student groups that applied to joint the school’s Multicultural Leadership Council (MLC): Students Supporting Israel. Wouldn’t you know it!? (One other group, Vanderbilt United Mission for Relief and Development, is awaiting a vote.)
There are two articles that say largely the same thing, so I’ll quote from the shorter Algemeiner piece. But let us not forget that Vanderbilt become an “Our Hero” school when its Chancellor, Daniel Diermeier (Chicago’s former Provost) had students removed and arrested after occupying the administration building for nearly a whole day, protesting Vandy’s supposed complicity in supporting Israel against Gaza. Many of the students were also given interim suspensions, and there’s no sign that those suspensions will be lifted. It was not free speech that Diermeier was opposing, for he’s a big advocate of such speech (after all, he’s from the University of Chicago). He was enforcing “time and place” regulations for protest, and it’s simply against Vandy’s rules to sit inside the administration building.
According to these two articles, the rejection of Students Supporting Israel (SSI) was a decision of Vanderbilt students, not the administration, and I guess they just don’t like Israel. After all, Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, both hate-filled groups favoring the elimination of Israel, are already members of the MLC (so is a subgroup from Hillel, but I bet it’s been a member forever).
Click below to see the piece from the Vanderbilt Hustler, the student newspaper:
I’ll quote from The Algemeiner, but you can check the other piece, too:
According to The Vanderbilt Hustler, [Students Supporting Israel] is the only one to be rejected from this year’s applicant pool, an outcome that SSI president Ryan Bauman said is evidence of febrile opposition to dialogue and coexistence among some segments of the student body. The only Jewish group to be admitted, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), is a fringe anti-Israel organization that did not condemn Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel and has long celebrated terrorism against Israelis.
Among the nine groups to be admitted to the MLC this year were the Taiwanese American Student Association, Vanderbilt Pride Serve, the Vanderbilt Association for South Asian Cuisine, and the Vanderbilt Iranian Student Association. One of the 11 total organizations that applied, Vanderbilt United Mission for Relief and Development, is still awaiting an upcoming vote.
As a requirement of its application, SSI was told to deliver a presentation to the MLC but given only a few minutes to do so. Afterward, the group was cross-examined by the MLC — of which Students for Justice in Palestine is a member organization — about their opinions regarding “genocide” and “apartheid,” an apparent attempt to use the proceeding as a soapbox for anti-Zionist propaganda.
“We told them that we didn’t show up to discuss politics,” Bauman told The Algemeiner during an interview on Tuesday. “We told them we were there to celebrate Israeli culture and further the pro-Israel movement and invited them to have other dialogues at another time. We were then told to leave, and they held a closed session. And as you can see, it resulted in us being rejected by a wide margin.”
Is there any reason besides antisemitism or anti-Zionism that SSI would be the only group to be rejected? If you know Jewish Voice for Peace and especially Students for Justice in Palestine, you’ll know that they’re to a large extent hate groups who favor the abolition of Israel (SJP also celebrated Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel). Is it too much to ask for a group supporting Israel to be added to the mix? Apparently so.
One more note from The Algemeiner:
This is not the first time that Students Supporting Israel has been denied membership in a student organization. In 2021, the president of Duke University’s Student Government vetoed a vote approving recognition of SSI, an incident which set off volleys of criticism and a sharp rebuke from the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.
“Grant them the same access,” Brandeis Center president Alyza Lewin said at the time, warning of potential civil rights violations. “Treat them no differently than any other student recognized organization. If the university chooses not to intervene and does not make sure that SSI gets equal access and it is understood to be no different than any other organization, there could be potential legal liability for the university.”
That also holds for Vanderbilt, whose reputation for fairness could be besmirched by this act. As I said, I don’t blame the administration, which has been exemplary. Chancellor Diermeier also adopted the position of institutional neutrality as embodied in The University of Chicago’s Kalven report, making Vanderbilt one of only a handful of schools to take this essential position. Pity his efforts are being tarred by a bunch of hypocritical students.
In reading the two articles, it certainly is suspicious that SSI was rejected. And the fact that the vote was so lopsided is interesting as well—particularly when compared to the near-unanimous vote in favor of Jewish Voice for Peace.
Maybe they should change their name to something relating to food, bringing them into intersectionality with the Vanderbilt Association for South Asian Cuisine. Just saying… .
I often wonder if perhaps Jewish and Israeli student groups should simply reject associations with other social and political groups—particularly those with a social justice orientation. I understand that the desire to belong is strong, but seeking association with people who want you to go away seems like a futile exercise.
I don’t think it’s so much a case of seeking association with the rest of the student body as it is of staking a claim to have an equal right to be represented and to be visible and active in the public square. While the rejection is tedious and hurtful, simply giving up is what the other students want, and therefore almost by definition a reason to continue the task, albeit a thankless one.
The MLC website is at https://anchorlink.vanderbilt.edu/organization/mlc
While one can ask why the university would give students authority via vote over membership in an organization such as this, Especially without a clear set of membership requirements, I would also ask exactly how a council member decides to vote yes or no. What are the characteristics of an organization that lead to its acceptance or rejection? Is it simply the existing board members’ feelings or some objective criteria? At the website are several versions of the constitution and by-laws; it has mutated in the past eight years from a mission of inclusivity to one with a focus on social justice (at least it is lower case here) and activism. The MLC is advised by one of the dei/social justice offices at the university. Perhaps the President might ask that office for a written justification of the negative vote. In any case this stinks of fraternity and sorority elitism of yesteryear and shows this organization up for what it really is: not different at all from the historical oppressors that they claim to reject.
The real problem is that a Multicultural Leadership Council exists in the first place.