One year after Columbia signed its resolution agreement, the university remains something of an example, for others in the sector and for the Trump administration. But what many have called Columbia’s capitulation hasn’t been a full win for either side.
Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment Wednesday against eight pro-Palestinian activists who are accused of conspiring to run a criminal intimidation campaign against University of Michigan officials while trying to force the school to cut financial ties to Israel.
The indictment describes threats and vandalism at officials’ homes, some businesses and the Jewish Federation of Detroit. The document highlights several incidents that made headlines in the past few years, including fake bloody corpses that were placed in an elected university board member’s yard and the spray-painting of anti-Israel messages at the home of the school’s president at the time, Santa Ono.
The Anti-Defamation League has given Princeton a C in its third annual Campus Antisemitism Report Card earlier this month. In 2024, Princeton got an F on its first report card.
The ADL has historically been considered one of the most prominent Jewish civil rights organizations, though its credibility has been contested in recent years. The league assesses 150 colleges and universities nationally, but many members of the Jewish community on campus consider the C grade to be unreflective of the state of Jewish life at Princeton, believing that Princeton deserves a higher grade.
Elisabeth Stewart
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: A University-registered lobbyist opposed two New Jersey Senate Bills regarding legacy admissions and definitions of antisemitism and Islamophobia in the 2024 legislative session, according to lobbying records obtained by The Daily Princetonian.
Amid the ongoing scrutiny of higher education from the federal government, both bills would have had profound implications for Princeton’s admissions policies, free speech on campus, and sources of funding.
Jessie Appleby
FIRE
Were the Gaza solidarity encampments erected on college campuses this spring an effective, or even legitimate, form of protest? Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza? It depends on who you ask. But how, if at all, should faculty handle these questions in class?
The manner in which faculty tackle contested or controversial issues in college classrooms is a source of perennial debate. That debate over preferred pedagogy reignited last month when a nonprofit organization accused a public college in California of violating students’ First Amendment rights based on incidents in which two professors seemingly injected their personal views on hot-button political issues into assigned classwork.
A trial began Friday for five current and former Stanford University students who occupied the university president’s offices during a pro-Palestinian protest in 2024 — in a rare instance of demonstrators facing trial for actions from the wave of campus protests that year.
Prosecutors accused the demonstrators of spray-painting on the building, breaking windows and furniture, disabling security cameras and splattering a red liquid described as fake blood on items throughout the offices. The university is seeking $329,000 in restitution.
Tom Perkins
The Guardian
Excerpt: The University of Michigan is using private, undercover investigators to surveil pro-Palestinian campus groups, including trailing them on and off campus, furtively recording them and eavesdropping on their conversations, the Guardian has learned.
The surveillance appears to largely be an intimidation tactic, five students who have been followed, recorded or eavesdropped on said. The undercover investigators have cursed at students, threatened them and in one case drove a car at a student who had to jump out of the way, according to student accounts and video footage shared with the Guardian.
Sharon Otterman
New York Times
Excerpt: Dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators barged into Milbank Hall on Barnard College’s Manhattan campus on Wednesday and staged a sit-in over the expulsion of two students who interrupted a class on Israel, sparking a showdown with Barnard’s administration.
Attorneys with the US Department of Justice have reportedly said they felt pressured to accuse the University of California of discriminating against Jewish students and faculty, at the urging of the Trump administration, in what one lawyer described as a “hit job”.
Nine attorneys, some of whom requested anonymity, shared insider accounts with the Los Angeles Times of the federal government’s investigation into California’s research university system. The attorneys said they felt pushed to conclude the UC had violated the law before they had determined the facts. All of the attorneys eventually resigned.
Earlier this month, the Anti-Defamation League gave Princeton a C on its annual campus antisemitism report card. It would make sense that the University, like many of its students, wouldn’t be used to receiving grades lower than an A. But this C is one we shouldn’t worry about. The ADL’s assessments of colleges and universities don’t actually measure antisemitism in any meaningful way, nor do they measure the quality of Jewish student life.
In a blistering report released Tuesday, Republicans on the House Education and Workforce Committee say campus antisemitism didn’t begin with the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and isn’t confined to a handful of universities.
“Instead, antisemitism in higher education is a systemic problem that affects a broad swath of America’s colleges and universities,” the report states. “The evidence demonstrates that antisemitism on campus is driven by persistent leadership failures and radical faculty and student groups that legitimize and foment antisemitism in classrooms and on campus grounds. Meanwhile, universities with satellite campuses overseas are failing to stop antisemitism and live up to their stated goals of spreading Western values.”
Incidents decreased most significantly on college and university campuses, by 66% (from 1,694 to 583).
The most significant factor contributing to the decrease in incidents on college campuses in 2025 was the decline of the anti-Israel encampment movement that drove the spike in incidents on campuses in the spring of 2024. Antisemitic incidents related to anti-Israel protests, including encampments, decreased by 83% on college campuses in 2025 compared to the year before. But the threat of antisemitism on college campuses is far from gone. Incidents on college campuses remained almost three times higher in 2025 than in 2021.
Sena Chang
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Antisemitic graffiti of a gray swastika was found on the wall of a graduate student apartment building inside the Lakeside housing complex in mid-July. The graffiti was removed immediately following multiple reports, with the Department of Public Safety (DPS) opening an investigation into the incident and increasing foot patrols in the area in response, according to University spokesperson Jennifer Morrill.
Construction was underway inside Lakeside at the time of the incident, and the University has not yet determined whether the graffiti was the work of a student or contractor. No suspects have been named.
Seth Mandel
Commentary
Excerpt: David Piegaro fell down the stairs outside a Princeton University building and rolled painfully to the bottom. That’s when he was handcuffed and put under arrest for aggravated assault. The supposed victim was Kenneth Strother, the university’s head of security—who had, according to video of the incident and witness testimony—caused Piegaro to fall down those stairs. Strother was unharmed. Piegaro faced jail time.
On Tuesday, Piegaro was acquitted. On Thursday, Princeton revealed it still had some salt to pour into Piegaro’s wounds. The university honored Strother with its President’s Achievement Award for his “commitment to excellence and exceptional performance.”
As students, professors, and administrators get ready to return to campus for what events both in the United States and abroad suggest will be another tumultuous year, the American Association of University Professors has decided to add fuel to the fire by announcing that it no longer categorically opposes academic boycotts. The decision by the once-august and respected organization is not surprising. After all, the AAUP is now led by a professor of journalism and media studies who a week ago used his official platform to call J. D. Vance “a fascist” and to claim that America’s colleges and universities are not in fact “ideological indoctrination centers.”
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.
Leela Hensler
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: The Princeton Police Department has stepped up patrols of the town’s Jewish Center on Nassau Street. The shift comes in the wake of half a dozen reported incidents of graffiti around town beginning in mid-August that are being investigated as “bias intimidation incidents.”
“All of these investigations remain active, [and] our detective bureau is following up on any possible leads,” said Captain Matthew Solovay of the Princeton Police Department in an interview with The Daily Princetonian. He also confirmed that patrols around parks and the Jewish Center had increased.
Multiple Penn-affiliated groups filed a motion on Tuesday to intervene as defendants in an ongoing lawsuit filed against the University by the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The lawsuit followed a July 2025 subpoena from the EEOC that required Penn to submit detailed information on workplace antisemitism complaints and membership lists for various Jewish-related campus groups. In November, the agency sued the University for allegedly failing to comply.
For the first time since the 2024 “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at Princeton, Yuval Donio Gideon, head of the Public Diplomacy Department of the Consulate General of Israel in New York, met with University administrators and campus rabbis to discuss the experience of Israeli and Jewish students on campus.
Gideon met with Vice President for Communications and Government Affairs Gadi Dechter and Vice Provost for International Affairs and Operations Aly Kassam-Remtulla, two top Nassau Hall officials. He also met with Rabbi Eitan Webb, the co-director of Princeton University Chabad House, and Rabbi Gil Steinlauf ’91, the executive director of the Center for Jewish Life.
