VAIDA: The tide is turned against the anti-Israel campus maniacs

American campuses were gripped by anti-Israel chaos in 2024.

More and more trends show hope that 2025 will be calmer than 2024.

College and university campuses should be places of intellectual inquiry: training grounds for future engineers, statesmen, historians, and physicists. But in 2024, they descended into anti-Israel chaos that made Woodstock look like a polite book club discussion of Pride & Prejudice. 

On campus after campus, anti-Israel activists repeatedly beclowned themselves, as Campus Reform constantly reported.  

They harassed university officials, assaulted Jewish students, praised terrorist leaders with blood on their hands, and trashed their campuses.

But there is good news: the tide seems to be turning against these anti-Semitic clowns. 

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Recently, the Harvard Medical School scrapped plans for a panel discussion, originally scheduled for Jan. 21, that would have featured Gazan patients talking about the Israel-Hamas War. The issue with the panel was that it would have featured no corresponding opinions from Israelis. 

And the victories don’t stop there. 

The same day that the panel discussion at Harvard was due to take place, radicals invaded and disrupted a class at Columbia University covering the history of Israel, reciting anti-Israel propaganda and disregarding the students and course instructor, who asked them to cease and desist. 

But this incident, which might have been seen as a routine protest meeting with no serious response in 2024, instead garnered a quick reaction from the Ivy League school’s leadership. 

Columbia’s administration not only swiftly condemned the activists responsible, it placed security officials around campus to defend courses that might be targeted by other maniacs, and also suspended one of the students who took part in the original classroom invasion. 

Other schools as well seem to have learned their lesson and taken measures in the fall of 2024 to stop any potential future student rampages. 

The City University of New York, University of Virginia, and University of Connecticut–among other schools–have all either beefed up security or outright banned students from setting up more tent cities to express their solidarity with bloodthirsty terrorists. 

In a further seeming rebuke to the protesters, several prominent universities such as Dartmouth, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania have adopted policies of institutional neutrality–meaning that they refuse to comment officially as institutions upon touchy and polarizing subjects. Significantly, such proclamations of neutrality came after college students routinely pressured school leaders to condemn Israel’s counteroffensive against Hamas following the Oct. 7 massacre. 

All of these measures–the neutrality proclamations, the strengthened security, the disciplinary measures against disruptive protesters–are the correct response.

Sure, the activists and professors who support them squeal that any action taken to protect campuses against anti-Israel activists is a “violation of freedom of speech.” 

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Not only is this rich coming from the people who want to ban any opinion to the right of Stalin, it is also wrong. Stopping activists from disrupting life on campus, setting up tent cities, and harassing Jews is not a violation of the First Amendment, it is protecting normal students from dangerous lunatics who want to shout and chant anti-Semitic slogans instead of carrying on a rational debate. 

The correct response to a child throwing a tantrum isn’t: “Okay sweetie, have all the ice cream you want,” it’s: “Go to your room. You’re grounded.” That’s what these university administrations are beginning to understand. 

Granted, it’s unlikely that these school leaders have developed a sudden love for Israel or dislike of leftist protesters in general. Rather, it’s more probable that university presidents are seeing the bad PR that comes from the constant protests, walkouts, and pro-terrorist rhetoric, and they don’t want to lose face or donor dollars. 

But regardless of their motivations, we have reason to be optimistic that 2025 will see at least a partial restoration of sanity to higher education. For that, Americans should rejoice.


Editorials and op-eds reflect the opinion of the authors and not necessarily that of Campus Reform or the Leadership Institute.