It seems we can’t go very long at Connecticut College without issues of free speech and the “events of last spring” returning to haunt us. Most recently, a change. org petition targeting Conn’s integrity accreditation circulated the web. The petition, written to Kathy Willis and Patricia Meservy of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, is seeking the investigation of Connecticut College in light of its anti-Semitism. It makes three claims: first, that the College failed to uphold the Honor Code (in reference to what these outlets have taken to calling “The Pessin Affair”; second, that it created a hostile environment for Jewish professors and students; and third, that it failed to act with academic integrity during the “libel-ing” of a Jewish professor by a politically motivated group. Last week the petition hit 1,000 supporters.
The petition cites a variety of articles that take a condemning stance toward the College. These articles, from which the petition sources its “facts,” target our student body in an aggressive and, sometimes, absurd manner. “These aren’t college students, they are one brain cell beasts freshly spawned from the primordial ooze,” wrote a commentator on one article. The title of another piece: “Welcome to Hamas West, AKA Connecticut College.”
Conversations like these are characteristic of the tone and angle taken by those reporting on our school. Their stories take a string of incidents – e.g. the condemnation of a professor in the spring of 2015, the anti-Taglit Birthright posters – and re-package them as symptoms of an anti-Semitic whole. The resulting articles have been untruthful at best, malicious at worst.
It would be fine to say that these types of organizations and people deserve to be ignored. In no in- stance would it be rational for us as a student body to focalize our own college experience through the eyes of propaganda websites that are using us as material for a polarizing global discourse. It just becomes an entirely different project when their claims are rendered valid by our own campus.
The petition, which is 100 signatures away from its 1,500 objective, is one troubling instance of that. And, as of this Sunday, a Google search of Connecticut College returns headlines concerning anti-Israel hate within the first page. So while the petition may not have any real impact on the school’s accreditation – by the way, who even knew such a thing mattered? – it has and will continue to create a misinformed public opinion of our school, and in the business of academia, public opinion matters.
Granted, the integrity of online petitions is inherently suspect. Like the many that have floated around the Connecticut College web-space before, they quickly become online platforms for public shaming and hate mongering rather than the constructive tools they pretend to be. Here is a sampling of people’s stated reasons for signing:
“It is horrifying to hear about Connecticut College’s open anti-Semitism”
“This is a disgraceful action for the College to allow and support. The College doesn’t deserve its accreditation”
“Connecticut College should be not only deeply ashamed of its behavior, but should be punished as well.”
Petitions like these also mis- represent our own student body, as the restrictions to access the poll don’t require any form of college identification, such as a student e-mail, in order to vote. Because each vote is essentially geo-tagged, it is public information that its signatures are coming from places like Brazil, Amsterdam and South Africa. These signatories express outrage at the College’s supposed “open” anti-Semitism. They have also probably never stepped foot on our campus.
“What is this petition really trying to achieve?” asked Daniel Kramer ’18, a leader in Conn’s Hillel group. “It’s trying to enrage people and we don’t need more negative attention drawn to the issue, that’s not what we’re setting out to do here.”
What petitions like these go to show is the double-edged nature of our Internet and our interconnectedness. We can claim that petitions give voice to the body of our population that is voiceless – and they can serve that function – but they can lead to just as much disconnectedness within our own community. We ought to be wary of virtue, of the promise of websites named change.org, and recognize them as equally fraught with the contentious nature of free speech as any public forum, regardless of their uplifting names. More important, we ought to be framing our own discourse and not letting others unreliably tell the Connecticut College story.
In a campus-wide email, President Bergeron highlighted the College’s efforts to do so, citing a balanced series of speakers representative of both Israel and Palestine. Bergeron also referenced three students, including Kramer, who had a won a grant from the World Jewish Congress to encourage campus dialogue about the topic. The students put the $2,500 to use just this past Wednesday, hosting an event featuring both an Israeli and Palestinian speaker, and have more events to come.
Part of the motivation for the students’ initiative was in response to the recent poster campaign targeting Taglit-Birth- right. The posters, which read, “Taglit-Birthright is Settler Colonialism,” were put up by a new campus group, Conn Students in Solidarity with Palestine.
“The poster campaign was what convinced us we needed to get moving,” said Connor Wolfe ’17, one of the three students awarded the grant. “We’re trying to create events so people can actually have dialogue instead of seeing posters on a wall. You can’t talk to a wall.”
On Dec. 16, 2015, the posters were picked up by Frontpage Mag – a website with the insightful slogan ‘Inside every liberal is a totalitarian screaming to get out’ – who republished them and condemned the posters as “anti-Semitic hate speech” and “indoctrination tools for Islam.” At around that time the College addressed complaints about the posters, defending free speech and recognizing “CSSP’s right to share its perspective.”
The difference between these two opinions owes, in part, to the difficulty of defining anti-Semitism, which is often muddled as synonymous with anti-Zionism. Officially, “Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities,” according to the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia.
And yet while it is a definition endorsed by the U.S. government, its breadth and political nature – the definition includes clauses concerning the right to Israel’s existence – make it an unwieldy one to use in the discourse surrounding Israel and Palestine.
Simon Luxemburg ’18, another of three student grant recipients, suggested, “before we (both as a campus community and society in general) talk about anti-Semitism in this context, we must clearly define what it is and when an- ti-Israel and/or anti-Zionist fervor translates into anti-Semitism or Jew hatred.” It will be necessary for us to work with them in re-imagining other ways to have that conversation than via an incendiary poster campaign. We need to sharpen our language in discussing something as complex as the Israel-Palestine conflict just as much as we, not some third party blogs with agendas of their own, should be the ones to shape how we talk about it. •
