In Their Own Words: How Sarah Lawrence Failed Jewish Students

The House Education and Workforce Committee’s new report on campus antisemitism contains something more revealing than its conclusions: the document appendix—hundreds of pages of internal university emails, one of the most revealing document troves in higher education in years. What administrators said privately, in real time, as Jewish students reported fear and isolation in the weeks after October 7, tells us far more than any official statement ever could. As a professor, I have seen how institutions narrate themselves publicly. These emails tell a very different story. At Sarah Lawrence College, the email record is unambiguous. And it shows an institution treating Jewish alarm not as a warning sign, but as a nuisance. Much of what happened is already public. According to a press release from Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg, a Jewish student harassed throughout the prior academic year received a message from Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter members after October 7 telling him he “should have been killed in Israel.” He left the college, in part because of its “refusal to protect him.” Other students left or considered leaving. SJP posted statements calling on peers to “defend the student intifada” and described the October 7 massacres as an “uprising.” The college responded by giving SJP a student leadership award. The nominating faculty member wrote, in the official college system, that SJP members were doing their “daily work against genocide in Gaza.” The Student Involvement office confirmed the winner in writing: “Yes, SJP!” That is what was visible from the outside. The internal record is worse. In emails obtained through the investigation, Dave Stanfield—the college’s Vice President and Dean of Students, the official charged with fostering a sense of belonging for every student on campus—dismissed Jewish student concerns as “exaggerated and alarmist,” writing that multiple claims had been investigated and found “factually inaccurate.” A verdict delivered by the official responsible for their safety. When a Jewish parent wrote to report that a professor had canceled class after most students left for a pro-Palestinian walkout, noting that their child “for the first time feels very let down by the professor and the school,” Stanfield’s response to a colleague was procedural: Should we clarify faculty discretion on cancellations? The response focused on policy—not the student’s experience. The Executive Director of Hillels of Westchester was writing directly to President Cristle Collins Judd throughout this period, in increasingly urgent terms: “there are many scared Jewish students on campus. Please speak out for them.” She described students who felt “invisible,” who held invitation-only mourning events hidden from campus common spaces—not out of preference, but because they feared protests at a mourning event. Jewish students hid their grief. At a college that was simultaneously celebrating SJP’s “activism” in official award ceremonies. What emerges in these emails is not urgency or empathy—but a pattern of dismissal and, at times, clear hostility. Presented with a formal letter from the Hillels of Westchester Board urging concrete action, Dave Stanfield dismissed it with open sarcasm: “I suppose she will recommend… that we disband SJP. Yeah, not gonna happen.” When pressed further, Vice President for Advancement and External Affairs Patricia Goldman pivoted to attack: “What about Hillel’s disgraceful silence?” When Judd forwarded the letter to colleagues, her three-word introduction was: “Here we go.” Not urgency. Not concern. Irritation. The faculty culture was consistent with this posture. When the Provost sent a neutral memo on attendance policy during the April 2024 pro-Palestinian walkout, a faculty member replied by invoking Harold Taylor’s 1951 defense of academic freedom against the American Legion—treating administrative neutrality as institutional betrayal. Jewish students had concealed their mourning events for fear of harassment. Pro-Palestinian walkouts received faculty protection and historical glorification. One standard for Jewish students. Another for everyone else. Applied consistently, in writing, by the people running the institution. Why did they respond this way? These documents do not reveal cartoonish villains. They reveal something more troubling: administrators and faculty who had come to see Jewish fear as suspect, Jewish organizations as complicit, and those targeting Jewish students as morally justified. How that framework was built—through hiring, through the intellectual culture of a place like Sarah Lawrence, through years of treating anti-Zionism as conscience rather than prejudice—is its own story. What the documents show is that framework in operation. And what it produced has a name. Not just indifference. Not just negligence. Not just institutional drift. This is the kind of differential treatment Title VI exists to confront—willful, sustained, and directed at Jewish students. Sarah Lawrence did not fail its Jewish students accidentally. It disbelieved them, dismissed them, and rewarded the people making them afraid. The record is now public. What remains is whether anyone will enforce the law.