Sixty-two years ago, George Wallace, the infamous governor of Alabama, stood in a doorway to block Black students from entering the University of Alabama. He claimed to be defending state sovereignty—but history remembers him for what he was: a symbol of moral cowardice and resistance to justice.
Today, elite universities—and the lawyers and leaders shielding them—are channeling that same cowardice. This time, the students outside the door are Jews. And the universities, far from defending them, are lawyering up, digging in, and deflecting blame.
The Trump administration, for all its controversies, has done something that elite academia refuses: demand equal protection for Jewish students under federal civil rights law. Harvard’s lawyers recently argued, “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”
But apparently, they can allow themselves to be taken over by masked demonstrators shouting genocidal slogans. They can tolerate professors who justify terror, administrators who hide behind legalisms, and mobs who block buildings and shout down Jewish students for daring to exist.
Let’s be clear: This isn’t about Israeli policy. This isn’t about Gaza or Netanyahu or ceasefires. The students being harassed are not Mossad agents. They are Jews, and they are being targeted not for their views—but for their identity.
Imagine that Donald Trump had launched an initiative to protect Black students on campus from white supremacist intimidation. Imagine a Harvard president refusing to cooperate. Imagine masked protesters blocking libraries, shouting the N-word, and demanding the university “cut ties with Black organizations.” And imagine a Black president of Harvard issuing a vague, bloodless statement defending “academic freedom” and declining to act.
It would be unthinkable. And yet that is precisely what’s happening—with Jewish students, and with Jewish leaders at the helm.
Alan Garber, the Jewish interim president of Harvard, has become a symbol of this failure. His lawyers compare federal oversight to authoritarianism. His campus remains hostile. His responses are legalistic, not moral. One cannot help but recall a different generation of Jewish leaders—those in America, not Europe—who kept their heads down during the Holocaust, fearing that standing up would provoke backlash from FDR or worsen their own standing. They should have taken a page out of Al Sharpton’s handbook—marshaled outrage, demanded attention, and refused to be ignored.
Instead, like Garber today, they chose submission over courage.
Even some in the Jewish political class have accused Trump of “weaponizing antisemitism” for political gain. Senator Chuck Schumer has said as much. But Schumer’s critique says more about his own discomfort than it does about the truth. Trump is not inventing the antisemitism on campus. He’s responding to it. And if Trump were fighting to protect any other minority group, the same critics would be cheering him.
Instead, they reflexively oppose him—because it’s Trump. And in doing so, they miss the point: This isn’t about who is doing the protecting. It’s about who needs protection.
And what exactly is the academic establishment afraid of? They warn darkly of Trump “running Harvard,” but what does that mean? That he’ll ban legacy admissions? Strip lacrosse recruits of their spots? No—what Trump wants is something far more basic: that our top universities stop admitting radicalized foreign students who arrive on academic visas only to glorify terror, call for jihad, and indoctrinate others into hating Jews and the very Western values that gave them a platform.
That’s not authoritarianism. That’s common sense.
The federal government has both the right and the responsibility to act when civil rights are being violated. Dwight D. Eisenhower understood this in 1957, when he sent troops to Little Rock. Bobby Kennedy understood it when he enforced desegregation in the South. And now, Trump understands it—however politically inconvenient that may be for his opponents.
University leaders, meanwhile, continue to fail the basic moral test of our time. Their DEI offices remain silent. Their professors teach a distorted history of colonialism while ignoring the terrorism of Oct. 7. And their students—many of whom genuinely care about justice—are being led into mobs that shout for intifada while claiming they’re standing up for human rights.
This is not moral complexity. It’s moral confusion.
Civil rights don’t depend on popularity, and they don’t stop at the gates of the Ivy League. When Jewish students are harassed, cornered, chased and vilified—whether by protesters or by professors—the institutions responsible for their safety must act. Not equivocate. Not litigate. Act.
And when these very institutions fail, it is not “government overreach” for federal authorities to step in. It is what the government is there for.
How sad it is that we are having this conversation in the first place, but even sadder that Jewish students need federal protection from Harvard. It’s time for Jewish leaders to speak. For college presidents to act. For lawyers to get out of the way. Because the new George Wallaces aren’t in Southern courthouses anymore; they’re on Ivy League payrolls and they’re standing in the way of justice—again.
I’m a retired hedge fund manager who helped invest taxpayer money into distressed assets during the great financial crisis. I now run my own family office, serve on the board of the Met Council (fighting food insecurity in New York) and help mentor young professionals in the world of finance. I’ve had two letters to the editor published in The Wall Street Journal.
