The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights is investigating Rutgers University based on a complaint by the Zionist Organization of America that Rutgers administrators have done little to respond to anti-Semitism on campus.
The federal civil-rights office has refused to investigate the university’s response to some of the alleged anti-Semitic incidents cited in the complaint, however, mainly because the Jewish organization had not identified Rutgers students who would step forward to support the group’s assertions that they were being harassed. The group is appealing those decisions in hopes of getting the federal agency to expand the scope of its investigation into whether Rutgers violated a federal law barring discrimination based on national origin.
In a letter to officials of the Zionist Organization of America that The Chronicle obtained from the group on Tuesday, Emily Frangos, the leader of a “compliance team” in the Office for Civil Rights’ New York office, said the agency planned to investigate the group’s claim that the university responded insufficiently to three complaints: that the outreach coordinator for the university’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies physically threatened a Jewish student and posted anti-Semitic comments about the student on Facebook; that other students on campus similarly used Facebook to post anti-Semitic remarks about the Jewish student in question; and that a student group critical of Israel discriminated against Jewish and pro-Israel students by charging them $5 to attend an event to which others were admitted for free.
But, because the Zionist Organization of American had not identified students willing to back its assertions they were being harassed, the civil-rights office did not plan to investigate the group’s complaints that the student group accused of selectively charging Jewish students—called Belief Awareness Knowledge and Action, or BAKA—had created a hostile environment for Jewish students by holding anti-Israel events and forums, the letter from Ms. Frangos said.
The letter similarly cited the Zionist organization’s failure to bring forward named victims, as well as its failure to specify dates when alleged harassment occurred, in explaining why the office did not plan to investigate allegations that Rutgers had failed to properly deal with complaints that Jewish students are subjected to a hostile environment in Middle Eastern-studies courses and are generally subjected to a hostile, anti-Semitic environment on the campus.
Rutgers University issued a statement on Tuesday saying it has made clear in its response to the Office for Civil Rights that the Zionist Organization of America’s allegations “are false and do not reflect the true environment of inclusiveness and a free exchange of ideas that exists at Rutgers University.” The statement says that Rutgers “has one of the largest populations of Jewish students of any public university in the nation” and “a long tradition of working with and supporting the Jewish community, and a longstanding commitment to facilitate meaningful dialogue and promote civility among all members of our community.”
The Rutgers inquiry is one of several investigations of anti-Semitism on campuses being conducted by the Office for Civil Rights, which last fall announced that it was stepping up its efforts against such discrimination.
In March, the office announced plans to investigate the University of California at Santa Cruz for anti-Semitism, based on a lecturer’s complaint that administrators there had turned a deaf ear to her concerns that critics of Israel were creating a hostile climate for Jewish people on the campus.
In September, the office informed Columbia University that it planned to investigate whether a Columbia professor had discriminated against a student by steering her away from a course on the basis of her Jewish background.
And the University of California at Irvine remains the subject of a separate Office for Civil Rights investigation, undertaken in 2008.
The American Association of University Professors has issued a statement expressing concern that some recent complaints of anti-Semitic incidents on American college campuses do not involve actual discrimination but instead represent attempts “to silence anti-Israel discourse and speakers.” The statement was signed by one of the American Jewish Committee’s top experts on discrimination, but was later disavowed by that group.
The Zionist Organization of America’s complaint against Rutgers accuses the outreach coordinator for the university’s Center for Middle East Studies of trying to provoke a physical fight with a Jewish student who wrote for a campus newspaper, and of calling that student a “racist Zionist pig” and encouraging verbal attacks on him by other students on Facebook.
The outreach coordinator could not be reached Tuesday for comment.
In a June letter to the Zionist Organization of America in response to its complaints, Richard L. McCormick, president of Rutgers, declined to discuss any personnel decisions but said “inappropriate language does not automatically constitute a breach of law or of university policy, nor does an individual’s private conduct necessarily constitute a breach of professional responsibility.”
