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A Jewish student looks at an anti-Israel encampment at Columbia University.
A Jewish student looks at an anti-Israel encampment at Columbia University in New York City on April 25, 2024. Photo by Leonardo Munoz/AFP via Getty Images.
Response To August’s Essay

August 11, 2025

The Future of Higher Education and the Jews: A Symposium

By The Editors

Leading thinkers situate the Jewish question in a larger discussion about how to strengthen, reform, and renew American universities.

For over a decade, Mosaic has been publishing essays and analysis on the prevalence of anti-Semitism in the universities, and other problems of intellectual and civilizational unravelling on campus. In the past few years, and especially since October 7, these concerns have become even more mainstream. 

Now that the alarm bells have been heard far and wide, and even in the halls of Congress, it’s time to move the conversation forward. And that’s what we aim to do this month at Mosaic. Eric Cohen and Sam Helyar’s essay, “A College Guide for the Perplexed” kicks off a monthlong conversation on the state and future of higher education in America. We’ll pay due attention to the unique dilemmas that Jewish students face, and also attention to the opportunities that Jewish ideas have to contribute. But we aim to situate these Jewish questions in the larger discussion about higher ed reform.

We’ve convened some remarkable people from inside and outside the universities—professors, college presidents, students, rabbis—to take up these questions.

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Responses to August ’s Essay