But first, the disclaimer: Nothing in this article constitutes legal advice. I am not an attorney. Before setting hiring policies or practices consult with a qualified professional, in other words, an employment attorney.
Secondly, the issue dealt with here, anti-Semitism on college campuses and beyond, is nationwide. I therefore have chosen to write in the plural and not to name schools or politicians. Click on the links for identification purposes and for sources confirming the facts as presented.
For a presentation on discrimination, I came up with a list of 20 “protected classes” in employment, everything from age to memberships. One “class” that is not “protected,” meaning it can, in my opinion, be the basis of legal discrimination is, “university attended.” (If you prefer, “school” or “college.” For present purposes, it’s all the same.) Simply stated, employers can refuse to hire graduates of certain schools as long as it is all graduates and not just members of a protected class.
In a previous article, which I shall refer to as “my creed article,” I showed that “creed” is a unique “protected class” because the protection is limited. Employers may refuse to hire, rescind offers of employment, and fire employees whose personal creed does not align with theirs.
Here we are concerned with graduates. That begs the question, what is a “graduate?” It is the product produced by the school, or, if you prefer, the service offered to the community/world-at-large by the school attended. No different, when you get right down to it, than the beer sold by Anheuser Busch or the clothes sold by Target. As I covered previously, the former lost billions when they partnered with the wrong person, and the latter when they decided to sell clothes designed for men who want to appear to be women. (It’s the simple truth so spare me the homophobia nonsense.) They both forgot their customer base and their customers launched boycotts, one of which is still, apparently, going strong. Logic dictates that if retail “products” or companies can be boycotted, so can universities.
Moreover, if the governor of a state, sorry, commonwealth, can “fire” an event booking service because they refused to list events featuring a woman who wants to protect women’s sport (again, spare me the homophobia nonsense) but has no problem listing pro-Hamas events, then how can it possibly be illegal for an employer to reject all graduates of a certain school or schools because of their, the school’s, policies?
Just as the above mentioned boycotts are perfectly legal, so are the actions of donors who have decided to no longer support schools because of their students’ behavior and administration’s complacency about anti-Semitic/pro-Hamas demonstrations on campus. Sadly, this is not unique to college campuses. But as I wrote in my creed article, if you can identify the protestors (which can be difficult because they usually wear masks) you can refuse to hire them, or if they are already employees, you can fire them. Law firms have done it! And there is a website that will help!
The extent of the hatred and mayhem on campuses in the United States is truly scarry and shameful. (For the record, it is not only happening at universities but also in high school classes.) One hundred professors saw fit to endorse students defending Hamas – the very same students causing Jewish students to have to barricade themselves in cafeterias or libraries. (Happily, twice as many denounced the university for permitting anti-Semitism on campus.) Jewish students, terrified, are being threatened with death, and campus security is being put on “high alert.” (There has been a single arrest reported.) To put it simply, Jewish students do not feel safe and they blame the administrations of their schools for what they are having to endure. And let us not forget that there are professors blaming their university administrations for daring to say that Hamas is a terrorist organization and thus endangering Palestinian students!
On the positive side, one state’s governor is condemning the above referenced professors in her state, but why would professors think they could act this way in the first place? After all, they have not been fired. But a different governor goes further and wants pro-Hamas groups banned from his state’s college campuses.
Of course, there are those who will cry “freedom of speech.” But they should not cry too loudly seeing that one university newspaper censored a pro-Israel writer claiming that her charges of Hamas atrocities were unsubstantiated. So much for freedom of speech. No, wait, that is freedom of the press.
To be fair, some university administrators are trying to correct past errors and do the right thing. What’s troubling is that, in this case, the president of the university needs to create an “advisory council” to come up with a solution. The solution is simple: Ban Hate! In any event, it is clear to some that Jewish students are “on their own.”
There is something systematically wrong when a professor has to call on his university to protect students. But then other faculty take the opposite approach, apparently, with impunity.
Alumni are concerned about the safety of Jewish students. Schools are losing tens of millions of dollars in donations, if not more, not to mention trustees. One US senator wants to “defund colleges over anti-Israel statements.” He is not alone. And Jewish students, are rethinking whether to continue at their current universities. In fact, Jewish enrollment is down at many ivy league schools.
So to recap, alumni involvement decreasing. Donor support decreasing. Government funding may be decreasing. Number of students may be decreasing. And if employers decide they do not want employees who were educated for four or more years in an environment of hate, number of graduates finding meaningful employment, also decreasing.
If, after spending tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a diploma which, because of university policies, has become worthless since they can’t find work, how will graduates and their parents react? Who can spell “class action suit?”
And there is more.
A quarter of hiring managers do not want to hire Jews. These are no doubt the same people who promote DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). But, as one brave college DEI director who tried to increase involvement of Jews at her college wrote, DEI is just another way of saying “critical social justice.” The Jewish students told her “the campus was essentially an antisemitic environment.”
But to end on a positive note, the solution may be with high school students!
Employment Edification 