Frederic J. Brown/Ronen Tivony/Getty Images; Jenny Chang-Rodriguez/Business Insider
- Hamas' attack on Israel and the Gaza invasion that followed touched off anger and fear at colleges.
- Harvard, MIT, and UPenn leaders faced criticism — but public universities also struggled.
- Emails show staff at seven public colleges attempting to appease students and alumni on both sides.
As the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT flail to appease donors and keep their jobs in the aftermath of their congressional testimony this week, emails newly obtained by Business Insider show how leaders at universities across the country have struggled to address the October 7 Hamas attacks.
Internal emails obtained by BI via public-record requests show how leaders at public universities including the University of California, Los Angeles, UC Berkeley, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faced immediate pressure from faculty, student groups, and, in one case, a state legislator to condemn Hamas' attacks and monitor Palestinian student groups.
The pressure on school leaders — agenda setters and fundraisers in chief — can be great, a reality underscored by the pressure on the University of Pennsylvania's president, Elizabeth Magill, to resign in the wake of her congressional testimony, which may see the school lose out on a $100 million gift from the money manager Ross Stevens. After David May, the president of Washington's Bellevue College, received a compliment on his communitywide email, his response indicated he knew others wouldn't see it the same way.
"Thank you for your kind words," he wrote. "I am currently busy buckling up."
'Where do we draw the line?'
For days after the attacks on Israel, which fell on a Saturday, administrators at some schools debated whether they should say anything at all.
In Washington, Shawn Devine, the executive director of communications at Olympic College, a community college with about 6,000 students, sought help from a listserv of other college spokespeople.
"Are any colleges considering or have sent messages regarding the declaration of war by Israel towards Hamas?" he wrote on October 9.
May, at Bellevue, was initially hesitant.
"This is a tough one to be sure," he wrote in an October 9 email. "The brutality of the attacks and the horror of civilians being killed and taken hostage as human shields is beyond inhumane. But I think also now of the response. It is a horror."
Chris Clemens, the provost at UNC-Chapel Hill, was also reluctant to weigh in.
"I stand ready to support you and your community in any way," he wrote on October 11 to an employee originally from Israel. "However, I fear that any statement I make, no matter how worded, will inflame sentiments on campus, especially given my known political predispositions." (Clemens once called himself an "outspoken conservative.")
"In my response to emails, I am mindful of those commitments regarding my own personal opinions," Clemens said in a statement to Business Insider. "As a campus leader, publicly sharing my own beliefs can have a chilling effect on open discourse on our campus."
One day after the Hamas attacks, college leaders were already facing pleas from students, employees, and campus groups such as Hillel. UCLA's chancellor, Gene Block, received an email on October 8 asking him to publicly back Israeli and Jewish students.
"Eighty years after the Holocaust Jewish communities are once again in flames," Amir Naiberg, the CEO of a university body that helps students and professors license their inventions, wrote. "The UC system has a thriving Israeli/Jewish community that needs your help."
As part of a list of recommendations for how the chancellor could support Jewish students, Naiberg called on Block to "publicly prohibit all activities designed to support Hamas."
Behind the scenes, the chancellor deliberated about how to respond to Naiberg's letter.
"As a public institution, we are barred by the Constitution from prohibiting expression based on the viewpoint of the speaker or content of the speech," Block emailed UCLA's provost. "If the university did this, we would be sued — and we would lose."
On October 8, UCLA had no "plans to issue a message" on the attacks, preferring to "go more targeted to affected students," a communications employee wrote in an email. By October 9, it had reversed course, issuing a statement that, in part, urged the university community not to let "anguish" over the "horrific and heart-wrenching terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens" morph into "resentment or mistreatment of our fellow Bruins at home."
At Berkeley, an initial note from administrators was met with responses indicating "that we fell short from the perspectives of many," Steve Sutton, the school's vice chancellor, wrote to a colleague at another state school the morning of October 9. "There is a desire that we actually be bolder in our description of the events (i.e. acts of terrorism)."
Sutton moved quickly to workshop another message, emails show, drawing inspiration from an email a Jewish summer camp sent to its listserv.
"I like this note below as it focuses on both Israeli and Palestinian lives, while putting the blame where it belongs — on Hamas," he wrote to a member of his communications team. "Maybe there is something here that we can use for our efforts."
Some campuses were rocked by activism. Rutgers University's president, Jonathan Holloway, was pulled in two directions by the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and groups of Jewish faculty and students. Campus Hillel leaders asked Holloway to revoke permission for SJP to hold a campus rally on October 12 — cc'ing New Jersey's governor and attorney general — citing the national Students for Justice in Palestine's defense of violence as a legitimate response to Israel's treatment of Palestinians and the protesters' plans to wear masks.
Holloway ended up issuing at least three separate statements about the Hamas attacks and the Israeli bombardment of Gaza that followed. Rutgers redacted almost all of the 142 pages of Holloway's correspondence it provided to BI, saying the emails fell under a state exemption allowing it to withhold records that show internal discussions and drafts.
Other campuses were relatively quiet. At Michigan Technological University, school officials were trying to figure out whom to support and how; they searched for students from Palestinian territories and Israel to see whether there were any who merited direct reach-out, and none were found.
"We have not reached out to the Hillel or the MSA students or advisors. We always struggle with decisions like this," Laura Bulleit, the school's dean of students, wrote in an October 10 email to two other school officials. "Under what circumstances do we reach and/or where do we draw the line?"
A UNC trustee wanted police to investigate a student protest
Some administrators were upset by pro-Palestinian student activists. Mike Cohn, the director of the UCLA office that oversees student groups, fielded a complaint from an alumnus about a post on Instagram by a member of the Undergraduate Students Association Council that expressed sympathy for Palestinians and criticized Israel, even as it condemned antisemitism.
"This particular USAC member is determined to provoke," Cohn wrote on October 10. "Efforts are being made to mitigate this kind of antisemitic rhetoric."
At the University of North Carolina, a trustee, Marty Kotis, urged the school's police chief and other public-safety officials to translate Arabic-language speeches from an October 12 rally and check whether they included threats. He cc'd two other trustees and said he had been in touch with Jon Hardister, a state representative, and that they discussed the threat posed by Hamas, among other topics.
Frederick Sellers, a campus public-safety official, said the school was doing enough.
"No specific credible threat information regarding any criminal activity or civil unrest in our state is confirmed at this time," he told Kotis. "I'm confident that our law enforcement partners, and intelligence agencies are tracking trends and tactics to ensure safety concerns for the Homeland are being mitigated, including monitoring conversations conducted in foreign languages."
Kotis, a real-estate developer, told BI that he still wasn't fully happy with administrators' response to the protests, which The Daily Tar Heel reported included the occupation of a campus building by SJP activists on November 17. He said academic discipline for students who violated school policies — and criminal penalties for students who trespassed or wore masks at protests — were "low-hanging fruit."
He added that the depiction of a paraglider, like those used by Hamas attackers to infiltrate Israel on October 7, on an SJP poster "crossed a line into harassment." And he said he believed other trustees shared his concerns, though he said he wouldn't speak for them.
"The congressional hearings that occurred recently demonstrate a lack of leadership," he said, later adding: "I don't think we'd be having this conversation if we were talking about white hoods that people were wearing on campus."
Update: December 8, 2023, 1:30 pm ET — This story has been updated with comments from UNC-Chapel Hill's provost, Chris Clemens.
Correction: December 8, 2023 — An earlier version of this story misstated who sent the letter the UCLA chancellor debated with university officials. The letter was sent by Amir Naiberg, not Gene Block.