(JTA) — In the days before hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman was to speak at Sunday’s conference on “Jews and Elite Universities” at New York’s Center for Jewish History, some 60 scholars signed a letter objecting that the vocal critic of Harvard’s handling of antisemitism allegations had no place speaking in such a setting.
The signers, either associated with CJH or users of its archives, found it “disgraceful” that the center gave top billing to Ackman, a Harvard alum who led a high-profile battle against former Harvard president Claudine Gay over antisemitism. Ackman, the letter said, is not a scholar and “used his wealth and influence to attack American universities and support the ongoing campaign to defund them.”
The letter also criticized the conference lineup for its “overall lack of academic expertise on Jews and higher education.” (Among the 15 speakers, I counted eight academics, two rabbis with campus connections, four journalists and Ackman.)
But if the critics thought the other invitees were going to roll over for Ackman, a former chair of the center’s board of directors, they were premature. Ackman was perhaps the only speaker to defend President Donald Trump’s cuts in federal funding to Harvard and the administration’s list of demands to increase “viewpoint diversity,” among other things. If a consensus emerged during the day-long conference, it was that while many elite universities stumbled badly in their responses to the anti-Israel protests after October 7, the government shouldn’t dictate what universities teach or how they operate.
Many of the speakers also agreed that the Trump administration — which has cited universities’ response to antisemitism as justification for withholding government funds — is using antisemitism as a pretext to undermine what the president sees as a leftist elite.
Ackman appeared in the last panel of the day, speaking to a crowd that filled all 250 seats in the center’s auditorium (CJH charged separate admission for the panel). He rejected the idea that Trump was using antisemitism as a pretext, and defended Trump’s maximalist demands on Harvard as an opening bid in a negotiation over political diversity, free speech and “how efficiently the institution is run.”
“You can complain about Trump’s methods, and yes, his latest letter was overreaching, for sure,” said Ackman, referring to an administration missive, sent May 12, suggesting Harvard was defrauding the government in its admissions policies. “But Trump is always overreaching. That‘s his negotiating style.”
He added, “If I were chairman of the [Harvard] corporation, I could resolve this litigation with Trump in a day.”
He called Harvard’s decision to sue the administration rather than to negotiate over its demands “the world’s stupidest move,” earning scattered applause.
Ackman also defended Trump’s move to cancel an array of federal contracts at Harvard for research into cancer, infectious diseases, veterans’ health and other topics.
“This is not an anti-science move on the part of the president,” said Ackman.”It’s a move to fix this once great institution.”
On the same panel, Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of Holocaust and Jewish studies at Emory University and the former State Department envoy on antisemitism, acknowledged that she had praised some of Trump’s early actions on antisemitism in various interviews, but said, “What we are seeing now is beyond the pale.”
“What we’re seeing now is an attack on elite universities in the name of antisemitism, which does exist on the campus,” she said. “What scares me … is if the universities that are fighting win, they will say, ‘We won despite the allegations that we were antisemitic,’ and if they lose, they’ll say, ‘We lost because of the Jews.’”
Lipstadt sat in the middle, physically and perhaps ideologically, between Ackman and the third panelist, Leon Wieseltier, the former literary editor of The New Republic and current editor of the journal Liberties. Wieseltier suggested that the Jewish community had overreacted at times to the campus anti-Israel protests, and that Jewish parents had failed by not preparing their children to defend Zionism in the face of anti-Israel attacks.
He also pushed back hard against Ackman, riling an audience that cheered and booed along partisan lines. “If you think for a second that Trump’s campaign against the universities is not part of the anti-intellectual, anti-elitist, coercive philistine tradition…” Wieselteir said, before being drowned out by applause.
Setting the terms of discussion
Trump’s latest moves against Harvard and other universities seemed to set the terms of discussion for the day. Even as speakers lamented diversity, equity and inclusion programs that they said either failed to address antisemitism and at times inspired it; or criticized double standards when it comes to what kind of hate speech is and isn’t acceptable on campus, many worried about the administration’s actions.
Eli Lake, a columnist for The Free Press who has written for a number of conservative publications, noted that the Obama administration also intervened in campus affairs when it issued guidance on how school’s handle sexual assault. (Trump rescinded those rules in his first term.) And while he agreed with the current administration’s stated intentions to increase “viewpoint diversity” on left-leaning campuses, he said withholding federal funding is “an awful kind of precedent, particularly since I don’t expect Republicans to be in power for the next 1,000 years,” he said.
“I worry a little bit that the Jewish community — and I think that Trump, in a weird way, encourages this — has a similar kind of relationship that they did with the ‘friendly’ czars of the Romanov era, meaning that you need to have this sort of very powerful figure coming in to be our protector,” Lake said. “And that to me is a Diaspora life that I would love to leave [behind] in history.”
Jewish studies professor Rachel Gordan, speaking on the same panel, also commented on government efforts to intervene in campus affairs. A faculty member at the University of Florida-Gainesville, Gordon said state legislation passed in spring of 2023, meant to curb funding for DEI at public universities, affected campus hiring and led to scrutiny of what could be taught in core general education classes — including her class on post-Holocaust American Jewry.
While held up as a model by other Republican lawmakers looking to reform higher education, the Florida bill “brought us into this era of repression and fear on campus that many people have compared to the McCarthy era,” she said.
Susie Linfield, a professor of journalism at New York University and author of a history of Zionism and the left, acknowledged how Jewish students were mistreated in the wake of October 7. She spoke of an Israeli doctoral student at Yale who told her that her professors had stopped speaking to her after the attacks and the start of the war.
But Linfield also urged American Jews not to succumb to “moral panic” in fighting campus antisemitism and demanding more from their universities. She suggested the Jewish community was facing “two crises of legitimacy.”
The first crisis is coming “from the activist left that is discrediting Zionism,” she said. The second crisis, she said, “originates from the government, and Trump’s attacks on the values and the very function of our institutions of higher education.”
“Needless to say,” Linfield said in conclusion, “none of these places are good for the Jews.”
