Category: Colleges acting badly

Another one bites the dust: Columbia’s president resigns

August 15, 2024 • 8:15 am

Congressional hearings about free speech and anti-semitism at Penn, Harvard, MIT and Columbia have now resulted in the resignation of the third of these Presidents. Yes, Columbia President Nemat Shafik, following Presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard and Liz Magill of Penn out the door, has resigned her post. President  President Sally Kornbluth of MIT remains in her job.

The brouhaha began last December when, facing two House panels, three Presidents said that in some cases, depending on context, calls for genocide of the Jews might not violate university regulations. Indeed, this was correct according to a First-Amendment construal of this kind of speech. The problem was that these universities, purporting to adhere to the First Amendment, didn’t really do so for other kinds of speech, so they were really guilty of hypocritical and unequal enforcement.  And their presentations on the Hill were stiff and unempathic. Shafik, grilled this April, angered those who said she’d done very little to curb antisemitism on her campus.

Further, Claudine Gay was later accused of serious and multiple incidents of plagiarism, and, in light of all the bad publicity, Harvard gave Gay the boot. Harvard now has now an interim President, Alan Garber, who will run Harvard for the next two years while it looks for a permanent President.

Click below to read the story. Shafik proved hamhanded in the face of pro-Palestinian and antisemitic behavior on campus, with apparently no students being disciplined, including those who stormed and occupied a Columbia building.

Click to read:

An excerpt:

Columbia University’s president, Nemat Shafik, resigned on Wednesday after months of far-reaching fury over her handling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and questions over her management of a bitterly divided campus.

She was the third leader of an Ivy League university to resign in about eight months following maligned appearances before Congress about antisemitism on their campuses.

Dr. Shafik, an economist who spent much of her career in London, said in a letter to the Columbia community that while she felt the campus had made progress in some important areas, it had also been a period of turmoil “where it has been difficult to overcome divergent views across our community.”

What she means is that she can’t manage to stop violations of campus rules for encampment and behavior by pro-Palestinian students. This is because Columbia won’t discipline violators.  A lot of the lack of discipline stems from the attitudes of Columbia faculty, many of whom supported the illegal protests and called for Shafik’s resignation after she called the police to dismantle the local encampment. Caught between Jewish faculty and students on one hand and pro-Palestinian faculty on the other, Shafik was rendered powerless. More:

She added that her resignation was effective immediately, and that she would be taking a job with Britain’s foreign secretary to lead a review of the government’s approach to international development.

The university’s board of trustees named Dr. Katrina A. Armstrong, a medical doctor who has been the chief executive of Columbia’s medical center and dean of its medical school since 2022, as the interim president. The board did not immediately announce a timeline for appointing a permanent leader.

. . . But as much as its sudden end, the brevity of Dr. Shafik’s presidency underscores how profoundly pro-Palestinian demonstrations shook her campus and universities across the country.

Facing accusations that she was permitting antisemitism to go unchecked on campus, Dr. Shafik made a conciliatory appearance before Congress in April that ended up enraging many members of her own faculty. She summoned the police to Columbia’s campus twice, including to clear an occupied building. The moves angered some students and faculty, even as others in the community, including some major donors, said she had not done enough to protect Jewish students on campus.

Dr. Shafik’s tenure was among the shortest in Columbia’s 270-year history, and much of it was a sharp reminder of the challenges facing university presidents, who have sometimes struggled recently to lead upended campuses while balancing student safety, free speech and academic freedom.

Few university leaders were as publicly linked to that dilemma as Dr. Shafik, whose school emerged as a hub of the campus protests that began after the Israel-Hamas war erupted last year.

Those protests, as well as accusations of endemic antisemitism, drew the attention of House Republicans, who orchestrated a series of hearings in Washington starting last year.

But make no mistake about it: the protests will continue this next academic year at Columbia and at other schools. The war in Gaza continues, and Israel is still demonized by many academics (remember that the American Association of University Professors just eliminated their two-decade opposition to academic boycotts, undoubtedly to allow boycotts of Israel).

And so Columbia has a color-coded system to indicate the degree of protest occurring on the campus. This is ridiculous:

To prepare for the possibility of renewed protests in the fall, the university announced a new color-coded system to guide the community on protest risk level on campus, similar to a Homeland Security advisory system. The level was recently set from Green to Orange [JAC: there’s also red], the second-highest, meaning “moderate risk.” Only people with Columbia identification are permitted to enter the central campus, which in the past has been open to the public.

College protesters have vowed to come back stronger than ever to push their main demand that Columbia divest from weapons manufacturers and other companies that profit from the occupation of Palestinian territories.

“Regardless of who leads Columbia, the students will continue their activism and actions until Columbia divests from Israeli apartheid,” said Mahmoud Khalil, a student negotiator on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the main protest movement. “We want the president to be a president for Columbia students, answering to their needs and demands, rather than answering to political pressure from outside the university.”

I doubt that Columbia, like Chicago and many other schools, will agree to divest, for that is eliminating institutional neutrality in the investment of college funds. As so long as there are calls for divestment, and the universities refuse to divest, the protests will continue.  Coming this fall: Code Red, when almost nobody will be allowed on Columbia’s campus.

Of course free speech, along the lines of the Chicago Prnciples, should reign at all campuses, but there should also be time, place, and manner restrictions so that speech doesn’t impede the functioning of the university (e.g. deplatforming speakers, sit-ins in campus buildings, use of bullhorns during class).  So far these restrictions have largely been ignored by schools like Columbia, loath to have officials or police “lay hands” on protestors since that creates bad “optics.”. But if these illegal protests continue, then we can kiss higher education in America goodbye.  But who cares? The pro-Palestinian protestors aren’t interested in holding universities to their mission. Rather, they want to bend universities to their own ideology, and many, in the end, want to efface the principles of Western democracy.

Year’s total: no University of Chicago protestors were penalized despite multiple breakages of state laws and University rules

August 14, 2024 • 10:00 am

The Hyde Park Herald reports that the University of Chicago, which previously withheld diplomas from eleven students for participating in our encampment, has given them back. This means that although the students were warned that being in the encampment was illegal, they, along with all the encampers, suffered no penalty for breaking University rules. The encampment was the fifth violation of University regulations by protestors that went unpunished. 

This seems to be the general trend in most universities. Now that the tumultuous year has ended, universities are experiencing a wave of forgiveness—a wave that will come back to haunt them this fall.  As far as I can see, no students were disciplined by the city of Chicago or by the University despite multiple and clear violations of both the law and University regulations. (This includes the Ciry of Chicago dropping trespassing charges against 24 students and two faculty who were arrested for violating University regulations for sit-ins in University buildings.}

In April I recounted the sad story of how remiss Chicago has been in punishing pro-Palestinian protestors who violated University regulations. As far as I know, the only puniahment levied the entire year, as described above, is a simple warning to the Students for Justice in Palestine that they had better desist from illegally disrupting and deplatforming opponents:

Official Warning – An official warning indicates the organization has violated University policies or regulations and will be placed on file. If the organization engages in any additional misconduct, the appropriate disciplinary body will be informed of this official warning, the related circumstances, and must consider the warning in determining further sanctions.

No that’s really going to deter illegal protests, isn’t it? As noted below, the protestors are proclaiming they’ll return this fall resuming their disruptions. Why wouldn’t they, when they know there’s no penalty for doing so?

Click below to read the Hyde Park Herald’s account of the restoration of diplomas:

An excerpt:

The last of the disciplinary cases against 10 University of Chicago students for their involvement in the pro-Palestine campus encampment was dismissed this week, student activists announced Monday.

Among those facing disciplinary cases were four graduating seniors and a graduate student, whose diplomas were withheld pending U. of C. investigations into potentially “disruptive conduct” at the encampment, which was erected on the Main Quadrangle in early May to protest the institution’s investments in weapons manufacturers arming Israel in its war on Gaza. Most of these cases – including those for another six undergraduate students – were dismissed last month, and the final one, the case of the graduate student, was dismissed and the degree conferred on August 12.

Youseff Hasweh, one of the four graduating seniors, said Monday that this final dismissal after months of pressure from students, alumni and faculty “tells UChicago that we’re never going to back down.”

“Students are even more fired up to join the movement and to let UChicago know that this wasn’t okay, that everything they’ve done this past year,” he said.

In addition to tearing down the encampment, U. of C. police officers arrested more than two dozen students and two faculty members during a November sit-in demanding divestment in the Israel-Hamas war and that the U. of C. cut ties with Israel altogether. U. of C. officers also arrested one person during a commencement walkout this June.

As I said, the City dropped all charges against the two dozen students and two faculty members.  I don’t know why this happened, but surely some punishment should be meted out by the University (as did Vanderbilt–see link above) for illegal sit ins, even if it’s only a note on the student’s transcript.

University regulations that aren’t enforced are regulations that are toothless and can be violated with impunity. I predict that the whole brouhaha will begin again this fall, as there’s simply no way the conflict between Israel and Hamas will be resolved by then. I’ll add this: those calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, including candidate Kamala Harris, realize that, by leaving Hamas in power, such a move will ensure that Israel will be forever subject to Palestinian terrorism—until the Jewish state is destroyed by an Iranian nuke.

As for my University, the paper says this:

Administrators for the U. of C. could not be reached for comment regarding the alleged photos as of press time.

That, of course, means they have no comment.

Get ready for fall—it will be a bumpy ride.

AAUP drops 20-year opposition to academic boycotts

August 14, 2024 • 8:30 am

Most rational people, I believe, are opposed to academic boycotts: those political movements that try to prohibit the exchange of scholars or academic information with countries deemed unacceptable on ideological grounds.  These boycotts not only stem the free flow of information among countries that is the lifeblood of academia—especially of science—but also punish those who can contribute to this knowledge even though those people rarely have any influence with their government. Indeed, as in the case of Israel (surely the reason for the dropping of the boycott prohibition), many scholars are opposed to the government’s policies.

Inside Higher Ed (click below to read) reports on the ending of boycotts by the influential organization the American Association of University Professors, an organization that should know better. Click to read:

The report:

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has dropped its nearly 20-year-old categorical opposition to academic boycotts, in which scholars and scholarly groups refuse to work or associate with targeted universities. The reversal, just like the earlier statement, comes amid war between Israelis and Palestinians.

In 2005, near the end of the second intifada, a Palestinian uprising, the AAUP denounced such boycotts; the following year, it said they “strike directly at the free exchange of ideas.” That statement has now been replaced by one saying boycotts “can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.” The new statement doesn’t mention Israel, Palestine or other current events—but the timing isn’t coincidental.

The new position says that “when faculty members choose to support academic boycotts, they can legitimately seek to protect and advance the academic freedom and fundamental rights of colleagues and students who are living and working under circumstances that violate that freedom and one or more of those rights.”

Note that the AAUP never prevented individual professors from deciding not to cooperate with faculty from other countries. Rather, they used to aver that systematic academic boycotts were not approved by the organization.   Now that’s all changed: systematic boycotts are okay.  But o its credit, the University of Chicago, under the late President Bob Zimmer, opposed academic boycotts in a 2013 statement, and our opposition remains intact:

“The University of Chicago has from its founding held as its highest value the free and open pursuit of inquiry. Faculty and students must be free to pursue their research and education around the world and to form collaborations both inside and outside of the academy, encouraging engagement with the widest spectrum of views. For this reason, we oppose boycotts of academic institutions or scholars in any region of the world, and oppose recent actions by academic societies to boycott Israeli institutions.”

That’s the way a gutsy university handles such matters. Sadly, the AAUP punted (read its statement at the link).  The AAUP’s statement was also heartily approved by a group participating in the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement, an antisemitic initiative whose goal is to eliminate Israel as a Jewish state. Click to read:

An excerpt:

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) commends the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) for dropping its biased, unethical policy opposing academic boycotts, which was primarily aimed at shielding Israeli universities from accountability for their egregious human rights violations.

PACBI salutes all those who worked tirelessly to push the AAUP to change its position, as well as the conscientious academics, students, and progressive academic associations that have for years advocated for ending US academic institutional complicity with Israel’s 76-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid and, in the process, challenging AAUP’s hypocrisy. Without their persistent protests and intellectual challenges, without the student-led encampments reenergizing campus campaigns for academic boycott and divestment in response to Israel’s Gaza genocide, the AAUP would not have reversed its ethically and logically untenable policy.

. . . Scrapping its unethical policy, which was, arguably by design, used to suppress academic freedom of many calling for BDS against Israel, the new AAUP position recognizes the obvious. It finally accepts that academic boycotts targeting institutions deeply implicated in grave human rights violations can be legitimate “to protect and advance the academic freedom and fundamental rights of colleagues and students who are living and working under circumstances that violate that freedom and one or more of those rights.”

The PCBI’s only beef is that the AAUP didn’t go far enough and denounce Israel specifically:

. . . AAUP’s failure to now endorse the Palestinian call to boycott complicit Israeli universities, which it finally recognizes as legitimate, even as Israel’s violence culminates in the world’s first livestreamed genocide, which has included scholasticide, domicide and engineered famine, is a profound ethical failure to make amends for the harm the AAUP’s racist policy has done to Palestinians and to our struggle for emancipation from colonial subjugation.

It’s clear from all this, as Inside Higher Ed notes, that the AAUP’s change of policy was to legitimize academic boycotts of Israel.  The coincidence of timing is too strong to imply otherwise.

University of California system professes institutional neutrality, but screws it up

July 25, 2024 • 10:45 am

Do I need to explain once more the principle of institutional neutrality in academia, whereby a university is prohibited from making official statements about politics, morality, or ideology in its announcements or on its website—except in rare situations when such statements are made to further the mission of the University? This principle was originally devised at the University of Chicago, codified in 1967 as the Kalven Report.

The reason for the principle is to avoid chilling or impeding free speech (we have a separate Principle of Free Expression) by making people fearful of angering authorities and endangering their own status at a university. If a department’s website opposed Israel’s war on Hamas, for example, such opinion (or its opposite) would have to be removed here, for it has nothing to do with the mission of the University. (Of course, there are always Pecksniffs who, by judicious word-twisting, can make any position seem relevant to the mission of a university. But really, our mission is teaching, doing research, and promulgating debate and searches for truth.)

While our Principles of Free Expression were published in 2015, they’ve already been adopted by 110 schools, which adhere to them in varying degrees. However, the Kalven Principle, published 48 years earlier, has been adopted by only a handful of other schools, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Vanderbilt University.  Some other schools are contemplating adopting institutional neutrality, but haven’t seemed to push it through.  I’m not sure why, given that freedom of speech and institutional neutrality are mutually supportive, but I suppose schools (and departments, also included in our Kalven Principles) simply can’t resist weighing in on the issues of the day. In fact, even departments at the University of Chicago sometimes can’t resist making statements that seem to violate Kalven, and the administration polices and adjudicates putative violations.

Now the University of California system, as reported by the L.A. Times, is considering adopting institutional neutrality, too, but has gutted the meaning of that principle by watering it down. Click the link below to read, or, if it’s paywalled, find it archived here

Here’s an excerpt from the July 17 article showing how the UC system’s “neutrality” works:

University of California regents voted Thursday to ban political opinion from main campus homepages, a policy initially rooted in concern about anti-Israel views being construed as official UC opinion.

Political opinions may still be posted on other pages of an academic unit’s website, according to the policy approved at the regents meeting in San Francisco. It will take effect immediately.

The main homepage of a campus department, division or other academic unit will be reserved for news about courses, events, faculty research, mission statements or other general information.

Opinion must be published on other pages specifically labeled as commentary, with a disclaimer that they don’t reflect the entire university or campus. Those who want to post statements on their department websites must follow specific procedures and allow faculty members to weigh in through an anonymous vote.

Regent Jay Sures, vice chairman at United Talent Agency, has pushed for such action for the last few years, previously saying he has been troubled by “abuse” and “misuse” of departmental websites featuring anti-Israel sentiment and other opinions that do not reflect official university views.

After initially proposing a more restrictive policy, Sures said the final draft reflects a better balance between free speech and acknowledging both those who want to make statements and those who oppose them.

“This reflects that we value academic freedom, and it provides a very inclusive environment for the individual departments to put out statements and reflecting minority opinions within those departments,” he said.

Sorry, but I find this deeply misguided.  What purpose is served by institutional neutrality on a departmental or division homepage that is violated if you simply click a link on that page?  After all, in California a department or a division can always weigh in on the war, affirmative action, gun control, politics, and so on, on other pages. Suppose the chairman of a sociology department puts up a post condemning Israel for its conduct of the war against Hamas. Even if it’s labeled as “commentary”, who would be foolish enough to think that this will have no effect on the speech of that department? Grad students, junior faculty, and others who are vulnerable will be inhibited from speaking otherwise, even at faculty meetings or in public. After all, your counterspeech could anger the chair, who could then exact retribution, damage your tenure and promotion, and so on.

There are other venues for expressing your opinions as private individuals: they are called “social media.” Or you can write letters to the editor, publish papers, write books, and so on. There is no need to bawl out your political or ideological views on a university website. (As for chairmen and University presidents and provosts, the line is blurred between their private speech and official unviersity speech, and in my view they’d best keep their views on nonacademic stuff to themselves. This is indeed the case at Chicago).

The best course of action is simply to tell people not to use any parts of university websites opinions other than those very relevant to a university’s or a department’s mission. Let us have none of this mishigass about taking votes or putting up disclaimers. That stuff can still chill speech.

A bit more from the article:

Sean Malloy, a UC Merced associate professor of history and critical race and ethnic studies, asserted that regents were trying to “gag faculty speech” and that the proposed policy reflected efforts to repress the growing movement for Palestinian solidarity across UC campuses.

He noted that regents never tried to intervene in faculty statements on the Black Lives Matter movement after George Floyd’s killing, on climate change or in defense of immigrant students.

“It is only when faculty speech threatened to upset support for Israel and Zionism that the Regents saw fit to enact such a policy,” Malloy said in a statement to The Times. “It must be seen along with the dispatch of police against UC students, faculty and staff, as well as the newly adopted measures aimed against encampments as part of an effort by a group of Regents to hold the UC hostage to their own commitment to Zionism in the midst of a genocide against Palestine.”

No, the purpose of such statements is not to “gag faculty speech”, and should certainly not be to profess commitment to Zionism! The principle is meant, again, to allow faculty and everyone else to speak freely without being nervous about revenge from the university.  You just can’t put your speech on official university web pages.

Now Dr. Malloy is right in saying that if there is such a policy, it has to be applied fairly and uniformly: statements not affecting a university’s mission should all be banned from official websites and statements. You simply can’t allow university members to approve of Black Lives Matter or weigh in on George Floyd on one hand, but then then prevent others from writing about Israel on the other. The fair and just solution is simply to tell people to publish all their personal opinions in other places.  After all, there are plenty of such places! This website is one of them: it’s private and not at all connected to or supported by my university. My opinions are, of course, my own, and not that of my school.

Sadly, the regents of the University of California don’t seem to understand either the meaning or the import of institutional neutrality.

Disgusting capitulation of the year: The University of Windsor gives away the store to pro-Palestinian encampers

July 11, 2024 • 11:15 am

Canada has been proving itself the most spineless country in the world when it comes to dealing with illegal campus activism (or other performative activism). Take, for example, The University of Windsor in Ontario, which until now I thought was a respectable university. They’ve had an encampment for two months, and the students, as usual, made a number of demands before they’d take it down.  But in a sickening display of cowardice, Windsor University made a deal with the students, one in which the University capitulates to a number of ridiculous demands. I receive a copy of what is purported to be the agreement, and will send it to you if you ask (it’s too long to reproduce here). But I’ll put some of the agreements below.

UPDATE: I now realized that the agreement is linked to in the CBC report (here), so I don’t need to send it to you. But the copy I received is very slightly different from that at the CBC link (the latter, for example, calls for an academic boycott of Israel, while that bit has been crossed out in what I received.)

First, though, here’s an article from the CBC news site that describes the agreement. Click headline to read:

And the story.  I’ll put below the specifics from the agreement that i was sent. Bolding is mine.

The University of Windsor says it’s reached a deal with students with a pro-Palestinian encampment that began in mid-May, and all tents will be removed from the southwestern Ontario campus within 48 hours.

“This includes peacefully ending the encampment,” the school said in a news release.

The school says the deal also includes more anti-racism initiatives, support for students impacted by the crisis in Gaza, “responsible” investing, and annual disclosures of direct and indirect public fund investments.

The agreement also involves boycotting institutional partnerships with Israeli universities until the “right of Palestinian self-determination has been realized.”

It’s the “most comprehensive and far-reaching” agreement to come out of Canadian encampment negotiations addressing issues like divestment, academic boycott and anti-Palestinian racism, the protesters said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.The encampment has been in front of the former Dillon Hall since May 13.

Negotiations between the two sides have been going on for four weeks, the group says.

“This deal presents to the students, staff, faculty and community as a whole that the university is willing to take solid steps towards a more transparent and just investment system, and rebuilding Gaza,” said Jana Alrifai, a spokesperson for the protest.

“It is a recognition of its past shortcomings and a commitment to betterment. Most importantly, this would have never happened without the fight and steadfastness of the student movement.”

Here are some other details in the agreement:

  • The university will establish anti-Palestinian racism training and education, which will be recommended for faculty, staff and students. The training will be mandatory for the leadership team and board of governors.
  • The university has 30 days to set up an anti-oppression website, which will include third-party information and resources on anti-Arab racism, anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia.
  • Students who part of the encampment won’t get any academic or employment sanctions for participating in or supporting the encampment.

The protesters will hold a 5 p.m. ET news conference on Wednesday.

Their encampment is among numerous ones set up on Canadian campuses since April, related to the Israel-Hamas war that began in October. Most of the encampments have since come down.

On Wednesday, an encampment at Montreal’s McGill University was dismantled as police, some wearing riot gear, and others on bicycles and on horseback, descended near the campus after the university served two eviction notices to protesters.

But we’re talking not about McGill but about Windsor.  As I said, I was sent a copy via an email that said this was the agreement signed by both sides, and will show you a bit of what is in it. If you want to see the whole agreement, go here.

Clicking on the heading will take you to the agreement linked to the CBC report, but the quotes I give below come from what I was sent—with the exception of the call for an academic boycott of Israel (it’s in the CBC linked copy but not in what I got). I cannot vouch for which copy of the agreement is the final one, but there’s almost no difference between them.

And some stuff they agreed on.  CONTENT WARNING:  ARRANT COWARDICE BY CANADIAN ADMINISTRATORS:

The University of Windsor is in the process of developing its first-ever anti-racism policy. A central feature of the policy will be a focus on identity-based oppression, including anti-Arab racism, anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia. The University will use its best efforts to complete the process by December 31, 2024. The University commits to including Palestinian, Arab and Muslim voices as part of the policy consultation. Regular updates will be provided on the Vice-President, People, Equity andInclusion’s website.

The University commits to establishing an anti-oppression website within 30 days of the ratification of this agreement, which will include institutional and third party information and resources on anti-Arab racism, anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia, linked for the benefit of students, faculty, staff and community members

The University agrees to establish anti-Palestinian racism training and education, which will be recommended for faculty, staff and students. The training and education will be mandatory for the Executive Leadership Team and the Board of Governors members.

The University agrees to make internal research grants available for application by students and faculty on the topic of Palestine in all of its dimensions.

The University agrees that students will not receive any academic or employment sanctions for their participation in, or support for, the encampment, bearing in mind the broad protections provided by the freedoms of expression, association, and assembly

No punishments, as usual!

The University agrees to remove the Aspire Anti-Racism information sheet from its website. [JAC: I don’t know what this website said.]

The University will invest funds as required to extend the Scholars at Risk program for an additional year (to end in 2025). Future institutional support for the program beyond 2025 will be reviewed annually by the University based on the availability of funding. The University will make the securing of funding for the continuation of the Scholars at Risk program a priority in its future financial planning. The University will make special efforts to recruit Palestinian scholars who have been impacted by the occupation of Palestine and the scholasticide in Gaza.

Scholasticide!

The University will endeavour to support students impacted by global conflicts and humanitarian crises, including Palestinian students, who have demonstrated urgent housing needs during the Intersession/Summer term with residence housing.

Provide counselling services for Palestinian, Muslim and BIPOC students which will address the rise of racism and Islamophobia. Ensure the necessary resources to ensure counselling is delivered by racial-trauma-focused therapists

The university will facilitate mental health support groups for students experiencing trauma related to the ongoing occupation of Palestine, not less than quarterly.

Anything about helping Jews or Israelis, or Jewish students affected by the war or antisemitism? I don’t see it. But wait—there are TEN PAGES OF THIS STUFF. And of course Windsor has to change its investment policies to the liking of the encampers:

The University administration agrees to propose to the Board investment committee an expansion of its RI Policy to include a new section on Human Rights and International Law. The section would be modeled after Section C. Climate Change. The section would include a commitment to review the weapons manufacturing industry, with particular attention on companies involved in manufacturing arms used in conflict zones where UN human rights mechanisms or resolutions have determined that serious violations of international human rights, humanitarian or criminal law have occurred. The section would provide an opportunity for the University to develop an operational procedure for its RI Policy based on human rights and international law. This operational procedure would be grounded in United Nations resolutions on human rights situations, and the work of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the United Nations Special Procedures and United Nations human rights commissions of inquiry as well as decisions of domestic legal bodies.

The University will prepare an annual responsible investing report, disclosing all investments in indirect, direct and pooled funds held in its Pension Fund, Endowment Fund and Working Capital Fund. The report shall be made publicly available. The first report will be published by December 31, 2024. The annual disclosure will provide a list of public companies within the indirect,direct and pooled funds and the amount of investments in each fund The annual disclosure will explain the application of the RI Policy, including the ESG factors and human rights, to the University’s investment decisions.

The University acknowledges the dire situation faced by Palestinian universities under Israeli occupation. This includes the destruction of the Palestinian universities in Gaza and the unjustified restrictions and frequent closures faced by Palestinian universities in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The University commits to establishing or reestablishing institutional relationships with Palestinian universities, which will include research partnerships and scholarly exchanges. Within its resources, the University will assist with, and support, the restoration of post-secondary education in Gaza.

The University will recommend to the Senate that it explore the feasibility of implementing a Palestine Studies minor under the Interdisciplinary and Critical Studies Department. Courses under this program will aim to explore Palestine in all of its dimensions.

Finally, the encampers have forced the University to violate institutional neutrality and agree with the UN’s demonization of Israel.  Windsor has no fricking business to weigh in on the war or politics, for it violates institutional neutrality by taking an official University position on the war. That, of course, chills the speech of those (presumably many) who disagree with the agreement and the stuff that Windsor will say in its capitulation:

Within 72 hours of the ratification of this agreement, the University will send a letter to the Government of Canada calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire. In the letter, it will also urge the Government of Canada to include anti-Palestinian racism within its Anti-Racism Strategy. Further, it will request that the Government of Canada should be generous in the humanitarian aid that it delivers to Palestine in order to enable Gaza to engage in reconstruction for its people, and to assist the Palestinians to realize their right to self-determination. The University will post the letter on its website.

This is in the document linked to at the CBC site, but is crossed out in the copy I was sent. If it really was agreed on, it calls for an academic boycott of Israel.

The University does not hold any active institutional academic partnerships with Israeli institutions. Because of the challenging environment for academic collaboration the University agrees to not pursue any institutional academic agreements with Israeli universities until the right of Palestinian self-determination has been realized, as determined by the United Nations, unless supported by Senate. This does not prevent individual academics at the University of Windsor from working (or collaborating) with academics in Israel.

Finally, there’s this—more taking sides in a conflict and more chilling of speech at Windsor:

For the purposes of the application of its RI Policy, the University recognizes that the United Nations, through its various bodies – including the Secretary General, the Security Council, the General Assembly, the Human Rights Council, the International Court of Justice and human rights commissions of inquiry – has found Israel, the occupying power, to be in serious violation of international law and human rights in the conduct of its occupation of Palestinian territory. It also recognizes that the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has established an active database of companies whom it has identified are engaged with the illegal Israeli settlement enterprise in the occupied Palestinian territory.

Of course there’s bupkes about Hamas violating international law.

This whole document is simply reprehensible, a sickening display of cowardice (and antisemitism) on the part of Windsor University, which commits itself to taking the side of Hamas in the war and providing resources to Palestine and Palestinian students that aren’t offered to Israeli or Jewish students. There are plenty of initiatives against “Islamophobia,” but I don’t see a single one against antisemitism. Does Windsor do all this stuff for Israeli academics, professors, and students? Perhaps they already have similar policies in place with respect to Israel (extra counseling for Jewish students, etc.), but I doubt it.

Again, if you want to see the whole nauseating agreement, click here.

Academic boycotts against Israel spread

July 10, 2024 • 11:30 am

This new article from the Wall Street Journal describes in some detail the way the world is boycotting Israel since October 7, both because it’s defending itself and because it’s a Jewish state.

Such boycotts aren’t new, of course, as the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement has been in swing since about 2001, but the boycotts, and calls for them, have intensified since the war in Gaza.  I’m most concerned with the call for academic boycotts, in which non-Israeli universities swear that they won’t exchange scholars or knowledge with Israeli universities. Such boycotts violate the free exchange of ideas that is the lifeblood of academia. But there are also material boycotts as well: BDS was, I believe, mainly meant to impede the exchange of goods. The academic part began around 2014, and was very quiet—until recently. And that’s what this article documents:

Click below to read the article, though it’s not archived (pdf available with judicious inquiry). I’ll give some quotes (indented):

Some examples of boycotts or calls for them:

When an ethics committee at Ghent University in Belgium recommended terminating all research collaborations with Israeli institutions in late May, Israeli computational biologist Eran Segal didn’t see it coming.

The sciences had seen little impact from global boycott movements, even months into the war, and Segal’s work had nothing to do with the Israeli military effort. The university’s research collaborations, the Ghent committee noted, include research on autism, Alzheimer’s disease, water purification and sustainable agriculture.

. . . Israelis are finding they are no longer welcome at many European universities, including participating in scientific collaborations. Their participation in cultural institutions and defense trade shows is increasingly becoming taboo.

Ghent University is, of course, where my philosopher colleague Maarten Boudry works. He’s vehemently opposed to such boycotts, and has decried them in Belgian and Dutch magazines and newspapers.

Below is an example of Israel being booted out of international meetings, though this one has little to do with academia:

Lidor Madmoni, chief executive of a small Israeli defense startup, prepared for months for a June international weapons show in Paris. The conference, Eurosatory, would be a rare opportunity for his small staff to expand their business, he said. Then came an email informing him that, because of a French court decision, his company was prohibited from attending.

“We have the obligation to block your access to the exhibition starting tomorrow,” the organizers said on the eve of the event, citing court orders that followed a French defense ministry ban issued in response to Israeli military operations in Rafah, the Gaza city where more than one million people had sought refuge.

The French decisions “shocked the entire community” of Israeli defense technology companies, said Noemie Alliel, managing director in Israel for Starburst Aerospace, an international consulting firm that develops and invests in startups in aerospace and defense. Conference organizers said they had appealed to overturn the court decision and told Israeli companies in an email that they were doing all that they could to enable them to attend.

. . . The Israeli defense-exports sector—flourishing before the war, with a record $13 billion in sales in 2023—got wind in March that it could be a target, when Chile barred Israeli companies from taking part in Latin America’s biggest aerospace fair. The French ban followed in June.

Back to academics (my bolding):

When the war began, new boycotts began to trickle in, mainly from humanities and social-science departments, said Netta Barak-Corren, a law professor who heads an antiboycott task force formed during the war at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The boycotts began to widen around two months ago, spreading to the hard sciences and to the university level—“universitywide movements and more importantly decisions to cut all ties with Israeli universities and Israeli academics,” she said.

More than 20 universities in Europe and Canada have adopted such bans, she said.

O Canada!  And from Europe:

An Israeli student who was preparing to study at the University of Helsinki said she was already looking for housing in Finland—until the school told her in May that it had suspended its exchange agreements with Israeli universities.

The University of Helsinki stopped sending students to Israel after Oct. 7 and decided to suspend exchanges in May to express its concern about the conflict, said Minna Koutaniemi, the head of the school’s international exchange services. The university doesn’t intend to restrict its researchers from collaborating with Israelis, she said.

From the U.S. (this “ban” may be rescinded):

Boycotts are gaining traction across the academic spectrum. Cultural Critique, a journal published by the University of Minnesota Press, told an Israeli sociologist in May that his essay was barred from consideration because, they believed, he was affiliated with an Israeli institution.

The journal told the scholar that it follows BDS guidelines, “which include ‘withdrawing support from Israel’s…cultural and academic institutions’.”

Cultural Critique subsequently apologized for excluding the article on the basis of the scholar’s academic affiliation and amended its website to say that submissions would be evaluated “without regard to the identity and affiliation of the author.” It invited the scholar to resubmit.

Authors participate as well:

. . . some creative artists abroad are cutting themselves off from Israel. Since the start of the war, a few dozen authors, most of them American, have refused to have their books translated into Hebrew and sold in Israel, said Efrat Lev, the foreign-rights director at the Deborah Harris Agency in Israel, a literary agency.

One author who had worked with the agency and wrote a young-adult book focusing on queer acceptance refused to publish a second book in Israel, although a contract had already been signed and a translation to Hebrew was under way, said Lev.

“I felt that it was an important book for Israeli kids who are experiencing similar experiences,” she said. “This broke my heart.”

Better to demonize Israel than to help gay Israeli kids!

Academic boycotts seem to me worthless; indeed, they’re counterproductive because they divide a worldwide academic community and impede the dissemination of knowledge.  The University of Chicago issued this statement when Bob Zimmer was President:

On December 22, 2013, the University of Chicago released the following statement on the subject of academic boycotts:

“The University of Chicago has from its founding held as its highest value the free and open pursuit of inquiry. Faculty and students must be free to pursue their research and education around the world and to form collaborations both inside and outside of the academy, encouraging engagement with the widest spectrum of views. For this reason, we oppose boycotts of academic institutions or scholars in any region of the world, and oppose recent actions by academic societies to boycott Israeli institutions.”

It’s not rocket science!  But people, including academics who should know better, are hell-bent on punishing Israel and, of course, those uppity Jews who defended themselves against Hamas.  As Dorian Abbot also pointed out, such boycotts violate the Mertonian Academic Norms:

You can see those norms here, which were given by sociologist Thomas Merton as “the four norms of good scientific research. . . . These norms are communism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism.”  The one Dorian refers to is the second:

  • “universalism: scientific validity is independent of the sociopolitical status/personal attributes of its participants.”

Ergo the status of “being Israeli” has no bearing on whether science should be exchanged or impeded.  Academic boycotts are, to use the argot, stupid.

FIRE poll has good news and bad news

June 21, 2024 • 11:30 am

A new poll by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has some good news and some bad news. I’ll highlight what I see are the important results, but you can read the whole thing by clicking below.


The poll was conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago (formerly the National Opinion Research Center), and their results are generally solid.  The sample, says the page, “The

.. . . was conducted May 17-19, 2024, using NORC’s AmeriSpeak® probability-based panel, and sampled 1,309 Americans. The overall margin of error for the survey is +/- 4%.

Here are some graphs:

While some of these protest actions are regulated on campuses (ours, for example, regulates the times when you can use amplified sound), the poll is simply about whether it’s okay for college students to engage in these activities. No “time, place, or manner” restrictions are discussed.

Given that, and looking at the dark and light red bars as indications of “not very acceptable”, we see pretty much what we expect. What’s surprising is that a huge majority of Americans (these are not just students) find burning an American flag unacceptable (about 70% “never acceptable and 12% “rarely acceptable”), despite the fact that burning an American flag is protected as free speech by the First Amendment!  (So is holding signs.) Americans either don’t know or don’t care about that interpretation of flag-burning by the courts. As the FIRE site notes:

“It’s no shocker that Americans tend to disapprove of illegal and illiberal conduct by student protesters,” said FIRE Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens. “But it’s alarming that a third of Americans say constitutionally protected and non-threatening activities like sign-holding or petitions are only ‘sometimes’ or ‘rarely’ acceptable. Nonviolent protest should always be acceptable on college campuses.”

But I disagree with FIRE in part here as there are time, place, and manner restrictions that apply even to nonviolent protests. Blocking access to campus or impeding classes with megaphones and shouting are nonviolent forms of protest, but prevent academia from operating propetly. In my view, FIRE is simply wrong that these should always be acceptable.  Much of the time, yes, but not always. 

Encamping is also of interest, and 43% of American think that establishing them is “never acceptable” while about 22% see them as “rarely acceptable”. About 25% see encampments as “sometimes or always acceptable”, with the “sometimes” outnumbering “always’ here.  Whether universities consider encampment acceptable, of course, depends on the school and the form of encampment.  Williams College, for instance, had a small, out-of-the-way encampment and nobody was bothered.

Here are the consequences that the American public thinks should fall onto students participating in encampments.


FIRE’s summary:

Nearly three-fourths of Americans (72%) believe that campus protesters who participated in encampments should be punished, but only 18% believe they should receive the harshest penalty of expulsion. Other responses ran the gamut from suspension (13%), to probation (16%), to written reprimand (12%), to community service (13%). Only 23% believe the students should receive no punishment at all.

LOL; I think more than 23% of colleges themselves believe that encamping students should receive no punishment at all. At least that’s my guess based on the number of students who seem to be getting of scot-free for encamping.  As for punishment, there’s roughly equal sentiment in faor of a written reprimand, community service, probation, suspension, or expulsion.  Perhaps a written reprimand would be okay for students who are first-time violators, but the penalty should go up if there are previous violations on a student’s record, and also on how much warning they were given by the university, as well as whether they engaged in any harassment of individuals during the encampment.

There’s a bit more:

“Public colleges and universities can usually ban encampments without violating the First Amendment, so long as the ban serves a reasonable purpose, enforcement is consistent and viewpoint-neutral, and students maintain other avenues for expressing themselves,” said FIRE Director of Campus Rights Advocacy Lindsie Rank. “Universities can’t disproportionately punish students just because administrators don’t agree with the viewpoint being expressed at the encampment.”

Agreed!

And I’ve saved the good news for last:

FIRE’s summary:

Almost two-thirds of Americans (63%) said that the campus protests had no impact at all on their level of sympathy for Palestinians in Gaza, and respondents were as likely to say that the campus protests made them sympathize less with the Palestinians (17%) as they were to say they made them sympathize more (16%).

In other words, the net effect of campus protests—and they surely mean “pro-Palestinian protests”—is ZERO: as just as many people become more sympathetic as become less sympathetic, while most people don’t change their minds at all. In other words, the protests are performative, at least with respect to American opinion. They could, of course, hearten or disappoint Hamas, but again the net effect would be nil.  What the protests do accomplish is reduce America’s confidence in colleges and universities, which seems to be continuously slipping. And yes, that’s bad news:

FIRE’s poll also shows that American confidence in colleges and universities continues to slip. Only 28% of respondents said that they have either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in U.S. colleges and universities. By comparison, 36% of Americans told Gallup in summer 2023 that they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education in the U.S.

The FIRE summary concludes with more bad news: a pessimistic take of Americans on whether institutions of higher education protest free speech

Colleges received middling grades in particular on the issue of protecting speech. Almost half of Americans (47%) say that it is “not at all” or “not very” clear that college administrators protect free speech on their campus. Roughly two-in-five Americans (42%) said that it is “not at all”or “not very” likely that a school administration would defend a speaker’s right to express their views during a controversy on campus.