Trusteeship Podcast: Antisemitism on Campus – What Boards Need to Know

Introduction:
Welcome to the Trusteeship Podcast From AGB, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. We cover everything higher education leaders need to know about the challenges facing our nation’s colleges and universities. More important, we provide the facts and insight you need to solve those challenges and to be the storytellers and advocates higher education needs. Today we’re talking about what board members need to understand about the rise of antisemitism on college and university campuses and why it matters for institutional leadership.

In this episode, AGB senior fellow Mary Papazian speaks with Dr. Rachel Fish, who serves as a special advisor to the Brandeis University President’s Initiative on Antisemitism and is an associate research professor at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies. They discuss how higher education leaders and trustees can recognize contemporary expressions of antisemitism, ensure alignment with institutional policies, and foster learning environments providing safety, inclusion, and academic freedom. This timely conversation offers practical insights for boards striving to lead with clarity and integrity in a time of rising polarization and campus unrest. Let’s get started. Mary?

Mary Papazian:
Welcome to AGB’s podcast series where we explore some of the most pressing issues facing higher education today. I’m your host, Mary Papazian, senior fellow at AGB. And in this episode we’re focusing on a subject that is urgent, complex, and deeply consequential. I’m joined by Dr. Rachel Fish, a nationally recognized scholar and educator on antisemitism. Rachel serves as special advisor to the Brandeis University President’s Initiative on Antisemitism and associate research professor in the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies. Rachel, I want to just jump right into this topic. So why don’t you start by giving us an overview of the Brandeis University President’s initiative on Antisemitism. We’d love to learn more about its origins, mission, and the scope of your current work, and how this fits into the broader effort to combat hate and bigotry in all its forms.

Rachel Fish:
Thank you so much, Mary, for inviting me to the podcast with AGB. I appreciate the opportunity. The background to the President’s initiative on Antisemitism really began in April of 2023. At the time, Brandeis University’s president, Ron Liebowitz, recognized that there was a need to be able to educate higher education administrators in order to really understand contemporary expressions of antisemitism. And it really was a public outreach initiative and it remains that today.

What’s important is that it really fits nicely with the unique history of Brandeis University. Brandeis University started and was founded in 1948. It began with the Jewish community establishing Brandeis University, but as a nonsectarian university. And the idea was that this could be a school of higher ed that Jews could attend. Because at the time, in 1948, Jews were discriminated in many institutions of higher education where they weren’t able to be accepted as students, both undergrad, graduate, professional schools, etc.

And so it starts very much in a place of saying, let’s create an institution for Jews, but it’s never been exclusively for Jews. It was also recognizing that there were other vulnerable populations, Blacks and African Americans, women who didn’t have access to higher ed. And Brandeis provided an academic home for many of these communities.

It’s important to note that this initiative began in April of 2023, prior to the horrors of October 7th when Hamas committed its terrorist attack against Israel and murdered and terrorized the Israeli civilian population. And so this initiative already had recognized that there was a need to educate higher ed administrators about issues of antisemitism, which had been in the making and had been cultivating in many institutions of higher ed for generations. But there wasn’t yet an initiative at a research one institution, and Brandeis put a stake in the ground. And this is an initiative that lives under the president’s office at Brandeis University now under the leadership of President Arthur Levine.

Mary Papazian:
Who himself is a great leader in higher education.

Rachel Fish:
Absolutely.

Mary Papazian:
It’s great to see Arthur in that role. So how do you see this initiative then fitting into the broader effort to combat hate and bigotry in all its forms?

Rachel Fish:
So this initiative really is specific to addressing antisemitism. But as you know, in order to be able to address antisemitism, you need to be able to also then understand the ways in which it intersects with other forms of hate. So what we know is that where antisemitism rears its head, it’s not too far along that other forms of hate tend to rear their ugly heads. And we also know from a lot of research that antisemitism is the gateway drug for many other proliferations of hate. And so when we are teaching about antisemitism, the higher ed administrators gain better skills to be able to identify those other forms of hate as well. But our initiative is primarily focused on contemporary expressions of antisemitism.

Mary Papazian:
And what we’re reading, of course, is that that is really something very serious on our campuses. So as you think about the work that you’ve done since 2023, when the initiative began, what were some of the intended impacts of the initiative and how have you seen it received and what have been some of the tangible achievements and outcomes that you’ve realized thus far?

Rachel Fish:
We really have seen that, for many individuals, they lack a basic foundational knowledge of the ways in which Jew hatred or antisemitism has transformed over time. And so we’re providing historical context. We’re providing shared language. We’re providing cutting-edge research, not just from Brandeis University, but from other academicians as well, to be able to inform the educational work that we do with the higher ed administrators. And these higher ed administrators are coming from a whole slew of positions within institutions of higher ed. These are provosts, deans of academic affairs, deans of residential life. These are individuals who hold senior positions for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. These are also positions with general councils, communications, admissions. So the idea is, is that these folks from across the university system really start to understand contemporary expressions of antisemitism so that when it emerges, they are able to identify it, they have shared language to be able to discuss it, and they can think very specifically about how their particular institution can confront it and address it.

Mary Papazian:
And as you think about some of these contemporary expressions, from what I’ve read about the program that you’ve developed, you also look at some of the history of antisemitism as well, is that right, to give it a context and a little bit of a through line?

Rachel Fish:
Absolutely, because as you know, and we believe that you can’t just look at today’s moment in time. I’m trained as a historian. So you have to be able to really situate different ideas and phenomena within their particular historical context. And it’s also important to be able to do so in order to have accurate language to describe what’s occurring. So we talk about the way in which you had Judea phobia or fear around Judaism and adherence to Judaism. That then transforms to a racialization around hatred of Jews as a people. And it transforms also in terms of hatred of Jews for their collective political identity. And not a single one of those mutations necessarily negates the prior form. They can all coexist, but it’s important to understand that the mutations are occurring because whatever the antisemite needs the Jew to be is how the Jew will be perceived.

Mary Papazian:
Thank you so much. And as a scholar of literature, I can appreciate the importance of language and really understanding what words mean. So I thank you for that. Now you work with, as you say, a whole university approach, administrators and faculty at all levels. At AGB, we focus of course on boards of trustees and on trustees and university leaders. So college and university trustees then need to understand about antisemitism. How does this understanding relate to their broader responsibility to ensure that campuses are free from all forms of hate and harassment?

Rachel Fish:
It’s a really good question, Mary, because we know that ultimately the trustees influence the leadership and the decision-making of the leadership. So the trustees not only have fiduciary responsibility, which is extremely important, but the trustees also need to be able to ensure that the university or college leader has the ability to pursue the most, as humanly possible, objective truth. That’s the north star. That means hold complexity, engage with multiple perspectives, cultivate and harness critical thinking skills among students, amongst faculty, ensure that there is intellectual pluralism within institutions of higher education throughout the departments, not just in a particular subject area.

So it’s important, A, that trustees understand and they too are able to identify contemporary expressions of Jew hatred. So they need to know what that looks like and how that manifests today. And that is important to understand that it can come from the hard ideological right position, and it can come from the hard ideological left position. They need to understand the way in which it also intersects with other forms of hate. Because as we said, these things rarely are in isolation.

We also need trustees and university and college leaders to understand that Jews need to be understood as a vulnerable minority and not part of the white majority. And that’s been difficult for some to understand because Jews are often thought of only as a religious minority and not as an ethnoreligious community. Jews are both a people and a religion. And of course within the Jewish community, you have a variety of ways in which Jewishness is expressed. Sometimes it’s through religious practice, sometimes it’s completely secular and cultural, sometimes it’s based upon one’s heritage and shared ancestry. So there are a variety of expressions of Jewishness. And so trustees have to familiarize themselves as well with this.

But what’s most important is that the trustees need to be able to ensure that the leadership of the institutions of higher ed are actually taking the policies that currently exist within the code of conduct, within the faculty handbook, the student handbook, and ensuring that those policies are implemented. Time, place, and manner restrictions, having to do with ensuring that academic integrity and rigorous academic scholarship is at play rather than scholar activism, ensuring that all students are protected and that all students have access to their right to learn. And that this is not a place that’s just becoming a forum, for example, either for battling out challenges in a very confrontational uncivilized and disrespectful way and/or a forum that shuts down speech. None of that is what we’re interested. More speech, better speech, informed speech.

Mary Papazian:
And obviously this ability to speak across difference is something that, as higher education institutions, we very much value. And this leads me to my next question, Rachel. How can trustees and higher education leaders, given what you’ve shared so far, balance a commitment to free expression with the need to protect students from targeted hatred? And here obviously we’re talking about antisemitism, but I would also include racism, Islamophobia, and other forms of bigotry.

Rachel Fish:
So I think what’s important to understand, and we all know this, is that, first of all, this concept of academic freedom is not a new concept. This is a concept that actually begins in the medieval period in Europe. But of course it also moves into the context of the American institutions of higher ed in the 19th century. And the idea here is that if a faculty member has expertise on a particular subject, then they should be able to speak about that particular subject. But if they don’t have expertise on the subject, then they shouldn’t be using their classrooms as bully pulpits for their own politicized agenda.

So for example, if you are a statistics professor, you should be able to teach statistics, teach the world of math. It’s not your job to engage in a conversation about the Middle East. There’s a big difference. So part of this is ensuring that faculty are actually staying within the confines of academic integrity. And if they are, then they have academic freedom. However, we do see that there are many faculty who go well beyond their area of expertise in order to hide behind the guise of academic freedom in order to promote a very clear political agenda. And it’s really important that higher ed leaders hold faculty accountable and ensure that they are not cultivating a hostile environment on campus that targets any community, and in this case particularly Israelis, Jews, and Zionists.

Mary Papazian:
And it seems to me certainly that these are really sharing some of the questions that board members should be asking of presidents and leadership. Because it would be the president’s responsibility to actually ensure that the campus environment itself is inclusive and that the policies internal to the campus are adhered to. At the same time, the fiduciary duty of obedience ask the trustees to ensure that the campus also and that they adhere to the policies, the regulations, however they were established, whatever it might be. So it really is a continuum, I think. So as we think then about empowering trustees to fulfill their fiduciary duties by honoring this distinction, what tools and strategies would you recommend for trustees, administrators, and faculty to develop or to hone, not just to recognize and respond to antisemitism, but to lead inclusively and to respond to all expressions of hate and bias on campus?

Rachel Fish:
So I think it’s really important, Mary, that the institutional leaders work closely with the trustees to do an audit of existing policies. What do you have in place? What don’t you have in place? What might you need to ensure is in place? I also think it’s important that all university faculty and staff receive training around all antidiscrimination policies, but also in particular at this moment in time Title VI training to ensure that folks understand when there is a violation of Title VI. And that’s not just for Jews. That includes people of color, that includes other national origin, so Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jews are in those categories as well. So it’s much broader than just focusing only on antisemitism. If a university or a college doesn’t have a policy in place, that’s when a trustee ought to be working closely with the leadership to think about what are the best practices, what already exists in other institutions, and how can it be applied to their particular institution.

It’s also very important to ensure that throughout the departments that the president of these institutions is really taking the initiative to ensure that, on faculty search committees, there is intellectual pluralism within all of the departments. It’s not about creating a one-sided agenda by the faculty who are all in agreement who don’t allow for dissenting perspectives to be part of the conversation and the growth of the field in the scholarship, as long as it meets the standards of scholarly rigor, academic rigor. So those are pieces of the puzzle that I think trustees, faculty, staff, and university and college administrators can all be working together on in order to be able to cultivate an understanding of what the expectations are, when those expectations are violated, the policies are in place, and it’s up to the leader of the institution and the trustees to have the leaders back to actually hold people accountable. That matters. If you don’t hold people accountable, then the policies mean nothing.

Mary Papazian:
Well, that’s very true, because there’s just no teeth to it. They become words on a paper, but not really enlivening the conversation on the campus. And thinking about the time, place, and manner policies as one example, we always talk about the big content neutral. So the idea here is that the policies themselves are not biased, that they’re creating the spaces to honor the kind of pluralism, intellectual complexity, and frankly, conversation that is imbued with critical thinking rather than ideology and the like. How much are you seeing that happening actually on campus and where do you see some of the challenges?

Rachel Fish:
Well, I think even just this past spring, we saw some campuses, Mary, who had difficulty enforcing time, place, and manner. So if students can’t access the library, if they can’t walk across the quad, if they can’t get into their actual classroom for an exam, if there’s a campus protest that’s happening during classroom hours and you can’t actually study, then that should be part of the conversation to say, folks want to protest, great, here’s the space they can protest. Here are the times they can protest. But it can’t be at the expense of the learning. That is why those students are there or why the faculty are there in the first place to be able to teach and to be able to receive that knowledge and engage in meaningful discourse.

Mary Papazian:
Yes, and it’s a really important point. So I want to get to more specifics here in terms of metrics or indicators. Trustees are looking to understand the circumstances on their campus. They’re looking to fulfill their fiduciary duties. And they like to see measurements to really understand and assess how well they’re doing on the campus or where the gaps are or the challenges might be. What kinds of metrics or indicators can help trustees and senior leaders evaluate whether their institutions are effectively addressing antisemitism alongside other forms of intolerance?

Rachel Fish:
So I actually think there are a few ways this can be done, and I also think it points to opportunities for additional research within institutions of higher ed. So one is, are we seeing within various disciplines that you do have intellectual pluralism? There’s a recent research paper out that is very worthwhile to look at, that is looking at the way syllabi are presented and whether or not dissenting perspectives are included along in that syllabus with the mainstream position. If they’re not, it raises a real question about what needs to be happening at the faculty level.

There’s also the FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education survey that’s looking at the way in which faculty are self-censoring. Because they know that if they offer a perspective that tends to be a little bit politically right of center or conservative, they may be shunned, lose potential opportunities in order to publish, in order to speak at certain academic conferences. And they may not be put up for promotion. They might not get tenure. So this is really important actually to understand that there’s not opportunity to ensure that intellectual pluralism and we need more of it.

In terms of the issues of Title VI, we need to make sure that the Title VI complaints that are made there is follow-through. What is the institution of higher ed doing in order to address those Title VI complaints? What is the follow-up process? How is the students notified? What is the way in which the school is actually educating in order to call people in to learn and appropriately holding people accountable when they are in violation?

I mean, Mary, let’s be very real. You’ve got a lot of young people on campus. Young people hold strong emotions and they’re going to be deeply animated about a lot of issues, some of which they don’t necessarily know a lot about. So this is a real opportunity for the institutions of higher ed to actually do what they’re best at, teach. And so it’s important to see by the faculty, by the trustees, and by the leadership, is the institution actually teaching and creating brave spaces that allow students to engage in a meaningful way with civility? Or is it shutting that opportunity down and only allowing a one-sided particular perspective to be heard?

Mary Papazian:
Well, that approach, Rachel, would benefit us in so many levels that really is the heart and soul of what a university should be, and it’s where the energy comes from. And I appreciate your reference to the passion that many of our students have on this and many other issues. It animates them. We remember those days and we hope we had some passion for the things in which we believed. But the role, as you say, of the university is to help really create those spaces so that informed conversations can take place, and so that learning happens.

And as we think again about the role of trustees, their obligation is to ensure a healthy institution. Setting the tone that these things matter, that they’re going to ask questions about it, that they’re going to themselves to model that kind of behavior can be a very valuable approach for many of our boards. As we wrap up our conversation, is there anything else that you’d like to share, particularly with our trustees, that would be helpful for them in understanding and navigating the challenges that come with the issue of antisemitism or any of the other kinds of discrimination that we’ve talked about today?

Rachel Fish:
I think what’s important, Mary, for trustees to understand is that we’re not trying at all to limit speech. You want robust speech. But that speech shouldn’t engage in demonization or delegitimization. So when you have any member of the university community demonizing or delegitimizing, you are now entering a space that ultimately usually starts with discrimination, prejudice targeting. And in this case can result clearly in aspects of antisemitism. So it’s fine to critique, it’s important to offer dissenting perspectives, but make sure that it stays outside of the demonization and delegitimization categories. And that’s true for any critique over any community and any identity. And I think that once we have a common language and a sense of respect for how to do that, and understand that you don’t necessarily need to build consensus, not everyone has to agree on a policy position, but rather to be able to harness those conversations that are rigorous, that use informed data and informed thinking and critical thinking, then you can have a meaningful give and take within the university community.

Mary Papazian:
Well, thank you. Why don’t we leave it there, because that is the direction I think in which we’re all leading. Thank you, Rachel, so much for the conversation today, but even more importantly, for the great work you’re doing at Brandeis and with institutions across the country. We wish you well. And to all our listeners, thank you for joining our conversation about this critical issue, and we look forward to reaching out with you and having continued conversations as the weeks and months follow.

Rachel Fish:
Thank you.