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According to a university spokeswoman, Kay Jarvis, “Dawson was fired by the provost because her behavior as a university representative at a conference and during an on-campus protest was inconsistent with her job responsibilities, including leading a multicultural office charged with supporting all students, and represented extremely poor judgment.” What does that mean?
The process that ended Dawson’s career began when the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a pro-Israel lobbying organization, denounced her to Santa J. Ono, the university’s president, and other administrators. According to the ADL letter, sent on August 5, 2024, two women Dawson met at a conference in March 2024 alleged that she had made antisemitic comments during a private conversation with them, to wit:
Those are indeed troubling antisemitic tropes, but Dawson denies uttering any of them. Here is her account of the conversation, recorded in an investigation performed by the law firm Covington & Burling, which I acquired through an open-records request. (As far as the supposed misconduct at the protest goes, Dawson never received a written explanation, nor was it part of the firm’s investigation.) It is worth quoting Covington & Burling’s account at length:
According to Ms. Dawson, she felt defensive at the suggestion that the university was failing Jewish students and noted that the university prided itself on being a safe haven for Jewish faculty and students historically. Dawson said that she acknowledged that students might be experiencing antisemitism on campus, but noted that there was also anti-Muslim, anti-Asian, and anti-Black sentiment at the university and that the university was concerned about each.
The two women asked Ms. Dawson about Jewish student participation in OAMI’s cultural graduations, and Ms. Dawson responded that OAMI worked with and facilitated graduations for students that approached the office. Ms. Dawson recalled that she said Jewish students were not big participants in cultural graduations, noting that Jewish students had other longstanding resources they felt more comfortable with. … Covington asked Ms. Dawson whether she made the specific statements in the ADL Michigan letter about Jewish students being wealthy and privileged, the university being controlled by “wealthy Jews,” and wealthy donors and Jewish board members controlling the president and silencing MENA [sic]. Ms. Dawson unequivocally denied making each of the statements, explaining that she “articulated that [Jewish students] were well-resourced …and had great support like regents who had Jewish representation,” while “MENA students have felt silenced.” … Ms. Dawson said that she told the two women that both Israelis and Palestinians had equal rights to the land of Israel, noting that she had read a study indicating that the genetics of the two groups suggested that both had been in the area for the same amount of time.
The two women who made the accusations, Naomi Yavneh-Klos, a professor at Loyola University New Orleans, and an unnamed fellow professor from a different institution, provided screenshots of text messages they sent to friends following the conversation as well as a Word document written a day later summarizing the encounter, all in line with their account.
In light of a leaked audio recording of Ono describing intense congressional pressure to highlight antisemitic incidents on campus, the response to one of the texts, curiously included in the screenshot, seems particularly ominous: “She was at a conference in an official capacity representing the school. If I were the Michigan president and I found out about this I would be worried about Congress trying to make an example out of me, especially in an election year and a swing state.”
Hyperbolic paraphrase is a mainstay of social media as well as national political discourse now, and anybody familiar with it might easily conclude that Dawson said what she says she said and that her accusers heard what they say they heard. At a time where many Jewish Americans understandably feel attacked and under threat, the unobjectionable statement that “Jewish students have strong support at the University of Michigan, including from several Jewish regents,” is easily translated into the ugly “the university is controlled by wealthy Jews.” Similarly, “Jewish students have not approached our office to arrange a special graduation ceremony because they have other resources available to them” becomes “she doesn’t work with the Jews because they are all wealthy and privileged.” And “both Palestinians and Israelis have ancestral ties to the land” becomes “Jews have no genetic ties to Israel.”
And yet, the memo continues, “On balance, we conclude that the weight of the available evidence supports the conclusion that Ms. Dawson made the statements attributed to her in the ADL Michigan letter,” while also proposing that “it is likely that the actual substance of the conversation fell somewhere between the descriptions provided.”
Surely only one of those can be true. Either it is likely that she made the statements, or it is likely that she made statements that “fall somewhere between.” Covington & Burling argues that Dawson “has a motivation to recall her statements during the conversation in the least offensive light” but fails to consider that Yavneh-Klos — who, per The New York Times reporting, has expressed frustration that “the current DEI narrative very often excludes Jews” — likewise may be motivated to present the conversation in the most offensive light. The sloppy paragraph suggests that in the end it didn’t matter what Dawson actually said — her offense was refusing to agree that Jewish students, the only group on whose behalf Congress has conducted extensive hearings, were uniquely persecuted on campus.
Preponderance of the evidence (“more likely than not”) is the least-exacting evidentiary standard, and it is easily met — particularly when you control what evidence is to be considered. I shared Covington & Burling’s report with several lawyers, all of whom found it flawed and unpersuasive. One noted with puzzlement that the memo did not refer to the investigation as “independent.” Another, with experience in workplace-misconduct investigations, suggested that a serious investigation would have sought to determine if Dawson routinely made antisemitic comments: “If she has those views and will share them with strangers at a conference, she’s shared them with others.” Covington & Burling, however, did not seem interested in ascertaining if Dawson in fact holds the views attributed to her. They did not interview her colleagues or members of the communities she served at the university; they did not search her emails; they did not talk to her Jewish friends. In fact, they “do not believe that Ms. Dawson intentionally mischaracterized her statements.”
Initially, the provost, Laurie McCauley, reacted in a restrained manner. She issued a written warning to Dawson and required that she attend training seminars on antisemitism and leadership. According to The New York Times, however, a regent, Mark J. Bernstein, wrote that he was “disgusted” by this outcome and demanded that Dawson’s employment be “terminated immediately.”
If that’s really what happened, McCauley should have offered her resignation rather than let a regent insult her decision-making and interfere in an HR process not under his purview. Instead, she seems to have allowed him to dictate a decision based on questionable evidence that ruined a Black woman’s life. Dawson was fired in such a public manner as to make her practically unemployable in the future.
Consider the following scenario: Two students engage Ono in a conversation about tensions on campus. A few days later, they contact the Council on American-Islamic Relations with an explosive allegation: “The University of Michigan president said the U-M should expel all Arab students!!!” They attach text messages they wrote the day before: “OMG, Ono says all Arab students should be kicked out!” Months later, CAIR writes to the regents and demands an investigation. The law firm speaks to the accusers, ascertains that the text messages are genuine, and interviews Ono, who strenuously denies making these comments. He doesn’t remember the conversation in every detail but recalls saying that many different groups have contributed to campus tensions, including pro-Palestinian protesters and pro-Israel groups. The law firm regretfully concludes that “on balance, the weight of the available evidence supports the conclusion that Mr. Ono made the statements attributed to him in the CAIR letter.”
Absurd, of course. We all know that this is not how it works at all — unless you have the misfortune to belong to a disfavored group. That category now includes anybody who works in diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, which our regents wholeheartedly supported until quite recently. These days, however, Jordan B. Acker, a Democrat, is now a “left-leaning attorney” who “speaks out against DEI after he’s targeted twice by anti-Israel agitators,” according to Fox News. Sarah Hubbard, a Republican, joined a conversation on Fox and Friends about how the “University of Michigan could dismantle” its “DEI program.” In The New York Times’s “University of Michigan Weighs Changes to Its Diversity Program,” Mark Bernstein, another Democrat, threatened a ”moment of reckoning.” Yet around the same time, the regents were declaring their full support for a number of the university’s DEI programs at their December meeting. But in light of the Department of Education’s last Dear Colleague letter, the future of DEI looks grim, particularly in light of the communications we have gotten from our provost and president, both of whom signal meek compliance rather than an appetite for a fight.
Needless to say, regents are entitled to change their mind about whether to continue spending a minuscule portion of our budget on DEI programs, or whatever we would call them now that President Trump has declared war on diversity, equity, and inclusion. The problem here is not a shift in opinion but a shift in process. Our regents, elected in statewide elections to eight-year terms along party lines, used to keep to their constitutionally mandated role of providing “general oversight” and passing the budget. Now, they are increasingly interfering in university affairs on a micro level, exhibiting neither concern for the consent of the governed nor minimal respect for student government or the elected organs of faculty governance — the Senate Assembly and its executive committee, the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs, which has called for Dawson’s reinstatement, along with our local chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
This contempt for democratic norms makes the regents, along with the central administrators who go along with them, such perfect creatures of this dangerous, authoritarian moment. Some examples:
The dismissal of Rachel Dawson at the behest of a regent should be seen in the context of these developments, which have unfolded largely in response to pro-Palestinian protests — including the one on August 28, 2024, where Dawson allegedly acted unprofessionally. Dawson told me she never received a written account of the putative misconduct, and that the ADL letter was only brought to her attention in early September 2024, after the protest. In the meantime, four of the protesters have been indicted on charges by the state’s attorney general, who has close ties to several of our regents (even though one of them, Jordan Acker, firmly denies he exerted any influence over the decision).
A friend recently told me that “the time for arguments is over; it’s all raw politics now.” That line serves equally well as a description of the Trump regime and an epitaph for the university, any university.
But now that the threat from Washington has come into such sharp relief, perhaps we can change course here at the University of Michigan. Despite the dismay I have felt at the regents’ recent conduct, I believe they are deeply committed to this institution and its future. They must have realized by now that the greatest danger we face is not a few dozen students waving anti-Israel banners but a federal administration that flags research proposals that include words such as “historically,” “female,” or “nonbinary.” It is time to declare a cease-fire at home. There is perhaps no better way to collectively signal our resolve to fight the destruction of the greatest university system the world has ever known than democratically elected regents and democratically elected faculty representatives banding together in mutual respect — however difficult this truce may prove to achieve, however hard all of us will have to swallow at times.
