Campus Antisemitism Monitors Will Fail in Extraordinarily Predictable Fashion

Trying to capitalize on the latest headlines, a bipartisan group of legislators is seeking to create government "antisemitism monitors" that will be dispatched to colleges and universities across the country. Fail to meet their scrutiny, and colleges could lose gobs of federal funding.

If enacted, this policy will fail in spectacular fashion. How do I know? Because we have a template in state anti-BDS laws, which backfire in similarly predictable ways. The problem is that while it's conceptually possible to craft valid and legitimat anti-BDS legislation, in practice the laws will be enforced by some mixture of apathetic mid-level bureaucrats, terrified associate deans, and hotshot headline-chasing politicians. Put that cocktail together, and the result is such lovely headlines like "homeless hurricane victims can't get disaster relief until they sign anti-BDS pledge."

Indeed, if the antisemitism monitors do come into play, I can predict exactly the scenario that will go down shortly thereafter at Any College, USA.

1. A student group invites some Palestinian poet to give a talk;
2. Canary Mission or similar digs through the poet's instagram and finds a post where they say something that many people might find troublesome: "from the river to the sea" or "the Zionist state will be dismantled" or something of that ilk.
3. They shriek that this is a violation of IHRA and federal law and the university risks losing all its federal funding unless it acts.
4. Some associate dean for student affairs panics and cancels the talk.
5. There's a massive backlash from the students (possibly including protests) as well as various academic freedom/civil liberties watchdogs who call the cancellation out as censorial bullshit.
6. Pro-Israel/Jewish groups make surprised-Pikachu face at how they once again somehow became the poster child for heavy-handed campus censorship. Who could have predicted? (Answer: Everyone. Everyone could have predicted).

And for all the grousing about "only the Jews don't get ..." X Y or Z protections on campus, it's worth noting that no other campus minority currently has a monitoring program like this. A good rule of thumb for whether one is advisable here is if one also would support a similarly empowered and emboldened "anti-racism" or "anti-Islamophobia" monitoring program. If your answer is something along the lines of "while racism and Islamophobia are serious problems, I don't trust the implementation and I'm worried about the possibility of abuse and/or chilling free speech" -- congratulations! You've identified the exact reasons why such a program is inadvisable for antisemitism as well.