Campus antisemitism fell 83% in 2025 — and the movement against Jewish students just changed clothes

On Wednesday, May 7, 2026, Inside Higher Ed reported the headline number from the Anti-Defamation League’s Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2025: campus antisemitic incidents fell sixty-six percent year-over-year — 1,694 down to 583. Anti-Israel protest-related campus incidents fell eighty-three percent. Vandalism, fifty-one. Physical assaults, seventy-two. The story carried through the news cycle in the language of repair: universities cracked down, encampments came off the quads, the numbers came down with them.

Two weeks earlier, on April 23, Jonathan Falk of Hillel International had written, in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a sentence that should have been the lede on every report-card story that followed: “More than half of what Jewish students experience now shows up online: in posts, anonymous messages, group chats, and the steady churn of conspiracy and incitement.” His framing of the underlying condition: “Campus antisemitism is fundamentally a climate problem, not a conduct-management problem. A campus can look calmer and still be deeply unhealthy.”

The encampments came down. The movement that built them — a movement whose stated enemy is the State of Israel and whose felt enemy, in the lived experience of forty-one percent of Jewish students on these campuses, is Jewish students themselves — did not dissolve. It changed clothes. It is now in faculty senates, in anonymous apps, on commencement podiums, and in federal court. The architecture is intact. Naming the architecture, and naming whom the architecture is built against, is the work.

What the headline number actually measures

The ADL audit counts incidents that look like incidents — assaults, vandalism, the protest-adjacent harassment that can be physically logged and reported. When ninety-four percent of the 150 schools in the ADL’s 2026 report card now prohibit unauthorized encampments and enforce those prohibitions with suspensions, expulsions, and settlements, the things the audit counts go down. They have. They should.

What the audit cannot count is what migrates. The Hillel/ADL/College Pulse student survey reports eighty-three percent of Jewish students have experienced or witnessed antisemitism since October 7, 2023; forty-one percent feel the need to hide their Jewish identity; only twenty-seven percent feel comfortable with others on campus knowing their views on Israel. Those figures do not track the audit. They track the climate. The climate is what the architecture produces.

The faculty layer

In September 2025, the ADL with the Academic Engagement Network published Faculty Under Fire. Of 209 Jewish faculty surveyed, 73.2 percent observed anti-Jewish activities by faculty, administrators, or staff. Forty-four percent were aware of a Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapter on their campus. Of those, 77.2 percent reported FJP-organized anti-Israel programming, 79.4 percent FJP-organized protests, 84.8 percent FJP-endorsed divestment campaigns. These are faculty observing faculty.

The Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine Network calls itself “a decentralized, national network of more than 130 affiliated campus chapters.” It commits to “protect and defend university students, faculty and staff who are defamed or disciplined for supporting BDS or otherwise advocating for Palestinian human rights.” Read that twice. The faculty network’s stated function includes catching and protecting the students the universities suspended.

When student chapters were suspended — Brown, Brandeis, Columbia, George Washington, Rutgers, Tufts, Temple, American, Vermont, and most recently Duke (April 15, 2026) over an Instagram post depicting “U.S. Imperialism” and “Zionism” as foaming pigs — the faculty network kept growing. Faculty have tenure, stipends, the prestige to fill auditoriums, and the institutional memory to outlast any one cohort of disciplined undergraduates. A movement that loses its students loses a year. A movement that keeps its faculty loses nothing. The Washington Times documented the pattern across the University of California system on February 11, 2026: faculty activism as the institutional throughline of the post-encampment year.

The online layer

In January 2024, before the May 2024 encampment wave, the ADL had already documented Sidechat and Yik Yak — Sidechat acquired Yik Yak in 2023 — carrying death threats, intimidation, and doxxing against Jewish students at Tufts, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and elsewhere. Columbia’s then-president Minouche Shafik called Sidechat “poisonous” in April 2024 testimony. The UNC system has since moved to block the apps on campus networks. They are still running.

Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism, in its 500-page April 2025 final report — fifty listening sessions, nearly 2,300 affiliates surveyed — documented Sidechat-borne harassment, “politicized instruction” in classroom curricula, and doxxing trucks circulating outside Harvard Yard with students’ faces and personal information. These are venues a physical-incident audit cannot count and a campus-conduct office cannot dismantle. Falk’s “more than half” figure is consistent with what Harvard’s task force, the ADL Sidechat record, and the post-October-7 climate surveys have been documenting separately since 2024. The data converge.

The platform layer

The 2024 encampments produced four cascades the news cycle has stopped following.

Columbia paid $221 million on July 23, 2025 — $200 million over three years to the federal government, plus a separate $21 million EEOC class settlement opened to claimants December 4, 2025 for Title VII workplace harassment between October 7, 2023 and July 23, 2025. EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas: “Every employee deserves an environment free from harassment tied to their faith or Jewish identity.” Acting President Claire Shipman acknowledged “painful, unacceptable incidents” and that “reform was and is needed.” Columbia disciplined more than seventy students — probations, suspensions, degree revocations, expulsions.

UCLA paid $6.45 million on July 29, 2025 in Frankel v. Regents of the University of California, the case in which a federal court — for the first time, on August 13, 2024 — enjoined a university over its handling of pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations, characterizing the encampment as a “Jew Exclusion Zone.” Hours after the settlement, DOJ issued UCLA a notice of violation. In February 2026, DOJ sued the university. Harvard was sued by the White House on March 20, 2026: the DOJ complaint alleges Harvard remained “deliberately indifferent” to “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” antisemitic harassment after October 7, 2023, and seeks recovery of “billions in taxpayer funding” plus a court-appointed compliance monitor.

And on May 4, 2026, the outgoing chair of the University of Michigan Faculty Senate, Derek Peterson, used the spring commencement podium to praise “pro-Palestinian student activists, who have, over these past two years, opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.” The phrase “Israel’s war” is doing work the historical record does not back. The war began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas led an invasion of Israeli communities, murdered roughly 1,200 people, and seized 251 hostages — many of whom remain in Gaza, where Hamas continues to operate from inside the civilian infrastructure it embedded in for that purpose. President Domenico Grasso apologized. More than a thousand faculty, staff, and students signed a letter demanding he withdraw the apology. The same chair. The same cause. A venue the encampment never had. The settlement, the federal injunction, the federal lawsuit, the commencement podium — these are not aftershocks. They are the new venues. The architecture moved.

Where to check every claim

The ADL’s Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2025 and the Inside Higher Ed summary are the source for the 66/83/51/72 decline figures — read the methodology, it counts incidents, not climate. Jonathan Falk’s JTA op-ed is the source for the “more than half online” figure and the climate-versus-conduct framing; Falk is Hillel International’s Senior VP for Campus Solutions and writes from inside the data Hillel collects.

The ADL’s September 2025 Faculty Under Fire is the source for the 73.2 percent figure. The Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine Network “about us” page carries the 130-chapter count and the protect-the-disciplined commitment in their own words; the ADL backgrounder on FSJP is the third-party documentation. The Washington Times UC piece documents the system-level throughline.

The JTA Columbia settlement coverage and the EEOC payout notice source the settlement figures and the Andrea Lucas quote. The Crimson Harvard lawsuit piece carries the DOJ filing language. The Washington Times UCLA settlement piece is the source for “Jew Exclusion Zone” and the $6.45 million breakdown. The Michigan Daily and Jerusalem Post both carry the May 4 commencement quote. The Crimson task-force coverage, the ADL Sidechat documentation, and the Jewish Insider Duke piece source the online and chapter-suspension layers. Read them. Then ask which story the headline number tells, and which story the documents tell.

---

A movement is not the same thing as the form it last took. The encampment was a form. The form was suppressed. The movement — its enemy, its cause, its in-group — was not. It moved into the venues enforcement could not reach. Faculty have tenure. Anonymous apps have anonymity. Commencement podiums have one chance and one microphone. Federal lawsuits last years.

To celebrate the eighty-three percent drop without naming the 130-chapter faculty network, the “more than half online” climate figure, the $221 million settlement, the “Jew Exclusion Zone” injunction, the White House lawsuit, and the commencement podium is to read the receipts and miss the ledger. The receipts say repair. The ledger says relocation — of a movement that targets Jewish students and the only Jewish state on earth, and that has now built itself into venues no encampment crackdown can reach. Relocation is what a movement does when its visible form is closed off. It is not failure. It is architecture working — against the people the architecture was built to work against.

Universities that read the audit headline and conclude they have solved a problem will find themselves writing the next $221 million check — and explaining to the next cohort of Jewish students why the venue moved while the climate did not. The honest work is not pretending the costume change was the curtain call. It is naming where the movement went, naming whom it operates against, building the climate measurement that catches it there, and refusing the relief of mistaking quiet quads for a quiet condition.

Read with us. Share when we earn it. Tell us when we miss.