A report from the Anti-Defamation League downgraded three top universities from a “D” grade to an “F” grade for their handling of last month’s pro-Palestinian protests that swept college campuses nationwide.
The University of Michigan, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Northwestern University were all given flunking grades for the response. Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO and national director of the ADL, said the organization created the “Campus Antisemitism Report Card” in April to address rising antisemitism on campuses to determine how schools are “protecting Jewish students.”
“What we found over the last few months is with these encampments and with these sort of actions that we’re seeing, that some schools handled it well and some schools handled it terribly,” Greenblatt said on CNN Newsroom Weekday.
He noted that Michigan, UCLA, and Northwestern’s responses to the encampments were “incredibly lacking.”
The three schools have substantial Jewish student populations as well. According to Hillel, Michigan is the fifth-most Jewish public university in the United States. UCLA ranks No. 29 and Northwestern is No. 20 in the rankings for private universities.
Greenblatt said while he expected antisemitic sentiments to simmer down as the school year ended, he noticed an “alarming surge of anti-Jewish hate connected to the encampments and other on-campus protests, putting students’ safety at risk and even prompting some schools to cancel graduation.”
Greenblatt pointed to President Michael Schill of Northwestern, who was the first to negotiate with anti-Israel protesters, as one reason the school moved down in the rankings. He said the most alarming situation he saw as it related to the protests was at UCLA, where some students physically blocked Jewish students from passing through certain parts of campus.
The ADL highlighted some universities, such as the University of Florida, the University of Texas, Austin, and Vanderbilt University, as schools that made improvements on campus antisemitism as a response to the protests.
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“Everyone should get ‘As,’ but some of these schools have simply failed to do the basics,” Greenblatt said.
The three schools join six other American universities, including Harvard University, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with “F” grades from the ADL.