I sure would hate to be the parent of a high-school senior right now. Cracking the code on which college or university hates my child least would haunt my dreams. The attempts by college presidents to stem the tide of antisemitism on their campuses — particularly with the rise of virulent and sometimes violent actions after the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror invasion into Israel — appear slapdash at best, complicit at worst.
Indeed, the April 17 appearance of Columbia University’s president, Manouche Shafik, before the House Education and Workforce Committee to testify about antisemitism on Columbia’s campus was emblematic of the problems facing college presidents across the country. Her testimony was almost as disastrous as the December testimonies of the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania. The only thing making her appearance somewhat less cringeworthy was that she had many months to prepare for probing questions from committee members. She was caught off guard fewer times.
Why are these presidents of academic institutions failing? Often, it’s because they have storied academic careers and rise to their posts without substantial experience in management or public-facing leadership roles. But the climate on college campuses today requires presidents who can actually manage and lead.
Presidents have to understand who all of the campus (and off-campus) stakeholders are: students, faculty, and staff, of course, but also parents, donors, alumni, job recruiters, the federal and state governments, local and national media, and the city or town in which the institution is based. Presidents whose history is exclusively in the academy believe they are well equipped to address on-campus stakeholders. They think they can manage profitable relationships with donors. But they tend to ignore the rest of their ecosystems, and to engage them only on an as-needed basis.
They can move quickly when they perceive it’s in their interest to do so. A recent example was the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement. Each university president competed with his or her rival presidents to be the first to establish a robust diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) apparatus on campus to address the needs of students to feel more “included.” The apparatus grew, hydra-like, replete with apparatchiks whose enforcement and discipline stoked fear across a given campus.
After October 7, it became clear that the DEI apparatchiks’ mission of inclusion did not include Jewish students, faculty, and staff on campus. Somehow, in the blink of an eye, Jews had become an oppressor class and thus fair game for attacks from far-left progressive faculty and students. Indeed, a campus culture of antisemitism seemed primed, champing at the bit, fully funded, and ready to explode in a fury unleashed directly at Jews. The terrorist attacks on Israel served as the backdrop and pretext for a “justified” and “justifiable” torrent. College and university presidents were caught entirely by surprise.
They shouldn’t have been. The causes of this fury are obvious. It’s impossible to ignore the insidious effort over the past 20 years by the government of Qatar to buy influence in the United States through large contributions to elite American universities. The “charitable” contributions were designed less to enhance a people-to-people understanding of Qatar and more to forgive Qatar, in advance, for gross human-rights abuses and for funding and hosting terrorists within its borders.
But when you follow the money, you also have to look at the ideology. Far-left organizations have joined forces with terror-linked non-profits and liberal billionaires to continue the public calls for the destruction of Israel, even after the Islamic Republic of Iran’s massive missile attack on the Jewish state. The blood libel against Jews has become mainstreamed. These well-funded activist-haters deny the evidence of genocidal war crimes perpetrated by Hamas against Israelis and others living in Israel.
These are all reasons why American Jews have awakened to an upside-down world. The institutions they valued, many of which they built over centuries, have turned against them. They are frightened in their homes, their schools, their colleges, their synagogues, their workplaces, and their communities.
Even the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which pushed a lot of the DEI apparatchiks’ language in recent years, has finally woken up to the threat of antisemitism on campus. It just published a Campus Antisemitism Report Card. Though not a comprehensive report, it examines the records, first and foremost, of the highest-profile campuses in the United States. It is a start. And its results are telling. Its conclusion: Most colleges are barely scraping by, and most of the Ivy League and other elite universities are failing.
The ADL’s report card is a shot across the bow of university presidents’ desks. The barrage of blowback they are facing from all of the stakeholders they have been studiously ducking has been fast and consequential. Those stakeholders should take immediate action to hold presidents accountable.
To wit:
Presidents are accountable. Their actions (and inactions) are noted. To date, their performance has been lackluster. To address antisemitism, presidents need to confront it directly. They need to make clear to students, before students do dumb things, that actions have consequences. This is always made clear to students involved in campus Greek life and athletics. Hence the vast majority steer away from the peer pressure to do dumb and dangerous things.
Freshmen new to campus should learn, as a mandatory component of orientation, that antisemitism constitutes hate speech and will not be tolerated in any form. Campus leaders often forget that most college freshmen have never met a Jewish person before and that their impressions of all new things will be formed early in their college experience. Campus adoption of and education about the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism is an easy place to start. Jewish speakers, artists, and exhibits should be safeguarded when they are on campus, not shouted down.
University presidents have been cowed by the loudest voices in the room, voices often spewing hatred and calls to violence. In some cases, they have exercised sound judgment and held students accountable. What is shocking on campuses post–October 7 is the much more common retreat of presidents behind “free speech principles.” According to Harvard’s ex-president Claudine Gay, whether calls to annihilate Jews are free speech is a matter of “context.” Most college presidents don’t want their future to look like Gay’s.
Greenlighting “free expression” for students who advocate and sometimes participate in violence against Jewish students and their allies is unacceptable. Free expression that crosses the line to intimidation cannot be tolerated. Doing so will have costly consequences for presidents and their legacies — one nervous parent of a high-school senior at a time.