Report to House Committee on Antisemitism at Rutgers

And Beyond

The Republican members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce recently released a 350 page document addressing antisemitism on American college campuses. In this post, I excerpt the entire section on Rutgers, except for the footnotes (the sort of hanging numbers shown here. You should download their document if you want the footnotes, which provide sources for their claims and and conclusions. Similar reports on Columbia, Harvard, Penn, UCLA, Northwestern, Berkeley, MIT, Barnard, and George Washington University appear in the full report.

---

From the report, excerpted verbatim:

Rutgers University

Since October 7, 2023, Rutgers only suspended three students, issued probation to four students, and issued two reprimands. Notably, no students received individual discipline for their involvement in either of the Rutgers encampments.370 However, Rutgers wrongfully took disciplinary action against Jewish students who spoke out about antisemitism that they experienced at the University.371 Particularly notable incidents and Rutgers’ disciplinary responses, or lack thereof, are detailed below.

• Rutgers Failed to Impose Any Discipline Upon Students Involved in the New Brunswick and Newark Encampments: There were no disciplinary consequences for students involved in encampments at two of the Rutgers campuses.372

  • The failure to impose discipline resulted from the capitulation made by Rutgers’ leadership to the encampment’s ringleaders. The lack of disciplinary action came despite threats to disrupt final exams by encampment members on the morning of May 2, 2024, in addition to other successful disruptions and troubling incidents at the encampment.373

  • Rutgers Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) threatened and planned a mass disruption of finals for the morning of May 2, 2024, resulting in more than 28 exams being postponed, affecting more than 1,000 students.374 Soon after, Rutgers leadership announced it had reached an agreement in response to demands laid out by the encampment protesters.375 In the agreement, Rutgers capitulated to various demands made by the protesters including leniency for students, faculty, and staff who were “involved in the encampment or related activity.”376

  • Although Rutgers maintained that “individual students who have been involved in any activities related to the encampment or support of the encampment, including presence in the encampment area, remain subject to the procedures of the Code of Student Conduct as communicated by the Office of Student Conduct,” no members of the encampment faced accountability for its serious disruption of academic life.377

From the forthcomimng Illustrated Orwelexicon. Nonviolence Any protest activity with which I agree, no matter how much it involves intimidation, vandalism, disruption, rioting, looting or other forms of violence.

• Student Who Encouraged Murder of an Israeli Student Allowed to Remain on Campus: On October 12, 2023, merely days after the October 7 terror attacks, a student posted on the social media platform YikYak, “Palestinian protesters there is an Israeli at AEPI go kill him.” This student received only a one semester suspension for encouraging violence against a fellow student.(378) Even more concerningly, the offending student was allowed to remain on campus under disciplinary probation for the remainder of the Fall 2023 semester and was only suspended for the Spring 2024 semester.(379)

• One Student Reprimanded for Mass Disruption of Town Hall: Rutgers failed to administer any meaningful discipline for individual student conduct violations at the mass disruption of a Town Hall meeting held by Rutgers leadership on April 4, 2024, issuing only a single reprimand to a student for the incident.(380) Notably, the student who received a reprimand was alleged to have led the protest and was found responsible for three conduct violations, including safety violations for failing to comply with university officials and police, disruptive acts, and disorderly conduct.381

  • During and after the Town Hall, student protesters shouted antisemitic comments at Jewish students, including “Globalize the Intifada,” “There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” and chanted “Settlers, settlers, go back home, Palestine is ours alone.”382 The scale of disruption forced the event to conclude prematurely with Rutgers President Jonothan Holloway leaving with a police escort. Following Holloway’s departure, Jewish students were escorted by police out the back of the building.383

• Lecture Disruption Prompts Three Probations: Three students received six-month probations for their involvement in a November 29, 2023, incident in which they disrupted a lecture given by Dr. Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert from Georgetown University. The disruption, organized by Rutgers SJP, included a group of “roughly a dozen” students who accosted Hoffman and called for the destruction of Israel “from the river to the sea.”384 Rutgers found the three students responsible for “intentionally or recklessly interfering with any University activity,” “disrupting/obstructing academic/administrative/University business,” and “disorderly conduct.”385

Rutgers Disciplined Jewish Students For Speaking Out About Antisemitism While Letting Antisemitic Conduct Violators Off The Hook

Alarmingly, several Jewish students were punished by Rutgers for raising the alarm about antisemitism they experienced. This stands as a marked contrast from Rutgers’ lax handling of antisemitic misconduct.

• Jewish Student Sanctioned For Posting About an Antisemitic Presentation: In one concerning case, Rutgers sanctioned a Jewish student who posted online about a classroom experience in which one of her classmates gave an antisemitic presentation in which Israel was compared to Nazi Germany, inappropriately featured images of Holocaust victims, and ridiculed Jewish students in the class for participating in Birthright Israel.386

  • After the Jewish student shared her experience online and submitted a bias report against the student who gave the presentation, Rutgers administrators instead opened a conduct investigation into the Jewish student. Administrators charged the Jewish student with multiple conduct violations, shown below:

    

    Documents obtained by the Committee expose the investigation as a biased effort by Rutgers administrators to punish the Jewish student for sharing her experience with antisemitism at Rutgers. Notably, the initial report submitted by the Jewish student was used as the foundation upon which Rutgers levied the case against the Jewish student. 388

  • Administrators justified their “findings” that the Jewish student engaged in “acts of dishonesty” and “defamation” under the pretense that the student had lied about her cell phone being “taken” by the classmate giving the antisemitic presentation. In fact, the Jewish student was coerced to hand her phone to the classmate.389 The administrators used the student’s explanation that she handed over the device out of fear to justify this perverse finding.390 These examples also reveal the shaky basis upon which the administrators crafted their rationale for finding the Jewish student responsible for creating a false statement:

    

    

    Ultimately, the Jewish student was sanctioned with a full year of disciplinary probation for actions the administrators characterized as “so serious that they could result in a suspension.”394 Meanwhile, the student who gave the antisemitic presentation faced no consequences.39

    

• Rutgers Law School Baselessly Opened a Disciplinary Inquisition of a Jewish Law Student Because He Spread Concerns About Antisemitic Students’ Pro-Hamas Rhetoric, Prompting Him to Transfer:

  • When Orthodox Jewish law student Yoel Ackerman pushed back against antisemitic, proHamas messages in the Rutgers Law School Student Bar Association group chat, he was subjected to antisemitic harassment.396 He was told that the well-documented rapes and murders committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, were “lies” fabricated by Jews engaging in “atrocity propaganda.”397 Ackerman faced further harassment and was brought before Rutgers Law School’s Student Bar Association (SBA), where he was publicly humiliated for being a “Zionist” and was forced to apologize for speaking out against antisemitism.398 This sham impeachment trial led to the brief suspension of the SBA, though it was quickly reinstated without consequence.399

  • When Ackerman shared those messages with members of the Jewish Law Students Association (JLSA) to assist in documenting instances of antisemitism on campus, Rutgers Law School administrators, including Assistant Dean Katherine Perez, Assistant Vice Chancellor Erica D. Williams, and Associate Dean Sarah Regina, opened disciplinary proceedings against him – falsely accusing him of “defamation” of his antisemitic classmates.400 Internally, Rutgers administrators referred to him as a ”Jewish law student” who “doxxed” his antisemitic classmates by informing other students of the content of their messages.401

  • While law students who participated in the unlawful Rutgers-Newark encampment faced no consequences for repeated disruptions of classes and open antisemitic harassment, Rutgers Law School administrators remained focused on pursuing Mr. Ackerman for their false allegations of “defamation.”402 The intensity with which Rutgers Law School persecuted Mr. Ackerman for quietly speaking out against antisemitism forced him to transfer to a new school – and Rutgers still announced new sanctions against him, were he to ever return to campus.403