THE MOST PRESTIGIOUS COLLEGES SEE THE MOST ANTISEMITISM

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“THE MOST PRESTIGIOUS COLLEGES SEE THE MOST ANTISEMITISM”

 

For parents wondering where to turn to find higher education with the least exposure to antisemitism and protests favoring the terrorist group Hamas, a new study should provide strong information about where to turn.

 

One thing the report shows: the more traditionally prestigious a university, the more likely it appears to be affected by those two factors.

 

The Santa Cruz-based AMCHA Initiative, which has tracked campus anti-Jewish bigotry on hundreds of campuses for almost 20 years, used four factors in its rankings. These include the number of faculty who have publicly supported an academic boycott of all things Israel, whether and how many academic departments have issued anti-Zionist statements, whether a school has a chapter of the group Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP), often funded by Hamas related non-profits and the state of Qatar, plus the number of on-campus FJP statements and events at each school.

 

Besides prestige, which probably draws FJP organizers to some schools, one other major pattern emerged that might surprise some: Christian church-affiliated colleges as large as Notre Dame and as small as California Lutheran almost without exception ranked very low in both anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

 

AMCHA often notes that while most faculty statements avoid outspokenly direct anti-Jewish statements, protests organized and promoted by anti-Israel professors frequently devolve into blatant antisemitism, with shouts like “Gas the Jews” commonplace at rallies. That's why it 's sensible to conflate anti-Zionism and antisemitism on campuses where some professors try to disguise anti-Jewish bias. 

 

Many schools listed with AMCHA’s worst ratings have also seen reports of anti-Jewish discrimination and rhetoric in classrooms and other private on-campus encounters between students. At some schools, students and outsiders have attempted to deny building access to classmates and others they believed to be Jews. See complete rankings at https://amchainitiative.org/azf-barometer.

 

Among the schools with the worst ratings in the study are some with the most selective admission policies in California and the nation.

 

Besides Ivy League colleges like Columbia, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania and other top-rated schools like New York University, Duke and the University of Chicago, myriad high-prestige, high-tuition California campuses also drew the most adverse rating.

 

These included Stanford University, Scripps and Harvey Mudd colleges and the Claremont Graduate University, plus University of California campuses at Los Angeles, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Irvine, Santa Barbara, Davis and San Diego. Other California schools like UC Riverside, Pomona College, USC and Cal State campuses in San Diego, Sacramento, Long Beach and Sonoma fell into the second-worst category.

 

Many of these colleges set up strong policies last summer to reverse damage to their reputations inflicted by seemingly unrestrained anti-Israel, pro-Hamas and anti-Jewish protests and actions during the 2023-24 school year.  A host of campuses reeled out of control within less than two days of the Hamas massacres and kidnappings of more than 1,400 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023.

 

The instant startup of those protests against victims of murder, rape and hostage-taking often made it appear that the campus events might be in deliberate cadence with the violence half a world away. “Gas the Jews” shouts were heard on many American campuses days before Israel began its reactive war in Gaza.

 

Previous AMCHA reports have linked the presence and prominence of FJP campus chapters to the strength and violence of those protests and to expressly anti-Jewish incidents at schools with the chapters.

 

Said the new report, “Many FJP chapters not only host virulently anti-Israel events and author anti-Zionist statements, they often collaborate with anti-Zionist student groups and academic departments."

 

No one yet knows whether the incoming Donald Trump administration’s statements opposing federal funding for colleges that allow such activity will have any effect.

 

But moves last summer by administrators at schools like Stanford and UC’s central president’s office seem to be scaling back both the frequency and intensity of the protests.

 

This does not mean there has been a decrease in classroom discrimination against Jewish students or in discrimination against Jewish students by others on campus, where Jews elected as student officers have sometimes been hounded to the point where they’ve left their longtime academic homes.    

 

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net