A working group assembled by the University of Pittsburgh to study antisemitism on campus has published its findings without first consulting the school's Jewish student body, estimated at around 1,400 students, or the wider campus Jewish community beyond the group's own members, The Times of Israel reported.
The group, made up entirely of Jewish faculty and staff, has drawn criticism from multiple directions. Some on campus object to its recommendations on free-speech grounds, while members of the Jewish community argue the opposite problem: that the process never meaningfully brought in Jewish students or faculty outside the working group itself. At least one of the report's authors says they faced harassment after being named to the group.
Group chair Katherine Blee has defended the approach, saying the panel's mandate was never to gather data but to produce recommendations from internal discussion among a deliberately varied set of members. The university has said it will act on several of those recommendations, including tightening Title VI compliance, clarifying speech and protest rules, revisiting bias training, and launching new "Dialogue and Discourse" programming.
At eight pages, Pitt's report is notably shorter than comparable documents produced at Harvard, Columbia and Stanford, each of which surveyed hundreds of Jewish students directly. Some faculty have pointed to that gap, along with the absence of listening sessions with the Jewish community, as evidence that internal disagreement inside the working group limited how far it was willing to go. One recommendation that did make it in, a standing advisory group on Jewish campus life involving Hillel, Chabad and the local Jewish federation, has already drawn objections from pro-Palestinian student groups.
