Mobs of keffiyeh-wearing undergraduates swarming and bullying Jewish students on US college campuses have given the world an astounding glimpse into the shocking state of America’s elite universities. The ugly and depressing image is one of world-class educational institutions having been converted into indoctrination centers under the thumb of fringe leftist thuggery. The rot oozing onto the campuses of Harvard, MIT, Columbia, Stanford, UCLA, et al, and plainly aired on media broadcast around the globe, sadly isn’t just surface decay; the decomposition has spread to the core, so blatant and outrageous as to have the federal authorities now moving in to stamp it out.

In 2025 the US Department of Justice (DOJ) found that at UCLA Jewish and Israeli researchers were subjected to “severe, pervasive and objectively offensive” harassment, with the university being “deliberately indifferent to the hostile environment.” The Trump administration has suspended hundreds of pricey science grants to UCLA and is threatening to cut off more funding if the abuse isn’t eradicated.

At Harvard University—where 60% of Jewish students complain of bias and discrimination—the US Department of Education and DOJ are currently reviewing all of that college’s federal contracts and are warning that they’ll all be terminated if the university doesn’t rein in the outrageous anti-Semitic cultural norms now running rampant across that campus.

An Israeli chemist, currently suing Stanford University for “unrelenting anti-Semitic discrimination,” alleges the abuse went so far as to include the sabotage of his research work.  He alleges the university did absolutely nothing when he brought those matters to their attention, simply ignoring him. The Brandeis Center is suing the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well, contending that MIT permitted faculty and students to “foster a hostile environment of harassment and intimidation.” Also within the last several months, Columbia University agreed to a $220 million settlement with the federal government as a result of the persistent hostilities endured by Jewish students on that chaotic campus.

American academia isn’t just destroying itself though with its unseemly descent into anti-Semitic sewers; it seems intent on taking the nation down with it. Scientists and researchers are sounding the alarm that the current chic Jew-hatred masquerading as “progressivism” has infiltrated all academic departments, including most concernedly STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), putting research and innovation at risk.

Eliciting the most from the best and brightest students, concentrating laser focused on solving the great medical, technological, agricultural and environmental challenges before the world, doesn’t seem to be the mission statement any longer of colleges across the country. The faculty, administrators and alumni of great American institutions are instead seemingly obsessed with a bizarre anti-Semitic fad that overrides any appeal to pushing this nation forward into a vibrant and vital future. Presidents and deans of premier colleges seem absolutely unconcerned with the sabotage, bias, and toxic groupthink that is starting to gnaw at those hard science disciplines upon which the nation progresses or retreats. Not only do they appear indifferent, but where their apt attention does lie speaks volumes about the dysfunctional crisis in higher education.

Few anti-Israeli demonstrations on college campuses lack a “Queers for Palestine” contingent—notwithstanding that simply being homosexual is illegal in Gaza and the West Bank, punishable by up to ten years in prison. Then too, Old Dominion University made room on its faculty for a professor who authored “Minor-Attracted People and their Pursuit of Dignity,” until the instructor was placed on administrative leave in 2021 owing to the public outcry at the attempt at softening and/or normalizing child molestation. Yet inexplicable support of every sort of affront to normalcy, decency, common sense, tradition, morality and order has become the cultural imperative in a higher education that has lost any semblance of harmony with the civilization that birthed it. Flag burning, statue defacing, anthem despising, America hating, sexual deviancy of all sorts—these and other degeneracy are the fast tracks to national collective suicide so in vogue among the American leftist literati.

And a disgusted public may have had enough of it. A 2025 NBC poll found that 63% of Americans doubted the value of a four-year college degree. Average citizens have witnessed their previously revered institutions of higher learning surrendered to chaos, insanity, racism, treason, anarchy, subversion, duplicity, hypocrisy, village idiocy—and astonishingly barefaced anti-Semitism—and are turning their backs in unison.

Almost a hundred years ago a great European nation foolishly summoned their Jew-hating academics to pen the insufferably vapid “100 Authors Against Einstein” and wound up a dozen years later a smoldering, shattered ruin. That’s not going to be repeated in America.  If the presidents of once great universities can’t quite wrap their heads around the new realities, hopefully the staggering fines and penalties the federal government is bringing to bear will sooner or later bring them around to their senses.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)