OPINION:
For years, the University of Michigan has marketed itself as diverse and inclusive. Yet a double standard persists. Harassment, intimidation and threats of violence that would be condemned instantly if they were aimed at any other group are tolerated when the targets are Jews.
The situation recently got so dire that federal law enforcement was forced to step in. On June 10, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment against eight pro-Palestinian activists for running a coordinated campaign of threats and vandalism against university leaders, law enforcement officials, local businesses and the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit, allegedly to force the University of Michigan to divest from Israel.
I am familiar with these so-called activists. They are the same types who ganged up on my pro-Israel peers and me in the student government. Why? To ostracize us for our support of the sole democracy in the Middle East, practicing the values for which it claims to stand.
This past year, I applied to fill an open seat for the School of Music, Theatre & Dance representative in U-M’s Central Student Government. During my interview, someone pointed out that I was associated with Students Supporting Israel, the group that had recently brought former Israel Defense Forces soldiers to campus.
With that one line, half of the assembly ignored all my qualifications and voted against my candidacy — simply because I support the state of Israel.
Universities were built to be engines of research and forums for debate, deliberation and discourse — places to help solve society’s hardest problems. That mission has been overshadowed by a turn toward grievance and mob rule.
Our institutions have let a leadership vacuum fester. It is the kind that produces the conduct of which eight individuals connected to the University of Michigan now stand accused.
Higher education is supposed to expose us to different points of view and teach us to engage one another with curiosity and civility, to debate a question and still have dinner with the person who took the other side.
It is meant to teach us that the world is imperfect and that compromise is how we effect change.
Instead, when someone holds a different view, these “activists” skip the conversation entirely. They brand the other side dangerous, fascist or whatever other epithet is trending and shut them out. If you do not conform, you must be a terrible person, unworthy of their time.
That societal rot is on full display at the University of Michigan. A culture that excuses escalating rhetoric and treats the other side as evil as an acceptable starting point for debate makes it easier for the few who do cross the line to feel justified.
According to the federal indictment, two of the accused allegedly agreed to “kill,” “torment” and “terrorize” their targets and the targets’ families. One, who was a medical student, allegedly wrote that a victim’s “entire family” was on his “hit list” and that he would become her doctor to “poison her a— slowly.”
Prosecutors say the group threw glass jars of butyric acid into family homes in the dead of night.
Jewish students are told we are overreacting when we raise concerns about our safety. This indictment proves we are not being dramatic; we are living with the consequences of a generation taught that violence is “activism.”
We need a culture shift. We must recover critical thinking and resist the pull of the bandwagon, harder than ever, when algorithms profit by feeding us only what we already believe.
The good news is that for the vast majority of us, who would never use threats or violence, it is a simple task. Have an honest conversation with someone you disagree with, without assuming the other person is evil for thinking differently, and while seeing them as human beings, not just their opinions on any single issue.
It sounds easy because it is. We simply have to choose, together, to talk like adults again. I have hope, but the clock is ticking. Cases such as this one are evidence of how little time we may have.
The federal indictment should be a wake-up call. What happened at the University of Michigan is not the product of eight isolated individuals acting in a vacuum. It is what happens when a culture rewards ideological zealotry, excuses harassment and treats disagreement as a moral offense.
The question is no longer whether higher education has a problem. The question is how much worse must it get before universities decide to confront it.
• Addison Stone is a rising senior at the University of Michigan, focusing on war and conflict studies, and is president of the university’s Students Supporting Israel chapter.
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