Emily Van Duyne on the Cowardice of Stockton University—and the Problem With For-Profit Higher Education
July 2026 was the deadliest month of the last year for Palestinians. The Gaza Health Ministry reported that 152 Palestinians were murdered by Israel, bringing the official death toll in the American-backed Israeli genocide to more than 73,000 people in less than three years. The UN reported in June that 20,000 of those people were children.
In spite of these horrific numbers, on August 1 the Atlantic City Press (my local paper) reported that John F. Scarpa, a so-called “major donor” to Stockton University, where I have taught since 2010, had complained to Stockton’s president, Joe Bertolino, that Stockton’s webpage for its master’s program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies contained “misinformation:” “The… ‘About the Program’ page… states that ‘Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza since October 2023 has killed, according to official figures, more than 70,000 Palestinians, including over 20,000 children, leaving almost the entire population of 2.3 million people forcibly displaced.’”
Scarpa—who made his fortune in the cell phone and cable tv industries—asserted that the genocide in Gaza is “a matter of significant legal, political, and scholarly dispute,” that the page’s language about the Israeli genocide “appears to be the personal views of one individual who has previously expressed similar positions and… should not be given a platform to spread opinion as fact.” This last was a transparent dig at my colleague Raz Segal, the author of text in question, and one of the leading Holocaust and genocide scholars in the world, who has been publicly harassed since calling the crisis in Gaza “a textbook case of genocide” in late October 2023. As a result of Scarpa’s letter, the Press reported, Stockton’s University Relations and Marketing office would be “‘reviewing the webpage and the concerns raised, including how content across different areas of the university is presented, attributed and reviewed.’” The following day, Stockton erased Raz’s words from its website.
