A week after a pro-Palestine protest on the Rutgers-New Brunswick campus dispersed following negotiations with university leadership, Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-Wyckoff) and Donald Norcross (D-Camden) have sent a letter to Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway questioning the university’s tactics.
The protest, which echoed similar encampments at other colleges around the country, had been ordered to disband by 4 p.m. on May 2 – and, unlike many equivalent protests, the protesters actually met that deadline thanks to Rutgers offering concessions on eight of their ten demands. But Norcross and Gottheimer’s letter calls into question why Rutgers administrators “appeased the demands of violent and hateful agitators.”
“We fear that the administration’s accession to troublesome demands made by protestors failed to adequately take into account the perspectives and voices of members of the Jewish community at Rutgers,” the letter states. “Furthermore, we are concerned that Rutgers appears to have incentivized people to act in a lawless and threatening manner by appeasing the demands of violent and hateful agitators while ignoring an analogous set of requests made peacefully to the University.”
According to the letter, a group of Jewish Rutgers faculty and students had made requests of the administration last December, such as providing training for school diversity and inclusion officers in combating antisemitism and creating a Committee on Antisemitism and the Jewish Experience – requests that Gottheimer and Norcross said remain unanswered.
“Collectively, these actions, and lack thereof, send the disturbing message that those on campus who abide by the rules and engage respectfully with the administration will be ignored while persistent purveyors of harassment, hatred, and intimidation will be rewarded,” the letter states.
The letter asks Holloway to reply by next Thursday with answers on what level of engagement the Rutgers administration has had with Jewish students and on whether the university intends to implement the recommendations of Jewish members of the community.
Gottheimer and Norcross are far from the only people to criticize Rutgers’ tactics in dealing with the protests. Many Republican state legislators have called for legislative hearings on the negotiations, while Gov. Phil Murphy said he didn’t think the administration had done enough to engage with Jewish students and faculty.
“If you’re going to sit down with one group of students, and you’re going to go through a [list of] ‘Will you consider this?’ – what about the folks, in this case in particular, the Jewish students, who apparently had given a set of demands back in December?” Murphy said yesterday, per ROI-NJ. “You owe everybody their seat at the table.”
But as Holloway himself noted in a statement to the Rutgers Board of Governors earlier this week, Rutgers achieved something that few other colleges managed: a peaceful resolution to the protests with no police involvement.
“I am confident in our decisions,” Holloway wrote. “They allowed us to maintain a safe and controlled environment, to protect Rutgers students and Rutgers property, and to assure that our students’ academic progress – taking finals and completing the semester – was not impeded.”