Over the past year and a half, the problems of many American universities have been front and center of our national conversation: the tolerance towards radical student groups and lawless campus behavior, the transformation of many humanities and social science departments into monocultures of ideological indoctrination, the misguided obsession with race and gender and the administrative bloat to enforce it, and now the targeting of Jews and Israel as the sin-stained enemies of the Progressive project to attack Western civilization with some perverse new strain of Red-Green anarchy. Of course, conservative intellectuals have been alarmed about the problems of the American university for decades—if not since 1951, when a young William F. Buckley published God and Man at Yale decrying the secularization of academic culture, then at least since 1987, when the philosophy professor Allan Bloom made himself into a celebrity with The Closing of the American Mind, arguing that a small-souled relativism had replaced the deeper quest for truth. This was followed by Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education, and from there an unbroken stream of analysis and critique. Meanwhile, the cultural problems on campus have only deepened, and in recent years a widening range of professors, deans, and college presidents, including many self-professed liberals, have written their own academic laments for the betrayal of liberal learning and free inquiry that once defined our best institutions of higher learning.
As a new school year approaches, it seems clear that we are living through a moment of academic reckoning—and, as a consequence, a moment of potential reform and opportunity. The excesses of campus activism have captured public attention, with a rolling tempo of news stories about the latest fines and settlements with the federal government over campus misdeeds. Employers are questioning whether a diploma from one of the highest-ranked universities represents more of a liability than an asset for a job applicant. Many are beginning to wonder whether once-revered degrees from schools like Harvard and Columbia are really trustworthy measures of an actual education and reliable indicators of sound character. And, as often happens when Western nations and cultures are in crisis, it is Jews who find themselves at the center of the civilizational struggle—and Jewish parents and Jewish students who are most urgently grappling with what college now holds in store. After decades of seeing the most elite universities as our temples, American Jews are wondering if we are living through yet another age of destruction and dispersion.
The anxious Jewish chatter is endless. At countless social gatherings and Shabbat tables, in numerous online forums and WhatsApp groups, Jewish parents are asking themselves and each other how to navigate college selection for their children. Those who two years ago wondered, “If my fifteen-year-old maintains her grades, can she win admissions to Harvard or Columbia?” now ask, “If my daughter gets into Columbia, do I really want her going there?” The father initially thrilled that his son was accepted to George Washington University or UCLA may now ask himself, “Will he be safe? Subject to anti-Semitic harassment? Or worse, will he come home for Thanksgiving wearing a keffiyeh and shouting at me and my wife for supporting genocide because we planted a tree in Israel in honor of his bar mitzvah?”
Jewish parents once worried primarily about whether there was a Hillel House, what the rabbi was like, or—most importantly—whether their child stood a good chance of meeting a suitable Jewish spouse. Now they confront serious questions about physical safety and whether they need to instruct their children in the mechanisms of dissimulation familiar to those living under totalitarian regimes. To be sure, there may be reason to expect that even the worst offending universities will now behave more responsibly in protecting the physical safety and basic rights of Jewish students, given the public scrutiny and severe consequences for their recent fecklessness. Yet many parents and students are now realizing that the problems extend beyond protests on the quad. The culture of anti-Semitism actually reaches into the academic soul of many institutions: the teachers, the courses, the curriculum, and the culture. Keeping Jews safe may prove a pyrrhic victory if it obscures this deeper problem. A century ago, anti-Semitism was also prevalent at America’s elite colleges, but the Jews who made it past the quotas could reasonably conclude that enduring the social isolation was worthwhile given the quality of education and the opportunity to join the ranks of America’s economic, professional, and civic elite. That calculation is no longer so clear.
Jews find themselves at a loss for navigating this terrain. Are their children better served in red-state universities—like the University of Florida and the University of Texas—where more welcoming legal and cultural frameworks prevail? Are some schools—like Vanderbilt and Washington University—addressing their Jewish questions more honorably and courageously than others? Non-Jewish parents, too, are raising their own concerns about how religious Christians are treated and whether parroting radical ideology is the perverse price for good grades and strong teacher recommendations. For decades, parents and students have relied on published college rankings, which claim to measure precisely those features and qualities that constitute a school’s excellence. Now parents are discovering that these same rankings offer little guidance on the urgent problems plaguing our university campuses. In fact, as explored more fully below, the most influential ranking systems generally reveal very little of value whatsoever. In this moment of confusion and opportunity, we need something better.
This essay proceeds from three fundamental premises. First, we believe that evaluative metrics do matter. In a sprawling and complex college market, parents, students, and donors require some empirical foundation for understanding the comparative strengths and weaknesses of different universities. They need evaluative tools that focus on what truly matters. Second, Jewish students rightly have their own priorities and concerns. They need to understand both the prevailing spirit and academic culture of each university they are considering and how it measures up in meeting their own Jewish needs and aspirations—including the relative prevalence of anti-Semitism, the ability to live a religious life in the company of other Jews, and the ability to study with professors who honor rather than denigrate Jewish civilization and Zionist achievement. Third, the humanities matter. Universities pursue many important aims across various practical fields of human life—including business, mathematics, science, medicine. But students who aspire to civic, political, or religious leadership are poorly prepared and poorly formed if the study of history, literature, philosophy, and politics are hollowed out or ideologically corrupted. Robust humanities married to real civic education remain an indispensable necessity for our culture. STEM alone, even at the highest level, is inadequate to the true aims of higher education.
The purpose of this essay is to explain what is wrong with current ranking systems and to outline a better framework—what we proudly call the Menorah Index—for guiding Jewish parents and students, guidance counselors and educators, donors and university leaders, as they choose where to go to college and why. We also hope that this analysis will awaken other Americans to think differently about the true value of a university education and how to assess the comparative strengths and weaknesses of different universities. To understand why we need better rankings—and to grasp why the humanities are in crisis and why it matters—we must recover a clear vision of what universities do at their best, which is inviting students to the disciplined study of the best that has been thought and said.
I. The Crisis of the Humanities
In July 2025, following the campus upheavals after October 7, the Cohen Center at Brandeis University released a study surveying “the political identities and viewpoints of faculty, their levels of political activism . . . and the extent to which they hold hostile views about Jews and Israel.” The findings were striking: 63 percent of humanities faculty believe Israel is an apartheid state; 45 percent believe all land seized through colonization should be returned to indigenous peoples; 90 percent believe racism is widespread in American life, with 79 percent incorporating this view into their classroom teaching. Another 79 percent reject the proposition that gender is determined by biological sex. Finally, 81 percent of humanities faculty disagree with the statement that DEI efforts promote division rather than unity. While the study’s authors suggested these results offered grounds for optimism because the academy is not exclusively dominated by leftist ideologues, the data rather confirm the effects of a pervasive ideological atmosphere.
Faculty members are not alone in maintaining this ideological uniformity. Proliferating ranks of DEI officers have intruded into faculty hiring and course requirements; campus cultures celebrate terrorism and racial division; administrators accommodate student and faculty radicalism with disturbing regularity. All of this comes at an average cost of approximately $90,000 per year for tuition, room, and board at our prestigious private colleges and universities.
These problems did not emerge overnight. For decades, many of the nation’s leading humanities and social-science departments have become laboratories for theories—about art and literature, men and women, war and peace—that are increasingly detached from reality. These theories have many names—intersectionality, critical race theory, queer theory, neo-Marxism—but they are all very similar, seeking to reduce our complex civilizational history into a simple story of oppression, with professors casting themselves in the heroic role of liberators. The most activist professors do not merely seek to indoctrinate their students; they actively recruit them to their causes. One instructive example comes from Princeton, which maintains a large and active chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine founded by Professor Max Weiss, who teaches a recurring course on modern Middle Eastern history. Starting with Professor Weiss, members of the FJP, having publicly declared their animus toward Israel, required students to attend lectures in encampment areas as explicit demonstrations of solidarity with anti-Israel protesters. That Professor Weiss has since been promoted to full professor and continues to teach about Israel demonstrates the depths of institutional failure.
This pattern is hardly uncommon. Many professors understand their role in explicitly political terms: to undermine and challenge all inherited orders and values. While authentic liberal education might help us examine our circumstances by seeing them in light of the finest achievements and hard-won wisdom of the past, contemporary critical theories regard history with systematic contempt, treating the ever-shifting theories of the post-modern present as the singular standard for judgment. At Boston College, the classics department came under scrutiny for offering a course on “Beast Literature,” focusing on anthropomorphized animals in ancient and modern culture, where students reportedly had to create their own “fursonas.” At the University of Pennsylvania English department, one encounters courses like “Queer Shakespeare,” “Literature Before 1660: Drama Queers Before Modernity,” and “Saints and Sex Demons.” Such offerings have become typical across many disciplines at nearly all universities.
Largely because of this deconstructive interpretive approach, humanities education has lost confidence in its own mission. Faculty members in literature, art, history, philosophy, and even theology no longer believe in the greatness of great books and great leaders. Small wonder they show little interest in teaching or studying them, except as malodorous specimens for cultural dissection. Small wonder they cannot convey enthusiasm for human excellence to their students. Caroline Levine, former chair of Cornell’s English Department, has argued that her discipline represents a kind of conspiracy, invented by imperial Britain to persuade Indian subjects to view English culture as superior and thus acquiesce to English rule. At Princeton, the classics professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta advocates deprioritizing Greece and Rome and their languages because classics serves as a vehicle for white supremacy. One of his colleagues, the Latinx-studies professor Lorgia García-Peña—who teaches a class on American civilization (a title she has publicly mocked)—declares her intention to dismantle the university itself, characterizing it as a “colonizing racial capitalist white-supremacist institution.” These are not extreme examples; they are the intellectual center of gravity in many modern humanities departments.
It is tempting to dismiss such absurdities, but we must consider their serious consequences. Lost is the capacity to understand or marvel at great works of art and music. Even rarer is the practice of placing these objects of classical education before students precisely when they are most hungry for wisdom. A few students will be attracted to the radicalism, but most will absorb a different lesson: namely, that these subjects lack any enduring value. They will conclude that the quest to understand the good life and good society is a trivial affair: a distraction from the pragmatic world of skills-development and career advancement. As a result, enrollment in the humanities continues to decline, and in a pathetic effort to woo back fleeing students, departments offer shallow courses on pop culture, pop politics, and sexual vulgarity. It is a vicious cycle of cultural evisceration, creating specialists without wisdom (to modify Max Weber’s famous phrase) and citizens without any deep loyalty to their own national inheritance.
The defense of the humanities is actually easy to articulate. Herbert Storing, one of the great 20th-century scholars of American politics, wrote that liberal education
represents an attempt to provide significant exposure to, and participation in, the great cultural tradition of the West (at least); it is an education based upon reading the great books, studying the great men, viewing the great aspirations and achievements, exploring the great questions that represent the peaks of the art, literature, and thought of the West.
This encounter with the greatest works of our shared past serves as both mirror and inspiration for wisdom-seeking students. The greatest thinkers in our tradition are also our greatest teachers. Studying their works can “give us the gift to see ourselves as others see us,” liberating us from parochialism, intellectual fashion, and prejudice by granting entry into profound reflections on the most enduring human questions. The great aspiration of the humanities is to acculturate students into a tradition of learning and inquiry that seeks truth and embraces the literary and artistic treasures of human achievement. This includes both greater understanding about the complexities of human nature and deeper appreciation for the virtuous if imperfect civilization that we have been fortunate enough to inherit, if we can keep it.
Such elevated concerns may seem like unjustifiable luxuries for young people anxious to find their way in an ever-changing and demanding professional environment. But not only should the moral formation and intellectual development of young Americans matter intrinsically, lest we decline into a kind of high-tech nihilism; the liberal arts also play a crucial role in preparing young men and women for both professional and civic life. By engaging with the greatest reflections on the human condition, students acquire the capacity to perceive and assess reality with clarity, the first task of any potential leader. As the distinguished classical historian Victor Davis Hanson put it:
Humanities students were more likely to craft good prose. They were trained to be inductive rather than deductive in their reasoning, possessed an appreciation of language and art, and knew the referents of the past well enough to put contemporary events into some sort of larger abstract context. In short, they were often considered ideal prospects as future captains of business, law, medicine, or engineering.
No longer. The world beyond campus has learned that today’s college students know how and why to adopt political positions but not how to defend them through logic and evidence. If employers are discouraged by the absence of real knowledge, they are even more troubled when ignorance is accompanied by zealotry. Ignorance combined with arrogance proves a fatal combination. When the humanities failed to demonstrate that their students were exceptionally well-trained writers, logical thinkers, and knowledgeable about historical events, figures, literature, and ideas, the liberal arts forfeited their immunity from the general reckoning universities now face.
Thanks to this prolonged decline, an ever-diminishing number of humanities courses offer education that meets these high purposes and high standards, while these disciplines become increasingly unappealing to students who might benefit from this kind of intellectual and spiritual awakening. Consequently, university education is failing in its most important moral and practical responsibilities.
This crisis in the soul-shaping and citizen-forming purpose of college should occupy the center of any serious evaluation of universities and any serious effort to reform and renew the higher learning in America. Whatever their specific academic major or professional ambitions, our best students should seek and expect a humanistic education rooted in the wellsprings of Western civilization. Yet as we shall see, the ranking systems that purport to measure educational quality are not merely blind to this collapse of liberal education. They may actually be accelerating it.
II. How College Rankings Have Failed Us
Every serious high-school student can expect daily deliveries of glossy brochures encouraging them to apply to dozens of different universities. The marketing formula is almost always the same: images of happy “diverse” students learning and exploring together; promised wonderlands of self-discovery; myriad statistics “at a glance” that purport to offer mathematical proof that University X or College Y will virtually guarantee you a successful life. In short: so many colleges, all competing to persuade young consumers (and their paying parents) that this university is best suited to making them happy versions of themselves, whatever their proclivities, aspirations, or desires.
By necessity, families need some objective compass to navigate the amorphous sea of institutions all vying for their applications, which is why the modern systems of rankings are so powerful. The problem is that such systems of assessment are paying little to no attention to what matters most: the culture and quality of learning.
We began studying these rankings expecting that, whatever their deeper shortcomings, they must at least convey some useful information. The more we investigated, the hollower they proved. Consider the U.S. News & World Report ranking, perhaps the most prominent and influential, whose methodology is largely mimicked by other ranking systems.
The first flaw is that such systems focus primarily on factors that tend to be easily measurable but not particularly helpful. Over half—approximately 60 percent—of a school’s USNWR rank is determined by reputation surveys and graduation rates. Academic factors, broadly interpreted, constitute less than 15 percent, and even those factors are not seriously connected to a school’s true academic strength, let alone any deeper assessment of the difference between genuine humanistic learning and trendy academic ideology.
This is not merely a case of measuring the wrong things or employing poor data-collection methods. In The Tyranny of Metrics, the historian Jerry Muller describes what he terms modern society’s metric fixation, partly defined as attempting to replace “judgment acquired by personal experience and talent” with quantified measurements based on standardized data. The appeal of precision and numerical data, with their appearance of scientific clarity and impersonal objectivity, leads people and organizations to attempt measuring and quantifying even where numbers reveal little and relying on them can produce harmful effects. As he puts it:
There is a natural human tendency to try to simplify problems by focusing on the most easily measurable elements. But what is most easily measured is rarely what is most important, indeed sometimes not important at all.
In the case of the universities, the rankings indeed measure something, but what they measure is, by comparison to the actual mission of universities, trivial.
Besides failing to measure meaningfully the educational strengths and weaknesses of universities, ranking systems have inadvertently helped to deform those institutions. Universities shift their institutional priorities and practices to improve their rankings. This pursuit of high rankings creates perverse incentives to perform well on standard metrics, often at the expense of the very qualities that earned them their reputations in the first place. This has often led traditionally elite institutions to lower their standards in order to remain elite. As Muller observes: “anything that can be measured and rewarded will be gamed.”
Graduation rates provide a particularly revealing example of a gameable metric of academic performance with an inverse relationship to academic quality. What do graduation rates tell us, or what are they intended to tell us? Theoretically, a school that fails to graduate its students has a problem. Perhaps its professors are ineffective and incapable of transmitting knowledge. Perhaps it enrolls terrible students or maintains horrible campus culture. Perhaps it is underfunded and cannot attract good teachers, or perhaps it serves economically disadvantaged students whose circumstances may interfere with graduating within four to six years.
For the most prestigious schools, however, graduation rates constitute generally useless evaluation tools. The USNWR ranking counts six-year graduation rates, where the Ivies all achieve 95 percent or higher. This should provoke concern rather than applause. After all, there is a compelling argument that a truly rigorous institution should fail some students. It should be difficult to excel at schools with the highest standards, designed to train the most capable young people for society’s greatest responsibilities. Earning top grades at the finest schools should require exceptional ability and determination. Yet graduation rates’ importance in the ranking system creates overwhelming pressure to maintain high graduation rates, inadvertently incentivizing relaxed academic standards. The simplest way to ensure excellent graduation rates is to make failure nearly impossible.
Anyone with even modest experience teaching or grading at the university level can attest to how little a student needs to accomplish to earn B grades—attend class and submit work, almost regardless of quality—and how difficult it is to fail a student. Recent reporting has revealed that at Harvard and Yale, approximately 80 percent of all grades in 2023 were A’s or A-’s, representing a 10–20-percent increase over just a decade. While more factors drive decades of rampant grade inflation than merely the gaming of rankings, rankings exert strong pressure in that direction—pressure that can be exploited at the expense of universities’ proper mission.
St. John’s College, which one of us attended as an undergraduate, exemplifies a school that has resisted this pressure, to its benefit as an educational institution and to its detriment in the most influential college rankings. For those unfamiliar with it, St. John’s—technically two colleges with nearly identical curricula, one in Annapolis, Maryland, and one in Santa Fe, New Mexico—is a small Great Books school where all classes are intimate seminars covering the traditional liberal arts: proof-based mathematics, the history of science, philosophy, literature, classics, and music. Students there study the Western canon by reading original texts rather than later interpretations or summaries. According to USNWR, St. John’s College in Santa Fe has a six-year graduation rate of 69 percent and currently ranks as the 114th-best liberal-arts school in America, while the Annapolis campus has a six-year graduation rate of 72 percent and ranks as the 83rd-best liberal-arts school in America.
One reason St. John’s College maintains such low graduation rates is that every cohort’s sophomore year includes a faculty review of students, where the weakest performers are removed for the benefit of the rest. In view of a ranking system that heavily weights graduation and retention rates, this is very poor policy. In terms of actual education, it proves highly effective both in improving seminar quality and incentivizing serious work. Likewise, all classes require active participation and substantial amounts of difficult reading—consequently, ill-prepared or unmotivated students tend to withdraw or fail. By insisting on its mission as an educational institution, St. John’s has sacrificed its place in the rankings. A potential employer, theoretically, should view this as advantageous: a student who succeeded at St. John’s has genuinely accomplished something beyond appealing to an admissions committee. Whether this reflects real-world dynamics remains unclear.
A second key flaw is that the most influential rankings system relies heavily on perceptions of quality, creating a self-perpetuating echo chamber of false excellence. Reputation surveys constitute the single largest factor in the USNWR ranking (20 percent of a school’s rank) yet they are essentially meaningless. Several thousand school administrators are asked to rate peer institutions’ academic quality on a 1–5 scale. Asking approximately 4,000 administrators to evaluate hundreds of colleges’ academic quality outsources qualitative academic evaluation to administrators with no reason to devote themselves to a nearly impossible task and no incentive to approach it fairly, even among the undisclosed number who actually complete the exercise.
Such a survey ultimately measures administrators’ impressions of each school’s reputation, reinforcing existing beliefs without reference to knowledge of what actually occurs at most rated institutions. It might as well rely on the previous year’s scores. Additionally, given the misguided ideas that have captured many administrators and faculty at the highest-ranked schools, these surveys are likely to reinforce the prestige value of the worst academic fads and perverse ideas currently degrading so many universities. Many other weighted factors, individually smaller but cumulatively significant in school rankings, can likewise either be gamed or inadvertently disincentivize academic rigor or teaching quality. These include: student-to-faculty ratios, faculty salaries, publication impact of articles associated with a school, and financial resources per student. What such academic articles actually say and how such money is actually spent: that is beyond the purview of the rankings system, which means the dominant ideological currents are generally perpetuated.
In assessing the failure of the U.S. News rankings system, we should understand what many students and parents rank highest for themselves in applying to college: a diploma’s value in the employment market. Employability represents a sensible, practical understanding of higher education’s purpose. Given how many colleges have diminished or deformed their higher purpose of shaping the souls of the young—and given the gigantic financial burden families are assuming in paying for college—who can fault students for embracing this pragmatic goal? They rightly seek some measurable payoff for their investment of significant time and money in a four-year degree. They further recognize that the evaluation of a diploma’s worth often comes down not so much to the quality of the actual education but the public reputation of the institution that grants it. Thus, students naturally wish to understand which schools prospective employers will find most impressive. Students and families are drawn to perceptions of prestige, and so rankings system aim to feed, shape, and control that hunger.
It has long been assumed that the most prestigious institutions—meaning the highest-ranked institutions—carry greater weight with prospective employers than other schools. One reason is that the finest schools attract the most capable students. Even if these institutions now appear more committed to distributing prestige than maintaining the educational standards that originally produced it, they remain the most difficult to enter, and their credentials mark graduates as “exceptional” to both peers and potential employers. This has been accepted wisdom for generations of Americans, with colleges acting as efficient sorting mechanisms for future employers.
Yet this accepted wisdom is now being questioned. Recent reporting by Aaron Sibarium at the Washington Free Beacon documents the grip that DEI policies maintain over university admissions, hiring, and faculty promotion. In February and then again in July 2025, Sibarium reported that Brown’s and Duke’s medical schools prioritized race above clinical skills in promoting and hiring faculty; in November 2024 he found that “dozens of departments set quotas for ‘underrepresented’ scholars” at the University of Illinois of Chicago; in July 2025, that UC San Diego sought a loophole to continue offering race-based scholarships even after affirmative action was made illegal in California; and, in April 2025, that UC Berkeley’s school of public health set racial quotas for the reading lists on professors’ syllabi.
John Sailer at City Journal has likewise recently reported on the race-based hiring schemes at George Mason, Ohio State, and Cornell; on the ways in which DEI bureaucrats have dictated hiring at many leading state universities; and, in March 2025, on the use of National Science Foundation grants to recruit and hire “minoritized postdoctoral scholars.” In two recent cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court has found that elite colleges have illegally employed race-based systems of selection in their admissions process. For both Sibarium and Sailer, these are only the most recent examples of what has been a constant drumbeat of similar reports over the last few years.
All of this—affirmative action in admissions, the self-destruction of the humanities, campus radicalism among faculty and students—has begun to puncture the iron wall of Ivy League prestige. In 2022, two federal judges, James Ho and Elizabeth Branch, declared a boycott on hiring Yale Law graduates as clerks after repeated incidences of Yale Law students infringing on the free speech of classmates and guest lecturers. In 2024, Judge Matthew Solomson of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims (and dean of the Tikvah Legal Fellowship) and ten other federal judges pledged not to hire clerks who matriculated at Columbia Law School beginning in the Fall of 2024. Forbes recently surveyed several hundred subscribers in hiring positions. “Among those in charge of employment decisions, 33 percent said they are less likely to hire Ivy League graduates than they were five years ago, with only 7 percent saying they were more likely to hire them.”
In the face of this tragic triumph of ideology over excellence, other ranking systems—such as the one published by the Wall Street Journal—have attempted to offer their own metrics for assessing the value of different diplomas, focusing much more on pragmatic standards such as expected earnings indexed against tuition price. This represents a conceptual improvement, to be sure, in seeking to assess the value proposition of different colleges by weighing degrees on a scale that actually does matter: professional success and income. But because the index combines the earning potential of engineers and art historians, the information it provides about future salaries is not especially useful even on its own terms. And as doubts about the value of the humanities grow, and as publications like the Journal evaluate schools based primarily on students’ financial outcomes, universities will be incentivized even further away from an emphasis on liberal learning. We will starve the humanities to death, and we will hope that the pursuit of wealth alone is sufficient for sustaining a flourishing civilization.
Amid this landscape, a few organizations have attempted to construct more meaningful evaluations of academic life. For many years, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) published Choosing the Right College, a guide that sought to assess universities based on their actual curricula and intellectual atmosphere. For students seeking institutions where the humanities retained some connection to their civilizational mission—or simply where political and intellectual diversity had not been entirely extinguished—this represented a genuinely valuable resource. Following ISI's discontinuation of this guide about ten years ago, two organizations have emerged to address different aspects of the academic crisis: the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which documents the assault on free speech and due process, and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), which exposes the abandonment of rigorous liberal-arts requirements.
FIRE’s systematic documentation of campus censorship has proved indispensable in revealing the extent to which genuine intellectual discourse has been suppressed. Their tracking of due-process violations in campus disciplinary proceedings and institutional silencing of faculty research has revealed distressing patterns in how universities now handle dissent and controversial scholarship. At the same time, FIRE’s singular focus on free speech and free thought sometimes obscures the fact that universities are not merely libertarian marketplaces of ideas but also, and more importantly, guardians of a civilizational inheritance, which it is their mission to perpetuate and pass down through the formation of their students. And the guiding principle of freedom alone—sacred as it is—cannot help academic leaders discern which books to read, which professors to hire, which courses to offer—and why.
ACTA’s guide, “What Will They Learn?,” focuses on the core subjects of liberal learning. Its rankings demonstrate how few institutions now require students to engage seriously with writing, literature, American history, foreign languages, economics, mathematics, and natural science—the very disciplines essential for cultivating informed citizens capable of self-governance and well-trained professionals capable of contributing to our nation’s economic flourishing. Its documentation of administrative bloat further reveals how universities have diverted resources toward bureaucratic excess.
Families looking for information about colleges can learn much—as we have—from these guides, and we hope to rely upon their ongoing efforts even as we make our own distinctive contribution to the field, tailored to the specific needs of Jewish families and Jewish applicants and paying special attention to the importance of Jewish ideas and Zionist history within any serious academic program.
If there is a lesson of the past many years, it is that the abandonment and betrayal of true humanistic learning—especially at our best universities—creates a civilizational vacuum that fools, charlatans, and radicals rush to fill. In the absence of tradition, wisdom, religion, civic piety, a sense of history, an appreciation of greatness, a love of nation, and the quest for truth, we are left with vandalism, anarchy, and civilizational self-hatred. The main target of this new radicalism—as it often is when nations and cultures lose their moorings—is the Jews, who ironically have been the greatest boosters and believers in American universities for decades. Perhaps now it is time for American Jewry to think anew.
III. The Jewish Question
For years, Jewish organizations—like Hillel and the Orthodox Union—have tried to provide Jewish families with useful data regarding which colleges and universities are most accommodating and supportive of Jewish life. And with the post-October 7 mobs of Jew-hating coalitions of students and faculty, a new category of ranking has emerged focused on Jewish anxiety about anti-Semitism and campus safety.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has long aimed to position itself as the guardian of American Jews against discrimination. Its record is mixed at best. All too often, the ADL has focused more on the general problem of “discrimination” rather than the ideological assault on Jews in particular, and it has sought to win for Jews the false privilege of being a protected group in the choir of victimhood. Since October 7, the ADL has sobered up, at least to some degree, and it seems to recognize that the assault on Jews and Israel is not merely another instance of the widespread problem of discrimination. As ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
Jewish students deserve better. . . . One would hope that administrators move now to ensure Jewish student safety. That means taking proactive steps to communicate campus rules and standards for student conduct, shore up campus safety and anticipate and mitigate further disruptions on campus.
Yet old instincts die hard. The ADL now maintains a “Campus Antisemitism Report Card,” grading universities on how they address the problem of anti-Semitism on campus. The problem is that the ADL still assumes that the best way to fight anti-Semitism is to push for the inclusion of Jews in the anti-discrimination bureaucracy: the very approach that gave rise to the DEI cartel which sees Jews as the embodiment of false privilege and Israel as a colonizing apartheid state.
The result is that the ADL gives too much credit for false solutions. Does it matter whether a school has included anti-Semitism in its lengthy code of discriminatory offenses, or established advisory councils to address anti-Semitism, or mandated anti-Semitism training for students and staff? These measures typically constitute mere window dressing, facades with nothing substantial behind them. Anyone who has endured organizational anti-harassment training should understand this intuitively.
These sorts of empty gestures, however, still lie at the heart of the ADL’s scorecards. Harvard, UCLA, and Columbia earn the same green check mark for administrative actions as the University of Florida. In fact, Florida receives more red flags than these others, given its reluctance to create an advisory council on anti-Semitism or mandatory DEI classes. For anyone who has followed news about these schools, such a conclusion does not pass muster. However well-meaning, these rankings may actually launder the reputations of some of the worst offenders. The answer to campus anti-Semitism is not to enshrine Jewish students within the class of protected minorities; and it is a grave error to instruct young Jews to think like helpless victims of discrimination. To be at war with an ideological assault is very different than being a passive victim of discrimination. And unless we reckon with the true nature of that assault—an attack on the Judeo-Christian West, with Israel and the Jews as convenient targets—we cannot combat it or create vibrant alternatives to it.
A more valuable approach to guiding Jewish families in the college process focuses on the vitality of Jewish life on campus—including the infrastructure of religious observance, such as access to kosher food and regular daily prayer services; the overall size of the Jewish student population; and the presence and vitality of Jewish organizations and activities on campus, such as Hillel, Chabad, Jewish fraternities, and pro-Israel clubs. For Jews seeking guidance on which schools can best support an observant Jewish life and which schools offer the greatest chance to socialize with other Jews, the relevant information is readily available, thanks to Hillel, the Orthodox Union, and even the ADL.
Yet these guidebooks for Jewish families do not seek to situate the vitality of Jewish life within a substantive assessment of the cultural and academic health of the university as a whole. By many important measures, Jewish life at Columbia is strong: many Jews are enrolled there, kosher food abounds, religious services of all stripes are available to all who seek them. Yet situated within the reality of the campus experience, we must ask whether Columbia a good place or a corrupt place for young Jews to seek out their own formation as Jews and as Americans. Moreover, registering the mere presence of Jewish institutions does not help prospective students understand the Jewish spirit they foster. For we know that many centers for Jewish life on campus have themselves become corrupted by the prevailing ideology: tolerating or even celebrating anti-Zionism and anti-Judaism within their ranks, all in the name of seeming tolerant, progressive, and committed to an ethical universalism unsullied by the responsibilities of national sovereignty. Not all Hillels—or Hillel rabbis—are created equal, even if they look similar in size and services.
What is genuinely needed is serious attention to Jewish ideas in the classroom, bringing the university’s humanistic mission and its Jewish possibilities into the same analytical framework. This means asking not merely whether kosher food or an eruv is available, but whether Jewish texts and thinkers are integrated into the curriculum’s intellectual core, whether the Hebrew Bible and broader Judeo-Christian tradition is treated seriously as foundational to liberal-arts education, and whether Jewish-studies programs offer courses in the great works of Jewish thought and great figures of Jewish history rather than trivializing or deforming Judaism though the lens of passing academic fads or abstruse pedantry.
Such an approach would recognize that Jewish students need both nurturing religious environments and serious academic programs that give due weight to the majesty and meaning of being Jewish. It would understand that the crisis in the humanities affects Jewish students with particular severity, since they often find themselves in classrooms where the very foundations of Western civilization—including its Jewish roots—are treated with contempt.
IV. The Menorah Index
Faced with the challenge of assessing our universities—as Jews who believe in the West, as American Jews who believe in America, as stewards of young people in need of moral, intellectual, and civic formation—we propose a new way of evaluating our institutions of higher education: what we call the Menorah Index. Launching in September, the Menorah Index will aim to offer a more serious assessment of the academic soul of our universities, while simultaneously attending to the vitality of Jewish life and the depth of Jewish learning on campus.
The Menorah Index will publish comprehensive profiles of colleges and universities—institutional portraits focusing on four fundamental areas: (1) their commitment to educating students in the riches of Western civilization, with the Hebraic tradition placed properly alongside the contributions of Greece, Rome, and the Christian inheritance; (2) the depth and quality of Jewish culture on campus, including the infrastructure necessary for Jewish students to live fully committed Jewish lives or to deepen their identity as Jews; (3) the culture of free inquiry and civil discourse on campus, as opposed to lawlessness, ideological coercion, and mob rule; and (4) the quality of university leadership, and whether the president, provost, and board of a given institution possess the intellectual backbone and moral clarity to preserve, perpetuate, and if necessary renew the university’s core purpose.
In assessing the quality of instruction in the humanities and Jewish ideas, our focus is on identifying institutions that have made the classical liberal arts central to their conception of undergraduate education. We elevate schools that have already created or soon plan to create a critical mass of faculty dedicated to teaching Western Civilization, with independent authority to offer full academic majors and the existence of general education requirements that focus on the wisdom-seeking reading of great books, the study of great leaders, and the preparation for civic leadership. The best programs should make a classical liberal-arts education not only rigorous but also accessible—including for students in fields like science, engineering, and finance who also need a formative experience in thinking about the good life and good society. We are particularly committed to highlighting institutions that elevate the place of the Hebrew Bible, Jewish thought, and the history of ancient and modern Israel: not as tokens of identity geared towards Jewish students alone, but as integral wellsprings of Western culture and the quest for truth. The Menorah Index takes seriously what happens around the seminar table, and it aims to help families and students understand what sort of intellectual formation can be gained at a given school.
Our assessment of the vitality of Jewish life on campus emphasizes three core dimensions: rabbinic leadership, religious infrastructure, and the campus climate regarding Israel. The presence of dedicated, knowledgeable rabbis is essential for guiding observant students and for inspiring those seeking deeper Jewish commitment. We also evaluate the quality and accessibility of kosher dining options; support for Shabbat-observant students; the presence of vibrant Orthodox student groups and regular prayer services; the existence of an eruv, thus enabling observant Jews to carry objects outdoors on Shabbat; and seamless accommodations for students pursuing pre-college study in Israel.
Prevailing attitudes toward Zionism and Israel are obviously central to what has attracted so much attention to campus life and raised so many concerns about Jewish safety. The Menorah Index will evaluate Israel’s role in campus life, tracking the presence of Zionist student groups and opportunities for building a deeper connection to the Jewish state, including opportunities for study abroad in Israel. We will also assess the nature and magnitude of anti-Zionist activity, including student government proclamations endorsing BDS measures. And we will assess the record of each university in confronting lawless anti-Israel behavior.
We will situate our analysis of anti-Semitic behavior in a much broader context: the culture of free inquiry, rule of law, and academic meritocracy. We will elevate institutions that uphold civil discourse, resist ideological conformity, and foster genuine intellectual engagement. We will celebrate schools where robust debate on big ideas takes precedence over ideological orthodoxy, while also recognizing that intellectual freedom should not replace the responsibility of universities to exhibit real intellectual judgment about what is worth studying and what is not; and that freedom of speech is not a license for unhinged radicalism. Institutions that rank highly in this category will tend to promote the pursuit of truth and protect speakers from mob intimidation or disruptive behavior. When evaluating schools, we will ask whether intellectual seriousness is valued and preserved; whether all groups are treated fairly and equally; whether lawless behavior is tolerated; and whether admissions decisions are based on merit or identity politics.
The fourth and final category examines university leadership—the single most determinant factor in an institution’s future. We will elevate presidents, provosts, and trustees who demonstrate a genuine commitment to renewing classical liberal education, defending free inquiry, and welcoming Jewish students and Zionist ideas. We will assess the actual track record of each academic leader, and we will assess the quality of board stewardship in ensuring that universities remain true or return to their highest and noblest purpose.
The Menorah Index aims to be more than another college guide. It is an effort to help reinforce and renew the animating purposes of the great American college, and to illuminate for Jewish families a new way of thinking about where to attend college and why it matters. It is now clear to the broader public that something has gone profoundly wrong in the American academy, and the Jews have served as signposts of a broader cultural crisis. Jewish students and faculty members have been targets of harassment on the quad, and the Jewish ideas and texts that once helped inspire Western culture and shape the institutions of American constitutionalism too often lie abandoned or abused in many university classrooms.
Yet signs of renewal are emerging. While some universities collapse into ideological conformity, moral confusion, and administrative bloat, others are rediscovering their purpose—creating new centers, schools, and honors programs where rigorous thinking, honest debate, and serious engagement with our civilization’s deepest wisdom, greatest achievements, and enduring virtues can flourish. The Menorah Index will shine a Jewish light on these new citadels in the making: schools that welcome Jewish students and honor the Jewish contribution to the unfolding drama of Western civilization. Where the Menorah spirit shines brightest—those are the institutions that will become the great ivory towers of the 21st century, restoring the Hebraic soul of America from our generation to the next.
To learn more about the Menorah Index and sign up for updates about its college and university assessments, visit MenorahIndex.org.
