You don’t need a majority to control an institution. Sometimes you just need a majority of the people who bother to show up.
That uncomfortable truth lies at the heart of a recent report from the Anti-Defamation League and Academic Engagement Network examining antisemitism and exclusion in higher education unions. Its most important finding is not simply that some unions have become hostile to Israel. It is how relatively small groups of committed activists can acquire the authority to speak for everyone else.
The mechanism is hardly mysterious. Low turnout. Organizational indifference. Highly motivated factions. Elections few members follow and meetings even fewer attend. Eventually, organizations created to represent faculty and graduate employees on wages, benefits and working conditions begin issuing pronouncements on Israel, Gaza and Zionism that many members neither sought nor support.
And the evidence is growing. A separate ADL study of Jewish members of K-12 teachers unions found educators describing self-censorship, fear of backlash, hostile rhetoric and failures by union leadership to address antisemitism.
This should concern people well beyond the Jewish community because it raises a fundamental question about democratic institutions: When does winning a vote become a mandate to speak for everyone?
Consider one example in the AEN-ADL report. A union local had roughly 250 members. Thirty-five attended a meeting. Twenty-one voted to endorse a statement supporting student protesters and demands to cut ties with Israeli institutions. The vote was legitimate. But was it representative?
That distinction matters. Democracy requires more than counting hands in the room. Institutions derive credibility from the proposition that their decisions reasonably reflect the people in whose name they speak. When 21 people can establish the political position of 250, procedure may have been satisfied while representation has failed.
Nor is this phenomenon accidental. The Democratic Socialists of America promotes a “rank-and-file strategy” encouraging socialists to organize within unions, support reform caucuses, seek leadership positions and connect workplace organization to broader political objectives.
There is nothing improper about organizing, persuading or running for office. That is democracy. But exploiting apathy to acquire institutional power becomes something different when the resulting leadership claims a mandate its membership never meaningfully supplied.
And political activism can migrate into collective bargaining itself. At Columbia, the student-workers union has included divestment among its bargaining demands, while the university has objected that some proposals intrude into academic and operational decisions.
This is about considerably more than Israel. It is about the vulnerability of institutions whose members assume somebody else is paying attention.
The answer is not to silence activists. It is to make representative institutions genuinely representative. Political resolutions far removed from a union’s labor mission should require adequate notice, meaningful participation and reasonable turnout thresholds. Particularly consequential positions may warrant supermajorities.
Jewish faculty and teachers should not have to abandon organizations established to represent them because a committed faction learned to operate the machinery better than everyone else.
And the lesson extends far beyond unions. Institutional capture rarely begins with someone breaking down the door. More often, the door is unlocked, the room is nearly empty and nobody notices who has taken the chairs.
By the time everyone else arrives, 21 people are speaking for 250. The question then isn’t simply why they showed up. It’s why everyone else allowed them to speak in their name.
