The Brooklyn College faculty has scheduled a mandatory “implicit bias coaching” for members of the school’s search committees for the morning of Yom Kippur.
Brooklyn College Schedules Mandatory “Implicit Bias Training” on Yom Kippur https://t.co/x3OcYzkfky
— Global News Club (@GlobalNewsClubs) October 1, 2022
The watchdog group StopAntiSemitism reported that the coaching is remitted for many who serve on job search committees with one of many 4 Zoom periods set for 11:30 AM Wednesday, the morning of Yom Kippur.
The group cited a Jewish professor who said that picking the date which is the holiest day of the year to all Jews, constitutes an act of bias against “observant Jews and secular Jews who sometimes attend providers on this at some point of the year. Such Jews are afforded solely three assembly alternatives, whereas all others are afforded 4.”
“That seems like implicit bias to me,” said the anonymous professor, who pointed out the irony of holding mandatory anti-bias coaching on a day that biases an entire segment of the college’s population.
StopAntiSemitism recently issued a scathing report card on antisemitism in US universities, which included the following segment about the City University of New York, which encompasses Brooklyn College:
In July 2022, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) filed a Title VI complaint to the OCR against CUNY regarding a series of consistent antisemitic incidences on its campuses. Antisemitic activity such as the distribution of hate-filled flyers targeting Jews – some of which included swastikas and attacked “Zionists” – have been commonplace at the University campuses in recent years. Despite this, CUNY has not taken any action or shown any intention of resolving the matter of what the ACLJ calls “pervasive antisemitic discrimination.”
These hate-fueled incidents resulted in retracted funding of $50,000 from the New York City Council that had been set aside for the school. A hearing on the matter was set for June 8 but had to be postponed when CUNY Chancellor Felix V. Matos Rodriguez cited a scheduling conflict and couldnʼt attend.
However, he also noted that he didn’t want to attend, and when the hearing was delayed to June 30th, Rodriguez canceled again. The hearing proceeded with Jewish students from CUNY testifying they felt their well-being was in danger – citing multiple incidences of harassment, assaults, and antisemitic slurs. The administrators who were in attendance confessed there werenʼt any programs for training staff on responding to antisemitism at CUNY, nor do they log antisemitic incidents. They also brought up that the school has not adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism – a definition that required for universities to sign onto yearly for federal government funding to acknowledge their Title VI participation.
In July, the US Department of Education accused the City University of New York of becoming a “pervasively hostile environment for Jewish students,” in a complaint alleging violations of the Civil Rights Act. According to the American Center for Law & Justice in Washington DC, “Some of the harassment on CUNY campuses has become so commonplace as to almost be normalized.”
Court papers cite incidents at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn where a Jewish professor “found swastikas carved into the door and her keyboard drenched in urine” and another Jewish professor from Israel was asked how many people she had killed.
The college’s former interim president said there were “too many Jews” on the school’s faculty.
