The Professional Staff Congress (PSC), a labor union representing 30,000 members across the City University of New York (CUNY), has officially rescinded its resolution in support of boycotting Israel, JNS reported.
The decision was made on Sunday following concerns over voting irregularities, according to the report.
Fran Clark, PSC’s director of communications, explained the reasoning behind the reversal in a statement to JNS.
“The PSC Delegate Assembly voted to rescind its resolution, passed on Jan. 23 by a 73-70 vote, which committed to divesting the union’s reserve funds from Israeli corporate securities and urging the Teachers Retirement System to do the same,” Clark stated.
“The Delegate Assembly chose to rescind the resolution, because irregularities were identified in the Jan. 23 vote,” he continued. “The irregularities were corrected, and a revote was held on Feb. 20. The divestment resolution failed with a vote of 113 opposed, 63 in favor.”
Jeffrey Lax, a CUNY law professor and founder of a nonprofit focused on combating antisemitism on campus, attributed the union’s decision to mounting public pressure. He believes that opposition from faculty members, some of whom threatened to leave the union, played a key role in forcing the reversal.
Despite the resolution’s repeal, Lax stated that antisemitism remains a pervasive issue within CUNY’s public college system.
“They are still the same antisemitic, racist Marxists they always were, and they will continue to engage in the same behavior, including chanting slogans like ‘Zionism is not welcome here,’” he told JNS.
“The delegates, who represent faculty members at CUNY including people like me, are not going to stop doing that,” he added. “They still believe that Zionism has no place at CUNY.”
CUNY, like other colleges and universities in the US, has seen an uptick in anti-Israel incidents since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Last May, a group of several dozen anti-Israel student protesters occupied and "renamed" a library at the CUNY Graduate Center.
The demonstrators, many wearing masks hung Palestinian flags and a red flag that read, "long live armed resistance" at the Mina Rees Library, which they dubbed "The Al Aqsa University Library” after a Gaza university that has been seriously damaged in the war between Israel and the Hamas terrorist organization.
The protesters left the library after several hours. No arrests were made.
In September, a CUNY Hillel dinner was disrupted by anti-Israel protesters who called to “bring the war home.
A third-party review of antisemitism and discrimination at CUNY, released later that month, called for a total overhaul of the system’s policies related to antisemitism and the creation of a center to address antisemitism and other forms of discrimination.