Mike Wagenheim
World Israel News, July 3, 2022
‘It’s horrible to be a Jew at CUNY’
The New York City Council postponed an early June hearing on antisemitism on college campuses to accommodate the schedule of the chancellor of the City University of New York.
At the rescheduled hearing on Thursday, Chancellor Felix Matos Rodríguez was a no-show anyway.
Instead, he sent a lawyer and two witnesses to appear on Zoom, as the council’s Higher Education Committee investigated what it calls “a pervasive culture of antisemitism on City University of New York’s campuses.”
Combined with a lack of concrete answers from CUNY administration representatives to questions they likely should have expected, some council members grew frustrated.
“This makes me question how seriously this problem is being addressed. Between you being virtual and the chancellor not being here, this doesn’t fill me with hope. And I’m a hopeful person,” said Higher Education Committee chair Eric Dinowitz.
“It is appalling that the chancellor of a major university system is so unconcerned about systemic bigotry targeting minority students, twice blowing off a government hearing on antisemitism,” Brooke Goldstein, executive director of the Lawfare Project and a co-founder of the #EndJewHatred movement, said in a press release.
“He cannot be trusted to uphold the civil rights of minority and marginalized students and faculty, including those in the Jewish community, and needs to go,” she added. “His silence is precisely why Jew-hatred has flourished under his failed leadership of CUNY.”
Glenda Grace, CUNY’s senior vice chancellor for institutional affairs, strategic advancement and special counsel, said she could not think of any examples off-hand where the school has disciplined anyone for antisemitism. She also said she did not have information about how many antisemitic incidents have been reported on CUNY campuses.
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