Last year, California State University at Fresno halted a search to fill a newly created professorship in Middle East Studies, named after the late professor and pro-Palestinian apologist Edward Said. In response, an emerita faculty member, Vida Samiian, abruptly resigned the committee in protest, citing a “documented campaign of harassment and intimidation of search-committee members [conducted] by Israel-advocacy groups to influence and derail the outcome of the search.” The anti-Israel organization Jewish Voice for Peace quickly produced a petition with 500 signatures condemning the university’s action, and the Middle East Studies Association, a group called the Islamic Human Rights Commission, and a few others joined in. But the decision to suspend the search, which, contrary to allegations was not canceled, and in fact will soon be resumed, had nothing to do with Israel or politics, and everything to do with a struggle over departmental turf, as Steven Lubet explains:

The whole affair was nothing more than a rather mundane episode of internecine faculty politics, which would have been readily discoverable under California’s Open Records Act if anyone had wanted to seek it out. In reality, Zionists had absolutely nothing to do with the suspension of the search, and no lobbying groups seem even to have been aware of it. As is clearly shown in Fresno State’s 407-page file on the search controversy, which I recently obtained through an Open Records Act request, the main procedural problems had been identified over two months prior to the suspension, and they involved nothing more than inter-departmental turf disputes.

When funds had first been solicited for the Edward Said chair, it was expected that the position would be housed in the Philosophy and Religious Studies department. . . . The four finalists, however, were all social scientists. . . . It was this distinction, and not the ethnicity or specific scholarly interests of the finalists, [as Samiian alleged], that ultimately frustrated the search. . . . The details surrounding the search suspension were fully known to Samiian, who was copied on most of the internal correspondence. . . . As we now know, however, Samiian’s conjectures were repeated and amplified uncritically, even though they were baseless.

Jews have historically been the target of conspiracy theories, from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in 1903 and still ardently promoted in many places, to today’s Internet memes about the secret power of the Rothschild family. In current iterations, unnamed “Zionists” are often the villains of stories about behind-the-scenes control of government, financial institutions, the media, and, increasingly, universities. Some conspiracy theories are descended from age-old prejudices, others are driven by contemporary political allegiances, and many partake of both.

Whatever their form or origin, the conspiracy theories are widespread and persistent. Jewish Voice for Peace, and other groups, jumped predictably to the conclusion that Zionists had been responsible for closing the Said professorship search, when even the slightest inquiry would have shown the assumption to be false.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.