Last week’s cowardly murders of two Israeli Embassy staff members by a man shouting “free, free Palestine” are not an isolated tragedy. It is the inevitable result of a campus culture that has mainstreamed hatred, glorified violence, and normalized antisemitic incitement.
Nowhere is this rot more concentrated than in the rarefied air of the Ivy League, whether at Columbia University, my alma mater, or Harvard University, which recently elevated to prestigious fellowships two students who assaulted a Jewish and Israeli peer, Yoav Segev, simply for his national origin. The problem is not just the students, but the professors who radicalize them, the bureaucracies that shield them, and the administrators who enable them.
If we’re serious about confronting the ideological decay in higher education, it’s time to use real leverage. The federal government should give schools such as Harvard and Columbia 30 days to expel every student who participated in the illegal encampments that shut down campuses; eliminate the ideological bureaucracies metastasizing under the banner of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the faculty; liquidate their gender studies departments, which function as training grounds for professional revolutionaries; and slash their administrative bloat by half. If not, the government should cut its federal funding pipeline.
The Trump administration has already leveled powerful remedies at major universities, such as threatening to freeze billions of dollars in federal funding they thrive off of, and imposing limitations on admitting international students. There are important fixes, but Harvard’s administration continues to resist cracking down on antisemitism on campus, showing us that they are no longer enough.
This approach has several advantages. First, it doesn’t make martyrs. Deportation creates headlines and sympathy — expulsion doesn’t. Second, it doesn’t individualize the problem. It is not this or that protester. It is the ecosystem that made them: the professors who express excitement over the mass slaughter of Jews, the administrators who coddle anti-white, anti-Asian, and anti-Jewish racism. Third, and most important, it is an approach that forces a change in the culture.
President Donald Trump was right to take action against a Palestinian agitator who overstayed his visa and trespassed in the violent takeover of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall. But Mahmoud Khalil isn’t the disease, he’s a symptom. The real corruption goes far deeper: a campus culture in which masked vigilantes can shout genocidal slogans, physically bar Jews from libraries, vandalize public property, and then still be welcome on campus.
This didn’t happen overnight. The cancer has been metastasizing for decades. Ivy League faculty members themselves have been a key vector of radicalization. Tenured professors with lifetime job security have spent years glorifying terrorism, demonizing Jews, and inculcating students with anti-American dogma. This is not an isolated fringe. It is the institutional consensus in the entire department.
These campuses are a host of elite self-radicalization. They have tolerated, coddled, and at times directly abetted the forces that now menace its Jewish students and shut down its classrooms. Don’t take my word for it, just look at how Columbia President Claire Shipman defended Khalil in her commencement address. Look at how, on May 7, dozens of masked radicals stormed Butler Library, screamed “from the river to the sea,” physically assaulted security guards, sending two to the hospital, and drove hundreds of students from their study halls, with many forced to leave their personal possessions behind. This wasn’t a peaceful protest. It was siege warfare.
And it wasn’t new. Last spring, Columbia canceled its main graduation rather than enforce the law. In February, radicals occupied Barnard College’s Milbank Hall and wouldn’t even let the dean use the bathroom without jeering at her. Days later, they seized the Milbank library and scribbled “death to America” in the guestbook. At every turn, the administration stood down, until the New York City Police Department had to drag students out of buildings they didn’t own but had effectively conquered.
This culture of lawlessness came from the top. Ivy League administrators tolerated encampments, apologized to the mobs, and begged not to offend. During the catastrophe of last spring’s “encampment” at Columbia, as anti-Israel radicals effectively occupied the campus, the administration suspended classes rather than disciplining protest leaders. They canceled the main graduation ceremonies rather than confront the hate directly. All while quietly collecting nearly $500 million a year in taxpayer-funded research grants, in large part from the National Institutes of Health.
The Trump administration has already frozen $400 million in Columbia funding in response. The NIH has pulled an additional $250 million. These are righteous moves, but the whole $1.3 billion should be on the line, just as Trump has called all of Harvard’s federal funding into question, and the price for keeping it should be the permanent dismantling of the infrastructure of antisemitism and race-hatred that the university has incubated.
If we want to tackle campus antisemitism, we must dismantle the conditions that breed it. That means tackling the culture of ideological extremism, especially the DEI apparatus, which teaches students to view Jews, whites, and Asians not as individuals, but as avatars of evil systems. That means ending the fantasy that “gender studies” is about helping women and not about tearing down the West. That means defunding, firing, and clearing house.
And here’s the twist: If Columbia and Harvard refuse, they’ll have explicitly chosen ideology over medicine, DEI over cancer research, Hamas slogans over heart disease labs. Let them explain to Congress and the public why “Zionists don’t deserve to live” is worth more than $1 billion in public support. Let them justify letting library vandals chant “death to America” while our taxes fund their salaries.
There’s nothing radical about expecting a university to protect its students and uphold basic law. There’s nothing reactionary about demanding that publicly subsidized institutions not enable genocidal rhetoric. If these elite campuses want to be a private madrassa of revolution, let them fund it privately, if they can. But if they’re going to remain a federally backed center of research and higher learning, they should show some baseline fidelity to law, order, and civilization.
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This isn’t about canceling speech. It’s about refusing to bankroll violence. The taxpayer is under no obligation to underwrite those who cheer on rape and slaughter — and certainly not when they physically block Jews from campus spaces and assault public safety officers in the name of “justice.”
If Columbia and Harvard choose to stand with the mob, let them do it on their own dime. America does not need its prestigious institutions to be staging grounds for antisemitism, anti-whiteness, and anti-reason. It needs them to be places of learning, inquiry, and respect. Only cutting the checks will. So cut them. Or cut these schools loose.
Dr. Sheila Nazarian is a Los Angeles physician and star of the Emmy-nominated Netflix series Skin Decision: Before and After. She is the host of The Closet podcast. Her family escaped to the United States from Iran.