After witnessing Jewish student life at Cornell University up close as an adjunct professor of law, Menachem Rosensaft, who knows a thing or two about antisemitism, said if he were to rate the Ivy League campus for how it handled the surge of antisemitic activity that rocked universities nationwide in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, he would give a “B.” 

The Anti-Defamation League gave the school a near-failing “D,” in the Campus Antisemitism Report Card that was first released in April and revised last week, which assigned grades from A through F to 85 U.S. universities’ institutional response to campus antisemitism. 

Rosensaft, who has taught a course at Cornell Law School on the law of genocide and war crimes trials since 2008 and who last year created a new course titled “Antisemitism in the Courts and in Jurisprudence,” called the “D” grade “unwarranted and decidedly does not correspond to what I have seen and have experienced on campus.” 

“This was done from a distance,” Rosensaft, general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress, told eJewishPhilanthropy, adding that the analysis was “shallow” and “did not give any justification for the grade or recommendations of what should be done in order for the university to improve its grade.” 

The schools selected for the report card were among the country’s top liberal arts colleges, in addition to schools with the highest enrollment of Jewish students, according to the antisemitism watchdog group. The report card — both the original and revised versions — have received sharp rebuke from Jewish leaders and organizations, including from Hillel, the most prominent group serving Jewish students, which typically has a good relationship with the ADL.

“We do not believe it is constructive or accurate to try to assign grades to schools,” Adam Lehman, Hillel’s CEO, said in April. “Efforts to do so, however well-intended, produce misleading impressions regarding the actual Jewish student experience at those schools.” (A spokesperson for Hillel said the group did not have a further statement about the revised report card.) 

Since Oct. 7, two high-profile incidents shook Cornell, both of which were acknowledged by the report card, and led to its low grade: the threats of physical violence against Jewish students and the declaration from history professor Russell Rickford that he was “exhilarated” by Hamas’ brutality. The student who made threats was quickly arrested, and Rickford was placed on a leave of absence. 

Rosensaft said that because the purpose of the report card is not to catalog antisemitism incidents, but to “evaluate how the respective universities and colleges have addressed and handled antisemitism since Oct. 7,” Cornell should have received a higher grade. “What I find really troubling is that they didn’t do onsite interviews with Hillel directors, Chabad rabbis and Jewish studies professors,” Rosensaft said. “The Jewish student groups on campus are the ones who know what’s been happening.” (According to the ADL, surveys were sent to all Hillels and Chabads; many did not respond). 

The ADL said in June that responses to anti-Israel encampments that overtook dozens of campuses led to the revision of the report card, which included upping the grades it gave to 12 schools, including Princeton and Stanford universities. The grades of three schools, including the University of California, Los Angeles, were revised downward, from “D” to “F,” for “serious incidents at encampments on campus and lack of adequate administration response.” In both versions, only two schools — Brandeis and Elon universities — received an A grade. Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology were among the schools that received an F grade. Overall, the revised version showed a minor improvement in the ADL’s assessment, with two schools receiving an “A,” 18 schools receiving a “B,” 32 receiving a “C,” 24 receiving a “D” and nine receiving an “F.”

The idea to create a report card ranking universities’ handling of antisemitism came about prior to Oct. 7, Shira Goodman, senior director of advocacy for the ADL, told JI. “All fall, even before the war, we were talking about rising antisemitism over the past years, what their obligations were under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and the National Strategy to Counter Antisemitsm.”

The Oct. 7 attacks sped up the process, Goodman said, noting that “when there are problems in the Middle East, it tends to increase antisemitism at home.” 

“As we saw protests and rising incidents being reported to the ADL, we launched our campus antisemitism legal line,” Goodman said, adding that by winter break, “we wrote to universities that they had to get it together, what we saw happening over the past few months can’t keep happening. That’s when we decided we needed to hold universities accountable and on Jan 11 announced that we were going to do a report card.” 

“We had been giving universities tools and resources all along [and now was the time] to hold them accountable,” Goodman said.

The group looked at three main categories for its rankings: incidents; administrative policies and procedures; and Jewish life (support available for Jewsh students). Goodman said that even the schools with D’s and F’s mostly “had really strong Jewish support… that’s important to point out.” 

In response to the criticism that the rankings did not include interviews with Jewish students and visits to all of the campuses, Goodman said that a campus climate survey was conducted in the fall. “We also went out in the field in October,” she said. “We were not able to include surveys on each campus… [ADL CEO] Jonathan Greenblatt and regional directors did visit many campuses but that was not part of the report card criteria itself.” In Cornell’s case, ADL New York’s regional director, Scott Richman, paid a visit. 

“We heard the criticism and it’s something we’re thinking about in the future,” Goodman continued. “Obviously there are costs associated [and] wanting to make sure it’s done right. We’re thinking about how to have more of that student and professional voice in there, but we never said we were measuring the individual student experience [but rather] the levels of antisemitism and the university response.” The ADL said it will continue to update the report card on an annual basis each April.

The ADL has also recently faced criticism by some for how it defines antisemitism. Last month, editors of Wikipedia voted to rate the watchdog group as an unreliable source on matters related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Several commenters on the free online encyclopedia said the ADL should be considered unreliable because it uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, which is also used by the U.S. government and several dozen nations, and which some on the left believe chills legitimate criticism of Israel. 

However, Goodman emphasized to JI that free speech was factored into the report card, noting that peaceful pro-Palestinan rallies were not necessarily deemed antisemitic, though in practice the organization categorized them as such. “[It was done] the same way we count antisemitism for our audit,” she said. “Harassment, graffiti, that kind of thing [was counted]. Criticism of Israel or support for civilian life in Gaza did not count as antisemitic. Support for Hamas or ‘Israel has no right to exist,’ attributing the actions of the Israeli government to all Jews everywhere, those kinds of things were counted.” The ADL’s 2023 audit counted 8,873 incidents, 3,162 (36% of the total) of which specifically contained elements referencing Israel or Zionism. Six hundred and forty-four Israel-related incidents took place on college and university campuses. The numbers contained 1,350 incidents included due to a post-Oct. 7 methodology update.  

In April, Rosensaft wrote in the Cornell Sun that it was “ironic” that Goodman compared the report card to the national college rankings by U.S. News and World Report. 

He said, “for as long as I can remember, the annual U.S. News and World Report survey has been criticized for using methodologies that do not adequately or accurately reflect the actual conditions at the different universities and colleges.”