A coalition of mental health professional organizations issued a letter to the University of Illinois Chicago on Monday, warning that the school has failed to provide “a safe, discrimination-free environment for Jewish graduate students,” citing alleged harassment and biased curriculum.
The statement, signed by the Jewish Social Work Consortium, Gesher Community Care, Trauma Informed Learning Alliance and the Chicagoland Jewish Therapists Group, called on the university to “take immediate, visible steps to address antisemitism and antizionism,” including timely investigations and safe reporting mechanisms.
The groups pointed to a series of incidents detailed by Ally Frank, a social work student at the Jane Addams College of Social Work.
Frank told JNS that on Oct. 6, 2025, as vice president of UIC’s Levine Hillel Jewish Student Association, she and fellow Hillel student leaders were tabling and raising awareness about hostages kidnapped by Hamas when “we ended up being surrounded and mobbed by about three dozen students” who shouted accusations including “genocidal baby killers.”
“They said that we have blood on our hands,” she said.
She started recording the students to capture faces “so that when we reported it to the university, hopefully they could identify any of these antagonists,” but that one member of the group “instructed the crowd not to let us leave because they couldn’t trust what we were going to do with these videos and our ‘Jewy’ connection.”
Police were called. It took them approximately 30 minutes to arrive, Frank said.
After reporting the incident to the university and interviews with administrators, what followed was “about three months of essentially radio silence,” Frank told JNS, until a meeting at which the university told Frank that there was no violation of the student code of conduct and it did not “rise to UIC’s level of harassment.”
Frank is hopeful that engaging directly with the university, instead of taking legal action, will help create “immediate and sustainable policy change so that a future class of students doesn’t feel the same way I do and is not impacted the same way that I am.”
She told JNS she has one more year left at UIC and has concerns about her name and face being attached to the accusations against the university, but that “the Code of Ethics for the National Association of Social Workers requires social workers who are bound by this code to call out injustice when they see it.”
If the university does not take adequate steps to address the issue, Frank said she will consult with her team to figure out next steps,"one email, one conversation at a time.”
