On Thursday, March 7, the Pitzer College Council discussed a resolution to suspend the college’s direct enrollment study abroad program with the University of Haifa in Israel. At the meeting, the council announced that they would follow procedure and take their official vote on the issue in their next meeting on April 11.
This discussion follows a 34:1 vote by the Pitzer Senate to suspend the program last month, although community members have been calling to suspend the Haifa study abroad program for years.
In 2019, the students and faculty members that made up the College Council voted 67:28 in favor of suspending the program, becoming the first higher education institution to pass such a motion. However, hours after it passed, former Pitzer President Melvin Oliver vetoed the motion.
Thursday’s meeting furthered the dialogue on this potential suspension. The meeting was open to all members of the Pitzer community; approximately 100 voting members and a few dozen other individuals attended.
The day before the meeting, Richard Ampah PZ ’25, Pitzer Senate vice president of external affairs, sent out an email warning of a potential overflow and predicting that the meeting would be “particularly well-attended.” Despite all attendees fitting comfortably on Thursday, this warning did not come unprompted, as campus buzz around the issue has generated a recent upswing in attention in anticipation of the vote.
On Wednesday, March 6, Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine hosted a vigil in recognition of what their Instagram called the “150[th day] of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.” At 4 p.m., approximately 30 students gathered in front of Pitzer’s Clock Tower to listen to organizers lead them in Muslim, Jewish and Christian prayers and to help build what one organizer called a “permanent vigil.”
The organizer noted that they expect attempts by administration to take down the vigil, which consists of flowers, teddy bears and notes dedicated to children who had died in Palestine since Oct. 7. They then added that they would continue to fight the administration by keeping the vigil and pressuring them to both suspend the Haifa program and divest from companies tied to Israel.
“We will keep building this vigil on the clocktower until they understand, firstly, that we should not have an institutional tie with Israel, which is the Haifa program, and secondly, [they] divest completely from an apartheid state,” the organizer said.
A week prior, on Wednesday, Feb. 28, TSL received a statement from Claremont McKenna College (CMC) Professor of Mathematics Lenny Fukshansky that expressed his and dozens of other faculty members’ opposition to the proposed suspension of the Haifa study abroad program and condemned the recent results of the Associated Students of Pomona College’s (ASPC) referendum.
The statement, titled “Promoting Learning, Rejecting Division: Claremont Faculty Against Academic Boycott,” had a total of 38 faculty member signatures. A majority of support came from CMC professors, representing 26 of the signatures. Following behind CMC, Scripps College had six signatures, Pitzer and Pomona College each contributed two and Keck Graduate Institute and Claremont Graduate University had one signature each. No one from Harvey Mudd College signed the statement.
Originally, the letter was drafted in collaboration between a small group of faculty members before being sent to colleagues whom Fukshansky said he knew personally and thought would be interested in signing it. In an interview with TSL, Fukshansky also noted that several individuals expressed support for the letter but ultimately refused to sign it for fear of backlash.
“There were a certain number of people who said that, while they do agree with the statement of the letter, they did not feel comfortable signing it because of, I guess, potential consequences,” Fukshansky said. “To me, it sounded like people are afraid of possible intimidation.”
The statement began by expressing some professors’ opposition to the suspension of the Haifa program, stating that the institution has a diverse array of students and viewpoints.
“The University of Haifa is among the most multicultural campuses in the world,” the statement read. “Its professors express a wide spectrum of opinion on Israel and Zionism. No college committed to promoting inquiry, dialogue and debate should refuse to send their students to the University of Haifa.”
The statement stood in support of President Gabrielle Starr’s Feb. 16 email to the Pomona community in which she opposed ASPC’s hosting of the referendum and suggested that targeting Israel could have antisemitic implications. Similarly, the Feb. 28 statement criticized the referendum’s focus on Israel, noting the historic vilification of Jewish people.
“As Pomona President Starr’s letter notes, branding Israel as the world’s only pariah state is troubling because of a long history of treating Jews as a singular threat to human progress and flourishing,” the statement read.
The statement also argued that, while “there is a spectrum of reasonable disagreement on the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” recent calls to suspend the study abroad program at the University of Haifa and to cease academic and economic relations with Israeli institutions did not recognize this spectrum.
“[These initiatives] are part of the broader Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which is opposed to any relations with Israel, its people, its institutions, and its supporters,” the statement read. “We fear that the intellectual retreat and calcification BDS encourages would make it harder for all of us to engage and understand both Israel and its Palestinian neighbors.”
In the interview, Fukshansky elaborated on his aversion to boycotts specifically.
“I am fairly pro-Israel in this situation and I know a number of people who also are,” he said. “For us, seeing boycott measures or calls for boycott measures feels very divisive. I can think of few things that are more illiberal than a boycott, because a boycott shuts down a conservation before it gets started.”
Several days after the faculty statement was received by TSL, California Scholars for Academic Freedom released a letter to the Pitzer community on March 1 endorsing the suspension of the study abroad program.
In the letter, authors highlighted what they referred to as the “denial of Palestinian freedom,” pointing towards the Israeli universities awarding academic credits for military service in Gaza and the destruction of every educational institution in Gaza.
“Even with this, some tell us that suspending institutional relations with Israeli universities crosses a ‘red line,’” the letter read. “This is a baleful case of being more concerned to oppose non-violent forms of resistance to oppression than to oppose the most violent forms of oppression.”
The letter also disputed the argument that a suspension of the study abroad program with the University of Haifa would restrict academic freedom, pointing out that it would not prevent scholarly communication between faculty at Pitzer and faculty at Israeli universities. It also explained that a suspension would not restrict Israeli students from enrolling at Pitzer, nor would it restrict Pitzer students as individuals from studying at Israeli universities.
“Put simply, it interferes with no one’s academic freedom,” the letter read. “Very differently, it ends a privileged status Pitzer has afforded the University of Haifa. The scandal of the motion passed by the Student Senate is not that it limits academic freedom but, very differently, that it would put Pitzer as an institution on public records supporting Palestinian freedom and equality.”
The Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) Rabbinical Council expressed similar sentiments of support for the suspension in a March 7 letter to the Pitzer community. The letter began by detailing the role Israeli universities have played in “the ongoing, unspeakable violence unfolding in Israel-Palestine.”
“It is important to note that every major Israeli university is a government institution that is intimately tied to the Israeli military, furnishing it with scientific, geographic, demographic and other forms of research that directly supports Israel’s human rights abuse of Palestinians,” it read. “It is also worth noting that the Israeli military has destroyed every university in Gaza in its current assault.”
The Rabbinical Council’s letter then expressed support for the suspension of the study abroad program with the University of Haifa.
“Suspending institutional ties with Israeli universities is a powerful and meaningful action that Palestinians have long been asking of their allies,” it read. “The suspension of institutional ties with Israeli universities is an example of a non-violent act of resistance to Israeli oppression that all people of conscience should appreciate and support.”
The authors then argued against the idea that supporting the suspension is antisemitic.
“We know there will inevitably be those who accuse those who advocate these such acts of ‘antisemitism,’” the letter read. “We reject this slanderous and dangerous canard. There is nothing antisemitic about standing up for the liberation of the oppressed — in fact, it is a sacred core value of Jewish tradition. Indeed, in a time of rising antisemitism, racism and systemic bigotry, such accusations do no favors to the Jewish people — or any other group of people who have historically been targeted for persecution.”
Fukshansky disagreed with this idea.
“In holding up one country — which happens to be defined as being the only Jewish state in the world — to different standards, I’m sorry to say, that’s antisemitism,” he said.
He expressed his hopes for more open conversations in the future.
“I’m hoping for an environment where, instead of screaming past each other, we can engage in actual peaceful and meaningful dialogue,” he said. “Perhaps it can lead to something, but at the very least it will lead to all of us feeling more comfortable and less intimidated.”
Ben Lauren contributed reporting.