Australian universities have been given three months to resubmit assessment material on their handling of antisemitism on campus, after the entire sector received a fail grade on work so far.
Constitutional lawyer and former Australian Catholic University vice-chancellor Greg Craven said universities had “short circuited” his “report card” on the sector by failing to address the “threshold issue” of adequately defining antisemitism.
Craven said this “intrinsically unacceptable” shortcoming had undermined “any effective attempt to address university antisemitism either by external authority or institutions themselves”.
“In the absence of the substantive adoption of a real definition, it is impossible to move to assessment of policy and procedures against that definition,” he told Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal.
Craven was appointed by Segal to produce report cards on universities’ individual and collective efforts to combat antisemitism. The first reports, on Group of Eight member institutions, were due in May.
