As the Trump administration ratchets up its efforts to influence higher education, the latest White House proposal for colleges and universities is being met with skepticism from academics — even as its authors say its implementation should be a no-brainer.

That’s in reference to a White House document called the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” a 10-point plan that the federal government is asking universities to sign in order to get preferential treatment for the federal funds upon which many research universities rely. 

If the schools don’t agree to the terms in the compact — which include commitments to end race-based hiring and admissions, limits on foreign enrollment and a pledge to foster greater ideological diversity — they risk losing billions of dollars.

The compact reflects an evolution of a familiar Trump administration argument: that America’s preeminent educational institutions have strayed from their mission, letting politics interfere with their raison d’etre as centers of academic excellence. Combating antisemitism on college campuses — a cause the White House has prioritized this year — provided President Donald Trump a foray into greater oversight of higher education. But there appears to be no direct line from that fight against antisemitism to the broader ideological framework in this compact, which makes only a passing reference to antisemitism.

A White House official who worked on the compact called it a “basic, basic easy low hurdle,” telling Jewish Insider that the document is “a nonpartisan, neutral concept.” 

Many academics, including several who have spoken out against antisemitism and against universities’ handling of it in recent years, don’t agree. 

“Fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth said last week, making MIT the first university to formally reject the compact. 

The White House wrote to MIT and eight other campuses this month, giving them early access. Brown University joined MIT in rejecting the compact on Wednesday, but the other seven universities haven’t yet responded ahead of the Oct. 20 deadline. 

With the compact, Trump is making the case that universities have a fiduciary responsibility to American citizens that they have not met, as academia has “lost its way,” according to the administration official. 

“It’s for the taxpayers,” said the official, who requested anonymity to speak openly about a negotiating process that is mostly taking place behind closed doors. “This administration is here to support research … but at the same time we also can’t abdicate our responsibility to you and myself. There are a lot of people who are cutting checks to the IRS because that’s what they have to do, and they don’t even go to college.” 

But where the Trump administration sees “good hygiene,” according to the official, many academics worry the compact’s far-reaching goals could amount to an overreach that impinges on free speech and academic freedom.

“It’s something that everybody’s talking about, and people are taking it very seriously,” said David Myers, a professor and the chair of Jewish history at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It really seems to touch upon one of the cardinal principles of university governance, which is autonomy and independence.” 

Menachem Rosensaft, an adjunct law professor who teaches about antisemitism and the Holocaust at Cornell University, called the compact “overkill, with a number of positive items in it, but overall problematic for any independent university of college.” 

Rosensaft questioned how the compact addresses antisemitism, if at all: Antisemitism is only mentioned in a section about foreign students, which accuses those who are “not properly vetted” with “saturating the campus with noxious values such as antisemitism and other anti-American values.”

Academics concerned about antisemitism told JI that the Trump administration is right to point out that severe problems exist in higher education. But many are unsure how this compact will address the issues Jewish students face. 

“I often wonder if a compact like this had come out of the Biden administration or a Harris administration, whether, from the faculty, there’d be that same kind of knee-jerk reaction [that] we have to oppose everything that comes out of the administration — when actually, when you read this line by line, there’s a lot of things we can agree with,” said Miriam Elman, a former political science professor at Syracuse University. 

“If you look at certain things individually, they’re OK. I don’t have any problem with freezing tuition, for example, or with arresting grade inflation. I don’t have any problem with teaching [Western civilization]. The problem is that, as a whole package, it’s kind of the antithesis of what universities are meant to do,” said Norman Goda, a historian and professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Florida. “And if the addressing of antisemitism is one of the aims of this, then I don’t know how that is done.”

Miriam Elman, a former political science professor at Syracuse University, said that some of the immediate skepticism of the compact is likely due to politics. But that doesn’t alleviate all of her concerns.

“I often wonder if a compact like this had come out of the Biden administration or a Harris administration, whether, from the faculty, there’d be that same kind of knee-jerk reaction [that] we have to oppose everything that comes out of the administration — when actually, when you read this line by line, there’s a lot of things we can agree with,” said Elman, who is the executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, which fights academic boycotts of Israel. 

“But we also are not naive. The Trump administration does have an agenda. It does have priorities, and it is wrapping those priorities into the fight against campus antisemitism. So there is a lot of concern.” 

The compact appears to be primarily directed at undergraduate programs. Dr. Philip Greenland, a professor of medicine at Northwestern University, said his colleagues at the medical school are generally not worried about the compact in the way many humanities professors are. “It could affect the medical school in a secondary way: If Northwestern is drawn into this and doesn’t comply, we may never get our federal funding back,” said Greenland. The Trump administration froze $790 million in federal funding for Northwestern in April. 

“Although the compact doesn’t seem to be talking about antisemitism, in the end, people will remember: How did the administration go after the universities?” said Pamela Nadell, the chair in women’s and gender history at American University and the author of a new book about antisemitism in America. “They said that they were promoting antisemitism.”

“I think it’s in some sense a good thing that it doesn’t call out, specifically, that this is about antisemitism,” Greenland continued. “What the compact seems to be more about is a claim, which is justifiable, that universities have become very, very ideological in one direction … People are claiming that the compact will deprive them of their free speech. But what that doesn’t recognize is that the current situation deprives other people of their free speech and their free expression.” 

The Trump administration official told JI that the compact is “all-encompassing,” and argued that its broad mandate includes antisemitism — but not only that.

“It overlaps, but the compact isn’t a compact to stop antisemitism. It’s a compact to return to lawful academic excellence and a marketplace of ideas, [and] that includes eradicating antisemitism,” said the official. 

Pamela Nadell, the chair in women’s and gender history at American University and the author of a new book about antisemitism in America, argued that the Trump administration’s earlier actions targeting antisemitism will come to be viewed as the pretext for what is now a much larger and more strategic rewriting of federal policy toward institutions of higher education. 

“Although the compact doesn’t seem to be talking about antisemitism, in the end, people will remember: How did the administration go after the universities?” said Nadell. “They said that they were promoting antisemitism.”

Over the weekend, The New York Times published a story contending that the momentum for settlements with elite universities was stalling amid divisions between those in the Trump administration looking to make a deal and those looking for more meaningful reforms in combating antisemitism. 

The story glossed over the related development we’ve been hearing from officials involved in the negotiating process: that a zeal for dealmaking from some officials is overshadowing the main reason the Trump administration was playing hardball with these schools in the first place — the rampant antisemitism that has been festering on campus.

In fact, the word “antisemitism” was hardly mentioned in the lengthy NYT story, a sign in itself of the administration’s flagging focus.

Indeed, many of the deals struck — along with the outlines of potential future deals — have focused on the dollar amounts in the settlement, without requiring many significant reforms that would deal with antisemitism at the elite schools.

Columbia University agreed in July, following a lengthy legal battle, to pay a $200 million settlement over three years to the federal government. In addition to the legal penalty, the Ivy League school — which did not admit to wrongdoing in the resolution agreement — pledged to implement a series of commitments aimed at protecting Jewish students. 

These include further incorporating the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism by requiring its Office of Institutional Equity to embrace the definition; appointing a Title VI coordinator to review alleged violations of the Civil Rights Act; requiring antisemitism training for all students, faculty and staff; and refusing to recognize or meet with anti-Israel student coalition Columbia University Apartheid Divest.

On Columbia’s campus, some pro-Israel students expressed disappointment over those “largely symbolic” commitments, which diverged from a list of reforms initially demanded by the Trump administration. 

Soon after Columbia, Brown University entered into an agreement with the Trump administration to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding. The settlement also primarily focused on money rather than reform, although unlike Columbia, Brown was not required to pay a fine directly to the federal government. The university instead agreed to pay $50 million over 10 years to workforce development organizations in Rhode Island. It also agreed to launch a third-party campus climate survey in an effort to protect Jewish students. 

Meanwhile, the conversation surrounding a possible settlement with Harvard has increasingly centered on the significant size of the potential payment — a whopping half-billion dollars — over any of the institutional changes the university will need to make. Sources familiar with the dealmaking confirm to Jewish Insider that President Donald Trump himself is increasingly enamored with the size of the payment, which has led some of his advisors to focus less on reforms and more on the money.

“There’s growing dissatisfaction with the White House letting universities buy their way out of accountability with no meaningful change. It’s clear they’ve been totally out-negotiated,” said one source familiar with the negotiations. 

Reading the Times story, the administration officials working to fight against the universities’ harassment of their Jewish students were caricatured as “ideologically driven aides,” whereas those looking to cut lucrative financial deals were portrayed as the pragmatists. 

The reality is the opposite. Securing government payouts as the primary achievement for using state power to freeze a private university’s funds makes the whole enterprise seem like extortion. Putting in the work to make sure these abuses don’t happen again is what would make the exertion of government power more justifiable.

Indeed, the outcome of this showdown with elite universities — with negotiations with Cornell and Northwestern taking place now — will be a test of whether many of the systemic abuses that led to the extraordinary freeze on research funding will be rolled back, or whether the tolerance of anti-Jewish discrimination on campus could become the new normal.

Harvard University’s recent decision to cover security costs for Harvard Hillel was celebrated by many Jewish students as a way to alleviate growing security costs amid a surge in campus antisemitism. But for others, it raised questions about why the agreement did not extend to other Jewish groups affiliated with the school, such as Harvard Chabad. 

“Of course, there is a sense that there should be a responsibility” to cover Chabad’s security as well, Harvard Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi told Jewish Insider, although he said that he has never directly asked the administration to do so.   

Alex Bernat, Harvard Chabad’s outgoing undergraduate student president who graduated in the spring, said it’s “crucial” that Chabad receive the same funding. “If you want to make claims about protecting the Jewish community, you have to protect the whole Jewish community,” he told JI. 

“As an incoming student planning to be active in Chabad, I’m concerned that only funding security for Hillel overlooks the safety needs of the entire Jewish community,” Stella Hiltzik, who is slated to begin her freshman year at Harvard in the fall, told JI. “In today’s climate, all Jewish spaces deserve equal protection.”

While Hillel owns its building structure, that building sits on university property. It also contains a Harvard dining facility and other spaces that are accessible to all students, faculty and staff using Harvard’s ID swipe system. Chabad’s building is located on private property in a Cambridge, Mass. neighborhood. The latter has been guarded by armed security — funded by donors — every day since the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks and subsequent rise of antisemitism on college campuses. 

A Harvard spokesperson declined to comment to JI regarding the reason Hillel received university-funded security, but Chabad didn’t. 

Since Oct. 7, Harvard Chabad has been a centerpoint of campus security concerns. In a December 2023 speech made on campus during a Hanukkah menorah lighting, Zarchi described an atmosphere of fear for Jewish students and for his own family, who he said had been advised by Harvard’s police department to obtain private security after Harvard Chabad became the first university to screen IDF footage from the Hamas terror attacks in Israel. “Twenty-six years I gave my life to this community. I’ve never felt more alone,” Zarchi said at the time. 

On July 31, following years of lobbying by Harvard Hillel officials and advocates, Harvard agreed to cover all security costs for the university’s Hillel through the rest of Harvard President Alan Garber’s tenure, which is set to conclude at the end of the 2026-27 academic year. The move comes as Harvard faces billions of dollars in federal funding cuts from the Trump administration over its alleged failure to address antisemitism on campus.

“By taking on responsibility for security at Hillel, Harvard University is making a powerful statement: Harvard is committed to the safety of Jewish students,” Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, executive director of Harvard Hillel, told JI when the announcement was made. 

Zarchi called it “misleading” to claim that the university is protecting Jewish students broadly if Chabad is not included. Since last week’s announcement, Zarchi said he has received “floods” of calls and emails from students, parents and alumni who are “deeply concerned” about the university limiting security funding to Hillel. Chabad, according to Zarchi, is attended by nearly 500 students per week. 

“It’s this public misrepresentation and abandonment of the safety of so many that we need to address,” said Zarchi.

 “All Jewish students at Harvard, whether it’s Chabad or Hillel, should have safety and security.” 

It’s spring in Cambridge, Mass. — graduation season — which means that large white tents have started to appear on the leafy quads throughout Harvard Square. 

Until Tuesday, a different kind of tent was still visible in Harvard Yard: small camping tents housing the stragglers who remained in Harvard’s anti-Israel encampment even after final exams wrapped up several days ago. Last week, Harvard suspended student protesters who refused to abide by campus administrators’ orders to disband the encampment, blocking access to their dorms. 

But now, just a week from the start of official university commencement festivities, Harvard has backtracked on its disciplinary action, ahead of the arrival next week of thousands of graduates’ family members, alumni and honorary degree recipients to the Ivy League university. University officials seemed to be saying that Harvard cannot get ready for commencement if Harvard Yard is still gated and locked, accessible only to university affiliates and the handful of people still camped out in protest of Harvard’s alleged “complicity in genocide.” 

In making a deal with the protesters, Harvard interim President Alan Garber joined a growing number of leaders at elite universities who are incorporating protesters’ voices into major university investment decisions and allowing student activists to get off with few, if any, repercussions after weeks of disciplinary violations. Harvard’s dean of the faculty of arts and sciences wrote in a Tuesday email that the outcome “deepened” the university’s “commitment to dialogue and to strengthening the bonds that pull us together as a community.” 

The path Garber took is now a well-trodden one — remove the threat of disciplinary consequences and allow protesters to meet with university trustees or other senior leaders to pitch them on divesting their schools’ endowments from Israeli businesses, a concession that before last month would have been unthinkable at America’s top universities. 

In a matter of days it has become commonplace. Just two years ago, Harvard’s then-president, Lawrence Bacow, responded to the campus newspaper’s endorsement of a boycott of Israel by saying that “any suggestion of targeting or boycotting a particular group because of disagreements over the policies pursued by their governments is antithetical to what we stand for as a university.” 

Northwestern University set the tone two weeks ago when President Michael Schill reached an agreement with anti-Israel protesters in exchange for them ending their encampment. Jewish leaders on campus found the agreement so problematic that the seven Jewish members of the university’s antisemitism committee — including Northwestern’s Hillel director, several faculty members and a student — stepped down in protest. Lily Cohen, a Northwestern senior who resigned from the committee, summed up their concerns: “It appears as though breaking the rules gets you somewhere, and trying to do things respectfully and by the books does not.” 

Her observation has proven prescient as universities negotiate with anti-Israel protesters who break campus rules while they slow-walk reforms long sought by Jewish students — or even avoid meeting with Jewish community members altogether. 

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Mone signed onto a far-reaching agreement with protesters this week that calls for a cease-fire in the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, condemns “genocide” and denounces “scholasticide” in Gaza and cuts off ties between a university-affiliated environmental NGO and two government-owned Israeli water companies. Meanwhile, Hillel Milwaukee said in a statement that Mone has refused to meet with Jewish students since Oct. 7. Where universities fumbled over statements addressing the Oct. 7 attacks last fall in failed bids to satisfy everyone, many campus leaders have now conceded it is easier to give in to protesters than to stand firm against their rule-breaking. (The president of the University of Wisconsin system said he is “disappointed” by UWM’s actions.) 

Princeton University and Johns Hopkins University made concessions to encampment leaders this week. At Johns Hopkins, the school pledged to undertake a “timely review” of the matter of divestment, and to conclude student conduct proceedings related to the encampment. Hopkins Justice Collective, the group that organized the protests, characterized the agreement as “a step towards Johns Hopkins’ commitment to divest from the settler colonial state of Israel.” 

In a campus-wide email on Monday, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber said all students must vacate the campus quad where they had organized an anti-Israel encampment. He offered the campus protest leaders an audience with the body that reviews petitions for divestment. Other student groups can also petition for a meeting, he wrote.

Students who were arrested during the course of the protests may have a chance to take part in a so-called “restorative justice” process, whereby the university “would work to minimize the impact of the arrest on the participating students.” If protesters take responsibility for their actions, Eisgruber wrote, the school will conclude all disciplinary processes and allow the protesters to graduate this month. 

At many more universities, top administrators — including university presidents — have met with demonstrators, giving them a chance to air their concerns even when they didn’t reach an agreement. University of Chicago administrators held several days of negotiations with encampment leaders before the talks fell apart and police cleared the protesters. The George Washington University President Ellen Granberg met over the weekend with student protesters who lectured her about “structural inequality” at GW and likened the university’s code of conduct to slavery and Jim Crow-era segregation, according to a video recording of the meeting.

College administrators’ negotiations to end the protests might bring a wave of good headlines and promises of quiet at campus commencements, the largest and most high-profile event of the year for most universities. But students haven’t said what they’ll do when school is back in session next year. 
By promising meetings with university investment committees, the administrators are almost certainly guaranteeing that campus angst over the war in Gaza will not die down. Brown University President Christina Paxson pledged that protest leaders can meet with the university’s governing body to discuss divestment from companies that operate in Israel — in October, a year after the Hamas attacks that killed more than 1,200 people and ignited the ongoing bloodshed in the Middle East.

Correction: This article was updated to more accurately reflect negotiations between Princeton’s president and the protesters.

A man convicted of manslaughter has been participating in an anti-Israel encampment in the middle of Syracuse University’s campus for more than a week, Jewish Insider has learned. 

Eural Warren Jr. was convicted of manslaughter in the first degree in 1996 when he beat a victim’s head with a firearm, causing multiple skull fractures, according to the New York State Department of Correctional Services website. (He was also charged with criminal possession of a firearm.)

The victim was punched and knocked down by a second person, and died due to his injuries. Warren appealed the conviction in 1997, but was denied. According to court documents from his appeal, “Medical testimony established that the victim died from the cumulative effect of several skull fractures, only one of which was caused by the second assailant. [D]efendant’s conduct was an actual cause of death, in the sense that it forged a link in the chain of causes which actually brought about the death.” Warren was released from prison in 2013 after serving 17 years, records show. His LinkedIn shows him as the “CEO/Executive Director/Founder” of No Space For Hate since April 2023. 

The 49-year-old is unaffiliated with the upstate New York university, but several photos obtained by Jewish Insider show him protesting and sleeping alongside students since the “Gaza solidarity encampment” overtook Syracuse’s campus on April 29. (On Tuesday, the encampment was directed by the administration to relocate off of the central quad to make room for graduation ceremonies; it was not shut down). 

Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick confirmed to JI that Warren is the person photographed at the encampment. “I can confirm it is absolutely the same person. I have looked up his mugshot just to be sure,” Fitzpatrick said. Of the encampment, Fitzpatrick added, “Syracuse administration has decided to handle it ‘internally’… my position is that [all of the protesters] are breaking the law [and] should be removed and arrested.” 

A spokesperson for Syracuse University did not respond to multiple inquiries from JI asking whether the school is aware of Warren. 

Warren’s troubling history came to light after a vocally pro-Israel female student alleged that, on several occasions, he photographed her and a friend passing by the encampment. “We were creeped out,” the student, who requested to remain anonymous to speak about a sensitive topic, told JI. “It wasn’t hard to find his name because he follows Syracuse’s Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace Instagram pages. Then we did a quick Google search and found out he’s a criminal,” she said.  

The student, who is active in the school’s pro-Israel group, said that last Sunday she reported Warren to the Syracuse Department of Public Safety, which encouraged her to fill out a bias report. She submitted the report on Tuesday, rather than going to the police. Also on Tuesday, Warren was photographed at the encampment, dressed in Syracuse gear to blend in with student protesters. 

By Thursday, the student hadn’t heard a response from the school. 

“It’s difficult, [especially] when the encampments were in the middle of campus because you couldn’t avoid it,” she said, noting that “intimidating” slogans have been tossed around by the protesters, “including calling for the intifada and ‘from the river to the sea Palestine will be free.’” 

The recommendations handed down earlier this week from Columbia University’s task force on antisemitism painted a picture of Jewish students feeling “isolation and pain” in the wake of pro-Palestinian protests that have gripped the campus since Oct. 7. 

They also cited a lack of disciplinary response from the university regarding unauthorized protests of the Israel-Hamas war as contributing to Jewish students’ struggles on campus, and called for the university to more effectively investigate policy violations by creating an easier process for filing complaints.

But on the pivotal question of whether some of the slogans chanted at those rallies veer from legitimate political speech into antisemitism the task force’s recommendations are ambiguous.

The report states, “Obviously, the chants ‘gas the Jews’ and ‘Hitler was right’ are calls to genocide, but fortunately no one at Columbia has been shouting these phrases… Rather, many of the chants at recent Columbia protests are viewed differently by different members of the Columbia community: some feel strongly that these are calls to genocide, while others feel strongly that they are not.” 

The report does not, however, specifically address the slogan “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free,” which has frequently been chanted at protests on Columbia’s campus and is widely viewed by Jewish groups as a call for genocide of Israelis.

According to David Schizer, a professor of law and economics and dean emeritus of Columbia’s law school, who is one of the three co-chairs of the task force, the key issue that the 24-page report addresses is the thorny matter of campus free speech — emphasizing that “everyone needs to have a right to speak and to protest,” he said. 

“How can we make sure the people have the right to speak and protest, while at the same time ensuring that protests don’t interfere with the ability of other members of the community to teach classes, study for a test, to hear their professors,” Schizer, who is also the former CEO of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, continued. While the report emphasizes the right to peaceful demonstrations, it also condemns faculty for participating in unauthorized demonstrations.

But some prominent leaders of the movement to fight antisemitism in higher education expressed skepticism that a set of recommendations could fix the raging antisemitism on Columbia’s campus — which has included repeated violations of the rules on protests and physical assault and other serious attacks on Jewish students. 

“The new recommendations have some technically good work which could provide incremental advances, but it’s certainly not the kind of thing that will solve Columbia’s problems,” Kenneth Marcus, founder of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, told JI. The Brandeis Center recently filed federal complaints against the University of California for antisemitism at UC Berkeley and American University, while the Department of Education is currently investigating Brandeis Center complaints filed against Wellesley, SUNY New Paltz, the University of Southern California, Brooklyn College and the University of Illinois for violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and for discrimination against Jewish students.

The recommendations come as Columbia faces pressure from donors and investigations by Congress and the Biden administration over antisemitism. It also comes in the wake of scrutiny regarding a number of antisemitism task forces set up at elite universities as a response to the surge in antisemitism that erupted following the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks in Israel. Five months later, questions remain over the effectiveness and direction of such groups — with some experts claiming task forces have been all talk with minimal action so far. 

But Schizer said that in Columbia’s case, there have been months of ongoing research of university policies, including interviewing students. It aims to release a series of reports in the coming months with the goal of gaining a deeper understanding of the campus climate and providing further recommendations.

The report states that while it agrees with the university’s principle that calls for genocide, like other incitement to violence, violate the rules, “the application of it should be clarified.”

It goes on to encourage the university’s legal team to “provide more guidance on this issue,” and emphasizes that clearer guidance is needed, like the university has done with its rules on gender-based misconduct to include “scenarios,” “to provide greater clarity help to provide fair notice, so Columbia affiliates have more of a sense of what is permissible (even if offensive) and what is not.” 

Columbia administration plans to review the task force’s interim policy at the end of this semester. Minouche Shafik, the university’s president, said in a statement that the new recommendations —  the first set in a series — are welcomed by the university and “will continue across a number of fronts as the University works to address this ancient, but sadly persistent, form of hate.” 

Marcus said it’s “good that Columbia finally has good people asking serious questions about harassment and disruptive protests,” but he added, “What’s needed is not just a few recommendations regarding the rules on protest. The fact is that there’s been antisemitic bigotry [at] Columbia University for decades now.”

“It’s not as if a few changes to the protest policies are going to substantially change the institution as long as they continue business as usual,” he continued. “Much of what’s in this new set of recommendations could have been written on Oct. 6 given everything that’s happened since. What’s needed is not a series of incremental measures, but a rethinking of what Columbia is doing to cause harm, not just to Jewish students but also to the surrounding community. These recommendations may lead to technical and marginal changes in the ways that the university responds to specific incidents, and generally speaking that’s a good thing. 

But it’s certainly not a solution to the problem.” 

Marcus noted that the recommendations are “framed fairly narrow, with response to only one narrow piece of the problem.” 

“I know this is only one of the series of reports that we can anticipate, but if this is an indication of what’s to come, it may provide some useful professional iteration but not a truly substantial change,” he said. “It does not indicate a new mindset that is ready to deal with the problems Oct. 7 has revealed.” 

Mark Yudof, chair of the Academic Engagement Network, expressed a similar sentiment as Marcus, but added that he’s “hopeful” the report will bring change. Schizer, as well as the two other co-chairs of the task force, Ester Fuchs and Nicolas Lemann, are all longtime members of AEN. 

“We need adequate rules about speech and we need to put teeth into it and have reasonable procedures in which people are actually disciplined for violating the rules,” Yudof said, calling the report “complex.” 

While skeptical, Yudof also expressed praise for the recommendations — “I think Columbia’s report gets at the core problem of education and I applaud them,” he said. 

“I like the report and am hopeful… I would urge the Columbia administration to adopt the recommendations of the task force, but the proof will be in the pudding.”

For two hours on Wednesday, lawmakers heard from a parade of Jewish students, each delivering the same message: They do not feel safe on their college campuses.

Speaking to a roundtable organized by the House Committee on Education & the Workforce, Jewish students from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia, Rutgers, Stanford, Tulane, Cooper Union and University of California, Berkeley spoke about about the harassment, threats and violence they’ve faced on their campuses since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

The students’ accounts were all remarkably similar, despite coming from a range of locations and school types, including openly antisemitic taunts and harassment, angry mobs rampaging through campus and overtaking campus buildings, vandalism and in some cases threats of or actual incidents of violence, all going largely or completely unaddressed by university administrators and campus police, despite repeated and sustained pleas from the students for help and support. 

In some cases, the students said professors and administrators were complicit or actively involved in the antisemitic activity. Students said that they feared for their safety and even their lives.

The students, saying they felt abandoned by their universities and had no faith in them to act to protect them, pleaded for action from Congress. They said that they hoped their testimony could serve as a wakeup call to both Congress and the American public.

“As my friends from Harvard and UPenn can tell you, it doesn’t end simply because presidents are replaced. Systemic change is needed,” Kevin Feigelis, a Stanford student, said. “Universities have proven they have no intention of fixing themselves. It must be you, and it must be now.”

Shabbos Kestenbaum — a Harvard student who said he’d contacted the school’s antisemitism task force more than 40 times without a response and had been threatened in a video with a machete by a still-employed Harvard staff member — called Congress and the courts the students’ “last hope.”

Multiple students and lawmakers said that the current events on campus carry echoes of 1930s Germany or the pogroms in Russia.

Some suggested potential courses of action that Congress and other federal branches could take, including leveraging U.S. taxpayer funding or the schools’ tax-exempt statuses, placing third-party monitors on campus and enforcing diversity requirements in Middle East studies departments requiring them to include pro-Israel views.

Students from Harvard, Penn and MIT all said that little has changed on their campuses since last year’s blockbuster congressional hearing on campus antisemitism, which prompted the ouster of Harvard and Penn’s presidents.

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), the committee’s chair, vowed that she and her colleagues would not stop their efforts to tackle antisemitism on campus.

“I was very emotional,” Foxx told Jewish Insider, “I’m a mother and a grandmother. I have one grandchild who went to college and I’m not sure what I would have done if he had come home to say he felt threatened on his campus like these students feel threatened. No student on a college campus, in this country, in the year 2024, should feel threatened.”

Foxx said that the committee’s antisemitism investigation is proceeding deliberately, but that the schools will be held to account. The committee has already requested documents from Harvard, Penn and Columbia and has now subpoenaed Harvard. Foxx suggested that other schools whose students had appeared Thursday could be next.