Profiles in Hatred: Dr. Alexander Cartwright’s Enablement
The 6th President of UCF presided over a campus-wide reenactment of Jewish history while refusing to take any action against antisemitism.
Dr. Alexander Cartwright has a long and storied CV: beginning as an electrical engineering graduate, progressing to faculty at a minor State University of New York (SUNY) member school, jumping between administrative roles at other SUNY schools before eventually becoming the Provost of the entire SUNY system. Spending just under three years in that role, he would be tapped as the Chancellor of the University of Missouri system in 2017, changing roles once again after less than three years to become the 6th President of the University of Central Florida.
Cartwright’s appointment to the post makes sense on paper. His background is in engineering, the discipline for which UCF is best known. His administrative portfolio spans multiple kinds of positions, from running departments and research operations to entire University systems. And yet, while his resumé clearly shows the work of an impressive administrator, it’s hard to get the sense that Cartwright is also an impressive leader.
Based on his actions following the October 7th pogrom, and his University’s subsequent descent into a bulwark of antisemitism, it’s hard to get the sense that Cartwright is much of a leader at all.
Immediately following the attacks, the Jewish community at UCF had high hopes for his leadership. He issued a statement which did the bare minimum: condemning a racist terror attack against the Jewish people. Yet, despite what would happen next on his campus, and despite the First Amendment empowering him to condemn actions that he otherwise would be unable to penalize, this would be both the first and last statement issued by Dr. Cartwright on the matter.
Things quickly took a turn for the worse for UCF’s Jewish community. Mainstream student organizations would line up to dogpile on Jewish people. Hate marches, left unchecked, would pressure Jewish organizations to decrease their public presence on campus. Well-documented police discrimination would be reported and inactioned. At every level, Cartwright was responsible for what was happening on his campus, and at every documented opportunity, he did nothing to stop it - despite him and his subordinates being legally empowered to do so.
Yet “silent” doesn’t quite describe Cartwright throughout this period. After all, he freely met with one of the worst hate groups on UCF’s campus, which he knew (or reasonably should have known, since his office had been made aware of it beforehand) has expressed a desire for another genocide of the Jewish people.
Cartwright’s “leadership” created a free-for-all climate of Jew-hatred in which aspiring UCF neo-Nazis could express their desires to massacre the world’s Jewish populations without any repercussions whatsoever. It should come as no surprise that in January 2024, one such student issued a credible mass shooting threat against a group of Jews.
Did Dr. Alexander Cartwright, President of the University, issue a statement at that time condemning the student for threatening to perpetuate a pogrom on UCF’s campus? Of course not. That would require Cartwright to be an impressive leader and not just an impressive administrator - or, rather, it would require him to be a “leader” of some kind in the first place. Instead, UCF’s Chief of Police made a weak statement calling for “civility” - and even then, only after facing massive pressure from a prominent civil rights organization.
Aside from being fundamentally responsible for the antisemitism of his own administration, Cartwright’s deliberate lack of speech implies a startling degree of cowardice. It does not take much leadership - perhaps even the bare minimum - to condemn racism under one’s own jurisdiction. Yet Cartwright could not find it within himself to do even that. We know that Cartwright is capable of these actions in his capacity as President: comparing his record to the President of UF or even USF makes it clear that this is a choice which Cartwright is making.
The question is if UCF’s Jewish community will display the leadership that Cartwright lacks, and demand his accountability for simply watching as the world’s oldest hatred rooted itself firmly at the world’s largest public university.