[To view the full report, click here or on the image below.]
Since the end of 2023, the extent of anti-American, anti-Israel, and antisemitic radicalism on college campuses has become an issue of national importance. In Congress, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce has even launched an investigation as “antisemitic mobs rule over so-called elite universities…” How did we get here?
A new CAMERA study, “Ivy League Propaganda: How Brown University Radicalized Students After October 7,” helps answer this question. Using Brown University as a case study, it documents how radical members of faculty turned a prestigious institution of higher learning into a center for ideological indoctrination under the nose of acquiescent administrators.
Just days after Hamas’s October 7 atrocities, Brown University leadership promised “to provide [its] community a chance to learn about and discuss current events in Israel and Gaza.” The statement appeared promising, suggesting the university was committed to maintaining its educational mission by providing students further opportunities to learn from credible experts. Unfortunately, it was a lie. What the university provided instead was anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda.
Consider just one fact: throughout the dozens of hours of recordings of these events, CAMERA could not find a single mention of the Israeli civilians, including children, taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists on October 7, 2023. Given that the plight of the hostages is the single most important factor preventing an end to the current war, it defies any reasonable, non-ideological explanation for that aspect of the conflict to be outright omitted from the conversations.
But speakers did not simply ignore such atrocities; they worked to make the very mention of Palestinian wrongdoing a taboo. One speaker proclaimed that it is a “dehumanizing, crude, very racist talking point that this is about Hamas.” Another decried the “problem” that “every conversation [about the war] begins with a condemnation of Hamas,” which had itself begun the war which people were discussing.
Many of Brown University’s speakers even glorified the atrocities carried out by Palestinian terrorists. One, a Palestinian academic from Birzeit University, spoke of the actions of October 7 as an exercise in “our right to resist” which, she declared, is “a way of being and survival for Palestinians.” Speaker after speaker described the murder, rape, torture, mutilation, and kidnapping of Israeli men, women, and children in heroic terms, such as “anti-colonial action” or “anti-colonial liberation struggle.” Another declared, just two weeks after Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel: “2023 will be reported historically as the year that Palestinians stood boldly in the face of colonial fascism.” The precise link between murdering and kidnapping Jewish children and standing up to fascism was left unexplained. One panelist even described the the story of Rachel Edri – an elderly Jewish woman who fed her terrorist captors to buy her rescuers time – as having “reveal[ed] cultural, linguistic, and human connection” between Edri and the Palestinian terrorists who butchered her Jewish neighbors.
This is just a sampling of the extremist and often antisemitic rhetoric that characterized Brown University’s post-October 7 events.
Consider then that the rhetoric highlighted in CAMERA’s report is what these academics are saying in public. Behind closed classroom doors, these same extremists have unfettered access to young, impressionable minds. It’s no wonder, then, that some 50 student organizations at Brown responded to the horrors of October 7 by calling Hamas’s atrocities “just.”
Donors, taxpayers, policymakers, parents, and prospective students should beware. The world’s tiny Jewish community is not the only target. Whereas the Jewish state is falsely depicted as a “settler-colonial entity” – and therefore fundamentally evil according to their ideology – so too is the United States. When they glorify terroristic violence against Jewish and Israeli civilians, they are also legitimizing the same terrorism that has taken thousands of American lives.
Of course, these radical faculty members can’t do this without some help. The hijacking of higher education has been made possible thanks to negligent or even supportive administrators. In the case of Brown University, President Christina Paxson has long been aware of the extremism pervading her university. In late 2023, CAMERA published a pair of case studies exposing the extremism and antisemitism pervading two different Brown University programs. Paxson was sent a copy of each. Nothing changed. If anything, things got worse.
Take, for example, the exclusion of Jewish students from university life. As CAMERA pointed out in 2023, a university journal had revised its “anti-oppression platform” to remove a reference to antisemitism and replace it with a declaration that it “stand[s] against the perpetuation of…Zionism.” That platform remains in place a year later. In the meantime, a Jewish student was removed from Paxson’s advisory committee charged with considering an anti-Israel divestment proposal on specious grounds of having a “conflict of interest.” The concern over such conflicts ended there, however. Multiple other committee members remained in place despite their records of anti-Israel advocacy and even openly advocating for the divestment proposal itself.
This pattern of behavior echoes the findings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which found that university administrators were derelict in their leadership, “declined to express support for campus Jewish communities,” “failed to impose meaningful discipline for antisemitic behavior,” and treated antisemitism “as a public-relations issue and not a serious problem demanding action.”
Unless and until Brown University’s leadership treats the issue seriously, students will continue to be subject to antisemitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American ideological indoctrination and academic rigor will continue to decline. The only winners in such a scenario are those who seek to tear down academic freedom, tolerance, and liberalism.
