Dhruv T. Patel and Grace E. Yoon
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 reaffirmed in a Monday letter that the University would not bow to interference from the Trump administration — even as he suggested Harvard and the government “share common ground.”
In a three-page message addressed to United States Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, who announced one week ago that the Trump administration would no longer issue any grants or contracts to Harvard, Garber defended Harvard’s record on antisemitism and doubled down on the University’s refusal to concede to what he called an unlawful attempt to shape its core values.
The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal
Excerpt: Columbia University’s decision Friday to bend to the Trump Administration’s governance demands has shocked the academy far and wide, and it is an unprecedented sanction. But perhaps it will also shock our academic elites into recognizing that they have courted this political backlash by too often abandoning their central mission of free inquiry.
Her confidence in handling that potential tinderbox, and others like it, impressed the trustees of Columbia University, who appointed Dr. Mnookin to be the 21st president, a role she starts on Wednesday. It is also emblematic of the deliberative leadership style she will seek to pursue at Columbia, she said in a wide-ranging interview last week.
Last Friday, the following letter was sent to President Eisgruber from the Princetonians for Free Speech Executive Committee regarding further action after the protests and event disruption that occurred on April 7th in McCosh Hall, and preparatory measures for upcoming campus events:
An immigration judge has rejected the Trump administration's efforts to deport Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was arrested last year as part of its targeting of pro-Palestinian campus activists, her lawyers said on Monday.
Lawyers for the Turkish student detailed the immigration judge's decision in a filing
with the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which had been reviewing a ruling that led to her release from immigration custody in May.
Rose Horowitch
The Atlantic
Excerpt: To do the same thing over and over and expect a different result is one definition of insanity. According to Robert Shibley, a special counsel of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), it’s also Columbia University’s approach to addressing anti-Semitism on campus.
On Tuesday, Claire Shipman, Columbia’s acting president, announced in an email to the community that the university would take several steps to quell anti-Semitism on campus. Columbia will appoint Title VI and Title VII coordinators to review allegations of discrimination. It will launch new programming around anti-Jewish discrimination, send out regular messages affirming its zero-tolerance policy on hate, and use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism for certain disciplinary proceedings.
Press Release
Knight First Amendment Institution, Columbia University
Excerpt: Multiple universities have recently announced that they will consider or rely on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA’s) definition of antisemitism in policing speech on campus.
The following can be attributed to Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “It’s disappointing that some of the nation’s leading institutions of higher education are agreeing to curtail and punish criticism of Israel in the name of fighting discrimination. As major free speech groups have recognized, using the IHRA definition of antisemitism to delineate the outer boundaries of free speech will have the effect of proscribing or deterring legitimate political speech and scholarship."
Bianca Quilantan and Madina Touré
Politico
Excerpt: Leaders who once helmed the nation’s most prestigious universities are homing in on a message for their successors: resist, defend and litigate.
That formula, they argue, is the only way to survive an administration eager to extract fundamental concessions from schools that go far beyond addressing stated concerns about antisemitism. In the three months since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump has demanded that some of these private institutions end diversity programming, change admissions requirements, toughen student discipline policies and audit some academic programs.
Vitus Larrieu
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: The University is investigating the disruption of a speaker event on Monday with former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 wrote to The Daily Princetonian on Tuesday. Eisgruber also said that he had personally apologized to Bennett and said he was “appalled at reports of antisemitic language” outside the event.
Eisgruber’s statement followed a letter written by Danielle Shapiro ’25 and Maximillian Meyer ’27, the respective presidents of pro-Israel student groups B’Artzeinu Princeton and Princeton Tigers for Israel. The letter accused protesters of antisemitism, asking Eisgruber to implement a campus-wide mask ban and dissolve Princeton’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The letter also called on Eisgruber to issue a public apology to Bennett and initiate disciplinary action against the protesters.
Myles McKnight ‘23
Editor’s Note: Though the author of the following commentary is a part-time employee of Princetonians for Free Speech, the perspective below is his alone and does not reflect the views of PFS.
Many Princetonians have been paying attention to a recent controversy concerning Near Eastern Studies Professor Satyel Larson’s Fall 2023 course entitled The Healing Humanities — Decolonizing Trauma Studies from the Global South. The controversy centers on Professor Larson’s inclusion of the book “The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability” on her syllabus. Authored by Jasbir Puar, the book is controversial for its claim that the Israeli government intends the mass debilitation of Palestinians.
Patrick McDonald '26
Campus Reform
Excerpt: Princeton University is offering a new course titled “Gender, Reproduction, and Genocide” that compares the Israel–Hamas conflict to the Holocaust.
The class is instructed by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a self-identified “noted Palestinian feminist” who has publicly denied that Hamas killed babies or raped women during the Oct. 7 massacre, according to The Washington Free Beacon.
Luke Grippo
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Political scientist and activist Norman Finkelstein GS ’87 returned to campus on Tuesday to discuss the war in Gaza with history professor Max Weiss. Throughout the talk, Finkelstein addressed the United States’ history with the Middle East from the early 2000s, the United Nations’ complicated history with the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the war in Gaza.
Tyler Coward
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression
Excerpt: Late last month, the student chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine at George Mason University posted a video on a social media account that criticized U.S. foreign policy and Israel. The video (now removed), which apparently stylistically mimicked a Hamas video, included phrases such as “genocidal Zionist State,” “the belly of the beast,” and “from the river to the sea.” It also specifically addressed conditions in Gaza and GMU’s alleged oppression of pro-Palestinian protestors.
Rather than protecting student political discourse, GMU demanded the SJP chapter take down the video explicitly because its language ran afoul of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s vague definition of antisemitism, which has been incorporated into GMU’s anti-discrimination policy.
Jake Offenhartz
Associated Press
Excerpt: New York University said it would deny a diploma to a student who used a graduation speech to condemn Israel’s attacks on Palestinians and what he described as U.S. “complicity in this genocide.”
Logan Rozos’s speech Wednesday for graduating students of NYU’s Gallatin School sparked waves of condemnation from pro-Israel groups, who demanded the university take aggressive disciplinary action against him.
Khoa Sands ‘26
Campus free speech has rarely been as salient as in the past months. The Israel-Hamas War has supercharged campus activists and the ongoing debate on free speech and the mission of the university. On December 6th, the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and M.I.T. testified at a disastrous House hearing where they seemed to be unable to take a position against calling for the genocide of Jews. Alumni, students, faculty, and donors were outraged. Four days later, the President of UPenn, Liz Magill, resigned and calls have been growing for the resignation of Claudine Gay, President of Harvard. In the background of this affair has been a series of pro-Palestine protests at university campuses across the country, often crossing the boundary into open anti-semitism. In such an environment, it is hard to feel welcome as a Jewish student.
Kate Hidalgo Bellows
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: The Trump administration has sent its first notice to a college that it may take away federal funding.
A new federal task force on antisemitism will review more than $5 billion that Columbia University receives from the government, and will immediately consider imposing stop-work orders on $51.4 million in federal contracts that Columbia holds.
In December, UC Berkeley administrators handed down a six-month suspension without pay to Peyrin Kao, a 26-year-old computer science lecturer, after finding that he had violated university policy by making pro-Palestinian comments to students in a classroom after class and advertising that he was participating in a hunger strike.
We asked two UC Berkeley professors with opposing views, Christopher Kutz and Erwin Chemerinsky, to succinctly lay out their case in support, or in opposition, to the measure.
Igor Mazin
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Ages ago, in the 1970s Soviet Union, a Jewish stand-up comedian, Mikhail Zhvanetski, remarked in one of his skits that if you want to argue about the taste of coconuts (not available in the Soviet Union at that time), it’s better to talk to those who’ve actually tried them. If you want to argue about antisemitism in academia, better ask those who have actually experienced it. Ask me.
The U.S. Department of Education is taking seriously a charge of “a pervasive hostile environment for Jewish students and faculty” at George Mason. This is as shocking to me (and to many of my Jewish colleagues at GMU) as hearing that I have broken two legs and never noticed it.
By Danielle Shapiro
Princeton’s President Christopher Eisgruber has positioned himself as perhaps the leading academic defender against the Trump administration’s crackdown on universities, citing the importance of universities and academic freedom, as well as his belief that the administration has greatly overreached in its attacks, especially against Harvard.
Yet his ability to lead credibly this defense was challenged in April by an event at Princeton featuring former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who is considered one of the favorites to succeed Benjamin Netanyahu next year. Demonstrators inside McCosh Hall shouted Bennett down and a fire alarm was pulled, apparently by a protester, ending the event. Outside, Jewish attendees were called “inbred swine,” among other slurs, and told to “go back to Europe.” President Eisgruber apologized to Bennett and university officials promised a serious investigation. A number of observers noted the importance of Princeton enforcing its rules in this situation. I attended the April 7 event, and I volunteered to speak as a witness to university investigators, with whom I met twice for over two hours.
Harvard University
Excerpt: This is the Final Report of the Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias.
This report summarizes the findings of the Task Force’s study of conditions at Harvard University. We gathered oral and written documentation between March and September 2024, and we devoted the rest of 2024 and beginning of 2025 to writing the report. Our work involved meeting with hundreds of students, faculty, and staff in listening sessions for specific segments of the campus community as well as private conversations with individuals. We also met with members of the wider Harvard community, including alumni. In our outreach, we spoke with non-Jews, American Jews, and Jewish and Arab citizens of the State of Israel within the Harvard community.
Brooke Lober, Eli Meyerhoff, and Emily Schneider
Academe Blog
Excerpt: The climate on American university campuses is dangerous. Administrators ban protests for Palestinian rights. Immigration and Customs Enforcement snatches students off the streets. The Trump administration revokes hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for research. And all this is done in the name of protecting Jewish students against a so-called culture of antisemitism.
Last April, Claire Shipman, the current acting president of Columbia University, told a congressional committee the university had a “specific problem . . . rampant antisemitism.” If that claim were true, it would constitute a crisis. But it’s not true. Instead, Trump and the Right are weaponizing false claims of antisemitism to attack pro-Palestinian protesters, and they’re using this lie as a smokescreen for destroying higher education and other public goods.
