Last week, the shopping period for my classes at Sarah Lawrence College (SLC) was disrupted on Zoom by a “Divestment Coalition” of campus groups, including the Sarah Lawrence Socialist Coalition and the Sarah Lawrence Review. The coalition announced a “boycott” of all my courses for the 2024-25 academic year, labeled me a “staunch advocate of Israel’s right to self-defense” —true, depending on how it’s defined—and falsely accused me of conflating “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) advocates with Nazis. They pressured potential students to avoid my classes, even resorting to direct messages over Zoom to dissuade them from registering.
The most worrisome aspect of this incident, however, was not the students’ actions—despite their blatant anti-Semitism and disregard for the principles of liberal arts education—but the laconic response from the SLC administration. When I reported these troubling actions, the administration first invited me to submit a bias report, and then asked for access to my personal Zoom account to identify the disrupting students.
My American politics classes usually have waitlists. But my Presidency class was not heavily enrolled this year—a Presidential election year. The “boycott” had had some effect. I emailed the school president and provost the following on August 22:
I just received my course placement info and see that only a handful of students have signed up for my Presidency class. As you know, historically my courses have been oversubscribed, especially in election years.
Please see the attached screenshot that was provided to me by a student who attended my Presidency interviews on Monday; it shows an intimidating zoom chat message they received from an anonymous fellow student attending the interview session. Students on the Zoom sessions were all sent this message.
Please let me know how you intend to proceed in resolving this unacceptable situation. Students should not be intimidated with potential cancellation by their peers just for choosing to take an American Politics class that has nothing to do with Israel or my Jewish heritage and faith.
I also noted in a second email the false and libelous statement made by the students during my class: “Incidentally, the alleged retweet about Nazis and Isis referenced in the image sent to you is completely fictional. It wouldn’t be something that I would say and I checked my Twitter history which revealed that I never posted anything like that or anything on that day for that matter. Any supposedly misogynistic and racist comments are likewise fictional. So not only is this group harassing and intimidating students, they are also outright lying about me.”
In response to clear anti-Semitism, harassment of a professor, intimidation of students, overt lies about me and my statements, and an unambiguous disruption of the learning environment, the SLC administration wrote me:
I certainly understand your distress over the messaging that occurred during your interviews; that was very unfortunate. Information on bias incident reporting at SLC can be found here; if you scroll to the bottom you will see the link to the Bias Incident Reporting Form, which begins the process. Though students are made aware of the bias incident reporting process, you can also certainly share this website with the student who made you aware of the messages.
Sam, I have also shared this incident with [another administrator] and copy him here.
With best wishes for the start of the semester,
Aside from introductory pleasantries, that note was all I heard from the college for over a week. Filling out the form would notify SLC’s Bias Incident Response Team, part of SLC’s DEI apparatus, to “make a preliminary assessment as to whether a College policy has been violated, and determine which other offices to notify.”
What kind of reception would a bias report of anti-Semitism be likely to receive?
This is the same DEI apparatus that, on October 9, just two days after Hamas killed 815 civilians and took 251 hostages in a sneak attack, sent out an email that began, “We are aware of the ongoing conflict happening with Palestine, including the most recent events that happened over the weekend.” Palestine? What about Israel? The email included two items: an offer of counseling and a notice about Students for Justice in Palestine’s upcoming “Hour of Solidarity with Palestine,” at which SJP invited students to “Join us to unpack the ongoing events in Palestine, understand the mainstream narrative, and take action!”
That’s hardly the only time SLC has seemed to “forget” about the concerns of Jewish students, particularly if they support Israel.
In response to complaints of anti-Semitism from Jewish students during the spring and summer of 2022, a DEI office administrator agreed that resident advisor training for the fall would include a segment on recognizing anti-Semitism. But less than 24 hours before the training, the leadership of the campus chapter of Hillel, the national Jewish group, was informed that it had been “accidentally” omitted from the schedule. Whoops! With effort, it was rescheduled for December 7—and was this time put “on hold” a month before, with promises of follow-up on “a path forward.” There was no follow-up. Whoops again!
That same fall, Hillel students submitted bias incident reports—like the one I have been invited to submit—saying that students threateningly surrounded their recruitment table at the Club Fair, while others told them they would like to join Hillel but were afraid to do so. They report receiving no response. Perhaps that was “forgotten” as well.
Sarah Lawrence College, as I mentioned when first reporting this incident, is already under a Title VI investigation because of its long and well-documented pattern of inaction toward Jewish community members who are treated poorly on campus. This silence is quite loud despite our president’s declaration that “there is not, nor can there be, any place for antisemitism or hate speech of any kind on our campus,” and the constant reiteration of the school’s principles of mutual respect. These include that “we endeavor to inflict no harm on one another, in word or deed,” “we embrace our diversity in all its dimensions,” and “we foster honest inquiry, free speech, and open discourse.”
The disruptions also directly violate SLC’s student conduct code, which prohibits disruptive behavior and any actions that impede others’ free expression and pursuit of education. The College’s Undergraduate Student Handbook notes that:
Sarah Lawrence College is committed to the ideal of a community founded on mutual respect and tolerance. Free and robust debate and exchange of ideas are at the heart of our academic enterprise. However, the College makes a distinction between free expression of ideas and physical or verbal abuse or harassment, which threatens or inhibits such expression or significantly interferes with a person’s education or work.
Using my class time to scare students away from taking my courses certainly interfered with their education. And, although SLC claims that “freedom of expression is a core value that fosters an environment of open dialogue and intellectual growth,” it is hardly an absolutist regarding the free marketplace of ideas.
SLC’s policy immediately goes on to say, “However, this freedom must be exercised responsibly, ensuring that it does not harm others or infringe upon their rights. Specifically, free expression must not: Cause injury or violate the rights of any member of the College community … [or] Disrupt classes or other College activities or business. This policy encompasses all forms of communication, including but not limited to oral, written, and electronic media (such as social media).”
While SLC policy mandates that incidents of discrimination be reported and investigated, whether or not someone fills out a “bias report,” I heard nothing about any such investigation until yesterday, September 4. Despite never hearing from the “other administrator” mentioned in response to my initial reporting email, the original administrator emailed me to say that the college had investigated “whether it would be possible to identify the student” who was directly messaging my students but said that since I had used my personal Zoom account for the session—as do many of my colleagues—I would need to work with college IT to make that determination. Not only is that unlikely to work, but there is a far more logical way to solve this “whodunit”—ask the Divestment Coalition, which publicly took credit for it. Its leaders, members, and supporters are clearly visible on their social media channels; these individuals can easily be reached.
Better still, explain to these students why such behavior is bad so they learn something from the experience—quietly punishing whatever individual student or students did the coalition’s work is unlikely to address the cultural problems on our campus.
SLC has left itself plenty of room to do something in public about the various efforts to marginalize and silence Jewish community members and supporters of Israel. Had I been targeted with a boycott for being a supporter of Black Lives Matter or LGBTQ issues, the same DEI apparatus that has a blind spot for anti-Semitism most certainly would have weighed in loudly against such behavior. Students and the larger community know about what happened in my class and understand that by its silence, SLC is endorsing cancel culture and libelous behavior when it comes to Jews and Israel.
This whole story is an absolute tragedy. I am so profoundly saddened to see SLC, a school that has historically embraced intellectual exploration, embraced curiosity, and promoted debate, fall to cancel culture and illiberal impulses. When I first joined the community 14 years ago, I adored meeting so many different people who helped me open my mind to many ideas and disciplines to which I had only limited exposure. I didn’t like everything and everyone then or today, but so many of these new ideas and experiences helped make me a better teacher and person—like helping spark my unexpected love of art, art history, and Russian novels.
I often wonder why students choose to spend time and money coming to campus if they already have such strong views about life and the human condition that they are content to miss the greatest feature of a liberal arts education: having one’s views challenged, expanded, and challenged again. It is entirely antithetical to a liberal education and a terribly wasted opportunity.
Similar stories are unfolding on college and university campuses nationwide. Whether newly felt or just newly exposed, anti-Semitism, hate, and violence appear to be flaring already this fall at schools such as the University of Michigan and Pomona College. But well beyond the hate itself, many students are now not able to openly question, debate, listen and learn from various and diverse views. If administrators at SLC and elsewhere do not do more to address this cancer in academia, it will destroy one of our nation’s greatest sets of institutions—institutions that have been engines of opportunity and innovation for generations.
We cannot, as a nation, allow our higher education system to collapse and degrade under the weight of ethnic, religious, and political point-scoring. We must have some rules about civility and behavior on college campuses. Whether those are tailored to allow maximum free expression and inquiry or, as at SLC, something less, they must be enforced fairly and consistently. Administrators who cannot evenhandedly enforce school rules and policies—and articulate to students why this is important—are not fit to lead. If they cannot see their way to principled leadership, they should step down or be replaced by those willing to follow the courage of their convictions.
Image by Zuko.io Images — Wikimedia Commons
I’m wondering the same thing, especially if funding for the student groups comes from the college.
Despite the Goldwater Rule, a clutch of “mental health professionals” (which not all them actually were) produced a book during Trump’s first campaign for the presidency, purporting to diagnose his psychiatric dysfunctions. As in the Goldwater case, their diagnoses did not all agree with each other, but they all found something that made Trump dangerous, unfit to serve, and generally deplorable.
As far as I know, the American Psychiatric Association has not officially expressed a criticism of this parody. In fact, some of its colleagues took up the cudgels to label the Goldwater Rule itself as (among other faults) a violation of their right of free speech. It seems that just as their understanding of professional ethics is problematic, so is their understanding of the scope of the First Amendment to the Constitution.
I am curious to know exactly what punishment Prof. Abrams desires for the students involved in doing this
I am curious why the AAUP, which claims it is fighting for academic freedom, and claims that even scant criticism of the profestocracy are “attacks,” has been so conspicuously silent to the harrasment of Dr. Adams by these Students for Hamas.
Well, since they tried to disrupt the educational system and lied about Professor Abrams to justify their actions, I would think expulsion of the leaders from SLC and suspension for two semesters from rank-and-file agitators would be completely fitting…
How about the same punishment it gave to Marlon Lask in 1993 when he laughed at Jonathan Boesky’s politically incorrect joke? https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/13/nyregion/free-speech-woes-at-sarah-lawrence.html
This is heartbreaking, and beyond shocking. Perhaps it shouldn’t be. I’m sorry this has and is happening to you.
And just where is the AAUP on this? Lying about and harrasing a faculty member?
Faculty under attack?!
Surely Mulvaley has reached out…?
Wolfsan…?
I’m wondering the same thing, especially if funding for the student groups comes from the college.
Sam, I am deeply saddened to read this account of what you’ve experienced at Sarah Lawrence. I know your excellent work and have followed both your scholarly writing and your writing more recent writing on free expression, cancel culture, and other issues relating to higher education. Thanks for bringing these issues to the attention of the general higher education community.
I agree with you that the issues that you are addressing are very much the fault of administrators who are unwilling to take a stand against anti-semitism and other forms of discrimination against disfavored groups. I am a strong advocate for free expression, and everyone–including Palestinian sympathizers–has every right to express their views on the Palestinian-Israel conflict. But no one has a right to engage in harassment or intimidation of others, violent action, or disruption of the educational function of the university. When this happens, university administrators have an obligation to the academic and scholarly community to identify those who have violated the rights of others and to take appropriate action–which includes, in the most egregious cases, suspension or expulsion. There are far, far too many cases of individuals engaging in actions that violate the rights of others, and it is a shameful that university administrators permit these actions to go on without appropriate action. Your case at Sarah Lawrence is, regrettably, just another one of the many cases that we see at colleges and universities around the county. It is clear to me that government action is necessary to force college and universities to act when the rights of others are violated.
A lot of this stuff came out of purgatorial cesspools like UMass Amherst and I was sending up flares 35 years ago — and no one believed me. in 1994 — 30 years ago — Hamas was in charge of security in the grad dorm — and proudly told me that they were the folks who had blown up “my” embassy in Lebanon a decade earlier. (I always thought it was Hezbollah who’d done it, but whatever…)
I’m not going to get into how the BIT (and related mental health laws) are being abused — for political ends — in higher education today, but this has BIT written all over it.
And DO NOT fill out a bias response form — anything you write will be used against you!
Now as to the future of higher education, I don’t think there is one.
I probably should get into the Behavioral Intervention Teams (BITs) — the secret star chambers who try and sentence students (and now faculty) in absentia.
In the spring of 2007, a clearly crazy student went on a shooting spree across the Virginia Tech campus, killing 32 and wounding 17 more. Virginia Tech screwed this up every way possible — and there is no way that they didn’t know about this student — but instead of addressing their many failings, the response was to create a secret group of top administrators that would evaluate and deal with dangerous students.
That would evaluate them in secret, and decide what to do with them in secret, without ever really telling them….
That worked for about 18 months, and then quickly devolved into the Soviet concept of Sluggishly Progressing Schizophrenia — the thing that got the Soviets kicked out of the World Psych Association in the 1970s. In both cases it is the concept that (a) our political views are the superior/correct ones to hold, (b) sane people would want to hold superior/correct views, and hence (c) anyone who doesn’t hold them is inherently insane.
Or as one undergraduate put it, “they think that all conservatives are crazy.” While I thought she was being a tad overly dramatic, a couple of months later I was hiding her so that the campus police couldn’t haul her off to the psych ward. My off campus job involved dealing with de-institutionalized mental health patients so I knew what “crazy” was — and she wasn’t.
And in fairness to both the Soviets and the campus administrators today, one has to remember what the term “abnormal” means — “not normal” or a statistical outlier. If you and all of your peers are to the political left of Vladimir Lenin, then “normal” constitutes being to the political left of Vladimir Lenin — anyone who isn’t is, by definition, “abnormal.”
But the philosophy behind the BITs has led to something else which actually says more about them than anyone else — they believe that the individual should conform his/her/its beliefs to match that of the collective, and anyone who doesn’t will inevitably progress to mass murder. It’s a highly illiberal position, but these people are not (small “l”) liberals — they actually are quite fascist and hence I am reminded of a Friedrich Nietzsche quote often used to explain fascism: “Everyone is the same, everyone wants to be the same, and anyone who is different goes voluntarily to the madhouse.”
The dead giveaway that Professor Abrams was sent to the BIT is this line: “Sam, I have also shared this incident with [another administrator] and copy him here.” That’s likely the BIT member…”
And “[t]hough students are made aware of the bias incident reporting process, you can also certainly share this website with the student who made you aware of the messages.” is an attempt to “out” the student so that the BIT can deal with this “dangerous” student as well.
My advice to Professor Abrams would be to (a) retain a good attorney, (b) read the NY State Mental Health laws and related regulations, and (c) be very careful who he talks to on that campus. While it is impossible to dispute the “professional judgment” of a mental health “professional”, it *is* possible to dispute the basis upon which a purported judgment was made, i.e. “she never met me.” There even is a “Goldwater Rule” that prohibits the diagnosing of someone who has not been examined as “mentally ill” — this came after the 1964 election when a bunch of mental health folk declared that Barry Goldwater was insane even though they’d never even met him.
And without being paranoid, if you know what is necessary to involuntarily commit someone in your state, you’re able to see it coming and dodge it. (And the truly crazy person couldn’t and wouldn’t, not that one ought to really have to be doing this….)
One has to be prepared to deny what one knows to be true — that it won’t matter what printed documents actually say because no one will ever bother to read them, that it doesn’t matter what third parties will freely state because no one will ask them. That it really doesn’t matter what the actual truth is, and what this says about the concept of “veritas” is why I think that higher education is mortally wounded.
I also have to wonder what the *actual* enrollment figures were, or would have been had the IT department played games with the software. Call me cynical, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the Sarah Lawrence Admin want to see fewer students enroll in his classes because they can justify getting rid of him.
One has to remember that the students are puppets — as many have pointed out, they couldn’t find “the river” or “the sea” on a map even if both were labeled. It’s the institution that hates Jews, the students merely seek to please those who have power over them. They need to be seen as ambitious young people who want a good GPA so they can get a good job…
This unwillingness of Sarah Lawrence College to create a level playing field for freedom of expression is the latest chapter in a long history of antisemitism at the college and in the college’s environs, Bronxville, NY, which was a community closed to Jews until the 1960s. Senator Jacob Javits even mentions Bronxville as antisemitic in his autobiography. In the 1980s the college attempted a coverup of its admissions quotas for Jewish students, which continued at least until 1956. (See https://www.commentary.org/articles/louise-rose/the-secret-life-of-sarah-lawrence/ ; there were also editorials in the NYT and WSJ). In 1993 the college threw a student, Marlon Lask, out of the college merely for laughing at a politically incorrect joke. In 2018 students attacked Prof. Abrams, whom I believe is the only Republican on campus, for being conservative, and claimed that freedom of speech is paramount to them–except, of course, for Lask. Six years later, “anti-Zionist” students now attack Abrams for supporting Israel. For a college that has a history of supporting left-wing dissent, Sarah Lawrence is amazingly indifferent to the speech of conservatives, Jews, and others who don’t fit its Marxist agenda. As an alum who used to donate out of my professor’s salary, I gave up on my alma mater in 2018 during the first assault on Abrams. I have urged my stepson, who also attended and is an investment banker, to do the same.
Institutions such as Sarah Lawrence exist on Federal largess and what we really need to do is re-elect President Trump and then insist that he do something about these bastions of intolerance, antisemitism, and dare I say it, anti-Americanism.
I agree. Have you signed Dan Klein’s petition, described here? He’s appreciate additional signatures. https://www.thecollegefix.com/professors-rally-academics-around-less-bad-candidate-trump/