Columbia University, Georgetown University and Northwestern University may see “mixed results” when it comes to fighting Jew-hatred from their new presidents, each of whom began their terms on Tuesday, experts told JNS.
Jennifer Mnookin, a former University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor who is Jewish, took the helm at Columbia. Northwestern’s new head, Mung Chiang, previously led Purdue University, and Eduardo Peñalver, Georgetown’s new president, was the head of Seattle University.
Columbia and Northwestern reached $221 million and $75 million settlements, respectively, with the Trump administration over Jew-hatred probes, and Georgetown faced scrutiny about a reported contract with Qatar. Robert Groves, the Washington school’s then-interim president, testified to Congress in July 2025 about Georgetown’s response to antisemitism.
“We may see mixed results,” Brandy Shufutinsky, director of the education and national security program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told JNS. She added that she’s “not particularly optimistic” that the new presidents will address Jew-hatred appropriately.
“Unless we eliminate the root cause of campus antisemitism, a change in leadership will act as a band-aid,” Shufutinsky said.
Gerard Filitti, senior counsel at the Lawfare Project, told JNS that the three new presidents have in common that they “treat Jewish students’ civil rights as one interest to be balanced against campus peace, not as a non-negotiable.”
The schools need leaders , who recognize that Jewish students must be treated fairly and respectfully and who enforces their civil rights, rather than a “listener or a consensus-builder.” They also need presidents, who enforce school rules about trespassing harassment and disruption “without a deal rewarding the violators.”
“Until a president governs from that premise, optimism is unearned and unwarranted,” he said.
Columbia
Mnookin has a “mixed record” on addressing Jew-hatred at her prior school in Madison, Wis., according to Shufutinsky.
“She reached a deal with anti-Israel protestors, agreeing to discussions on discriminatory BDS policies,” she said. “A statement issued by the university administration expressed its appreciation for the encampment, framing it as a First Amendment protest and ignoring its blatant and arguably illegal discriminatory nature.”
The public school stated in May 2024 that the encampment was “motivated by understandably passionate feelings about the devastation in Gaza and was a source of community for many participants.”
Mark Goldfeder, director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, told JNS that the new Columbia head “sent police to clear the Wisconsin encampment, then turned around and negotiated with Students for Justice in Palestine when they set up a second one.”
Mnookin has a worrying pattern of “real words about antisemitism, wrapped in packaging designed to offend no one, followed by rewards for the people who broke the rules,” Goldfeder said.
Shortly after Oct. 7, Mnookin issued a statement at the school on “the tragic events in Israel and the Palestinian Territories,” he told JNS. “‘Tragic events’ like a pogrom is a weather system.”
“Before the first paragraph is over, murdered Israelis have already become future deaths of Israelis and Palestinians alike, and antisemitism has picked up its mandatory companion, Islamophobia,” Goldfeder said. “Then she cautions that Middle East politics involve ‘many deeply held perspectives.’”
There shouldn’t be different perspectives on slaughtering people in their homes, according to Goldfeder.
“Try the substitution test,” he told JNS. “A chancellor, who responded to a mass murder of black churchgoers with a note about tragic events and deeply held perspectives, wouldn’t survive the afternoon.”
Goldfeder is more concerned about Mnookin’s May 2024 statement about the encampment agreement, in which she “described an encampment she admitted was unlawful as understandably motivated and a source of community.”
“The deal itself? SJP promised to follow rules that already bound every student on campus and in exchange, they got face time with university decision makers to push divestment,” Goldfeder told JNS.
Filitti, of Lawfare Project, told JNS that Mnookin’s deal with the encampment protesters sent “the message that occupation is a negotiating tactic rather than a punishable act.”
“Columbia does not need a president who confuses deescalation with equality,” he said.
Georgetown
Shufutinsky, of FDD, thinks that under Peñalver, “we will see similar results that we witnessed under the previous university president,” unless Peñalver cracks down on “foreign funding of antisemitic university departments.”
Filitti told JNS that Peñalver is a “step backwards for Georgetown.”
“Where his predecessor rejected a student divestment resolution, Peñalver said, at Seattle University, that the matter warranted ‘further conversations,’” he said. “What that signals is that openness to divestment is openness to discrimination, which is what BDS really is.”
According to Goldfeder, “when students demanded divestment and a total break with Boeing” at Seattle University during Peñalver’s tenure, he “told them he personally opposed cutting Boeing ties, then offered to walk them into the boardroom to argue for it anyway.”
“He agreed to convene a working group to revisit the conduct code governing protests at the request of the protesters,” Goldfeder said.
Peñalver was “exactly right” in his reasoning not to issue a statement on the Gaza war, because “institutional statements are empty gestures that silence dissent,” according to Goldfeder.
“But refusing to make statements is not the same as enforcing rules, and there’s nothing in the record showing he’s ever enforced one against this movement,” he told JNS.
Northwestern
Chiang “may have better luck” at Northwestern, since he’s focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics, according to Shufutinsky.
But the university “also receives a lot of funding from hostile foreign sources that allegedly also fund antisemitic activities on campuses across the country,” she told JNS.
Goldfeder also thinks that Northwestern is in the best position of the three with Chiang, who as the president of Purdue University “wrote a personal letter to the Jewish community condemning the Oct. 7 attacks, put encampment participants on disciplinary probation and kept his campus calm while everyone else’s burned.”
“He shows up with, as one Northwestern alum put it, a reputation for defending free expression while not tolerating antisemitism,” Goldfeder told JNS. “That’s great.”
Filitti told JNS that Chiang is taking over a university, whose community criticized its settlement with the Trump administration as a “capitulation.”
Michael Schill resigned as university president in September 2025 “under federal scrutiny of the university’s failure to protect Jewish students’ civil rights,” Filitti said.
“Chiang has no record of confronting Jew-hatred but did speak of ‘learning the culture,’” he told JNS.
Goldfeder said that all three of the new presidents “inherited problems they didn’t create, and all three deserve the chance to prove me wrong in either direction.”
But “none of this actually depends on my optimism,” as the Columbia and Northwestern settlements “are contracts,” Goldfeder said. “Contracts don’t care how anyone feels.”
