One Week Later. Silence From UVA.
A Student Answered. UVA Didn't.
Last week we asked whether anyone in UVA's administration would respond to a petition promulgated by the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) demanding the resignation of Darden Dean Yael Grushka-Cockayne on the grounds that she is Israeli and served in the IDF, as Israeli law requires of nearly everyone.
A week on, no one in the administration has spoken up for Dean Grushka-Cockayne or noted that demanding the resignation of our new dean based on national origin would be a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.. Not President Beardsley. Not the Board of Visitors. Not the Provost’s Office. No Darden faculty. Not the Faculty Senate. Not the Office for Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights, which administers the very policy, HRM-009, barring adverse employment action based on national origin. The article was carried in our newsletter on Aug. 21, a listserv that reaches senior administrators. It has produced no responses.
The one substantive response came from a student.
On Aug. 25, Cavalier Daily opinion columnist Joshua Hawkins published a column calling SJP's campaign “absurd.” Grushka-Cockayne served from 1993 to 1996 as a junior officer in the IDF. Women were not permitted in most IDF combat roles until 2000, four years after she left. Israeli conscription is compulsory, and refusing it carries a prison term. The Israeli software company that SJP ties her to sells enterprise resource planning systems; she was a marketing director for its U.S. branch. Assuming arguendo that there is any veracity to the claim that Israel committed genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the inference that Dean Grushka-Cockayne was somehow involved in it is absurd on its face. It is nothing less than an attack and smear on the Dean’s nationality.
A student-columnist managed this response in one day. A university with a communications staff and a civil rights unit has managed nothing in a week.
To be clear about what we are asserting. SJP may publish whatever petition it likes; that is freedom of expression, and we are not asking anyone to stop it. We are asking the University to state plainly that it will not act on it, that national origin plays no part in personnel decisions at UVA, and that smear attacks and discrimination based on national origin will not be tolerated. That is nothing more than an affirmation of federal law and of UVA's own policies.
And we all know that the bigwigs at UVA would not tolerate it and be quite vocal about it if she was instead declared unfit to lead because she was a woman or if she was a member of a racial minority. It is time for UVA’s recent history of double standards to be finally put to an end. You vocally defend all your protected community members or none.