It’s late August. For those of us in higher education, this means getting ready for a new academic year. Sadly, it seems that for Jewish students and professors, the fall semester brings with it one more daunting challenge: the return of the Tentifada, the onslaught of anti-Semitic pro-Palestinian protests that erupted on campuses nationwide last year.
Proof points abound.
For one thing, the tents are back. Earlier this summer, as Columbia University, having barely recovered from having to cancel its main commencement ceremony because of concerns that the festivities would be disrupted, once again saw its lawn taken over by a self-described “autonomous group of Palestinian students.”
You would expect Columbia’s administration to learn from past mistakes and keep the situation from getting out of hand. You would expect them to heed Mayor Eric Adams’s wise advice and practice a zero-tolerance policy to those keen on disrupting university life and claiming university spaces as their own. But this is academia we’re talking about. They never learn, and they certainly haven’t learned anything when it comes to keeping Jews safe.
Instead, as House Education and Workforce Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) revealed in a scorching report earlier this month, Columbia has done exactly nothing to make sure the worst of the lawless protesters in its midst were punished.
Of the 35 students who were placed on interim suspensions in April for failing to leave their encampment — festooned, as you may remember, with the flags of Hamas and other terrorist organizations, not just Palestinian flags — 31 are currently in good standing.
It gets worse. Of the 40 Columbia students arrested by the NYPD when the university finally broke down and invited New York’s finest to step in and clean up its mess, 18 were immediately restored to good standing through what the university called “alternative resolution,” and 21 are in good standing, pending that most fearsome of all punitive measures known to man: an academic hearing.
Plainly put, Columbia did nothing to stop the riots in the first place. And once the rioters had been arrested and charged, it was quick to let them off with a just slap on the wrist. It hardly takes a Ph.D. to understand that these same students will now return to school emboldened to do much more, putting Jews on campus through a veritable living hell.
Thankfully, Foxx has subpoenaed the university’s interim president, as well as the leaders of its board of trustees. But Columbia is hardly alone. A slew of other institutions — here’s looking at you, Harvard, Northwestern and Penn, among others — have fallen far, far short of using their summer break to do real soul-searching and take serious measures to guarantee the safety and well-being of their Jewish students.
With the Tentifada once again upon us, it’s time to take action. But what, then, should be done? Three things come to mind.
First, lawmakers like Foxx are absolutely correct to exert pressure on university administrations, making sure that they live up to the modest measures that they already promised to take. Such robust inquiries have already pushed out the worst offenders, like the bumbling presidents of Harvard and Columbia; they should continue until academia’s Augean stables are, if not entirely clean, at least somewhat aired out.
Second, lawmakers should work assiduously to make sure we use every tool at our disposal when holding universities responsible. This includes immediately expelling all students, and deporting all foreign students, who express support for terrorism and terrorist organizations, and denying federal grants to institutions that fail to take hate crimes seriously.
Finally — and, maybe, most importantly — there’s the rest of us, which includes students, parents, alumni, donors and everyone else who has anything to do with any American institution of higher learning. Our responsibility is to make sure we continue to hold our schools accountable, and that we refuse to send them our children and our dollars until they make real commitments and follow through on them.
This, alas, is much easier said than done. Our ordeal is far from over. The marauders are back at it, and responsible adults are nowhere to be found on the quad. It is up to us to save the day.
Asaf Romirowsky is executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.