More than 100 Jewish faculty members signed a statement condemning the Trump administration for making “unwarranted threats” to Northwestern and taking away the rights of students, faculty and researchers “in the name of Jews.”
The statement, which was sent to NU’s Board of Trustees and shared with the broader NU community, said the Department of Education’s claim of “relentless antisemitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year” does not resemble life at NU.
The faculty wrote that a “fair-minded assessment” would affirm that NU administration and faculty is committed to “rigorous and respectful debate.”
“To punish Northwestern financially or to limit academic freedom in the name of protecting Jewish students could itself spark antisemitism — and would be an injustice to those very students and an injury to American society at large,” the statement reads in part.
Five NU Jewish faculty members — including philosophy Prof. Sandy Goldberg and history Prof. David Shyovitz, who is also the director of Jewish and Israel Studies — drafted the statement together before sending it to other NU Jewish faculty to sign. Shyovitz said the faculty that signed the statement come from different Jewish backgrounds and hold political views across the spectrum.
“What I think brought all of us together was this sense that regardless of those differences, which are important, all of us are going to be worse off in trying to make a difference in the things we care about if the University is threatened and limited,” Shyovitz said.
The idea for the statement came after several Jewish faculty members expressed frustration to each other at the “profound overreaction” of what the Trump administration perceived to be rampant antisemitism on campus, Goldberg said.
Shyovitz said it became clear that Jewish faculty’s experiences were not being represented in public conversation and were worth sharing.
The public perception of NU in the media and on social media is “dramatically disconnected” to his experience on campus, Shyovitz said. This reputation has been used as a justification for policies that are counterproductive to combating antisemitism, he said.
The $790 million federal funding freeze for NU, announced April 8, was said to be a result of federal antisemitism investigations into the University by a Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson. The University has yet to be officially notified by the Trump administration.
“We have much fewer resources in Jewish and Israel Studies to teach about antisemitism and to teach about Israel and to teach about the Middle East, because we’re now in a financial crisis,” Shyovitz said. “Students who want to learn about these things in a nuanced and informed way, they’re going to be able to do less of it because of the way that the federal administration is trying to fight antisemitism.”
There could be significant long-term consequences to freedom of speech and academic freedom on campus from the Trump’s administration’s reaction, Goldberg said.
For Goldberg, it is important that the University be allowed to enforce its own rules, calling interference from the federal government “a recipe for disaster.” He said the federal government’s punishment of NU has created a “chilling effect” on free speech and research at the University, where he said ideas should be debated openly without fear of punishment from the federal government.
“As a Jewish faculty member, the one thing that’s really important to me (is) I don’t want the federal government acting in my name,” Goldberg said. “They are using antisemitism as a cudgel to beat elite universities into submission, and that’s deeply disturbing to me.”
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