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City University of New York caves in to pro-Israel pressure – again

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18 September 2024

Masha Gessen (pictured) recounts in this New York Times article the many times when CUNY or its constituents such as most recently Brooklyn College or Hunter College have caved in to pressure from pro-Israel forces by shutting down discussion of Palestinian human and political rights. One can only wonder how long Americans will tolerate this undermining of First Amendment rights by advocates of a foreign country.

The Organizers Are Jewish. The Cause Is Palestinian. This College Won’t Be Hosting.

Sept. 14, 2024

The view from the stage of a large auditorium.
Credit…The New York Times
M. Gessen

By M. Gessen

New York Times Opinion Columnist

On the surface, this is a small story: A college canceled an event planned by a magazine. But it seems to be a story about something bigger: fear. Rather, it’s a story about many fears — including the fear of antisemitism, the fear of being accused of antisemitism, and the fear of controversy generally — and how they can combine to turn an institution designed to facilitate open discussion into something that makes open discussion impossible.

The college is Brooklyn College. The magazine is Jewish Currents. If you’ve never heard of it, that is because it’s tiny. Decades ago, it was militantly atheist and affiliated with the Communist Party. In this century, a new generation took over — not Communist and not necessarily atheist or even secular, but still well to the left of the political mainstream. Since its relaunch in 2018, the magazine has risen to minor media-world stardom (both The Times and The New Yorker have published profiles of it). The publication has grown, especially in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, but its subscribers still number around 10,000. I serve on the board of Jewish Currents, and I am a professor in the same university system that Brooklyn College is a part of.

Back in May, the magazine arranged to use Brooklyn College facilities for a day of panels and performances about politics and culture that would include, among many other speakers, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories and Robert Malley, who served as the lead American negotiator on the Iran nuclear deal. Scheduled for Sunday, the event was also a fund-raiser for humanitarian services for Palestinian children and legal support for pro-Palestinian activists in the United States. But just two weeks ago, Brooklyn College canceled. It told the magazine that the reason was a roof leak in the main auditorium, but all the other spaces the magazine had arranged to use were placed off-limits, too — even though they were in a different building altogether.

That roof may indeed be leaky; subsequent events have also been canceled. But with the magazine being shut out entirely, my mind flashed to a time about 20 years ago when I trailed Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess champion turned opposition politician and outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, on what was supposed to be a speaking tour of southern Russia. In city after city, venues he had rented would fall through: A sewage pipe supposedly burst in one of them, electricity was shut off in another, and a giant stage curtain had either collapsed or got stuck in a third.

So recently I reached out to Dena Beard and Marcus Richardson, of the college’s performing arts center (which runs the auditorium), and Michelle Anderson, the college’s president. I heard back from Richard Pietras, the college’s director of communications, who began our phone conversation by saying, “I’m not comfortable being on the record.” The college told New York Jewish Week that politics played no part in the cancellation. But the refusal to answer questions and speak openly about the matter, as well as recent events at that college and elsewhere, leave a very different impression.

“It seems silly to say this,” Corey Robin, an outspoken professor of political science at Brooklyn College, told me, “but this” — fostering open discussion — “is what a university is for. You can’t talk about a two-state solution or a one-state solution if you can’t even have a conversation about it on a college campus.”

Discussion of Israel and Palestine has long fallen into a special category. Some have called it “the Palestine exception to free speech.” Brooklyn College, like other universities, has weathered many controversies in this area.

In 2010, an alumnus very publicly cut the college out of his will after a book by the Brooklyn College professor Moustafa Bayoumi, “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America,” was assigned as that year’s required reading for incoming students. The problem? Bayoumi’s advocacy of Palestinian rights. The following year, the college fired an adjunct professor after a local assemblyman objected to unpublished academic writing that was critical of Israel. In 2013, the college came under fire from politicians, the Anti-Defamation League and one of its most prominent alumni, the lawyer Alan Dershowitz, for hosting a conversation between a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement founder, Omar Barghouti, and the philosopher Judith Butler. In 2016, the then chancellor of City University of New York, of which Brooklyn College is a part, commissioned an outside investigation into allegations of antisemitism there and on three other campuses. It concluded that most of the statements in question concerned constitutionally protected political speech.

In May 2023, a student speaker at the CUNY School of Law commencement, Fatima Mousa Mohammed, gave a speech about public interest law and devoted three minutes to a discussion of the plight of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. The speech ended without incident, but two weeks later The New York Post put her picture on its front page, with the headline “Stark Raving Grad.” That’s when CUNY’s chancellor, Felix Matos Rodriguez, and the board of trustees issued a statement denouncing her talk as “hate speech.” The mayor of New York, state legislators from both parties and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas piled on, too. A group called Stop Antisemitism, whose specialty is getting people fired, accused Matos of transforming CUNY “into America’s most antisemitic university.” Word among faculty was that Matos might lose his job — largely because a student speaker had cited facts that have been documented by the United Nations, many human rights groups and this publication.

It all put me in mind of an observation Hannah Arendt made in her 1967 essay “Truth and Politics” about facts that “are publicly known, and yet the same public that knows them can successfully, and often spontaneously, taboo their public discussion and treat them as though they were what they are not — namely, secrets. That their assertion then should prove as dangerous as, for instance, preaching atheism or some other heresy proved in former times seems a curious phenomenon.”

At the end of October, Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered an external review of allegations of antisemitism at CUNY. For months, lawyers from the firm Latham and Watkins interviewed professors, administrators and students at Brooklyn College. They still have not released a report.

And most of that happened before the congressional hearings on antisemitism on college campuses — before the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, who tried to give nuanced testimony respectful of their students’ speech rights, and the president of Columbia University, who threw her students and faculty under the bus, lost their jobs.

Last year, Anderson, the Brooklyn College president criticized a pro-Palestinian protest scheduled to take place on campus. The protest moved just off campus grounds. Soon The Nation published a series of articles about whether the college was targeting Muslim students. Meanwhile, a sizable and diverse coalition of students had organized to demand Anderson’s resignation.

Separately, some Jewish students complained that the off-campus protests made them feel unsafe. Several lawmakers said that they would attend the rallies to protect Jewish students. One of them, the City Council member Inna Vernikov, brought a gun.

Before the start of the new school year, Governor Hochul, joined by her commissioner of homeland security, Jackie Bray, gathered more than 200 administrators of CUNY, the State University of New York and private colleges and urged them to adopt strict rules to limit campus protests — something the Jewish Currents event very well might attract.

Through dozens of email messages, the closest I got to why Jewish Currents was shut out of not just the leaky theater but all the secondary venues, too, was that the venues are too small for everyone to squeeze in all at once — which is true but irrelevant, since no one was proposing to do so.

Particularly given the way this was all communicated, I think a simpler explanation is fear. Certainly, there would be good reason for Brooklyn College leaders to fear the way these issues are manipulated in public discourse. By choosing the path of excessive caution, however — canceling the event entirely and being cagey about the reasons — Brooklyn College not only betrayed its own mission, it also scored another victory for those who cynically wield accusations of antisemitism to quash open discussion and turn facts into dangerous secrets.

Matos, CUNY’s chancellor, survived the firestorm following the law school graduation speech. The school’s administrators, though, decided that they would not include student speakers in this year’s graduation ceremony. Guest speakers pulled out to protest this decision. There was now almost no risk that anything controversial would be said during the ceremony — or that much would be said at all. Because the law school does not have an auditorium large enough, the festivities were supposed to be held at Hunter College, which is also a part of CUNY and where the ceremony had taken place before. But Hunter notified the law school that it would not provide the space. Law school administrators scrambled unsuccessfully to find another venue anywhere in the university system.

The law school ultimately held its commencement at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Jewish Currents found an alternative venue, too. It’s not a university.

M. Gessen is an Opinion columnist for The Times. They won a George Polk award for opinion writing for The New Yorker magazine in 2024. They have written 11 books, including “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017.

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