As Jewish students return to college campuses across the country, bracing for the possibility that antisemitic attacks will resume, one of the challenges when it comes to protecting Jewish and pro-Israel students is the variation in how institutions approach security, says Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America.
One campus might have its own police force, while another might rely on the city’s law enforcement to address security concerns when they occur, according to Fingerhut, a former president and CEO of Hillel International, as well as a former Ohio Board of Regents chancellor and former member of Congress.
“There’s a wide range of different capabilities at a university when it comes to security,” he told JNS.
“You can’t wait until there’s an incident,” Fingerhut added, stressing the importance of law enforcement and campuses building relationships.
“People need to know each other. They must understand the policies,” he said. “That’s what we’ve been very focused on helping our Federations do.”
Fingerhut applauded the University of California system’s recent decision to enforce policies on its 10 campuses to protect students. In a letter on Aug. 19, Dr. Michael Drake, the University of California president and a physician, wrote that the system will “prohibit camping or encampments, unauthorized structures, restrictions on free movement, masking to conceal identity and refusing to reveal one’s identity when asked to do so by university personnel.”
That decision likely stemmed from a recent federal legal decision rebuking UCLA for its “unimaginable” and “abhorrent” decision to overlook discrimination against Jewish students, according to Fingerhut.
“I’m sure the decision in the case involving UCLA played a role in their thinking,” he said. “These are the exact kind of steps that are needed.”
Fingerhut told JNS that he’s hopeful “that you won’t have to get the courts involved case by case—that people will, like the UC system and others, proactively understand what their responsibilities are.”
While UCLA was expected to appeal, the university said in a motion on Aug. 23 that it won’t be appealing.
Columbia and Barnard
JNS asked Fingerhut about Minouche Shafik’s recent resignation as president of Columbia University. Shafik drew criticism for taking too long to call in police to dismantle an anti-Israel encampment, and the Ivy League school has been the subject of lawsuits and federal probes for alleged antisemitic discrimination.
A House committee has also accused the university of failing to turn over documents about Jew-hatred on campus. On Wednesday, it subpoenaed six senior Columbia leaders, including its newly installed interim president, Katrina Armstrong.
Fingerhut told JNS that Shafik’s decision to step down demonstrates that there are “real challenges to Jewish students there, and she did not successfully manage that.”
“I think that it’s clear that their response has been wholly ineffective,” he said. He added that her resignation was “appropriate” to “the extent that the president is responsible.”
He praised the Hillel on Columbia’s and Barnard College’s campuses, which he knows “very well,” but said on a university-wide level, much more work needs to be done.
“The focus is really that they’ve not successfully developed and implemented the kinds of policies that they need to not just protect all the Jewish students but to ensure that that campus is really not a hotbed of anti-Jewish activity,” Fingerhut said.
Cause for optimism
While the situation has been bleak at certain schools, Fingerhut expressed optimism about other campuses, including state universities like the University of Florida, where he said there is a large Jewish student population that has experienced “no issues at all.”
Some private schools, like Vanderbilt University, “took appropriate responses” to campus unrest, he said. It was one of the first schools to expel anti-Israel student protesters.
In fact, campuses overrun with chaos are the exception rather than the rule, according to the Federations leader.
“The important thing to realize is that there’s a couple thousand institutions of higher education in America,” he said. “We’re talking about maybe 200 that have experienced these problems.”
As for the others, he said, “we need to lift them up.”
