The Chronicle of Higher Education is a hypocritical echo chamber that expresses disregard for Jewish parents.

TLDR: "University leaders need to understand our existential crisis if they are going to fix it. Administrators and faculty depend on balanced news sources, and the Chronicle of Higher Education does not prepare them to rise to this moment."

As the Trump administration attempts to destroy higher education as we know it in the name of combatting antisemitism on campus, the Chronicle of Higher Education—the most influential comprehensive news source about American universities—expresses open disregard for Jewish parents when even mentioning them at all. Universities cannot face our existential crisis without insight into key stakeholders’ perspectives, and to survive we need faculty and top administrators to get out of their echo chamber and understand how people outside our walls see us.

A year ago, I contacted the Chronicle to discuss what I perceived as anti-Jewish bias in their reporting, and on May 20, 2024, sent them a detailed memo with numerous examples to back up this assessment.

First, I shared details of my experience pitching them op-ed pieces about two different topics—an experience that gave me the impression that Chronicle reporting holds Jewish people’s concerns in contempt.

Below is from my memo:

Dear leadership of the Chronicle of Higher Education,

The two pitches that I have made to the Chronicle for review essays related to DEI received dramatically different responses depending on which minority group they discussed.

In the first case I was treated with warmth, curiosity, and professionalism. In October of 2022 I proposed an essay on “Dismantling university support for women in the name of equity.” I was told the staff was intrigued by the idea and they wished to know more about sources of evidence. We corresponded back and forth several times and then spoke at length by phone. Ultimately I did not write the piece…but my experience was one of positive engagement.

By contrast, this February I was treated dismissively when proposing to write about the relationship between DEI programs and antisemitism. My observation is that right-wing individuals who are already hostile to DEI programming have latched onto campus antisemitism as a hook to argue against it. Antisemitism gives these bad actors the ammunition they seek to rail about ‘woke’ universities, and this is an Achilles’ Heel for higher education. I argue that for Jewish students to feel excluded on campus pushes away a traditionally progressive-leaning group that has historically championed DEI. Rather than warmth, I received a curt response: ‘Unfortunately the essay topic outlined in your note does not meet our current needs.’ I responded with thanks to the staff for consideration and asking for any feedback regarding the gap with respect to current needs and received no response.

It was a surprise how explicit and revealing the staff was that concerns about women meet the Chronicle’s needs whereas concerns about Jewish people do not meet the Chronicle’s needs. They didn’t offer the stock phrase that they receive many proposals and cannot accept them all, but instead they said straight out they just didn’t want to hear it. Media professionals rarely state their biases out loud, and here the editorial staff provided the troubling news that they simply do not care about the topic of antisemitism and DEI programming—wow.

I also shared with the Chronicle observations about their coverage that led me to perceive anti-Jewish bias. Notably, in a single daily briefing on May 16, 2024 there were two articles that made for a striking juxtaposition.

The first of these articles defended university encampments meant to protest the Israel-Hamas war against how it was being portrayed by legacy media as a coordinated effort across schools. From my memo:

Encampments are defended prominently and proactively: The lead content of the daily brief was the claim that encampments at various universities are strictly local, that they are not related to each other, and that national news organizations look incorrectly for commonalities and gloss over distinctions between them. It is unclear why it would be a problem even if protests across universities were coordinated, especially given that many students said they were acting in solidarity with besieged peers elsewhere. The Chronicle’s reporting was protective and supportive of the encampment movement and even got out ahead to defend it against potential criticisms by asserting that protests across the country are not related to each other.

Then I argued by contrast:

Jewish parents are portrayed as conspiracy actors who stifle free speech with baseless complaints:

Later in the same daily brief there was a link to an article about how Jewish parents behave badly—they are coordinated and attempt to stifle free speech by complaining to administrators en masse. The article portrays these parents with nothing but criticism and suggests they have no valid concerns.

That second article in the same daily briefing that caught my eye was a veritable take-down of Jewish parents. Below is their summary that appeared in the email newsletter:

Parent activists

As they respond to student protests, college presidents have many constituents to consider: trustees, donors, students, professors, lawmakers, alumni. But that list isn’t complete without parents, at least in the view of the organizer of Mothers Against College Antisemitism.

Elizabeth Rand, a lawyer who organized the private Facebook group, is the mother of a high-school senior. Her group — which has nearly 60,000 members — has “filled administrators’ inboxes and voicemails with their concerns,” our Emma Pettit reports, asking, among other things, for colleges to take a harder line against Pro-Palestinian student demonstrations.

The group says it seeks to protect Jewish students from bigotry; critics say some of its actions target professors and seek to constrain free speech.

When Emma asked Rand about the perception among some that an outside group like hers should not have a voice in college decisions, the organizer replied: “We’re consumers. If I’m giving you $80,000 a year, you’d better behave.”

Below is my interpretation of the full article, again from the memo that I sent to the Chronicle. It is admittedly cheeky commentary, but you can read the original article to assess for yourself whether the shoe fits.

· Jewish parents who complain to universities are coordinated by a centralized source, which turns out to be nothing more than a parent with an obnoxious Facebook page. She has no resources, organization, or infrastructure—literally the extent of her coordination is a cringeworthy page on Facebook. Although the word “conspiracy” isn’t explicitly used, the writer’s clear message is that Jewish people are organized and coordinate their actions.

· Jewish parents behave badly and create trouble for university administrators with a flood of baseless complaints. They stifle the free speech of faculty who voice anti-Israel views.

· Jewish students are overreacting when they object to acts like projecting “Glory to our Martyrs” on the side of a building named for Jewish donors.

· For any potentially legitimate concerns with antisemitic acts there have already been apologies, e.g., the Columbia student who said he would murder Zionists and a professor who called October 7th “exhilarating.” To mention apologies multiple times seems to suggest impatiently that there is already closure on these incidents and it is not valid to feel upset by them anymore.

· Math class is a legitimate forum for expressing anti-Israel views and it stifles free speech if parents are concerned about political discussions during math.

· Then the shocker: Over halfway through the article there is a parenthetical sentence “(There have been reported incidents of Jewish students’ dorm-room doors being graffitied or set on fire.)”—after which the article immediately switches back to saying Jewish parents are a problem for universities because they trample free speech by weaponizing antisemitism. The word “reported” even implies subtly that these incidents might not have happened.

I shared my holistic sense of the Chronicle’s coverage as falling into classic unflattering portrayals of Jewish people. Again, from the memo that I sent to their senior editorial staff:

Recently a DEI facilitator at WashU made the fascinating point that Jews are the only minority group that people both kick up and kick down: if one puts down Jews it is okay because they really control the world behind the scenes through powerful organizations and it is heroic to expose their conspiracies. Last week the Chronicle followed exactly that playbook to the letter by writing that overzealous Jewish parents are coordinated in their efforts to cause trouble for universities. If your dorm-room door is set on fire that doesn’t fit our narrative, so here’s a parenthetical reference casting doubt that it even took place.

It is perplexing to me how many people claim that the main problem with antisemitism is how it gets weaponized without entertaining the possibility that it actually exists. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s reporting appears to focus primarily on weaponization and uses a classic antisemitic trope to portray Jews while doing so.

Taking this evidence together gets us back to the review essay I proposed in February: Antisemitism plays straight into the hands of people who already hate universities. It is an Achilles Heel that provides right-wing politicians the content they want….[Y]our organization contributes to this problem facing our industry.

After sending the Chronicle this memo, I heard back from one of the senior editors and we had a good Zoom call. He respectfully disagreed with my characterization above, but based on our conversation invited me to pitch an editorial that would be called “Elise Stefanik is cynical but she has a point.” The idea would be that on college campuses the discourse regarding the Congressional hearings in December of 2023 has been wholly dismissive, without even considering that there is any substance to concerns about antisemitism on college campuses. The editor likened universities to handing Stefanik a loaded gun and suggested that for higher education to acknowledge its own failing would help reduce anti-university sentiment.

So back in May of 2024 I thought we’d had a breakthrough!

In the intervening year this op-ed had been on my backburner, and it jumped to the front when Donald Trump started fighting publicly with my alma mater Harvard. I sent that same editor a pitch and full draft of an op-ed focusing on how Jewish parents have become radicalized by lack of regard for their children’s health and safety, and that this is a monster of universities’ own creation that threatens our field. For about two weeks I heard nothing, then after sending follow-up messages was told that they were going to pass on publishing it. It felt like gaslighting to be guided towards something that they would consider to fill a major void in their news coverage of key stakeholders, and then upon writing it to be told no thank you without so much as feedback on the content.

To test whether I am just imagining that the Chronicle of Higher Education’s coverage is a hypocritical echo chamber where Jewish parents are mentioned unsympathetically if they are even mentioned at all, I collected some data. In a search on the Chronicle’s website for the keywords “Jewish parents,” there were only 21 hits, which is itself fairly shocking that a stakeholder group at the center of the current crisis would receive so little attention. Interestingly there was a gap of almost 12 years from July of 2012 to February of 2024 without that text string appearing at all.

After the terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023, it took over four months for the Chronicle first to use the words “Jewish parents” in an article. The piece in February 2024 called “A campus where everyone is just like you” was about how colleges had started using identity-based marketing to lure Jewish students. In the kind of microaggression against Jewish people at which the Chronicle seems to excel, the article referred to “the Israel-Hamas conflict,” which strikes me as a fairly sanitized way to describe a terrorist attack against Jewish civilians consisting of mass rape, murder, and hostage-taking. The article also implied that Jewish students are basically enemies of free speech who cannot handle political disagreement—in the context of why identity-based marketing appeals to them—by questioning the politics of those to whom such identity-based marketing would appeal. They wrote that pro-Palestinian students and academics deny that there is antisemitism on college campuses and “urg[e] college leaders to condemn Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, which has killed some 28,000 people, and stop kowtowing to donors.” They indicated that Jewish students receive preferential treatment by noting that colleges do not similarly market to Muslim students. Note that this article was written by a staff writer for the Chronicle as a piece of news—this was not an op-ed from someone outside the publication.

Next, in April 2024 there were two sentences in a daily newsletter about the results of a very striking poll: “Antisemitism concerns shape college choices: In a survey, almost two-thirds of Jewish parents, 64 percent, said their children stopped considering a college because of increasing antisemitism after the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel, according to Hillel International. Even more, 96 percent, said they are worried about campus antisemitism.” The Chronicle provided a link to Hillel’s website but provided no further reporting about this topical and highly relevant set of findings.

In May 2024 the article appeared that I describe in detail above, in which Jewish parents were portrayed in a way that the word “unflattering” can barely begin to describe.

In June of 2024 there was an article about the use of racial preferences in college admissions, which had incidental use of the words “Jewish parent” within a list of possible ways students might refer to their backgrounds in an application essay without violating the Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions.

In July of 2024 there was a heartwarming article about a Jewish donor at Colgate University renaming a building that he had endowed from his family’s current name to their previous name that had been used before the 1940s, to honor their family members who had changed their names to reduce antisemitism against them. This shows that not all of the Chronicle’s coverage about Jewish people is negative, but it picked up on a different trope about us: sometimes Jewish people are newsworthy to universities as big donors. Along these lines, the story mentioned that the protagonist is a billionaire.

There have been no hits on the Chronicle’s website for keywords “Jewish parents” during the 10 months since then.

For gallows humor, let me also point out that the older hits among the 21 total articles include:

· Two pieces made the argument that antisemitism on college campuses is an issue of the past: “At Hillel Summit, Some See a ‘Golden Age’ for Jews on Campuses, Not an Era of Anti-Semitism” (May, 2006) and “Ghosts of the Past: Anti-Semitism at Elite Colleges” (December 2000).

· In a book review called “(Secular Jewish) Man Seeks God” in December of 2011, the teaser for the article is “Why are so many secular Jews ill-equipped or unwilling to understand or rigorously evaluate other religions?” The writer criticizes both the book’s author, themselves, and pretty much all Jewish people, “[e]ven among those raised with a serious Jewish education, as I was.” (Back in Brooklyn, we called people like this “self-hating Jews.”)

· Some articles were about individuals whose parents happened to be Jewish, including Jesus Christ.

You can’t make this up, people. Actually, you can—but if my goal were to write a caricature of everything that the American public thinks is wrong with so-called ‘woke’ universities and the anti-Jewish bias that permeates legacy media then I wouldn’t have made it this extreme.

When I summarized to a senior editor of the Chronicle the above analysis—the mere 21 mentions on their website of the text string “Jewish parents” and the unflattering nature of these pieces—he respectfully disagreed with my assessment and said that they cover issues of antisemitism in depth. Then he pointed me to a recent article that does not use the word “parent,” which suggests entirely missing the point.

I am aware that writing this essay and sharing my analysis of the Chronicle’s biased coverage of Jewish parents is likely to add fuel those who wish to dismantle universities. My hope had been to work with the journal to provide university administrators and faculty with the information they so badly need in order to get out of their echo chamber, but numerous attempts failed.

If our major trade journal does not provide insight into a major constituency—indeed, showing open resistance to doing so—then that part of the story must also be told. The alternative to sharing these concerns is to stand by and watch my employer and others be put in harm’s way. University leaders need to understand our existential crisis if they are going to fix it. Administrators and faculty depend on balanced news sources, and the Chronicle of Higher Education does not prepare them to rise to this moment. I hold out hope that the Chronicle can reconsider its anti-Jewish bias and open itself to divergent perspectives.