In the wake of a series of anti-Semitism charges filed against St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, the institution has had to acknowledge a long-standing problem in its history.
St. Cloud State University agreed to pay $314,678 to a group of professors who sued the school over charges of anti-Semitism, while other faculty who shared in the suit will split a $50,000 fund. The school also decided to create a Jewish studies center and change its discrimination policies.
“St. Cloud State University deeply regrets any acts of anti-Semitism that have occurred on the university campus or in the community,” said SCSU president Roy Saigo in a statement. “St. Cloud State University and the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System strongly oppose anti-Semitism and any other form of discrimination.”
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Arie Zmora, a faculty member of SCSU’s history department, along with two other professors and a student, sued the university for being forced to hear their colleagues describe the history department as the “Christian department” and for their support of Nazi Germany.
Zmora is an Israeli immigrant.
“This was never about money,” Judy Schermer, lawyer for Zmora, told the Chronicle. “This was about bringing about real change. There were complaints for decades about discrimination at this university.”
Complaints of discrimination at SCSU are nothing new. Such complaints include racist flyers and allegations of faculty performing “Heil Hitler” salutes.
In some cases, certain SCSU faculty members allegedly sent letters to high schools urging students to avoid the university, as it would be detrimental for them to enroll.
The school has never denied it has a discrimination problem. In 2001, the Minnesota Legislature devoted an entire hearing to the situation of anti-Semitic allegations at SCSU.
In the past decade, some professors have estimated the number of Jewish faculty has declined by nearly 40 percent.
While no one has claimed the university has a policy of removing Jews from its composition, many feel it has been immune to the discrimination faced by Jewish faculty.
The university has taken a number of steps to address the problem. These include hiring an independent investigator to look into discrimination complaints and reviewing internal mechanisms that deal with how investigation complaints are handled.
Cornelius Schnauber, professor of German and expert in the history of anti-Semitism at the University of Southern California, said the incident at SCSU was most likely isolated.
Schnauber noted that academia must also strive to separate anti-Semitism from pure criticism.
“Anti-Semitism in colleges among faculty is mostly isolated,” Schnauber said. “On the same hand, we must differentiate anti-Semitism and questions of policy concerning Jews and Israel.”
