OPINION:
Parents of high schoolers are now the most powerful force in higher education. As they take their teens to visit colleges and guide them through the application process, they must have the courage to reject the elite schools that failed to protect students from the violent protests and disruptive activism we saw this past spring.
For too long, these schools have enjoyed their grand status in American society. Parents and employers watched young Americans on our college campuses celebrate the slaughter of innocent people in an Israeli village, rally in support of a terrorist organization, disrupt learning and campus life and attack Jews, both physically and verbally.
While much has been done to repair these broken institutions, parents hold the power to realize true reform. They must take the bold step of refusing to continue to feed the beast.
To give credit where credit is due, many universities have taken steps since summer to steer their institutions back to their mission: education and academic inquiry.
The University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, Harvard University and the University of California System have adopted institutional neutrality policies that ban schools from making statements on political issues that do not directly affect campuses. These policies reject social justice activism, which far-left professors and administrators stoked on campus for decades and finally erupted last spring as revolutionary students erected tent encampments, occupied buildings and committed millions of dollars’ worth of damage through vandalism.
The critical mass of schools cracking down on disruptive political protests directly responds to the parents, alumni and students who have refused to donate to their alma mater. The adage holds true: Money talks.
Media scrutiny has also made a difference. Campus Reform has published more than 1,200 articles on antisemitism in higher education since Oct. 7, 2023. Our coverage breaks down the academic jargon professors use to brainwash students into demonstrating for Hamas and Iran’s anti-American causes.
Parents spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to send their children to college. They deserve to know and understand why liberation theory, decolonization and anti-Zionism are not benign academic ideas but vehicles for activist professors and students to push anti-American activism in classrooms and on the quads.
The universities that have failed the worst are concentrated on California’s coasts and in the Northeast: Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University Harvard University and Yale University, for example.
These schools typically score highest on famous national school rankings. They rely on prestige, selective admission rates and alumni contributions to perpetuate their elite reputations. Families already started to reject these institutions when antisemitic protests celebrating Oct. 7 devolved into physical attacks, calls for genocide and occupations of campus grounds.
Harvard University, which had some of the most high-profile antisemitic protests, experienced a 5% enrollment decrease after a wave of high school seniors refused early decision acceptances because of the stigma of the school’s tolerance of hatred.
Emerson College acknowledged earlier this year that the size of the entering fall 2024 cohort was significantly below estimates because of the negative reputation it garnered for antisemitic activism on campus. That decrease led the school to lay off 10 staff members to cut costs.
We’re also seeing many high school students from the North choosing historically less prestigious schools in the South, where patriotism still prevails over anti-American demonstrations.
Congressional hearings and Title VI investigations have also made parents aware of the problems on college campuses. I filed 33 Title VI complaints against universities that failed to protect Jewish students during the fall 2023 semester to raise awareness and give a voice to the powerless on campuses.
Those complaints have resulted in 14 opened investigations, Brown University’s agreement to update its antidiscrimination policies and a pending resolution at Temple University. Such external intervention is necessary to rescue higher education from itself, but nothing cures moral rot like an evaporation of funds, applications and prestige.
A parent-led boycott would ratchet these numbers up and compel universities to undo the damage their administrations have enabled. The more families that say no, the more university leaders will act to restore civility and higher learning.
Universities depend on robust alumni giving and aspirational parents pushing their children to apply to “reach” schools to maintain their status in famous national university rankings. But those rankings have the power to confer prestige only because we let them tell us what makes a good education.
We are well on our way to restoring our higher education institutions. And parents will take us to the finish line.
It’s time for parents and their children to boycott.
• Zachary Marschall is editor in chief of the Leadership Institute’s Campus Reform and an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Kentucky.
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