At a moment when the country and its culture are fundamentally confused about race, religion, Jews, and the Middle East, Syracuse University is pausing the enrollment of new majors in the Jewish Studies Program along with majors in the Department of African American Studies, the Department of Religion, and the Program in Middle East Studies. Add to that Classics, European languages, and other programs across the Humanities.
Based on harsh budgetary pressures and the need to “reallocate resources,” the decision by SU to pause new enrollments to majors identified by the Administration as “third tier” and to do so with the possibility of ultimately closing some programs will cause real damage to the undergraduate experience at SU. It will make SU less attractive to students and their families, and is only generating confusion among students at SU.
The minor in Jewish Studies and the major in Modern Jewish Studies at Syracuse University take the Jewish experience in modern times as its signature focus. A student minor or major can build their coursework around a flexible, individually crafted course of study. Our popular courses explore American, European, Israeli and Yiddish literatures, Jewish thought and culture, Jewish history, Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Holocaust and antisemitism, as well as an introduction to Judaism, the Hebrew Bible, the classical Jewish textual tradition and Hebrew language.
Jewish Studies provides a critical and core discourse that contributes to the understanding social change and communal resilience, human value and personal meaning. It does so today at a moment of profound social and psychic disruption. Our classes, which typically generate repeat enrollments, contribute to the study of “culture, community and change,” a rubric SU now claims to be promote as a “pillar of distinctive excellence.”
We are all in this together. Programs such as Jewish studies, African American studies, Middle Eastern studies, Religion, and foreign languages complement and enhance other areas of study. We draw from an array of cultural perspectives – including perspectives from minority communities – that are typically overlooked in larger programs of study such as English, history, philosophy and political science. Our classes in the Jewish Studies Program attract robust enrollment from students with diverse backgrounds from across all colleges within SU, including professional schools. Majors and minors enjoy a personalized and intensive student experience with faculty and graduate student teaching assistants.
A decision to eliminate enrollment in the modern Jewish studies B.A., along with other impacted programs, would be nothing less than a body blow to the Jewish Studies Program at SU. The decision would:
[1] Form part of a larger assault on the Humanities writ large in the larger life of the modern universities are now dominated by STEM and professional schools and programs.
[2] Cut off potential avenues of growth for advanced undergraduate study, which will not easily grow back once eliminated.
[3] Send an unambiguous and negative signal to students, faculty, parents and the larger Jewish community, including parts of the Jewish donor community, that Jewish studies as well as other impacted areas of study simply don’t matter at SU.
[4] Cause reputational harm to SU as an institution of higher learning for serious humanistic research while undercutting the value of a Syracuse degree.
The impacted programs now under pause are instead being forced to bear the burden of large, systemic failures and mismanaged institutional and budgetary priorities that plague modern universities. Indeed, these cuts at a time of war, racial and religious polarization, festering antisemitism and a climate of authoritarianism across the globe are a symptom of severe disorder and social malfunction in university life and the culture at large.
When I was an undergraduate many decades ago, I was one of two majors in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst. I was privileged to engage intensively with wonderful professors who looked after me. I went on to pursue graduate work at Stanford and a rewarding academic career here at SU, which has been my home for 28 years.
Before the age of intellectual austerity, one could imagine the existence of small programs thriving in a greater university ecosystem. Course enrollments in the Jewish studies program, all of them cross-listed across the humanities, are evidence of student interest in the classes we offer. SU should be promoting diverse areas of study, not abandoning them in the face of negative headwinds affecting humanistic study across the entire modern university.
A great institution of higher education is only as strong as its smaller programs. Jewish Studies should be a vital component part of that vision of the university as a place that fosters diverse and vital knowledges.
The very real challenge addressed by the program review now underway at Syracuse University is how to grow the number of majors and minors in our impacted programs and across the humanities. I have every confidence that faculty in the Jewish studies program and other impacted programs want nothing more than to engage the larger university community regarding the future of these programs together. This requires serious work from colleagues in the impacted programs. But to date, the Administration has taken a sink or swim approach to the Humanities and to our impacted smaller programs. The Administration has offered no concrete help countering built-in structural impediments to enrolling new majors, impediments which are built into bureaucracies and curricula across the entire university.
Long recognized as a vital concern for Jewish community, the future of Jewish Studies is on the line at Syracuse University and across the country.
As director of the Jewish Studies Program, I am asking for support from the Jewish community. To this end, I especially invite students and their families, alumna and supporters to contact the chancellor, provost, and deans at Syracuse to engage them in the open spirit of contributing to what is a still fluid conversation. But more importantly, I invite students and their families to consider the value of the student experience in majors and minors across the Humanities and in small, intensely vital programs of study such as Jewish Studies. These provide critical complements to other areas of study and are themselves inherently interesting.
As one student told me, the professional colleges prepare students for jobs demanding critical and human intelligence whole failing, spectacularly, to train students in those very skills. A keen combination of human values and critical inquiry based on close reading and writing and communication are precisely crucial now at the very moment when artificial intelligence and other technological transformations take on a life of their own. Faceless technologies polarize the country and culture. Institutions of higher education such as SU should be doubling down on the Humanities and supporting our small, impacted programs, including Jewish Studies, as essential to the mission of the modern university in service to the common good.
