Four Jewish students booted from a controversial Brooklyn College forum hosted by a pro-Palestine group were wrongfully ejected — but their ousters weren’t due to religious discrimination, according to an investigation released Friday.
Poor oversight of the event by Brooklyn College, not religious or racial discrimination, was behind the Feb. 7 incident that saw four Jewish students and a Daily News reporter blocked from the pro-Palestine event, investigators said.
“It is clear that there was no justification for the removal of the four students. They did not create a ‘disturbance,'” investigators from Bryan Cave law firm wrote in a 36-page report released by City University of New York.
Even though the four were all Jewish and two wore yarmulkes, “there is no support for an inference of discrimination based on religion,” the investigators wrote.
They were asked to leave because they were talking and passing papers to each other — leading an overzealous student volunteer from the pro-Palestine group to conclude they were going to hand out political flyers, which was prohibited, investigators found.
From the get-go, school officials didn’t move quickly enough to take control of the contentious Feb. 7 event that featured Omar Barghouti, a human rights activist and founding member of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, investigators said.
Brooklyn College officials allowed Students for Justice in Palestine — the hosting group — to handle the master list of RVSPs, as well as set the press policy for the night, the report said.
Students for Justice in Palestine told school officials they didn’t want any press in attendance — but two reporters who had privately RSVP’d in advance were allowed inside while others, including Daily News reporter Reuven Blau, were denied access.
And it wasn’t just the press that couldn’t get in. Many students who signed up through the online registration system set up by the pro-Palestinian group later got dropped from the master list because it was so disorganized, the report said.
The college’s biggest error was not setting clear protocol for who had the authority to eject attendees.
“Brooklyn College administration did not handle this event well. It was probably a mistake … to give the students primary responsibility for maintaining order,” the report concluded.
The two-month investigation was commissioned by CUNY chancellor Matthew Goldstein in the wake of the embarrassing incident.
