For the last year, Jewish students at the University of Pennsylvania have been pleading with the university to restore a sense of peace to campus. Throughout my senior year, others and I dedicated ourselves to protecting Jewish students and ensuring that professors were held accountable for fostering an environment of hate.
We have asked repeatedly for accountability and action, yet the university has remained indifferent, allowing this unrest to fester. The core problem stems from professors who not only express antisemitism in their classrooms and on social media but also incite others, and sometimes even themselves, to act on these hateful beliefs.
We were consistently told that tenure is absolute and that “academic freedom” overrides any morals or stability on campus. Yet last month, Penn decided to impose major sanctions on law professor Amy Wax after years of controversy over comments she made, such as, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely in the top half.” I find the comments Wax made deeply disturbing, but I would like to shine a light on the egregious double standard Penn applies when it comes to antisemitism.
The Faculty Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility concluded that Wax “violated the university’s behavioral standards by engaging in years of flagrantly unprofessional conduct within and outside of the classroom that breached her responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal learning opportunity to all students.”
Compare that ruling with the fact that the faculty senate voted in the spring not to disband the anti-Israel encampment, which included terrorist flags, weapons, harassment and intimidation, and vandalism and, in the words of the president of Penn, violated “state and federal law, including Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.” The clear danger the encampment posed, coupled with five professors obstructing police officers, did not display sufficient “unprofessional conduct” for the senate to open an investigation.
The decision to sanction Wax included a letter of reprimand from Provost John Jackson Jr. stating, “The Board determined that your conduct failed to meet these expectations, leaving many students understandably concerned that you cannot and would not be an impartial judge of their academic performance.” Jackson went on to demand that Wax refrain from “flagrantly unprofessional and targeted disparagement of any individual or group in the university community.”
But the words of the provost aren’t worth the pixels they take up on his screen. Countless professors celebrated the Oct. 7 massacre, constituting disparagement of Israeli students on campus. There was no investigation, let alone consequences, for a professor who displayed a Hamas logo on his Facebook account. Anne Norton, who serves on the executive committee of the faculty senate, has engaged in disgusting antisemitic tropes. Last fall, Norton liked a tweet stating, “Playing the victim is what Jews are best at,” and she just recently defended Iran indiscriminately launching nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel. Not only has she not been sanctioned, but she is considered to be an arbiter of what is and is not professional conduct.
While the provost provides that students are “understandably concerned,” he simultaneously never responded to letters signed by thousands of community members in September, October, April, and May, all of which urged him and the Penn administration to protect Jewish students. Even professor Dwayne Booth, who spends his time making antisemitic cartoons, faced no investigation despite the president of Penn describing his cartoons as “reprehensible” and “painful to see.” In that same statement he excused such cartoons based on Penn’s “bedrock commitment to academic freedom,” but it seems the commitment is only applied when Jews are the ones being targeted.
The hearing board also concluded that Wax’s behavior “has created a hostile campus environment and a hostile learning atmosphere.” But somehow, this same hearing board has come to no such conclusion, nor has it even begun a process to investigate the possibility of a hostile learning environment, for Jewish students.
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One of the strikes against Wax was that she invited Jared Taylor, a white supremacist, to speak. Again, this is something that should be condemned. But consider that back in September 2023, multiple departments co-sponsored a festival that included speakers such as Roger Waters, whom the State Department described as an artist who “has a long track record of using antisemitic tropes to denigrate Jewish people.” To underscore the hostile environment created by the speakers, the festival was hosted on Yom Kippur, the holiest day for Jews, and some professors even forced their Jewish students to attend despite Yom Kippur prohibiting Jews from attending school.
Penn continues to prove to the world that it does not believe in free speech but rather preferred speech. While the university has targeted Amy Wax, it has yet to take meaningful action against numerous professors who have actively discriminated against Jewish students. Despite the lack of concrete evidence that Wax discriminated, Penn imposed sanctions merely on the concern that she might discriminate based on race. Penn has made and continues to make it abundantly clear to its Jewish students and professors that their safety does not matter.
Eyal Yakoby, a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in political science and modern Middle East studies, is a prominent voice on issues of radicalism and antisemitism in universities.