Ivory Tower Hypocrites
The Top Ten Universities Enforcing Double Standards in Free Speech
#1: University of California-Los Angeles
#2: Columbia University
#3: University of Pennsylvania
#4: Georgetown University
#5: University of Louisville
#6: Wake Forest University
#7: University of Nevada-Las Vegas
#8: University of Illinois-Chicago
#9: George Mason University
#10: University of Washington
Introduction
One of the foremost principles of higher education is the pursuit of the truth through free and open discourse, no matter where it may lead. Yet over the past several decades, few places in America have become more hostile to free speech than our universities. These institutions of higher education have often lived up to their ivory tower reputation, becoming cloistered echo chambers of leftist thought where voicing a dissenting view is cause for abrupt dismissal or being hauled before a disciplinary board and sentenced to reeducation.
The last year has brought an apparent shift in these attitudes. In the wake of rising anti-Semitism and the pro-Hamas campus rallies and occupations that were sparked by the terror group’s October 7 massacre, university administrators seem to have had a sudden change of heart. Free speech, once considered suspect, is now declared to be of paramount importance to the healthy functioning of a university, even—or perhaps especially—when the group being targeted by it is Jews.
In defending Penn’s hosting of the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, which featured multiple speakers well-known for their anti-Semitism, Former Penn President Liz Magill released a statement naming free expression as one of the university’s foremost values. “We unequivocally – and emphatically – condemn antisemitism as antithetical to our institutional values,” she wrote. “As a university, we also fiercely support the free exchange of ideas as central to our educational mission. This includes the expression of views that are controversial and even those that are incompatible with our institutional values.”
Columbia University’s former president Minouche Shafik, who resigned following her failure to rein in pro-Hamas demonstrations on campus, similarly pledged that the university administration “are committed to academic freedom and to ensuring that all members of our community have the right to speak their minds” and argued before Congress that “We believe we can confront antisemitism and provide a safe campus environment for our community while simultaneously supporting rigorous academic exploration and freedom.”
Responding to pro-Hamas protests on campus, the University of Louisville’s former President Kim Schatzel described why they must be permitted to continue, saying, “The answer is that as a public university, the University of Louisville’s restrictions on such speech—no matter how offensive the content—would constitute a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution that protects free speech…”
These sentiments might forecast a step in the right direction—if only they were consistent. But at far too many campuses, the same administrators that have defended the free speech rights of Jew-haters, Hamas supporters, or radical gender activists have blatantly failed to secure the same rights for those with opposing views.
It is time that we hold these university administrators to account for their double standards in protecting free speech on campus and withdraw federal funding from those who do not immediately rectify this duplicity.
The following report names the most egregious perpetrators of these double standards in free expression as Ivory Tower Hypocrites. These are universities whose leaders have permitted woke leftist activists, including those affiliated with the terrorist group Hamas, to run roughshod over campus rules and violate codes of conduct—not to mention moral decency—with impunity, while failing to extend even basic free speech protections to students and faculty with opposing views. The rule of the mob has no place in academia.
We call on the universities implicated in this report to take immediate action to review and standardize their policies on free expression to protect all viewpoints equally and to further institute harsh penalties for those who disrupt organized events or speakers. We further call on all alumni of these universities to withhold any further donations until they have been sufficiently convinced that these severe defects in equal protection have been remedied. And we urge President Trump and Congress to investigate these clear violations of federal law and withhold funding to those universities who fail to uphold equal standards in protecting free speech.
#1: University of California-Los Angeles
In the spring of 2024, as pro-Hamas protests roiled college campuses and illegal encampments led by keffiyeh-wearing radicals took over campus quads, the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) stood out as an example of supreme hypocrisy on how to handle controversial discourse on campus.
Radical student activists aided by outside agitators took over an enormous swath of campus, denying entry to “Zionists” (meaning virtually all Jews) or anyone who refused to parrot their glorification of Hamas and the beauty of the terrorist organization’s October 7th massacre of over 1200 innocent Israelis. Students who attempted to breach the wooden and metal barricades erected to form the so-called “Palestine Soldiarity Encampment” were explicitly turned away with either words or, when the activists deemed it necessary, physical force. Instead of ensuring equal access to all students, as is the university’s constitutional obligation, university security forces were instructed to stand by and guard the encampment.
The Amcha Initiative, a watchdog group dedicated to tracking and combatting anti-Semitism on campus, has documented some of these horrific confrontations on the public university campus and the resultant denial of freedom of speech and freedom of association. As Amcha reports:
- A Jewish counter demonstrator at the anti-Zionist encampment on campus was beaten. After her 13-year-old sister dropped her Israeli flag, the counter demonstrator bent down to pick it up and at least five kefiyah-clad protestors accosted her, first by stomping on the flag and then by knocking her to the ground, repeatedly kicking her in her head and causing her to lose consciousness and apparently suffer a concussion. When she awoke she was bleeding from her head, disoriented, and unable to recognize her family.
- According to the ADL, a Jewish individual was also harassed near the encampment by an individual who stated, “Go back to Poland.”
- A pro-Israel counter-protester was attacked by an anti-Zionist encampment protestor who attempted to rip the sign from his hand, grabbed his hat and flashed a taser.
- Also, the same day, a moving barrier of protesters was formed to block a Jewish student, who wears a Star of David necklace, from entering campus while as a security officer stood nearby. The Jewish student told protesters, “I’m a UCLA student, I deserve to go here, we pay tuition, this is our school, and they’re not letting me in. My class is over there, I want to use that entrance … will you let me go in?” The protesters simply told him that they’re “not engaging” and blocked the Jewish student every time he attempted to go through the entrance.
- Additional incidents occurred with anti-Zionist protesters affiliated with the SJP and JVP encampment blocking Zionist students from walkways and accessing the library, using wristbands to identity anti-Zionists, with many of these incidents documented on video. In one video, protestors have taken over access to an area near the school library, demanding wrist bands and approval to each student passing, with one Jewish student attempting to enter and upon being denied asking, “So you won’t let me in because I’m Jewish?” The anti-Zionist protester responses, “Ummm no… we have a couple Jewish students here… are you a Zionist?” The Jewish student responds, “Yes of course I am” to which the protester retorts, “Well yeah, we’re not gonna let Zionists in.”
Even professors were not guaranteed unfettered access to the campus. UCLA Professor Nir Hoftman, who has taught students on campus for 22 years, reported to Fox News that he was assaulted by the pro-Hamas demonstrators merely for attempting to walk across campus. “They literally assaulted me on the way over here. I was walking to give the interview to a news station and two or three thugs tried to block my approach to the open area. I ignored them and one of them stood in front of me and said, ‘you can’t walk this way.’” One of the demonstrators then tackled him from the side and pulled his earbud from his ear before fleeing.
Campus security was present, but did not take any action to protect the professor. “The security people who were there, were watching, not doing anything,” Hoftman reported, describing the state of the campus as “anarchy, it’s like the wild, wild west.”
So deep was the protestors’ entitlement that they had the gall to blame UCLA for failing to protect them when their illegal and unconstitutional encampment was attacked by a group of pro-Zionist activists on the night of April 30, 2024.
“The life-threatening assault we face tonight is nothing less than a horrifying, despicable act of terror. For over seven hours, zionist aggressors hurled gas canisters, sprayed pepper spray, and threw fireworks and bricks into our encampment,” claimed the Encampment in a press release. “Campus safety left within minutes, external security the university hired for ‘backup’ watched, filmed, and laughed on the side as the immediate danger inflicted upon us escalated. Law enforcement simply stood at the edge of the lawn and refused to budge as we screamed for their help.”
The pro-Hamas faction’s illegal siege of the campus persisted for over a week before UCLA finally sent police to dismantle it—a less than permanent solution, as various attempts to re-establish it have persisted into the next school year and UCLA has taken minimal action, if any at all, against the campus occupiers and the professors who aided them in their illegal action.
UCLA’s failure to control and discipline its population of student Hamas adherents is bad enough—a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution—which is being litigated in the courts after a group of Jewish students have filed suit in federal court. But even worse is the university’s blatant hypocrisy when it comes to protecting speech that deviates from the woke progressive narrative.
In May of 2024, shortly after the police finally disbanded the initial creation of the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” conservative author and JihadWatch.org director Robert Spencer was scheduled to speak at UCLA in an event organized by Young America’s Foundation. The title of his planned speech was “Everything You Know About Palestine is Wrong.” You can probably guess what happened next.
“UCLA repeatedly ignored requests for information, withheld paperwork approvals, prevented Plaintiffs from effectively advertising in advance of the event, and engaged in other bureaucratic delay tactics,” YAF describes in a lawsuit filed against UCLA for illegally blocking a pro-Israel speaker from campus. “When that did not work, UCLA resorted to less subtle forms of censorship.”
“At the very last minute, just before the lecture was scheduled to take place, UCLA pulled a fast one: locking the doors to the event space, and claiming that the talk needed to be moved to an out-of-the way location because of purported security concerns arising from threatened counter-protest activity.”
The lawsuit filed by Young America’s Foundation “seeks a preliminary and permanent injunction prohibiting UCLA from engaging in this kind of viewpoint discrimination or bowing to a heckler’s veto as well as providing security equally without concern for the content of speech and events being protected,” a press release from the organization states. “In addition, YAF seeks a declaratory judgment that UCLA violated the First Amendment with its actions surrounding YAF’s planned lecture with Robert Spencer. The lawsuit also seeks compensatory and nominal damages along with punitive damages and attorney fees.”
“UCLA allowed its campus to be taken over by a radical anti-Israel mob, claiming that it could not do anything because the mob had a right to free speech (never mind the violence and property destruction),” describes Mountain States Legal Foundation Senior Counsel James Kerwin. “But when YAF wanted to put on a true free speech event — a peaceful lecture presenting another perspective on the Middle East conflict, UCLA changed its tune and shut the talk down.”
UCLA’s cancellation of Robert Spencer’s speech is hardly the first time the university has failed to protect free expression due to the pro-Jihad mob. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has protested a case very similar to Robert Spencer’s. In February of 2024, as FIRE describes:
UCLA’s Nazarian Center for Israel Studies planned to host the in-person lecture, “Israel and the Middle East after the October 7 Massacre: Threats, Challenges, and Hopes,” featuring former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni. After UCLA’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter announced its plan to protest the event, the Nazarian Center moved the event to Zoom to “avoid any disruptions.” FIRE wrote the Nazarian Center on April 10, explaining UCLA has a constitutional duty to provide sufficient security to ensure invited speakers may safely speak without significant disruption and urging the Center not to capitulate to those who threaten to disrupt scheduled events in the future. After UCLA’s response argued that moving the event online was not a heckler’s veto because it allowed Livni’s lecture to reach a larger audience, FIRE wrote UCLA again on June 3, to explain that a move online in response to critics’ reactions limits how Livni and her faculty host may communicate messages—and still effectuates a heckler’s veto regardless of UCLA’s subjective view of the preferability of online events.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center has also experienced censorship from UCLA firsthand. Back in 2015 and 2016, when the Freedom Center put up posters on the UCLA campus accusing the campus organization Students for Justice in Palestine of being “#JewHaters” and supporting terrorism—statements that have been thoroughly validated since October 7th—UCLA’s top administrators denounced the Freedom Center as “Islamophobic” and “inflammatory” and threatened legal action for any future poster campaigns.
UCLA’s continued and abject failure to protect conservative and pro-Israel speakers and students on its campus while yielding completely to the pro-Hamas mob firmly earns it the top ranking on the list of Ivory Tower Hypocrites.
#2: Columbia University
More than any other university across the nation, Columbia has become a symbol for the lawless riot of Jew hatred and pro-terrorist sentiment that has overtaken our college campuses. And deservedly so.
During the spring of 2024, the Columbia campus became engulfed in chaos, as pro-Hamas students, aided by radical faculty and outside organizers, established an illegal encampment on the South East Lawn, calling it a “Gaza solidarity encampment” and a “liberated zone” and using violence and physical force to deny entry to anyone deemed a Zionist.
As the anti-Semitism watchdog organization, the Amcha Initiative, reports:
The protestors had defended their encampment by encircling it and chanting, “we don’t want no Zionists here,” called for an intifada, and physically intimidated Jewish students that were observing or recording. Professors spoke at a “faculty solidarity teach in,” where Professor Mahmood Mamdani stated, “The response to Zionist power is to criminalize anti-Zionism as antisemitism”… The Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine group praised and promoted support for the encampment online, even going so far as to illicit donations for the protestors violating university policy.
As Amcha has documented, “multiple Jewish students were assaulted” in the so-called “liberated zone” and elsewhere on campus: “Protestors off campus threw fake blood at Jewish students. According to the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Workforce, a photographer wearing a ‘bring them home necklace’ had coffee thrown at him by a protester while simply standing nearby. A Jewish student was accosted when walking home wearing a Star of David necklace, and a hostage tag when a woman began screaming at the student, calling the Jewish student a Zionist and a murderer while banging what appeared to be a pot on the barricade, and after being told by a police officer to stop, accused Jewish students of ‘killing her people’ and said ‘We are Hamas’ which was caught on video. A Jewish Columbia student reported to the Committee that many Jewish students ‘who [live] right next to the campus couldn’t sleep due to screams of Intifada until 1AM.’”
The university response to these blatant acts of anti-Semitism and disruption was abysmal. Administrators pleaded and negotiated with the pro-Hamas agitators to disperse the encampment but refrained from taking hard line disciplinary tactics or banning the organizers from campus. As a result, the illegal demonstration persisted, eventually shutting down campus life entirely, forcing the cancellation of graduation ceremonies, and creating a rabidly hostile climate for Jewish and pro-Israel students at the university.
An incomplete list of offenses committed by the pro-Hamas rioters compiled by the Amcha Initiative includes:
- A protestor holding a sign saying “Al-Qasam’s [sic] next target” who stood in front of a group of Jewish students holding Israeli flags and singing.
- A Jewish student wearing a yarmulke being shoved and screamed at by protestors, “you’ve got blood on your hands!” when he attempted to recover an Israeli flag stolen by a protestor, who then ran to a cheering crowd of anti-Israel protestors that attempted to burn the flag. (The student additionally claims a rock was thrown at his face and protestors screamed, “Kill the Zionist”).
- Protestors screaming “go back to Poland!” and “yehudim, yehudim [which translates to Jews, Jews]” at Jewish Columbia students trying to leave campus.
- Protestors circling around the main gates and entrance to campus, with one stating, “I am Hamas,” which was documented in video.
- Crowds screaming “tear down the gates” and various hateful chants in English and Arabic as individuals unaffiliated with the university climbed the University’s gates.
- A Jewish Columbia student being splashed with water by a protestor.
- Protestors chanting, “Al-Qassam you make us proud! Take another soldier out!,” “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!,” and “Hamas we love you. We support your rockets too!”
- A protestor delivering a speech on campus that exclaimed, “We are here today because on October 7 the Palestinian resistance in Gaza broke through the walls of their open air prison, shattering the illusion of the invincibility of their occupiers. [Cheers from the crowd.] By setting up this encampment in the heart of the Zionist stronghold of Columbia University, we intend to do the same.”
- A protestor standing immediately outside Columbia’s gates leading a crowd in Arabic chants glorifying terrorism and encouraging students to become terrorist “martyrs” after which he explained in English that the chant translated to “mother of the shahid, mother of the martyr, I wish my mother was in your place.”
Witnessing these acts, Columbia’s Orthodox rabbi, Elie Beuchler, emailed Jewish students on campus to say that though it “deeply pains” him, he recommended that Jewish students remain at home and not attend class on campus “until the reality in and around campus has dramatically improved.” Columbia University initially permitted just Jewish and pro-Israel students to attend classes online, but instituted remote learning for the entire campus on April 22nd.
The University also failed entirely to prevent outside agitators and known terrorism supporters, as well as individuals previously banned from campus, from participating in the pro-Hamas riots. As Amcha reports, “numerous unauthorized individuals, including ones explicitly banned from campus, have been documented at the encampment, including: Within our Lifetime organizer Nerdeen Kiswani, who was banned from campus for speaking in support of terrorism at “Resistance 101,” was recorded as being on campus and leading chants of “there is only one solution, Intifada revolution”; Shellyne Rodriguez, who was fired from faculty positions at CUNY Hunter College and the School of Visual arts after threatening a New York Post reporter with a machete, was photographed on campus at the protests; a student that had been suspended for involvement with the terrorist-associated “Resistance 101” event and who also has defied an eviction order from Columbia; and visiting professor Mohamed Abdou, who President Shafik promised was being terminated, was also photographed at the encampment.”
It was only after the pro-Hamas demonstrators seized control of Hamilton Hall, briefly taking hostage members of the janitorial staff, and causing widespread damage to university property, that the university finally called in the New York City police to expel the agitators. Millions watched on live national television as police officers in riot gear entered the building through an upper story window, arresting the remaining protestors and surveying the devastation they left behind.
Throughout this entire, highly public, ordeal, Columbia’s top administrators, led by then-president Minouche Shafik, attempted to negotiate with the pro-Hamas radicals who had overrun the campus and made Jewish students abandon it in fear of their lives and safety. Despite the imminent danger to Jewish students and the direct calls for terrorism and genocide emanating from the campus quad, the administration repeatedly adopted a policy of appeasement toward the pro-Hamas rioters and insisted that allowing free expression was a core campus value.
In a letter to the campus community written during the ongoing protests, Shafik, pledged that the administration “are committed to academic freedom and to ensuring that all members of our community have the right to speak their minds,” while noting that students must also comply with time, place, and manner rules regarding protests.
Shafik also testified before the Committee on Education and the Workforce for the U.S. House of Representatives, stating that “We believe we can confront antisemitism and provide a safe campus environment for our community while simultaneously supporting rigorous academic exploration and freedom,” adding that “This is my highest priority right now at Columbia.”
While Columbia’s administration allowed the illegal pro-Hamas demonstrations on campus to fester for months before taking action against the rioters, the university adopted a sharply different tactic towards Israeli professor Shai Davidai, a vehement critic of the administration’s failure to rein in the Jew-haters on campus.
As pro-Hamas rhetoric and protests overtook Columbia’s campus, Davidai was one of the few faculty members courageous enough to take on the demonstrators firsthand, often heading to campus with a small band of Jewish students to counter-protest in support of Israel and meeting with threats and violence as a result. He also publicly confronted Columbia administrators, calling them out on their failure to protect Jewish students and shut down the illegal pro-terror demonstrations.
Davidai was recorded on video confronting Columbia COO Cas Holloway with strong words about his abnegation of responsibility for the Jewish students under his charge. “You are indifferent and you know what? Hatred happens when people like you are indifferent. You are the chief operating officer of Columbia. Do you realize that?” the Israeli professor asked.
Another video shows Davidai addressing Columbia’s assistant director of public safety Bobby Lau: “You are such a useless administrator. But you know what, there were so many useless administrators in Nazi Germany. And you know what, after the war, they said they did everything they could.”
“To every parent who sends their kids to Columbia,” Davidai shouted in a filmed counter-protest, “I want you to know one thing. We cannot protect your child.”
“I’m not saying this as a professor, I’m speaking to you as a dad,” Davidai continued. “We cannot protect your children from pro-terrorist student organizations, because the president of Columbia University, of Harvard University, of Stanford, of Berkeley, will not speak out against pro-terror student organizations.”
Davidai’s activism on behalf of Columbia’s Jewish population and his refusal to accept the administration’s anemic response to pro-terror demonstrators and vandals, made him an easy scapegoat for the administration. In October 2024, Davidai was temporarily suspended from the university and banned from campus by the Columbia administration for allegedly harassing and threatening university faculty members. He is not teaching any classes on campus this semester and as of this writing, his ban remains in effect.
“Threats of intimidation, harassment or other threatening behavior by University employees, including faculty members, will not be tolerated,” the school said in a letter outlining Davidai’s suspension.
“It’s hypocrisy to the nth degree,” Davidai said of his suspension by the university, also characterizing it as “nothing but retaliation” for outspoken comments on the failures of the university and its leadership.
Davidai also correctly noted that the university is enforcing a blatant double standard, punishing him for his provocative but legal speech calling out administrators but allowing the pro-terror demonstrators to rampage unchecked for months without consequence.
“There are professors who either participated in or taught in the encampment,” he told the New York Post. “Not a single professor has been fired or suspended since October 7 for antisemitism and support of terrorism.”
“He’s never been suspended from anything,” Davidai notes of Columbia Professor Joseph Massad who labeled Hamas’s October 7th massacre “awesome.”
More recently, and following the withdrawal of $400 million in federal funds by President Trump due to the university’s failure to address anti-Semitism on campus, Columbia has finally begun to hold some of the illegal agitators accountable for their actions. Several of the students responsible for the occupation of Hamilton Hall have been expelled or suspended. Still, these disciplinary consequences are much too little, much too late.
Columbia’s persecution of Professor Shai Davidai for taking the administration to task while coddling and appeasing pro-Hamas demonstrators for months earns the university its spot on the list of Ivory Tower Hypocrites.
#3: University of Pennsylvania
When Former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill was grilled by Congress in the spring of 2024 over pro-Hamas demonstrations and calls for the genocide of the Jews on her campus, she insisted that protecting free speech was a top priority. Magill was blatantly lying. Recent events reveal that the University of Pennsylvania has enforced radically different standards on free expression, depending on who is doing the speaking.
Even before Hamas’s October 7th massacre made pro-Hamas rallies a daily feature of campus life across the nation, Penn demonstrated an extreme tolerance for speech promoting Jew hatred. In September of 2023, the campus played host to the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, an event sponsored by numerous university departments and centers including the Middle East Center, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, and the Wolf Humanities Center.
Featured speakers at the event included Roger Waters, of the band Pink Floyd, a notorious anti-Semite, who has a penchant for dressing in imitation Nazi garb during performances. Another highlighted speaker was former CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill, whose Jew hatred proved too much even for the legacy media. Lamont Hill was fired by CNN after he endorsed the genocidal statement “Free Palestine, from the River to the Sea” in a speech at the United Nations.
The festival’s co-chair, Susan Abulhawa, is a blatant Hamas sympathizer. Following a terrorist shooting outside a synagogue in Jerusalem, Abulhawa, rather than condemning the violence against civilians, sought to justify it. “Every Israeli, whether in a synagogue, a checkpoint, a settlement, or shopping mall is a colonizer who came from foreign lands and kicked out the native inhabitants,” she wrote. “They all serve in the racist colonial military. The whole country is one big militarized tumor.”
Given the line-up of pro-Hamas speakers and organizers, the festival unsurprisingly devolved into an open forum of Jew hatred. As the American Jewish Committee reported, “The festival’s inaugural event includes a screening of the film Farha, which includes a number of toxic antisemitic tropes, including a modern retelling of the blood libel trope that casts Jews as vicious, bloodthirsty, and cruel. The film is a distortive piece of fiction, yet it is often treated as evidence of extreme, unprovoked Israeli cruelty towards innocent Palestinians during Israel’s War of Independence.”
Individual speakers at the event also demonized the Jewish people and Israel, while justifying Hamas’s targeting of the innocent.
Hoda Fakhreddine, one of the organizers of the festival who serves as a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Penn, invoked the genocidal phrase “From the river, to the sea,” and claimed that “Palestinians are a people who have been facing the daily brutal injustices of an apartheid regime for the past 75 years.” She invoked anti-Semitic tropes, claiming that Jews control the media, and denied the fact of the Jewish people’s historic connection to the land of Israel.
Fakhreddine laughed off concerns that the presence of so many anti-Semites on campus might cause Jewish students at Penn to fear for their safety, dismissing them as “hysterical and racist accusations that our presence here poses a threat to Jewish students on campus, making them feel unsafe and fearful of wearing their kippas.”
“Again, this is an old, well-worn colonial script of the violent, dark, irrational and savage native,” Fakhreddine asserted.
In perhaps her most direct statement of Jew hatred, Fakhreddine alleged that “So many of us in this room have had to watch our elders die in refugee camps that aren’t fit for rodents, all so they [Jews] can have an extra country if they want, the violence of which is on full display on this campus every year when Zionists set up their so-called Birthright Trips propaganda tours to recruit young American Jews to become our colonizers, tormentors and Lords.”
Penn Professor Fakhreddine was far from alone in expressing her Jew hatred. Speaker Ahmad Zahid claimed not to “hate anybody for who they are” but asserted that “We hate occupation. We hate apartheid. We hate racism,” accusing Israel of all three sins.
Palestinian poet Dana Dajani vilified Jews for claiming their birthright as citizens of Israel, stating “The insanity of your alleged birthright, Israelis minting fresh citizens. They import entitlement and market it as democracy. And though your apartheid apathy acknowledges 1 million of my friends had second class citizens among you, millions still are caught in between.”
For his part, Pink Floyd bandmate Roger Waters endorsed the genocidal and Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, begging the audience to “please support the boycott, please, you know, please.”
Following Hamas’s October 7 massacre of innocent Israelis, the climate of Jew hatred on campus only grew worse—and yet the Penn administration stood idly by and watched their own faculty side with Hamas.
On October 16, 2023, a pro-Hamas front group, Penn Against the Occupation, held a “Collective Walk Out for Palestine.” During that event, a Jewish student was assaulted while putting on tefillin (boxes containing Torah verses used in prayer).
The Amcha Initiative, a watchdog group that tracks anti-Semitism on campus, describes some of the other events that took place:
“A speaker claimed there were no ‘innocent civilians,’ since ‘all settlers and all settlements are legitimate military targets and they will be targeted until the time in which one-state, a plura-national, secular and socialist state is formed on Palestine and you can either live there in peace or you can go back to Moscow, and Brooklyn and and f**king Berlin where you came from,’ and added, ‘I can never condemn the violence [against Jews].’”
“Comments by professors further condoned terrorism directed at Jews.”
“Chants that included ‘Intifada, Intifada,’ ‘Resistance is Justified, When People are Occupied,’ and ‘Free Palestine.’”
“Another speaker stated, ‘Zionism is racism’ and ‘the only solution is a one state solution from the River to the Sea.’”
“According to reports mentioned in a lawsuit against the University, Professor Biareishyk ended his Russian history class early so that students could attend the walkout. Also according to the lawsuit, a student with a yarmulke was harassed by protestors, who called out ‘how does it feel to be a part of a mass genocide?’ Similar profanities were directed at another Jewish student who was wearing a Star of David necklace. Several students yelled to Jewish students to ‘get out of here k*kes!’ Three men, whose faces were covered by keffiyehs and who were standing at the outskirts of the rally, harassed a female Jewish student with statements of, ‘you’re a dirty little Jew, you deserve to die’; ‘you don’t deserve to be on the same earth that we stand on’; and ‘the Jews deserve everything that is happening to them.’”
Penn Professor Huda Fakhreddine, one of the organizers of the Palestine Writes festival, spoke again at the Walkout for Palestine. “Israel is the epitome of antisemitism,” she claimed. “Just to assume that all Jewish people [condone] genocide is horrifying. As [Roz] said, it desecrates the memory of Holocaust victims and it humiliates every Jewish person.”
Despite abundant evidence of her Jew hatred, Huda Fakhreddine remains a professor in good standing at the University of Pennsylvania. The same cannot be said for UPenn Law Professor Amy Wax. Despite holding tenure at the university, Professor Wax was severely disciplined by the university for expressing her views on race and gender, which were judged to be controversial and potentially harmful to students. Among the comments deemed so potentially damaging were Wax’s assertion that African-American students at Penn Law “rarely” finish in the top half of their class (an assertion the university has yet to actually challenge with factual evidence) and her belief that there are two human sexes, male and female, which are binary and immutable. For these beliefs, among others, Professor Wax was suspended for one year at half pay, despite her status as a tenured professor.
According the Washington Free Beacon, which has reported widely on the case:
The embattled professor is undeniably a bomb-thrower. She has argued that the United States would be better off with fewer immigrants, that racial differences in IQ explain racial disparities in achievement, and that Asians’ “overwhelming” support for Democrats reflects their “indifference to liberty” and “lack of … individualism.” She has also invited Jared Taylor, a self-described “white advocate,” to speak to her class on multiple occasions.
But those views are not obviously more offensive than the ones Penn platformed in September 2023, when faculty members hosted a Palestinian literary festival featuring prominent anti-Semites.
Wax is now suing Penn for racial discrimination (because the university penalized her for conduct that faculty of other races committed without complaint) and breach of contract since the university promises to protect the academic freedom of its faculty, but clearly has abandoned that guarantee in Wax’s case.
In October 2023, then-Penn president Liz Magill sent a memo to trustees claiming that “Penn does not regulate the content of speech or symbolic behavior.” The case of professor Amy Wax reveals the blatant hypocrisy of this assertion.
“The [memo] makes clear that even if Jews are ‘harmed’ by the speech of radical left Palestinian supporters appearing at the [Palestine Writes] Festival, those organizing the [Palestine Writes] Festival and inviting Jew-hating Palestinian nationalists will not be punished because Penn permits and protects the expression of all viewpoints, even those that are contrary to Penn’s ‘institutional values,’” explained Wax’s lawyers in a letter to the university. “But if a strongly conservative and tenured professor invites Jared Taylor, assigns Charles Murray and Enoch Powell, and takes to social media to tell very hard-to-hear truths about group differences, she is not protected. Rather, she is sanctioned.”
Penn’s conduct in persecuting Professor Amy Wax for views dissenting with the university’s DEI orthodoxy while allowing other faculty and students to call for the genocide of the Jews reveals the university to among the worst Ivory Tower Hypocrites.
#4: Georgetown University
In the months after Hamas’s barbaric October 7 massacre of innocent Israeli Jews, Georgetown University, located in our nation’s capital, played host to many vitriolic, anti-Semitic events and demonstrations. Led by both students and faculty, these events featured unmistakable calls for the genocide of the Jews and the continuation of terrorist violence against Israel.
A mere three days after Hamas’s mass slaughter, kidnapping, rape and torture of Israeli civilians, Georgetown’s chapter of the Hamas-funded campus organization, Students for Justice in Palestine, released a statement that demonized Israel and condoned Hamas’s actions. “Peace cannot exist without justice, and justice starts with ending the occupation of Palestine…,” SJP declared. “We cannot live in peace with an apartheid, zionist regime an ethno-religious – supremacist settler-colonial political system in power… [SJP] affirms that the anticolonial struggle for justice is the only way that liberation and peace can become a tangible reality.”
Georgetown Law SJP joined the Georgetown chapter of the National Lawyers Guild in releasing a statement which lambasted GU President DeGioia for publicly condemning Hamas’s October 7 massacre. The statement justified Hamas’s atrocious acts of terrorism, stating that, “As law students, we know that resistance under occupation is a legal right and is predicated on the violence of occupation. Resistance, armed struggle, and wars of national liberation are endorsed by international humanitarian law.”
When Jewish Life and the Georgetown Israel Alliance organized an event featuring IDF soldiers on campus, SJP together with an array of pro-Hamas organization mobilized to disrupt the event and then bragged about their success at impeding pro-Israel speech on campus: “SJP + JVP + the Divest Coalition mobilized HUNDREDS of students to come together and send the university our message: we will NEVER accept genocidal war criminals on this campus… These IOF soldiers did not enjoy a SECOND of peace from the moment they stepped foot on our campus… our chants were so loud that those inside could not even hear the soldiers speak… Our demands remain the same. Ceasefire. Divest. Free Palestine.”
At a September 2024 rally held by the Hamas-affiliated campus organization Students for Justice in Palestine, demonstrators held signs openly promoting terrorism including one that read “Jews for Intifada.” The sign depicted inverted red triangles, a symbol of Hamas’ targets for elimination. A separate “walkout” for Palestine the previous April featured chants of “There is only one solution; Intifada, revolution.”
Through months and months of these pro-Hamas outpourings, the Georgetown University administration did virtually nothing to impede the calls for a Jewish genocide that resounded across the campus. “We respect the rights of members of our community to express their personal views and are committed to maintaining the values of academic freedom and serving as a forum for the free exchange of ideas, even when those ideas may be controversial and objectionable to some,” a Georgetown spokesperson told the media recently, responding to concerns that the Trump administration might seek to penalize the university for allowing anti-Semitism to continue unchecked.
This unflinching dedication to free speech is clearly a very recent development for the university which has garnered national headlines for persecuting students and faculty who dare to speak out of turn. Consider the case of law professor Ilya Shapiro, who tweeted his opposition to Biden’s pledge to select an African-American woman to serve as the next justice on the Supreme Court. Shapiro believed that Sri Srinivasan would be Biden’s “best pick” for the Court but noted that “alas [Srinivasan] doesn’t fit into latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get [a] lesser black woman.”
Instead of defending Shapiro’s academic freedom, Georgetown Law Dean William Treanor called Shapiro’s tweet “appalling” and “at odds with everything we stand for at Georgetown Law” and placed the new hire on administrative leave before he was able to teach a single class. The university initiated a four-month investigation to determine whether Shapiro had violated Georgetown’s diversity and inclusion policies, during which time the professor was entirely sidelined at his new job,
Georgetown reluctantly reinstated Shapiro after the end of the school year and acknowledged that he did not violate Georgetown’s absurdly restrictive free speech policies—not because his comments about Biden’s Supreme Court nominee constituted legitimate political discourse, but only because he was not yet an official employee of Georgetown at the time of his tweets. The university used the exoneration as an excuse to scold Shapiro for “your comments” which “had a significant negative impact on the Georgetown Law community, including current and prospective students, alumni, staff, and faculty” and “could have the effect of limiting Black women students’ access to courses taught by [you] and undermine Georgetown Law’s commitment to maintain inclusive learning and working environments.”
Nor was Shapiro’s persecution the only instance of Georgetown’s brutal repression of free expression. In March of 2021, Georgetown Law School fired one professor and placed a second on administrative leave for comments expressing “angst” that African-American students tend to earn grades near the bottom of the grading scale. Despite the likely validity of this statement of fact, Georgetown summarily fired the professor for wrongthink.
Georgetown’s students have also suffered persecution for exercising their First Amendment rights. In September 2019, the Georgetown University College Republicans held an event intended to combat climate alarmism and prove that the global situation is not so dire as many on the left have claimed. A mob of student protestors crashed the event and ignored over 40 requests from the police to leave, resulting in the evacuation of the room and the temporary suspension of the event.
Joking about the incident in a conservative group chat, student Jack Wagner suggested “Can we call ICE on [the protestors].” Another student responded in kind, jesting “nah, it’s melting … climate change bro.”
This innocent exchange became the fodder for a campus mob to demand that Wagner be punished for his private joke. The campus group, Hoyas for Immigrant Rights, put out a statement claiming that Wagner’s “words are embedded in racism and white supremacy” and “ultimately created an unsafe environment for students at Georgetown University,” and asserting that Georgetown “must hold Jack Wagner accountable for his words.” Hundreds of students, dozens of faculty members, and 20 campus organizations signed on to this statement asking the university to take disciplinary action against a student for a private and inoffensive joke.
Georgetown University refused to act against students and faculty who openly promoted terrorism against the Jews while persecuting campus conservatives for expressing their constitutionally protected speech. The university has undoubtedly earned its spot on the list of Ivory Tower Hypocrites.
#5: University of Louisville
As a publicly funded educational institution and part of the Kentucky state university system, the University of Louisville has both a constitutional and a moral obligation to uphold the principles of academic freedom and free expression. Instead, the university has perpetuated a blatant double standard, firing a professor for his off-campus remarks on the harms of radical gender ideology while insisting that pro-Hamas speech that threatens Jewish students on campus must be permitted on campus.
Professor Allan Josephson was hired by the University of Louisville in 2003 to lead its department of psychiatric and child psychology—a program that at the time was “struggling.” Following fifteen years under Josephson’s leadership, the department “now has a national reputation,” according to a lawsuit filed by on the professor’s behalf by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).
“He provided such superlative leadership that his supervisor … awarded him perfect marks in his 2014, 2015, and 2016 annual reviews,” the lawsuit describes.
This all changed after Josephson spoke out about his views on childhood gender transition—a topic that was practically unheard of when he was hired back in 2003, but that has rapidly become a huge topic of controversy in American society.
At a 2017 event held by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Josephson condemned the radical new practice of transitioning children who are confused about their gender and subjecting them to experimental treatments that can cause permanent life-altering changes such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. This path of medical intervention neglects “the developmental needs of children and relies on ideas that are just not true,” stated the professor—a view that has since been upheld by recent medical analyses such as Britain’s Cass Report.
At the Heritage Foundation forum, Josephson went on to explain that “the notion that gender identity should trump chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, and secondary sex characteristics when classifying individuals is counter to medical science.”
“Children persistently, insistently, and consistently demand many things that are not good for them,” he continued. “A parent’s role is to resist these demands when parental wisdom trumps children’s limited life experience.”
Astoundingly, Josephson’s remarks at this off-campus forum—which according to every principle of academic freedom as well as the professor’s personal constitutional right to free speech are legally protected—led to his firing by the University of Louisville in February of 2019.
“Universities are supposed to be a marketplace of ideas, but the University of Louisville is turning itself into an assembly line of one thought,” declared Travis Barham, an attorney for the Alliance Defending Freedom. “Dr. Josephson has had a long and distinguished career at the University of Louisville, leading and rebuilding its child psychiatry program. Public universities have no business demoting or firing professors simply because they hold a different view than their colleagues or the administration, but that’s exactly what’s happened here.”
One of Josephson’s colleagues claimed falsely that the professor “has recently given speeches… in which he refutes the existence of transgender identity.” As the lawsuit filed by the ADF explains, Josephson “never refuted the existence of gender dysphoria; he simply advocated a different method for treating individuals experiencing it”—A method that has since been validated by a great deal of medical science that the radical gender cult prefers to ignore.
Josephson’s case has now been ongoing for several years. The university attempted to get the case dismissed, arguing that it was legal of them to fire Josephson for his remarks at an outside event because they related to his official duties as a professor. In September of 2024, a federal court sided with Josephson and the long tradition of protecting free expression in America, noting that “Even if Josephson’s participation in the Heritage Foundation panel were part of his official duties, that would not alter our conclusion that he engaged in protected speech at that event.” The case will now continue in district court.
The University of Louisville’s persecution of Josephson for his protected—and medically evidenced—speech is made particularly egregious by its recent insistence that pro-Hamas demonstrators on campus must be allowed to air their calls for Jewish genocide.
Mere days after Hamas’s barbaric October 7 massacre of over 1200 innocent Israeli Jews, the campus chapter of SJP at the University of Louisville planned a “National Day of Resistance.” Chants at the event included “From Palestine to Mexico, all these walls have got to go” and “not another nickel, not another dime, no more money for Israel’s crimes.”
Even more egregiously, the Louisville SJP chapter promoted their demonstration with an image of a paraglider flying into a crowd. Paragliders were notoriously used by Hamas to invade Israel and perpetrate the atrocities of October 7th and are widely considered to be a symbol of support for the slaughter and bloodshed committed by Hamas on that day.
Louisville SJP offered only the flimsiest of justifications for this promotion of terror: “We have been using it as a symbol to our return to our land,” a protester told a local media outlet. “We are not sympathizing at all with the actions that these people and these paragliders may be doing.”
Responding to anti-Semitic protests on campus, Louisville administrators explained why they could not censor such cries for Jewish genocide or take action against the perpetrators.
“Many in our community—both on and off campus—have strongly questioned the university allowing such a gathering on campus and have expressed disbelief and anger that the university has not censured this organization,” described the President of the University in a statement following the Day of Resistance protest. “The answer is that as a public university, the University of Louisville’s restrictions on such speech—no matter how offensive the content—would constitute a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution that protects free speech…”
Where were these same principles when Professor Josephson, with his lifetime of expertise, dared to question the doctrines of radical gender ideology and child gender transition? For its blatant double standards in protecting anti-Semitic hate speech while firing a professor for questioning pediatric gender “treatments,” the University of Louisville belongs on the list of Ivory Tower Hypocrites.
#6: Wake Forest University:
Wake Forest University, located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, waxes eloquently about the importance of freedom of expression in its policies and promotional materials. But the prestigious university is guilty of a double standard when it comes to deciding who truly deserves free speech on campus.
In late April of 2024, a student group calling itself Free Palestine established an illegal 3-day encampment on Hearn Plaza on campus. Demonstrators chalked genocidal and Jew-hating messages on the sidewalk reading “From the river to the sea” (a call to destroy the totality of Israel as a Jewish homeland) and “F*** Israel.” The Amcha Institute, an anti-Semitism watchdog group, reports that “several university faculty and staff members volunteered to watch over the protesters in shifts” and that “one faculty member tried to prevent a student from pouring water out on the antisemitic chalk messages, while another confronted students for taking videos of the huddled group.” When “One student said that they were bothered by the protesters’ presence on their campus…a faculty member replied that the student could go back to their room.”
Instead of immediately shutting down this illegal pro-Hamas rally, Wake Forest administrators instead negotiated with the agitators. “Throughout the evening, our shared goal was to keep everyone safe and avoid disruption of our academic mission and planned campus activities. It was a priority to seek a peaceful outcome. Administrators and the organizers of the demonstration remained in dialogue throughout the evening, night and early morning, and reached an agreement shortly after 9 a.m. that led to students agreeing to take down the tents in the encampment,” explained a statement from administrators that was emailed to the full university community.
“We respect and uphold the rights of our community to peacefully assemble, and are committed to protecting free expression while ensuring the safety of all on campus,” the statement added.
Yet when Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldier Sam Fried was invited to speak on campus by the Office of Jewish Life in February of 2025, he met with quite a different reception. Fried is an American from Queens, NY, who joined the IDF in 2020. Following his service there, he enrolled in college, but felt called to rejoin the IDF following Hamas’s barbaric October 7 massacre of innocent Israelis. “I felt it was my obligation to be one of the fighting Jews in history,” he said.
Upon returning to America, Fried was horrified by the pro-Hamas climate he witnessed on campuses and in major American cities, and started speaking out about his experiences.
“It’s very simple,” Fried said. “We are speaking the truth. We are on the right side of history […] the most common misconception about the IDF is that we want war. We do not. We are a defense force. We want peace.”
Instead of welcoming Fried’s unique perspective on the conflict, university faculty sought to bar him from campus. Three professors—Dean Franco (English), Barry Trachtenberg (history) and Mir Yarfitz (history)—published an op-ed in the campus paper claiming that that allowing Fried’s speech to go forward would “misrepresent the diversity of Jewish perspectives on [the Israel-Hamas] conflict.”
“The invitation of Mr. Fried […] represents more than just a speaking engagement –– it signifies an institutional choice to amplify voices directly connected to military actions that have drawn international condemnation,” the oped claimed.
In an unintentionally ironic statement, the three professors argued that their attempt to cancel Fried’s speech “stems not from a desire to limit discourse, but rather from our commitment to meaningful academic dialogue.”
Despite a total lack of concern for the Jewish students who may have felt threatened by the pro-Hamas illegal encampment the previous year, the professors claimed to be “especially concerned about how a Jewish Life-sponsored event will affect our students and colleagues who remain traumatized by the war in Gaza.”
The University responded to these sentiments by caving immediately and rescinding funding for Fried’s speech, resulting in its cancellation.
Wake Forest University Chaplain Chris Donald expressed his agreement with the three professors who objected to Fried’s speech, claiming that the event “would not meet th[e] objectives” of “meaningful dialogue on the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” an absurd standard for any one event to aspire to.
In reporting on this story, campus media were quick to point out that the university also cancelled a planned speech by San Francisco State University Professor Rabab Abdulhadi on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s brutal October 7th massacre, but to compare the two cancelled events is equating apples and oranges.
Abdulhadi is a notorious anti-Semite, who has explicitly celebrated the October 7 massacre of over 1200 innocent Israelis, the rape of women, and the taking of hostages including children and babies, as a victory for the Palestinian cause. On the day of that massacre, Abdulhadi tweeted “It’s worth remembering how vicious colonists act when the colonized dare #breakTheirChains from #Palestine, #Algeria #Vietnam … to #TurtleIsland. No innocent bystanders here. Demand Immediate accountability for #IsraeliCrimes. #BDS.” In the professor’s eyes, the children who were burned to death while their parents watched and women who were raped at a music festival were not “innocent bystanders” but “colonizers” deserving of their fate.
Abdulhadi has also sought to build relationships with anti-Israel terrorists. While attending a university-sponsored trip to Israel in 2014, she met with anti-Israel terrorists Leila Khaled and Sheikh Raed Salah. Abdulhadi has praised Khaled, a notorious airplane hijacker, as “an icon in liberation movements and…an icon for women’s liberation.”
In September 2020, Abdulhadi held an event featuring Khaled as an invited speaker. Abdulhadi planned to stream the event on Zoom, but the platform canceled its coverage citing Khaled’s terrorist record.
Furthermore, in cancelling Abdulhadi’s speech, university administrators cited, not the professor’s abhorrent views, but rather security concerns.
“Inviting a scholar to give a lecture titled ‘One Year since al-Aqsa Flood: How do We Review a Year of Genocide and Resistance?’ on the first anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel led to a series of cascading events that eroded the University’s confidence in ensuring security in the rapidly-evolving environment surrounding the public event date,” Wake Forest administrators explained in a statement.
Despite the university’s official cancellation of Abdulhadi’s speech, the event organizers, who included Professor Tratchenberg and WFU Free Palestine, proceeded with the speech at a church off-campus.
To compare Abdulhadi, a Jew-hater of the first degree, who planned to celebrate Hamas on the anniversary of October 7, with IDF solder Sam Fried who selflessly risked his own life to defend the Jewish homeland, is the height of hypocrisy. Wake Forest deserves its place on the list of Ivory Tower Hypocrites.
#7: University of Nevada-Las Vegas
The University of Nevada-Las Vegas claims to champion free expression. In a prominent section of the official university website, the university pledges that “As a public university, UNLV is committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression. This includes constitutionally protected rights of free speech and assembly, regardless of content.”
UNLV proceeds to explain why upholding free speech is crucial to its mission as an educational institution: “The First Amendment and the university are founded on the philosophy that everyone benefits in an environment where ideas can be expressed and responded to rather than being subject to a rigid, imposed belief system where those who deviate from it are punished,” states the university website. “Freedom of speech serves as the very basis of and foundation for academic inquiry.”
Despite these strong assertions about the importance of protecting free expression, recent events on campus suggest that UNLV has failed to live up to its principles.
In February of 2024, Dr. Asaf Peer, a professor of physics at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, was invited to UNLV to give a lecture on black holes to contribute to a public physics symposium. Dr. Peer’s speech had absolutely nothing to do with Israel’s ongoing defensive war against Hamas, but that didn’t matter to radical agitators on campus, who succeeded in shutting down Peer’s speech while campus police capitulated to the pro-Hamas rioters.
As reported in the Jerusalem Post, Peer was only about 15 minutes into his physics lecture when a barrage of angry protestors burst into the auditorium armed with banners and flags accusing the Israeli professor of genocide.
“Hey Asaf Peer! Because of 1948’s Nakba in Palestine you were able to obtain your PH.D in illegally occupied Ramat Gan is that why you support genocide?” read one sign. “Didn’t higher education teach us to be ethical? Why is administration supporting speakers who openly support genocide?” questioned another.
Showing admirable restraint, Peer invited the protestors to remain in the lecture hall while he continued speaking about black holes and promised to discuss “unrelated issues” with them afterwards. Instead of accepting this generous offer, the protestors escalated their disruption, screeching insults at the professor.
An edited video of the incident captured the protestors’ jeers at the professor. “You should all be ashamed of yourselves!” yelled a female protestor, speaking to the audience at large. When an audience member objected that he could not hear the professor’s physics lecture over their disruption, she responded, “I don’t care about his lecture, I care about the dying children [of Gaza].”
The protestor goes on to accuse the crowd: “If you care so much you wouldn’t be amplifying Zionist voices and coming to these presentations. You’d be amplifying Palestinian voices.”
“And why is it so hard for you to say the words ‘Free Palestine,” the demonstrator continues. “There’s nothing complicated. It’s not a conflict. It’s not a war. It’s a f—king genocide!” The protestors’ tirade continues in this vein for several minutes, with numerous references to “starving children” in Gaza and the use of “white phosphorus” along with claims that “It’s not about Hamas, it’s about human beings.”
Organizers of the event called on the campus police for assistance, but instead of expelling the rioters from the event, the police capitulated entirely to the heckler’s veto. Campus police told the organizers that they could not remove the protestors and instead shut down the event, escorting Peer off campus, allegedly for his own safety.
In an email to the Nevada Current, Peer described his interactions with the UNLV police that night and their failure to expel the demonstrators.
Campus police first asked the professor if his lecture was political in nature. He responded that it was a scientific lecture.
“[Campus police] then went to the corridor to consult with the organizer, and after a few minutes they returned and announced that they decide to end the event, and to escort me outside of the campus, in order to ensure my safety,” Peer explained. “When I asked why they decided to do so, they answered that (1) since the event is announced as a public event, everyone has the right to be present in the room, and they have no right to ask anyone, including the protesters, out of the room. (2) Due to freedom of speech, they cannot enforce the protesters to be quiet.”
“What about my freedom of speech?” Peer questioned, noting in his email that the protesters were successful in shutting down his lecture.
The absurd claim by the UNLV police that since Peer’s speech was a public event, protestors could not be expelled, is directly at odds with UNLV’s Policy on Speech and Advocacy in Public Areas. This policy states that “[Free speech] activities must not, however, unreasonably interfere with the right of the University to conduct its affairs in an orderly manner and to maintain its property, nor may they interfere with the University’s obligation to protect rights of all to teach, study, and fully exchange ideas,” adding that “Physical force, the threat of force, or other coercive actions used to subject anyone to a speech of any kind is expressly forbidden.”
“I did not feel unsafe, and I was surprised that the police decided to end the event, instead of removing the protestors from the room,” Peer told the Jerusalem Post.
The protestors’ motives for disrupting Peer’s speech were unquestionably anti-Semitic. The Israeli professor was on campus to speak about physics, not the Israeli-Hamas War in Gaza. It was Peer’s identity, as an Israeli Jew, that led to the cancellation of his speech, not anything he was communicating.
“We are very concerned about this incident. In the face of it, there appear to be serious questions about campus security, academic freedom and the enforcement of existing University policies on free speech,” UNLV’s Jewish Faculty and Student Group said in a statement. “We have made formal inquiries to senior University leaders, and we are awaiting clarification of their understanding and of their intentions to address this serious matter.”
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) along with other Jewish organizations and community members, also contacted the university to express concern and outrage that Peer’s speech was cancelled due to an illegal protest. In response, UNLV President Keith Whitfield released a statement saying that he was “reviewing the decisions and actions associated with the event to help determine how we can better handle such situations in the future.”
UNLV’s blatant double standard in allowing an illegal, anti-Semitic protest to disrupt a planned science symposium—solely because the speaker was an Israeli Jew—is an astounding breach of that university’s duty to protect free expression. Its failure to enforce any consequences against the intruders, adds to its failure. UNLV is highly deserving of its place on the list of Ivory Tower Hypocrites.
#8: University of Illinois-Chicago
During the weeks and months following Hamas’s horrific October 7th massacre of innocent Israeli Jews, the University of Illinois-Chicago, like many campuses across America, played host to pro-Hamas protests and riots that created a hostile climate for Jewish students on campus.
In March of 2024, campus demonstrators deliberately targeted the university’s Jewish population by holding a rally in front of the campus Chabad house and chanting genocidal slogans including “There is only one solution; Intifada, revolution” and “We don’t want no two states; we want all of [19]48.”
At another rally held the following month, pro-Hamas activists chanted “Resistance is justified”—an endorsement of terrorism—and held signs with the genocidal message “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a call for the elimination of Israel and the slaughter of its Jewish population.
A third demonstration featured blatantly anti-Semitic signs accusing the Jews of blood libel and invoking one of their most sacred symbols to do it. “There is blood on your hands” read signs at the event with a Star of David replacing the “A” in “hands.”
Faculty and staff at UIC also promoted Jew hatred. Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) and the Arab American Cultural Center at UIC hosted an event titled “UIC Art and Love Fest for Palestine.” The event invitation demanded that Israel institute a ceasefire without acknowledging that Hamas and Palestine were the instigators of the conflict and continued to hold innocent Israeli Jews hostage in barbaric conditions. “Drop by to create art to show our love for Palestine,” urged the invitation, adding that “We stand for ceasefire and an end to the Palestinian genocide.”
Throughout this months-long outpouring of Jew hatred, UIC administrators were deafeningly silent. Curiously though, the university very recently revised its policy on open expression, which dates from October 3, 2024.
“The University of Illinois Chicago, in its role as an academic institution, is committed to an environment in which a variety of ideas can be reasonably proposed and critically examined,” states the policy. “We encourage the free exchange of ideas and the expression of dissent within the university community, while remaining committed to creating and nurturing an environment that balances our respect for individual freedom with our beliefs in responsibility towards community.”
The new policy also highlights the importance of “contentious” speech, declaring that “Individuals are encouraged to engage in dialogue, debate, and deliberation; and to hear diverse points of view – including controversial and, at times, contentious speech – all of which is critical to the development of active and analytical thinking skills.”
While these statements in support of free expression are laudable, UIC has not historically stood by them. Consider the case of UIC law professor Jason Kilborn, who found himself in hot water with the university for including redacted references to racist and sexist slurs in a 2020 law exam.
The exam question asked students to consider a hypothetical example in which an employee was called “a ‘n____’ and ‘b____’ (profane expressions for African Americans and women)” as evidence of discrimination in a lawsuit. Kilborn notably did NOT actually spell out the slurs—which would have also been within his rights—but instead used the first letter and dashes as quoted above. But even this minimal reference to the existence of these slurs was enough to set off the campus speech police.
The Black Law Students Association put out a statement on social media claiming that Kilborn’s reference to these redacted slurs “shocked students and created a huge distraction from taking the exam.” The Association also created a petition demanding that Kilborn be removed as chair of the academic affairs committee and from his other committee appointments.
Kilborn offered to send a letter of apology to his students, but that failed to satisfy the UIC administration. Yielding to the mob, UIC suspended Kilborn, and required him to undergo diversity trainings in order to return to the classroom. In an ironic twist, the readings that Kilborn was assigned to complete for this diversity training used a censored form of the same ethnic slur which had prompted his suspension in the first place.
“They assign me to do this online sort of diversity course… But they also, of course, wanted to make it more burdensome and painful for me, and so they assign me a series of these supplemental readings,” Kilborn told CampusReform.org. “[UIC has] subjected me to a year-long relentless campaign of torment because I wrote “N” space on my exam, and now, the very first reading that you give me says “N (space) in it,” he said.
Kilborn has filed a lawsuit against UIC alleging violations of his academic freedom, UIC policy, and several constitutional amendments.
Nor is this the only case in which UIC administrators have persecuted individuals for free expression which contradicts the woke leftist narrative of the oppressed and their oppressors. Members of the conservative student group, TPUSA, were threatened with arrest when they set up a table to distribute leaflets on campus without first reserving a space.
Video of the incident shows that the TPUSA students were approached by Ruby Lepe, assistant director of building management, who ordered them to leave.
“You have to make a reservation,” Lepe declared. “All this space here, this space inside the building, and the grassy areas, are reserved for meetings and conferences.”
When a TPUSA member objected that, “You shouldn’t have to reserve a space on a public property,” Lepe responded, “This isn’t public property, it’s university property,” ignoring the fact that as a public university, UIC is bound by the First Amendment.
UIC’s blatant failure to protect the free speech of the TP USA members and Professor Kilborn while giving pro-Hamas fanatics free reign to terrorize Jewish student on campus, demonstrates why it belongs on the list of Ivory Tower Hypocrites.
#9: George Mason University
When George Mason University played host to egregious pro-Hamas protests, university administrators defended the demonstrators on free speech grounds. But when two female law students at the university expressed their concerns about gender-confused biological men using the women’s restrooms on campus, the university quickly enacted legal measures to silence them and prevent any further discussion of the issue.
GMU has a lengthy resume of anti-Semitic and pro-terror activism. Just days after the Hamas massacre that killed 1200 and resulted in the rape, mutilation and kidnapping of hundreds more, SJP held an “Emergency Palestine Protest – Support the Resistance.” During this event, SJP’s chants glorified the Hamas terrorists, some of whom gained entry into Israel via hang gliders: “They’ve got tanks we’ve got hang gliders, glory to the resistance fighters;” “glory to the resistance fighters;” “settler, settler go back home, Palestine is not your home.” An advertisement for the rally stated: “SJP Mason calls on the GMU community to support the struggle of our people against colonialism and the zionist occupation. It is our duty to echo the calls for liberation of our homeland and our people, from the river to the sea. Show up and show out for Palestine, and let GMU know that we will rise against the occupation!”
A group calling itself GMU Intifada released a statement on their now-deleted Instagram titled “The student intifada lives on.” The statement condoned terrorism, and urged students to “take action” on behalf of Palestine: “We call upon you to rapidly escalate your resistance efforts in order to honor the steadfast people of Gaza and Palestine. Every drop of Palestinian blood spilled fuels the flame of our resistance against a university profiteering off the genocide of our people… Student Intifada will not halt until all ties with weapons manufactures and institutions aiding in the genocide of Palestinians are ceased, and the complete and total liberation of Palestine is realized. Resistance until victory, GMU Intifada.”
As the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has documented, an anti-Israel sit-in at the university featured a banner reading: “Divest from death” which depicted a bloody hand bearing the Israeli flag and piles of money, a blatant reference to anti-Semitic tropes. A sticker found on campus, from the pro-Hamas outlet Within Our Lifetime, read urged students to “Resist colonial power by any means necessary”—an unabashed incitement to terrorism.
Throughout months of anti-Semitic provocations, the university administration was mostly silent, releasing only a handful of statements decrying “acts of violence and hostility toward members of the Jewish and Muslim communities” but also instituting a Patriot Plan for Community Safety and Well-Being which prioritized freedom of speech. “While the First Amendment allows for and protects hate speech, it doesn’t mean that we encourage it,” states the Patriot Plan. “We are at our best when we choose speech that makes our point without hateful rhetoric and language and we ask everyone in our community to engage vigorously but do so in a manner that is respectable to others.”
The attitude of extreme tolerance that George Mason adopted towards pro-Hamas protests and events is at odds with its conduct in a very different matter. When two female law students expressed concern about the possibility of trans-identified male students using the restrooms reserved for women, they met with immediate censure and repercussions.
A lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court on behalf of the two women by the Alliance Defending Freedom describes how the two women, Selene Cerankosky and Maria Arcara, were issued a no contact order for a fellow student by GMU’s Office of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion solely due to gender critical comments they expressed in an online group chat for law students. Ironically, the women never had any in-person contact at all with the student who filed the complaint against them—their only interactions took place in an online forum where they expressed their concerns about biological men entering women’s restrooms. According to the ADF’s lawsuit, George Mason University “enforced its anti-harassment policies to punish students based on the content and viewpoint of their protected speech.”
The legal filing concisely lays out the sequence of events that led to the women’s censorship:
On September 27, 2024, a classmate solicited their opinions in their class-wide “Scalia Law ‘25” GroupMe chat regarding his proposal for the student government to have GMU put tampons in the men’s restroom. Ms. Cerankosky voiced her concern that if GMU adopted a policy “allow[ing] biological females into male restrooms to access period products as ‘trans men,’” then that would mean “female bathrooms will welcome male occupants.” She asked her classmate to “recognize the concerns of biological female students” and how they would feel “considerably uncomfortable if there are males using private women’s spaces on campus.” She noted that “[w]omen have a right to feel safe in spaces where they disrobe.” Ms. Arcara only posted twice during this conversation to “agree with [Ms. Cerankosky]” and to highlight her concerns for her own privacy and safety “if a biological man is in the [bath]room with [her] at a vulnerable time.”
Their classmate, who had claimed to be their representative to the student government and initially promised to “advocate for all” students and viewpoints, responded by mocking their concerns and labeling their views as bigoted for questioning others’ gender identity…
Unbeknownst to the two women, this same classmate, named in the lawsuit only as “Mr. Doe,” filed a complaint with GMU’s DEI office, claiming that they had harassed him by voicing their fears of men entering women’s intimate spaces.
In fact, it was “Mr. Doe” who was potentially guilty of harassment. The complaint describes how he derided the women for their views and labeled them as bigoted:
“Mr. Doe […] responded to Ms. Cerankosky and Ms. Arcara by labeling their concerns as bigoted, despite soliciting their opinions and initially promising to ‘advocate for all’ students,” the complaint reads. “He stated that their views of ‘one’s gender’ were just “a perception,’ and that it wasn’t any of their ‘business what gender someone identifies with, as, or if they identify with any at all.’
“He further mocked their concerns and beliefs by asking if a male ‘need[ed] to have a shaved head, have or not have certain anatomy, not wear makeup, dress a certain way, or fit a systemic stereotype of a ‘male.’”
Following Mr. Doe’s complaint to GMU’s office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the office issued both women a no-contact order for Mr. Doe, who had previously claimed to be their representative in student government.
The legal filing states:
Two weeks later, on October 11, both Ms. Cerankosky and Ms. Arcara received no-contact orders from GMU’s Office of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (“DEI Office”), prohibiting them from having any contact with their classmate…
GMU issued these no-contact orders under their Title IX Sexual Harassment Policy. But GMU has applied this Policy to the students because of their protected speech, not any conduct. Indeed, neither Ms. Cerankosky nor Ms. Arcara have ever spoken to their classmate in person or interacted with him outside of the “Scalia Law ‘25” GroupMe chat.
To compound the infringement of the women’s legal rights, the complaint notes, “They did not receive notice that anyone had complained about them and were not given an opportunity to review the allegations against them or defend themselves.”
“Instead of allowing the students to disagree civilly and respectfully with one another and to discuss these important issues, GMU chose instead to censor the Plaintiffs,” concludes the legal complaint.
It was only after being sued by the ADF for violating the two women’s First and Fourteenth Amendment rights that George Mason University backtracked and agreed to lift the “no contact” order they had imposed.
George Mason University failed to adequately control and discipline its pro-Hamas radicals while misusing its sexual harassment policy to infringe on the legitimate concerns and speech of its female students about gender radicalism. It has earned its place on the list of Ivory Tower Hypocrites.
#10: University of Washington
The University of Washington, like many institutions of higher education, makes explicit promises about guaranteeing freedom of expression. “As a public university, we are firmly committed to supporting and legally bound to permit speech that falls within the broad definition of protected expression,” the university states on its website. “We believe that upholding the right to free speech is not only consistent with our commitment to remaining a diverse, welcoming and inclusive community, but is, indeed, a necessary condition for cultivating and welcoming the kind of robust debate and thriving public discourse that is essential to every institution of higher learning.”
Sadly, as is the case with many prominent universities, the University of Washington has fallen far short.
In January 2025, UW was set to host Olivia Krolczyk, a women’s rights advocate and ambassador for the Riley Gaines Center who speaks out on the issue of how “transgender women” (aka men) are endangering women’s sports and intimate spaces. As a student at the University of Cincinnati, Krolczyk was given a failing grade by her gender studies professor for using the term “biological women” in a paper, so she has also been a victim of the gender mafia.
As a young woman with an important perspective on this very timely issue, Turning Point USA and the Leadership Institute brought Krolczyk to campus to give a speech. The title of her planned address was “Protect Women from Men: The Threat of the Trans Agenda.” The speech was scheduled to start at 6pm at Thomson Hall on campus, but right from the start, a crowd of angry protestors from the radical Marxist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) gathered outside to protest. The demonstrators quickly swelled into a crowd of approximately 200 individuals.
Krolczyk attempted to go forward with her address, but only a few minutes into her planned remarks, one of the protestors illegally pulled the fire alarm, forcing the evacuation of the building.
After the fire department confirmed that there was in fact no fire, Krolczyk attempted to continue with her speech, but was interrupted constantly by the pro-trans protestors banging on the windows of the hall, flashing lights, using noisemakers, and even shattering a window. Ultimately the UW police decided to shut down the event in the interests of safety and deemed it necessary to escort attendees out in groups of two and three to protect them from the demonstrators.
Perhaps predictably, the University of Washington attempted to blame Krolczyk and Turning Point USA for their embarrassing failure to protect free speech on campus.
While acknowledging that the violent demonstrators forced the cancellation of the event, UW claimed in a statement that “it is clear that presenters and disruptors are, in some cases, seeking to antagonize one another in ways that provide dramatic content for their social media feeds” and noted that Krolczyk had told the student newspaper that she was “excited” the event was shut down.
What Krolczyk actually said to the campus paper is a bit different. “I’m almost excited [about being shut down], I know that sounds weird, but I’m excited because that means we’re doing something right… We’re speaking the truth and they can’t handle it …”
“University of Washington is trying to blame me and @TPUSA for the violent protests that occurred at my event last night,” Krolczyk responded to the university’s statement. “I was adamant about continuing the event; however, in a decision with the PD we decided the protests were too violent and it was unsafe to continue the night.”
“I am out here advocating for free speech, the erasure of DEI, more single sex spaces for women, for the equality for women to participate in sports without men being in there,” she added. “Essentially, we got shut down, they will not silence us, [and] we will be sure to come back.”
Despite promising that the perpetrators who forced the shutdown of Krolczyk’s speech will “face legal and disciplinary action if they are identified,” no forthcoming news reports from the university note that any disciplinary action was taken.
UW also has an abysmal history of protecting the free speech rights of Jewish and pro-Israel individuals on campus.
In September 2024, anti-Israel activists attended a UW Board of Regents meeting with the particular aim of preventing Jewish speakers from being heard. As the Amcha Institute, an anti-Semitism watchdog group reports, “Jewish individuals who spoke at a UW Board of Regents meeting were interrupted by protesters who called for BDS and chanted, ‘Shame,’ ‘we are shutting this meeting down, we are not leaving until divestment,’ ‘disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest,’ and ‘we will honor all our martyrs.’”
A statement released by the Board of Regents clarified that the interruptions were specifically aimed at Jewish speakers. “Speakers addressing labor issues and those calling for divestment from Israel had spoken without interruption, but when Jewish speakers opposed to divestment and concerned about antisemitism on campus began their comments, protestors repeatedly interrupted and shouted them down. Despite repeated warnings to stop and clear the room, protesters continued their chants to shut down the meeting.” Despite condemning this behavior, UW again made no promise of disciplinary action against the disruptors.
In May of 2024, the Amcha Institute reports, “A Jewish student wearing a yarmulke at the University of Washington was threatened by a group of individuals dressed in black and carrying sticks and shields near an encampment. When the student sought help from the administration, officials advised the student to go around the encampment for their safety, rather than ensuring their right to safely access the campus.”
The University of Washington has given the radical gender mafia and pro-Hamas left free reign on campus, while allowing these violent groups to curtail the free speech rights of women and Jews. The university amply deserves its place on the list of Ivory Tower Hypocrites.