Kathy Hochul, the Governor of the State of New York, posted a letter to X on Saturday night stating that “calling for the genocide of any group of people” on the campus of a New York State public college or university “would constitute a violation of New York State Human Rights Law and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
She said that it was affirmed to her by the chancellor of the State University of New York (SUNY) that such calls would be considered a violation of SUNY’s code of conduct and that the chancellor of New York City’s public college and university system confirmed the same policy to be true for those schools as well.
“In addition,” Hochul wrote, “failure to address such activity would constitute a violation of New York State Human Rights Law as well as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” which holds recipients of federal funds (in Hochul’s words) “responsible for keeping students free from a hostile environment based upon their ethnicity or national origin – a standard that has been applied to antisemitism.”
Calls for genocide on college campuses violate New York’s Human Rights Law, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, & SUNY’s Code of Conduct. We’re prepared to take enforcement action if colleges & universities are found not in compliance. Read my letter to college presidents: pic.twitter.com/1bpW3s0LQh
— Governor Kathy Hochul (@GovKathyHochul) December 9, 2023
The letter came amid outrage over the testimony of three college presidents– Claudine Gay of Harvard, Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania– at a congressional hearing last week on the subject of campus antisemitism.
At the hearing, the three presidents were asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would constitute a violation of their schools’ bullying and harassment policies, and each of them said that, while a call for genocide is wrong, it would not necessarily violate the policies in question.
Hochul: answers at the hearing were disgraceful
“I was shocked,” Hochul said in her letter, “to see the presidents of several prominent universities…fail to clearly and unequivocally denounce antisemitism and calls for genocide of the Jewish people on their college campuses.” Hochul said that the “moral lapses that were evidenced by the disgraceful answers” given by those university presidents “cannot and will not be tolerated here in the state of New York.”
The United States has seen a surge of antisemitism following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. This surge has exacerbated an existing antisemitism issue on American college campuses.
Governor Hochul, a Democrat, visited Israel shortly after the attack on a solidarity visit.
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