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Dear Members of the Campus Community,

By now, many of you will have heard about a recent interfaith dialogue program that was disrupted when one of the panelists, an imam, publicly refused to share the panel with the another guest speaker, calling him a “Zionist” and leading Muslim students in a walkout.

Immediately after the event, we began receiving complaints in our Chief Diversity Office alleging antisemitism and violent threats which are now being investigated to see whether the actions violated our discrimination or harassment policies. Investigations of this nature are governed by the challenging interplay between the rights we all have under the First Amendment, and the obligations that colleges and universities have under Title VI regulations to protect our communities against discrimination and harassment.

What is clear to me is that one of the most distressing moments of the event, captured on tape, was the voice of a Jewish student, responding when the chaplain said he was shocked at the walkout, saying: “We’re not. This happens all the time.”

We cannot persist as a community if there are members saying, with good reason, that they feel unwelcome and sidelined. I had always thought that the true beauty of City College—something of which I am so very proud—is the embrace we have typically extended for people from every corner of the world, from every rung on the social ladder, and with the greatest variety of human experience and culture.

Quite apart from our ongoing investigation, I wanted to address several issues:

The interfaith dialogue was a college event organized by our new chaplain designed to deepen interfaith understanding. The imam’s speech, and the walkout, made dialogue impossible. The act should be anathema in an institution founded on the belief that knowledge requires us to face even the most contentious issues with resolve and respectful engagement. If the imam in question did not share that belief, he should never have taken the stage. As a speaker who accepted the responsibility of joining the panel, his acts were diametrically opposed to the campus ethos that inspired the interfaith conversation.

In the days that followed, several serious consequences surfaced: The Imam was threatened with murder. The college worked with the NYPD to verify the threat and an arrest was made. We also learned of a social media post that directly called out the other guest speaker, the campus leader of Hillel (who did not even get the opportunity to speak at the dialogue event). While the words in that post may not have explicitly threatened violence, we live in a world where public and personally directed condemnation can bring deadly consequences, regardless of a poster’s intentions. At minimum, the democracy we hold dear demands care and caution. Ideally, it should encourage a deeper effort to find common ground.

As a campus, we will respond to these recent events in several ways, in addition to the aforementioned investigation. We are modifying the way we process and approve student events, passing them—like every other campus event—through our Events Committee with due diligence given to ensuring they have effective and trained moderators. We will continue to deploy the tools that we, and the university, have developed to deepen our ability to engage respectfully with one another, including the work of our Constructive Dialogue Initiative and our Sustained Dialogue Institute. We will be carefully considering what the future of interfaith programming looks like at CCNY— is there a way forward for these kinds of discussions? How might they be strengthened to avoid disruption and disrespect? When we proceed, it will be with a more careful set of programming guidelines.

As we move into the last days of the fall semester and into the holiday season, I urge you to reflect on a few things. Think, for instance, how much easier it is to tear down our civil inheritance than it will be to build it back up. Think how precious an opportunity we have been given to gather each day and embark, together, on a search for knowledge and truth. Consider, perhaps, what it would look like on all sides to persuade rather than punish, or to see arriving at deeper understanding and engagement as more important than scoring a point against a perceived adversary.

We will never know, until it’s too late, when we have finally broken the civil bonds that connect us, one to another. Let’s not make efforts to build community and deepen understanding of the occasion for that rupture. The diversity that we talk about so often, and with such pride, is not itself a solution to strife: it is an opportunity to work with the raw material of difference and fashion from its resilience built on the strength of our heterogeneity. I wish you all a productive end to the semester, a peaceful holiday season and the wisdom and grace to be careful with one another.

Vince Boudreau
President