As colleges have faced scrutiny over their handling of reported antisemitism and Islamophobia on campus this past academic year, many of them have turned to a familiar, often-faulted tactic: the task force.
Task forces tend to bring together people across a campus to closely examine contentious issues, from enrollment and strategic planning to racial equity and sexual-assault prevention. The groups’ presence can be time-limited or indefinite. Critics often call out such efforts as window dressing — making it look like an institution is taking action when the recommendations are mostly vague and just go up on a shelf.
So what’s coming out of this latest round of task forces?
Helmed by faculty or staff members, the councils on antisemitism and Islamophobia have gathered community feedback through focus groups, online forms, town halls, and dedicated email inboxes. They’ve indexed recommendations for supporting students, diversifying scholarship, bridging cultural divides, and streamlining bias-reporting processes.
At times, the advisory groups have themselves been the subject of controversy. On Monday, 28 Republican members of Congress denounced the preliminary recommendations released by Harvard University’s antisemitism task force as weak, and called for the institution to carry out an earlier advisory group’s more extreme proposals, including a ban on masked protests.
Now, with the fall term fast approaching, several task forces have completed their work and published reports outlining the isolating climate for Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, Jewish, and Israeli college students in the United States during the Israel-Hamas war.
Here are four themes that have emerged in the task forces’ scope, findings, and recommendations:
Task forces have mostly avoided making calls on controversial definitions.
Some college presidents have cited the safety and inclusion of Jewish students as a reason to clamp down on certain kinds of pro-Palestinian speech — for instance, protests that use the phrase “from the river to the sea,” which some interpret as calling for genocide against Jews. Anti-Zionist activists, meanwhile, have argued that their conduct is not antisemitic, because they are critical of the state of Israel, not of their Jewish peers.
The latest reports do little to resolve this disagreement for colleges.
- In its report, released in May, the University of Pennsylvania’s antisemitism task force offers a definition of antisemitism that sidesteps the question of whether criticism of Israel is anti-Jewish. Acknowledging that opinions differ on this question, the task force says antisemitism is “the expression or manifestation of hatred, violence, hostility, or discrimination against Jews because they are Jews.”
- Stanford University’s antisemitism task force spends several pages of its report, delivered to university leaders in May, discussing the debate over antisemitism’s meaning. The task force says it does not advocate for Stanford to adopt a particular definition, but suggests a two-part test “for analyzing instances of anti-Zionism or antisemitism.”
- Columbia University’s antisemitism task force does not provide a definition of antisemitism in its report, the first in a planned series. In March, following the document’s release, one of the task force’s co-chairs told The New York Times the group’s job was to hear Jewish community members’ perspectives, not to define antisemitism.
Nicholas Lemann, the aforementioned co-chair and a professor in Columbia’s journalism school, told The Chronicle the decision to eschew a definition wasn’t unusual, both among antisemitism task forces and across the landscape of antidiscrimination efforts.
“Most universities have pretty extensive existing regimes on racism- and gender-based discrimination,” Lemann said. “And most of them don’t have a web page, ‘this is how we define racism.’”
Some do wade into the controversy over free speech.
This spring brought about an escalation in pro-Palestinian protests, with students and other activists erecting encampments and taking over administrative buildings to demand that colleges divest from Israel. While the action has cooled over the summer, disciplinary and legal proceedings for those involved are ongoing.
The task forces on antisemitism and anti-Arab bias have a lot to say about the protests. But there’s also a lot of disagreement on how much institutions should regulate speech.
A report from a separate Stanford task force on Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian communities describes a “Palestine exception” to the university’s commitment to free speech. At Stanford, the task force writes, “Palestine is ... a topic that one cannot study, discuss, or teach without potentially damaging one’s future.”
The committee urges Stanford to eliminate the double standard for pro-Palestinian speech and revise its existing time, place, and manner policies “to expand rather than restrict” student speech.
“Speech should not be suppressed simply because it makes other people uncomfortable,” the report states, adding that safety concerns must be backed up with evidence of threats, “rather than reliance on all-too-common tropes of Palestinian or Muslim violence.”
Stanford’s antisemitism task force, meanwhile, points to a different double standard it sees in attitudes toward free speech: a too-high tolerance for antisemitism. It calls on Stanford to more consistently enforce content-neutral rules on speech, and to condemn antisemitic language.
“If you have rules that protect the right of speakers to speak, and that impose reasonable and content-neutral standards on the time, place, and manner of certain kinds of speech, and then they’re not enforced, what kind of university do you have?” asked Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and co-chair of Stanford’s antisemitism task force. “What kind of climate do you have at that point?”
Diamond said the other committee’s claim of a Palestine exception does not take time, place, and manner restrictions seriously enough.
“I’m not saying there aren’t people who have been inappropriately discouraged, intimidated, or even silenced,” Diamond said. “I don’t know that, but it’s certainly imaginable. But I wish there was recognition of the other problem — the insensitivity of the constant assault of this, and in forums and places where, frankly, it’s just not appropriate.”
Still, Abiya Ahmed, a co-chair of the task force on Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian communities and director of the Markaz Resource Center at Stanford, said she believed that there were more similarities than differences in the two reports’ findings.
In the antisemitism report, Ahmed said, “I think you’ll see the same kind of things that we heard from people that we spoke to about muting of identities, othering, feeling like they can’t bring their whole selves to work or having a perception that, because of their particular identity or ascribed identity, certain political views would be associated with them.”
Diamond echoed this, saying the two reports displayed similar concern for the safety and dignity of all students.
Many students and employees say they feel discriminated against on the basis of their views and identities.
Several of the task forces quote or paraphrase from interviews with Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian students, faculty, and staff, who described feelings of exclusion and hostility on campus since October 7.
But leaders of the task forces emphasized in conversations with The Chronicle that there was no universal experience.
Jeffrey Koseff, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford and co-chair of its antisemitism task force, said Jewish interview participants fell into three major categories: some were “incredibly traumatized” from direct encounters with antisemitism over the last nine months; others chose to conceal their identity in a bid to avoid antisemitism; and another group said they didn’t experience it firsthand at all.
Ahmed said that while the consequences of talking about Palestinian rights disproportionately affect Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim campus-community members, all advocates of the cause are hurt by crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech. That committee’s report features excerpts from conversations with Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim people, as well as their allies.
Her co-chair, Alexander Key, an associate professor of comparative literature at Stanford, said the unwritten rule against pro-Palestinian speech has played out in different ways for people with varying degrees of power on campus.
“For a senior tenured faculty member, it’s damaging in a philosophical and a personal sense,” Key said. “And then for an untenured short-term lecturer, it’s existential. And for a Palestinian-American undergraduate, it’s existential and personal harm.”
Task forces recommend investments in student support and in Jewish and Middle Eastern studies.
Among the less-contentious suggestions put forth in the task forces’ reports are accommodations for Jewish and Muslim students around religious observance, and commitments to Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim studies.
- Harvard’s task force on anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bias recommends the university fund a visiting professorship in Palestinian studies in the short term, and hire more Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian faculty in the long term. The committee also notes the need for more dedicated prayer spaces on campus.
- Harvard’s task force on antisemitism encourages the university to make kosher hot meals available at more locations on campus.
- Stanford’s antisemitism task force recommends the university create a permanent program in Israel studies and expand opportunities for students to study in Israel.
- Stanford’s anti-Arab bias task force urges the university to institutionalize religious accommodations across campus, including by scheduling mandatory classes for first-year medical students around Friday prayer times.
- Penn’s task force urges the university to hire additional faculty and staff in Jewish studies and require “academic experiences” that incorporate antisemitism into training on inclusion and unconscious bias. It also calls on the university to improve outreach to, and recruitment of, Jewish faculty, staff, and students; to better meet their religious needs; and to increase the security presence at Jewish institutions on campus.
Some of these ideas are pretty low-hanging fruit, said Leonard Saxe, director of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University.
The Harvard task force’s recommendations around kosher dining options and Jewish holidays “may be things that one can do if you need to feel that you’re doing something,” Saxe said.
“But if the problem is as serious as they describe it,” Saxe added, “that doesn’t seem like, even in the short term, a very important thing to focus on.”
What’s next?
A few task forces, including Harvard’s, have only issued preliminary reports so far. Others, including at the University of Maryland at College Park and the University of Washington, have not yet released any findings. Maryland has a joint task force on antisemitism and Islamophobia, while Washington separated the groups.
Lemann told The Chronicle that the Columbia antisemitism committee’s next report, to be released in about a month, will focus on student experiences and summarize listening sessions the committee conducted with students.
A few college leaders say they have already started carrying out some recommendations — though in many cases, specifics remain elusive.
- In June, Penn took up its antisemitism task force’s request that it clarify its open-expression policies. Larry Jameson, the interim president, announced that temporary rules for campus demonstrations would be in effect while a faculty-led panel reviewed the university’s free-expression guidelines during the 2024-25 academic year. Those temporary rules ban encampments and overnight protests and require permission to build structures on campus.
- Stanford’s interim president, Richard Saller, said in June that the university was already tackling some of the issues mentioned in the reports. “Others suggest areas of attention,” he told a university news outlet.
- Alan Garber, Harvard’s interim president, told the campus community in June that the university would begin to review and execute the committees’ short-term recommendations over the summer. “Those that are longer-term will be developed, refined, and implemented in due course,” he wrote.
