On Mar. 3, Ellie Avishai hopped on a call with a senior colleague from the University of Austin in Texas. She was shocked when the colleague informed her a recent LinkedIn post of hers—an anodyne post of maybe 100 words, mostly a quotation and congratulation, which she had not given much thought to previously—had gotten her into big trouble with the university higher-ups. In her post, which dealt with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, she wrote that “we can have criticisms of DEI without wanting to tear down the whole concept of diversity and inclusion.”
That ran contrary to at least one funder at the university. As a result, the private post-secondary institution tore up its contract with Avishai’s smaller educational organization, the Mill Institute, severing ties with Avishai and her team the very day she got the call.
Avishai, who lives in Toronto, recently published an account of this in Quilette, which brought its own wave of flak online—did she not know the UATX, whose website says they “champion academic freedom,” was right-wing coded? That she would have to toe a line that pleases its ideological backers? But as Avishai explains to The CJN’s opinion editor, Phoebe Maltz Bovy, on The Jewish Angle, the idea of advocating a hardline political stance in a classroom is entirely antithetical to the Mill Institute’s vision of education.
Transcript
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Hi, this is Phoebe Maltz Bovy. You’re listening to The Jewish Angle, a podcast from The CJN. In the 2010s and into the early 2020s, a perennial hot button topic was something called cancel culture. This wasn’t really about terrible people getting their due but rather about slight or perceived missteps being blown way out of proportion. People, some well known, some not, would post something to social media that rubbed strangers or maybe their employers the wrong way, and then this would cost them their job or their reputation or their personal relationships or some combination. Cancel culture at the time was kind of understood to be a left-wing phenomenon. Yet here we are, it’s 2025, and an educator and thought leader—she will be able to explain how she defines her own role—got into some hot water for a LinkedIn post perceived as being too favourable to DEI. My guest today is the educator in question, Ellie Avishai. Ellie, welcome.
Ellie Avishai: Thank you, Phoebe.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: She’s the co-founder of the Mill Institute, an organization providing educational resources promoting viewpoint diversity and open discussions about contentious issues. While she came on my radar via her really compelling piece in Quillette about parting ways with the University of Austin in Texas, which sounds kind of far-flung for us here in Canada, she lives right here in Toronto. So first off, yeah, do you consider yourself an educator or something else?
Ellie Avishai: I definitely think of myself as an educator first and foremost. I started off my career as an ed assistant in special ed in the Toronto District School Board. I worked in a middle school and a high school supporting students in their resource room. Pretty much every role that I’ve had since has been around supporting schools to create environments for students where they can be really deep critical thinkers, where they can take on real-world problems and where their education feels like it’s relevant to the world around them.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: You co-founded the Mill first Center, then Institute, correct? Yeah. Explain its relationship to your graduate studies at Harvard.
Ellie Avishai: So yeah, that’s interesting. I went to Harvard after spending almost a decade at the Rotman School of Management at U of T. I did my MBA at Rotman and then I was hired out of the MBA program to help create a set of ideas that were growing in prominence at the business school at the time called integrative thinking. It was really about helping people explore the value of looking at opposing ideas and the way the clash of ideas can help you develop new ways of problem-solving. I came to Harvard after a decade of doing that at Rotman and found that the environment at Harvard was like no educational environment I had ever been in before, in that there were really clear ideas about what was okay to think and what was not okay to think. I want to be clear; I don’t want to overstate it. That wasn’t everywhere and it wasn’t in every class. It was also probably some of the most thoughtful, intelligent, incredible people I’ve ever met, including faculty.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yes. And you are very gracious. I just want to ask, though, to try to parse this a little bit: how much do you think was about which university it was versus which program it was versus which country it was versus what year it was?
Ellie Avishai: I definitely don’t think it was just Harvard. The fact that it was Harvard could have been most liberal arts-focused universities in 2015 when I started that degree. The fact that it was a school of education, I think, is very relevant. Schools in education are known for being extremely progressive and a lot more strident about ideas that focus around diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s understandable why, right? Because the whole idea behind a school of Ed is that you’re thinking about what’s good for kids, and people get very passionate about these ideas. I think the year also mattered. I started in 2015. Donald Trump was elected for the first time during that period of time. It was also a time when progressive communities were getting more ideologically narrow and more dogmatic about ideas around power and oppressor-oppressed dynamics—all of these ideas that I’m sure people have discussed to death already.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I mean, I wrote a book about that during that time which came out in 2017. So this was definitely the moment when this was really ramping up.
Ellie Avishai: Yeah, so the moment mattered. The fact that it was a school of education mattered, for sure.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Did you have to do, like, privilege check activities? Did you have to do that sort of thing?
Ellie Avishai: Yes, we did a privilege walk during our orientation. Actually, yeah, it was funny. It was like the first moment doing that privilege walk was the first moment that I sort of had my radar, you know, it’s like my warning bells internally went off and I thought, wait a minute, what’s going on here? And not even because—
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Do you want to explain what a privilege walk is? Yeah, because not everybody wrote that book, so—
Ellie Avishai: Yeah, yeah.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: A privilege walk, it’s a niche thing to know about.
Ellie Avishai: A privilege walk is an activity where everybody lines up shoulder to shoulder, and then there’s a set of statements read aloud. If that statement is true for you, you step forward. If it’s not true for you, sometimes you just stay where you are or step back. The idea behind the privilege walk is that it’s supposed to show how separated people can be based on the privileges or lack of privileges that have come to them, mostly based on their race and their sex—those are the big things. Wealth is sometimes in there too. Like, if you ever had someone pay for your university, you step forward. If someone looked at you, followed you in a store, or made you feel unwelcome in a particular space, you step back. What it does is it’s designed to slowly separate out because of the way that the questions are asked. It’s very deliberate. There’s an outcome that the privilege walk is looking to effect. Usually what happens is that people who are wealthier are in the front, people who are poorer are in the back. White people are in the front; everybody who’s not white is in the back. People who are male are in the front; women are in the back. That’s the basic idea. And the thing that’s interesting about it is it does spark conversation. The danger of it is that it’s, you know, it’s developed for a particular reason. It always gets the same outcome. You know what I mean?
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I mean, I have a lot of thoughts about these that I don’t think there’s gonna be time to get into all of them. But I just think about what a strange moment it was that so much candor was expected of people in such a public way. You know, like, it almost feels like a kind of CV or biography equivalent of when you have the swim test on the first day of school, and you have to get into a bathing suit in front of people you’ve just met and do a swim test. You know what I mean? Like, you’re supposed to suddenly say all these very personal things about yourself. That’s one issue. And assume that people are telling the truth. Like, who knows who’s paying for school? How it seems a little like, is this being fact-checked? You know what I mean? That’s another thing. And also, there’s this sort of assumption that it’s not scientific in any way. You know what I mean? This isn’t saying what is, how advantageous, you know what I mean? It’s very crude. It’s missing things. It’s not weighted in any way. You know what I mean?
Ellie Avishai: Absolutely. And on.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So it has a lot of issues.
Ellie Avishai: Yeah. And it’s very clear where you want to be. I mean, it’s very clear who comes out of that exercise intended to feel worse than others. Right. I mean, like, there is a judgment.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: There, but who is it? Who would you say is intended to feel worse?
Ellie Avishai: If you’re up at the front, you have a lot of exploring to do. You know, why are you up at the front? Are you aware that you’re up at the front? Are you aware that on the basis of just your skin color, you’re up at the front?
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So let’s get us now to the Mill Center now Institute. So that came out of this, not just the Privilege Walk, but just this sort of your previous work and also these experiences.
Ellie Avishai: Yeah, that general feeling that I had at Harvard and also understanding after talking to educators around the country and school leaders talking to them about the way that they were feeling and realized that they were feeling in, you know, 2019, especially in 2020, very similarly to the way I had felt at Harvard. And given that my background is in, you know, critical thinking and deep learning, the idea that so many people were sitting in educational environments all around the country being very nervous about talking about issues that matter to them and about, you know, things like race and gender and trans issues and politics and immigration, all these things worried me a lot. And I thought if what I experienced at Harvard could be anywhere like a microcosm of what educators are feeling across the country, it means that there are millions of important conversations that aren’t being had, and people are going to be bypassing them in the same way that many of us at Harvard ended up just kind of shutting down and bypassing and not having the conversations we needed to have, honestly.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So to get really concrete about this, I want to ask about how the Mill Institute has approached the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with that extremely non-contentious issue. That’s right, certainly. Okay, I’m quoting you. After the Hamas attacks of 7th of October 2023, we released a new challenge that asked students to define and understand a set of contentious words such as apartheid, genocide, and Zionism and explore how opposing definitions of such words might bring more nuance to their understanding of the conflict. End quote. So I wanted to just ask a little bit more about this. Where and how old were these students, and how did it go?
Ellie Avishai: Yeah, so we did this work both with middle and high school students and also with undergrads. But the resource that we developed was for high school. And the idea behind this resource that we developed, and also then we led a number of sessions in a variety of schools, was to help students enter into the topic without the starting point being their own opinion. Because that’s one of the big challenges is that people form very strong opinions about something as complex as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without actually knowing much about it. And then it ends up just creating sort of… It makes it so hot that nobody can really talk about it. So, how did it go? It was amazing. So every one of these conversations went really, really well.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Did you learn it from the teachers? How do you, or do you go in person? Like just sort of materially, what’s happening?
Ellie Avishai: So in a few places we went personally and taught it. We did it with three, I think three or four high schools. And then we…
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: And where were the high schools?
Ellie Avishai: Just in different. One was in Austin, one was in.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Michigan, you know, so in the States. In the States.
Ellie Avishai: And then we also did a session at the Munk School at the University of Toronto with their public policy students. And so there are a couple of things that we did to set the stage that I think are really important. One is that we talked first about the danger of echo chambers. The first big conversation we’re having isn’t about the conflict, but why it is that when you’re in an echo chamber environment where the goal is to get everybody to agree, you end up with really sloppy thinking. We dissect that together so that we’re all sort of on the same page about that. The second thing we do is to help students see the invisible minority, sorry, the invisible majority in the room. There are lots of studies out there about how small groups of people with extreme views, whether it’s in our public discourse or in a classroom, can really set the tone. Everybody thinks that everybody holds those extreme views and they don’t realize that the majority of people in the space don’t have such strong views. So what we did is we surveyed students ahead of time, and we gave them pairs of questions. For example, one might be, “I sometimes think that people who are supporting Israel are ignoring the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.” But the pair to it is, “I believe someone can support Israel without ignoring the suffering of people in Gaza.” Obviously, you don’t put them right next to each other, but you have those pairs within the survey. When we do that, what you see is that most people in the room agree with both of those statements. When you put that side by side and play that back to students, they understand that they’re in a room of people who are more open-minded than the most extreme statements that have been said. So that really helps to create…
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: And this wouldn’t lead to people all yelling at one another or doing as is often done on Blue Sky, defending the echo chamber as a safe space.
Ellie Avishai: It didn’t, it didn’t. In any of the classrooms that we were in, on the contrary, I think people kind of took a collective breath. In fact, even people who held pretty extreme views came up to us afterward and said, “Hey, actually, like, this was really helpful because it wasn’t sort of asking them to get into a fighting match about whose opinion made more sense, you know what I mean?” So, but that’s just sort of setting the stage. Then I think there are a few things that we did that are really important that also help to bring down the temperature. One is we gave students a common set of information to discuss. So we’re not just asking them, like, apropos of nothing, “What’s your opinion about what’s happening between the IDF and Gaza right now?” We gave them a podcast, actually, to listen to. We gave them a New York Times podcast that they did shortly; I think it was in November of 2023, so not even a month after October 7th, called 1948. That was the name of the podcast, and it was really helpful. It just sort of traced the narrative on the Israeli side and the narrative on the Palestinian side from the founding of Israel in 1948 on. And then we asked them to discuss that podcast. So instead of it being just like, “Who’s right, who’s wrong?” they had some data to actually talk about. And the second thing is, again, we didn’t ask them to talk about what their personal opinions were. Instead, we asked questions like, “What is each side in this conflict?” Not that there’s only two sides, but “What is each side taking as settled or obvious that they’re not questioning? And what is something that the other side is bringing up that you think maybe this first side is missing?” Right. So it’s like they’re doing thinking work where they actually have to analyze and get a little bit deeper as opposed to having an opinion.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: That sounds fantastic. And it sounds like maybe you all will solve. You’ll bring peace to the Middle East. Oh, right. I want to talk about sort of what you were. What you and the Mill Institute were doing at the University of Austin. But first, for the uninitiated, of whom I might have to somewhat include myself until reading your article, what exactly is the University of Austin? I had this vague understanding of, like, oh, it’s the Barry Weiss University that’s not actually a university, but maybe is now a university. What is it?
Ellie Avishai: The University of Austin is a private university that really—
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Is it accredited?
Ellie Avishai: It’s in the process. So they are running an undergraduate programme and they’re kind of in the process toward full accreditation. They welcomed their first freshman class this past fall, but they’ve been kind of on the path there since, I think 2021 was when they launched. And the idea of the University of Austin was really to show another model to, you know, what they felt were a failing model in higher education. Now, that was getting increasingly ideological in the way that it was engaging students. So they wanted to create a university that was founded on what they called the fearless pursuit of truth and where people could speak openly, and you wouldn’t have these kinds of cancellations. I mean, that was sort of the founding idea behind the university. Although, of course, I’m sure, yes, do a much better job than me. But that’s the. That was the idea. That’s what drew me.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yes. So your institute became like an affiliated. So what exactly were you doing at the University of Austin?
Ellie Avishai: Yeah, I mean, we were kind of came in as an affiliated institute understanding that our role would largely be outside of the university. So they got excited about the project that my co-founder, Alana Redstone, and I had been putting together called the Mill Centre because I think they felt like there was so much overlap in the way that we were looking at the education space. And it was exciting to them to imagine, I think, that while they were building this new university, they would have an affiliated institute that was acting as like an arm of the university out into the education space.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So what happened then? What’s the action bit for those who have not yet read your Quillette piece?
Ellie Avishai: Yeah, so we operated for about two years, two and a half years, in this kind of relationship with the university. And then on March 3rd, I got into a call with a colleague who said, “You know, Ellie, we really, like, there’s a real problem. We’ve got to talk about your social media post.” And I was like, I have no idea what you’re talking about. So the post that I had written was this really anodyne, very boring; I mean, it was a nothing.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: It was a LinkedIn post. I mean, I looked at it, and it is, It’s a LinkedIn post. It’s not…
Ellie Avishai: It thanked a writer. He’s actually a Yale psychologist named Michael Strambler, who’s a wonderful, very thoughtful writer, and is actually now one of our advisors and mentors. I thanked him for giving a shout-out to the Mill Institute in a piece that he wrote. And the piece that he wrote really just said, “Look, DEI has some real issues, and they’re real, but the way to tackle the issues associated with DEI is not to kind of bring down a sledgehammer and become really ideologically captured on the other side and start firing everybody and then just, you know, not really being able to reach across the aisle at all. We should always be able to do that.” So I agreed. I said, “Yes, I think we should always be able to do that, and we can have critiques of DEI without throwing out the whole idea of diversity and incl.” That was the problem. And apparently, I had really triggered somebody that was sort of a powerful person in the university. And that evening, I was let go, and so was my whole team, which.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I’m so sorry this happened to you. And also, it’s just there’s something sort of surreal about this because I feel like one was so recently hearing about this story from the other side.
Ellie Avishai: I think it’s also really important to say that even if this LinkedIn post thing hadn’t even been an issue, I think it’s very likely that the Mill Institute and the University of Austin would have parted ways pretty soon anyway because of the way that what each of us are trying to do in the education space have been getting kind of further and further and further apart. Know, I mean, the University of Austin has really put a very clear stake in the ground around DEI, and they’ve also been very, it’s been very clear they’ve been defining themselves as the anti-Harvard. They’ve been defining themselves as against what other universities are doing, but in a way that says, “We think that these ideas that are coming out of progressive spaces are the problem.” And that is so far from the way the Mill Institute defines its work. If we were to take a side in the culture war, it would undermine everything that we’re doing. Because what we’re saying is the culture war itself is the problem. Having culture war dynamics in an education space is the thing that prevents people from talking honestly, is what leads to sloppy thinking, is what creates, you know, a tendency to close on oversimplified ideas too quickly, and it drives out rigour because as soon as you’re on a side, you kind of don’t need to go any further, you know. So ultimately, we could never have been, like, that could never have been a harmonious connection for long because of the differences in the ways that we were approaching education.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So you got some pushback. And I did not think this was fair pushback. But you did from some people who thought that you sort of, you should have known this was a right-wing university. Yeah, people said I was a rube. And I guess I wanted to ask, do you think it’s that the place itself changed, like perhaps because of who was in power in the States? Or do you think that it was you seeing the true colors that were kind of there all along?
Ellie Avishai: Well, let’s be clear. I think most of the pushback that I’ve gotten, especially on social media, is from people who had a very narrow understanding of what the University of Austin is and was and just was. It was like throwing red meat to a pack of—you know, I mean, it was like they were just waiting, I’m sure, for some confirmation that this was just a right-wing project that was sort of, you know, all along. And here was a way of proving it. Those people are wrong, and I never really took that particularly seriously. The real part of the question that you’re asking, do I think it was sort of there all along or it changed? The answer is both. Yes, there was that tension there all along. There were always people pushing towards it being a little edgier and a little more kind of playing into the culture war, and those who fought very hard against it. Like all places with people and real institutions, not just kind of symbolic ideas, it was complex and interesting and pretty vibrant actually, that tension. I do think over the last six months, there has been a shift at the university. There’s been a much stronger push towards playing into that culture war vibe. I mean, you can just see it in the social media. Just look at the communications that have come. Yeah.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: And it’s interesting, what you write about really is like schools, always like colleges, high schools, whatever, have rivalries, and that’s sort of a normal and healthy part of educational life, certainly in the States. But what you’re describing is something different. This idea is of like that, this is to vanquish. Like you use the expression zero-sum, that it’s the idea of having that university instead of other universities. Like if there’s a competition between two rival high schools, it’s not so as to destroy one of the high schools.
Ellie Avishai: Absolutely. I mean, I can understand as a startup university that needs to find a way to kind of push through all the noise. Why creating a line like “we’re the anti-Harvard” is kind of cute, you know, and no, but what you’re describing.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Is something else that seems of a piece with the kind of Trumpian, like coarsening of discourse type approach. But I want to talk about one thing really, because we’re running out of time. This is really important. So just another thing that you write in your piece which people should really go read, also in Quillette, I’m quoting you here. It turned out that what I was observing was symptomatic of the larger ideological tension developing within UATX between two camps: those specifically championing an unabashedly anti-woke conservative agenda and those such as myself, prioritizing academic freedom more generally. End quote. So it seems like what was happening at the University of Austin was itself part of a broader rift within this heterodox or anti-woke coalition. So I guess I’m just trying to figure out like, where are people, often Jews, not always, who take this kind of liberal, antisocial justice excesses stance left at this point in time? Because it seems like what does it even mean? Like anti-woke or anti. Things like a privilege walk, critical of things like a privilege walk. What does that even mean now? You know what I mean? So where do you go from here? Kind of not just you personally, but just sort of that position?
Ellie Avishai: Yeah, that’s a big question.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I ask myself this question every day and I don’t have an answer.
Ellie Avishai: I mean, look, if I relate it back to my own Judaism, I mean, all I can say for myself is, you know, and look, this also comes from growing up in a, you know, with a father who is, you know, an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has written many books on it.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Who’s your father?
Ellie Avishai: Bernard Avishai. Well, yes, and he, you know, I mean, he. The work that he does. Actually, maybe I’ll end with the work that he does because I think that it points away. So it’s that he teaches a course right now at Dartmouth with a colleague named Ezzedine Choukri Fishere, who was an Egyptian diplomat, and the two of them teach a course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, kind of allowing that. They’re coming from these very, very different backgrounds and they co-teach it together. And the way that Dartmouth has approached the conflict has really been kind of a beacon. I think 60 Minutes even did a piece on them because it’s really shown a different way than, for example, what happened at Columbia, if that’s kind of a good comparator. The idea there is you have to start from a place of complexity and nuance. If you start from a place of let’s simplify these ideas down into soundbites and then claim that anybody that doesn’t hold the same soundbite that I do is on the wrong side of history, you’re lost. You’re lost. You’re in a place where you might do a really good job assembling a bunch of people around. That will cheer every time you post something. They’ll like, carry you on their shoulders, but you’re never going to learn anything, and you’re not going to really understand what’s going on in the world around you. You have to start from a place of nuance. My father says actually that one of the things that he and Ezzedine always agree on is that they both have a sense of tragedy about the conflict in Israel. And I think that that needs to be true for all of us as we. Think about these really big challenges, political and otherwise, that are happening around us. If we aren’t within ourselves doing that, if instead we’re allowing ourselves to just get sucked into oversimplified ideas, you know, then this culture war is going to keep perpetuating and we’re just going to see these sort of ever-widely, you know, swinging pendulums that I sort of said in my piece. You know, it’s like when a pendulum becomes a wrecking ball. It becomes a wrecking ball. No force that slows it down. Well, the force that slows it down is an ability to understand that these things are complex and to have the humility ourselves to say we are actually pretty ignorant of most things, and our job is to understand what we don’t know, not gather the people around us and start parading and cheering. So I don’t know what that means beyond our own just individual behavior, you know, but I think that’s the place to start.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Thank you so much, Ellie Avishai, for coming on The Jewish Angle.
Ellie Avishai: Thank you, Phoebe. It was wonderful to be here.
Show Notes
Credits
- Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy
- Producer and editor: Michael Fraiman
- Music: “Gypsy Waltz” by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective
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