The Emory Wheel Since 1919
Emory University’s Independent Student Newspaper
Volume 106, Issue 5
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
Printed every other Wednesday
Q&A: Deborah Lipstadt returns to Emory
Department of Education investigates Emory over race-based discrimination
By Lauren Yee Managing Editor
The Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.
Content Warning: This article contains references to antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism.
The Emory Wheel: How have you seen antisemitism within Emory?
Deborah Lipstadt, one of only four people ever named as Emory University Distinguished Professor and the former U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, will return to Emory at the end of this month. She is the only current holder of the professorship, which Emory has awarded to Lipstadt, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, author Salman Rushdie and poet Kevin Young. Lipstadt, who founded the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and served as its first director from 1998-2008, came to Emory 30 years ago because of its “distinguished” Jewish Studies program. She said that Emory was a place she wanted to be and has had a “great experience” in her time at the University. Beyond Emory, Lipstadt was a historical consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The biographical film “Denial” (2016) was based on Lipstadt’s book “History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier” (2005) about her experience as the defendant against Holocaust denier David Irving in a libel suit. Ahead of her return, Lipstadt sat down with The Emory Wheel to share her perspective on antisemitism at Emory, last year’s nationwide campus protests and her hopes for students and the University.
Lipstadt: Well, I haven’t been at Emory now for three years, so I can’t really comment on Emory specifically, and I don’t like to surmise. But I have seen the tsunami of antisemitism, and more than a tsunami of antisemitism, I’ve seen the normalization of antisemitism. That it becomes okay to go on [The Joe Rogan Experience] and say overtly antisemitic things. I’ve just seen a lot of it around in places where you wouldn’t have seen it, where it might have existed before, but now it’s in more mainstream places, and that’s very disturbing. TEW: Reflecting on your time as U.S. Special Envoy, what goes into the day-to-day? Lipstadt: It could be a day where I start off in the morning talking about something going on in Poland and then I turn to something going on in London, and then a trip I have to have. It could be any one of a dozen different things. It moved very quickly. It was a lot of things happening, and I really enjoyed that because it was just so diverse. It could be if there was an antisemitic event in a country, it could be if we were trying to put together a resolution or a new program, it could be working with the administration on a statement they were making that would include some reference to
antisemitism. It could be sometimes unpredictable, sometimes I knew exactly what was going to happen. It was a lot of diplomatic meetings, a lot of meetings with ambassadors, foreign ministers if I was traveling abroad or ambassadors here in Washington. It was very, very variegated and very exciting. TEW: How will your time as ambassador influence your interactions at Emory? Lipstadt: I’ll be able to bring to students more real-life experience. What was it like, sitting in the Oval Office talking about antisemitism with the president? What was it like talking to the secretary of state? What was it like speaking before people at intelligence agencies, Department of Justice, FBI, about this issue, talking to them, hearing from them? Too often in the academic world, we live in the rarefied ivory tower, where we think that’s real life. And I got to see a little more of what passes for real life coming from Washington. TEW: What courses will you teach after you return? Lipstadt: Well, I won’t teach for about the first year and a half because I’m going to be finishing up a book on my experience, but I probably will do some seminars, maybe a freshman seminar on antisemitism, the history of antisemitism, and maybe, a course on the Holocaust, but that’s yet to be determined.
See FORMER, Page 3
By Siya Kumar News Editor The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced it is investigating Emory University and 45 other higher education institutions for possible violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The OCR initiated its investigation on March 14, citing allegations that graduate programs engaged in university partnerships and diversity initiatives that may involve “racial preferences and stereotypes.” Title VI prohibits institutions that receive federal funding from discrimination based on race, color or national origin. The allegations against Emory center around the University’s partnership with The PhD Project, a nonprofit organization that aims to support students earning doctoral degrees in business. OCR claims that the organization limited eligibility based on participants’ race and potentially disadvantaged applicants who do not identify as underrepresented minorities. OCR is also investigating six other institutions for “impermissible racebased scholarships” and one university for allegedly administering a segregated student program. The investigation comes as U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration reevaluates diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in
higher education. Additionally, in 2023, the Supreme Court ruling ended affirmative action in college admissions in June 2023. Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a press statement that the department is committed to ensuring that students are assessed based on merit rather than race. “Students must be assessed according to merit and accomplishment, not prejudged by the color of their skin,” McMahon said. “We will not yield on this commitment.” Just over two months ago, Emory and OCR reached an agreement concerning allegations of anti-Muslim discrimination. The complaint centered on alleged violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act related to harassment, doxxing and vandalism targeting Muslim students. The agreement was reached under the Biden administration. As part of the resolution, Emory agreed to take corrective actions, including revising its nondiscrimination policies, improving its anti-discrimination training and clarifying its campus protest policies. However, the agreement did not determine whether Emory had officially violated the statute. Emory did not provide comment by press time.
— Contact Siya Kumar at siya.kumar2@emory.edu
Emory signs new waste management contract, community advocates for more publicity By Pooja Sanghvi Contributing Writer Emory University signed a new contract with Waste Eliminator, a fullservice waste management company, this semester to increase landfill diversion rates, according to a University press release. As part of the Office of Sustainability Initiatives (OSI) and the Sustainability Visioning Committee’s Sustainability Vision and Strategic Plan, the University hopes to divert 95% of construction waste from landfills by the end of the year. The plan states that the committee’s goal is to prioritize sustainability to improve environmental practices. During a tour of the recycling facilities in October 2024, Professor of German Studies and Linguistics Hiram Maxim said that he learned that Goodr, Emory’s previous waste management vendor, only diverted 51% of waste from landfills. The Emory Wheel reached out to Vice President for Campus Services and Chief Planning Officer Robin Morey for more details on Emory’s contract with Waste Eliminator, who redirected the Wheel to the press release. In the March 12 statement, Morey said that the new recycling facility will use gas capture technologies to decompose waste in landfills. Maxim said that Emory has successfully diverted pre-consumer waste
Ha-Tien Nguyen/Senior Staff Illustrator
made in kitchens and pre-consumer laboratory waste in the past. However, Maxim said that post-consumer waste has not been properly diverted into compost, plastic and metals, mixed paper, white paper and landfill bins around campus. “One of my big concerns … is the sentiment among a lot of students that I’ve talked to, a growing cynicism towards Emory’s claims of sustainable practices, and the belief that Emory is engaged in greenwashing,” Maxim said. Emory Climate Coalition (ECC) and Emory Ecological Society member
Benji Jackson (23Ox, 25C) said that because people do not trust Emory’s waste management, many community members do not separate their trash correctly between the bins, leading to contamination of compost and recycling. Once a certain amount of a bag is contaminated, it can no longer be diverted from landfills, according to Jackson. Sunrise Emory member Taylor Black (28C) said she often tells her friends to be mindful when separating trash between bins. “Most of the people I talk to just dump things in random bins because
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they just don’t think it matters,” Black said. Jackson said that doubts about Emory’s sustainability practices have existed for a long time, and the last contract’s failure to meet the 95% diversion rate by 2025 only added to the skepticism. “There’s pretty widespread doubt across the university about the current waste sorting and with landfill diversion rates,” Jackson said. “A lot of that existed prior to the widespread knowledge of how the previous contract was failing.” Jackson said he and other ECC
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members are advocating for increased transparency and publicity about the new waste management vendor to ensure the community contributes to sustainability efforts. “What we’re turning towards now is different routes of publicizing new details of the contract and different ways of reassuring faith in the system,” Jackson said. “Also trying to work with OSI and other bodies on campus to implement new measures of making sure what happened in the past doesn’t happen again to the same degree.” Maxim emphasized the importance of raising community awareness about proper waste sorting. “We need to do more educational efforts, but we also need to pay more attention to what we are putting where,” Maxim said. Additionally, Maxim praised the University’s commitment to sustainable practices amid growing political dissent over green initiatives. “It’s always been one of the sources of pride as a member of the Emory community that Emory’s committed a lot of resources, time and effort to sustainability,” Maxim said. “I know the current political climate is not friendly towards sustainability goals, but I’m hoping Emory can stay true to its goals.”
— Contact Pooja Sanghvi at pooja.sanghvi@emory.edu
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