Institutional Antisemitism: Governance Failure as Discrimination Mechanism {#institutional-antisemitism-governance-failure-as-discrimination-mechanism .Title}

Seth C. Oranburg¹

February 14, 2026, Draft

Abstract

Campus antisemitism is widely recognized as a crisis. Yet the dominant responses to it, whether federal coercion or university compliance, have failed to address its structural source. This Essay argues that “institutional antisemitism” is best understood not as individual prejudice scaled up, but as a governance phenomenon: the predictable consequence of accountability structures that permit organized factions to capture institutional authority while denying targeted groups any procedural recourse. Drawing on organizational theory and the author’s prior work theorizing elite universities as “sovereign charities,” this Essay defines institutional antisemitism as a term of art in legal scholarship and offers a practical analytical framework, the disentanglement matrix, for distinguishing protected expression from institutional discrimination. A review of the past year’s university settlements and federal interventions confirms that neither coercion nor compliance has remedied the underlying governance failure. The Essay concludes by proposing procedural reforms, centered on the fiduciary duty of obedience and stakeholder standing, that would make institutional antisemitism structurally less likely.

Introduction

Antisemitism on American campuses is not new. What is new is the frank acknowledgment, from university presidents and federal officials alike, that existing institutional structures have failed to address it.² In the two years since the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre of some 1,200 Israelis, American universities have witnessed encampments, exclusion zones, faculty boycotts, and the systematic intimidation of Jewish students.³ Survey data from Hillel International, the Anti-Defamation League, and StandWithUs confirm what Jewish students already know: large majorities have experienced or witnessed antisemitic incidents, and most lack confidence that their universities will respond.⁴ Seventy-eight percent of Jewish college students report concealing their religion to avoid harassment.⁵

The two dominant responses to this crisis have been federal coercion and institutional compliance. Neither has worked. In the year since the Trump administration began its campaign of conditional funding, six major universities have signed settlement agreements.⁶ Columbia paid $221 million. Brown committed $50 million. Cornell agreed to $60 million. Northwestern paid $75 million. Penn and Virginia modified policies without cash payments.⁷ Harvard, the wealthiest university in the world, won a sweeping victory in federal court in September 2025, only to face a continued appeal and the President’s demand for $1 billion in damages.⁸

Yet after all this, are Jewish students safer? The evidence says no. A report published this week by the AMCHA Initiative documents how faculty at three University of California campuses used their positions of departmental authority to advance a coordinated anti-Israel agenda that fueled harassment, exclusion, and intimidation of Jewish and pro-Israel students.⁹ The report found that 115 faculty at UCLA, 171 at Berkeley, and 55 at Santa Cruz signed academic boycott statements during the 2023-25 academic years, many of them department chairs with authority over hiring, curriculum, and programming.¹⁰ Campus antisemitism at those three schools surged. At UCLA, incidents against Jewish and Zionist students rose from four to 130 over a two-year period.¹¹

The AMCHA report’s conclusion deserves emphasis: “This is far bigger than a student discipline issue. It is a faculty governance failure.”¹² That diagnosis is correct, but it does not go far enough. Faculty governance does not exist in a vacuum. It operates through authority delegated from the board of trustees. When the board fails to enforce a duty of obedience to the institution’s stated mission, departmental sub-units are free to capture that delegated authority and deploy it against a specific minority. The governance failure, in other words, is not limited to faculty conduct. It runs through the entire institutional architecture of the American private university: self-perpetuating boards, hollow fiduciary duties, vague missions, and the absence of stakeholder standing to challenge any of it. In a companion article forthcoming in the Dartmouth Law Journal, I develop the concept of the “sovereign charity” to explain how elite private universities came to wield public power without public accountability.¹³ This Essay applies that structural analysis to a specific problem. It argues that what we observe on campuses is not merely antisemitism at universities; it is antisemitism by universities, which is to say, antisemitism that the institutional structure itself produces.

This Essay’s contribution is to define “institutional antisemitism” as a term of art in legal and organizational scholarship and to provide a practical analytical framework for identifying it. The definition is precise: institutional antisemitism is the condition in which an institution’s governance structures predictably and systematically fail to protect Jewish members from identity-based exclusion, while protecting other groups from comparable harms, because of structural features of the institution rather than the prejudice of any individual decision-maker. The analytical framework is what I call the “disentanglement matrix,” a two-by-two table that distinguishes individual from institutional action, and perspective-based from identity-based targeting. The bottom-right quadrant of that matrix, where institutional authority is deployed against an identity group, is where institutional antisemitism lives. The governance void makes it possible. Procedural reform can make it less likely.

The Essay proceeds as follows. Part I defines institutional antisemitism and distinguishes it from individual prejudice and cultural bias. Part II summarizes the governance void that enables it, drawing on the sovereign charity analysis. Part III introduces the disentanglement matrix. Part IV reviews the past year’s federal interventions as a natural experiment in coercion versus reform. Part V proposes structural remedies.

I. Defining Institutional Antisemitism

The term “institutional racism” entered public discourse through the work of Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, who in 1967 distinguished between individual acts of prejudice and the “established and respected forces in the society” that produce racial inequality without requiring any individual racist to pull a lever.¹⁴ Institutional racism operates through policies, practices, and procedures that produce discriminatory outcomes regardless of the intent of the people who administer them. The concept was a breakthrough because it shifted analytical focus from motive to mechanism.

No comparable concept has been developed for antisemitism in legal scholarship. The literature on campus antisemitism tends to focus on one of two registers: individual incidents (a student harassed, a swastika drawn, a professor’s hostile remark) or broad cultural claims (the “new antisemitism” thesis, which links anti-Zionism to older forms of Jew-hatred).¹⁵ Both registers are important. But neither captures the structural mechanism by which universities, as organizations, produce and sustain conditions hostile to Jewish participation.

The organizational theory literature provides the missing vocabulary. Mark Suchman’s foundational work on institutional legitimacy distinguishes between the perception that an organization’s actions are proper and the structural conditions that sustain or erode that perception.¹⁶ Henry Hansmann’s analysis of nonprofit governance identifies “voice” and “exit” as the two mechanisms by which stakeholders discipline institutional behavior; when both are absent, managerial autonomy becomes managerial impunity.¹⁷ Elinor Ostrom’s work on commons governance demonstrates that institutions which exclude affected parties from decision-making processes tend to produce outcomes that serve insiders at the expense of outsiders.¹⁸

These frameworks, taken together, suggest a definition. Institutional antisemitism is the condition in which an organization’s governance structures predictably and systematically fail to protect Jewish members from identity-based exclusion, while protecting other groups from comparable harms, due to structural features of the organization rather than the prejudice of any individual decision-maker. Three elements warrant emphasis.

First, the failure is predictable. It follows from features of institutional design, not from bad luck or bad actors. When a university’s board is self-perpetuating, its mission is vague, its fiduciary duties are unenforceable, and no stakeholder has standing to challenge governance decisions, the institution is structurally vulnerable to capture by whichever faction is most organized. The faction need not be antisemitic in intent. It need only be indifferent to Jewish exclusion, or willing to tolerate it as a cost of pursuing other goals.

Second, the failure is asymmetric. This is what I have elsewhere called “inclusion asymmetry”: the selective enforcement of civil rights protections such that some groups receive robust institutional support while others are left exposed. In testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights last month, I described the experience of inclusion asymmetry from the perspective of a Jewish law professor whose university denied him travel funding to testify about antisemitism while supporting comparable advocacy for other groups.¹⁹ This Essay describes the mechanism that produces that experience. Universities maintain offices, programs, and policies dedicated to racial equity, gender inclusion, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and disability access. These are good things. But when a university’s civil rights infrastructure treats antisemitism as “political activity” rather than identity-based exclusion, the asymmetry is structural, not incidental.²⁰

Third, the mechanism is governance. Institutional antisemitism is not merely a cultural atmosphere or a collection of individual bad acts. It is the product of governance structures that (a) allow organized factions to capture institutional authority through departmental resolutions, faculty senate votes, or administrative discretion; (b) provide no procedural mechanism for affected stakeholders to challenge that capture; and (c) selectively enforce inclusion norms, protecting some identity groups while leaving others exposed. When all three conditions are present, antisemitism does not need a champion. It needs only an absence of constraint.

The AMCHA report on the University of California illustrates all three conditions. Faculty at UCLA, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz organized through Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters that formed after October 7, 2023.²¹ These groups used existing governance channels, specifically departmental authority over hiring, curriculum, and programming, to advance anti-normalization campaigns that called for severing all institutional ties with Israel and rejecting speakers, programming, and partnerships connected to the Jewish state.²² Department-sponsored events became “systematically anti-Israel and overwhelmingly featured BDS-supporting speakers without balancing perspectives.”²³ Jewish and pro-Israel students reported escalating harassment. Yet the UC Board of Regents lacked governance mechanisms to intervene, because faculty governance over academic programming is largely self-regulating. No student or faculty member had standing to challenge the department-level decisions that produced these outcomes. The governance void did its work.

This is institutional antisemitism. Not because every faculty member who signed a boycott statement hates Jews. Many, perhaps most, believe they are expressing legitimate political views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the institutional effect is exclusion along identity lines, accomplished through governance channels that offer the excluded group no recourse. The intent of any individual participant is beside the point. The structure does the work.

II. The Governance Void

Why do American universities lack the governance mechanisms to prevent institutional antisemitism? The full answer requires a doctrinal account that I have provided elsewhere.²⁴ This Part offers a summary of the structural conditions that make institutional antisemitism possible, so that the reader unfamiliar with university governance law can follow the analysis that comes after.

American elite private universities are what I term “sovereign charities”: institutions that wield public influence, receive public subsidy, and perform public functions, yet govern themselves as private corporations answerable to no external constituency.²⁵ The term captures a structural paradox. These are not public agencies subject to democratic oversight. They are not market actors subject to shareholder discipline. They are nonprofit corporations whose boards select their own successors, define their own missions, and interpret their own compliance with those missions, all while receiving billions in federal grants, tax exemptions, and student aid.

Three features of this architecture are relevant here.

The first is the self-perpetuating board. Every colonial-era university charter, and most modern ones, vest ultimate governance authority in a board of trustees that selects its own members.²⁶ Harvard’s Corporation has governed by internal appointment since 1650. Yale’s “Successors to the original Trustees” elect their own replacements. At most elite private universities, faculty, students, alumni, and the public have no binding role in governance. They may advise. They do not decide.²⁷

The second is the hollow duty of obedience. Nonprofit law nominally requires trustees to act within the institution’s stated mission.²⁸ This “duty of obedience” is supposed to constrain mission drift. But when trustees write the mission statement themselves, and when that statement is so vague as to be unenforceable, the constraint is illusory. Consider Harvard’s mission: “to educate future leaders” and “strive toward a more just, fair, and promising world.”²⁹ What set of trustee decisions would violate that language? The answer, practically speaking, is none. Courts defer to trustees’ own interpretations under the business judgment rule, and state attorneys general rarely allocate resources to challenge even flagrant mission drift.³⁰ The duty of obedience is, as Alan Palmiter has written, the “forgotten fiduciary obligation.”³¹

The third is the absence of stakeholder standing. In a for-profit corporation, shareholders can bring derivative suits to discipline the board. In a nonprofit university, no comparable mechanism exists. Students, faculty, alumni, and donors generally lack standing to challenge governance decisions.³² The state attorney general is the nominal enforcer, but as Evelyn Brody has documented, attorneys general are chronically under-resourced and politically disinclined to take on wealthy, prestigious institutions.³³ The result is structural impunity.

These three features, taken together, create what I call the governance void: a zone of institutional life in which power is exercised without meaningful constraint, accountability, or recourse. The governance void is the structural precondition for institutional antisemitism. It does not cause antisemitism in the way that a virus causes disease. But it creates the conditions under which antisemitism can take root in institutional structures and resist removal, much as an immunodeficiency does not cause infection but makes the body unable to fight it.

The analogy is useful in another respect. When the body’s immune system fails, the solution is not to attack the body from the outside. It is to restore the immune system’s capacity. Federal coercion is the equivalent of bombarding a patient with external interventions while ignoring the compromised immune system. The settlements of 2025 prove the point.

III. The Disentanglement Matrix

If institutional antisemitism is a governance phenomenon, practitioners and policymakers need a tool for identifying it. The challenge is that campus controversies involving Jewish students and Israel-related speech present a tangle of competing claims: academic freedom, political expression, identity-based exclusion, and institutional authority all run together. A professor who refuses to write a recommendation letter for a student applying to Tel Aviv University might be exercising protected conscience or committing identity-based discrimination. A department that passes a resolution endorsing the academic boycott of Israeli institutions might be engaging in protected collective expression or deploying institutional authority against an identity group.

The disentanglement matrix sorts these cases along two axes. The first axis concerns who is acting: an individual (a person exercising personal judgment) or an institution (an entity deploying organizational authority, resources, or official channels). The second axis concerns what is targeted: a perspective (a political viewpoint, policy position, or ideological commitment) or an identity (a people, ethnicity, national origin, or religious group).

The combination produces four quadrants:

                         **Perspective-Based**   **Identity-Based**   -------------------------- ----------------------- ----------------------------   **Individual Action**      Protected Expression    Personal Discrimination

Institutional Action Governance Question Institutional Antisemitism

——————————————————————————-

Table 1. The Disentanglement Matrix.

Each quadrant warrants brief discussion.

Individual action targeting a perspective is the domain of protected expression. A professor who declines to collaborate with a colleague over disagreement about Israeli settlement policy is exercising academic freedom. A student who refuses to join a study group that supports Zionism is making a personal choice. These acts may be distasteful, but they are protected. No governance reform should reach them.

Individual action targeting an identity is personal discrimination. A professor who refuses to write recommendation letters for students because they are Israeli, or who grades Jewish students more harshly, is engaged in identity-based exclusion. This is already prohibited by Title VI and Title VII. The problem here is enforcement, not definition.

Institutional action targeting a perspective raises a governance question. When a university divests from fossil fuels through proper board channels, or when a faculty senate passes a resolution criticizing a foreign government’s policy, the action deploys institutional authority in service of a political perspective. Reasonable people disagree about whether universities should take such positions. The important point is that these decisions, even when controversial, are procedurally cognizable. They pass through governance channels. They can be debated, challenged, and reversed through those same channels.

Institutional action targeting an identity is institutional antisemitism. When a department uses its authority over programming and curriculum to advance an anti-normalization campaign that systematically excludes Israeli and Jewish perspectives; when a faculty governance body passes a resolution endorsing an academic boycott that, in operation, excludes scholars on the basis of national origin; when a university’s diversity infrastructure devotes resources to every marginalized group except Jews; when campus facilities are converted into exclusion zones from which Jewish students are physically barred, as occurred at UCLA,³⁴ the institution is deploying its authority against an identity group. This is the bottom-right quadrant. This is institutional antisemitism.

The critical analytical move is this: institutional antisemitism occurs when identity-based exclusion is laundered through the institutional-action channel and relabeled as perspective-based. Academic boycotts of Israel claim to target a political perspective (Zionism, Israeli government policy, occupation). But in operation, they target an identity: Israeli scholars are excluded because of their nationality, and Jewish scholars who maintain ties to Israeli institutions are excluded because of their ethnic and religious connections to the targeted state. The boycott does not ask whether an individual Israeli scholar personally supports any particular policy. It excludes categorically. That is identity-based targeting accomplished through institutional channels.

The laundering works through what might be called a jurisdictional retreat. The act itself sits in the bottom-right quadrant of the matrix: a department deploys institutional authority to exclude on the basis of identity. But when challenged, the actors retreat to the top-left quadrant, claiming the protection of individual academic freedom and political expression. A faculty senate votes to endorse an academic boycott of Israel. That is institutional action targeting an identity. When a Jewish student or colleague objects, the response is: “We are merely expressing our individual political views through shared governance.” The institutional character of the act disappears. The identity-based effect disappears. All that remains, in the defender’s framing, is protected speech by individual academics. The matrix makes the retreat visible. It forces the question: was this act taken through institutional channels, using institutional authority? If so, it is institutional action, and the “academic freedom” defense does not apply to the institution. Individual professors retain their right to speak. Departments do not retain a right to boycott.

The governance void makes this laundering possible. Because no stakeholder has standing to challenge a department-level boycott resolution, and because the duty of obedience does not constrain a board that wrote its own mission in language too vague to violate, there is no procedural mechanism to force the institution to distinguish between perspective-based and identity-based action. The disentanglement matrix provides the analytical vocabulary. But without governance reform, the vocabulary has no forum in which to operate.

A brief note on the matrix’s limits. The line between “perspective” and “identity” is not always crisp. Anti-Zionism and antisemitism are not identical, and this Essay does not claim they are. Many people hold critical views of Israeli government policy without harboring animus toward Jews. The matrix does not ask about individual belief. It asks about institutional effect. When institutional action produces systematic exclusion along identity lines, regardless of the stated rationale, the bottom-right quadrant applies. The question is not whether the boycotters intended to target Jews. The question is whether the institutional action, assessed by its operational effect, excludes on the basis of identity. If it does, the governance structure that permitted it, and failed to provide recourse against it, has produced institutional antisemitism.

IV. The Natural Experiment

The past year has provided something close to a controlled experiment in whether federal coercion can remedy institutional antisemitism. The results are in. It cannot.

Between April 2025 and November 2025, the Trump administration froze billions of dollars in federal funding to major universities, launched Title VI investigations into more than sixty institutions, and conditioned the restoration of funds on sweeping changes to governance, speech policy, admissions, and institutional mission.³⁵ The stated justification was combating antisemitism. The operational effect was a campaign of financial pressure unprecedented in the history of American higher education.³⁶

Universities responded in two ways. Most complied. Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, Penn, and Virginia each signed agreements that included some combination of financial payments, policy changes, and monitoring provisions.³⁷ Harvard resisted, won a district court ruling that the funding freeze violated the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act, and now faces an appeal to the First Circuit.³⁸

What did compliance produce? The settlements required universities to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, appoint liaisons for Jewish students, conduct campus climate surveys, and submit admissions and hiring data.³⁹ Columbia agreed to screen prospective international students for commitment to “civil discourse.”⁴⁰ Northwestern reversed commitments it had made to pro-Palestinian protesters regarding investment transparency and dedicated space for Middle Eastern and Muslim students.⁴¹ Brown agreed to provide women athletes with locker rooms based on biological sex and to adopt the administration’s definitions of “male” and “female,” a provision that had nothing to do with antisemitism.⁴²

Notice what none of these settlements required: governance reform. Not one settlement mandated changes to board composition. Not one expanded stakeholder standing. Not one strengthened the fiduciary duty of obedience. Not one required mission specificity sufficient to constrain future board discretion. The settlements addressed symptoms. They left the disease untouched.

This should surprise no one who understands the structure of the problem. Federal coercion, as I argued in a prior essay, represents one of four structural postures available in university governance.⁴³ In a matrix organized by source of authority (university or government) and mode of authority (consent or power), federal coercion occupies the government-power quadrant. It substitutes executive fiat for institutional self-governance. It can compel compliance. It cannot produce legitimacy.

The settlements prove the point in real time. Columbia paid $221 million. Did Columbia reform its board? No. Did Columbia create stakeholder standing for faculty or students to challenge department-level boycott resolutions? No. Did Columbia adopt a mission statement specific enough to be enforced against trustees who tolerate identity-based exclusion? No. Columbia wrote a check and moved on. The governance void remains.

Harvard’s case is instructive from the opposite direction. A federal judge found that the administration’s funding freeze violated Harvard’s First Amendment rights and failed to follow required administrative procedures.⁴⁴ The judge accused the administration of using antisemitism as a “smokescreen” for a broader political agenda.⁴⁵ This ruling was correct on the law. But it does nothing to address the governance failure that left Jewish students at Harvard exposed in the first place. Harvard won in court. Jewish students did not win on campus.

The administration’s response to Harvard’s judicial victory was to escalate, not reform. In February 2026, President Trump demanded $1 billion in damages and declared that the administration wants “nothing further to do, into the future, with Harvard University.”⁴⁶ This is not a governance strategy. It is a grudge. And it illustrates the core problem with the coercion model: the goal of federal intervention is not the protection of Jewish students, but the subordination of institutional autonomy to executive will.

Meanwhile, the AMCHA report on the University of California, published this week, shows that the governance failure persists at institutions that were never even targeted by the federal campaign.⁴⁷ UC campuses are public universities subject to state oversight by the Board of Regents. They were not among the sixty institutions that received Title VI warning letters. Yet faculty governance failure at UCLA, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz produced some of the worst antisemitic conditions in the country. The report’s recommendation is telling: it calls on the Board of Regents to “bar academic departments and units from using their UC association to promote boycotts and political agendas” and to “prohibit political activism in the classroom.”⁴⁸ In other words, the report calls for governance reform. It calls for the Board of Regents to exercise oversight authority over faculty governance bodies that have been captured by organized factions.

This is the lesson of the past year’s natural experiment: coercion without governance reform is a shell game. Universities pay fines, adopt definitions, appoint liaisons, and submit to monitoring. Then the political winds shift, and the compliance framework collapses. The settlements of 2025 are already showing strain. Harvard’s appeal may invalidate the legal basis for conditional funding. A new administration could reverse every policy the current one has imposed. None of this is durable because none of it addresses the governance void.

V. Toward Structural Reform

If institutional antisemitism is a governance phenomenon, the remedy must be governance reform. This Part sketches three reforms that are procedural rather than substantive. They do not require universities to adopt any particular values, admit any particular students, or reach any particular conclusions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They require only that universities govern themselves through structures that make institutional capture harder, stakeholder recourse available, and identity-based exclusion cognizable.

Standing reform. The most immediate structural need is to give stakeholders a legal mechanism to challenge institutional antisemitism when it occurs. Under current law, only the state attorney general has standing to enforce fiduciary duties against nonprofit boards, and attorneys general almost never do so.⁴⁹ Faculty, students, alumni, and donors are shut out. The result is that department-level boycott resolutions, anti-normalization campaigns, and selective enforcement of inclusion policies are effectively unreviewable.

Legislatures could expand standing by enacting statutes that permit affected stakeholders, defined by sustained institutional ties, to petition courts for review of governance decisions that produce identity-based exclusion. The model is the corporate derivative action, adapted for the nonprofit context. The California Supreme Court’s decision in Turner v. Victoria supports this approach. There, the court recognized that restricting standing to insiders could undermine enforcement by enabling retaliatory ouster, and acknowledged that legislatures may authorize stakeholder enforcement mechanisms for charitable entities.⁵⁰ Procedural safeguards, such as demand requirements and fee-shifting for frivolous claims, can prevent harassment litigation while opening the courthouse door to meritorious challenges.

Duty of obedience reform. The duty of obedience, properly revitalized, could constrain the governance void that makes institutional antisemitism possible. State legislatures could adopt statutory definitions of the duty that require mission statements to include specific, measurable commitments to equal treatment of all students regardless of religion, ethnicity, or national origin. Such specificity would give courts and attorneys general a standard against which to assess deviation. The Robertson v. Princeton litigation, though settled, demonstrated that when mission specificity is justiciable, courts can evaluate whether institutional behavior is consistent with fiduciary duty.⁵¹ What is needed is not more litigation, but clearer benchmarks that make the threat of litigation credible.

Operational test reform. The IRS could reinterpret its Section 501(c)(3) operational test to require that tax-exempt educational institutions demonstrate measurable equal access for all identity groups as a condition of exemption. The model exists: nonprofit hospitals must satisfy a “community benefit standard” that includes concrete requirements for emergency room access, Medicaid patient care, and community health initiatives.⁵² Universities face no comparable requirement. A reformed operational test could condition tax exemption on demonstrated compliance with antidiscrimination obligations, including obligations not to tolerate institutional-level identity-based exclusion. This would not be a mandate about what to teach. It would be a condition of public subsidy: if you receive the benefit of tax exemption, you must ensure that your governance structures do not produce systematic exclusion of identity groups from full institutional participation.

These three reforms share a common logic. They do not impose ideological requirements on universities. They do not tell boards what to believe or whom to hire. They create procedural conditions under which institutional antisemitism is structurally less likely to emerge and, when it does, structurally more likely to be challenged.

Conclusion

The problem of campus antisemitism will not be solved by settlements, fines, or executive orders. The problem is structural. It lives in the governance void: in the self-perpetuating boards that answer to no one, in the missions so vague they constrain nothing, in the fiduciary duties so hollow they protect no one, and in the standing doctrines so restrictive that no one can challenge any of it. Coercion addresses the symptoms. Compliance addresses the optics. Neither addresses the structure.

This Essay has tried to do something different. It has defined institutional antisemitism as a term of art in organizational theory and law, grounded in governance structures rather than individual prejudice. It has offered the disentanglement matrix as a practical tool for sorting the tangled controversies that arise when speech, identity, and institutional authority collide. And it has proposed reforms that are procedural, not substantive: standing, obedience, and the operational test.

The deeper claim is that governance reform benefits everyone, not only Jews. The same governance void that permits institutional antisemitism permits other forms of institutional capture, other forms of selective inclusion, other forms of accountability arbitrage. Fixing the structure protects all stakeholders, because the structure is the problem. Antisemitism thrives in the governance void where “mission” has been replaced by managerial appeasement. Restoring meaningful governance constraints does not guarantee that Jewish students will be protected. But it creates the conditions under which protection becomes possible, and the conditions under which failure becomes accountable.

The task is not to reinvent university governance. It is to rebind it, through law, to the public purposes that justify it.⁵³