Ned Glick

Consumerism meets identity politics

This is Part 2 of a two-part series. The first examined Oberlin College’s “Jewish problem.”

When Nathan Heller’s “Letter from Oberlin: The Big Uneasy” appeared in The New Yorker (May 30) his sub-headline asked: “What’s roiling the liberal-arts campus?”

At least for some Jewish students, Oberlin’s obstacles to Jewish life are signs of two roiling processes: “identity politics” and higher education’s drift toward business models in which students primarily are customers.

From its origins in 1833, Oberlin College has been at the forefront of social changes. In particular, no institution in the United States has an older coeducational baccalaureate program. As well, before the Civil War, members of the Oberlin community were active in movements to abolish slavery. The college advertises that it “regularly admitted African American students beginning in 1835.”

Oberlin’s avant-garde history influences student applications and admissions, as well as faculty recruitment – and some unexpected campus activities. For example, in December 2015, unnamed members of the Africana community referred to Oberlin’s legacy and/or public relations when they delivered to the administration an undated multi-page list of “demands not suggestions,” which included a “four percent annual increase in black student enrolment”; “divestment from all prisons and Israel”; “that spaces throughout the Oberlin College campus be designated as [segregated] safe space for Africana identifying students” (exclusively?); that several professors (identified by name) should be subject to “immediate firing”; and that other professors should be given preferential treatment.

Oberlin College proclaims efforts to ameliorate affronts or afflictions perceived by cohorts such as African-Americans, Muslims, students with physical handicaps and non-heterosexual students. A “Campus Climate Report” (May 19, 2016) also includes a section on problems experienced by some Jewish students, but does not specifically deal with reports that “progressive” protesters who confront other forms of bigotry often deny the significance of antisemitism.

This phenomenon occurs on other campuses, too.

In August, the Washington Post published an op-ed focused on “an Iranian Jew,” Arielle Mokhtarzadeh, who traveled “to attend the annual Students of Color Conference” at the University of California, Berkeley. There she found: “Over the course of what was probably no longer than an hour, my history was denied, the murder of my people was justified, and a movement whose sole purpose is the destruction of the Jewish homeland was glorified. Statements were made justifying the ruthless murder of innocent Israeli civilians, blatantly denying Jewish indigeneity in the land, and denying the Holocaust in which six million Jews were murdered.”

Also in the Post, Molly Harris, a student at McGill University, addressed students just beginning post-secondary education: “Get ready to meet new people, learn things that fascinate you, and figure out who you are and who you want to be.

“If you’re Jewish, you should probably also prepare yourself for the various forms of anti-Israel sentiment, and maybe even antisemitism, you’re likely to encounter on your new college campus.

“In the past year alone, as a Jewish student at McGill University in Montreal, I’ve been called a ‘Zionist b—.’ I’ve been told several times that Jews haven’t suffered (never mind the Spanish Inquisition, Eastern European pogroms and centuries of violence and marginalization leading up to the Holocaust). I’ve seen my friends mocked for their Judaism in crude, hateful language on popular anonymous social media platforms.”

Following his May “Letter from Oberlin,” Heller again wrote in The New Yorker (Sept. 1): “Students … may try out defensive ethno-racial flag waving, religious and political dogmas, athletic and fraternal self-segregation…. My work elsewhere has made me think that this isn’t just an Oberlin, or liberal, thing.”

Indeed, on Aug. 5, the New York Times printed a front-page article about racial and identity politics at many campuses. This reporting was not about Oberlin, but it named other “small, selective liberal arts colleges” as well as Ivy League universities. An Amherst graduate said, “As an alumnus of the college, I feel that I have been lied to, patronized and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot….”

But perhaps Oberlin still is a cultural leader. In an Aug. 27 article, the Times mentioned Oberlin as a counter example to the University of Chicago, which sent first-year students a letter saying Chicago did not support “trigger warnings” and did not condone “safe spaces” nor disruptions of speakers. (Disclosure: I was a Chicago faculty member from 1968 to 1970.)

In Frank Bruni’s June 23 New York Times essay about Oberlin – as one of the campuses “roiled the most by struggles over political correctness” – he wrote: “Students at Oberlin and their counterparts elsewhere might not behave in such an emboldened fashion if they did not feel so largely in charge. Their readiness to press for rules and rituals to their liking suggests the extent to which they have come to act as customers – the ones who set the terms, the ones who are always right – and the degree to which they are treated that way.”

Bruni built upon a poignant essay about “Customer Mentality,” written in February 2014 for Inside Higher Ed by a Western Carolina University assistant professor of English, Nate Kreuter. When students transformed into customers, Kreuter observed concomitant re-purposing of campus infrastructure, curriculum and faculty.

Bruni provided photographs of water parks with pools and slides on campuses, and described campus entertainment complexes, golf putting greens and other resort-like amenities. He also wrote: “Small wonder that grade inflation is so pronounced and rampant, with A’s easy to come by and anything below a B-minus rare.”

Barry Schwartz, professor of psychology at Swarthmore, told Bruni: “There’s a big difference between teaching students and serving customers.”

Kreuter in 2014 noted that the student-as-customer business model had adverse consequences within and beyond academic programs: “The impulse to protect the brand also frequently compels universities to shirk responsibility when missteps or scandals occur, rather than immediately taking responsibility and corrective action.” He argued that administrators may “protect the brand” in instances of “high-profile college athlete crime” or sexual assaults or injuries from fraternity hazing.

A Times essay (Sept. 4, 2016) by a Yale faculty member, Jim Sleeper, argued that right-wing “wealthy donors” exaggerate negative impacts of political correctness, while they promote more potent poisons. But he also agreed that: “Most university leaders serve … pressures to satisfy student ‘customers’ and to avoid negative publicity, liability and losses in ‘brand’ or ‘market share.’…”

Oberlin College’s publicists like to recall the institution’s abolitionist era rather than its place in the history of the Anti-Saloon League and Prohibition. So perhaps it is not surprising that Prof. Joy Karega could post anti-Jewish materials and conspiracy theories for many months, and that Oberlin administrators and trustees reacted only last March, after Karega generated condemnation both online and in worldwide print media – likely to harm Oberlin’s brand.

At the University of Lethbridge, Prof. Anthony Hall’s “globalization studies” promoted “open debate on the Holocaust” and claims that the 2001 destruction of New York’s World Trade Centre was a “Zionist job.” Administrators tolerated Hall for 26 years – suspending him only this month, after news stories about “possible violations of the Alberta Human Rights Act.”

During my one-to-one conversation with Oberlin College president Marvin Krislov in April, he told me that many students gave Karega high ratings. From a marketing perspective, favorable student evaluations may help justify annual tuition above $51,000 – costs above $66,000 including room and board. But if students give high ratings to a predilection for bigotry and conspiracy theories (and lack of scholarly accomplishment) then something has gone wrong with their education.

Bruni’s essay asked, “But what does the customer model [of college students] do to their actual education?” One Oberlin graduate responding to The Atlantic in December 2015 wrote: “There is now an atmosphere of close-mindedness, intellectual submission, conformity and fear.”

College and university emphasis on marketing to customers likely is linked to cost.

Tuition – and every other post-secondary education expense – has increased at a pace beyond general inflation (or household income gains). Consequently, total student debt in the United States now is about $1.2 trillion, according to the August Forbes – exceeding total credit card debt or the total of automobile financing in the entire American population.

This precarious state of affairs may be a response to reported correlation between higher education and greater lifetime earnings or lower unemployment; but correlation does not indicate cause and effect. Bruni refers to “an expectation among many students that their purchase of a college education should be automatically redeemable for a job….” But, as Kreuter wrote, “A post-secondary education is not a guarantee of success. It is not the straightforward purchase of a better future. It never has been.”

At Oberlin, in fact, the student newspaper published an article in March 2014 stating that “40% of [our] 2013 graduates are unemployed, and one-third of graduates are working in positions that do not require a degree.”

Of course, many Oberlin students and graduates have priorities other than high-income jobs; but one unidentified correspondent, writing to The Atlantic in December 2015, stated: “Oberlin students [do] want what other college students are asking for, whether they phrase it this way or not: better control of the college’s money.”

Oberlin, unlike most American campuses, has no fraternities or sororities. Historically, students lived in residences supervised by the administration, which also oversees most meals. So, students see what Oberlin does with funds for their food. But why have many top-tier media published articles discussing campus food complaints at the college?

The emphasis of complaints has not been that the food tastes bad, has dubious nutritional value, etc. Oberlin food complaints instead focus on meals that particular students deem to be culturally inappropriate or disrespectful. Mainstream media regard Oberlin’s food criticisms as curiosities sufficiently ludicrous to entertain a wide range of readers; but these cultural food fights are quite logical outcomes when the student-as-customer model meets racial and identity politics at the topic of food.

Likewise, identity issues can lead students to denounce “cultural appropriation,” not only in meals, but also in other aspects of life – clothing, terminology, music, books, even the curriculum. Novelist Lionel Shriver says that, if she did not reject criticisms of “cultural appropriation” in literature, then “all I could write about would be smart-alecky 59-year-old, five-foot-two-inch white women from North Carolina.”

And, as customers, students can demand not to take certain courses. At Oberlin, one of the “unmalleable” demands in December 2015 was that, in the Oberlin Conservatory, “seeing as how most jazz students are of the Africana community they should not be forced to take courses rooted in whiteness” of classical music.

In the New York Times, Krislov wrote: “American higher education is at a crossroads, as it was in the 1960s when college students were galvanized by the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement.”

But I do not accept that anti-Zionist petitions or Africana demands for specific foods and segregated “safe spaces” in Oberlin buildings somehow are comparable to my classmates’ efforts in the 1960s civil rights movement and later protests against U.S. war policy in Vietnam. (On the campus of Kent State, one of Oberlin’s neighbors, U.S. National Guard troops shot and killed unarmed students during anti-war protests in May 1970.)

In spring of 2016, one student on the cusp of graduation said, “I’m going home, back to the ’hood of Chicago, to be exactly who I was before I came to Oberlin.”

Marc Chafetz explained – in the New York Times – why that remark disturbed him: “I graduated 41 years ago…. Oberlin changed me profoundly. I found out how little I actually knew about the world, and it unleashed a hunger to learn that has never dissipated.”

No matter what identities students bring or what paths they follow afterward, higher education should involve them in exploration and intellectual discovery – and civil encounters with one another.

Ned Glick lives in Vancouver. His baccalaureate is from Oberlin College and his PhD is from Stanford. After teaching at the University of Chicago, he had University of British Columbia appointments in mathematics, in statistics and in the faculty of medicine. He retired to emeritus faculty status in 1992.

Oberlin’s Jewish problem

Protesters at Oberlin College. (photo by Pteranadons via Wikimedia Commons)

(This is Part 1 of a two-part series. The second article examines the student-as-customer approach at universities and its relation to identity politics on campus.)

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wrote in a June article that “Oberlin College would certainly be in the running” if he picked one campus “that has been roiled the most by struggles over political correctness.”

While university president Marvin Krislov has acknowledged upheaval, he wrote – in the same Times section – that Oberlin’s “faculty and staff … maintain high academic standards and rigor.”

Since I attended the 50th reunion of my class, I realize I do care about the calamity that Oberlin College now exemplifies.

Every town in northern Ohio has history built around either its bar or its liberal arts college. Oberlin was a “dry” town, founded in 1833, the same year as Oberlin College. Then, in 1893, Oberlin became the birthplace of the Anti-Saloon League, the political movement behind the U.S. Constitution’s 18th amendment: prohibition, which took effect in 1920. That social experiment was a disaster, and the 21st amendment repealed the 18th in 1933. Oberlin College finally eased its ban on beer decades later, yet zealotry still haunts the campus.

Bruni scorns “the demand for a so-called trigger warning to students who might be upset reading Antigone,” and he seems bemused by “complaints about the ethnic integrity of the sushi in a campus dining hall.” But it was not funny when, in September 2013, a Latina Jewish student helped plan a Shabbat dinner where Latin American food would be served – and another Oberlin Latina student denounced the event’s “cultural appropriation.” As one Jewish student recalled in a Tablet article this past May, posters for a previous Asian Fusion Shabbat were “defaced with graffiti about appropriation and orientalism. Comfort food Shabbat was also ill received, with comments about appropriating black cooking.

“There is a common belief at Oberlin that all Jews are white and rich” – so a Jew cannot be Latin American, cannot be a “person of color,” etc. – and, therefore, all Jews on campus should eat “white” food. Of course, such dogma defies both fact and logic, harms individuals and undermines the college’s stated “diversity” goals.

In the same Tablet article, it was noted that, in 2013, the Oberlin Student Cooperative Association revoked affiliation of one dining hall, “the Kosher-Halal Coop (used predominantly by Jews).”

Timothy Elgren became Oberlin’s dean of arts and sciences in July 2014. In February 2016, Oberlin’s online news site posted the transcript of conversation in which Elgren told Krislov that “changes to the way we run our faculty searches have been very important.”

One such search for an assistant professor led to the appointment of Joy Karega. By March, Karega had received worldwide attention for her social media postings of anti-Jewish hatred and conspiracy theories. Karega has neither denied nor disavowed her connection to these items.

In November 2015, for example, Karega wrote that “ISIS is not a jihadist, Islamic terrorist organization. It’s a CIA and Mossad operation….” In other online postings, Karega asserted that Israel and/or Jews also were responsible for bringing down the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Centre on Sept. 11, 2001; for murders at the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris in January 2015; for the massacres of 130 people in Paris in November 2015; for shooting down a Malaysian passenger jet over Ukraine; and for “weaponizing the weather” to inflict the damage of Hurricane Sandy in New York City.

Karega’s illustrated postings also have claimed that the Rothschild family is “worth 500 trillion dollars,” owns “nearly every central bank in the world” and owns “the media, your oil, and your government.” Abraham Socher, an Oberlin associate professor of religion, noted in the student newspaper, the Oberlin Review, that such notions harked back to the infamous antisemitic fabrication The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He reminded his readers that a U.S. government definition of antisemitism specifically includes: “Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as a collective – especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.”

While Karega posted anti-Jewish bigotry and conspiracy theories online, she also taught “social justice writing” to Oberlin students. When I spoke with Krislov on April 6, he could not identify any actual research or publication by Karega at Oberlin. Yet, Karega retained her professorial position there.

Starting in March, publicity about Karega and Oberlin spread among online news sites and print newspapers in the United States, then to papers in England and Israel. Articles about controversy at Oberlin had appeared months earlier in The Atlantic and Vanity Fair, as well as a New Yorker feature that followed in May.

As I learned about Karega, I found that broad anti-Jewish manifestations at Oberlin predated her – and that other campuses in the United States and Canada may have similar cultures, in which it is acceptable to denounce, mock, bully or intimidate any student who is perceived to be Jewish. Perhaps only “fringe” individuals on campus indulge in bigoted behavior, but the community as a whole may ignore or appease the fringe – as part of “free speech” and “academic freedom” or to avoid personal reprisals?

Some of the fringers, however, restrict free speech. They disrupt presentations that they disdain and they have invaded Hillel meetings or other Jewish activities, according to one unnamed “longtime Oberlin professor,” quoted in the same Tablet article as the student cited previously.

Hadas Binyamini, a 2014 Oberlin graduate and co-founder of the college’s J Street U chapter, wrote in the Forward in March this year: “I was uncomfortable publicly identifying as a Zionist” but, even more importantly, “What I didn’t find at Oberlin were spaces to engage with prevalent forms of antisemitism that have nothing to do with Israel. No tools were offered for students to critically examine American Jewish identity and to deconstruct antisemitic motifs….” And, Binyamini continued, “the Multicultural Resource Centre … remains silent on antisemitism. Similarly, the department of comparative American studies, which trains students to ‘investigate power, inequality and agency through the analysis of … race … class … and citizenship,’ [seems] unable to engage students with these same issues when it comes to American Jews.”

Marc Blecher, an Oberlin professor of politics and East Asian studies, agreed: “our Multicultural Resource Centre has been silent on antisemitism.” It is worth noting that, this year, Oberlin celebrates the 20th anniversary of its MRC, which “strives to advance … multicultural understanding among all campus communities.”

Isabel Sherrell, another Jewish graduate of Oberlin – who, according to the Forward, attempted some dialogue with Karega – compiled a list of anti-Jewish incidents and attitudes on the campus. She permitted the use of her name when a Washington Post blog publicized her observations this past February. For instance, Item #6 on her list is anti-Zionist advocacy in the classroom of an African studies professor. Item #18 includes, “Being told I was simply European and Judaism is a religion not an ethnicity,” although the latter view logically contradicts the (false) campus dogma that a person cannot be both Jewish and a “person of color.”

Item #10 on Sherrell’s list begins, “The fact that so many Jewish students are bullied into silence….” Unlike Sherrell, I have zero personal knowledge of “cyber-bullying” or “trolling” or “doxing” via “social media” and I have no idea how a target on campus should respond to such abuse. But Jonathan Weisman – who is not a student, but rather is an editor at the Washington bureau of the New York Times – announced in June that he felt obliged to quit Twitter altogether, because, “For weeks, I had been barraged on Twitter by rank antisemitic comments, Nazi iconography of hooknosed Jews stabbing lovely Christians in the back, the gates of Auschwitz, and trails of dollar bills leading to ovens.” (Weisman believes that the tweets he received came mostly from right-wing white supremacists, not from left-wing campus “social justice” warriors.)

By mid-April, Oberlin’s board of trustees and a majority of faculty members had publicly criticized Karega. Also, some sort of investigative process was announced. But at least three members of the Africana studies department individually voiced some support for Karega. One concern was that

Karega might be a scapegoat, burdened with blame for an anti-Jewish climate that pervaded the campus before she arrived.

I have found no record of public comment by Krislov regarding Karega or related issues until after her story went viral. Then, he issued a statement, which the Oberlin news site posted on March 1, about “The Mission of Liberal Arts Education”: “At Oberlin, we are deeply committed to … ensuring our students a diverse, inclusive and equitable educational experience. We demand intellectual rigor….”

In his mission statement – as in his Times essay and elsewhere for months – Krislov minimized campus problems, promulgated platitudes and did not mention Karega by name.

Oberlin has an Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, and it released on May 19 a “Campus Climate Report,” which also did not include Karega’s name in its Jewish section.

During the first week of August 2016 – five months after the earliest Times article about Karega, and fast approaching the start of the 2016-2017 academic year – Oberlin finally announced that “Dr. Karega has been placed on paid [emphasis added] leave and will not teach at Oberlin” until “the faculty governance process … plays out.” Karega’s attorney accused Oberlin of “pandering to the dictates of a handful of vocal and wealthy religious zealots.”

The Atlantic, back in 1941, invited and published an article on “The Jewish Problem in America,” in which the journalist (formerly an Episcopal priest) Alfred Jay Nock wrote: “The problem, stated in the fewest words, is that of maintaining a modus vivendi between the American Jew and his fellow citizens which is strong enough to stand any shocks … such as may occur in the years ahead.”

From New York City, he observed with alarm: “… in the late summer of 1939 … anti-Jewish street demonstrations … were going on in Brooklyn, Jackson Heights, the Bronx and Yorkville at the rate of 50 or 60 a week. “These were assaults, baitings, intimidations, picketings, soapbox speeches, incitements to boycott, and the like.

“I think it is not impossible that I shall live to see the Nürnberg laws reenacted in this country and enforced with vigor.”

The Nürnberg – or Nuremberg – laws, which were announced by Nazi Germany in 1935, stripped Jews of citizenship and institutionalized their persecution. Happily, Nock lived to see Hitler and Nazism defeated in 1945.

In 2014, the Nuremberg city council adopted a one-page resolution stating: “We are decisively opposed to every form of antisemitism…. Jewish life in Nuremberg enjoys our very special protection and our care [and] demonstrations in the context of the Israeli-Palestine conflict must be prevented from being misused as political manifestations of antisemitism.”

Oberlin’s official online optimism outshines Pollyanna, Pangloss and Pinocchio. But the actual campus – the college on the ground in Ohio, about 35 miles southwest of Cleveland – does have a Jewish problem in 2016.