Authorities arrested Patrick Dai, a junior at Cornell University on Tuesday for allegedly posting online threats to rape and kill Jewish students. He also encouraged others to join the violence.
The antisemitism that had already begun to take root on many American college campuses years before the horrors of October 7 is gaining dangerous ground among some of America’s youth. The likelihood of antisemitic violence on campus is growing.
So, how did we get here, and what should we do about it?
Most parents send their kids to college to receive an education that cultivates character, social and civic responsibility, and intellectual growth in preparation for meaningful vocation and participation in a free society. But for many of today’s American college students, along with delving into Dante, taking on Organic Chemistry 1, or learning to speak French – they may also be learning how to be antisemites.
Parents may think their child is immune.
But perhaps as much or more loudly than the volumes stored in classically-columned university libraries, the words and actions – or lack thereof – of campus administrators, faculty, and peers speak and teach.
Too many leaders of American universities aren’t acting much like real leaders, and that’s perilous for our nation’s college students. The muted responses to what President Joe Biden called “the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust” shock and horrify.
In response to the Hamas massacre, Northwestern University President Michael Schill said on October 12 that, “Northwestern does not intend to make an institutional statement.” The next day, after an apparent nudge of the moral compass, he issued a revision.
Provost Jenny Martinez and interim president Richard Saller of Stanford University wrote on October 11 that they “believe it is important that the university, as an institution, generally refrain from taking institutional positions on complex political or global matters that extend beyond our immediate purview, which is the operations of the university itself.” This, about the barbarity whose horror has only grown as details have emerged.
We have witnessed similar delayed, sheepish, and evasive statements from leaders at Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, and Dartmouth, where leaders have been unwilling to take clear moral stands against Hamas’ genocidal aspirations and evil actions.
To be sure, one can legitimately criticize the policies of the government of Israel, but refusing to recognize the nation’s right to exist, calling for its annihilation with phrases such as “from the river to the sea”, or failing to condemn without caveat Hamas’ actions on October 7, is an entirely different matter.
Weak university leadership and a lack of ethical clarity create a climate of permissiveness. As a result, too many faculty members on American college campuses feel empowered to model antisemitic attitudes and actions.
A Columbia University professor praised the events of October 7 in an article as “a stunning victory.”
At Cornell, a professor described Hamas’ terror as “exhilarating” and “energizing".
An instructor at Stanford reportedly called the Jewish students in his class “colonizers”, told them to stand at the back of the class, and dismissed the murder of “only” 6 million Jewish people during the Holocaust. “They did not feel like they had the capacity at this time to argue with a teacher at Stanford,” said executive director of Stanford’s Jewish Community Center, Rabbi Dov Greenberg in an interview with CNN. “They’re just kids.”
These educators set nefarious examples for the impressionable college students in their charge.
Each autumn, thousands of eager young people gather on campus greens and browse options at festive collegiate “clubs and activities” fairs. There, they encounter dozens of neatly arranged tables festooned with balloons and bubble-lettered signage extending invitations to make new friends and discover new interests. Intramural soccer? A Cappella Club? Economics Enthusiasts Club? And how about joining Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)?
Parents may want to ask if their child has joined an organization that referred to the October 7 terror attack as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance”.
A day after the attack, SJP’s University of Virginia chapter published a statement expressing that the membership “unequivocally supports the right of colonized people everywhere to resist the occupation of their land by whatever means they deem necessary [emphasis added].” National SJP provided a poster template to students celebrating Hamas paragliders and the terror they inflicted upon Israeli innocents at a music festival.
And kids at California State University Long Beach made use of these hateful templates to help them organize a poster-making meeting, too.
At New York University, antisemitic students tore down posters of innocent hostages kidnapped by Hamas terrorists. Reports emerged just yesterday about a similar incident at George Mason University, located just 30 minutes outside Washington, DC.
On October 25th, SJP students projected the phrases “Glory to our martyrs” and “Free Palestine from the river to the sea” on the Melvin and Estelle Gelman Library at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Parents may want to ask whether such abhorrent things are happening at their child’s college or university and take steps to protect their kids from hate. As a first and often neglected step, parents should stay emotionally connected with their college student, keeping lines of communication open.
They can ask their students how administrators, faculty, and peers have been conducting themselves in recent weeks. Parents can also educate and equip their kids to recognize and wholeheartedly reject barbarism and antisemitism.
Amidst confusing messaging and campus contexts of moral relativism, students must know how to identify evil when they see it. A few reputable sources to start with include: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, and Anti-Defamation League.
When we send our kids to college, we expect them to become more knowledgeable, thoughtful, empathetic people.
Not antisemites.
“History teaches that hate never fully goes away; it only hides until it is given just a little oxygen,” wrote President Biden. “That is why we must confront antisemitism early and aggressively whenever and wherever it emerges from the darkness.”
Parents must equip their kids now to confront history’s longest hatred.
It’s uncloaking itself, and there’s no time to waste.
Until the next post,
Antonette