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Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, gave the peace sign to those protesting him.
Roy De La Cruz/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images
Amid questions about how exactly the Trump administration wants universities to respond to reports of antisemitism on campus, the federal task force that’s punished institutions with funding cuts applauded Yale University’s handling of recent protests.
“We are cautiously encouraged by Yale’s actions,” the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism said in a statement Thursday.
Last week’s protests in New Haven surrounded a visit by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister, to an off-campus Jewish society called Shabtai. Israeli courts have convicted Ben-Gvir of supporting a terrorist group and incitement to racism. The Israeli military previously deemed him too extreme to serve.
On Tuesday night, the eve of Ben-Gvir’s visit, about 200 pro-Palestinian protesters gathered on the campus’s main plaza, according to the Yale Daily News student newspaper. Demonstrators began forming a tent encampment, the paper reported.
A university spokesperson told the Yale Daily News the assembly was violating time, place and manner protest restrictions, and administrators gave final warnings to disperse around 11 p.m. The encampment dissolved before midnight, the paper reported.
In a statement, the university said that “during the interaction, staff identified students who had been warned or disciplined in previous incidents that violated university policy.” The statement said these students have been notified “that they are subject to immediate disciplinary action.”
Further, Yale announced that it was ending the registered student organization status of Yalies4Palestine, a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter. The university’s statement Wednesday said the group had called on “social media for others to join the event, and this morning joined with an unregistered group in public statements taking credit for the event.” It said group members had just recently met with university officials “to discuss recent policy violations and were warned that further violations would jeopardize the group’s privileges.”
The group didn’t return Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment. In a statement on Instagram, it suggested it wasn’t involved.
“Rather than divest from genocide and stand up to fascism, the Yale administration has chosen to repress students organizing for justice,” it wrote. Saying the university administration had once again shown “it stands with the Zionist status quo,” the group told administrators “you can shut down a protest, you can suspend an organization, but you cannot stop the Student Intifada.”
Yale’s statement said, “Concerns have been raised about disturbing antisemitic conduct at the gathering,” adding that the university is investigating “and will hold those who violate our policies accountable.” The university didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment.
On Wednesday, demonstrations continued outside the off-campus Shabtai house where Ben-Gvir was set to address students and faculty, according to the Yale Daily News, which reported that many who identified themselves as Jews and Israelis were among those protesting him. Protesters threw water bottles at the minister as he left the event that night.
On Thursday, the Trump task force against antisemitism issued its statement, referencing videos “of an antisemitic encampment and outrageous examples of harassment and bigotry in New Haven.”
“But with respect to on-campus events, Yale University appears to have enforced its time, place, and manner policies, cleared the area, de-registered a student organization involved in the incident, and started an investigation into individual discipline for students who crossed the line from speech into unlawful conduct,” the statement said. After giving its cautious praise of the university’s actions, the task force said it “will be keeping an eye on the situation and aftermath.”
Yale has as yet escaped the sweeping funding cuts the Trump administration has doled out to other Ivy League institutions for allegedly failing to address antisemitism.
The task force also seemed pleased with Columbia University, which has had roughly $650 million in federal funds frozen, after the university vowed Thursday to tear down any encampment following news reports that students were planning to erect tents on campus.
“I’m very pleased with where we are with Columbia, and I think even over the weekend when we saw that there were some protests on campus, Columbia did exactly what they said they were going to do,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon, a member of the task force, told CNBC. “Police were called in. They made arrests. They shut down this protest when encampments were threatened to be restarted. And that’s exactly what we had hoped that they would be doing. So they’ve shown they’re putting teeth behind making sure that students’ rights are protected on campus.”
Columbia officials didn’t respond to a request for more information about McMahon’s comments.
Meanwhile, the task force is hoping that Harvard University returns to the negotiating table after the panel froze billions of Harvard’s grants and contracts. The freeze came after Harvard rejected the task force’s sweeping demands. Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, did say in a statement Thursday that the university’s governing boards have now empowered him “to call on a faculty panel” to investigate students and impose discipline in cross-school cases. He said this was an effort to have more consistent discipline when students from multiple schools are involved in incidents.
