In late April, the Williams College Council, the college's student government, rejected a request to recognize a group called Williams Initiative for Israel (WIFI). The move was more or less unprecedented: In the previous decade, the College Council had not rejected any otherwise-qualified group. WIFI's opponents openly admitted that they did not want a pro-Israel organization to operate on campus.
In short, the student government at one of the nation's finest liberal arts colleges utilized two sets of criteria—one for a proposed pro-Israel group composed mostly of Jewish students, another for every other current and potential student group on campus. Often, debates about biased attitudes toward campus pro-Israel voices and the mistreatment of Jewish students raise ambiguous issues. This was not one of those cases.
One longtime faculty member, art history professor Michael Lewis, told me that the council's decision "surprised" him. Williams, he noted, traditionally has "tended not to be a highly politicized campus"—a legacy that makes the vote more noteworthy than had it come from more activist colleges such as Swarthmore, Oberlin, or Vassar. Lewis added, however, that the campus climate had begun to change in the past few years.
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