The Trojan Horse of Campus Antisemitism

The federal government is exploiting real concerns about Jew hatred as a vehicle to deliver a right-wing policy grab-bag.

Promises made, promises kept. Donald Trump is nothing if not forward when it comes to his plans. The president campaigned on tightening the screws on American universities amid chaotic campus protests over the war in Gaza. He promised to deport, in his words, “pro-Hamas radicals.”

In recent weeks, over 1,500 international students have had their visas revoked. Earlier this month, the administration sent a letter to Harvard demanding a number of changes, including “reforming programs with egregious records of antisemitism” and increasing “viewpoint diversity.” In following its now-standard negotiating formula, the administration insists that failure to comply will result in loss of federal funding—the university has already seen billions frozen. In a massive escalation, the government is now mulling revoking Harvard’s nonprofit status.

Agree or disagree, the substance of the letter is not the core problem. In fact, we actually agree with some of its stated aims. Yet, more importantly, we believe that this letter and the effort behind it represent a massive federal government invasion into the realm of free expression.

As we dig into this issue, a word on our backgrounds: If Epshtein and Gottesman weren’t dead giveaways, we’re both Jewish. Uriel is the son of Soviet immigrants who faced persecution in the motherland. As a student at Yale, he founded a year-long fellowship for West Point cadets and other Yale students culminating in a trip to Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Evan worked for half a decade in the American Jewish community. Before that, he was a member of the inaugural Hillel International Student Cabinet and a leader at Rutgers Hillel, serving the largest undergraduate Jewish student population in North America. We take antisemitism seriously. So we naturally support the ostensible outcome the administration is seeking: stopping Jew hatred on campus.

We don’t need to rehash everything that happened in the last year of protests. That Columbia abruptly shut down, pandemic-style at the end of the last academic year—and remains a largely inaccessible fortress—is a powerful sign that something is deeply wrong. Other campuses were similarly disrupted.

The same goes for the notion of increasing viewpoint diversity. Uriel’s political background is right-of-center, Evan’s left. We disagree on a lot, but we do so productively, each challenging our respective assumptions and forcing the other to sharpen his views. (Just writing this piece required a fair bit of haggling over language!).

One area where we do agree is that we both wish more college students had this same opportunity to disagree. In a 2024 survey of over 6,000 American professors, more than a third reported varying degrees of self-censorship. Only 20% said a conservative would fit in well in their respective departments. But as much as we would like to see this addressed, it’s a complicated phenomenon that requires a thoughtful approach. The government can’t simply will it away by executive order, even if it had the authority to do so.

So, again, the issue is not just the substance of Trump’s demands. It’s the very fact that these are demands—diktats handed down from the federal government. The state should not use its coercive power to determine the ideological composition of a university’s faculty or student body. Imagine a Democrat in the Oval Office forcing Liberty University to hire more liberal professors or admit more progressive students. Conservatives would be up in arms, and justifiably so.

Now, you might say, as conservative pundit Seth Mandel does, that accepting federal money means accepting federal oversight. Fundamentally, that equation makes sense. If you take government money, you should be subject to government rules. But Mandel goes further, writing in Commentary:

“The schools agree to the terms—which include following civil rights law. The schools then break the terms of the agreement but insist they should keep the money anyway.”

Mandel just assumes that Harvard has violated civil rights law. Have they? In what specific manner? As of yesterday, the only party in the latest spat between the government and Harvard to file a lawsuit is the university. The Trump administration has not made this case, except by implication in a passing mention at the top of its letter to Harvard. But implication does not a concrete allegation make. And it certainly does not provide a sound basis for the IRS drawing up plans to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt nonprofit status, which would amount to institutionally nuking the university.

Further, we have to consider this effort as part of a broader pattern of behavior from the administration. Trump went after Harvard for a reason. Much like in the jail yard, if you knock out the biggest, baddest guy around, everyone else will fall in line. If Trump can bring Harvard to heel, then every other educational institution—from massive state universities to tiny liberal arts schools and community colleges–will be put on notice. He did the same with law firms, attacking the most prominent law firms that had represented his most high-profile enemies.

You don’t have to harbor any love for these institutions to recognize the chilling effect that extracting concessions from them will bring. Meanwhile, ICE continues to abduct foreign residents—both student protesters and random, unaffiliated victims—denying them due process, often without clearly identifying any alleged crimes committed. Elon Musk, a private citizen in a position of enormous, unaccountable influence, threatens consequences for anyone who fails to tow the line. With all of that, it’s no surprise to hear Senator Lisa Murkowski—a member of Trump’s party—say that she and her colleagues “are all afraid… because retaliation is real.”

Meanwhile, it’s difficult to take the president’s focus on antisemitism seriously given his personal embrace of antisemites. We are supposed to believe that this administration cares about Jews because it plans to deport allegedly antisemitic students on college campuses who wield limited real-world power. Yet the very same Trump administration went out of its way to rescue Andrew Tate—an overt antisemite, explicit Hamas supporter, Holocaust denier with incredible media influence who faces specific and credible criminal charges—from a foreign travel ban. Some, like, Batya Ungar-Sargon and Josh Hammer, who peddle apologia for the government over the campus issue, have disowned Tate. But such denouncements ring hollow when they are still willing to give President Trump the benefit of the doubt and applaud the type of executive overreach they would have never have accepted under Trump’s predecessor.

Failing to specifically spell out the ways in which Harvard violated the law, refusing to offer specific avenues for Harvard to actually remedy identifiable infractions, and perhaps most tellingly of all, pairing a purported focus on antisemitism with any number of other right-wing priorities, tells us that this isn’t a coherent program for protecting Jewish (or any) students, but a populist grab bag that has nothing to do with antisemitism. Looking at all of these facts, we must conclude that the administration is using antisemitism as a convenient Trojan Horse to expand its power over academia in a politically palatable way. It is not enforcement of the rule of law but imposition of rule by law.

The knock-on effects of this are plainly bad for American democracy, to say nothing of American Jewry, which will now be identified with a partisan and authoritarian campaign, and will suffer the political and social consequences. It should raise many red flags that Trump has used antisemitism as a cudgel not only against universities, but also against the law firms he is singling out for political persecution, attempting to compel those firms to take on pro bono cases on behalf of Jewish causes. We are Jews, but we are also Americans, and we did not ask for this.

In his Commentary piece, Mandel confidently asserts that “The defenders of these institutions are merely demanding that Trump let them go back to the status quo of having academic freedom for some but not for others. If these groups would as emphatically demand the protection of Jewish academic freedom, we’d know they were sincere. As of now, there are zero such groups.” A claim that’s as bold as it is wrong. We represent one such group—the Renew Democracy Initiative. And we know that there are others, both in the pro-democracy space and in the American Jewish community.

That’s not to say that there aren’t those in the anti-Trump camp who have been inconsistent on free speech. Yet in excusing the administration by calling out its critics as hypocrites, Mandel and his fellow travelers expose their own hypocrisy. They are not standing on principle. Either the First Amendment and other limitations on government power matter, or they don’t. Those standards matter when we are talking about President Biden and left-wing activists, and they matter when we are confronting President Trump and Anti-Woke^TM ideologues.

That is why we stand with Harvard and any other university willing to push back against the federal government’s excesses. We know that American higher education is deeply flawed. We bristle at every story we hear from Jewish students of access to class blocked off or chants euphemistically framing the October 7 terror attacks as noble resistance. We feel it viscerally because we still work with students and were in their shoes once.

At the Renew Democracy Initiative, we put principles ahead of individual policies and personal preferences. We work with hundreds of political dissidents who have seen this movie before. Like many Jews, authoritarianism is a matter of genetic memory for us—for Uriel, whose parents grew up under communism in the Soviet Union, and for Evan, whose ancestors fled Europe at the end of Russian bayonets during World War I. We know all too well that we should beware of any leader or movement that enforces conformity, even when they come bearing gifts.

Uriel Epshtein is the CEO of the Renew Democracy Initiative.

Evan Gottesman is the chief-of-staff of the Renew Democracy Initiative.

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