Jewish Student Group Succeeds in Halting Mobil Oil Co. Recruting Drive on Campus

The Jewish Activist League at Brandeis University has taken credit for the cancellation by Mobil Oil Company of its recruitment session scheduled for this past Monday. Students M. J. Rosenberg and Bruce Phillips, the JAL leaders, called it “a victory in our struggle against those companies that adhere to the guidelines of the Arab Boycott Committee.” They added: “We also consider it significant that the JAL of Brandeis was the first campus Jewish group to take on Mobil and they so easily caved in when they were forced to justify their anti-Jewish position. We have no doubt but that it was student pressure, and the tacit support of the Brandeis Administration, that led to the Mobil surrender.” The two activists said they hoped that “the tactics used by the Brandeis JAL will be followed by students at other schools with substantial Jewish populations when companies like Mobil appear on their campus.” On Feb. 12, more than 100 Jewish students at Brandeis interrupted a job presentation by four Mobil executives, challenging their company’s policy. They and other students then left the room, leaving only around 10 of the original group of around 125 students.

Rawleigh Warner Jr., chairman of Mobil, denied last month that the huge oil operation he heads complies or has complied with “a world-wide boycott of Israeli goods.” noting that “Mobil observes only those boycotts which are the expressed policy of the U.S. government.” Rosenberg termed this policy anti-Semitic. One of the Mobil officials, college relations manager Robert Brooksbank, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he had decided not to return to Brandeis Monday because there had been “a very poor response” at the February session and because it was “unlikely” that Mobil “could get a fair hearing at this particular time” considering “the general climate that has prevailed on the campus.” Elaborating on the unsympathetic “climate” at Brandeis, Brooksbank said the “baiting” by Jewish students had given him and his colleagues “very little opportunity to be rational, very little opportunity to be factual.” The situation was further complicated, he added, by squabbling among various Jewish protesters. It was all, Brooksbank said, “a very distressing situation,” especially in that Mobil had considered Brandeis “a good source for recruits of the Jewish faith.”