On October 10, 2023 — just three days after Hamas perpetrated the largest bloodletting of Jews since the Holocaust — I was preparing to teach my evening graduate seminar at Northeastern University on terrorism and counterterrorism, when a stranger accosted me in the hallway by my office.
Wearing a keffiyeh, he pressed a flier into my hand to attend a “vigil” in Cambridge advocating Palestinian resistance. I quietly turned around, put the flier in my office and headed off to class, where I spotted the same intifada-enthusiast seated among my students.
I politely asked him to leave so I could start teaching about international security as I had at Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins and Northeastern for the last decade. The class only met once a week, and I was eager to commence my lesson plan. But the intruder refused to leave, cutting into class time. He told me that he’s a student at the university and needed to ensure that my course, in which he was not enrolled, aligned with his anti-Israel views. After about 15 minutes of unsuccessfully negotiating with him to leave, he started pacing around the classroom, giving a diatribe against Israel while encouraging the shocked students enrolled in the course to walk out of my class to attend the anti-Israel rally across town in Cambridge.
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I was not the only Jewish faculty member whom the anti-Israel activist targeted to restrict academic freedom at my school. Significantly, neither of us was teaching about anything related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; my module that day happened to be on the topic of right-wing extremism. No, my colleague and I were targeted for being Jewish faculty.
Both of us submitted separate formal complaints to the Office of Student Conduct and Conflict Resolution (OSCCR). But OSCCR refused to appraise me about the outcome of my complaint. Later in the term, I discovered that my university clearly did not discipline the student enough because my phone blew up with alerts from friends that the activist was getting escorted out of the graduation ceremony by police for making a huge scene with fake blood to the horror of all the graduating students and their families.
When I drive to school, I often give my mother a call. And she often asks me whether there’s any more madness on campus. What she means to ask is whether there are any more disruptions from extremist students on campus. But this is a common misperception about the hierarchy of problems Jewish faculty have faced in American higher education, which precede the October 7 terrorist massacre and resultant “global intifada” on college campuses nationwide.
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Such incidents are understandably highly salient in the news. The bigger problem for me, though, was not the intifada-supporting student’s theatrics, but that the university administration did not get my back. The administration never checked in with me or my students after the class was taken hostage by an extremist; the university refused to supply any security to my classes even after being targeted; and the university failed to sufficiently address the known student extremist, leading to embarrassment when the spoiled graduation ceremony became a national news story.
This is how universities across the country have dealt with the campus intifadas against Jewish students and faculty — by doing next to nothing.
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That is until Donald Trump was re-elected as president. Ever since, there’s been a palpable sense that antisemitism and associated extremism will be punished if not from the universities, then by the government. Since his re-election, there have been no intifada-intruders in my classroom. And I know that if there are, they will be handled more seriously by the administration. And for the first time in my decade at Northeastern as a professor, my substantial service to Jewish students as the faculty advisor to Chabad and Hillel have been properly counted in the annual merit reviews for salary and promotion.
These positive changes, I believe, are due to the Trump effect.
