Editor’s note: This column was originally published on Dec. 20, 2023. In light of the protests on college campuses the past few weeks and President Joe Biden’s calls to fight antisemitism, Frank Shatz requested that it be reprinted. The column is one of three that recently won Shatz a first-place award in column writing from the Virginia Press Association.
I was dismayed and shocked by the resurgence of antisemitism in the United States.
I am a 98-year-old Holocaust survivor who arrived in America 65 years ago, at the height of the Cold War, after escaping from Communist Czechoslovakia.
I came together with my late wife, Jaroslava, a Roman Catholic Czech woman to whom I was married for 74 years. We started a new life here.
We found in America our “Shining City on a Hill.”
During my more than six decades of American citizenship, I have never personally encountered or experienced antisemitism in this country.
Thus, while recently watching the testimony of three university presidents before a House committee, I recalled how leading universities in pre-World War II Germany and Hungary become incubators and the breeding grounds of intellectual antisemitism that metastasized into the mass murder of millions of Jews.
The planners of the Holocaust, and the executioners of the plan to kill millions of Jews by using modern technology such as gas chambers, were carried out by graduates of elite German universities. Among the graduates was Dr. Joseph Mengele, known as the “Angel of Death.” He selected thousands and thousands of Jewish women and children to be sent to the gas chambers and be cremated.
The college presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and MIT, testifying before Congress, evaded stating clearly whether calls for the genocide of Jews by some of their institutions’ students is a violation of their school’s free speech policies. They used lawyerly language, arguing it depends on “context.”
According to experts, “free speech” at university campuses has been elevated to a sacred level. To avoid conflict with vocal student groups, university administrators were willing to tolerate hate speech, even when the words were calling for violence against ethnic or religious groups.
“With the dramatic rise in antisemitism, we are discovering that this is a mistake: Antisemitism — and other forms of hate — cannot be fought on university campuses without restricting poisonous speech that targets Jews and other minorities,” Claire O. Finkelstein, professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania and chair of the law school’s committee on academic freedom, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed article.
“Universities must consider their obligations to the broader society as they prepare young people to assume responsibilities in public life,” Finkelstein continues. “What values do university presidents think are most important to prepare leaders in a democracy? The ability to shout intemperate slogans or the ability to engage in reasoned dialogue with people with whom you have moral and political differences? Is it any surprise that students educated in an environment of antisemitism would behave as antisemites in their adult lives?”
During my 42 years of close association with William & Mary, as a “friend of the college,” I was always impressed not just by the quality of education here, but also its mission “to make a meaningful difference in our communities, the state, the nation, and the world.”
In the span of four decades, during the terms of several William & Mary presidents and while serving on the advisory board of the Reves Center for International Studies, I have never observed tolerating hate speech or curtailing academic freedom.
As a public university, William & Mary is bound by the First Amendment to permit the expression of divergent views but is not helpless to prevent hate speech.
To the credit of successive administrations, William & Mary, the “Alma Mater of the Nation,” has succeeded in the balancing act of letting ideas float freely while maintaining a safe environment on the campus.
A good example was the recent protest of a group of pro-Palestinian students at the Gates Forum, held at the Sandler Center’s Commonwealth Auditorium.
About 10 protestors, wearing Palestinian symbols and holding up red-stained hands, marched in silently and marched out.
William & Mary’s competent and successful handling of the current crisis besetting our nation campuses should be a model even for Ivy League universities.
Frank Shatz is a Williamsburg resident. He is the author of “Reports from a Distant Place,” the compilation of his selected columns. The book is available at Bruton Parish Shop and on Amazon.com.
