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From: Len Gutkin
Subject: The Review: Michigan's president admits to regulatory overcompliance, maybe.
Why so many emails? That’s the question Silke-Maria Weineck, a professor of German literature at the University of Michigan,
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Why so many emails? That’s the question Silke-Maria Weineck, a professor of German literature at the University of Michigan, asks in her latest essay in our pages. The emails are from Santa Ono, the university’s president. Here’s an excerpt from one:
Late last night, a group of Jewish students had gathered for dinner at the Southfield home of a local rabbi when, shortly before 11 p.m., an armed individual entered through an open backdoor, stole a bag, and fled. No one was injured and law-enforcement officials with the Southfield Police Department are investigating this as a home invasion and a crime of opportunity.
A scary incident, to be sure. But did it have anything to do with antisemitism? The police didn’t think so, but Ono’s framing strongly suggested otherwise. “As tensions in the Middle East have escalated in recent days, it is more important than ever that we work collectively to offer solace and safety to one another,” his email began. And ended: “These are challenging times, but there is enormous strength in our community. Resolve with me to join together in solidarity, and help everyone feel safe, protected, and empowered to live and learn at the University of Michigan.”
Another email described “an assault against a Jewish member of our community” — a “young man was punched while on the steps of a house occupied by members of a historically Jewish fraternity.” You would infer from this that the young man had been targeted in a hate crime. But fully five days before Ono’s email, Michigan Hillel had denied that the attack had anything to do with the victim’s ethnicity or religion.
The rush to describe these episodes as antisemitic might reflect, Weineck argues, Ono’s attempt to appease Congress, which has been putting pressure on colleges about campus antisemitism. By tying a random breaking and entering to “tensions in the Middle East,” Ono sends a signal to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights about his institution’s vigilance. He also, Weineck says, plays into a “political project … to make Jewish students, faculty, and staff live in fear.”
There is, in a way, nothing new about any of this. The cultivation of hypersensitivity by college administrators had its first great flowering over three decades ago. The journalist Richard Bernstein’s Dictatorship of Virtue (1994) offers a cornucopia of evocative anecdotes from that prelude to our present. Consider the posters that the University of New Hampshire put up all over its campus in 1993. “Religious persecution has no place at UNH,” the posters said. “We seek not only to be a diverse community but a caring one. Tell someone. File a complaint.” (Other posters replaced “religious persecution” with “sexism,” “racism,” “discrimination,” and “homophobia.”)
An ironic consequence of such discourse is that students might come to dramatically overestimate the threat of prejudice. Bernstein considered just that to have happened at the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, when the Office of Student Life welcomed incoming minority students by informing them that “Institutions of higher learning across the United States are troubled by … proliferating incidents of racial and sexual harassment, bigotry, and incivility.” A renascent version of such rhetoric, retrofitted with the jargon of “structures” and “systems,” became obligatory for administrators in recent years. As Princeton’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, said in 2020, in a letter announcing “the university’s efforts to address systemic racism,” “racist assumptions from the past … remain embedded in the structure of the university itself.”
Eisgruber’s letter became well-known because the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights used it to open a Title VI investigation. That move was widely perceived as an act of trolling by the Trump administration, but one person’s troll is another’s idealist. Surveillance by ideologically motivated regulators is hardly an innovation of Trump’s DOE, or even of 21st-century identity politics. Bernstein describes what was, in the early ’90s, “a new type of specialist at many universities": the nonfaculty administrator devoted entirely to equity issues. His exemplary case is an affirmative-action office director at the University of New Hampshire whose tasks include Title VII and Title IX enforcement, despite not being a lawyer.
The synergy between campus activists and the regulatory bureaucracies controlled by elected officials has another, more recent precedent, of course: the tumultuous revisions of Title IX policy after Obama’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, which led some colleges to investigate plainly protected speech as discriminatory. Today, zealous — some will say overzealous — policing of potential expressions of antisemitism has likewise followed the Biden administration’s release of a comparable “Dear Colleague” letter, this one focused on Title VI.
At Michigan, Ono himself seems to have admitted to a kind of overcompliance when it comes to antisemitism, at least on the evidence of a leaked audio recording: “The government could call me tomorrow and say in a very unbalanced way, ‘The university is not doing enough to combat antisemitism,’ and I could say, ‘It’s not doing enough to combat Islamophobia,’ and that’s not what they want to hear.”
In response, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, not unreasonably, filed its own complaint with the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights. Dueling campaigns for heightened regulation on behalf of one’s group are a predictable outcome, perhaps, of the campus penchant for what Bernstein calls “advanced sensitivity.” Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the University of Michigan assured the public that “President Santa J. Ono has spoken out repeatedly against antisemitism and Islamophobia, and he will continue to do so, as any form of discrimination or hate is an affront to our community.” That probably means more emails.
“Both the Dadaists and the Surrealists sought to dissolve art into life, but the Surrealists also aimed to bring to life the ‘revolutionary energies’ stored in everyday, outmoded objects, from derelict factories to abandoned toys.” In The Brooklyn Rail, Jensen Suther writes about surrealism — part of a cluster of essays marking the movements centenary.
Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.
Yours,
Len Gutkin
