Protesting Northwestern U’s Flawed Compulsory Training on Criticism of Israel as “Antisemitism”

Henry S. Bienen

Interim President, Northwestern University

nupresident@northwestern.edu

 

Dear President Bienen and Colleagues: 

 

We write on behalf of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and its Committee on Academic Freedom to express our deep concern about your decision to prevent students from enrolling in classes unless they complete the deeply flawed online anti-bias training that Northwestern University has mandated for all undergraduate and graduate students. Sanctioning students for their principled opposition to this problematic training, in the manner of a corporation disciplining its employees, is unworthy of a self-respecting institution of higher education. It is also a violation of your students’ right to free speech and of the principles of academic freedom.

 

MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, the Association publishes the prestigious International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 2,800 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and outside of North America.

 

According to The Daily Northwestern, the new online training was introduced on 20 February 2025, pursuant to President Donald Trump’s controversial executive order of 29 January 2025 titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism.” The training is titled “Building a Community of Respect and Breaking Down Bias” and (following introductory material by university leaders and staff) includes a pair of videos provided by non-academic organizations. The first video, “Antisemitism Here/Now,” was produced by the Jewish United Fund, a Chicago-based Israel advocacy organization. The second video, “Beyond the Headlines: Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Biases,” was the work of a company called The Inclusion Expert, LLC.

 

Students and others have pointed out that both videos crudely reduce complex and highly contested histories and geographies to inaccurate claims, emotive morality tales and vapid platitudes. “Antisemitism Here/Now” embraces the widely criticized IHRA definition of antisemitism and repeatedly conflates criticism of the state of Israel and of Zionism with antisemitism. It depicts Israel as simply and unquestionably the embodiment of the right of Jews to self-determination in their historic homeland, an assertion which is certainly central to Zionist ideology but is hardly uncontested, including by many Jews. The video also completely elides Palestinian aspirations and rights. It presents a stylized graphic purporting to be “a contemporary map” that includes both the Golan Heights and all of Jerusalem within the territory of Israel, ignoring the fact that most of the world regards the Golan and East Jerusalem as occupied territories. The graphic appears to present the West Bank as a unit within Israel named Judea and Samaria, erasing the realities of an Israeli occupation that violates international law. Viewers will learn nothing from the video about Israeli settlements on confiscated Palestinian land, militarized checkpoints, the separation wall or Israeli-only highways, all features of a regime that the International Court of Justice has ruled constitutes an instance of apartheid, a crime under international law. “Antisemitism Here/Now” highlights the violence and loss of life incurred during Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023 but fails to mention Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza. 

 

In short, the understanding of antisemitism past and present that the video conveys reflects the perspective of a non-academic organization seeking to further its own political agenda, which is apparently that of the Israeli right. The video is certainly not informed by the serious research on, and sophisticated pedagogical approaches to, antisemitism, Zionism and the Palestine conflict that scholars and educators at Northwestern and elsewhere have produced over the decades. Colleges and universities certainly have an obligation to combat antisemitism, along with all other forms of racism, but forcing your students to participate in a training that utilizes such blatantly one-sided and inaccurate materials does a great disservice to the training’s ostensible purpose.

 

The second video in the training, “Beyond the Headlines,” is a set piece of evasion. It makes no mention of there being actual Palestinians in Palestine. Set to a muzak backdrop, the video offers a breezy narrative of “Islam’s” contributions to the Enlightenment before “Western Christendom dismantled Muslim civilizations,” a thoroughly unscholarly (indeed, bizarre) formulation. It then jumps to post-9/11 Islamophobia, namechecking the “contributions” of prominent Muslims, Palestinians and Arabs (“Steve Jobs, of Syrian heritage, transformed the face of global technology”). Like the “Antisemitism Here/Now” video, it fails to mention what has been happening in Gaza over the past two years.

 

On 16 September 2025, students who in good conscience objected to, and refused to complete, this deeply flawed training received an email from Northwestern’s administration informing them that they would be barred from enrolling in courses. We note that barring international students from enrolling in courses puts their visa status at risk, while for some graduate students course enrollment is a prerequisite for retaining their positions as teaching or research assistants. Northwestern also threatened that students who did not complete the training by 20 October 2025 would lose eligibility “to live in campus housing, access campus facilities or receive financial aid, including Federal Work Study allocations.” 

 

The cardinal issue at stake here is not the lack of “balance” or symmetry between the two videos. It is that Northwestern is seeking to coerce its students, as a condition of their enrollment, to affirm their acceptance of inaccurate, tendentious and in some respects offensive viewpoints authored by external organizations that possess no scholarly expertise and have no standing to produce credible knowledge. Acquiescence in a mandatory “training” about contested issues is a feature of authoritarian regimes and corporate entities; it has no place in a university that claims to be dedicated to fostering independent thought and the free exchange of ideas and opinions.

 

We remind you of the statement in Northwestern’s own faculty handbook regarding the university’s “mission to discover, produce, and communicate knowledge to students…. This mission depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.” We also call your attention to the AAUP’s recent warning about the misuse of antidiscrimination law to create an enforcement apparatus that represses freedom of thought and expression: “Allegations of discrimination must not be used to undermine entire bodies of knowledge; to demonize student, staff, and faculty protest; to undercut or eliminate shared governance; and otherwise to destroy the possibility of democratic higher education.”

 

We therefore call on you to live up to Northwestern University’s avowed ethos of free inquiry by immediately rescinding the threat to block non-complying students’ ability to register for courses and their access to financial aid and university resources. We further call on you to engage seriously with the criticisms of the anti-bias training that students and others have raised, and to promptly and thoroughly revise the training so that it embodies genuine scholarly expertise, rather than the uninformed or deliberately partisan perspectives of outside organizations.

 

We look forward to your response.

 

Sincerely,

 

 

Aslı Ü. Bâli 

MESA President

Professor, Yale Law School

 

Laurie A. Brand
Chair, Committee on Academic Freedom
Professor Emerita, University of Southern California

 

Cc:

 

Farida Shaheed

United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education