Yale and the anti-Semitism initiative

There’s been a lot of howling about Yale’s decision to shut down the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism. Here’s my story.

These complaints have fallen into two categories: There’s the ADL, which said, if the program was broke, then fix it, don’t kill it.

And there’s everyone else, who basically say, it was a great program, there’s no plausible reason for killing it.

The problem is, there are plausible reasons for killing YIISA — and Yale has provided them. More on that in a second.

A few of the defenses have gone so far as to speculate that it was political pressure because of the program’s emphasis on Muslim anti-Semitism — but have failed to produce a smoking gun.

The latest to advance such an argument is Walter Reich in the Washington Post today. He refers to YIISA’s conference last August, and its emphasis on Muslim anti-Semitism:

The conference provoked a firestorm. A Syrian American law student published a broadside in the Yale Daily News attacking the institute and the conference as fueling “anti-Arab bigotry and Islamophobia.” The Palestine Liberation Organization’s representative to the United States wrote to Yale’s president accusing the conference of demonizing Arabs — “who are Semites themselves” — and urging him to dissociate himself and Yale from the conference’s “extremism and hate-mongering.” The Internet lit up with attacks on the institute and Yale.

Yale administrators and faculty quickly turned on the institute. It was accused of being too critical of the Arab and Iranian anti-Semitism and of being racist and right-wing.

I highlighted the second graf because, if one is going to posit that Yale succumbed to political correctness, one needs a better case than a sloppy transition from the active to the passive voice ("It was accused" — who accused it?), and a reference to anonymous "administrators and faculty." Are we to believe, absent a smoking gun,  that a single broadside — by a student, no less — and a letter from a PLO apparatchik killed the program?

The thing is, you shouldn’t  need a smoking gun showing bad faith — you shouldn’t even need to accuse Yale of bad faith  — to prove the worthiness of the program. You just need to prove the worthiness of the program.

It is true that defenses of YIISA’s worth have proliferated, and Reich, a George Washington University professor and an adviser to YIISA,  has one:

The institute’s faculty governance committee includes 13 Yale faculty members.  It has four faculty researchers; a faculty advisory committee consisting of 14 faculty members and two students; eight post-doctoral fellows; six graduate fellows; and 11 undergraduate interns.   It has launched the first international association for the study of anti-Semitism and has supervised undergraduate dissertations. Yale students have attended its seminars and courses.

But what’s missing from  every such defense I’ve seen is an answer to Yale’s specific problems with YIISA — or even an acknowledgment that Yale has outlined the specific issues. (The exception, again, is the ADL.) Here they are, as outlined in my story, by Donald Green, the Yale official who oversees YIISA and other interdisciplinary programs:

Green said that other programs that the Institution for Social and Policy Studies oversees, like the Study of American Politics and the Field Experiments Initiative and Agrarian Studies, have survived because "they have generated an extraordinary number of research articles in top-tier academic journals."

Still others, like the Ethics, Politics and Economics major and the Interdisciplinary Bioethics Center, survive because they draw hundreds of students to their seminars, he said. Others — such as the Center for the Study of Race, Inequality and Politics and the Program on Nonprofit Organizations — were terminated because, like the anti-Semitism initiative, "they failed to meet high standards for research and instruction,” Green said.

In the case of the anti-Semitism initiative, Green said: "Little scholarly work appeared in top-tier journals in behavioral science, comparative politics, or history. Courses created in this area did not attract large numbers of students."

What YIISA defenders need to address is whether these expectations are reasonable and fair: Could YIISA have reasonably matched the publication records of political science and science programs? Reich says Yale students attended YIISA’s seminars, but Green’s problem is that they did not attend them in the "hundreds" as they did two other programs. Are these comparisons fair? Is it reasonable to expect a boutique topic like anti-Semitism to match in interest a 21st century hot button field like bioethics?

Without answering those questions, Green has a strong case, especially because he is able to show that shuttering YIISA is not sui generis — Yale has also ended what sound to be two other intriguing programs for similar problems.