In November 2025, when antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal announced that Emeritus Professor Greg Craven would head what she called the “University Report Card Project”, the media referred to her plan as an “audit” of higher education’s response to antisemitism.

It was never anything of the kind.

An audit involves dispassionate scrutiny by a professional employed on the basis of sworn impartiality. As a 2020 parliamentary report into the auditing industry explains, such people

must ensure that they are independent of mind and of appearance, both acting and being seen to act with integrity, objectivity and professional scepticism. In other words, auditors must be mindful, not only of actual conflicts of interest, but also of the perception of conflicts of interest.

That is not what Greg Craven is doing.

By the time of his appointment, he’d already made up his mind about the universities and antisemitism. In one of his regular columns for the Australian, he’d declared:

universities are not helplessly beset by mutant radical groups espousing anti-Semitism. They themselves subscribe to that anti-Semitism, albeit without the loudspeakers.

In that piece, written in early 2025, Craven attributed the universities’ supposed enthusiasm for antisemitism to, in part, postmodernism, which, he explained,

has held sway in our universities for almost 40 years. In essence, it holds that there is no such thing as objective truth, so if you want to see every Australian Jew as a US-funded Zionist monster, go right ahead. Evidence is not required, just conviction, preferably radical conviction.

But, for Craven, the problem wasn’t merely the curriculum. It was also the political radicalism of, um, the university vice chancellors.

“[T]today’s vice chancellor was”, he wrote,

yesterday pompous Maoist with a seething disdain for the Israeli running dog. It partly explains why so many ­senior university administrators perceive that they have a problem around the Jews, so the Jews must be the problem.

In other words, to conduct her so-called “audit”, Jillian Segal appointed a man who’d had not only found the universities guilty of tolerating antisemitism but had described them as “subscribing” to it, apparently at the behest of vice-chancellors still in thrall to youthful Maoism.

Segal described Craven as “one of Australia’s foremost thinkers on education governance and the public responsibilities of universities”. In reality, as the Boomer-brained screed extracted above suggests, the Professor long ago transitioned from serious thought to culture-war fulminations — an evolution that allows a man who once earned an eye-watering $1.35 million remuneration package as Vice Chancellor of the Australian Catholic University to perch in the Australian’s opinion page and denounce others as  the “cultural elite”.

We know from material obtained by the Guardian under Freedom of Information laws that Segal hand-picked Craven for the $232,466 contract, with “others on the shortlist only to be contacted if he said no”.

So what qualifies the Professor to assess antisemitism?

Allow him to explain.

In December 2023, he told readers that:

the real charge against the Jews is their unforgivable authenticity and agelessness.

Before Karl Marx (himself a Jew), Napoleon, Caesar and Alexander, even before the millennia-old Catholic Church and Christianity itself, there were the Jews. They are still here, a race, a religion and a culture.

The ancient Greeks and the Romans have gone, with their religions and their daily languages. Christianity fights for survival. But somehow the Jews survive, a standing reproach to our own vulnerability.

…

To the louche left, they offend because of their unswerving commitment to truth as they have inherited it. As a people, they will never be dispersed by assurances they do not really exist or that He Who Is represents a mere phantasm.

In reality, as its oldest continuous intellectual culture, the Jews are indispensable to the West. They are in the truest sense its cultural aborigines. […] They are hated not merely because they occupy territory or fight wars but because they represent that Greatest Satan, the West.

We of the West should recognise fellow souls when we see them.

Note that final sentence. Grammatically, the subject “we of the West” includes both the Professor and his readers. It does not, however, extend to the Jews whom he is discussing. For Craven, Jews might be “fellow souls” but they’re not “of the West’. Despite that, he thinks them “indispensable”, because of an “unswerving commitment” to what he deems “authenticity and agelessness’.

This is an old, old argument. Back in 1920, Winston Churchill made the same claim in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, using the same exclusionary pronoun.

“We”, he said,

owe to the Jews in the Christian revelation, a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together. On that system and by that faith there has been built out of the wreck of the Roman Empire the whole of our existing civilisation.

Churchill did not think Jews “of the West”, either. Yet, he, too, admired Jews — or, more exactly, he admired some of them.

Dividing what he called this “mystic and mysterious race” into two parts, he praised “national Jews” as “useful in the highest degree”, singling out their achievements as “bankers and industrialists”. He then excoriated those he called “international Jews” — that is, Jews who supported socialism or other radical movements. Churchill claimed that “the majority of the leading figures [of the Russian revolution] are Jews” with the “prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism […] taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses”.

Against this “Jewish” Bolshevism, he advocated Zionism, as a policy “in harmony with the truest interests in the British Empire”. He explained that

schemes of a world-wide communistic State under Jewish domination are directly thwarted and hindered by this new ideal, which directs the energies and the hopes of Jews in every land towards a simpler, a truer, and a far more attainable goal. The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.

The passage illustrates how what is sometimes called “good Jew, bad Jew” (an actual headline in the Herald article) works as an antisemitic trope: Churchill’s praise of “national Jews” allows him to deploy all the hateful stereotypes of Jewish perfidy against those who don’t live up to his understanding of Jewish “authenticity’. The historian Barnaby Raine cites an old Yiddish joke that is apropos here: “A philosemite is just an antisemite who happens to love Jews”.

We can’t hold Craven responsible for Churchill. We can, however, examine the Professor’s own behaviour.

In January 2026 — that is, several months after accepting his lucrative appointment to Segal’s report card project — Professor Craven used his column in the Australian to argue that, in response to the Bondi massacre, the government should implement “measures typically used in times of war”. He wrote:

We are not talking about conscription, martial law or internment here, although a couple of decades” house arrest for Louise Adler is appealing. But it is entirely right that we are looking at carefully modulated restrictions on expression of hateful ideas and the suppression of hateful organisations.

Craven must have known that Louise Adler came from a family with direct experience of the repression he wished upon her. She has, after all, repeatedly discussed how, in 1941, her grandfather was, in fact, arrested and interned by the Nazis, who murdered him in Birkenau. Her father, aged only fourteen, joined the Jewish section of the communist partisan movement, which meant urging “French Jews not to report to their local police station, to encourage them to go into hiding, and to provide rations and places to sleep for young children abruptly orphaned”.

No doubt our antisemitism auditor would say that, in context, it was clear that he was joking: that, in fact, he didn’t really seek Adler’s detention but merely thought it witty (in an article about the massacre of Jewish people, no less) to giggle about having her arrested.

All well and good. But how does the Professor respond when others make far less offensive jokes?

In January 2025, Sarah Schwartz from the Human Rights Law Centre described her involvement in an anti-racism symposium at the Queensland University of Technology:

This week, during a comedy debate, I pilloried Peter Dutton’s racist, ignorant and monolithic conception of Jewish people. I argued that he uses this conception to promote division, attack the ALP and push an anti-immigration agenda. In my presentation, I referred to Dutton’s racist conception of Jewish people as “Dutton’s Jew” — Dutton’s racist conception of Jews, not actual Jewish people. Against this conception, I spoke about how Jewish people are diverse and about how the Jewish community is not a monolith. … Far-right social media accounts have been sharing the slide of my speech titled “Dutton’s Jew”, without any of the context. These groups promote dangerous disinformation, which no one should take at face value. My speech was part of a comedy event making fun of racists. If we didn’t laugh we’d cry.

As the comments make clear, Schwartz’s presentation humorously critiqued Dutton for deploying the “good Jew, bad Jew” trope, with an accompanying PowerPoint slide describing the traits she said he ascribed to those with whom he agreed.

In response, on 1 February 2025, Professor Craven published an article in which the comedy debate featured as Exhibit A demonstrating the “intense climate of fear” supposedly prevailing on Australian campuses. He wrote:

No “obvious” Jew can set foot of an Australian campus without wondering how it will go.

As in past pogroms, the safest thing to do is not go, or not look too Jewish.

This all came to a head in the gathering at the Queensland University of Technology, where a chart was displayed of “Dutton’s Jew”, describing the ingrained, contemptible, characteristics of the species.

In my view it was similar to charts in Nazi Germany illustrating the ­facial features of Jews. The speaker has since claimed she was not referring “to actual Jews”, but “the way Peter Dutton … uses us as political footballs to push his own agenda”.

Just to add the bizarre to the outrageous, one of the speakers at the conference where the Dutton Jew was displayed was Dr Randa Abdel Fattah of Macquarie University.

She not only denies Hamas is a terrorist organisation, but has received hundreds of thousands in taxpayers money to pay for her research. Nice work if you can get it.

QUT later apologised for the Dutton caricature in that very university way. It was sorry people were upset, but not for the actual racial libel. In other words: We are sorry you Jews are thin skinned, but do get over it, Schlomo.

In that last line, Greg Craven — a Catholic of Irish heritage — invokes the stereotypical Jewish name “Schlomo” to accuse Sarah Schwartz — a Jewish woman — of bringing to a head a “pogrom” by speaking at a comedy debate during an anti-racism conference. He claims a leader of the Jewish Council of Australia made the campus unsafe for those who “look too Jewish’. He says that a PowerPoint slide made with clip art constituted a “racial libel” that was “similar to charts in Nazi Germany”.

Again, you can see how this draws on his identification of an authentic, unchanging Judaism as “indispensable to the West”. In his article outlining his theories, Craven explains how, in response to a:

cultural dirty-bomb assault against Western values, there is no Israel, only a greater us. As far as Hamas and its allies are concerned, we all wear kippahs now.

By defining Jewish authenticity in terms of the culture war to which he’s dedicated, Craven presents himself as symbolically wearing a kippah. On that basis, when writing about the QUT comedy debate, he feels entitled to joke about “Schlomo” while failing to mention the common Ashkenazi Jewish name “Schwartz” (referring instead only to “the speaker”). He does, however, note the presence at the conference of “Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah of Macquarie University”. Abdel-Fattah didn’t participate in the debate but Craven names her and not Schwartz, presumably to disassociate the presentation from its author’s Jewishness.

The same logic underscores his attack on Louise Adler. Had pro-Palestinian activists called for the detention of a woman from a family of Holocaust survivors, Craven — who has no qualms in comparing a comedy debate to Nazism — would have, of course, denounced them as antisemitic. But because Louise Adler sympathises with Palestinians (who, in Craven’s schema, are opposed to “Western values”), the Professor (adorned in his imaginary kippah) judges her insufficiently Jewish, and so thinks it’s legitimate — funny, even — to joke about putting her under house arrest.

That piece appeared while Craven was already receiving hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to investigate campus antisemitism. When it comes to punishing others, Craven takes the hardest of lines. “Anti-Semitism is a disease, not a position”, he writes, “and anyone spreading its symptoms through their employment should be sacked on sight”.

Well, quite.

He won’t be sacked, of course, precisely because his so-called “audit” is not any kind of investigation but an opportunity for a man who has, for decades, espoused a conservative critique of higher education to implement aspects of that long-standing agenda — with the blessing of the Labor government and a right-wing antisemitism envoy determined to suppress any opposition to the genocide in Gaza.

A peer-reviewed study in the Lancet now estimates the death toll from the first sixteen months of the attack on Gaza at 75000 people. Historians Liat Kozma and Lee Mordechai of the Hebrew University trace what they call “a chronicle of starvation”, noting how, during the war, the deliberate Israeli blockade of food caused “the deaths of at least 463 people many of them children”. They note that “starvation is a war crime under international law” and yet food shortages in Gaza continue. The New York Times has published a long account of the rape and sexual violence endured by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody, abuse previously repeatedly documented by other organisations.

At the universities, as elsewhere, people of all backgrounds, ethnicities and identifies have registered their horror at the suffering in Gaza. How could they not? Many of them have already faced discipline or intimidation for their protests. Now they’ll be policed by a hired ideologue from the Australian.