ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt Slams ‘Weak’ University Presidents, Says Professors Are Terrorizing Jewish Students
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt slammed university presidents for failing to protect — and radical faculty members for terrorizing — Jewish students during an appearance on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports on Wednesday.
Greenblatt began by denouncing the recent shooting of three young men of Arab descent in Vermont over the weekend, declaring that “there is no excuse” for violence against Arabs or those who are attending pro-Palestinian rallies.
Then he moved onto a discussion of an ADL study that found that a supermajority of Jewish students and 44% of non-Jewish students have been subject to or witnessed anti-Semitism on campus.
“Colleges are not doing enough to protect their Jewish students,” argued Greenblatt. “When three out of four Jewish students tell us, Andrea, that they have either seen or experienced themselves an anti-Semitic incident, when I am hearing students tell me, from Ivy League universities, you know that they are literally being harassed on campus, that they’re hiding in their dorm rooms like Maya from Brown, or that literally they’re considering leaving campus altogether, something is profoundly wrong.”
“And I got to ask, Andrea, why are these university presidents so weak?” inquired an outraged Greenblatt. “They seem to lack a kind of moral center that they’ve had for so many other incidents, and appropriately so. Why when Jewish students, why when Israeli students are being targeted and victimized, is their response a kind of acquiescence or so often silence?”
“And there’s also the faculty responsibility, I have to say, because on many of these campuses, presidents or administrators, but the faculty, tenured faculty, have an enormous amount of power for what happens on these campuses,” replied host Andrea Mitchell.
“Yeah, and you can look at what happened at Cornell or at Columbia, or at so many of these places where tenured faculty who are protected by their system of employment somehow, literally the students they’re supposed to be responsible for in teaching, instead, they terrorize and they taunt,” agreed an animated Greenblatt.
“Although there is tenure, Andrea, these presidents do have the authority to remove people from committees, to prevent them from getting promotions. There are ways you could tell a professor that you don’t want him or her to teach all together,” he continued. “I mean, I do think that these presidents have kind of hid behind the tenure system, but they are the ones who are responsible and need to be accountable to their children, to their students, and to the parents like me who send our kids to these places.”
Watch above via MSNBC.
