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
