It hasn’t been a good couple of years for Ivy League presidents. Since December 2023, five have stepped down—which is to say, been shown the door—including two from the same institution. All those departures stemmed, directly or indirectly, from the presidents’ failures to address anti-Semitism on their campuses.
The first domino to fall was Liz Magill at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), who exited after her disastrous testimony before Congress in the wake of the brutal October 7 attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas terrorists. Responding to a question from Elise Stefanik (R, NY), Magill admitted that calls for genocide against Jews might not violate her university’s Code of Conduct. It was, she said, “a context-dependent decision.”
Oof.
One of Magill’s companions during that hearing, Harvard president Claudine Gay, was next to go. She, too, came under fire for similar comments during her testimony, but that was not what ultimately did her in. In December, journalist Chris Rufo published a side-by-side comparison showing that Gay had plagiarized large portions of her doctoral dissertation. Not good. She resigned on January 2.
Magill and Gay were followed shortly by Martha Pollack of Cornell in June and Nemat Shafik of Columbia in August, both of whom were roundly criticized for their poor handling of pro-Hamas protests on their respective campuses—which is to say, for allowing protestors to run amok to the detriment of not only Jewish students but the entire university community.
The latest casualty is Katrina Armstrong, also from Columbia, who stepped down in March after only eight months as interim president. The Trump administration had threatened to cancel more than $400 million in grants to the university over its inability or unwillingness to curb anti-Semitism and resulting violations of the Civil Rights Act. Armstrong responded by making certain promises—such as prohibiting protestors from wearing masks—then appeared to renege on those promises, then claimed she hadn’t reneged.
Pro tip for prospective college presidents: If you hope to have a long tenure, disingenuousness, at best, or duplicity, at worst, is not a good strategy.
[RELATED: From Tenured Professor to Lumpenproletariat: The State of Higher Ed Faculty in America]
In fact, that is one of several lessons presidents can learn from these sad stories of ignominious failure.
The most important is simply to do the right thing, consequences be damned. Allowing one group of students to systematically harass, abuse, and threaten another group is wrong, full stop. It certainly wouldn’t be tolerated if the harassers were white supremacists and their victims were black. The offending parties would quickly be escorted off campus, probably expelled, and perhaps arrested—and rightly so. We should have no more patience when the perpetrators are pro-Hamas protestors, and their targets are Jewish.
If other students, the press, or elected officials criticize you as president for consistently upholding the rights of all students, let them. If you get fired for doing the right thing, so be it. You can depart with your head held high, which is more than we can say for the five presidents mentioned above. Note that their pathetic attempts to hold onto their jobs by waffling and dissembling ultimately did them no good. They sold out their honor for nothing and left in disgrace.
Remember, college presidents are not politicians. Sure, as president, there’s a political aspect to your job. You must court donors, negotiate with faculty, and seek to minimize bad press. But your goal is not to be re-elected. It’s to lead your organization on the path to excellence and prosperity. You can’t do that by trying to be all things to all people or by performatively taking what you perceive to be a popular stance. You must have a moral compass that functions independently of all constituent groups. You’re not there to represent their interests—or your own. You’re there to protect the long-term interests of the university.
Perhaps the biggest mistake presidents make is cow-towing to students. It’s disheartening and disgusting to see administrators sitting idly by as students take over buildings and public spaces. Someone needs to stand up to these spoiled, overgrown adolescents, and that someone might as well be you. Tell them, “No.” Tell them to get out of your office. Call the cops and have them thrown out.
Not only will the university benefit from these righteous actions, but those students will, too. They’re kids. They obviously can’t discern right from wrong if they think it’s okay to harass their fellow students or occupy spaces that don’t belong to them. They need to be taught otherwise. As an educator, that is part of your job.
Will this approach be well-received? Probably not. Will it save you from Armstrong’s fate? Again, probably not—but also yes. You might be fired, but you will be remembered as a higher education hero rather than a craven incompetent. And you might just inspire other presidents on other campuses to show some backbone, too. That may be the only way we’re ever going to move beyond this nonsense and get back to educating students.
Follow Rob Jenkins on X.
Image: “Flags of the Ivy League” by Kenneth C. Zirkel on Wikimedia Commons
“Allowing one group of students to systematically harass, abuse, and threaten another group is wrong, full stop. It certainly wouldn’t be tolerated if the harassers were white supremacists and their victims were black. The offending parties would quickly be escorted off campus, probably expelled, and perhaps arrested—and rightly so. We should have no more patience when the perpetrators are pro-Hamas protestors, and their targets are Jewish.”
This didn’t start with the Jews.
Arguably it started nearly 50 years ago when students were permitted to bring rifles and bandoliers into Cornell — they should have been expelled for that. Instead they were rewarded, memory is that the student who was behind that went on to a nice career at TIAA-CREF.
In more recent years there has been “The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary” (BAMN), Antifa, BLM, etc. Not all of these groups have targeted Jews — in fact, most of them didn’t. But when you hate Western Civilization and the Judeo/Christian tradition, Jews will be one of the groups whom you target.
And the question I ask is has the Ivy League been so thoroughly de-WASPed that Jews are the only ones left to target?
Personally, I literally went from the deck of a lobster boat to a state school, I never breathed the ratified air of the Ivy League, but from what I can see from the outside, these are no longer the WASP bastions they were a century ago. They are bastions of wealth and privilege to be sure, but it’s now other groups teaching and projecting some very different values.
And this is demonstrated by groups such as ISI who have shown how very little Ivy League graduates know about American civics and culture. I seriously wonder if most Ivy League graduates could pass the civics test given to (legal) immigrants.
I’m not saying that higher education isn’t obnoxiously antisemetic — it is, and has been for at least a few decades now. Nor am I saying that we shouldn’t do something about this, we can and we must. What I am saying is that it is not just hatred of Jews — that it’s a much larger problem.
Remember that a decade ago, the chant at Yale was “F*cking White Male.”
It’s really a fight between individualism and collectivism — between “the American Way” and “Godless Communism.” No, I am not reincarnating the late Senator Joseph McCarthy, although I remind people that (a) the man was an alcoholic by the standards of the 1950s (when *everyone* drank like a fish), and (b) he might have done a little better had he been sober, people usually do. He was right, after all — the Soviet archives confirmed it…
But it’s the difference between the individual values of the American Revolution (Life, Liberty, & Property) and the collective (group) values of the French Revolution (Liberty, Equity, & Fraternity). The Soviets spent a lot of money trying to influence American academia in the 1960s & 1970s, and not all their money was wasted.
George Orwell saw through this 80 years ago, and a lot of this antisemitism is the “three minutes hate” — people feeling good about themselves by hating someone else. I am not the first person to point out that most of those chanting “from the river to the sea” have no idea what river, what sea, nor the ability to find either on a map — even if everything was labeled.
They hate Jews — but do they even know what a Jew is? Do they know anything about Judaism? Anything at all?
I don’t think so. They truly are that ignorant — and that brainwashed….