While recruitment at the city’s top Jewish schools “had all but ceased” for CUNY schools, Lax argued, the university was also “hell-bent on replacing its Jews with anti-Semites.” Recent CUNY hiring decisions would seem to support this allegation. In 2021, Chancellor Rodríguez tapped Saly Abd Alla, a BDS supporter and civil rights director for the Minnesota chapter of CAIR—the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a pro-Hamas group—as “chief diversity officer” at CUNY. In 2022, Abd Alla was tasked with investigating claims of antisemitism and anti-Zionism which Lax had made internally—an assignment that the Post’s Melissa Klein called “a master class in ‘gaslighting.’”

The problems at CUNY garnered national attention in May 2023 when Fatima Mousa Mohammed, a graduate speaking at CUNY Law School’s commencement, called for a “revolution” and expressed hope that the “rage” of her fellow graduates would be “fuel for the fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism and Zionism around the world.” She said she had chosen to attend CUNY Law because it recognized that “the law is a manifestation of white supremacy that continues to oppress and suppress people in this nation and around the world.” With her head covered in a hijab, the Yemen-born, Queens-raised future lawyer lashed CUNY for continuing “to train and cooperate with the fascist NYPD, the military” and scorned the university for continuing “to train IDF soldiers to carry out that same violence globally.”

Trying to stave off legal consequences, in December 2023, Gov. Kathy Hochul issued a letter to the presidents of New York’s colleges and universities declaring that failure to address “calls for genocide” made on college campuses “would constitute a violation of New York State Human Rights Law as well as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” In October, after the outbreak of campus protests, Hochul had asked former state Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman to review “CUNY policies and procedures,” with an eye to recommending actions for the CUNY Board of Trustees “to bolster its anti-discrimination policies and help protect Jewish students and faculty.”

Lippman told the Post at the time he wanted to “analyze the actual atmosphere at CUNY and not just focus on formal written policies” in an administrative handbook. “How does it look on the ground? … And what can we recommend systemically, that will make it better?” Bratman was interviewed by Lippman’s team in January and said it included top lawyers from his current firm, Latham & Watkins, who seemed to be conducting a thorough study. But the report, which was supposed to be released last spring, has not seen the light of day. The governor has yet to explain the delay, and whether, as rumor has it, it is election related.

In another apparently PR-minded attempt to ward off lawsuits, Chancellor Rodríguez made showy announcements of several campus efforts to fight hate, including a new Center for Inclusive Excellence and Belonging (CIEB), and a student-run social media campaign called “Our CUNY: Hate Divides Us, Diversity Defines Us”—announcements that were conveniently made this summer, when school was out of session. This year, the New York City Council reportedly allocated $600,000—up $50,000 from last year—to CUNY for all the fancy portals, information gathering, training, and social messaging it has in mind to expand its “anti-hate initiatives”—a category that dilutes antisemitism in a pool of other “hatreds,” namely “Islamophobia.”

Who is investigating the claims the students make? Bratman said each of the 25 campuses in the CUNY system has one (or fewer) DEI personnel. And the single DEI officer might be an elderly person who receives hundreds of reports. If each report requires 10 hours of investigation, how would the task be possible—even if the employee were by chance a seasoned investigator who could analyze and write clearly? “The person will get to the 17th incident by November, and then the 60-day resolution window that they’ve put in place has already passed,” Bratman said.

But the more fundamental problem at CUNY, Bratman pointed out, is that the basic job of educating children has been abandoned. “Academia has been lost,” he said. “The essence of academia—open discourse, civil dialogue, and academic excellence—is gone. Academia used to be about growth, research, exploration, discovery, openness. Now it’s about boycotts. Today, the teachers believe their job is indoctrination.”

A faculty member in the physics department of another CUNY school who preferred to remain unnamed told me that students have stopped asking questions. “People don’t even know how to talk and think here. In some physics classes, we all notice that people don’t ask questions anymore. They don’t think about what they might want to know or say and ask questions. The intellectual level is very low.”

Along with a colleague, this professor is starting a club to show the students how to discuss an issue—ask questions, gather facts, make up a hypothesis and form an argument in a civil, academic manner. “They don’t know how to have a reasoned discussion based on facts, where you have some respect for the other side,” he said, adding optimistically “we want to show them what it is.”

Bratman said the baby boomers and the millennials are gone; the faculty is made up of people raised as social justice warriors. “The faculty is the scariest entity in this struggle,” he told me. “The faculty are the troublemakers, the faculty drives the context, the faculty sets the agenda, the faculty indoctrinates our students instead of educating them, instead of allowing them to grow.”

“They only want one voice to be heard and one solution: ‘intifada revolution.’ That’s what they will tell you is their agenda.”

A colleague in the English department told him that he plans to teach English 101 based on “Palestine and trans rights.” When Bratman “pushed back,” the faculty member told him he wants the students “to feel how I feel and how every Palestinian feels under their oppression and genocide.”

According to Bratman, “It’s fascist. It’s 1984, and it must be said very, very clearly.”

He asked me to step into the shoes of an 18-year-old student.

“You send your 18-year-old kid to school, right? They’re an impressionable, young, scared person, anxious. They come to class, their professor says, ‘In the class, you’re going to take on a queer identity, or the role of an oppressor.’ So what can the kids do? They can try to drop the class, which is going to be very hard for them because it’s their first year.

“Two, they can be a fighter in the class. It’s going to be terrible. They’ll have to take a stand every day, which is very hard for a young person to do.

“Or three, they’ll have to acquiesce. And most students will choose to acquiesce for the grade and to not make waves. That’s what’s happening to our students. They’re not just indoctrinated. They’re bamboozled, bombarded, propagandized by these faculty members who have lost their minds or worse, and who only have an agenda, only teach through bias, only teach through one perspective. Their whole goal is to minimize the opportunity for young people to grow.”

Bratman pointed out that every semester, teachers submit their curricula and syllabi to the provost, who is free to determine if they are or are not acceptable. “No one is saying no because they’re too afraid. Or too lazy.”

Emily Benedek has written for Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and Mosaic, among other publications. Her sixth book, Hometown Betrayal: A Tragic Story of Secrecy and Sexual Abuse in Mormon Country, will be published on October 15.