NBC’s Mitchell: Faculty Members Are Also Responsible for Campus Antisemitism, They Have Power over What Happens

On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” host Andrea Mitchell noted that while the presidents and administrators of colleges and universities bear responsibility for handling antisemitism on their campuses and protecting the Jewish students on their campuses, some degree of responsibility also falls on members of the faculty because tenured members of the faculty wield “an enormous amount of power over what happens on these campuses” in a lot of instances.

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt stated that “the colleges are not doing enough to protect their Jewish students. … And I’ve got to ask, Andrea, why are these university presidents so weak? They seem to lack a kind of moral center that they’ve had for so many other incidents, and appropriately so. Why, when Jewish students, why when Israeli students are being targeted and victimized is their response a kind of acquiescence or so often, silence?”

Mitchell then said, “And there’s also the faculty responsibility, I have to say, because, on many of these campuses, [not only] presidents or administrators, but the faculty, tenured faculty have an enormous amount of power over what happens on these campuses, depending on the university of course.”

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