The Professional Staff Congress, a 30,000-member labor union for the City University of New York, rescinded its resolution supporting boycotting Israel on Sunday.
Fran Clark, director of communications at PSC, told JNS that the resolution was scrapped due to voting irregularities.
“The PSC Delegate Assembly voted to rescind its resolution, passed on Jan. 23 by a 73-70 vote, which committed to divesting the union’s reserve funds from Israeli corporate securities and urging the Teachers Retirement System to do the same,” Clark told JNS.
“The Delegate Assembly chose to rescind the resolution because irregularities were identified in the Jan. 23 vote,” he said. “The irregularities were corrected, and a revote was held on Feb. 20. The divestment resolution failed with a vote of 113 opposed, 63 in favor.”
Jeffrey Lax, a law professor at CUNY and founder of a nonprofit that combats campus Jew-hatred, told JNS that he believes his organization’s public campaign influenced the union’s decision to reverse course, including pressure from professors who threatened to resign from the union.
“There is not one iota of the union having done this because it was the right thing to do,” Lax said. “It’s not like they suddenly realized that this is hateful, racist and antisemitic. They did it because they were worried there would be no more union if they actually went through with this.”
Lax told JNS that repealing the BDS resolution does not change the public college system’s problem with Jew-hatred.
“They are still the same antisemitic, racist Marxists they always were, and they will continue to engage in the same behavior, including chanting slogans like ‘Zionism is not welcome here,’” Lax said.
“The delegates, who represent faculty members at CUNY including people like me, are not going to stop doing that,” he added. “They still believe that Zionism has no place at CUNY.”
