We are higher-education leaders in Texas who have lessons to share in this context. We served together as regents of Texas Southern University, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in Houston’s historic Third Ward. Our student-focused approach centers on economic mobility, international experience and interfaith outreach.
Our experience leads us to conclude that campus antisemitism propagates when campus leaders elevate elitist virtue-signaling over student success. TSU showed resilience to anti-Jewish hate. There were no encampments on our quad, and activists who tried to thwart our commencement exercises were ignored. We believe this is because our students are responsible to consequences. Students at HBCUs, state colleges and religious universities are not preoccupied with the elite status economy. They are focused on the credentials necessary for opportunity. Data supports our belief: Researchers, for example, found an inverse correlation between encampments and Pell grants.
Campus atmospherics are the starting point. The purpose of higher education is to form disciplined minds capable of truth-seeking, sound judgment and high-level skills. Elite universities demolished the knowledge hierarchy over time, making criticism and deconstruction the primary modes of pedagogy. Students learned to unmask, rather than to judge. The result is an intellectual climate that cultivates grievance-based thinking.
Antisemitism metastasizes where students believe the zero-sum fallacy that “in groups” succeed at the expense of “out groups.” Historically speaking, this kind of thinking is dangerous for Jews.
Moreover, this account clarifies that antisemitism is a problem of the university itself. While outside agitators played a role in campus chaos, the school became a host by degrading its own immune system. For this reason, universities cannot eradicate prejudice by issuing statements or expanding the anti-discrimination bureaucracy. They must restore serious education, a scholarly environment that teaches students to reason morally while remaining cognizant of the market.
Beyond restoring critical thinking to its proper meaning, universities must improve their return on investment by ensuring that students graduate prepared to perform essential functions that employers are willing to pay for. We recognize that some are allergic to the workforce development language of “skills” and “competencies,” and we agree that a university is much more than a pre-professional boot camp. But we do insist that the university at least remain accountable to the realities students face after graduation. In doing so, we see a win-win result of helping students prosper while keeping academic life inoculated against Jew-baiting pseudo-intellectuals, who dominate where grievance overshadows empowerment.
Israel is the antithesis of grievance culture. Israel’s survival owes nothing to moral posturing or ideological purity. A cultural bias for excellence and skills competence, a bias born of extreme peril, made the Jewish state grow and thrive. In this regard, our TSU students—and the millions of other students striving for better opportunities than those of their childhood—share something in common with Israelis.
We know from our own experience that university students, faculty and leadership of state schools, HBCUs and similarly situated institutions can benefit from being in fellowship with their Israeli counterparts for this and many other reasons.
Few countries spend as much as Israel on building global friendships; we encourage engagement with Israel’s significant investments in student-exchange programs. Students who could not otherwise study abroad might expect at least a partial scholarship for a visit to Israel. Likewise, opportunities are available for student athletes—TSU’s basketball team will scrimmage with Israel’s national team this summer—and for faculty and administrators, who might deliver guest lectures at Israeli universities or join interdisciplinary delegations.
Most especially, fellowship with a society organized around responsibility and resilience, even in the face of great challenges, inspires striving students. In Israel, students encounter a successful society shaped by rightly ordered priorities. Responsibility cannot be deferred in Israel. Tradeoffs are real. This encounter centers the questions necessary to succeed amid moral complexity, the essential goal of higher education.
Enriching exchanges happen close to home, too. TSU’s leaders made a point of observing Jewish holidays with local Jewish leaders in view of the cowardly equivocations administrators from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania made during well-publicized congressional testimony on campus antisemitism in December 2023.
Our outreach has been beautifully reciprocated, as when Houston’s Jewish community turned out in force at a TSU film showing in Houston’s Fifth Ward. The relationship is a mitzvah for us all.
We remain in the early days of the three strategies we have shared here. And we do not pretend to know what they will bear in the long term. Still, we are encouraged by the first fruits. And we know that our focus on economic mobility, international experience and interfaith engagement enriches our students’ lives, now and in the future.
