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An independent review ordered by Gov. Kathy Hochul has found that the City University of New York needs to “significantly” overhaul and update its policies in order to handle the levels of antisemitism and discrimination that exist on its campuses.
CUNY campuses have been a center of pro-Palestinian activism for years, which Jewish students and elected officials have said sometimes manifests as antisemitism. Since the Hamas attack on Israel last October, there have been dozens of arrests of pro-Palestinian demonstrators on CUNY campuses, including at an encampment at City College in April that was shut down by the city police.
The review, which was commissioned by Ms. Hochul last October after a surge in hate and bias incidents and was released on Tuesday, documented inconsistencies and a lack of oversight in how CUNY’s 25 campuses handled complaints of antisemitism and other bias among students and staff members.
But the review, which included interviews with more than 200 people over 10 months, also found that it was a “small, vocal minority of individuals” responsible for antisemitic incidents, and not a widespread problem.
The report’s author, Jonathan Lippman, a former chief judge of New York, offered more than a dozen recommendations to improve the campus climate, including the creation of a new CUNY center devoted to efforts to combat hate.
CUNY said that it had already begun to put some of the recommendations into effect, including approving the anti-hate center, which will be called the Center for Inclusive Excellence and Belonging. Ms. Hochul said on Tuesday that she was directing CUNY to enact all of them.
“We look forward to working on implementing Judge Lippman’s recommendations to redouble our efforts and build on our progress to create a more inclusive campus environment for students, faculty and staff,” Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, the CUNY chancellor, said in a statement.
While his investigation focused on policy shortcomings and did not provide a rundown of antisemitic complaints, Judge Lippman wrote in a letter to Ms. Hochul attached to his report that there had been “an alarming number of unacceptable antisemitic incidents targeting members of the CUNY community.”
Still, he wrote, “the vast majority of students and members of the CUNY community do not engage in antisemitism or discrimination of any kind and instead want only to access the quality education CUNY affords.”
The report is one of many examinations of antisemitism on university campuses that have been published in the aftermath of the campus protests, including a pair of reports about Columbia University. The CUNY report also follows a recent federal investigation by the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. Education Department, which found that CUNY had mishandled multiple complaints of antisemitism and other bias since 2019.
For example, in 2021 several Jewish students at Hunter College, a CUNY campus, complained that students and faculty members had disrupted an online class “to call for the decolonization of Palestine.” Without interviewing any students, Hunter College concluded that the disruption did not violate students’ rights and closed the matter.
In a settlement with the Office of Civil Rights announced in June, CUNY agreed to reopen investigations into such complaints and provide training to employees who conducted these investigations. Judge Lippman recommended additional steps to allow complaints to be handled more fairly.
One issue, he found, is that each CUNY campus handles complaints of discrimination independently, with insufficient oversight. He also called CUNY’s online portal for lodging complaints about discrimination a “black box.”
More generally, while CUNY should be applauded for its extremely diverse student body, “at some schools, this diversity has not translated into an environment of tolerance and respect,” he wrote.
He recommended that the system “increase efforts to recruit and hire those who foster inclusive dialogue” and faulted faculty members generally for too often inflaming conflict between those with differing viewpoints, rather than encouraging peaceful solutions to disagreements.
Judge Lippman’s report was more critical than several prior reports, in part because federal guidance has shifted, and because criticisms of Zionism, the movement for a modern Jewish state in its ancestral homeland, are now more likely to be seen as discriminatory than they were in years past.
A 2016 report on antisemitism at CUNY, for example, found that provocative chants led by pro-Palestinian groups, most notably the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, were broadly protected as free speech, even if some found them hateful.
Yehudit Meira Biton, 40, welcomed the report’s recommendations. She said she withdrew from Brooklyn College in 2022 after hearing repeatedly from instructors in her mental health counseling master’s program that Jews were white oppressors and therefore not welcome to talk about their own history of oppression. Ms. Biton is Afro-Latina and an Orthodox Jew; she said that when she complained, nothing happened.
“I’m very happy that they are finally doing something,” she said.
But Parima Kadikar, a third-year student at CUNY School of Law and member of the law school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, rejected the report and the effect it could have at a time when universities are cracking down on student protests.
“The report disingenuously smears student activism and threatens to overhaul students’ rights to call for Palestinian lives and liberation,” she said.
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