Columbia University student protesters camped on campus to call for divestment from Israel, April 28, 2024. (Philissa Cramer)

(JTA) — The letter grades that the Anti-Defamation League has issued to campuses on their response to antisemitism are showing signs of growing influence: The group announced today that several schools have adopted new policies to improve their grades in the month since this year’s report was released.

The ADL also said it upped grades for 19 of the 135 schools it assessed this year, including Northwestern University, Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University and the University of Southern California. Ten of those schools implemented new policies in the last month, while the other nine made the Jewish anti-bigotry group aware of existing policies that had not factored into the initial grades.

In a statement, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called the revised grades “encouraging,” adding, “These important steps and policies send a clear message that antisemitism will not be tolerated on campus.”

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The ADL’s report cards, now in their second year, remain controversial among Jews on campus for using rubrics that critics argue fail to take the totality of Jewish student life into account and unfairly penalize schools when antisemitic incidents take place, rather than focusing on how the campus responds to them.

At the same time, many schools are paying close attention to them: the ADL says that 84% of all the colleges it graded “engaged” with the group on their grades.

The new policies some schools adopted to boost their grades include:

• Forming new committees and advisory councils on antisemitism and Jewish life (Purdue University, University of Georgia and the University of South Florida, among others)
• Implementing bans on masked protests (Tulane University)
• Launching Jewish alumni groups (Tulane, University of Pittsburgh, University of California Santa Barbara)
• Incorporating antisemitism into anti-discrimination training and policies (American University and San Diego State University, among others)

The ADL bumped each of the revised reports up by one letter grade, in the process lifting three “F” grades (at the University of Minnesota, UC Santa Barbara and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo) and awarding three new “A” grades (at Purdue, Georgia and Arizona State University).

None of the ADL’s revised grades take into account the latest development on campus: pro-Palestinian student protesters being arrested by immigration officials and threatened with deportation. Hillel International’s CEO released a statement this week expressing concern over the deportation effort.

The ADL did not respond to a request as to whether such headline-grabbing incidents, which have unfolded at Columbia and Tufts Universities as well as other schools, would factor into their report card grades.

The group had praised the arrest of Palestinian protester Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia, while calling for the law to be heeded. This week, in an interview with Jewish Insider, Greenblatt called out “this disturbing pattern of how these enforcement actions are happening.”

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