US students face recruitment challenges after Gaza protests

Last autumn, Ryna Workman had an offer to join an international law firm after they completed their legal degree at New York University.

But their response to the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel changed all that.

Shortly after the attack, Workman made a pro-Palestinian statement in an email sent as part of their role as president of the Student Bar Association, saying “Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life”.

After other students shared the email with Workman’s would-be employer Winston & Strawn, the firm rescinded their job offer, stating the comments “profoundly conflict with [the firm’s] values”.

Other students have had a similar experience. Davis Polk & Wardwell, another law firm, said it would revoke three offers to students at Harvard and Columbia because of similar declarations. A number of other business people — including Bill Ackman, founder of Pershing Square, and the heads of companies including food chain Sweetgreen and DoveHill Capital Management — have threatened to do the same.

Law firms including Sullivan & Cromwell said they would not tolerate bias, hate speech or discriminatory remarks by employees. They are stepping up background checks internally and through external due diligence companies, including examining applicants’ social media posts and affiliations to student societies.

Such scrutiny is adding to pressures on a graduating cohort in an uncertain job market, after the isolation and anxiety of the Covid-19 pandemic deprived many of a normal school and university experience. The National Association of Colleges and Employers estimates the largest single drop in a decade in the hiring of new graduates this year — down 5.8 per cent over last year alone.

It raises questions about the extent of employers’ rights to examine the activities and beliefs of candidates seeking recruitment, and is prompting those who support students to reconsider the advice they give on how the next generation can protect their reputation.

A number of students — notably from poorer backgrounds — have avoided becoming too engaged in the protests for fear of being disbarred from graduating. Others have said classmates left demonstrations early out of fear that their activism, if made public, could damage their job prospects.

Since Columbia University took the rare step of summoning police on to its New York campus this spring to break up the encampment of students protesting against Israeli bombing of Gaza, similar interventions at universities across the US have led to nearly 3,000 arrests.

Other students face disciplinary action directly from their universities, which could remain on their academic records and delay or prevent them from even completing their studies.

They face far more scrutiny than demonstrators in the past, driven in part by a spate of “doxxing”: personal information which is posted online, often by organisations that publicly accuse pro-Palestinian activists of extreme or antisemitic beliefs, which activists deny holding. 

Randall Schmollinger, who has just completed the first year of a masters in international relations at Columbia and has been involved in campus protests, said he and a number of friends were still struggling to find summer internships.

“I would be lying if I didn’t think the stigma of being at Columbia might have crossed their minds. Even if it’s not explicit company policy, it creates a sense that candidates are fighting uphill to get recruited.”

Tracking the underlying reason for rejections is difficult: neither employers nor university careers services, cautious of legal or reputational risk, are keen to comment. However some said they had reassessed activity in response to recent demonstrations.

One senior executive at a large Wall Street bank said the protests would have an impact on which schools they targeted. “There are consequences to these people’s behaviour,” the banker said. “We’re still going to hire from Harvard and Columbia but we’re even more open minded about where we recruit from.”

Neil Barr, managing partner of Davis Polk & Wardwell, said: “We have heightened antennas to the issues on campus; we want to make sure that the people we are hiring are complying with university rules and the laws of the cities in which they live. Where we have no tolerance is where the nature of speech turns to hate or discrimination.”

In private, a number of other employers have indicated that while they are keen to diversify the range of institutions from which they recruit, they will not discriminate against entire universities — notably elite ones on which they heavily rely.

Smaller and more ideological recruiters have dominated the public debate. A group of federal judges who said they had “lost confidence” in Columbia over its handling of the protests and would not hire law clerks from the university were all conservatives appointed by former president Donald Trump.

A few employers have taken the opposite position. Andrew Dudum, chief executive of hims & hers, a telehealth company, who has Palestinian roots, posted on X: “If you’re currently protesting against the genocide of the Palestinian people & for your university’s divestment from Israel, keep going. It’s working. There are plenty of companies & CEOs eager to hire you, regardless of university discipline.”

After a backlash that temporarily depressed the share price of his company, he was forced to stress that his support for peaceful protest was “in no way [to] condone nor support acts or threats of violence, antisemitism, or intimidation”.

Graduate recruitment has highlighted the difficulties of political activism within organisations. While many employers came out with messages of support for Black Lives Matter and Ukraine, leaders grappled with how best to respond to the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Senior managers report intergenerational tension over workplace priorities and culture, including whether junior staff should have a say in who the company does business with, said Megan Reitz, associate fellow at Saïd Business School, Oxford university. “We have managers and leaders who see a raft of issues as being outside of the workplace remit — but younger generations have, in some cases, a different view about where work begins and ends. The younger generation expect to have a voice in the workplace — and we’ve told them, often, that the workplace is up for it.”

For new employees, the workplace might be “the first place some of them will be forced to interact with people whose views don’t align with their own,” said Tanya de Grunwald, chief executive of the Good + Fair Employers Club. She said that in the UK “employers are increasingly reporting that graduates are sometimes highly intolerant of alternative views on social and political issues”.

Officials at several elite universities with high-profile protests said they had not observed any significant drop either in on-campus recruitment events or hiring of recruits. Megan Hendricks, executive director, MBA Career Services & Employer Alliance, said her board members reported that “they aren’t seeing any issues or shifts” when it came to on-campus recruitment. While protest has been less prominent in the MBA sector, the alliance membership includes business schools at Columbia and other institutions where campus activism has made headlines.

Santina Pitcher, a director of the University of Berkeley’s career centre, said the institution’s students have been successful in recruitment and talking to employers. “I would expect to have seen some more but I can honestly say since October 7 I have only heard of one employer who has backed out and decided not to come to campus.”

But she advised greater caution on the part of students. “You need to be very careful about what you’re putting out there and clean up your online presence”, while ensuring social media accounts are made private. “If it’s online, they are going to find you. Make sure LinkedIn is popping up first.”

She said her colleagues advised students that if employers asked “inappropriate questions” about their beliefs and affiliations, they should respond by querying how that related to the job they had applied for.

However, she said: “We know employers are probably not always sticking to the script of the right questions to be asking. If you’re hearing something that is giving you a red flag, that’s information to help you make the decision on whether that’s the job for you.”