Over 100 Jewish faculty and staff members at Northwestern University released a statement on Wednesday rejecting the use of antisemitism accusations to “justify actions that may ultimately harm students, suppress debate, and weaken institutions of higher education.”
The group released this statement in response to Northwestern being named and investigated by the U.S. Department of Education for alleged Title VI violations. Northwestern University is just one of 60 institutions facing similar investigations.
“The fact that U.S. government leaders are stripping rights from students, faculty, and researchers nationwide in the name of Jews is deeply offensive to us,” the statement reads.
Signatories state that they “are united by the conviction that our Jewishness must not be used as a cudgel to silence the vigorous exchange of ideas that lies at the heart of university life.”
The climate at Northwestern
In its qualifications for investigation, the U.S. secretary of education cited “relentless antisemitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year” at the university.
The statement by the faculty members rejects this notion.
“As Jews who walk the campus every day and teach in its classrooms,” they write, “we can reliably report that this depiction bears little resemblance to life at Northwestern.”
Although the statement acknowledges that antisemitism does exist, nationally and on college campuses, the signatories are against the characterization of it as relentless.
Sanford Goldberg, a Jewish professor of philosophy at Northwestern and a statement signatory, told the RoundTable that there have been some “incidents that have made me uncomfortable on campus,” but that those have been “very few and far between.”
“College campuses are places where people come together from a variety of different backgrounds and have to figure out how to talk about things,” history professor and signatory Deborah Cohen said. “Students and adults alike are figuring out how to respectfully disagree with other people.”
David Shyovitz, director of the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies and associate professor in the history department, said that the federal characterization of Northwestern is “just not consonant with people’s realities.”
In Shyovitz’s opinion, it’s theoretically possible that a university truly facing catastrophic antisemitism might warrant federal intervention.
“There are laws that govern these kinds of things, and they’re important,” Shyovitz said. But in his experience, “nobody really feels the way that the atmosphere on campus is being described.”
A moment of unity
Goldberg emphasized how important it is that this statement was signed by Jewish faculty across the political spectrum at Northwestern.
“That was really, really important to me,” Goldberg said. Goldberg and his colleagues set out to create a document that would not “further divide the Jewish community,” but rather bring them together in a moment of unity against threats to the university.
Cohen repeated this theme as well.
“There were a number of Jewish faculty and staff who were coming from very, very different perspectives, different politics, and had the same discomfort about the way in which the campus was being represented,” Cohen said.
Shyovitz described the community that signed this statement as disagreeing on much — he cited that Jewish faculty members have differing political views, opinions on the conflict in Gaza, Middle Eastern policy and even issues having to do with the Jewish community and antisemitism. Asking them to agree on these things would be impossible.
“What I think many people do feel united around, is this idea that what we do at the university is important.” Shyovitz said. “It’s important, you know, to do medical research, do scientific research, but it’s also important to teach about these issues that are so contentious right now in a sophisticated and nuanced and rigorous way.”
“Our ability to do all of those important things is going to be curtailed,” he went on, “with these kinds of really just unproductive and counterproductive threats that are coming out of the federal administration.
Response to the statement
“I think the general statement has been viewed very favorably,” Goldberg said. “Some people have been disappointed, mainly from the more conservative side of things. I have heard folks who are worried about our understating of the problem with antisemitism.”
The statement does acknowledge that antisemitism is a problem, but the text is short.
“I think people were happy that this is a focused enough statement that it speaks to what we all really know,” Shyovitz said.
He’s heard positive response, with people feeling that the statement “contains the appropriate amount of sort of nuance, on the one hand, but also that it’s brief and focused enough that people can unite around it.”
Jewish people in the spotlight
Shyovitz also said that, historically, Jews gaining centrality in political discourse has frequently had “catastrophic blowback on the Jewish community itself.”
He pointed to the Dreyfus affair, and of course, the characterization of Jewish people as a problem to be solved in the 1930s leading up to the Holocaust and World War II.
Shyovitz has met some Jewish people who believe that the “federal administration, at least, are looking after Jews.”
While he understands the temptation to feel that way, in his opinion, inserting Jewish people into “the center of divisive issues and political discourse — I think that can have blowback and lead to more of the problem that it claims it’s trying to solve.”
Cohen also cited a disconnect between the federal administration’s supposed protection of Jewish people and how it “seems to be at odds with their embrace of far right parties, especially the Alternative for Germany and the Orban movement.”
For Jewish faculty and staff who have not yet seen the statement, the writers have left it open to join and more names have joined the list in the last several days.
Over 100 NU Jewish faculty and staff decry federal antisemitism actions is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.