Mick Hartley

I posted about Danielle Greyman last year. She's the student at Leeds University whose essay on Hamas was failed because it wasn't sufficiently anti-Israel. 

David Hirsh brings us up to date:

Leeds University has paid damages to Danielle Greyman to settle her legal claim after she alleged that her third year Sociology essay had been failed unfairly because of antisemitism. Asked to write about a case study of the crimes and immorality of the powerful, she wrote an essay about Hamas and the UN in Gaza. The essay was failed because it did not blame Israel for the crimes and immorality of Hamas and the UN.

To my mind, this story taken as a whole, is evidence of an antisemitic hostile environment at Leeds University and in its Sociology Department; and there is nothing exceptional about Leeds; the hostile environment exists in many of our universities.

First, Danielle’s essay was failed by two markers, who made it clear in their comments that their main problem was that it was not written according to their own anti-Zionist intellectual framework. The essay was then given to a third examiner who backed up the fail.

I have marked hundreds of sociology essays, over 20 years, with colleagues, with moderators, with external examiners, with the Exam Boards. Danielle’s essay was not a fail; it was so far from being a fail that in my experience it is an outlier of one.

Danielle appealed to the department informally and it responded with a bureaucratic face; she appealed formally, and it put up a brick wall. The University appeals process stood with the department over the issue of antisemitism, but it did find a procedural reason to have the essay re-marked.

The re-mark that it ordered awarded a pass to the essay. This came only after Danielle had worked hard all summer to rewrite and resubmit the essay; which was in the end rather good, but which was given only a grudging bare pass. Meanwhile, Danielle had in any case earned sufficient credits to be awarded her 2.1 degree but nobody told her that.

Leeds set about putting up a second brick wall against Danielle, this time a legalistic one. It defended every point made by Danielle and her lawyers from UK Lawyers for Israel. The university refused to read my own expert report on the essay, which the lawyers submitted. A big, powerful institution, the University threatened to escalate and to inflate its legal defence against Danielle, and to put her at risk of huge costs if she were to lose in court. But Danielle and her lawyers, who stood by her without expectation of payment, were not to be frightened.

But the University was. It had made grandiose claims about the falsity of the allegation of antisemitism – how very dare she? And then it caved. It abandoned the defence of its Sociology Department, its staff, and its institutional processes and it paid damages to the student who had accused them, while continuing to deny that she had been damaged. The University’s last word to Danielle was a gaslighting letter, reiterating that everything she had claimed was false.

Danielle Greyman has now abandoned her dreams of an academic career in Britain and moved to Israel.