The Faculty Member Who Could Not Be Named

On May 13, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency published a detailed report on the Sarah Lawrence College student senate’s decision to deny recognition to a campus chapter of J Street U, the liberal Zionist student group whose national platform supports a two-state solution and a negotiated peace. The report is thorough, sourced, and damning with audio recordings of senate deliberations, transcripts of meetings, and on-the-record comments from the dean of students, the Hillel director, and the J Street national president. A senator is on the record describing recognition of the group as akin to recognizing “a white supremacist organization.”

The story is a portrait of a campus.

Before going further, a clarification. The argument that follows does not depend on agreement with J Street U’s positions. J Street is a progressive Jewish organization whose views on Israel and American foreign policy are well to the left of my own; I have substantive disagreements with several of its platform commitments. None of that is relevant here.

The argument depends on a simple principle that an institution committed to free inquiry should already accept: A mainstream student group cannot be denied recognition on the basis of its viewpoints. The students who applied to form a J Street U chapter had the right to organize regardless of whether their classmates, their professors, or their administrators shared their politics. The question is not whether J Street is correct. The question is whether Jewish students at Sarah Lawrence are allowed to organize around a viewpoint that disagrees with the campus consensus.

With that established, let’s return to the JTA piece. The most telling fact in it is not in any of the quotations. It is in a parenthetical.

In March, the Jewish students who had applied to form the J Street U chapter appealed their denial. JTA reports that supportive faculty, including the students’ advisor, had planned to attend the appeal meeting. But just before the meeting, the student senate announced that only two people would be permitted to attend, and that they would have ten minutes to make their case. Supportive faculty were excluded from the room.

The reporter describing this episode adds a parenthetical: “The faculty advisor declined to be identified publicly out of fear of the repercussions for their own standing in academia.” That is the entire sentence. A faculty member at an elite liberal arts college, working with Jewish students to form a chapter of a mainstream liberal Zionist organization—and then excluded from the procedural hearing where their students’ appeal was decided—asked a national reporter for anonymity to describe what happened. The reporter, applying JTA’s editorial standards for granting anonymity to sources, agreed.

Pause on that. A national newspaper concluded that a faculty member at Sarah Lawrence had a credible enough fear of professional consequences—consequences from their own institution—that their name needed to be withheld from a news story about their work with their own students. That is not a partisan characterization of the campus climate. That is the editorial judgment of an independent national outlet, on the record, in print.

This is the climate at Sarah Lawrence, in a single documented fact. And it is worth dwelling on, because everything else about the J Street U story and about the broader pattern of which it is the most recent example follows from it.

This is the climate at Sarah Lawrence, in a single documented fact.

Consider, in this light, the faculty petition that was eventually organized to urge the administration to grant J Street U recognition. JTA describes it as a petition “circulated to a limited number of faculty members” that gathered “more than 20 signatures.” Each of those three details—the circulation, the public posture, and the final count—deserves attention.

First, the circulation. The petition was not sent to the full faculty. It was sent to a hand-picked list of likely signers: colleagues the organizers had identified in advance as receptive. The initial distribution went to fewer than two dozen recipients. Sarah Lawrence has a long institutional tradition of full-faculty petitions on contested questions, and the mechanisms for broad consultation exist and are used routinely. When students associated with Students for Justice in Palestine have faced disciplinary consequences for varied actions over the years, a more robust public faculty discussion followed, drawing far broader participation than anything mustered for J Street U. The infrastructure for full-faculty mobilization is not theoretical. It is in working order. It is used. It was simply not used for these students.

This means that the organizers, working on behalf of Jewish students, made a deliberate calculation: They would not ask the broader faculty whether it agreed. The most plausible reading of that calculation is that they already knew what too many of their colleagues would say. They knew which faculty members are hostile to liberal Zionist and Jewish students. They knew which colleagues would refuse to sign, or worse, would actively organize against the petition. The hand-picked list is not just a list of allies. It is also, by implication, a documentary record of the organizers’ assessment of where the rest of the faculty actually stands.

This is, in its way, the most clarifying single fact in the entire matter.

The argument that the Sarah Lawrence climate is hostile to Jewish students is not a claim made by outside critics or by faculty members like me who have been writing about it for years. It is a claim made, implicitly, by the very faculty members who organized this petition. They know their colleagues. They made calculations about which of their colleagues could be asked. The petition’s targeted distribution is, in effect, a private faculty intelligence assessment, conducted by faculty in good faith, of who on this campus can be relied upon to defend Jewish students and who cannot. The number who could be relied upon, by the assessment of those best positioned to know, is fewer than two dozen.

Second, the public posture. The petition’s existence is known to the press—JTA references it in its reporting—but the petition itself has not been released publicly with its signatories attached. It has not been posted to the campus, published in the student paper, or attached to any public statement of faculty solidarity with the students. The signatories’ names are not, to date, on any public document. Whatever the petition is, it is not a public expression of faculty solidarity. It is an internal one, delivered behind closed doors, in a form that the administration can file, debate, or quietly ignore without any of the faculty signatories being publicly identified.

Third, the count. Sarah Lawrence employs approximately 285 instructional faculty. The petition gathered roughly twenty signatures (JTA’s reported figure) and at most around thirty by the time it was delivered. Even at the higher number, that is roughly ten percent of the teaching faculty. Ninety percent of the institution’s teachers either declined to sign or, far more likely given the targeted circulation, were never asked.

There is no reading of that ratio that flatters Sarah Lawrence.

Either a substantial majority of the faculty actively opposes recognizing a mainstream liberal Zionist student group, or the organizers correctly assessed that asking the majority would produce a refusal. Both readings describe a faculty body in which open defense of Jewish students seeking to organize around a mainstream Jewish viewpoint is a minority position, and known to be one.

Both readings describe a faculty body in which open defense of Jewish students seeking to organize around a mainstream Jewish viewpoint is a minority position, and known to be one.

Taken together: a targeted ask, a private posture, and a participation rate that suggests the broader faculty would not have signed if asked. This is not a portrait of faculty conscience asserting itself. This is a portrait of a small, hand-picked group doing the most they could do in an environment where doing more was understood, by everyone involved, to be unsafe.

And it is worth noting what other Jewish faculty have, over the past decade, watched unfold on this campus without speaking publicly—a swastika on a Jewish professor’s office door; a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter awarded the college’s Group Excellence Award in spring 2024, an institutional honor the House Education and Workforce Committee later cited as evidence of administrative “emboldening” of campus antisemitism; the November 2024 occupation of the main administrative building by students distributing pro-Hamas material; the January 2026 disruption and shouting-down of New York Times columnist Ezra Klein as a “Nazi normalizer” at a “building bridges” event the sitting president treated as a joke from the stage; a Divestment Coalition “boycott of an entire faculty member’s courses” in 2024; the departure of Jewish students from the college, including Sammy Tweedy, son of Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, who described being treated as a “pariah” for visiting Israel; the Hillel International judgment that the climate is “among the worst we’ve seen”; and the opening of a House Committee on Education investigation that named the college among institutions whose responses were found wanting.

They had reasons. The reasons are now in print, in a parenthetical, in JTA.

None of this means the faculty who organized the petition did anything wrong. They did what they could, in the climate as it actually is. A private letter signed by ten percent of the faculty is more than no letter signed by none. The advisor who has spent the year doing the actual work of supporting these students, even under cover of anonymity, has done more than the administrators who hold the bylaw authority to grant recognition and have, to date, declined to use it.

The point is not that any individual faculty member failed. The point is that an institution that describes itself in its own Principles for Mutual Respect as committed to “honest inquiry, free speech, and open discourse” has produced an environment in which honest inquiry on this question, free speech on this question, and open discourse on this question are practiced behind closed doors, by curated lists of insiders, with the on-the-ground organizer asking a national reporter for anonymity to protect their career.

Imagine the equivalent in any other context. Imagine a campus where defending a mainstream Black student group, or a mainstream LGBTQ student group, or a mainstream Muslim student group required a private faculty memo signed by ten percent of the teaching staff, circulated only to a curated list, with the actual on-the-ground advisor asking a national reporter for anonymity to protect their standing in academia, after being barred from the appeal hearing where their students’ case was decided. The headline would write itself. The administration would face calls for resignation. The board would convene an emergency meeting. Donors would demand accountability. Accreditors would take notice.

At Sarah Lawrence, in May 2026, this is what defending Jewish students looks like. And the institutional response, so far, has been silence.

The college president has not invoked her authority under the student senate bylaws, which explicitly permit her office to grant recognition to a student organization. The relevant provision reads: “Under circumstances requiring immediate action or when it is in the best interest of the college, the Office of Student Involvement and Leadership may grant, suspend, or remove recognition of the organization.” Note the breadth. The bylaw does not require a procedural emergency, a finding of misconduct, or any specific predicate. It permits intervention whenever the administration determines that intervention is in the college’s best interest. The dean of students has nonetheless told JTA the administration “does not intervene in the process unless there is a clear violation of policy”: a framing that treats the administration’s own bylaw authority as if it were narrower than it is, and that treats viewpoint-based denial of recognition to Jewish students as not, evidently, the kind of circumstance for which the bylaw was written.

The student senate chair who presided over the denial of J Street U is herself a named plaintiff in Abdulhaqq v. Sarah Lawrence College, a federal lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York in August 2025 that names both her own institution and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce as defendants, alleging that the institutional response to allegations of campus antisemitism has unlawfully chilled pro-Palestinian speech. The appeals committee that affirmed the J Street U denial did so without recording its vote tally and without giving a reason—and only after restricting attendance at the hearing to exclude the supportive faculty who had planned to be there.

Each of these facts, on its own, would be a procedural irregularity at a healthy institution. Taken together, they describe an administrative posture in which the institution has decided, in practice, that Jewish students seeking to organize around a mainstream liberal Zionist platform may be denied recognition by their peers, with attendance at appeal hearings restricted to keep supportive faculty out of the room, and that the administration’s role is to gesture at process while declining to act on substance.

This is what viewpoint discrimination and antisemitic hate looks like when it has become institutionalized. It is not a single incident. It is not a hostile speech. It is not a vote. It is an ecosystem—of student senate practices that exclude Jewish viewpoints under the cover of procedural opacity, of administrative postures that decline to intervene on the principled grounds that intervention is uncomfortable, of faculty self-protection so calibrated that the people doing the right thing must do it in private, of campus rhetoric so saturated that a reporter for a national Jewish newspaper applies the editorial standard normally reserved for sources in vulnerable positions and concludes that the request for anonymity is warranted.

The students at Sarah Lawrence who applied to form J Street U did nothing wrong. They asked, in good faith, to organize around a platform held by a substantial portion of the American Jewish community and represented in mainstream American political life. They were denied. They appealed. They were excluded from their own appeal hearing along with the faculty who would have spoken on their behalf. They were denied again. Their faculty advisor, working quietly to support them, could not afford to be named in the newspaper covering their case. A small group of their professors organized a private letter on their behalf, signed by less than one in ten of their colleagues, that the college administration has so far declined to act on.

The students at Sarah Lawrence who applied to form J Street U did nothing wrong.

This is the climate. The faculty advisor’s anonymity is the proof. And the institution that produced both has so far refused to meaningfully address what is plainly visible to anyone—journalists, students, parents, donors, accreditors, investigators—who is willing to look.

A community worth belonging to does not require its members to be anonymous in order to defend its values. A college worth its tuition does not require its faculty to choose between their conscience and their career. An administration worth its salary does not respond to a national story about viewpoint discrimination on its campus with procedural deflection and silence.

Sarah Lawrence will not fix this on its own. The pattern is too old, the incentives too entrenched, the institutional habits too settled. What changes the climate is external attention, sustained public scrutiny, and the willingness of those who are not yet at professional risk to say out loud what those who are at risk cannot. The faculty advisor could not speak. I will and others must.

Samuel J. Abrams is a Professor of Politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.