“CLEARLY ANTISEMITIC” STATEMENTS MADE AT WILLIAMS COLLEGE STUDENT GOVERNMENT MEETING: As I noted previously, the Williams College student government denied official recognition to a pro-Israel student group, Williams Initiative for Israel, even though the group met all criteria for recognition. The decision had obvious antisemitic undertones, but a source just sent me the minutes of the next student government meeting (which I also found online here). At that meeting, a student named Lance acknowledged that when he took the minutes of the previous meeting, he didn’t “type down” “clearly anti-Semitic things.” Open antisemitism at an elite college. Why is the college administration silent?
Lance: Hi there, I’m the minutekeeper. My name is Lance. Anyways, thank you so much for your thoughtful email. If you’d like to tell me… so, just a procedure from CC, because I want to be done with it too, I understand. If you say that a certain thing was misattributed to the wrong person, I was handling 12 different guests that were sitting in geographically different locations, I had to look down while typing, right? So it is a bit challenging, but for instance, I don’t remember which guest number you were and I don’t remember which guest number you were. I also don’t know which guest number I attributed your guest number to, right? But if you want to send me a quick correction, because clearly you know which ones are misattributed, I can easily change those numbers real quick. That is always how we do it, that is why we approve them in the next week’s minutes. As for ‘in shambles’, I only didn’t type down two things: 1) personally identifying information – if someone who said something that was deeply personal, I tried to limit that to preserve anonymity; 2) clearly anti-Semitic things I didn’t type down. I want [sic, won’t?] repeat them, but I didn’t type those things down. So those are the only two things I didn’t type. If that is a mischaracterization that you are uncomfortable with, I don’t know what to tell you. Those are the only two things I didn’t type. Again, there is an audio recording. I can’t actually, accurately 100% transcribe things, though I do try my best. But that is really all I can say. If there are specific edits, I’d love to hear them. I can just edit them real quick, we can vote on it, and we can move on to this training.