Does the anti-Semitism debate at CUNY pose a threat to academic freedom?

What exactly is going on at CUNY?

The public university has recently come under fire from the Zionist Organization of America for alleged anti-Semitic incidents on some of its campuses, which ZOA is blaming on chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine. ZOA is so convinced of SJP’s responsibility that it has explicitly called for the organization to be banned from CUNY campuses — but, as Sam Kestenbaum writes in the Forward this week, ZOA has its own agenda, and it may be difficult to verify the claims made in its memo to the CUNY board:

Yet an inquiry by the Forward into the allegations of anti-Semitism cited by ZOA suggests that those attorneys may have a difficult time with their investigation: The ZOA letter is vague as to when and where several of the most clearly anti-Semitic episodes took place, and as to what witnesses are making the charges. Charges were self-reported by students, who remain anonymous. A ZOA campus coordinator said that contact information linking students to specific claims was not provided to CUNY’s investigators.

The article also raises a possible issue of academic freedom: Nerdeen Kiswani, the vice president of Hunter College’s SJP, tells Kestenbaum that at a “liberated CUNY,” Zionism “should not be part of the curriculum.”

In some ways, CUNY seems like a microcosm of what’s going on at multiple campuses around the country. Tomer Kornfeld, the president of the Hillel at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says that he got involved with Hillel when he saw SJP rallies during his freshman year and wondered why no one was countering them. But: “The more we got involved in pro-Israel work, the more campus tension got insane. It was almost as if once we started speaking up, things got blown out of proportion.”

This probably sounds familiar to a lot of students on any given side of the BDS debate at campuses where it’s become a consistent part of student politics — when you start responding, you necessarily start amplifying “campus tension.” Whether it’s blown out of proportion is subjective, but tension can only really thrive between two loud parties, rather than one loud and one silent or unorganized.

What do you think about what’s going on at CUNY? Get in touch: editor@newvoices.org.