The Canadian university survey details how anti-Zionism is destroying academic freedom, today

There is a lot of material in the Canadian Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences (CASE) survey that was just released, and I don't want to bury any of the important points. I already discussed the appendix pointing out how the students don't even understand that standard antisemitic tropes are bigoted to begin with. 

Another very disturbing finding is how the environment on campus is destroying the fundamental right of academic freedom to begin with.  

BDS justifies boycotting Israeli academia in the name of academic freedom, and the irony is obvious: they are shutting down access to Israeli research and study, the very opposite of such freedom, by claiming that this is what Israel does. In reality, every example they give is where Israel is responding to specific security needs: checkpoints that slow a professor's commute from Ramallah to Bir Zeit, a university closed after a wave of terror attacks, a permit denied to a visiting lecturer. That is the preferred frame. Israel restricts, the world's students and faculty must speak up.

CASE describes a chilling effect on academic freedom happening right now, on North American campuses, at a scale that dwarfs anything done to Palestinians.. It is the academic freedom of Jewish students, and almost nobody talks about it.

The survey polled roughly 900 Jewish students across Canadian postsecondary institutions. The results are chilling: 

• 71.8% limit what they say in class about being Jewish. 
• 41.3% avoid certain classes or events altogether. 
• 39.8% say antisemitism has hurt their academic performance. 
• 32.5% have considered dropping a course or leaving their program because of it. 
• 25.9% have considered leaving their university entirely.

When you look at classroom-level issues, the problem is worse. 36% encountered course content or discussion they experienced as antisemitic or biased. 34% had a professor bring up Jews, Israel, or Zionism in a class where the subject had nothing to do with any of it. 47% felt pressured to share their opinion of Israel with other students, 36% felt pressured to conform to a professor's views on the subject, and 20% felt pressured to join an anti-Israel protest. 

Eighteen percent of the incidents students described named a faculty member as the source of the problem, and another seven percent named a teaching assistant, meaning the people grading these students' work are, by their own account, sometimes the ones doing the intimidating.

This is what an actual academic freedom crisis looks like: a quarter of the affected population weighing whether to abandon their education, and two in five reporting that their grades have already suffered for it.

The usual debate about academic freedom discusses the freedom of the professors to say what they want. Do they have the right to write offensive things on social media? Do they have the right to bring their politics into the lecture hall? Can they move the class itself to a protest encampment? 

Nobody asks whether the professor lecturing on "Zionism as a death cult" or assigning a podcast that likens Zionism to Nazism is violating the academic freedom of the Jewish student sitting in the third row, the one who must now calculate whether raising their hand is worth the risk. A university is a place where students are supposed to be free to question a professor's claims, disagree with a reading, or simply stay silent, without paying for it in a grade or in the room's good opinion of them. The CASE report makes this argument explicitly: a professor's freedom to express a strong political view does not cancel a student's freedom to question it, dissent from it, or decline to answer at all. When 71.8% of a population self-censors and 18% name their professors as the source of the antisemitism they've faced, that second freedom is the one actually collapsing. 

Not to mention that there is a power asymmetry between the lecturer and the student. For all the talk among progressives  about the dangers of power disparities, this one is not considered a problem when the instructor is on the "right side of history." The silenced student has little power to fight back.

Grading a Jewish student down for writing about the sexual violence of October 7, as one CASE respondent describes happening to her, generates no petition and no coverage, because the assumption on campus is that this is simply what a controversial classroom discussion looks like. It is not. It is a professor using the power to grade as a weapon against a viewpoint she does not share, and the CASE data suggest it happens routinely enough that Jewish students have already built their behavior around expecting it. Self-censorship is as debilitating to a campus environment as external censorship is. 

Nobody needs to be fired, no protest needs to be banned, no professor needs to lose the freedom to say something odious about Zionism from behind a podium. A written policy protecting student dissent will not by itself produce it, because the student in the third row is weighing the cost of speaking up against the professor's actual conduct, not the student handbook. If a professor is going to declare that Zionism is an evil ideology or that Israel is a "sea of savages and barbarians," as CASE respondents report hearing, that professor has to say just as clearly, and just as often, that disagreement is welcome and will cost nothing in the grade book. The students deserve the same respect the professors demand for  themselves. A lecturer who loudly expresses an opinion must be equally loud that others can disagree. When the disagreement descends into sneering dismissal is when academic freedom is shut down.  

The side that has the power to give grades and decide on a student's future is in a position of power, and the more strident the opinion, the more important it is to make anyone who disagrees feel comfortable. 

A Jewish student who has watched classmates get frozen out for saying something politically incorrect about Israel or the Palestinians will read an unqualified political declaration as exactly what it is: a rule as to what is acceptable and unacceptable to say in the classroom.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)