This January, UConn Hillel is offering students the chance to take a 10 day trip to the Israeli and Palestinian region to “discuss different topics regarding Israeli and Palestinian societies including history, culture, human rights and political issues.” The trip is highly subsidized by the Maccabee Task Force, which generously funded UConn Hillel’s previous trip to the region in 2023. The advertised intent of the trip is to help students of all religious backgrounds develop their own opinions on the conflict and prevent the spread of Islamophobic and anti-Semitic rhetoric on UConn’s campus.
A similar trip faced backlash in 2022, when Students for Justice in Palestine pointed out problematic aspects of the trip such as the logistical difficulty that would come should a Palestinian student wish to be included on the trip. Students have also criticized the trip for presenting “itself similar to a study abroad trip or a vacation,” according to the Daily Campus.
This year’s “Perspectives 2025” trip has an added problematic element: the region is deadlier than it has been in decades.
UConn is no stranger to being the launching pad for trips to war zones. In May 2023, members of UConn School of Business’ Daigle Labs travelled to Lviv, Ukraine on an entrepreneurial mission. Despite Lviv being an active warzone, Dr. Ryan Coles and two recent UConn graduates explored the city, visited Ukrainian Catholic University and enjoyed coffee at cafes. These same cafés were destroyed just weeks later in a Russian bombing, according to Dr. Coles in a UConn Today article from September 2023. In fact, earlier this month, Russia launched an attack on Lviv, killing a mother and her daughters and damaging over 50 buildings.
For a university that dedicates generous resources to promoting student safety, these trips do not sound so safe. Even if they are not on the front lines, UConn’s undergraduate and graduate students are being invited on trips where their lives are at stake. The violence in these war zones is indiscriminate and has already taken a toll on local populations. There is no need to send our students to active war zones when UConn already offers countless Experiential Global Learning opportunities in business, human rights and the arts.
Young adults should not be unnecessarily put at risk in the name of education and certainly not under UConn’s name. As a home and community for young people with limitless potential, it is UConn’s duty to promote safety and rational decision making. Voluntarily sending students to war zones is far from rational.
Nice work pretending that a student org’s activities are official UConn programs. This paper has an unhealthy obsession with Hillel.
Oy vey, stop talking about Hillel, goyim!
Should we shut down our ROTC program as well?
Yes
Imagine an editorial board that decides not to cover UConn’s plummeting US News ranking. But to have yet another article demonizing Hillel. You call this journalism?
Great article! This trip should not be happening regardless of what side of the conflict you are on. Uconn has a responsibility and a goal to protect their students, and sending them on a trip to an active warzone goes against that goal. #freefreepalestine
Would you protest an SJP trip to Palestine on the grounds of safety?
Please disclose who within the Daily Campus is a member of Hillel, member of SJP, member of ASA, and/or member of UConn Divest.
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Benjamin Franklin
As an alum and father of a soon-to-be Husky, it amazes me how ignorant our current generation of students have become. There is little to no understanding of the history of liberty and tyranny, nor even that of the constant nomadic existence of humanity since we first came into being (ie, Palestinians aren’t actually from “Palestine,” which was an invention of the Romans to humiliate Israel after putting down an uprising in 135CE).
It is not the university’s job to keep students safe. It is to provide a laboratory of learning, where students can be pushed and push themselves to a greater understanding of the world around them, prepared to step forward and contribute to their families, communities, states, and nation. Yes, that may include scary places where the world needs leaders to step up and help others.
The Daily Campus fails yet again in their duty to provide accurate journalism. If anyone on their editorial board bothered to do any fact checking they would acknowledge that UConn Hillel is a 501c(3) nonprofit organization that functions INDEPENDENTLY of the University of Connecticut. But that would be asking too much of the Daily Campus which again demonstrates its glaring lack of journalistic integrity. I cannot imagine that the Maccabee task force would permit this trip to run if it’s not safe for students to travel to Israel and if students don’t have a desire to travel to this region to educate themselves, then they don’t need to apply. It’s that simple. Why the DC continues to nurse such an unhealthy obsession with Hillel is indeed concerning. Please do us all a favor and educate yourselves on journalistic best practices and focus on real issues that matter to students.