If you have a conversation with Jewish parents of teenagers, typically their overwhelming focus is not just that their children attend college, but they must attend the “right” college. That college may have a history of educating children like theirs, but today it is more interested in two things: Extracting huge sums of money from parents and indoctrinating their children. When the college staff is espousing concepts inherently against you and your heritage, it is time to demand a change or to pull the plug.
A recent study was done of the personnel on college campuses. The study did not involve nebulous poll questions; it relied on the words expressed by the college personnel on twitter. Some will try to argue against the results of the study because it was done by a right-of-center think tank – The Heritage Foundation. That would be a classic case of attacking the messenger instead of disputing the findings.
DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is the issue. Since most Jewish parents are liberals or even further left, their initial thoughts are it is a good thing for colleges to address this subject. When you find out the average university has 45 staff people working on this issue, one might wonder what they all are doing. That is a lot of money to pay for positions that did not even exist five years ago. When you find out that those 45 people don’t consider you part of DEI despite being an interest group that has borne the burden of more oppression than any in recorded history, you might question what they are doing.
Heritage did a search of the twitter feeds from 741 DEI staff at 65 universities. The twitter feeds were the personal accounts of the subjects in the study versus the DEI staffers’ university accounts. They compared the nature and number of tweets regarding Israel to those by the same people about China.
First, let’s address the two countries. Israel is a democracy that has rights for women, gays, and Arabs. The one million Arab Israelis have the same rights as non-Arab Israelis. It has freedom of the press and an independent judicial system. China has none of these things. Women are often oppressed and forget about gays having any semblance of acceptance. China’s press is part of the ruling party’s operation. Don’t even discuss the courts in China – no freedom or rights there. Then there is the slave labor that is condoned by many and the ruling government. China just broke a treaty and is turning Hong Kong into a totalitarian island. Otherwise, there should be no comparison between the two countries at enlightened universities. In other words, kind comments about Israel and derogatory comments about China. As New Yorkers say, fuhgeddaboudit.
There were three times as many tweets about Israel as there were about China by the 741 DEI staffers with 96 percent of Israel tweets critical and/or negative. The smaller China tweet count produced 62 percent that were positive about China. As has been stated many times in this column, a disproportionate emphasis on Israel particularly in a negative manner is inherently anti-Semitic.
As was stated by the people who performed the study, “The evidence demonstrates that university DEI staff are better understood as political activists with a narrow and often radical agenda rather than promoters of welcoming and inclusive environments. Many DEI staff are particularly unwelcoming toward Jewish students who, like the vast majority of Jews worldwide, feel a strong connection to the state of Israel. The political activism of DEI staff may help explain the rising frequency of anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses.”
If you don’t think this is a problem, consider the amount anti-Semitic incidents occurring on these campuses. How exactly are the immense amount of DEI staff addressing these incidents? In the 2020-2021 school year, Hillel reported there were 244 incidents despite the education experience being almost entirely virtual. That is a significant increase from the 181 in the prior year when there was on-campus instruction.
The findings are the findings, and they need to be confronted. Do not wait for anyone such as the ACLU or ADL to do something. Those organizations are lost. Organizations like Stand With Us are confronting this situation as well as some of the on-campus Hillel’s. This is something every parent of a college age student needs to address before their children are harassed at the very campus for which their parents paid a fortune to attend.
To read further on this, search for the study, Inclusion Delusion: The Anti-Semitism of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion staff at Universities.