A Princeton alum tells NR his complaints about the apparent violation have been ignored by administrators.
Just days after Hamas’s brutal terror attack on Israeli civilians, the Princeton University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine used a school-wide email listserv to send a statement excusing the rape and murder of innocent people to the inbox of every student on campus, in apparent violation of university policy.
Under Princeton policy, “mass electronic mailings are permitted only as authorized by appropriate University offices.” Those same rules include a prohibition on distributing “malicious, harassing, or defamatory content through university channels.” A Princeton spokesman would not say whether SJP received permission to send the email from any university authority, but a Princeton alumnus and student tell National Review that the incendiary, issue-specific email represents a departure from the kinds of communications typically sent out to the student body.
More than three months after the email was sent, the students who wrote it and the organization they represent have not faced any consequences for the apparent violation of school policy.
The SJP members who wrote the October 14 statement, one of many that captured attention in the wake of October 7, blamed Israel for Hamas’s attack, justified the massacres that took place that day, and called for Israel’s destruction.
“We, the Princeton Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), hold the Israeli apartheid state ultimately responsible for the tremendous loss of life in Occupied Palestine, Gaza, and the West Bank,” the statement read. Describing Hamas’s actions as “an unprecedented uprising,” the authors “reject[ed] any discourse that uses the word ‘terrorism’ to describe Palestinian attacks on Israelis while not using the same label for the Israeli state violence that is the everyday reality for Palestinians.”
Later on in the missive, the SJP members “call[ed] for the full dismantling of the Zionist apartheid state” and decried a “dangerous public discourse that labels anyone supporting Palestinian liberation a ‘terrorist sympathizer,’” saying that they “demand decolonization” and that “peace is only possible if the occupation ends.”
Danielle Shapiro, a current Princeton student who wrote about the email in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, told National Review that the incendiary message was sent to an address covering all members of her residential college, and the addresses of each of the other six residential colleges on the university’s campus. As text underneath the body of the message reads, the email “was instantly sent to all college listservs.”
SJP was founded in 2001 by Hatem Bazian, a Berkeley professor, who was a fundraiser for a pro-Palestinian group that once had its assets frozen by the federal government because it was suspected of funding Hamas. Bazian, who has a long history of anti-Israel statements and tweets, has also called for an “intifada” in the U.S.
Several universities, including Brandeis, Columbia, George Washington, and Rutgers, have suspended their campus’s SJP chapters for violating university policy by harassing students and holding demonstrations without following their respective institution’s guidelines.
In a December 13 letter, Princeton University president Christopher Eisgruber assured Representative Mikie Sherrill (D., N.J.) that the institution he runs takes “every complaint seriously” when dealing with antisemitism on its campus.
But a Princeton alumnus tells National Review that his experience with the university suggests this is not the case.
Bill Hewitt, a 1974 graduate of Princeton who has remained involved with the institution in the half-century since he received his degree, filed a complaint regarding the university’s handling of campus antisemitism with the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC), a “permanent conference of the representatives of all major groups of the University.”
In a petition sent to the council’s judicial committee on December 18, Hewitt called into question the university’s lack of action on the campus SJP chapter’s seemingly unauthorized use of the schoolwide email listserv to send its statement.
Hewitt also mentions in his petition Princeton’s prohibition on distributing “malicious, harassing, or defamatory content” through university channels and argues that, because many Princeton students are Jewish or Israeli citizens — and have family living in Israel — the SJP statement sent to the entirety of the student population could constitute harassing, even malicious content.
The judicial committee is tasked with, among other things, hearing and deciding cases involving serious alleged violations of university policy.
However, Hewitt told NR, the committee has not yet moved to hear his complaint.
Hewitt, who has served in a variety of legal and business-side positions with large corporations and now conducts litigation discovery work in commercial lawsuits, was an active member of the Princeton Club of Chicago — serving on its board for a time — and its chapter in Northern California before recently moving to central Kentucky. He has interviewed prospective students for the Princeton Schools Committee and volunteered for the university’s annual giving phone-a-thon.
He told NR that, as “a strong supporter of Israel and Jews,” he took note of Eisgruber’s response to Sherrill’s letter.
“Eisgruber’s statement leapt to my attention,” Hewitt said, and after learning about SJP’s mass email through Shapiro’s op-ed, he “wondered whether any offended recipients would file a complaint.”
“When I learned of Zach Dulberg’s New York Post opinion piece as to his experience making a harassment complaint,” he told NR, referencing one of many students served with a no-contact order over pro-Israel speech, “I saw further opportunity to put Eisgruber’s assurances to Sherrill and the university community to the test.”
“I thought this complaint could lead the university to take small — but useful — steps to enforce its rules about university IT resources and identify boundaries for acceptable versus impermissible speech,” Hewitt said.
In this case, he told NR, the committee did confirm it received his petitions, but nothing else has happened as a result.
Hotchkiss told NR that scheduling could be to blame for the lack of action on the complaint thus far.
“The complaint will be addressed in accordance with University policy. I would note that the complaint was filed during fall term final exams, and the spring term began this week following the University’s winter break,” he wrote in an email.
While it is the case that, because the judicial committee is composed of administrators, faculty members, and student representatives, scheduling may indeed play a role in the lack of action on the complaint, there are questions that remain unanswered.
In addition to a question about whether the university had granted SJP permission to use the email listserv to send its October 14 statement, Hotchkiss did not address NR’s inquiry into whether the SJP email did indeed violate Princeton policy or whether the university believes the language in the statement constitutes malicious or harassing content under its IT guidelines. He also failed to say whether the university had considered taking action against the SJP members who sent the statement under either its requirement that students receive authorization before sending an email to the entire community or its policies against distributing malicious content.
Princeton has also come under fire in recent weeks over its handling of campus tensions surrounding the Israel-Hamas war, specifically its policy of issuing no-contact orders (the higher-education version of a restraining order) to students whose only offenses are either reporting on campus protests or expressing pro-Israel beliefs.
While university administrators have not yet determined whether the SJP email constitutes harassment, they have added trigger warnings to archival documents in the campus library for the purpose of “protecting researchers” from harmful content about historical racism. Both the no-contact policy and the trigger warnings added to archival documents appear to contravene the university’s stated “free-expression” principles.