JTA — Universities that reached settlements with the Trump administration last year to preserve federal funding mostly received higher marks on the Anti-Defamation League’s campus antisemitism “report cards,” released this week.

Columbia, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia, which struck deals in order to end federal civil rights investigations — and some in exchange for large payouts — all saw their ADL grades boosted.

This was the ADL’s third year of grading how universities have handled antisemitism and the first to reflect the Trump administration’s campus antisemitism policies, which have been hailed by some Jewish groups as necessary and criticized by others as using antisemitism as a pretext to crack down on academic freedom.

“I think some of those policies may have affected what’s happening on campus, and therefore that impacts the grades.” Shira Goodman, head of the ADL’s Center to Combat Antisemitism in Education, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Goodman said that neither a university’s dealings with the government, nor litigation from private organizations including the ADL, affected a school’s grade. Instead, she said, such actions along with “Jewish communal pressure” were more likely to prompt a school to take antisemitism concerns more seriously, and some of the terms agreed to in the settlements “are the things we’ve been measuring, that we’ve been calling for since 2023.”

Cornell University earned its second C in a row despite........

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