When Missions Collide

It was a scene students said they never expected to see at Brandeis University, a private liberal-arts institution where generations of diverse students and faculty members have been encouraged to vigorously debate contentious topics: Four police officers wrestling a student to the ground, kneeling on his back and slapping handcuffs on him as they tried to break up a combative crowd chanting “intifada, intifada” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Hours before, on November 10, the administration had sent students an email urging them to communicate in a manner “free of menace and intimidation.” These specific phrases, and any others that invoked “violence, death, or annihilation,” wouldn’t be tolerated.

The timing of that email was no coincidence. A rally had been scheduled for 3:30 that afternoon to protest the university’s November 6 decision to ban the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine for allegedly supporting Hamas and violence against Jews. The pro-Palestinian chants the Brandeis administration had singled out — staples at many rallies today — were almost certain to ring out. They were also certain to offend a large swath of the campus.

The sharp disagreement over the meaning of the banned slogans has inflamed debates on campuses around the country about the limits of protest. Some hear the phrases as a call for justice and equality for millions of Palestinians after decades of Israeli control. Others are sure the words call for the destruction of Israel and violence against Jews. To Brandeis’s leadership, they amount to harassment and intimidation of the students the university was established to support.

Brandeis was founded in 1948 as a nonsectarian Jewish university, three years after the end of the Holocaust, and at a time in America when many colleges refused to hire Jewish professors and restricted the number of Jews who could enroll.

Today, Jewish students make up about a third of Brandeis’s undergraduate population. It’s perhaps unsurprising then that the university would make a priority of shielding its Jewish students, faculty, and staff from what could be considered hate speech.

But there’s another side to Brandeis’s mission and history that has complicated its response: The university was named for Louis D. Brandeis, the first Jew appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and a fierce defender of free speech who famously asserted that the remedy for harmful speech is “more speech, not enforced silence.”

In 2018, Brandeis trustees adopted a new free-speech policy that cited the university’s namesake. It said that “attempting to define realms of prohibited speech would be for the administration to produce a chilling effect upon speech and exchange of views on campus.” The university, the policy added, “has a responsibility to encourage the airing of the widest range of political and scholarly opinions and to prevent attempts to shut down conversations, no matter what their topic.”

It resulted from a yearslong effort to ensure that a student body that was growing more ethnically, racially, and ideologically diverse could communicate and learn from one another in ways that were more civil than combative.

A safe haven for Jews. A bastion of free speech and social activism. Two parts of Brandeis’s DNA now seemed to be at odds as dozens of students began to converge on the lawn outside the Shapiro Campus Center on a chilly fall day, some wearing Palestinian keffiyeh scarves and dressed in black, white, green, and red, the colors of the Palestinian flag. A small cluster of students stood off to the side, quietly holding an Israeli flag.

To compile this report,The Chronicle spoke to about a dozen students and faculty members with views that ranged from strongly pro-Israel to vehemently pro-Palestine, in addition to combing through police reports, video footage, student-newspaper coverage, and social-media posts. The president, Ronald D. Liebowitz, was not made available for comment, but he sent more than a half dozen emails to the campus detailing the factors administrators were weighing as events unfolded.

The decision on November 10 to crack down on student protesters has widened schisms between faculty and the president, students and police, moderate and conservative Jews, and Jews and Muslims.

“I worry about what the violent arrests of protesters have meant for the type of institution we claim to be,” Gowri Vijayakumar, an associate professor of sociology and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “Many of us came here inspired by Brandeis’s social-justice legacy, for its radical inclusiveness, and for its passionate students who wanted to change the world. Now, many students and faculty seem afraid, silenced, unsure of how to engage.”

Jewish students, she pointed out, have diverging views on the war, and many oppose the actions the Israeli government has taken in retaliation for the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel that left more than 1,200 dead. Some of the students participating in the pro-Palestinian rally were Jewish or Israeli, she said, and they, too, have complained that their views are being suppressed.

Maya Stiefel, a Brandeis senior who is among the Jewish students who say they feel threatened by the most extreme pro-Palestinian rhetoric, said protesters shouldn’t be surprised at the backlash.

“When students enroll in Brandeis they have to keep in mind that it’s a university with a deep Jewish history that was founded when other universities had quotas on Jewish students,” Stiefel said. “They have to know that when conflicts arise, the university is going to side with Jewish students.” Still, she felt authorities went too far in forcibly arresting protesters. “I don’t support police violence,” she said. “It just drew more attention to the protest. There are probably more effective ways to respond than shoving students to the ground.”

Stiefel took a gap year between high school and college to study in a seminary in a kibbutz in the West Bank and plans to return to Israel for graduate school. For her, the war “is deeply personal” and the November 10 protest was deeply disturbing. “I walked by and it felt alarming and scary to see people shouting what I would consider to be hate speech,” she said.

Since the Israel-Hamas war broke out and concerns about antisemitism have swept campuses nationwide, pressure has been building on colleges from politicians, donors, and alumni to respond more forcefully to anti-Israel protests and to discipline students for speech that others find harassing or intimidating. That pressure intensified in the wake of a congressional hearing last month when the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania were chastised for failing to take a stronger stance against acts deemed antisemitic.

Administrators have issued mass suspensions, fired pro-Palestinian professors for expressing their views, and preemptively canceled events they perceived as being potentially contentious. Some student protesters have been arrested.

At the same time, advocacy groups, students, and faculty members have warned that such actions imperil free speech and academic freedom. Colleges should be doing more, they argue, to encourage open and civil dialogue, even about topics as difficult as the decades-long Israel-Palestinian conflict.

It’s not always clear that students want that. Many students, particularly those from underrepresented backgrounds, believe college should be a place where they can feel protected not only from discrimination, but also from words they find threatening or harmful. The concept of safe spaces has spun into debates over whether students should be shielded from words and ideas they find threatening.

Everyone, it seems, is being accused of a double standard. Some conservative politicians and activists who have derided the idea of safe spaces for students of color are now demanding the same courtesy for Jewish students. And colleges that were faulted for cracking down on offensive speech when it was directed at students of other racial-minority groups have sometimes been accused of allowing it free rein when Jews are the target. Amid such complaints, and threats of funding cuts, colleges are reevaluating their free-speech and student-conduct policies to create what they perceive to be the right balance between these competing priorities.

Brandeis’s president may be feeling those tensions more than most. Liebowitz, who became president of the university in 2016 after presiding over Middlebury College for 11 years, was one of the first college presidents to publicly condemn the Hamas attacks.

He’s also taken it upon himself to be a leader in pushing other colleges to tackle antisemitism more aggressively. In November, Brandeis hosted a leadership symposium on antisemitism in higher education that attracted more than 100 participants from 21 colleges. His marketing team has also taken out full-page newspaper advertisements for Brandeis, including one in The New York Times that reads: “Just because Jews are accepted by universities doesn’t mean they are accepted.” The ad continues: “In 1948, Israel and Brandeis were both founded to give Jews a safe haven from antisemitism. In 2023, we were reminded why.”

Closer to home, he’s sent regular email updates to students, faculty, and staff. On October 23, he reiterated the university’s unwavering support for Israel and empathy for everyone at Brandeis who’d been affected by the war. “Know that Brandeis is committed to free speech and encourages respectful dialogue, and we also prohibit threats to, or harassment of, any members of our community,” Liebowitz wrote.

On November 6, Brandeis became the first private university to remove its recognition of the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, or SJP.

The suspension means it is no longer eligible to receive funding, conduct activities on campus, or associate itself with the university. In defending his actions, Liebowitz said that “SJP openly supports Hamas, which the United States has designated as a foreign terrorist organization,” and it has called “for the violent elimination of Israel and the Jewish people.” He said Brandeis’s policies allow the university to “restrict expression … that constitutes a genuine threat or harassment.”

A Muslim student affiliated with the Brandeis chapter of SJP said she was unaware of some of the more inflammatory rhetoric coming from the national group which, following the Hamas attack, celebrated “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” against “a violent settler state.” The national statement urged college students to “join the call for mass mobilization,” proclaiming “glory to our resistance and our martyrs.”

The junior said she understood how that could make people feel uncomfortable, but that Brandeis’s chapter wasn’t in any way advocating violence. She is one of several Muslim students who spoke to The Chronicle on the condition that her name be withheld.

The students said they worried about personal and professional backlash for speaking out. Shortly after the Hamas attack, reports circulated that a “terror list” had been posted online of Brandeis students who are active in Muslim and pro-Palestinian groups. It was later taken down, the Brandeis junior said.

Students weren’t the only ones hesitating to speak out publicly. At a time when college leaders were attempting to dodge being dragged into an increasingly polarizing debate, Liebowitz was making a strong statement, and doing so publicly. Universities can’t stop hate speech, he wrote in a November 6 opinion piece in The Boston Globe, “but they can stop paying for it.” He added that “groups that receive privileges through their affiliations with the university, including using its name, will lose their affiliations and privileges when they spew hate.”

He bemoaned “this twilight zone moment when students and faculty seem to be enjoying their freedom to express grotesque language about Jews, Jewish life, and the Jewish state.” The university, he wrote, would “uphold free speech rightly understood.”

The free-speech advocacy group FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) denounced the decision to “derecognize” the student group as “a brazen act of viewpoint discrimination.” As a private university, Brandeis isn’t bound by the First Amendment, but has pledged to uphold the highest standards of open inquiry.

“Justice Brandeis would be turning over in his grave,” said Harvey Silverglate, a FIRE co-founder. Brandeis, he said, was “one of the greatest supporters of free speech and free thinking to ever grace the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Meanwhile, the campus protest was being organized. “It is absurd for Brandeis to frame itself as an institution for social justice while openly supporting an ongoing genocide, and attempting to censor students for speaking out or even holding a vigil,” a group called the Revolutionary Student Organization of Brandeis announced November 8 on Instagram.

At 11 a.m. on November 10, the email from administrators went out to students urging them to avoid intimidating or harassing rhetoric. While it didn’t refer specifically to the protest planned for that afternoon, it made a point of citing phrases including “intifada, intifada” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

A Muslim student who asked not to be identified said that when she read the email, “I remember thinking this is totally in anticipation of the protest” planned for that afternoon. “They aren’t going to like it and will do everything they can to keep it from happening.”

She and a friend went to the protest and found the presence of police officers from both the campus and the City of Waltham “kind of scary.”

Outside the Shapiro Campus Center, a crowd that grew to about 150 people listened to emotional speeches and testimony calling for a ceasefire and an “end to genocide.” One speaker described Hillel as a “racist organization that upholds a racist state,” while another criticized the university’s “McCarthy-ite” silencing of those speaking out against injustice, according to an account in the student newspaper, the Justice.

About a half hour into the rally, shouts of “intifada, intifada” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” began, and at 4:30 p.m., police issued the first of four orders for the crowd to disperse. The chanting continued and a student who would later be arrested urged the crowd, using a bullhorn, to “stand their ground,” according to a campus police report.

About a half dozen police officers formed a line that directed students away from the protest site as a few of the demonstrators screamed and taunted police, calling them “Nazis” and “fascists,” saying their protest had been peaceful and there was no reason for arrests.

Cellphone footage from the day shows a chaotic scene as police arrested seven people, pushing some who resisted to the ground to handcuff them. Three Brandeis students and four people unaffiliated with the university were charged with some combination of disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and failure to disperse. One student accused of throwing water at a police officer was charged with assault and battery.

The events left the campus bitterly divided. Three days later, dozens of students walked out of class to protest what they called police violence in the students’ arrests. They sat quietly on the Great Lawn outside the campus center, holding sheets of white paper, in an act meant to mirror Chinese protests against government censorship.

The day after the protests and arrests, Liebowitz wrote that he empathized with everyone who was emotionally struggling with the fallout from a war that has cost so many Israeli and Palestinian lives. Students have a right to voice their opinions about the war, he said, but they lost that right when their chants turned to hate speech and words that incite violence. “Attacks against any background or belief system are unacceptable and will not be tolerated,” he said.

In response to the growing anger over the student arrests, Liebowitz doubled down, writing two weeks later that the university welcomes and protects all students, but was established “to counter blatant antisemitism in higher education ... ”

Even today, he said, “Brandeis’s status as the singular Jewish-founded non-sectarian institution remains an important part of its identity and bestows upon it certain responsibilities,” including being a leading voice in countering antisemitism.

The university’s top priority, the president said, is keeping everyone physically safe on campus during a time of intense emotions and threats of violence. He pointed out that three college students of Palestinian descent had been shot — at least one seriously injured — while they were on their Thanksgiving breaks in Burlington, Vt.

“I think, with any protest, it’s a question of whether chants rise to the level of inciting violence against anyone, which I don’t think ‘From the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, people who are oppressed will be free’ does,” another Muslim student said. When he chants that, “I’m not calling for genocide of Jewish people and I don’t think anyone has that intention.” The way he sees it, a call for freedom and equality has been “twisted to mean something hateful.”

Others point out that those words have been used by Hamas in its violent campaign to destroy Israel. At the very least, they say, it challenges Israel’s right to exist and makes many Jews feel deeply uncomfortable.

In an opinion piece in The Brandeis Hoot in December, Stiefel, the Brandeis senior, wrote that the campus “has now become a hostile environment to be a Jewish student. When I hear my fellow classmates chanting, ‘intifada, itifada,’ I hear them chanting for the death of my friends and family members who are living in Israel through brutal acts of terror,” she wrote.

A Muslim student who attended the rally said she’s gotten tired of having to defend herself for calling attention to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. On social media, and in class discussions, she said, “There are a lot of accusations that if you’re supporting the Palestinian cause, you’re supporting Hamas or terrorism.” Friends she used to be close to avoid eye contact, whether out of discomfort or disapproval, she’s not sure.

She ended up at Brandeis, in part, because of her experience participating in a social-justice program on campus while she was a high-school sophomore. “We learned about the civil-rights history of Brandeis and all the influential people who came through here,” including Anita Hill and Herbert Marcuse, who taught at Brandeis, and Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman, who were students.

In his 2020 book Learning on the Left, Stephen J. Whitfield, a professor emeritus of American studies, profiled the liberal and radical students and faculty members who shaped and were shaped by Brandeis. Whitfield, who received his doctorate from Brandeis and taught there for more than four decades, said in an interview that although the university has become politically more conservative in recent decades, “there’s a legacy that could be invoked by anyone who sees himself as a social activist.” Today, though, “What is defined as the left and progressivism and social activism seems to be taking not merely the pro-Palestinian side” but one that challenges the very existence of Israel, he said. That’s resulted in deep rifts among progressives and tensions within Jewish communities, including at Brandeis.

Another Muslim student told The Chronicle that Brandeis’s reputation as a university committed to free speech and social justice was a major attraction for him. Toward the end of his senior year in high school, in the spring of 2020, the first major outbreak of Covid had shut his school down and protests were erupting over the murder of George Floyd by police officers.

“I was really interested in racism and health disparities and thought this was a place where people could talk openly” about challenging topics, he said. Brandeis also offered him a generous scholarship and had strong science programs, he said. He never expected he’d end up feeling silenced there.

On December 5, the administration called off classes for a teach-in to try to quell some of the tension on campus. Chad Williams, a professor of history and African and African American studies, helped lead a session on policing and race in the United States. Other sessions included discussions on hate speech and the First Amendment and social media’s role in protest, polarization, and disinformation.

“I was admittedly hesitant to participate given everything that had transpired in the weeks leading up to it,” Williams said. “It felt very reactionary and performative in a lot of ways.” The campus was reeling, though, and something needed to happen.

“There was a great deal of shock over what happened,” he said. “Brandeis has always been very tolerant of student protests and dissident voices. There was a great sense of betrayal.”

He believes administrators should have consulted with faculty members before making the decision to ban phrases and put the police on standby. “I could probably run off a laundry list of phrases that would make me feel threatened or uncomfortable,” Williams said. “Does that mean they should be banned on this campus? I don’t think so.”

In November and December, faculty members voted to call on Brandeis to seek a dismissal of all of the charges against the students. They also called on the university to establish a task force on free expression and to pursue an independent investigation of the events leading up to the arrests.

“What concerned me most is that we were perceived as promoting free expression for some voices, but not for others, whether it was a matter of policy or just the way it played out,” said Jody Hoffer Gittell, a professor at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management and chair of the Faculty Senate.

A university spokeswoman told The Chronicle that it would be inappropriate for Brandeis to interfere with the work of the district attorney, and that the student-conduct process will be deferred until the criminal process is complete. The university agreed to establish a task force on free speech and free expression, with faculty input on who should be included. The goals will include finding ways to promote more civil discourse and opportunities for students to learn from people with varying perspectives.

It also agreed to commission an outside review, but faculty members complained that the scope was too narrow and that it won’t be completely independent, since the administration selected the reviewers without faculty input.

LeManuel (Lee) Bitsóí, vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion, said he and a colleague attended a training on antisemitism to try to be more responsive to students who are feeling threatened. About a third of Brandeis’s students are students of color and one in five are international, many from the Middle East. “The diversity that our founders envisioned is happening. We’re grappling with those growing pains,” he said. “We came to Brandeis by choice. Now that we’re here, how do we engage in civil discourse?”

Gabriella Fine, a junior who went to a Jewish high school in Maryland, is president of J Street U Brandeis, a group that describes itself as an “American pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, pro-peace” organization supporting a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Her group recently held an event in which five discussion topics were posted on a wall and students were asked to go to the one they found most challenging, then the one to which they thought they had some answers. The topics included hateful rhetoric, conscientious use of social media, and confronting absolutism on campus. “We’re not here to scream. We’re not here to yell. We’re all so stressed out,” she said.

She understands that for many people, talking about the war is still too uncomfortable. “We are the space,” she said, “for people who are ready.”

Many of the people interviewed by The Chronicle described Brandeis as being at a crossroads, one that will shape how it balances its Jewish identity, social-justice mission, and commitments to diversity and to open inquiry.

When it comes to responding to divisive speech, “I think that unfortunately, November 10 will be a huge piece of history that people will talk about and hopefully will teach us a big lesson,” said the Muslim student who said she’d learned of a “terror list” circulating online. “I’m not sure why it happened the way it did. It was such a confusing and traumatizing time. It made me think that maybe this is not a safe space for me and I can’t be too vocal.”

Gittell, the Faculty Senate chair, said that an independent investigation of how the events unfolded would help reassure the Brandeis community that the university was committed to learning from any mistakes. Footage of the arrests, she said, was difficult to watch, and she heard from students who were “devastated” that their efforts to mourn the loss of life in Gaza were cut short.

“There’s a sense at Brandeis that we’re here to have honest, difficult conversations and think about big issues,” she said. “That spirit of free inquiry is in the history of Brandeis and the legacy of Justice Brandeis.”

Like other universities, Brandeis will have its work cut out for it. Students, Liebowitz wrote last week as he welcomed them back for the spring semester, have been complaining about “the polarized and contentious nature of campus discussions, their fear of stating their opinions, and the vitriol they have been subjected to on social media.” Parents are worried about their students’ safety, he said.

Nevertheless, he said, the university is looking forward to more conversations in the coming months that he hopes “will include varied viewpoints, shared in an atmosphere of respect.”