Universities all talk, little action on fighting antisemitism

Ivy League universities pride themselves on having high academic standards. Unfortunately, far too many have let their moral standards slip into decay.

As the malevolent specter of antisemitism surged anew after the Oct. 7 Israeli massacre by Hamas terrorists, many American college campuses became hotbeds of hate speech.

Harvard University, Tufts University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were among the sites of anti-Israel protests and harassment of Jewish students. These and other schools had a chance to take stock and course correct.

They failed — literally.

The Anti-Defamation League issued its “Campus Antisemitic Report Card” Thursday, in which it evaluated 85 of America’s top liberal arts colleges, and those with the highest Jewish student populations, according to reports.

Those getting “F” grades were Harvard, the University of Chicago, Stanford University, MIT, Princeton University, Tufts, the University of Virginia, Michigan State University, SUNY Purchase, SUNY Rockland, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Swarthmore College.

The grades were based on the schools’ antisemitic incidents, “Jewish life on campus,” and administrative actions taken to fight antisemitism and protecting Jewish students.

These institutions are not short of sound bites in verbally condemning antisemitism on campus. It’s on the action front that so many dropped the ball. There’s a disturbing reason for this.

When Rabbi David Wolpe, a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Divinity School, announced his resignation in December from the university’s Antisemitism Advisory

Group, he posted on X, “the ideology that grips far too many of (Harvard’s) students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil.”

Harvard is not alone. As the ADL noted in its report, hours after the Oct. 7 attack, a student group called the Coalition Against Apartheid joined with other student groups at MIT and nearby Boston-area schools and issued a statement that they “hold the Israeli regime responsible” for Hamas’ violence, and justified Hamas’ terrorism by “affirm(ing) the right … to resist oppression and colonization.”

Casting the victims as villains is morally repugnant, as is universities’ failure to address the pernicious ignorance and hatred at its core.

In a comment to The Hill, Tufts spokesperson Patrick Collins said the school “disagrees” with the grade and said Tufts has “vigorously condemned antisemitism incidents on campus.”

Condemnation only goes so far. How many universities are fighting pro-Hamas propaganda with facts? Or are their faculties too far down the rabbit hole of “radical chic” antisemitism?

Last week, the New York Post reported, some 150 students at Pomona College in Claremont, California stormed the building that houses school president Gabrielle Starr’s office — and refused to leave, in protest of the removal of pro-Palestinian art on the campus.

Starr confronted the students: “If you do not leave within the next ten minutes, every student in this building is immediately suspended from this institution,” she said in a video posted on X.

That’s how you do it. Anything less is just enabling.