“Welcome to MIT!” the flyers being handed out to incoming students announce, next to a drawing of Tim the Beaver, MIT’s mascot. The flyers go on to comment on the conflict in the Middle East and the State of Israel in particular, and they list more than 20 additional resources.
One of the “resources” they list is the Mapping Project, a blatantly antisemitic organization, which provides an interactive map of Jewish organizations, synagogues and nonprofits, complete with the names of their leaders. The purpose of listing these organizations is to “dismantle” them. The goal, as the Project itself states, is “to reveal the local entities and networks that enact devastation, so we can dismantle them. Every entity has an address, every network can be disrupted.”
As the Anti-Defamation League points out, “Many familiar antisemitic tropes are woven into this project, including:
“Myths of Jewish wealth, power and control through the project’s inordinate focus on revealing the identity of Jewish philanthropists, doctors, and media.
“Scapegoating the Jewish community by claiming that Jews are overwhelmingly responsible for a range of societal ills.
“Advocating the isolation and shunning of the entire Jewish community and those who interact with it, including through boycotts.”
“I believe the Mapping Project promotes antisemitism,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth wrote in a note to the MIT community. She went on to say that she had heard from students that the flyers made them feel that they were not welcome at MIT. “Do we really want to draw lines on Day One and risk making any of our newest students question whether they belong here?”
The answer, plainly, is that some students do want to make Jewish students question whether they belong here, and it is the university’s responsibility to make sure that they do feel welcome, not only by notes such as the one sent by Kornbluth (the only survivor of the infamous congressional hearing last December that led to the resignations of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania) but also by their actions.
What happened last spring at campuses across America, where Jewish students were literally blocked from attending classes and subject to verbal abuse, is simply unacceptable. The purpose of a university is to educate its students, and to do that it has to protect them from physical and verbal abuse.
“My daughter has to go back to UCLA and see what she has to endure this year,” the man ahead of me in line at the bookstore told me. Last spring, she was blocked from attending classes and taunted with cries of “go back to Poland,” where, now generations ago, her relatives who did not get out perished.
The high-profile protests that some feared could taint the Democratic National Convention didn’t happen. Palestine was not given a speaking part. The sky didn’t fall. They had a chance to protest outside, in a designated zone, and not interfere with the convention.
It’s a model for what should happen on campuses this fall. UCLA is under an injunction to protect its students. The UC system has adopted new rules prohibiting encampments and masks used to conceal identities. Harvard is requiring students to get permission before setting up tents, art exhibits or chalking on the sidewalk in public spaces.
I’m a civil libertarian. I believe in free speech. But reasonable time, place and manner restrictions need to be imposed lest the universities fail again, as so many did last spring, to educate and protect their students.
University presidents have every reason to take this mandate seriously. The high-profile resignations at Harvard and Penn, followed by the recent resignation of Columbia’s president citing student strife on campus, underscore the fact that mishandling this issue is a career-ender. It’s also the right thing to do.
Susan Estrich is a lawyer, professor, author and political commentator.