As Campuses Reopen in 2026, Jewish Students Face a Deeper Institutional Failure

As college campuses re-open for the Spring 2026 semester, university leaders are eager to project calm. Protest encampments have been cleared. Media attention has drifted. Administrators speak of healing, dialogue, and renewed commitments to inclusion.

For Jewish students, however, the reality is far less reassuring. The question they face is no longer whether antisemitism exists on campus. That question was settled long ago. The real question is whether universities remain capable of governing themselves in ways that allow Jewish students to participate fully and safely in academic life.

Recent reporting and surveys suggest the answer is increasingly no.

New data released in January by StandWithUs shows that large majorities of Jewish student leaders have personally experienced or witnessed antisemitic incidents, ranging from harassment and intimidation to coordinated online targeting. Particularly troubling is that a meaningful share of these incidents involved faculty members and administrators, not just students acting at the margins.

The stories behind the numbers are by now familiar, and still unsettling. Jewish students report being taunted with slurs, encountering classrooms transformed into ideological battlegrounds, and seeking help from administrators only to be told that this is simply what contemporary activism looks like.

Campus antisemitism persists today not because universities lack policies, statements, or task forces, but because they have lost the capacity — or the will and moral fortitude — to govern consistently when doing so carries reputational or ideological cost.

This is not an episodic crisis. It is not the residue of a single geopolitical moment. It is the product of a deeper institutional failure that has been years in the making.

I have been writing about ideological conformity and governance breakdowns in higher education since well before October 7, 2023. In 2018, I published research documenting the ideological homogeneity of university administrators. That work resulted in vandalism of my office and faculty-supported calls for a tenure review — an early warning of how dissent was already being policed.

What has changed since then is not the existence of hostility toward Jews on campus, but the confidence with which it is now expressed, and the reluctance of universities to confront it directly.

The scale of the problem is undeniable. Hillel International has documented thousands of antisemitic incidents across US campuses over the past academic year. Surveys consistently show that most Jewish students have experienced or witnessed antisemitism, and that a majority lack confidence in their universities’ ability to respond effectively.

But focusing on numbers alone risks missing the more consequential point. Antisemitism on campus is no longer primarily a student conduct problem. It is a failure of institutional governance.

That failure has begun, quietly and reluctantly, to be acknowledged even by elite university leadership. Harvard President Alan Garber recently admitted that faculty activism has chilled free expression on campus, and narrowed the range of views students feel comfortable voicing in the classroom. Such candor is rare, and it matters.

Yet the significance of that admission lies not in its novelty, but in what it reveals about the broader system. Elite universities know what has gone wrong. They possess internal climate surveys, legal analyses, and compliance offices that document the problem in painstaking detail. The issue is not ignorance. It is unwillingness.

This is not a debate about controversial speech. Universities exist to host disagreement. The crisis arises when authority figures use institutional power to signal which identities and viewpoints are protected, and which are expendable, while insisting that their hands are tied.

This dynamic is no longer hypothetical. A substantial share of antisemitic incidents now originate with faculty or staff.

Faculty-affiliated activist networks have proliferated across campuses, often operating with tacit approval from administrators. When professors face no consequences for antisemitic rhetoric, students receive a clear message about whose dignity matters.

Universities often respond by invoking complexity — free speech, academic freedom, the difficulty of drawing lines in polarized times. But this explanation collapses under scrutiny. Universities know how to enforce rules when they choose to. Antisemitism, however, has too often been treated as an exception — reframed as political critique, shielded by academic language, or excused as moral urgency.

In practice, this failure follows a familiar pattern. Complaints are routed through opaque processes. Responsibility is diffused. Decisions are deferred indefinitely. What looks like procedural care from the outside is experienced by students as abandonment.

This helps explain one of the defining paradoxes of Jewish campus life in 2026: Jewish institutions are flourishing, even as universities falter.

Chabad and Hillel have expanded rapidly since October 7. Chabad on Campus International now operates on more than 950 campuses worldwide. New Jewish centers are being built at major universities. Shabbat dinners are fuller than ever.

This is resilience, and it deserves admiration. But it is also an indictment.

Jewish students should not need refuge from their own universities. A vibrant Hillel should be a center of Jewish life, not a shelter from institutional neglect. When Jewish belonging is secured primarily through parallel institutions, something fundamental has broken in the civic promise of higher education.

This is where accountability must enter the conversation.

If universities cannot enforce their own nondiscrimination policies consistently, then Title VI enforcement must become more predictable, faster, and more consequential. Investigations should not linger for years. Outcomes should be transparent. Boards of Trustees must stop outsourcing moral responsibility to administrators trained primarily in risk avoidance. Trustees exist precisely to govern when institutions lose their bearings. Silence is not neutrality. It is acquiescence.

Responsibility does not rest with universities alone. The Jewish community must also speak with greater clarity.

Parents sending children back to campus deserve realism, not reassurance. Donors funding universities and Jewish campus life alike should ask harder questions about where their money is going. Too often, Jewish leadership has responded by building around institutional failure rather than confronting it — an understandable strategy in the short term, but unsustainable over time.

Many Jewish communal institutions have adapted and pivoted in a hostile environment. But adaptation and pivoting is not reform. Resilience is not resolution. The long-term health of Jewish campus life depends on universities once again fulfilling their basic obligations.

As campuses reopen this spring, Jewish students are returning to environments that may feel quieter, but remain deeply unsettled. The slogans have shifted. The tactics have evolved. But the hostility persists.

The question now is whether universities — and those who govern them — are prepared to enforce standards consistently, protect Jewish students equally, and reassert their own legitimacy.

If they cannot, the erosion will not stop with Jewish students. It will continue to corrode the credibility of higher education itself.

And that is a cost no university — and no community — can afford to ignore.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.