Two weeks ago, the president of Sarah Lawrence College (SLC) attended the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ 2026 Annual Meeting in Washington. I downloaded the more than 100-page program and read it closely. The program makes clear that, for higher education’s leadership, campus anti-Semitism ranks well below other perceived institutional priorities.

The conference’s dominant preoccupation was artificial intelligence (AI). More than thirty sessions addressed its integration into teaching, its effects on assessment, its governance, and the risks of institutional lag. Panels promised “scalable AI literacy,” “replicable frameworks,” and institution-wide deployment strategies—clear signs of administrative anxiety about losing control of the classroom.

The program also devoted extensive attention to resisting government oversight.

One session, “Collaboration as an Essential Strategy in Challenging Times,” convened leaders from the Modern Language Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and Phi Beta Kappa. Their focus was not on pedagogy or scholarship but on politics. Executive orders and accountability efforts, attendees were told, had inspired a new era of “collaborative resistance” across higher education, including coordinated legal action against the federal government.

Other panels characterized limits on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) as threats to academic freedom and human rights, and urged an “unapologetic, visionary commitment” to DEI—effectively redefining dissent as moral failure and accountability as censorship.

The conference also featured multiple sessions devoted to “healing” and institutional transformation. Universities showcased restorative practices, reconciliation models, and “healing-centered pedagogy.” These frameworks, largely adapted from racial justice work, were treated as indispensable tools for navigating the “present moment.”

Only after surveying this landscape does one arrive at campus anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism appeared only once in the entire program. The session—“From Prejudice to Pluralism: Addressing Antisemitism and Islamophobia on College Campuses”—was allotted thirty minutes and scheduled for 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, when many attendees were already leaving. And, rather than addressing anti-Semitism as a distinct concern, it was paired with another topic—Islamophobia—despite the role campus anti-Semitism has played in the departures of university presidents at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania and in ongoing Title VI investigations.

Jewish students on many campuses now report hiding religious symbols, avoiding Jewish spaces, and altering daily routines in response to hostility. In the months following October 7, 2023—the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, which also goes unmentioned—encampments spread across campuses nationwide, often featuring rhetoric that endorsed or normalized violence against Jews.

None of this appeared in the program. There were no sessions devoted to October 7, no sustained examination of the encampments that followed, no panels on the congressional testimony that ended presidential careers, no discussion of Title VI investigations, and no sessions centered on the Jewish student experience itself.

From the schedule alone, it is clear what higher education leadership treats as urgent—and what it is willing to defer. AI is treated as an existential institutional threat. Government oversight is framed as an emergency requiring coordinated resistance. DEI is elevated to a moral absolute. Anti-Semitism, despite its scale, visibility, and consequences, is peripheral.

I have taught at SLC for nearly two decades and have written extensively on ideological conformity and institutional behavior in higher education. The AAC&U program is not an outlier. It is a mirror. It shows how the sector behaves when it gathers privately to decide what matters and what can be deferred.

Universities insist they are committed to inclusion, dialogue, and student well-being. But priorities are revealed not in statements, but in schedules. When an institution repeatedly fails to treat one group’s vulnerability as worthy of sustained focus, that failure is not neutral. It is the quiet logic of institutional anti-Semitism; not always animated by overt hostility, but by indifference and tacit approval. (Read Christopher L. Schilling’s “Anti-Semitism and the Character of America.”)

The conference promised “constructive engagement.” Higher education’s leadership addressed technology, politics, and institutional self-defense. The call from Jewish students—for safety, for seriousness, for the basic recognition that their experience matters—was ignored.

From the program alone, it is clear how institutions allocate attention and urgency. A sector that cannot recognize a crisis of its own making, even when it is written plainly into its own agenda, should not be surprised when the public concludes that its moral authority has eroded.