The Intifada invaded American soil. An Egyptian pro-Palestine activist set eight elderly Jews on fire in Boulder, CO, in early June, and a radical socialist murdered two Jews in Washington, DC, in May.
With an undeniable direct line from universities’ unrelenting indifference toward Jewish students since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas militants led a surprise attack into Israel, to these terror attacks, it is now time for the Trump administration to ramp up its efforts and go after university trustees by name.
The administration is rightly defunding research at Harvard University and investigating a violent May 5 protest at the University of Washington. But bureaucratic measures have little impact when campus leaders are unable or unwilling to prosecute campus antisemitism with unapologetic and irreversible firings, expulsions and arrests.
The deaths and savagery in Washington, DC and Boulder did not have to happen. But they did happen because university trustees, who are ultimately in charge of their institutions, allowed college presidents and leftist faculty to downplay the threat anti-Israel activism poses to American Jews.
Both attackers invoked the same “Free Palestine” chants that protesters have yelled on campuses since 2023. In 2024, I went to the George Washington University campus and recorded a pro-Palestine tent encampment during which students called to “Globalize the Intifada” and “honor” their “martyrs.”
The recent attacks in Boulder and Washington D.C. are exactly what leftist students and faculty envisioned when they called for a worldwide crusade against Jews. The Boulder attacker exclaimed that “we need to end Zionists” as he hurled Molotov cocktails on senior citizens.
The administration has made re-funding institutions like Harvard University, Columbia University, Princeton University, and Northwestern University conditional on broad measures such as eliminating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and beefing up campus security. Those conditions are appropriate, but there is more the Trump administration can do to save these corrupt institutions from themselves.
The U.S. Department of Education should implement new demands that call out by name the trustees and require those members to make a series of votes on measures that bolster campus safety, expedite expulsions and staff firings, combat antisemitism, and overhaul admissions policies that prioritize social justice activism over academic merit.
Refunding universities should be conditional on the actions of their boards of trustees. University trustees have evaded public scrutiny during this antisemitism crisis, but they are the ones ultimately in charge and most empowered to fix higher education from within their institutions.
Harvard trustees include Obama administration alumni Former Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and Former Small Business Administrator Karen Gordon Mills, but little media scrutiny is placed on them.
Trustees are in charge of hiring and firing top university leadership and approving high-level modifications to school operations. The problem with the current conditions is that they are within the power of university presidents to execute and while some major decisions require trustee approval, the presidents are seen and judged as the ultimate decision-makers.
As a result, ineffective presidents like Harvard’s Claudine Gay or University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill may depart due to incompetence, but the trustees that put them in power and enabled a culture of indifference to antisemitism remain.
Columbia University is ground zero for this new experiment in collegiate accountability. Trustee Claire Shipman serves as acting president after Interim President Katrina Armstrong’s disastrous tenure, during which she appeared to backtrack on installing new campus safety officers.
A lot of good her hollow promises did for campus safety. Anti-Israel protesters held a Columbia University library hostage on May 7 as civil-minded students attempted to study for finals, and Shipman deigned exasperation.
Shipman, who testified her bewilderment to Congress in 2024 over antisemitic campus protests, appears none the wiser in 2025 as she still expressed naive hope for an outcome that day that didn’t involve police. It takes a galling amount of aloof delusion to look past campus protesters’ well-documented history of repeat violent behavior and aversions to de-escalation measures, but Shipman and her peers nonetheless possess that destructive talent.
Trustees have the ability to fire top university employees who have enabled antisemitic activism and hate for years on campus. They can modify admissions requirements that currently prioritize leftist social justice activism narratives over academic merit. They can cancel contracts with researchers and partners who undermine American values and encourage antisemitism to flourish under the false banner of anti-Zionism.
Nothing is stopping the Trump administration from freezing more money at more schools, and adding a laundry list of specific conditions that named trustees can meet to restore safety at their institutions.
It’s time to drag the trustees out of the shadows and put them under public scrutiny.
Zachary Marschall, PhD, is Editor-in-Chief of Leadership Institute’s Campus Reform and an adjunct assistant professor of arts administration at the University of Kentucky.
This article was originally published at www.thecentersquare.com
