Despite philosophical differences, the authors of two separate reports emanating from Stanford University in the United States on ways to address antisemitism and Islamophobia on campus say they believe there is enough overlap between the two documents on which to found a common vision for the institution.
The reports released last month by committees at Stanford University, one charged with studying antisemitism and the other Islamophobia on campus, paint pictures of a university where both Jewish and Muslim, Arab and Palestinian (MAP) students, faculty and staff feel physically and psychologically unsafe, and abandoned by their university’s administration.
Both reports charge that the elite university has forsaken its raison d’être: the impartial search for truth.
Among the dozens of recommendations – some of which, were they to be implemented, would discomfit the other group – are some that would lower the temperature on a campus that is presently under investigation by the Department of Education for violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (The latter is the Federal law that prohibits universities that accept federal funds from discrimination based on race, religion, shared ancestry, ethnicity or national origin.)
Stanford’s President Richard R Saller and Provost Jenny Martinez commissioned the reports on 13 November 2023 following the establishment of a pro-Palestine encampment on the university’s quad, and an upsurge in Islamophobic and antisemitic actions – in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October and Israel’s military response in Gaza two weeks later.
“Members of our community,” Saller said when announcing the two committees, “have been feeling pain, fear, anger, and invisibility as they have confronted the ugliness of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other expressions of hatred, both here on our campus and in the wider world.”
Speaking directly to the purpose of the committees, he continued: “The steps we are taking are intended to respond to specific needs of our communities, to support the wellbeing of community members, and to foster the atmosphere of open, civil, deeply informed discussion that is important for Stanford and our educational mission.”
An emphasis on recommendations
Each report states outright that its goal is not to outline what a Middle East peace might look like. Rather, in addition to placing on public record instances of harassment, physical threats, silencing in classrooms and dorms, and ‘othering’ of Jewish and MAP students, respectively, each report provides recommendations.
Such recommendations include educating the wider Stanford community on antisemitism and Islamophobia, improving dealing with antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents, and clarifying the university’s rules around protests. Each report proposes strategies to foster dialogue across religious and ethnic lines in order to build a more cohesive community.
However, evidence of harassment is offered in both reports. The MAP report, titled Rupture and Repair: A Report by the Stanford Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian Communities Committee (Rupture and Repair), for example, notes a 900% increase, to 50 incidents, of anti-Palestinian/anti-Arab bias or Islamophobia on Stanford’s campus between October 2023 and May 2024.
Among these incidents were a least two physical assaults, intimidation of a woman wearing a hijab, online harassment, and a professor who told a student: “I think you do work with Islamic jihad and Hamas and Iran – people that murder and torture gays, women, and you are their useful idiot.”
Rupture and Repair further charged Stanford’s administration with weaponising the university’s rules against encampments by, for example, threatening to issue trespass notices against the encampments.
Likewise, in ‘It’s in the Air’. Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias at Stanford and How to Address it (It’s in the Air), the subcommittee, co-chaired by political science professor Larry Diamond, Mosbacher Senior Fellow of Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution (both at Stanford), found that “antisemitism exists today on the Stanford campus in ways that are widespread and pernicious”.
It cited examples of vandalism, including the sacrilegious act of ripping mezuzahs off Jewish students’ door frames and the drawing of swastikas.
In one freshman class – “COLLEGE 101 Why College? Your Education and the Good Life” – the professor asked Jewish students to raise their hands if they were Jewish and said “he was simulating what Jews were doing to Palestinians” by taking a Jewish students’ belongings and moving it to the edge of the room while the student was turned around and looking out the window.
In another class, after a student said that six million Jews died in the Holocaust, the professor responded: “Yes. Only six million” and said 12 million had died in the Congo during Belgian colonisation.
The committee documented cases of Jewish students feeling so unsafe they had to hide their Stars of David, and the creation of a new epithet, ‘Zio’ used, Diamond said, in sentences like, “She’s a Zio [meaning Jew], so you can’t trust her.”
At times, protestors at encampments on the university’s Quad chanted threats: “We know your names, we know where you work and soon, we are going to find out where you live” and “Go back to Brooklyn” – Brooklyn being that part of the United States with the highest Jewish population.
In sum, during the fall of 2023 and winter of 2024 quarters, there were 146 events reported to Stanford’s Department of Public Safety (DPS), 75 (or 51%) of which targeted either Jewish or Israeli students who make up 10% of Stanford’s total enrolment of 17,529.
Yet, despite such content, neither Diamond nor Professor Alexander Key, professor of comparative literature with expertise in Arabic literature, and co-chair of the committee that wrote of Rupture and Repair, view their reports as “duelling”, as The New York Times characterised them on 20 June.
Rather, as Key underscored: “You can’t threaten people with discriminatory hate; we should all be treating each other with respect because we’re all members of one university community.”
Speaking directly about swastikas, he added: “That’s what’s so frightening about the stuff that Jeff [Kosof, co-chair of the committee that wrote the It’s in the Air report] and Larry [Diamond] reveal in their report: if people are invoking the Nazis to target Jewish students on social media, this is antisemitism, it needs to be stopped. It’s not acceptable at the university.”
For his part, Diamond told University World News that his committee was not interested “in an Olympics of suffering”.
He said his committee does not have to say that what Jewish students are experiencing is “equivalent to, or greater than what Arab students are experiencing, or Palestinian students, or black students, or Hispanic students, or Pacific Islander students. It’s not a contest. You look at each form of discrimination, marginalisation, and injustice. And each one needs to be addressed”.
Interestingly, both reports were critical of how Stanford’s DPS dealt with reports filed through the Protect Identity Harm (PIH) system. Jewish and MAP students had so little faith that a report would lead to action that many told the committees they didn’t even bother to file reports, while some MAP students said they feared that filing reports would be singling themselves out before the administration.
Accordingly, each report called for revision of the PIH system and for the DPS to be more responsive.
Policies for residences
More than half of Stanford’s students live in campus housing, including 97% of its 7,207 undergraduates. While Diamond stressed that many resident assistants (RAs) were supportive and fair minded, and supervised dorms in which Jewish students felt safe, there were others where Jewish students did not feel safe.
“In some instances,” notes It’s in the Air, “RAs posted antisemitic or threatening content on social media, for example [saying] that Jews don’t need protection because antisemitism isn’t real. In others, they abused their role to advance divisive political agendas that left their Jewish residents feeling that they could not trust or approach them.”
The MAP students’ experience with RAs parallels that of Stanford’s Jewish students. Some were responsive to MAP students in distress and pointed them towards helpful resources. In other cases, the report notes, students were “fearful of communicating with their RAs due to the general silence on Palestine and-or specific real or perceived political misalignment”.
MAP students who were RAs found themselves “caught between being genuine and their fear of being punished, with one noting that she tried to keep her activism separate from her role in the dorm and said, ‘I felt very othered in a position where I was supposed to help people not feel othered and it’s hard to do that. I felt it was unclear what could get me fired. As I look back, I realise what lengths I went to [in order] to dehumanise parts of my identity because I didn’t want to get fired’.”
Both committees called for better training for RAs, though each proposed a different curriculum. Diamond told University World News that the training must focus on what’s permissible.
“It involves clarity that you cannot use any official channel of communication, anything related to your role as an RA, the dorm, mobile phone, text messaging network, a Slack channel to the dorm, or anything else to push political and divisive views that will leave some students feeling like they’re not part of the community,” he said.
The report calls for the training of RAs (and teaching assistants) to include education into the history and forms of antisemitism and anti-Israel bias.
The MAP committee calls for “training on anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab bias and Islamophobia, as well as mental health training related to these communities” and for clarification on the “policies around student rights to political expression: detailing specifically the hanging of banners, flyers, etcetera, in rooms, doors, shared spaces, etcetera and ensure all residential staff (RFs [resident fellows] and RAs along with professional staff) have adequate training around those policies and their application.”
Further, the committee says Stanford must “[e]nsure the consistent application of those policies across political issues and not just with respect to pro-Palestine support”.
Philosophical differences
The different emphases in each report in regard to RAs and other issues stem from basic philosophical differences between the two committees.
Central to the MAP analysis is what is called the ‘Palestine exception’, which Key explains as “a real epistemological problem. This is the one thing you can’t talk about. Talk about Ukraine, who cares? Talk about Palestine? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, bad for your career. Better to keep quiet; this could be bad for your job. Let’s just not talk about Palestine”.
To counter this silencing, the MAP committee calls for a 10-year commitment to hire 10 new tenure track positions in Arabic and Palestinian studies in order to build the university’s capacity in these areas and make Stanford a destination choice for students interested in studying these areas.
(While he did not specifically agree with the MAP committee’s proposed number, Diamond told University World News that he was sympathetic to this argument.)
Exploding the ‘Palestine exception’ is also why Key and his colleagues write in support of the “People’s University for Palestine” (PUfP), a kind of ‘university’ set up by students as part of the second encampment that began last April.
As did hundreds of similar encampments across the United States and, indeed, in Canada (where some are still in place) Stanford’s students called for the divestment from corporations that supply weapons and surveillance technology to the Israeli government.
Additionally, according to the MAP report, the PUfP hosted presentations on Palestine’s intersection with other causes, film screenings and it “raised awareness on the Palestinian issue by embracing intersectionality and connected struggles”.
It also “shed light on how the ongoing war in Gaza is part of and intertwined with larger global oppressions against Indigeneity, Muslim identity, the environment, and the Global South”.
Among other topics, the PUfP covered “From Vietnam to Falastin: Intertwined Histories and Futures”, “Bringing Indigenous Revolution to Campus: Lessons from Palestine, Kurdistan, and Wallmapu”, “Asian American Organising and Solidarity with Palestine”, “Spirituality, Buddhism, and Non-Violence”, “Lunch & Learn: Bridging West Oakland and Gaza”, and “‘The Palestine Problem’: Black & Palestine Solidarity Teach-in.”
The PUfP did not adhere to what most American professors consider the sine qua non of academic freedom: their control, as experts, of the curriculum.
Accordingly, when Key was asked to square the MAP committee’s support for a ‘university’ outside of professors’ academic control, he said that the kind of centralised control of syllabi that exists at the University of St Andrews (where he took his undergraduate degree and later did some teaching) or even at Harvard (where he did his PhD) “is just not the Stanford way for good or ill”.
“It’s a much more laissez faire attitude here,” he said, adding that students did not receive credit for whatever work they did in the PUfP; the structure was wholly separate from Stanford’s accredited units.
The most important point about the PUfP, he explained, is that it is a flashing red light that the university is not doing its job.
“If it were, we wouldn’t have needed the People’s University for Palestine, because we would have had a university, Stanford, in which these discussions and these varying epistemologies and political analyses could have been argued about and processed in our university,” he said.
The Palestine exception also explains the MAP committee’s opposition to a normative definition of antisemitism (or, for that matter, Islamophobia) – because any such definition could impinge on pro-Palestinian advocacy.
The committee rejects “attempts to revise university policy in any unit to limit opportunities for speech expression in response to Palestinian advocacy”, he said.
Accordingly, the MAP committee rejects the idea of “civil discourse” in favour of “vibrant discourse”.
“Civil discourse,” Key explained, is problematic because, in North America, it has a “long history of being mobilised against interest groups that are committed to political change. ‘Can you be more civil? You need to be more civil.’ We have serious concerns about that.
“We don’t think it’s an effective approach. We don’t think it’s appropriate. We don’t want to repeat the same mistakes. We want a situation in which people are able to feel like they are able to bring their commitments to the discourse, their ideas to the table.
“And civil discourse, whilst in the abstract its definition says that people can do this, the history of civil discourse in North America has done the opposite. And we don’t want to do that,” he said.
By contrast, Key continued: “vibrant discourse is a world in which you don’t have to sign up for a specific epistemological project in order to take part in the discourse. In anticolonial and decolonial work, for example, a lot of people have done a lot of useful theoretical work that contests framings based on liberal understandings of reason.
“In fact, what worries us about some framings of civil discourse is that they appear designed to exclude some knowledge production, in favour of a certain kind of knowledge production, which is itself contested.
“Liberal reasoning, for example, could be thought of as contingent on belief in the existence of abstract universal reason or on the denial of experience and tradition; all such claims need to be engaged and contested rather than one of them being accepted as the prior conditions of discourse”.
Defining antisemitism
It’s in the Air calls for Stanford to introduce time and place restrictions on protests on the quad as well as banning loudspeakers blaring protest messages into classrooms. Further, it calls on university leaders to “exercise their own free speech right to call out and condemn antisemitic and anti-Israel speech on campus”.
One thing the report does not do is provide a definition of antisemitic speech. Instead of endorsing, for example, the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definitions endorsed by the United States State Department and House of Representatives, the committee proposed a framework consisting of two questions to determine if a speech act is antisemitic.
First, “Does the objectionable act employ antisemitic sentiment in its substance? In other words, does it “rely on specific examples of antisemitic belief such as blood libels or claims about Jewish avarice?” Or does it embody tropes like the Jews control the media or banks?
Second, “Does the objectionable act rely on antisemitic logic in its structure?”, for example, by asking if the speech act “blur the lines between the Jewish people and a concept of ‘The Jews’ as a nefarious and perhaps hard to identify cabal?” Does the statement rely on the “structure of antisemitism [which] figures Jews as a kind of universal unwelcome guest and a source of eternal trouble?”
This question would not prevent criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war aims in Gaza but would identify when and how such criticism tips over into antisemitism.
For, under the structure of antisemitism, “Blaming Jews does not mean holding actual Jewish people responsible or accountable but, rather, using the figure of ‘the Jews’ or ‘the Zionists’ as a necessary feature of a larger explanatory argument.”
Examples of this is the statement, “You are Jewish; therefore, you are to blame for Israel’s policies”, or when, as the report documents, Jewish students were pressed in class to declare whether they were Zionists or not.
Common ground
Despite these philosophical differences, both Diamond and Key told University World News they believe there is enough overlap on which to find a common vision for Stanford.
An important part of this re-imagining of Stanford is the recognition that both Jews and the members of the MAP community are minorities that are not recognised as such by the existing framework of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
While both reports call for these groups to be included in the existing DEI structure, It’s in the Air goes further and suggests radical reorganisation of what Diamond explained was the faulty binary DEI model of oppressor-oppressed or coloniser-colonised, under which Jews are first identified as ‘white’ (which, especially in Israel, is not always the case) and are always placed on the left side of the binary.
Diamond and his co-authors point to Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (GSB) – which they found to be relatively free of antisemitism – as having a different DEI model.
In the GSB, “faculty, staff and students are trained in the importance and methodology of perspective taking and the complexity of identity. Employee training is buttressed by staffers whose role is not only to advocate for DEI but to facilitate discussion and understanding of how identity influences people’s opinions, experience, and information processing.
“Rather than being siloed in their own DEI infrastructure, staff members who are charged with overseeing affinity groups (whether students or alumni) integrate into the various student and alumni services”, they state.
At the centre of both Key’s and Diamond’s belief that their reports can chart a way forward for Stanford (and, by implication, for other colleges and universities) is their common emphasis on the university being the “site of knowledge production”, as Key called it.
“We think that part of the solution to the problems we identify is a substantial and substantive investment by the university in scholarship in these areas. It’s not going to fix everything, but we’re a university and producing knowledge is what we do.
“And if we have an asymmetry between the knowledge that’s being produced on campus [because of the Palestine exception], this has kind of a trickle-down effect into the classroom, into different spaces, into increased pressure on specific faculty, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera,” he said.
“We want the big investment. We don’t think that, you know, a couple of lines in the next few years, maybe replacing some existing faculty who leave, is going to cut it. Right?
“This kind of investment needs multiple stakeholder communities invested; it needs the donor community invested, the faculty invested, the academic leadership invested. It needs the development office keyed in; it’s a big … multi-stakeholder push to have this kind of investment,” he explained.
‘Vibrant and civil’ conversations
Diamond told University World News that while it was important to recognise the different emphases in the two reports, it was “important to emphasise” that the two sets of co-chairs had had “vibrant and civil” conversations with each other as they were preparing the reports.
“I think we can say: ‘We like and respect each other.’ I think we share a common vision of the university where nobody will be discriminated against on the basis of identity: not students, not faculty, not staff; where people can sit in auditoriums, in classrooms and talk about issues that are very divisive, very painful – and listen to the other side.
“I think that these conversations about identity in the United States, about exclusion, about the Israel-Palestine conflict, about the war in Gaza, about the massacre on October 7, about what the future of this profoundly precious territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea should look like – two states – how might it be achieved, or the articulation for why there should be one state, can be made,” he said.
“There’s no way you can have the conversations that need to be had without them being robust and vibrant, which are the two adjectives they use,” Diamond said.
By way of example, he invited the pro-Palestinian side to explain how the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” means something different to how most Jews and Israelis interpret it.
“There’s going to be passion. There’s going to be conviction. There’s going to be emotion. There’s going to be anger expressed.
“But in the university, the anger, the passion, the conviction, you know, has to be tempered by evidence, by a willingness to submit one’s arguments to the test of logic and historical accuracy, by a willingness to listen to the other side, and by some underlying social fabric, of mutual respect for the equal dignity of all of the individuals participating in these conversations.
“I think there’s a lot of common ground there [between the two reports] that we can work with. I should really love our peers and the other committee to speak for themselves, and I’m sure they have asked the same question,” said Diamond.
