Rutgers faculty defend the university in advance of Thursday’s GOP-led congressional hearing on antisemitism on campus

With their president next up to be grilled by a GOP-led congressional committee probing antisemitism on campus, some Rutgers University faculty, including leaders of its union and a group of Jewish professors, are speaking up in defense of the school’s decision to negotiate an agreement with pro-Palestinian encampment protesters.

Jonathan Holloway, Rutgers’ president, will testify Thursday morning before the Committee on Education and the Workforce, along with Michael Schill, president of Northwestern University, and Gene Block, chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles. Following the last committee hearing on the subject in December, two of the three college presidents who testified — University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill and Harvard University’s Claudine Gay — ultimately resigned following a backlash against their testimony.

The stakes are high.

» READ MORE: Rutgers president called to testify before congressional committee probing antisemitism on college campuses

“We think that the education workforce committee is led by people who would like to bring down higher education and they are using accusations of antisemitism to try to push forward an anti-education agenda that they have been pushing for a long time,” said Rebecca Givan, vice president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT. “We appreciate the approach that President Holloway has taken and we hope that he will stand strong.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, spoke out against the committee and its approach at a news conference Wednesday, along with union leaders from Rutgers and Northwestern Universities.

The union support for Holloway’s decision to broker an agreement with the pro-Palestinian protesters comes after years of conflict with the university president. Rutgers faculty union has long been at odds with Holloway over his leadership of the 67,672-student flagship university, especially during a strike last spring when Holloway had threatened to seek an injunction to make faculty return to class. And in September, the faculty senate voted no confidence in him, following several controversial decisions, including the ouster of the Newark campus chancellor and the planned merger of the university’s two medical schools.

» READ MORE: As free speech issues rage on campuses, Rutgers’ president is joining the national movement to promote civil exchange

Holloway, formerly the provost of Northwestern University who became Rutgers’ first Black president in 2020, has continued to be staunchly supported by the board of governors. A U.S. historian and professor of history and African American Studies, the Yale-educated Holloway has been a proponent of free speech on campus. He is part of a national movement of more than a dozen college presidents committed to championing free expression, civic preparedness and the civil exchange of ideas on campus.

“I have all kinds of criticism (of Holloway) in other dimensions,” said David Kurnick, an English professor, who has taught at Rutgers for 17 years. “But I support him here as a representative of higher education and its autonomy and students’ rights to protest and free speech. In so far as he is being attacked for all of that, I support him.”

Kurnick coauthored a letter titled Jewish Academic Support for Rutgers-New Brunswick Agreement, now signed by more than 600 Jewish faculty — about 100 of them affiliated with Rutgers — that praises the May 2 agreement between Rutgers and the protesters.

» READ MORE: While a few other universities reach compromises with protesters, why can’t Penn?

“The agreement, which brought the encampment to a peaceful end, makes a host of crucial commitments to the flourishing of Rutgers’ Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim communities, including the founding of an Arab Cultural Center, the hiring of several professors with specialties in Middle Eastern Studies, fellowship support for displaced students from Gaza, the development of a possible student exchange program with Birzeit University, and several other provisions,” the Rutgers academics wrote.

Rutgers also agreed to review as part of the regular university process a demand that the university divest its financial holdings from any firm connected to Israel. The agreement included commitments for the president and chair of the joint committee on investments to meet with up to five students to discuss their request for Rutgers to divest.

“We reject utterly charges that these commitments are in any way harmful to Jews, at Rutgers or anywhere, and denounce calls on President Holloway to rescind the agreement,” the letter from the Jewish academic group said.

At Rutgers-New Brunswick, a 43,859-student campus, the 75-tent encampment went up in late April and came down peacefully three days later after the agreement was reached. Rutgers has among the largest populations of Jewish students and Muslim or Arab students in the nation, according to the university. The outcome stood in stark contrast to other universities where encampments have been up for weeks and in some cases, including at Penn, taken down by police with protesters being arrested.

» READ MORE: Rutgers’ president on the medical school merger, that vote of no confidence, and the faculty strike

But the deal quickly drew bipartisan criticism, including from N.J. Gov. Phil Murphy, who said the university dealt with the protesters differently than it did with students who brought claims of antisemitism on campus.

“We fear that the administration’s accession to troublesome demands made by protestors failed to adequately take into account the perspectives and voices of members of the Jewish community at Rutgers,” wrote U.S. Reps. Donald Norcross and Josh Gottheimer, both New Jersey Democrats. “Furthermore, we are concerned that Rutgers appears to have incentivized people to act in a lawless and threatening manner by appeasing the demands of violent and hateful agitators ...”

In the face of criticism, Holloway said he was confident in the decision, which “allowed us to maintain a safe and controlled environment, to protect Rutgers students and Rutgers property, and to assure that our students’ academic progress — taking finals and completing the semester — was not impeded.”

But some Jewish faculty in the community have denounced the agreement. More than 170 students and more than 200 faculty and staff have signed letters critical of the schools’ handling of antisemitism on campus.

“We ... would like to share our experiences of the past academic year in the hope of conveying the hurt, pain, and isolation that many of us have suffered and suggesting ways that the entire university community might do better in the future not just to support its Jewish students, but to create a more tolerant climate for all its members.

“People we once considered our friends celebrated Hamas’s atrocities. Our peers defended this act of ‘resistance,’ calling it justified and deserved.”

Rebecca Cypess, professor of music and an Orthodox Jewish professor, wrote a May 3 letter to Holloway and Francine Conway, chancellor of the New Brunswick campus, asserting that antisemitic incidents have occurred at Rutgers in classrooms, dorms and across campus.

“Throughout this year, I have found it difficult to breathe,” she wrote. “I have lost my taste for my job; the job that I used to feel in working at Rutgers has disappeared.”

She faulted Holloway for engaging in negotiations with groups “that have held the university hostage all year,” she wrote, yet not agreeing to implement antisemitism training across the university.

Neither the Chancellor’s Advisory Council on Jewish Life or the Jewish Faculty Administrators and Staff (JFAS) were consulted on the negotiations with the protesters, Cypess wrote.

She is leaving Rutgers and has accepted a job as dean of the men’s and women’s undergraduate colleges at Yeshiva University.

Joe Gindi, 21, a rising junior, who grew up in the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn, said he hopes Holloway will acknowledge at the hearing that he will live up to his agreement to enforce the code of conduct in regard to student groups “that have flagrantly violated it,” including those involved in the encampment.

“I’m guardedly optimistic that he will be very clear about where mistakes have been made and what our path forward will be,” said Gindi, an economics major.

He cited as mistakes the agreement itself and not incorporating JFAS and students into the negotiations.

Some Jewish faculty, including Kurnick, said their voices in support of Palestinians have been discounted. They haven’t even been allowed to join JFAS, Kurnick said.

“We want to change this idea that this activism that we are seeing on these campuses is somehow against Jews and that Jews are not a part of it,” he said, noting that he spent the good part of several days at the encampment.

Todd Clear, a criminologist and law professor, in an opinion piece for the New Jersey Star Ledger countered the idea that antisemitism is rampant at Rutgers.

“What is rampant is opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza,” he wrote.

He hopes Holloway will stand up to the committee’s criticism.

“Our president who is a scholar of the modern Civil Rights movement is in a better position,” he said, “than almost any other president to speak truth to power.”