https://www.city-journal.org/article/why-universities-target-jews
Many Jewish students, parents, and donors are rethinking their allegiance to America’s elite universities. They think that Jewish students are not welcome there.
That message is being sent in two ways. First, these schools aren’t admitting Jewish students at the rates they once did. Harvard used to be about 20 percent Jewish; today, it’s below 9 percent. At the University of Pennsylvania, long considered one of the friendliest campuses to Jewish students, the number of observant Jews admitted has dropped by about two-thirds, from 200 in the early 2000s to about 70 today, according to Inside Higher Ed. Jewish enrollment is down across much of the Ivy League.
Second, the Jewish kids who are admitted increasingly feel uncomfortable on campus. In a now-infamous congressional hearing, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT struggled to say definitively whether calls for genocide violated their campus codes of conduct. Schools committed to “safe spaces” are strangely silent about anti-Semitism, and in some cases seem implicitly supportive of acts of intimidation and violent protest.
In response, some top Jewish students are forswearing their dreams of Columbia or Yale and applying elsewhere. Some prominent Jewish donors have publicly condemned the schools’ double standards and begun pulling funding, or they have threatened to do so. The Jewish community had previously been downright devoted to America’s elite educational institutions. These slow, even belated, steps show that the long-honed Jewish knack for sensing danger finally has kicked in.
The current situation facing some Jewish students on college campuses, and the Jewish reaction to these trends, evokes a disturbing historical parallel. Nations that have antagonized Jews, and have seen Jews flee in response, often were experiencing a deeper rot and corruption. History is littered with nations, from Imperial Spain to Czarist and then Soviet Russia to Nazi Germany, whose underlying problems were worsened by government-sponsored scapegoating and driving away of Jews. Persecution of the Jews did not always cause those nations’ decline, but it was a signal that it was coming.