People of the Pod A United Front: U.S. Colleges and AJC Commit to Fighting Campus Antisemitism
This week, groups representing more than 1,600 colleges and universities pledged reforms to fight campus antisemitism—a major breakthrough in the effort to end anti-Jewish hatred and create campuses where Jewish students feel safe. In collaboration with American Jewish Committee (AJC), the groups urged the Trump administration to continue making the eradication of antisemitism a priority, but without endangering the research grants, academic freedom and institutional autonomy of America's colleges and universities. Here to discuss this collaboration are Sara Coodin, Director of Academic Affairs for AJC, and Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education.
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Transcript of Conversation with Ted Mitchell and Sara Coodin:Manya Brachear Pashman:
This week, groups representing more than 1,600 colleges and universities pledged reforms to fight campus antisemitism -- a major breakthrough in the effort to end anti-Jewish hatred and create campuses where Jewish students feel safe. In collaboration with American Jewish Committee, the groups urged the Trump administration to continue making the eradication of antisemitism a priority, but without endangering the research grants, academic freedom and institutional autonomy of America's colleges and universities.
Here to discuss this collaboration is Sara Coodin, Director of Academic Affairs for AJC and Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education. Ted, Sara, welcome to People of the Pod.
Ted Mitchell:
Thanks, Manya, good to be here.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
So Ted, if you could please give our listeners an overview of who signed on to this. Who are the six organizations, and do they encompass all of the higher ed institutions in the country?
Ted Mitchell:
We represent everybody. And so it's everybody, from the Community College Association to the land grant universities, to AAU, the big research universities, the state colleges and universities, and then ACE is an umbrella organization for everybody. So we've got built in suspenders, and we've got every institution in America on the side of eliminating antisemitism.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
And then, I guess, the next question is, why? I mean, why was it necessary for American Council on Education and these other associations to join this effort?
Ted Mitchell:
Well, a couple, a couple of things. I mean, first of all, we have partnered. AJC and Ace have partnered for a number of years to identify and try to address issues of antisemitism. So feel like we've been in partnership for some time on these issues. And unfortunately, the need has continued to grow. I think that last spring was a real wake up call to a lot of our institutions, that they might have been comfortable believing that there was no antisemitism on their campus, but boy, they got up. They got a notice in the mail.
So I think that we have, as a group, all six of us, we have worked with our institutions since last spring to create opportunities for institutions to do better. And so we had long conversations over the spring and summer about changes in disciplinary policy, everything from masks to how to make sure that every group that was seeking to have a voice make a protest was operating under the same rules, make sure that everybody understood those rules. And frankly, I think we've made great progress over the course of the summer.
There are still things that we can do better. There are always things we can do better. But I think the call for this letter was the conflation by the Trump administration of antisemitism and efforts to eradicate antisemitism with all of the other activities that go on on a university campus that are not really related to antisemitism. And case in point is the administration's willingness to hold research funds hostage to institutional changes and behaviors that have never been stipulated. So we're in this interesting spot where we want to do better. We're working on doing better, and the administration is saying, well, just do more. We can't tell you when you'll get there. Not only is that sort of fruitless, we also think it's illegal.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
So Sara, I know AJC published an action plan for university administrators last year, and that not only includes concrete steps to address antisemitic incidents when they happen immediately, but also ways to cultivate a healthier culture. Does AJC expect the member schools of these six associations to draw from that action plan?
Sara Coodin:
So, we hope so. You know, we don't have the power to mandate that any university in particular, much less a range of universities representing all of higher ed the entire spectrum adopt our specific action plan, but our action plan is really, I think, quite thoughtful, and covers a lot of territory. So we're thinking about all of the citizens of campus. We're thinking about administrators.
We're thinking too about how administrators can create frameworks so that students can get the education that they're meant to receive on site, and for which they, you know, attend university in the first place, we're thinking too about the role of faculty, and specifically at this crucial moment, because so much attention has been paid to the experience of students and to what happens when you create clear expectations and convey them to students through codes of conduct and other kinds of regulatory initiatives.
We're thinking very seriously about what it would mean for administrators to convey those expectations to their faculty as well, and we think that there are lanes through which they can do this that have been under scrutinized and underutilized, and usually that falls into the bucket of professionalization.
What do you do with faculty who are showing up fresh out of grad school on your campus? How do you as an institutional leader or a provost, convey the expectations that you have about the rights and responsibilities of being a teacher, a research supervisor, someone who might be supervising student activities and clubs like the student newspaper. How do you convey your institutional expectations and your expectations of these folks who are in positions of leadership for a generation or more? So it's it's an area that we think is really ripe for conversation and for folks to be convening in meaningful discussions about what the next steps consist of.
Ted Mitchell:
Manya, if I can, if I can interject, I really applaud the framework. I think is a great place for us to start. And I know that one of the things that was important and beginning to get support from my members and other people's members was the convening that we that we held a while ago in Washington that drew 85 college presidents together, and that was a solutions focused meeting. And I think it really suggests to me that there is quite an opening for us to work together on creating a framework that could be adopted either formally or informally by many institutions.
As you say, none of us can mandate what's going to happen. That's also true for the government, frankly. But I think the more and the sooner we can build a common common consensus around this, the better. And to your point about faculty responsibilities. We hear a lot about academic freedom. We hear a lot about faculty rights. We often forget that there is a responsibility for faculty to be the adults in the room and to expand the dialog and raise the level of discussion, and we need, we need to promote that.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
You know, I'm curious, are there any examples of institutions that have made a change have drawn from that action plan, and it created positive results. Sara?
Sara Coodin:
So I think we're seeing the effects of time, place and manner restrictions, and we first saw those being articulated through the task force at Columbia. And we know Columbia is not, not exactly an ideal institution right now for for a lot of different reasons, but that's not to disparage the efforts of the folks who sat on that antisemitism Task Force who came up with very specific and extremely thoughtful recommendations for their school.
And I pride myself on having worked with a team that took those ideas and made sure that other schools were aware of them, so that they weren't trying to reinvent the wheel. And I think that's often the function that we've served, and particularly in the last year, because schools can and do operate in silos, whether they're geographical silos or silos within their own particular brand of school, big research institutions, Ivy League institutions, sometimes they're in conversation, but it can be very useful to serve, for us to serve as a convening function.
We're not also not reinventing the wheel necessarily, but we're working in partnership to try to bring a solutions focused kind of perspective to this, because we think there are solutions in view? Obviously, leadership plays a key role in any institutional context. Are people emboldened enough to actually feel like they can convey those solutions to their communities and stand by them? And that's something that we have seen happen. I wish it were pervasive. I wish it were happening in every case. It's not, but there are certainly institutions that have taken the lead on this, whether quietly or very loudly, and I think it's important to bring our solutions to the attention of other institutions as well.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
Ted, I'm curious, can you shed light on the conversations that have unfolded since October 7, 2023 I mean, as students were setting up encampments and staging sit ins. Was there hand wringing, or was it considered, well, at least at first, typical college activism part of university life,
Ted Mitchell:
I think it started off as I certainly would never say ho hum. It started off with a sense that there has been a horrific event in the world. And of course, our campuses are going to be places where students need to respond to that and reflect on it. So I think in the early days, there was a sense that this was a right thing for campuses to be engaged in. I think the surprise came in the following weeks. 90s when the pro Palestinian, anti Israel and antisemitic counter protests began to happen and and that was something that we really didn't expect, certainly not in the volume and intensity that took place.
And I think I've said this from from the beginning, I think that we were taken by surprise and on our back foot, and so I can't, I don't know a college president who would say, stand up and say we did everything right after October 7. And you could see this in, you know, presidents making a statement on a Tuesday that they had to either retract or revise on a Thursday, and then by Monday, everything was up in the air. Again, I think that there was a lack of a sense of what the framework is looking for.
There's a there was a lack of a sense of, here's where we stand as an institution. Here's what's permissible, here's what's not permissible, and we're going to be even handed in the way we deal with students who are protesting and expressing expressing their beliefs. We need them to be able to express their beliefs, but under no circumstances can those expressions be violent. Under no circumstances can they discriminate against other groups or prevent other groups from access to the education that they came for.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
Is some of what you're saying informed by 2020, hindsight, or is it informed by education? In other words, have you? Have you yourself and have have college presidents learned as as this year has progressed,
Ted Mitchell:
Well, this goes to Sara's really good point. I think that there have been two kinds of learning that have taken place. One is sort of informal communication back and forth between Presidents who sort of recognize themselves in other circumstances. And I think that that's been very powerful. We for a while, in the spring, had informal Friday discussion discussions where any president who wanted to come and talk would come and talk, and they were avidly taking notes and trying to learn from each other in real time.
I think the second kind of learning was after students went home, and there really was a broad agreement that institutions needed to tackle their policies. We ran into presidents in the spring who had not read their student conduct policies, and from from there to people who had very elaborate Student Conduct policies but weren't actually following them very well, or had a lot of exceptions, or, you know, just crazy stuff.
So summer was an incredible time of calculated learning, where people were sharing drafts of things. Sara was deeply involved in, in making sure that institutions were learning from each other, and that Sara and her colleagues were pulling these together in the framework, in the framework that we have, you know it's still happening. I talk often with with presidents, and they're still exchanging notes and tactics about things that are going on, going on this fall, but they're doing so from a position of much more stability,
Manya Brachear Pashman:
Having taken that breath over the summer and prepared.
Ted Mitchell:
Having taken that breath, having sort of been through the fire, having taken that breath and having really regrouped. And one of the things that has been most essential in that regrouping is to make sure that all parties on campus understand what the rules and regulations are. From faculty to staff to Student Affairs personnel, to make sure that when a campus takes an action that it's understood to be the appropriate response to whatever the event might have been.
Sara Coodin:
And just to add to that point, about how, many institutions were caught flat footed. And I won't attest to whether I experienced this first personally, but thinking back to the history, the days of, you know when, when protests were either about apartheid in South Africa or it, it seemed like there was a very clear position and a clear kind of moral line there when it came to protests. So that's one example where it seems like there was a right side to be on.
And I think that that is much, obviously we look at the protests from last year as being far more out of line with any sense of a moral right, they were in some cases host to horrific antisemitism and directly responsible for making Jewish students feel unsafe on campus. So the other example of protest, which is before my time, were the Vietnam protests on college campuses. Were really directed against the government. And last year and two years ago, we saw protests where one group of students was effectively protesting against another student group, another student population. And that is something that university administrators haven't seen before.
If they were caught flat footed, it's because this was a novel set of circumstances and a really challenging one, because if you have students being activists about a geopolitical event, the focus is somewhere out there, not a population that has to live and learn on your campus. And so we're seeing the kind of directed impact of those protests on a particular group of students that feel like they no longer have a home on campus or on particular campuses, and that is a uniquely challenging set of circumstances.
Of course, we would have loved it if everyone had a playbook that worked, that could have really caught this stuff from the get go and had a very clear plan for how to deal with it, but that simply wasn't the case. And I think there are good reasons to understand why that was the case. Those codes of conduct hadn't been updated, in some cases, in 70 years.
Ted Mitchell:
Your insight is really powerful, that this was one group of students against another group of students, and that's very different. But taking it back, not historically, but just sociologically, one of the things that we also learned is that this generation of students comes to our campuses with almost zero muscle and no muscle memory of how to deal with difference. And so this generation of students is growing up in the most segregated neighborhoods since the Civil Rights Act. They're growing up in the most segregated schools since Brown. And they are parts of these social media ecosystems that are self consciously siloing.
And so they come to our campuses and they confront an issue that is as divisive as this one was last spring, and they really don't know how to deal with it. So that's the other learning that we've taken. Is that we need to get very serious about civic education, about how to have conversations between left and right, Jewish students and non-Jewish students, Muslim students and others, and white and black. And we need to get better at that, which, again, comes into the where's the faculty in this? And if they're not a part of that kind of engagement, especially if they take sides, then we've really lost a lot of our power to create a kind of contentious but productive democratic citizenship.
Sara Coodin:
What we have been privy to, and in the conversations that we've had with, I think leading university presidents and chancellors who really have have done the right thing, I think in the last year, they're, they're affirming a lot of what you're saying, Ted, about this inability to engage in in civil discourse. And in some ways, it's an admissions problem. It's admitting students who are, you know, they're writing to an audience that is looking for world-changing activism. And when you do that, you're going to get a lot of really inflamed activists on your campus.
I think the faculty piece is more complicated. I think that speaks to a couple of generations’ worth of lack of framing, of what academic freedom even is, and a kind of entry into the conversation through all kinds of back channels, that the most powerful thing you can be as a teacher is a world changer. And that means gravitating towards the extremes. It doesn't mean cultivating civil discourse, because that's boring. Why would you want to do that? That's, that's not the way to make a splash.
It's disappointing to see that kind of ethos take hold. But I think there are ways in which it can be more actively discouraged. Whether it's through admissions, through looking to hire on the basis of different criteria when you're looking for faculty. And it's also a K-12 problem, and we affirm that, and that's something our Center for Educational Advocacy looks at very seriously in the work that we do in the K-12 space.
How do we work with instructors and heads of school in that space to better prepare students who arrive on a college campus, knowing how to engage in civil discourse, knowing how to disagree in a way that doesn't have to result in everyone holding hands at the end and singing Kumbaya. But it shouldn't produce the culture that we saw last year. It shouldn’t. It's incredibly damaging. And I think we've seen how ineffective that model is and how turbulent it is.
Ted Mitchell:
It’s interesting that you raise the admissions question, because I think that, Manya, to your question about what have people done? A lot of this gets really granular, like, what essay questions do you ask? And a lot of them are, what have you done to advance something you believe in?
And I was talking with a president who came in right before the springtime, who changed the essay question to be a question about bridging. Tell the committee of a time when you helped, you know, bridge an issue, a group, whatever. And I think that the attention on antisemitism in particular is really that is driving us to think about those micro-elements of our processes that actually foster, in some ways, this kind of segregation and combat that we saw in such grotesque detail last spring.
Sara Coodin:
Yeah, it's interesting. I know you work with faith-based colleges as well, and that notion of service, which is not part of the infrastructure for most schools, seems like a productive part of, maybe, a future conversation about a different model for being in the world.
Ted Mitchell:
I think that that's right, and I love all of our members, but the faith based institution, because this has always been front and center for so many of them, who will you be in the world as a question to ask every single student, who are you in the world, to ask every faculty member that those are natural questions in many of our many of our faith based institutions. And I really admire them. Admire them for it.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
And of course, that's the purpose of going to a college or university, is to figure that out, right? Who you are going to be in this world.
I want to ask both of you, what is the next step? Will there be an effort to reverse some of the measures that have been taken by the federal government to get universities to comply, or is this more about proactive measures?
Sara Coodin:
I mean, I can say, for our part, we have no leverage over the federal government. We're not in a position to tell them to do anything. We can appeal to them to be more measured, as we have, and we've appealed to them to be part of a larger conversation about what's going on right now and we make those efforts routinely. I think the path forward is for universities to really think carefully about who their partners are in this work.
And that's, I think part of the effect of this statement is that we are, we, AJC, are there to work towards constructive solutions, and that has always been our basic mission in terms of our advocacy, but we now have it in a very public form. And we're not there to simply hold accountable. I mean, we all hold one another accountable perpetually. We are actually there to do the work and to engage in constructive solution seeking. And I think we're at a moment now where we've seen enough, we've kind of seen enough of this film, that we can come up with some better solutions going forward. It's not catching us kind of flat footed in the same way, because we've had some time to reflect.
And I think that's where the future of this leads to. It leads to constructive solutions. It leads to coming up with really effective strategies to migrate knowledge and approaches, and tailor them to the specifics of campuses that you know are very unique, are very distinctive, and are broad in this country. As you know, Ted, this is a country with so many types of educational institutions, so many.
Ted Mitchell:
So the statement is important from a number of different perspectives. One is that it's great that we have come together to ask the federal government to separate the important issue of antisemitism from the other interventions that the federal government is attempting. But the other really important thing that we want the letter to signal is our helping institutions develop the right way to combat antisemitism and, more importantly, prevent it, and through its work on antisemitism, really develop this kind of more inclusive civic culture on our campuses.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
You know, AJC does a state of antisemitism in America report every year, and the most recent report found that roughly a third of current American Jewish college students or graduates had experienced antisemitism personally at least once in the past year, and about little over 20% reported being excluded from a group because they were Jewish. And I'm curious if university administrators pay attention to these kinds of statistics, or maybe, did they pay attention before October 7, and are they paying attention?
Ted Mitchell:
Now, I think, with some embarrassment, I'll say that before October 7, antisemitism was a back burner issue, and in many cases, was seen as yesterday's problem or even a historical problem. History has that nasty way of never quite going away. And you know, we see it again here. You know I remember. Was it three years ago that we co hosted a symposium in New York on antisemitism on campus, and it was it was striking. It was well attended, and people really heard a lot.
But the the most striking thing that we all heard was testimony from Jewish students, not only about the frequency of antisemitic activity, but their exclusion from what we used to be able to call DEI initiatives, and that somehow whatever was happening to Jewish students wasn't the same thing. And I went away heart's sake about that. And I think that we, you know, we let two years pass without doing much about it. And we were called, we were called to account for that. So I think that, now that antisemitism has the attention of colleges and universities, we can't squander it.
But instead, we really need to move forward and say, what is it that institutions need? Can I take one more second about data and statistics? When I read that report the first thing that I noted was that those numbers are almost precisely the same numbers that women on American colleges have experienced assault, sexual assault, 30% of women on college campuses have felt that they were assaulted in one way or another verbal and 20% feel like they were physically endangered. And so it's not a good thing, but it speaks to the scope of the problem. And in our little world, there really was a lot of attention placed on safety and security for female students, prevention sexual assault prevention, identification of the places where sexual assault was more prevalent, fraternities, alcohol as a as a fixture of that and I hope that we're going to have the same data driven conversations about antisemitism that we did about women's women's safety issues on our on our campuses.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
That is such an interesting observation.
Sara Coodin:
Just to latch on to that point, about data and about how, how. I mean, we too, were surprised by some of the returns this year. We knew it had been a tough year, but we didn't exactly know what students were going to report. We asked specific questions about specific aspects of their experience. But I think you know, one of the things that stands out about the data, for me is, is the framing that we had for students when we asked about their experiences, we asked about their subjective experience, something that's occasionally used to discount our data. Hey, you're asking about people's feelings, but actually, we want to know about the experience, the subjective experience. This is a key component of what the college experience actually amounts to for students going through it.
And of course, we want a solid record of the number of incidents that students are exposed to, whether it's violence or, you know, whether it's coming through the form of words. There's a range of different options, but I think when you look at things like numbers of Jews on college campuses, you get a particular story about the presence of a fractionally tiny minority at elite institutions. Particularly, the numbers are fairly good, although they've dropped in the last number of years.
But I think that that doesn't tell the full story. And I think you need that subjective aspect to find out how Jewish students are feeling in those roles in those institutions. And I kind of want to use this just as an opportunity to double down on the importance of that, the feeling that student have about their experience in college, which is an experience they've worked terribly hard to arrive at, and that they tend to take extraordinarily seriously once they've arrived it is It is unthinkable to allow that experience to continue to be shaped by antisemitism. It's flatly unacceptable.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
Well, Sara, Ted, thank you so much to you both for elaborating and explaining what this means, and I wish you both luck in carrying out the mission.
Ted Mitchell:
Thank you so much.
Sara Coodin:
Thank you.
Manya Brachear Pashman:
If you missed last week’s special episode, be sure to tune in for my conversation with Holocaust Survivor Tova Friedman and Lisa Marlowe, director of the Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center outside Philadelphia – a conversation that was recorded live at the Weizmann National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. Be sure to listen.