Is the Campus Crackdown Good for America? – Live with Noah Pollak and Jonathan Rauch

SAPIR is a journal exploring the future of the American Jewish community and its intersection with cultural, social, and political issues. It is published by Maimonides Fund with Bret Stephens serving as Editor-in-Chief. Subscribe at www.sapirjournal.org/subscribe. Since October 7, American universities have become the center of a fierce debate over antisemitism, free speech, civil rights, and the proper role of government. In this special live debate, recorded at the Israel on Campus Coalition's National Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., host Aviva Klompas moderates a discussion on the resolution: "The campus crackdown is good for America." Noah Pollak and Jonathan Rauch debate whether federal intervention has made campuses safer for Jewish students, where the line between oversight and overreach should be drawn, and how universities should balance civil rights, free expression, and institutional independence. This debate is part of the SAPIR Debates, a forum for thoughtful disagreement on some of the most consequential issues facing the American Jewish community today. Guest Bios Noah Pollak is a political appointee in the Trump administration. He is Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Education, where he works on higher education policy and civil rights enforcement, and he’s a Senior Advisor in the Treasury Department's Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and a board member of Heterodox Academy. He is the author of The Constitution of Knowledge and has written extensively on free speech, liberal democracy, and the institutions that sustain them.