WASHINGTON — When hundreds of pro-Israel college students from around the country gathered in the nation’s capital earlier this week for the Israel on Campus Coalition’s three-day annual national leadership summit, the rise of antisemitism on campuses sparked by the aftermath of the Oct. 7th terrorist attacks nearly two years ago was still a topic of conversation throughout panels and hallways. 

This year, however, some students also said that antisemitism is lessening — though they offered mixed views about what is leading to the improved campus climate. 

Some attributed it to the Trump administration’s ongoing pressure campaign on universities to crack down on antisemitic behavior, which has included federal funding cuts from dozens of schools. Others said their campuses started to take a serious approach to antisemitism, before President Donald Trump was reelected, in the fall semester following the wave of anti-Israel encampments from the previous spring. 

But many student leaders from universities that have been targeted by the Trump administration — facing billions of dollars in slashed funds — said that if their school enters into negotiations to restore the money, they would like a deal to include structural reforms, unlike the one made last week between the federal government and Columbia University. 

The penalties under that deal were largely financial, with Columbia agreeing to pay a $200 million settlement over three years to the government.

Harvard University has signaled a willingness to settle next, The New York Times reported this week, which could see the school agree to the Trump administration’s demand for as much as $500 million to end its clash.

“If there is a settlement in the coming days, I don’t think that Harvard paying a fine would be helpful,” Kyra Esrig, an incoming sophomore at Harvard, told Jewish Insider at the ICC summit. Instead, Esrig hopes to see “more of a focus on antisemitism itself without this maneuvering to get it to be a DEI incentive that every time they talk about antisemitism they have to add that they’re not anti-Muslim as well.”

“I want to see something specific in writing — [outlining] the steps the university will take to change antisemitism. I want to see an action-specific type of agreement. If the university treads more carefully around the issue, if the university is at least a little more responsive to people’s concerns around antisemitism, I think that will be a good thing.” 

Esrig does not believe antisemitism has improved on campus since the Trump administration slashed $2.6 billion in funding from the university in the spring.  

“It’s not like the Trump administration came into power and then there was sweeping change. For Harvard to change its culture, that’s an incredibly difficult thing to do and I don’t know that the Trump administration can go about issuing that.” 

“I’m not entirely sure what the Trump administration is trying to gain,” Ezra Galperin, an incoming junior at the Ithaca, N.Y. school, told JI. “I think Cornell’s administration has been pretty effective in combating antisemitism — before there were threats from the Trump administration — with President Kotlikoff coming on. [Kotlikoff] makes a point of listening to Jewish students.”

Rather, “a lot of the positive changes are coming from the original backlash after Oct. 7,” she said, pointing to the university expanding its kosher lunch options in August 2024. 

“That’s a result of the powerful force of Jewish students at Harvard saying that we need certain resources,” Esrig said. 

Cornell University faced a $1 billion funding cut in April from the federal government amid a civil rights investigation into its handling of antisemitism. Ezra Galperin, an incoming junior at the Ithaca, N.Y., school studying government, noted an improvement in campus antisemitism this year compared to last.

But he attributes the shift to the university’s new president, Michael Kotlikoff, who stepped into the role in March. 

“I’m not entirely sure what the Trump administration is trying to gain,” Galperin told JI. “I think Cornell’s administration has been pretty effective in combating antisemitism — before there were threats from the Trump administration — with President Kotlikoff coming on. [Kotlikoff] makes a point of listening to Jewish students.”

“There’s progress to be made, but I don’t think it warrants a millions of dollars fine,” Galperin said.

If Cornell does enter into a settlement with the government, there are two reforms Galperin hopes to see. “I want to make sure organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine that stir things up on campus are held accountable,” he said. “I want to see accountability for the grad students union who is seemingly selective in the students they choose to represent, alienating those who are pro-Israel. That’s my main hope for the year.”  (Cornell SJP was suspended in March for disrupting the “Pathways to Peace” event where former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro and former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad spoke.)

“What I would like to see, in light of the cuts, is a deal to be made which would include a mask ban imposed and enforced, for regulations to be actually written down more clearly and then enforced and then for punishments to be enforced on those who have breached the regulations that are made,” said Maximillian Meyer, a rising junior at Princeton University and student president of the campus group Princeton’s Tigers for Israel.

“If a deal is to be struck, I do hope it’s something tangible,” Galperin continued. “There is a sense that the Columbia deal was insufficient and a bit of a ploy.” 

Maximillian Meyer, a rising junior at Princeton University and student president of the campus group Princeton’s Tigers for Israel, said he is taking a wait-and-see approach to the government’s crackdown on his campus, which also faced a funding freeze in April. 

“I would be in support of a settlement — but not just any settlement,” Meyer told JI.

“What I would hope the Trump administration’s cuts would do, at a minimum, is to compel the university administration to enforce its own regulations. Even since the Trump administration made its cuts, the Princeton administration has not enforced its policies on time, place and manner restrictions.

“What I would like to see, in light of the cuts, is a deal to be made which would include a mask ban imposed and enforced, for regulations to be actually written down more clearly and then enforced and then for punishments to be enforced on those who have breached the regulations that are made,” Meyer continued, pointing to anti-Israel demonstrators repeatedly disrupting former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s speech at the university — including pulling a fire alarm — just days after the Trump administration slashed funding. 

“The university should have been prepared for disruptions, but was undeterred by Trump’s funding cuts,” Meyer said. He called on Princeton to “work with the Trump administration to do something about [antisemitism]” rather than “the university’s current posture which is fighting against the administration.” 

But Uriel Alvin, a student at City College of the City University of New York,  expressed concern that any government intervention does more harm than good on campus. 

“After the [Gaza solidarity] encampments [in spring 2024], we saw protests afterwards because of NYPD’s involvement shutting down the encampments,” said Uriel Alvin, a student at City College of the City University of New York. “I think having intervention causes more problems — adds to the flame more than it puts it out.  I don’t think it was helpful for Columbia either.”  

Alvin said he has worried about wearing a kippah on campus since Oct. 7, and that he “hasn’t felt any better this year.” 

Earlier this month, Félix Matos Rodríguez, chancellor of CUNY, was called to testify during a House Committee on Education and Workforce hearing over his alleged failure to address campus antisemitism. That hearing, or any approach that involves the government, “wouldn’t help things,” Alvin said. 

“After the [Gaza solidarity] encampments [in spring 2024], we saw protests afterwards because of NYPD’s involvement shutting down the encampments,” he said.  

“I think having intervention causes more problems — adds to the flame more than it puts it out.  I don’t think it was helpful for Columbia either.”  

In a move called for by pro-Israel students at Columbia University, the school announced on Friday that disciplinary action and rules surrounding student protests would be moved out of the purview of the faculty-run University Senate and into the provost’s office.

“This is the most encouraging and commendable action taken by Columbia’s administration to address the systemic problems within the university since [the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks],” Noa Fay, a graduate student entering her last year in Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, told Jewish Insider. 

“Revoking the University Senate’s power over disciplinary and rule-making procedures has been top of the institutional reform list for many Columbians who wish to see our university restored to order and excellence.”

Critics of the University Senate say that since Oct. 7 and the ensuing protests that have roiled Columbia’s campus, the 111-elected member body has blocked discipline against anti-Israel protesters and removed protest regulations aimed at protecting Jewish students. 

Earlier this week, when the university released a list of commitments to address antisemitism on campus, several Jewish students expressed concern that structural reform to the University Senate was missing. 

Fay, a student member of the Columbia-SIPA Anti-Hate Task Force, suggested to JI earlier this week that changes to the University Senate are one of the most important measures that could create a safer climate for Jewish students “as it has served most reliably and forcefully to protect those guilty of antisemitic racism at school.” 

Last August, the University Senate passed revised guidelines for the Rules of University Conduct that removed an interim demonstration policy that the university implemented following disruptive — and sometimes violent — Gaza solidarity encampments that spring, put in place to restrict the location and times that protests were allowed.  

Lishi Baker, a rising senior at Columbia studying Middle East history, wrote in a 2024 Columbia Spectator op-ed that the University Senate had refused to let Jewish students share their experiences of antisemitism on campus when the university’s task force on antisemitism presented its second report to the body. 

“I was one of the students asked by the task force to speak,” Baker wrote. “However, when the task force co-chairs informed members of the Senate leadership of their desire to bring students, those Senate leaders dismissed the idea outright.” 

The Senate has been under university review since April. The decision by Columbia’s trustees to diminish the Senate’s power comes as university leadership is in the final stages of talks with the Trump administration to make a deal that would restore some $400 million in federal funding that was cut by the government in March due to the university’s record dealing with antisemitism.