A Total Assault on the University

James Chandler argues that claims of combating antisemitism are a bogus rationale for the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on universities, from 2017 to the present.

By James ChandlerMay 4, 2025

• Education

• Politics

WE ALL REMEMBER the assault on an American university eight years ago this August, when white nationalists without authorization marched menacingly across the University of Virginia, one of the nation’s oldest and most respected institutions of higher learning. The events of that weekend were horrific, but at least they made a certain kind of sense. This was, after all, an attack supported by the Ku Klux Klan on an elite university. David Duke himself was on hand in Charlottesville to explain that the lethal events there represented a “turning point” in the effort “to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump.”

Moreover, the spectacle of white supremacists with neo-Nazi paraphernalia chanting “Jews will not replace us” came as no surprise to anyone who knew the history of the Klan since its reemergence in 1915. Black and Jewish people alike had been targets of its depredations for over a century, and both groups had joined hands in social justice movements to fight back. Trump’s “very fine people” response to the fatal events in Charlottesville is a matter of public record. So was his brazen 2020 message to the Proud Boys (a group identified by the Anti-Defamation League as both antisemitic and white supremacist) to “stand by” until needed, as they apparently were on January 6, 2021, when they, too, would come to be seen as very fine people in his eyes.

The attacks that have been taking place on American universities lately are far more threatening than the one in Charlottesville because they are both more sweeping and less intelligible. But things are beginning to clarify. We are a year out from last spring’s widespread student protests against the devastation in Gaza: Columbia’s then-president Minouche Shafik appeared before Congress on April 17, 2024. We are also three months into the rollout of the second Trump administration. It is time to acknowledge the appalling irony that stands revealed today: a quasi-fascist assault on institutions of higher education is cynically masking itself as a battle against antisemitism.

It should by now be clear that the Trump administration’s domestic agenda has major goals that are irrelevant to issues of antisemitism. Rather, these officials mean to target universities for perceived liberal leanings, to deport students on ideological grounds, to clamp down on sexual and gender freedoms, and, it is now evident, to roll back the hard-won achievements of the Civil Rights Movement. Christopher Rufo, one of the architects of the current assault on higher education, has spoken more explicitly about this last goal now that he has scaled up his Florida work for Governor Ron DeSantis to a national effort for Trump. One of the key points debated in Rufo’s recent New York Times interview with op-ed writer Ross Douthat is the cards-on-the-table question of whether the linchpin 1964 Civil Rights Act should be turned inside out or simply repealed outright.

Yet even now, astonishingly, much of this increasingly explicit far-right takeover—enforced by authoritarian measures reminiscent of Germany in the1930s—continues to pose as a crusade against antisemitism. Perhaps even more astonishingly, this rationale continues to be taken at face value even in the media outlets Trump vilifies as liberal or “sleazebag” (the terms are almost synonymous for him). Reporting on the freezing of $2.2 billion after Harvard refused to comply with the administration’s sweeping demands, CNN could comment naively that “the proposed changes are the latest effort of the federal task force to combat antisemitism on college campuses after a spate of high-profile incidents around the country in response to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.”

Few of the most informed observers believe the task force’s targeting of Harvard—or Columbia, Brown, Cornell, or Northwestern—has much of anything to do with antisemitism. An important statement titled “Not in Our Name,” which has been signed by hundreds of Jewish and Israeli faculty members across the country, makes this point forcefully. Beyond the university, Not in Our Name has now taken to the streets. Timothy Snyder (of Yale and University of Toronto) and James Schamus, the latter addressing fellow Jewish professors at Columbia directly, have both argued that the attacks on these universities are themselves antisemitic. Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, has recently warned that “Trump is selling Jews a dangerous lie.”

How did we get here? Much of the multipronged effort we are now seeing unfold, including the funding cuts for overhead costs in science grants to universities and the rollback of measures taken to advance the cause of civil rights in the United States, was already outlined in the education section of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—a plan Trump of course repeatedly disavowed in his run for reelection. Crucially, Project 2025, drafted well before the autumn of 2023, makes no mention of antisemitism in its proposed “reforms” of American education. The Heritage Foundation’s supplemental plan, Project Esther, does, but its quiet release did not occur until October 7, 2024, just a month before the election.

A reasonable starting point for explaining how antisemitism came to be mobilized on behalf of such a reactionary and calculated campaign is the resignation of Liz Magill as president of the University of Pennsylvania in early December 2023. Her decision to step down came just days after being interrogated by Elise Stefanik, a House member from New York, when Magill gave a legally correct answer to a carefully crafted trap-question: “At Penn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct?” The immediate occasion for the interrogation of three university presidents, including Magill, was their universities’ responses to the atrocities of the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israeli citizens and foreign nationals. Yet Magill, who resigned first, was called to face congressional interrogation in no small part because of a controversy earlier that autumn in which she ran afoul of some of Penn’s major donors.

That September, Penn hosted a literary festival by the organization Palestine Writes that several of Penn’s biggest funders, including board chair Marc Rowan, attempted to block. In response to these efforts, Magill issued a statement condemning antisemitism on campus but also insisted that the festival should go forward as part of Penn’s commitment to free expression. By December, the escalation from donor pressure to congressional pressure proved fatal to her presidency, as it would again for Claudine Gay’s presidency at Harvard. This same combination of congressional and donor pressure would later lead to the resignation of Minouche Shafik at Columbia.

By the April 2024 hearing, the death toll in Gaza had risen to over 30,000, with massive destruction of schools and hospitals, and the protests against the war in late autumn had grown and spread. Columbia’s protest had taken the form of an encampment on campus, and soon, partly in solidarity with Columbia’s students, there would be hundreds of encampments on campuses across the country, involving tens of thousands of student protesters. As the war raged on, the presence of these encampments and the activities of the students participating in them posed questions that were debated on and off campus. For these protesters, the point was to speak up in defense of a people being decimated in Gaza and brutally suppressed in the West Bank. For the vast majority of the protesters, the target was both the policies of an Israeli state under the problematic leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu and the support of those policies courtesy of American tax dollars ($40 billion over the previous decade, much of it for armaments).

For some, but by no means for all, the protests extended to the larger Zionist enterprise and to the consequences of that enterprise for Palestinians since 1948. Many of the protesters, students and faculty alike, were Jews; more than a few were Israelis. To the extent that the protests targeted Israeli state policies, they raised questions (strange ones, perhaps) about whether an objection to what the state of Israel is doing in Gaza could make a Jew, or anyone else, an antisemite. To the extent that the protests targeted Zionism itself, they raised further questions about the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. And of course, to the extent that these were protests—speech that goes beyond routine discussion to address a situation of emergency or crisis—they raised questions about how much freedom they should be accorded.

The answers to all these questions were different in different settings. As for the definitional issues, I remember listening to an interview conducted by NPR’s Ari Shapiro with two liberal Zionist journalists, including Franklin Foer of The Atlantic, both of whom had covered the question of antisemitism in recent years. I found it very unsatisfactory at the time, and having just gone back to listen to it again, I still do. The interlocutors danced awkwardly around the central question of what distinguishes anti-Zionism from antisemitism, until at one point they arrived at an even more awkward juxtaposition of what some Jewish students were experiencing during the protests and the slaughter taking place in Gaza:

SHAPIRO: Frank, what do you think about the argument that the real trauma from past events and fear about what future events may bring should take a back seat to the ongoing killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians?

FOER: I would say it’s not even just—I mean, I think that minimizes what Jews are experiencing on campuses and in the world just to say that it’s an expression of past trauma, which—obviously it’s filtered through past trauma […] But if you—on college campuses and in neighborhoods and—there are these very real examples of antisemitism. And just because there’s one crisis that’s happening in Gaza does not mean that there are not other crises that are happening in the world.

This barely coherent response was more than a little troubling. I was listening to this broadcast with a friend in my car, and we both realized at this point that further trouble lay ahead.

As for questions about the latitude that would be given to student protest, answers also varied widely. The denouement at Columbia was widely televised, as were events at UCLA. I happen to have spent spring term at the University of Virginia, site of the deadly Klan march in 2017. There, in early May, the state police were called in to clear a small, peaceful protest near Jefferson’s Rotunda; the state police had not been called in against the white nationalists’ march on the Lawn. At Northwestern, where earlier in the protests the president had discouraged the flying of Palestinian flags but not Israeli flags, an agreement was eventually negotiated with protesting students. Northwestern, recently hit with a $790 million threat from the Trump administration, seems to be paying a price for that flexibility.

At the University of Chicago, there was a clear effort to find a way to end the encampments before the June commencement ceremony, which was to be staged on the central quadrangles where the protesters had pitched their tents. On returning from Virginia in May, I was told by a colleague that negotiations were taking place and that the student representatives in these talks had narrowed down their hopes to one single concession from the university—committed, as they knew it to be, to academic norms above all others. The request was that the university publicly acknowledge what a UN commission in mid-April had already determined: that “scholasticide” was taking place in Gaza. The State of Israel, the students are reported to have stipulated, needn’t have been named in any such statement.

Whether this ever became the sole student demand is a matter of dispute, but I knew there was a lot of faculty support for the students and for their shrewd proposal. I sent two letters myself to our president encouraging this concession, but I got no reply. The tents were eventually cleared by campus police in the dark of night a few days before the commencement ceremony. At the ceremony itself, several students walked out to protest the university’s withholding of diplomas from four students involved with the encampment.

In addition to last spring’s crackdowns, universities have more recently rewritten their codes of conduct to install draconian rules inhibiting or prohibiting protest, with dubious implications for the norms of free speech and academic freedom. None of this, it turns out, has prevented the unappeasable Trump administration from making the campus events of last year the ostensible grounds for the unprecedented assault now unfolding. It is high time that the cynical opportunism of this campaign be called out for what it is.

It matters enormously, through all this, that some of those who are most genuinely and sincerely concerned about incidents of antisemitism on American campuses are taking exception to the Trump administration’s tactics. These observers reject the idea that some conspiracy of left-wing antisemitic brainwashing is needed to explain why so many students have joined much of the rest of the world in condemning the systematic devastation in Gaza. I’ve cited disappointing coverage from the liberal mainstream media, so let me close on a more optimistic note.

Last month, NPR’s Morning Edition aired an interview with Kenneth Stern, the Bard College professor and self-declared Zionist who had primary responsibility for drafting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism. The immediate occasion was the Trump administration’s threat to withhold $400 million from Columbia (this was before the announcement of threats against Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, and Harvard). Stern, who had already gone public in The New Yorker with anxieties that his own definition was being adversely weaponized, was asked what he made of the administration’s claim that “it is going to root out antisemitism specifically on college campuses […] telling 60 colleges they’re under investigation for failing to protect Jewish students.” Here is his answer:

I think it’s a total assault on the university, which has been a very important institution, you know, for Jews over the last number of decades. J. D. Vance had talked about […] following the playbook of [Viktor] Orbán in Hungary of dealing with education. And I think that’s what we’re seeing unfolding. We’re seeing an attempt to not […] make a distinction between actual harassments, true threats, and so forth [but rather to] go after views of people and hurt the university that way.

Asked about the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the grad student from Columbia arrested and relocated to a Louisiana detention center, Stern responded as follows:

[W]hen you start saying that we’re going to go after people whose speech we don’t like—for nothing more—that’s a predicate. […] Where does that end? And to me, one of the things that’s important for our ability to combat antisemitism and other forms of hate is having strong democratic institutions. When we’re assaulting free speech, that’s McCarthyism. We don’t have strong democratic institutions anymore.

After emphatically declaring that the administration was “absolutely weaponizing antisemitism,” and thus making Jewish students less safe rather than more so, Stern explained his larger approach to education:

When I teach—and I teach about antisemitism and I teach about Israel and Palestine—I want students to be able to say what they think. I want to create a space where they feel comfortable to be wrong and experiment with ideas. If we don’t have that as the core of the American educational enterprise, we’re going to suffer tremendously in the long run.

I urge everyone to listen to Stern’s words in his own compelling voice, the voice of a committed Zionist who is also a committed educator at one of our newly vulnerable liberal arts colleges. Kenneth Stern or Donald Trump—which one genuinely cares about the interests of Jewish students, and Jews more broadly? Whom should we trust when it comes to the sensitive and crucial issues of our moment—antisemitism, academic freedom, free speech, and the contested issues of liberal education in the United States, to say nothing of the war still raging in Gaza? This is a question that needs to be posed again and again until this cynical campaign to take down our colleges and universities on bogus pretenses ceases to have even a shred of public credibility.

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Featured image: Eugenio Agneni. Study for the Shades of the Great Florentines Who Protest Against Foreign Domination, 1857. Gift of Roberta J. M. Olson and Alexander B. V. Johnson, Yale University Art Gallery (2023.77.1). CC0, artgallery.yale.edu. Accessed April 30, 2025. Image has been cropped.