WHEN IT COMES to how it treats different groups on campus, Harvard wants the world to know that it is balanced. It cares about all groups equally. So naturally, on Tuesday, when it issued a lengthy report about antisemitism at Harvard, the university also issued a lengthy report on Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias at Harvard.
The reports reveal a profound imbalance at Harvard. One group, overwhelmingly, feels unwelcome and unsafe. You’d never know which group that is, however, from reading the New York Times.
Before I say anything else — and there is much to say — it’s important to note that how the New York Times reports this news will loom large in the public imagination and has the potential to do much damage.
Consider these two paragraphs, which get buried two-thirds of the way into the New York Times piece on the two Harvard reports:
The two task forces worked together to create a campuswide survey that received nearly 2,300 responses from faculty, staff and students. It found that 6 percent of Christian respondents reported feeling physically unsafe on campus, while 15 percent of Jewish respondents and 47 percent of Muslim respondents reported the same. (The university does not track the total population of these groups on campus.)
In addition to the 92 percent of Muslim respondents who worried about expressing their views, 51 percent of Christian respondents and 61 percent of Jewish respondents said they felt the same way.
Got that?
For all the articles, claims, reports, think pieces, op-eds, statements, and speeches from elected politicians and other worthies about rampant antisemitism on college campuses, these two massive reports discover that the one group on campus — whether we are talking about faculty, students, or staff — that most consistently feels nervous about expressing its views and most consistently feels physically unsafe on campus are … Muslims.
We are often asked to take the feelings and perceptions of Jewish students, faculty, and staff as proxies for the objective safety and security and sense of welcome that Jewish people do or do not feel on campuses across the country.
Yet, according to their self-reported experiences in the new Harvard studies, Jewish students, faculty, and staff at Harvard consistently feel more welcome, safer, and freer to be Jews, including being Zionist Jews, than do Muslims at Harvard.
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Author: Corey Robin
Corey Robin is a distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the other of "The Enigma of Clarence Thomas" and "The Reactionary Mind."
