Campus Anti-Semitism Prompts New York Lawmakers To Slash Funds
Image by Wikicommons
By Sam Kestenbaum March 18, 2016
The New York State Senate has voted to slash $485 million in funding to senior colleges in the City University of New York system to “send a message” that not done enough to fight campus anti-Semitism.
On March 14, a state budget resolution championed by Republicans passed after a sprawling 2-hour debate on the Senate floor, Capital New York .
“These are the things that have been happening at CUNY,” said GOP State Sen. Ken LaValle of Long Island. LaValle, who chairs the chamber’s committee on higher education, described what he said is a pattern of anti-Semitic incidents, “and these are the things that the Senate Republican conference says are intolerable and must stop.”
The resolution was met with vocal opponents who called into question both the allegations of anti-Semitism and the usefulness of cutting funding to the school.
Democratic Sen. Liz Krueger called the language of the resolution “shocking.”
“I’d never heard from my senate colleagues or my constituents that anyone thought CUNY was an anti-Semitic institution,” said Krueger, who represents Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “And even if CUNY has a problem, how is cutting a third of their budget going to solve the problem?”
The allegations of anti-Semitism stem from a long February letter penned by the Zionist Organization of America to CUNY, accusing the group Students for Justice in Palestine of anti-Semitic actions on campuses.
The letter describes incidents at four colleges in particular – Hunter College, Brooklyn College, the College of Staten Island, and John Jay College – including swastikas appearing on campuses and pro-Palestinian protestors shouting at Jewish students: “Zionists out of CUNY!” and “Get out of the Middle East!”
For example, in November 2015, SJP held a rally at Hunter College as part of a campaign for free public college tuition that the ZOA alleges became a “hateful and divisive demonstration” against Jews. SJP decried CUNY’s “Zionist administration” in social media posts, the ZOA wrote, and later dozens of students chanted, “Long live the Intifada!”
CUNY serves some 480,000 students at 24 campuses across New York City, including continuing and professional education institutes. The defunding would affect the system’s 11 senior colleges, which include all of the schools where the alleged incidents took place.
Students protest at Hunter College, a part of the CUNY university system. Image by Youtube.com
CUNY chancellor James B. Milliken issued a response earlier this month to the ZOA’s allegations by hiring outside attorneys to look into the incidents and develop new “policies on speech and expression.”
“We take seriously our responsibility to promote and encourage tolerance and civility,” Milliken wrote in a March 16 letter to the Senate, following their endorsement of the resolution. But as a public university, Milliken added, “CUNY cannot infringe the constitutional right of free speech and association of its students faculty and staff.”
Mort Klein, the president of ZOA praised the move to defund.
“This was years in the making,” Klein said, describing the ZOA letter at the root of the resolution. “We are seeing horrific incidents of anti-Semitism on campuses.”
But Palestine Legal, a pro-Palestinian legal aid group that has previously sparred with ZOA, said, “A government body’s denial of funding, where motivated by a desire to suppress speech, is prohibited by the First Amendment.”
“The letter attempts to censor speech supporting Palestinian rights by falsely conflating criticism of Israeli policy with anti-Semitism,” wrote Radhika Sainath, a Palestine Legal staff attorney, in an email to the Forward. “With respect to the defunding of CUNY — were it to happen — the decision could be subject to legal challenge on First Amendment grounds.”
Krueger said she was surprised by the allegations of anti-Semitism.
“I said, ‘What the heck?’ My husband is a CUNY professor, we are both Jewish, we have been married 26 years,” she said, “and he has never brought home to me any concerns about anti-Semitism.”
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