Being Jewish Faculty in Portland and at Lewis & Clark

On Friday, a colleague of mine who teaches at Reed invited a group of Jewish faculty (and our families) from various Portland campuses to her house for dinner. It was meant to be a place of mutual support and fellowship in what has undeniably been a tough couple of weeks. There were some young (elementary school age) kids there, and just watching them run around and have way too much sugar and scream nonsense games -- the unbridled, uncomplicated, chaotic joy of youth -- was cleansing in a way I didn't know I needed. 

I was the only Lewis & Clark attendee, but there were folks from Reed, Portland State, and the University of Portland in attendance. Inevitably, stories were swapped about various events and goings-on, and the degree to which people felt supported (or not) by their home institutions. A lot of the stories were harrowing; this part of the evening was not pleasant (though I think it was ultimately for the best that we had a space -- a "safe space"? -- in which those stories could be told in a supportive and welcoming environment). And it made me once again reflect on how lucky I am to be at Lewis & Clark, where (at least at the law school) it seems we've dodged much of the bad behavior that has afflicted some other campuses.

In fact, I want to share some of my recent "Jewish faculty" experiences at Lewis & Clark, precisely because they've mostly been good, and good in a way that stands against certain narratives that pervade about academia. To be clear, I don't offer these stories to falsify others' accounts -- as the conversations at Friday's dinner made clear, many people at many campuses are having a genuinely bad time of it. But I do think it's important to stress that academia is not a monolith and that there are places doing it right just as there are places doing poorly; and beyond that, the bright spots in academic life do not always come from the places you'd expect (at least, if you're a regular imbiber of the prevailing discourse). To wit:

• I've felt fully supported by my colleagues over the past few weeks (I'm also not the sort of person who needs much in the way of "check ins" to verify my emotional well-being). That said, the two non-Jewish colleagues who most distinctively went out of their way to "check in" on me and see how I was doing after October 7 were (1) the chair of our DEI committee and (2) the Pakistani Muslim teaching fellow in our Animal Law program.
• Speaking of DEI, I went to speak to our (staff) director of DEI issues to ask her what her sense was about how things were playing out on the law school campus. She responded thoughtfully and compassionately, in a way that clearly demonstrated she was paying attention and providing care and support where needed. Her overall report was that (a) there were more campus community members directly affected by the events than I think many would have thought; (b) there were the usual instances of 20-somethings who are professionally-argumentative but whose politics aren't fully thought out speaking in ways that perhaps was not fully respectful of the reality that many of their colleagues were directly affected by the events; but (c) there had been no major flare-ups or crises; the "problems" were within the normal bounds of what one would expect to see when emotionally-charged events occurred on the global stage.
• As many of you know, I hosted at Lewis & Clark this past year a conference on Law vs. Antisemitism, and selected contributions are being published in a symposium issue of the Lewis & Clark Law Review (which I am writing the introduction for). The law school was nothing but supportive of the conference itself, even though I was only in my second year teaching when I threw a major international conference at them. More to the immediate point, after October 7 the Editor-in-Chief of the law review reached out to me on her own initiative to ask if I wanted to revise my introduction to account for the Hamas attack or the aftermath, and assured me that if I did want to make revisions they would make sure they'd adjust their production schedule to accommodate. I'm still considering her offer, but regardless of whether I take her up or not I was extremely impressed with her thoughtfulness and gesture of inclusion.

I don't claim things are perfect -- for me, for other Jewish community members at Lewis & Clark, for Muslim or Palestinian community members at Lewis & Clark, whomever. On the upper campus, for instance, there was an instance of just a few days after October 7 of "free Palestine" graffiti on the upper campus undergraduate buildings (though -- without downplaying the significance of it -- it seems that Lewis & Clark has a bit of a "tradition" around Indigenous Peoples Day of a certain segment of the student body tagging buildings with various "anti-establishment", "anti-colonialist", and "counter-cultural" messages, and this was part of that rather than a truly spontaneous "Jews in Israel just got murdered so let's celebrate with a hearty 'free Palestine'!"). 

But on the whole, as terrible as "the world" has been this past month, I've been extremely grateful for the little local slice of the world I have at Lewis & Clark. And just as we harp on the bitter, I do think it's important to give due credit and attention to the sweet.