How to preserve free expression on ever-divided campuses - opinion

When American Jewish community members established Brandeis University in 1948, they sought to provide Jewish students, along with people from all marginalized communities, with a refuge from the discrimination embedded in the college admissions process.

Given the institution’s awareness of American Jews’ vulnerability, it should be no surprise that former college president Ron Liebowitz immediately and unequivocally condemned the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks. 

Liebowitz stands out among his counterparts both for denouncing these atrocities and for his navigation of the challenges since that horrific day. I hope that interim president Arthur Levine continues Liebowitz’s legacy.

The administration has protected Jewish students and preserved the namesake’s core value of free expression on a divided campus. University administrators across the country should take note and replicate this successful model or risk tolerating a hostile environment against Jewish students, faculty, and staff.

Due to the university’s unique history, it is easy to dismiss the administration’s approach as unreplicable in other contexts. Many people falsely assume the school is a majority Jewish university and uniformly Zionist. 

The nonsectarian university’s undergraduate population is about 35% Jewish. Within this vibrant community, there is a wide range of opinions toward the Middle East, just as there is across the whole student body. 

Brandeis University lived up to its values by becoming the first private university in the country to derecognize its Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter. Liebowitz clearly articulated how this group violated basic human decency by proudly supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization that seeks the genocide of the Jewish people. 

Simultaneously, he expressed empathy with Palestinian pain and correctly differentiated Hamas from the Palestinian people.

Throughout the past year, Liebowitz made clear that community members could voice solidarity with Palestinians during the ongoing war responsibly. In anticipation of an anti-Israel demonstration, the administration sent an email on November 10 explaining that calls for “violence, death, or annihilation” are not permitted and listed some examples of go-to antisemitic eliminationist chants.

In contrast, peer institutions that did not adopt these policies enabled an environment of antisemitism. On October 8, 2023, MIT student agitators blasted an email to undergraduate students that demonized the Jewish state a day after Hamas massacred 1,200 people and kidnapped more than 250 men, women, and children. 

What counts as antisemitism?

In her congressional testimony, MIT President Sally Kornbluth failed to unequivocally say that calls for the genocide of Jews violate campus policies. When a disruptive encampment emerged last spring, the university dragged its feet for weeks before enforcing its campus guidelines.

Meanwhile, Brandeis’s vice president for student affairs, Andrea Dine, and two colleagues wrote a joint email last spring. They explained that protests would be permitted exclusively in specific spaces, and they explicitly banned “occupying or blocking access to buildings” and setting up “outdoor encampments.” 

Efforts like these helped the school maintain a safe, quiet, and productive end to the spring semester.

Unfortunately, the school’s policies were not consistently respected. Last March, students from unrecognized clubs, including SJP, hosted an unauthorized gathering. At the event, they desecrated the Jewish mourning prayer to glorify terrorism. 

Attendees recited kaddish yatom, the mourner’s kaddish, for all Palestinians who have died since Israel’s founding and thereby failed to distinguish between tragic civilian deaths and those of terrorists.

While these acts are deeply unfortunate, Brandeis administration’s policies ensure events like these are the exception, not the norm. Given the administration’s success at creating a healthy campus environment, it should come as no surprise why Jewish students still feel safe at our school. 

It is too easy to excuse the lackluster responses toward campus antisemitism as the product of an impossible balancing act for administrators to navigate. The steps Liebowitz made – from derecognizing the SJP to clearly explaining when free speech crosses into hate speech to banning encampments – are tools that are available to university presidents across the country. 

It is not a matter of ability but rather of moral clarity and courage that has set our school apart from its peers.

The noncommittal approach taken at other universities has failed to heal the campus communities, let alone preserve the befuddled administrators’ careers. 

Those who seek communal healing from the chaos that antisemitism has brought upon university campuses should call for administrations to follow Brandeis’s lead by employing former president Liebowitz’s approach.

The writer is a sophomore at Brandeis University, studying international and Judaic studies, and a CAMERA on Campus fellow.