FRONTLINE: CRISIS ON CAMPUS Key Art | ©2024 Jeenah Moon/Reuters/PBS

The FRONTLINE documentary CRISIS ON CAMPUS premieres on PBS on Tuesday, June 11. The crisis has only intensified since writer/director/producer James Jacoby sat down for an interview with ASSIGNMENT X during the Winter 2024 Television Critics Association (TCA) press tour in February 2024.

At that time, Jacoby was in the middle of production on CRISIS ON CAMPUS, so he could not speak about the final edit. Jacoby was also one of the filmmakers on the FRONTLINE documentaries NETANYAHU, AMERICA & THE WAR IN GAZA/FAILURE AT THE FENCE, which premiered on December 19, 2023, and NETANYAHU, AMERICA & THE ROAD TO WAR IN GAZA, which premiered May 23, 2024.

Although the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 and Israel’s subsequent bombardment of Gaza are the biggest flashpoints for current university controversies, Jacoby says, “I think there have been undercurrents of all sorts of issues on campuses for many years now. I think that October 7 has been an escalation of what were issues on campuses that were pre-existing. But it’s certainly been an inflection point.”

Jacoby was brought onto CRISIS ON CAMPUS after the project was already underway. “FRONTLINE began working on this in conjunction [the U.S. non-profit documentary production organization] Retro Report. They’re our partner on this project. Retro Report and FRONTLINE were just sending out teams to some of the universities to follow this and see where it was going to go. So, it started filming on a few campuses, starting in early November. I had just wrapped up a film that we did very quickly about Benjamin Netanyahu that aired in late December. I jumped on this project just after that.”

As to a through-line between Israeli President Netanyahu’s actions and the crisis on campus, “What I would say about this is that, one, if you think about students now on campuses, whether they’re undergraduate or graduate students, they have for the most part grown up with Netanyahu’s Israel, and the policies that Netanyahu has promoted and promulgated during his premiership. So, I think that they’ve grown up with an idea of Israel that’s in part informed by the fact that he’s been in charge. So, younger people have grown up with a Netanyahu Israel. But also, potentially with the misconception that he is emblematic of Israel and Israelis more generally, which of course, he’s not.”

Most Americans would not want to be blamed for the actions of certain politicians that they did not vote for or endorse. “Exactly. So, I think that, in some ways, it’s an important distinction to be made. We could be critical of a politician for their policies and their government policies, but that’s distinct from whether the United States or Israel has a right to exist.”

Working on the Netanyahu documentaries gave Jacoby some insights into the current project. “The Netanyahu documentary, in part, was analyzing both Israel and his rise as a political figure. We began the film in the present day, but then went back to the early Nineties, where he was leading the opposition to the Oslo Accords. At the same time, Hamas was developing as an opposition to the peace process as well. And they started their terror campaign back in the early Nineties, in opposition to the peace process.

“And I think that, when you start talking to college students, and others on university campuses, especially in the pro-Palestine camp, and bring up Hamas, which of course perpetuated the attack on October 7, it immediately gets very tricky. Because they don’t want to be affiliated with Hamas, but of course, Hamas is a part of this equation. They’re the governing body in Gaza, right? So, it absolutely is relevant to any engagement with pro-Palestinian students, and it has been interesting to me to, for instance, go to rallies, and you bring up Hamas in a question to a young student, and they’re like, ‘Hamas has nothing to do with this, with why we’re here today.’ And it might be a pro-ceasefire rally. Well, you [say], ‘They do have something to do with why we’re here today.’ But I think it speaks to a little bit of why this is such a touchy, incendiary issue.”

Do many of the students Jacoby has spoken with know much about the history of the region and the origins of Israel as a state?

“I haven’t done a survey. But one thing that has been interesting is, on one hand, I’ve been struck by how engaged and bright a lot of students are, and they’re engaged in international affairs. But I have been struck, when I’ve asked certain students, especially students from elite universities, that have been at some of the rallies, ‘Have you, at your university, how many courses have you taken in the history of the Middle East, or the politics of the Middle East?’ And I’m alarmed at the amount of students that have said to me, ‘Oh, I don’t take those courses. I do my own research.’ Or, ‘I don’t want to take those courses, because the professors are biased for Israel,’ or, ‘for Palestine.’ And I just think that that’s a dangerous place to be.”

Immediately after October 7, was Jacoby expecting that politicians would challenge the presidents of universities, to the point of forcing some of them to resign?

“As interested as I am in the student dynamics, I think that my focus [in CRISIS ON CAMPUS] is primarily about what’s happened with the presidents. There was that famous hearing, of course, with the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and M.I.T., and I’m interested in the idea of higher education institutions, especially our elite institutions, becoming battlegrounds for these proxy political battles right now.  We’re in an election year, everything is politicized at the moment, and I think it’s important to understand how these institutions are being drawn into the battle.

“I think we can expect that politicians will take any opportunity to politicize anything right now. Higher education has been in the crosshairs of certain conservative politicians for many years now, acting as though the ‘woke’ mentality has ‘infected’ some of our elite institutions. And so, we’ve seen that as part of a political movement that’s been burgeoning.”

Jacoby adds that he means for “infected” to be in quotation marks. “It’s not to be dismissive of very serious and legitimate concerns about certain aspects of what ideologies are present on campuses now, and how people are thinking about the world, but I do think that the politicization of this issue has brought it to a new level.”

Without naming names, does Jacoby feel that some of the politicians feel they benefit from as much know-nothingism as possible?

“I don’t want to make a blanket statement. I think that – something struck me in what [former Harvard University president] Claudine Gay wrote in her op-ed in the NEW YORK TIMES after she resigned. Basically, she said that there are certain political forces that benefit from propaganda, from people not really being able to read through propaganda messages, and that, if you think about it, the assault on higher education, to some extent, no matter what political corner it comes from, if you don’t want people to be able to be informed and educated and to question things, then propaganda reigns. And again, that’s not a place where we want to be.

Jacoby relates that getting interviews with both students and faculty has “been difficult for this story to get a lot of people to speak. We’ve had difficulty getting access to various administrators, we’ve had difficulty getting access to donors, we’ve had difficulty getting access to professors, we’ve had difficulty getting access to students.”

One reason for this, Jacoby thinks, may be “that, especially in the day and age of social media, where you can get your own message out, and you can control your own message, as opposed to speaking to a journalist who is trying to contextualize and speak to a lot of different people, I think people are sadly choosing not to speak to journalists sometimes, because they feel as though, ‘Oh, if I can control my own message on X, or on Instagram, or on whatever platform I’m on, why would I speak to anybody?’ That said, though, there have been courageous professors, students, hopefully administrators and donors that are talking to us.”

Is there anything from Jacoby’s own days as a college student that’s informing his work on CRISIS ON CAMPUS? “Yeah. Somebody I’m going to be speaking to in the film is my former professor from college, who has found himself in some ways in the middle of the storm. He is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. I took a couple of classes with him in college about the politics of the Middle East, and he’s now found himself essentially attacked by both sides for things he said, and things he’s said that have also been taken out of context.”

How do the professors, at least those who have gone on the record, feel about their students’ activism?

“I think it runs the gamut. I think that if I were to generalize about what I’ve been hearing from professors is that professors are right now grappling with students who sometimes want to see things as black and white, and [the professors] are there to kind of challenge black and white assumptions, and say, ‘No, there are nuances. It’s not a copout to say there are nuances, that there are complications.’

“Middle East politics is extremely complicated, and the history is not black and white. So, some educators that I’m talking to are rising to the challenge, but a lot of people are very afraid of this issue, and want to shy away from controversy. If you’re an administrator, for instance, and you see what happened to your peers from Harvard, M.I.T., and Penn, you don’t necessarily want to stick your head out on the line.”

While Jacoby doesn’t want to speculate on how things might have gone differently with the university presidents, “I do think the fact that they were women mattered.”

Jacoby intends for CRISIS ON CAMPUS to explore multiple issues. “I think the reaction to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict just emblematic of something larger, which is that, one, again, this political battle being fought out on campuses, and two, the story in and of itself is a little bit about the media, and how you can go to college campuses and not necessarily see or feel a crisis happening. But there is a vast media appetite for it.

“So, for instance, at Harvard, there was a deliberate attempt by certain people to bring a lot of media to what Claudine Gay and the Harvard leadership were doing after October 7. And so, it’s our job to unpack and analyze, okay, October 7 was indeed about the war and the reaction to it, but it was also an opportunity for various people with various agendas and narratives to take advantage of the moment and make it a bigger news story than it may have been.”

This seems like a lot to pack into a one-hour documentary, but Jacoby observes, “One of the beauties of FRONTLINE is, you can take even some of the most complicated stories and do justice to them in an hour.”

What would Jacoby most like people to know about CRISIS ON CAMPUS?

“At their most ideal, our colleges and universities, higher education, should be these places that we protect from outside forces meddling too much with politics, with speech. There should be a true premium, especially in this country, placed on these institutions of higher learning where students can be open to ideas, can be challenged, and where they don’t necessarily become politicized by, again, any part of the political spectrum. And I think what we’re seeing right now play out is an escalation in, again, proxy battles being fought out, larger political forces using these schools as battlefields. That is something that we should all be giving a lot of thought to. That’s not a place where we want to be.”

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Article:  CRISIS ON CAMPUS: Filmmaker James Jacoby on new PBS documentary

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