Surveillance, Grading and Exclusion of Universities via a failed 'Report Card'
How not to deal with real and alleged antisemitism in universities.
This is scary. There is a proposed Report Card (and that’s the word) that Australian Universities must deliver to the Australian Antisemitism Envoy on how antisemitism is dealt with. It extends to what amounts to government surveillance and grading of how varous forms of protest and dissent are dealt with. It was written by the conservative academic and The Australian columnist (surprise) Greg Craven for Jill Segal. Once again, Prime Minister Albo, for reasons best known to himself has swallowed all this hook, line, and sinker.
I do want to make it clear that I think there are problematic views and behaviours at some campuses towards Jewish/Zionist students, and I have made those clear in various parliamentary submissions. Some students feel compelled to hide their identify. That is awful and should not be the case. There are a number of bad faith actors and groups on the far left (aside from the ‘regular’ Nazis and cranks who prowl campuses) who cause more bad than good in the name of their revolutionary cause. They breach acceptable behavioural standards and I have no empathy for them. I know there are people on the left who will hate me for saying that, but well, sometimes we need to be honest about attention-seeking problematic people and groups. But we actually lack reliable data as to the overall reality, despite all sorts of claims as to the depth and frequency of antisemitism.
I am critical of reports that have come out from organizations such as the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the Australian Union of Jewish Students/Zionist Federation, and the Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism and others. They represent political advocacy rather than a defensible argument. One report (that of AUJS/ZFA) was contract research with a unit at ANU that in my opinion, was in breach of research standards. Apparently, however, client research is exempt from academic considerations. Some of my concerns were taken up a few years back here, but the problem continues as reflected in the ideology at work with Craven and Segal.
Problems with these reports include (and there are more):
Fundamental conceptual flaws: They make assumptions about what constitutes antisemitism without exploring its complexity and disputed nature, resulting in category conflation (apples and oranges in the same basket)
Lack of sophisticated measurement tools for perceptions of antisemitism, discomfort etc (together with assumptions about what constitutes antisemitism)
Severe selection bias: Self-selected samples from advocacy organizations
Invalid comparisons: Comparison to probability samples while using convenience sampling, or drawing statistical conclusions from non-probability samples. Lack of controls with qualitative data
Question design: The surveys are rife with badly constructed leading questions
Political agendas designed to support predetermined conclusions (e.g. that criticism of Israel should be prohibited on campus)
Dismissal of alternative views via research exclusion: Minimal engagement with Jewish students who don’t equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism and/or the general student population
Exaggerated findings based on data manipulation without acknowledgment of limitations
Sponsorship bias: The problem is come at from a particular perspective.
The actual prevalence of antisemitism (in all its complexity and/or confusion) hasn’t been established. Any limitations are hidden in the fine print and generally ignored in the media.
No attempt is made to compare what happens to Jewish students to other minority groups. Is that situation better? worse?
Furthermore, discourse about antisemitism in general presents a picture that antisemitism is somehow across all aspects of campus life without any clear examples. Does this mean it is institutionalized in faculties? That all buildings are covered in hateful graffiti? What does a “hateful atmosphere” mean/ How many universities? When? How often? It is all very unclear, yet this is also clear in the hundreds of submissions made to parliamentary inquiries. Some have a distinct boilerplate look.
With this in mind, the “Independent Assessor” (aka Inquisitor) and universities engage with the peak Jewish bodies including the corporate Australian Union of Jewish Students (it’s actually unknown as to the percentage of Jewish students it represent, as it is possible to know how many Jewish students there are in Higher Ed) as well as the Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism - which is a very pro-Zionist group. No other groups are named. This is essentially the politics of exclusion, even though there are any number of Jewish students and academics with a different point of view on these matters..
The Report Card, via the Independent Assessor will focus on the “lived experience” of students and stuff. Yet the concept of “lived experience” as an absolute benchmark is heavily contested in public policy and research as a method in which to assess situations. To keep matters simple. I can have a perception of fear of crime in the streets when in fact, the crime rate is dropping. Do we put more police in the streets? This is the sort of problem we are dealing with. It is dealt with well in some UK and US reports on campus perceptions of antisemitism.
This observation from the working group on the definition of antisemitism at University College London (UCL) is relevant. “ [The report] acknowledges that there is a reasonable concern behind this view, namely, that members of oppressed groups will generally have special insight into the nature of their own discrimination and marginalization, which is not shared by members of the wider community, or indeed, by those who engage in or are complicit with that oppression. The Group recognizes that special weight must be accorded to the lived experience of Jewish members of the university. However, we do not believe that the meaning of a term such as antisemitism can be defined solely by reference to the views of a particular group of students or staff. Similar concepts such as racism, sexism or Islamophobia are not defined solely by reference to the views of the groups particularly subject to such forms of discrimination and oppression.”
This problem is even more exaggerated when the group representation is limited to for example, AUJS members who appear to have a particular political axe to grind. The same would apply to members of any other identified group where representation was skewed.
This issue (as with crime perceptions) is also affected by the quality of reporting, surveys and data and media and community perceptions. The data on antisemitism on campus is by and large accepted as truthful, though ALL the surveys I have looked at have severe methodological limitations as noted. Print and social media push the shonky data. Additionally, because of definitional problems a whole range of ‘incidents’, many of which can be classified as political in nature, are classified as antisemitism. Thus, I see a Free Palestine sticker. I am upset. I see it as antisemitic. Is this the case, and is my distress more of a political nature, one that exists in a free society. That’s very different I think to say, a Death to Zionists sticker on the scale of offensiveness (you may disagree, but that is why data integrity is so important). There is a huge difference between political distress and fundamental ontological undermining. Context is everything on campus.
It is not just a matter of “lived experience” for one groups and for all parties, there is a huge difference between“ the experience of feeling uncomfortable and that of feeling physically threatened and unsafe.” (see the Maryland report below). As I have said, one’s perceptions are not a valid way to measure the reality of a situation. Putting “lived experience” as an ultimate truth credential leads to all sorts of problems See here and here and here for very different viewpoints. None of this seems to have been of the slightest academic concern to Greg Craven. That’s because they are playing a political game against free speech.
This is how a University of Maryland report put it when dealing with perceptions of antisemitism and Islamophobia:
“[The] need to recognize the generational trauma experienced not only by Jews and Israelis on campus but also by Arabs (including Palestinians) and Muslims. Task Force members emphasized that disagreements need to be acknowledged and cannot be reduced to a common denominator, which in turn requires addressing the question of how to hold discourse together while allowing for quite painful and uncomfortable conflict (p. 5)…..One of the important distinctions that became clear to the Task Force, both from expert testimony and our own discussions, was between the experience of feeling uncomfortable and that of feeling physically threatened and unsafe. The University has a responsibility to keep all members of the campus community safe from harm or imminent threats of any kind. Indeed, as one of our free speech experts framed it, “you need to be physically safe to be intellectually challenged.” At the same time, as an institution whose mission encompasses intellectual growth for all participants, a commitment to engaging with unsettling or uncomfortable facts and ideas is necessary. To address conflicts without making others feel unsafe requires high standards of collegiality and pluralism. In return, community members must expect and be willing to feel uncomfortable and to see their fundamental assumptions challenged (pp. 5-7)
Now the various standards in the Craven document are said not to be stipulations but are open-ended. The document pushes the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism and accompanying examples to be adopted in statutes even though it was never intended to have legal standing and is highly criticized not so much for its short definition of what constitutes antisemitism, but the controversial examples it provides. Some of these examples — despite protestations to the contrary — have been used and are used to close down all form of criticism of Israel in higher education in the US, and that will surely be the case here, unless a way can be found around them or to subsume them into a pile of policy documents.
(Universities can also use the Universities Australia definition, which has been subject to much debate, and the report makes no acknowledgment of other worthy considerations of antisemitic such as the Nexus Document or the Jerusalem Statement. Why not? The basic reason is that they are dismissed as without merit by the ECAJ and others despite the considerable thought put into them). The second reason appears to be the international power and resources behind IHRA adoption which for all intents and purposes, wants prescription of a woolly political document. No one else can match their firepower. The Jewish academics behind Nexus and Jerusalem only have their pencils. The playing field is very uneven. And note, in all this criticism, I have barely raised the Palestinian perspective. That is how critical the issue is to Jews who also dissent.
I also quote from the Craven document “ It also is intended that best practice be distilled and celebrated for adoption by other institutions” What the #$%$!! is “celebrated” meant to mean? In fact, if there is any cause for “celebration”, we can look at court rulings which indicate the legal limits of what Craven and Segal appear to be trying to do, by stealth.
The Chief Justice of the Federal Court in the Brighton Secondary College Case established that people can see antisemitic behaviour when it is not always the case. Feelings and perceptions are not always right. At the same time — to all those who think that antisemitism is non-existent in Australia — she in fact established its existence at that school. The Haddad case also demonstrated the existence of antisemitism, but at the same time, that “political criticism of Israel, however inflammatory or adversarial, is not by its nature criticism of Jews in general or based on Jewish racial or ethnic identity”. There is other case law internationally to back up this view.