Alec Schemmel of the Washington Free Beacon reports one prominent school’s recent missteps in its approach to fighting antisemitism.
Last fall, Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Sally Kornbluth tapped a group of Jewish faculty members to advise the school on a new initiative meant to combat campus anti-Semitism. The participants were “hopeful,” they said in an email to fellow MIT staff, that the move would help them “more effectively influence the decision making to reduce the tensions on campus.”
Shortly thereafter, in January, an announcement from MIT chancellor Melissa Nobles dashed those hopes.
The school’s “Standing Together Against Hate” (STAH) initiative, Nobles said, would include four panels: one on anti-Semitism, one on “campus freedom of expression,” one on Islamophobia, and one on “anti-Palestinian racism.” Omitted from the speaker series was any talk on racism or hatred targeting Israelis and Zionists.
MIT’s hand-picked speakers also prompted concern. Islamophobia panelist Dalia Mogahed in the wake of Oct. 7 endorsed Hamas terrorism as an act of lawful “resistance” and suggested that Israelis are “savages” who “kill babies” and “bomb hospitals.” Free speech panelist Erwin Chemerinsky, meanwhile, serves as the dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, which was sued in November over “unchecked” campus anti-Semitism.
For the Jewish faculty members, Nobles’s announcement came as a surprise—not because MIT declined to take their advice on panel topics and speakers, but because the school failed to seek out their advice altogether. The members responded by disbanding their advisory group.
“As our group was originally conceived in the framework of STAH, we want to emphasize that we had no input to the published program and/or reviewed it before its announcement,” the advisory group members said in their February email. “As a result, we recently informed President Kornbluth that we would disband the advisory group.”
