Is antisemitism ‘rampant’ at our universities?

Many years ago, in a dusty lecture hall, one of my professors told me something I’ve never forgotten: Any truth can be distorted by exaggerating it.

I’ve been thinking about his remark during the recent allegations of antisemitism in American higher education. Jewish students have filed lawsuits against Harvard — a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” their complaint alleged — and several other universities. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Education has opened investigations of antisemitism and Islamophobia at nearly 100 institutions, including Temple and Drexel. (The department dismissed its probe of the University of Pennsylvania after students filed a federal lawsuit making the same charges.)

Meanwhile, critics have noted that the number of Jewish students at many elite universities has declined sharply in recent years. According to the students suing Harvard, its percentage of Jewish students has dropped 60% over the past decade. That “evinces an intentional effort, much like Harvard’s quotas one hundred years ago, to exclude Jews,” as their lawsuit claims.

Like the quotas 100 years ago? Really?

Of course not.

Let’s be clear: Antisemitism exists on our campuses, just as it does in our broader society. But it pales next to the harm Jewish students suffered in the past. And we harm our present-day students when we pretend otherwise.

Start with the quotas, which Ivy League universities instituted in the early 20th century to stem the rising number of Jewish students. At Yale, the chairman of admissions worried that the list of new students in 1929 “might easily be mistaken for a recent roll call at the Wailing Wall.”

And that could only mean a loss of status for the universities, their leaders worried. “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews ... meets its fate because they drive away the Gentiles,” Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell warned, “and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.”

Quotas remained in place into the 1960s, even as universities continued to deny them. Recently uncovered evidence from Stanford — which proudly advertised its religion-blind bona fides — shows that officers limited admissions from two high schools in Los Angeles in 1953 because they had large Jewish populations.

Are we to imagine that admissions officers today are deliberately trying to reduce the number of Jewish students, as they did a century ago? That’s absurd. The big reason for the decline is the drive for racial diversity, which “makes it a little harder for many applicants who are perceived as white to get in,” explained Mark Oppenheimer, host of a podcast on the history of Jews in the Ivy League.

To be sure, there has been a troubling spike in antisemitic incidents on our campuses since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Most notoriously, a Cornell student was arrested after allegedly threatening to rape and kill Jewish students. At Cooper Union in New York, meanwhile, Jews took refuge in the library while pro-Palestinian protesters pounded on the windows and doors.

But are Jewish students “experiencing a wave of antisemitism unlike anything we’ve seen before,” as Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan A. Greenblatt claimed? That seems absurd, too.

In the 1920s, Syracuse University — which had its own Ku Klux Klan chapter — housed Jews separately from Christians. Jews were excluded from fraternities at Brown, where the president refused to allow a Jewish fraternity because it might harm the school’s reputation. The yearbook at the Naval Academy printed the picture of a Jewish cadet on a perforated page, so it could be removed without damaging the rest of the volume. And so on.

Nor could Jews occupy leadership positions in student organizations. A Jewish student at Harvard quipped that a Jew had as much chance of becoming editor of the campus newspaper as he had of becoming pope. “We were kept out of everything,” recalled Yale graduate Max Lerner, who went on to a brilliant career in journalism.

And Jews faced threats of violence on campus, long after the quotas came down. In 1978, on the 40th anniversary of the Kristallnacht attacks on Jews in Germany, students at the University of Florida gathered outside a Jewish fraternity and chanted, “Your mother was bright but she was a lampshade.” That same year, soccer players at Babson College — preparing for a match against Brandeis, a heavily Jewish school — wore shirts with swastikas under their uniforms and shouted, “Kill the Jews.”

That should put today’s challenges in perspective. I understand why some Jews interpret “From the river to the sea, Palestine should be free” — a much-heard chant in recent months — as a demand for genocide. But nobody is calling explicitly for their elimination, as happened in the not-so-distant past.

I know that might seem like cold comfort to our Jewish students. They feel anxious, aggrieved, and scared. I’m Jewish and I’ve felt the same way.

But I also know that antisemitism has diminished radically since the days of the quotas. And if we teach our Jewish students that nothing has changed — or even that things have gotten worse — we will reinforce precisely the fear they are experiencing right now. I just don’t see how that can be good for them. Or for anyone.