Critics told JNS that a new rating of hostile campuses from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which blamed Israel for being attacked on Oct. 7 and which has a long history of anti-Israel statements, ought to be regarded with a lot of skepticism.
“CAIR has caused so much pain for American students in recent years with their statements and actions that it’s hard to believe they are genuinely concerned about hatred of any kind,” Jayne Zirkle, director of communications and outreach at the Lawfare Project, told JNS.
“With that being said, we are proud to stand against Islamophobia and for free speech always,” Zirkle said. “America’s students deserve campuses where ideas can be debated openly, faith can be expressed freely and alliances, like the U.S.-Israel relationship, can be explored without fear of bias or censorship.”
Mark Goldfeder, director and CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, told JNS that CAIR’s methodology conflates efforts to fight Jew-hatred with violations of Muslim civil rights.
The new report “claims to measure Islamophobia and free speech on campus. It doesn’t,” he said. “It measures how willing a university is to let one side redefine civil rights as immunity from consequences.”
Goldfeder told JNS that schools lost points in CAIR’s ranking for adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred.
“It literally treats adopting a tool for identifying antisemitism as if that itself is a civil-rights violation,” he said. “Any serious civil-rights organization has to preserve a basic distinction.”
“You can protect Muslims from bigotry without demanding that Jews absorb bigotry,” he said. “You can defend Muslim students’ rights without requiring antisemitism-blindness as the price of entry.”
A school that recognizes Jew-hatred isn’t therefore a hostile campus. “It’s hostile when it fails to protect any students from harassment, threats, exclusion or violence,” Goldfeder said. “If your definition of being pro-Islam requires treating the fight against antisemitism as Islamophobia, you’re not pro-Islam. You’re just an antisemite.”
CAIR’s 2025-26 ranking grades 51 colleges and universities on, it says, how they handled allegations of Islamophobia and treated pro-Palestinian activism.
It evaluates schools that CAIR says “have engaged in the suppression and targeting of Muslim, Palestinian, Arab and allied students speaking out against genocide from October 2023 to December 2025.”
“Many of the institutions our team reviewed self-selected to be instruments of repression when it came to Muslims and others who held anti-genocide viewpoints,” CAIR’s research and advocacy director stated.
No school received an “unhostile campus” designation.
Columbia University and the City University of New York—both of which have been sites of Jew-hatred since Oct. 7—turned out to rank among the worst in the CAIR framework. Each scored just 2%.
Other low marks included the University of Michigan (7%), the University of Chicago (10%), and Harvard University and Case Western Reserve University (each 12%).
