The university was supposed to be the place where a person entered as a mind, not as a tribal suspect. It was supposed to be the one institution in the West that could survive passion by submitting it to inquiry, argument, and discipline. That illusion is over. What we are watching now on major Western campuses is not a temporary failure of academic leadership. It is the exposure of a deeper mechanism: the campus has become a border regime in which Jewish presence is treated as conditionally admissible, morally probationary, and politically revocable.

Recent events make that hard to deny. UC Berkeley agreed on March 19 to tighten protections against antisemitism in a settlement that bars exclusion based on support for Israel or Zionism, expands training, improves complaint handling, and pays $1 million in legal costs. On March 20, the U.S. Justice Department sued Harvard, alleging it failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students and seeking recovery of massive federal sums. On March 23, the administration opened further probes into Harvard. In the UK, a March 2026 report and related coverage described antisemitism on campuses as having become “normalised.” 

The easiest mistake is to call all this a “campus climate problem.” That phrase is too soft, too meteorological, too innocent. Climate sounds like weather. What we have instead is selection. The issue is not that some students say ugly things. Universities have always contained vanity, cruelty, and ideological theater. The issue is that entire institutions have drifted toward a structure in which the Jew is no longer received as an ordinary participant in common life, but as a figure required to perform prior moral disarmament before being granted legitimacy. The Jew may enter, but only........

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