Of the three things commonly blamed in the campus antisemitism debate, only one moves with the incident counts: across 20 universities, the documented spring-2024 protest-arrest count rises and falls with recorded antisemitic incidents at a correlation of 0.81, while foreign funding barely does (0.40) and school size less still (0.26). That is a coincidence of two separately kept records, not a cause, and both run high on the same prominent campuses. The debate usually fixes on the other two, a short list of named schools said to be the worst and foreign money said to be behind the campus protests; but the raw incident counts behind those rankings mostly measure how large and prominent a campus is, and adjusted per student the order changes. This report matched the three records, the foreign funding each campus discloses to the federal government, the antisemitic incidents each has logged, and the arrests at its spring-2024 protests, to see which move together.
This report measures what coincides with what in the records. It does not claim that any of these things causes another, it takes no position on the protests themselves, and it does not treat protest as antisemitism. The link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is a separate, contested question the Institute measures in its own report and does not adjudicate here. The corpus is 20 campuses, an illustrative set, not a representative sample of American higher education.
Key Findings
- Across 20 campuses, the documented spring-2024 protest-arrest count correlates with the recorded antisemitic-incident count at 0.81, far above foreign funding (0.40) or school size (0.26). Both counts concentrate on the same prominent campuses, so this is a coincidence of two records, not evidence that one produces the other. (Hanover Institute analysis, 2026.)
- The foreign-funding explanation is weak and full of exceptions. Cornell discloses the most foreign funding of the 20 ($4.2 billion) and sits mid-pack on incidents, while Brandeis, the University of Maryland, and the New School log high incident rates with little or no reportable foreign funding. (Hanover Institute analysis, 2026.)
- Raw incident counts mislead. The University of Texas at Austin records 101 incidents (a seeming hotspot) but only 2.3 per 1,000 students; Brandeis records 33 (seemingly quiet) but 9.1 per 1,000. The headline counts track size, not the per-student rate. (Hanover Institute analysis, 2026.)
- A peer-reviewed study of 349 institutions found foreign-funded campuses had elevated antisemitic incidents (Bass and colleagues, 2024), but its authors disclaim causation and call the result preliminary; the documented records here show the relationship is weak and not robust at this scale.
- Prominence inflates both sides of the comparison. Columbia is an extreme outlier (493 incidents, 55 per 1,000), and the most prominent campuses draw both the largest protests and the most incident-tracking, so part of every correlation here is attention, not phenomenon.
Do the headline campuses have the highest incident rate?
Not as the raw numbers suggest. Antisemitic-incident counts make headlines as totals, and totals reward size and prominence: the University of Texas at Austin (43,000 students) logs 101 incidents, the University of Maryland 179, both larger than Brandeis at 33. Adjusted for enrollment, the order changes. Texas falls to 2.3 incidents per 1,000 students and Brandeis rises to 9.1, near the top. The honest comparison is the rate, and by the rate the campus with the highest recorded rate is not always the one in the headline.
One campus stands apart on any measure. Columbia records 493 incidents and 55 per 1,000 students, five times the next-highest rate, the documented epicenter of the period and the single point that most shapes every pattern below.
Does the foreign money track the incidents?
Weakly, and not reliably. Plotted against each campus’s antisemitic-incident count, foreign funding produces a correlation of just 0.40, and the exceptions are the story. Cornell discloses $4.2 billion, the most of the 20, and records a middling incident rate. The University of Miami takes real money and has the third-lowest rate. In the other direction, Brandeis, the University of Maryland, and the New School all rank high on incidents with little or no reportable foreign funding (the New School and Cal Poly Humboldt fall below the federal $250,000 disclosure threshold entirely, yet log 47 and 20 incidents).
A larger peer-reviewed study points the same modest direction: across 349 institutions, those receiving foreign funding showed elevated antisemitic incidents (Bass and colleagues, 2024). But that study’s own authors call the finding correlational, disclaim causation, and label it preliminary, and at the scale of these 20 campuses the relationship is weaker still and does not sort the schools. The money is a talking point the records do not carry.
Then what does track the incidents?
The arrest counts, by a wide margin. Of three candidate measures, foreign funding, school size, and the documented spring-2024 protest arrests, only the arrest count moves with the incidents, at a correlation of 0.81, double the funding figure (0.40) and triple the effect of size (0.26).
This is a coincidence of two separately measured things, the arrests recorded at protests and the antisemitic incidents recorded by a monitoring database. It is not a claim that the protests are antisemitic or that they cause the incidents; those are different questions, and the report makes neither claim. What the records show is that the campuses where the protest activity was most intense are also, with few exceptions, the campuses where the most antisemitic incidents were logged.
How tight is the link between arrest counts and incident counts?
Strong but not deterministic, and the exceptions are the point. The University of Maryland and Cornell logged 179 and 121 incidents with no mass arrests at all. The campuses with the largest arrest counts, UCLA, Columbia, and New York University, are also among the highest on recorded incidents, and the campuses with no arrests, Miami, Touro, Binghamton, sit at the bottom, but the fit is not perfect, which is what keeps the relationship a correlation rather than a rule.
How much of this is just prominence?
Some of it, unavoidably. The same handful of prominent universities, Columbia above all, draw the largest protests, the most national coverage, and the most thorough incident-tracking by the databases and the press. Prominence can inflate both numbers at once: a campus in the spotlight accrues more recorded arrests and more recorded incidents than an equally affected campus no one is watching. That shared driver is part of why the correlation is as high as 0.81, and it is the reason this report stops at description. The records establish that protest intensity and incident counts move together across these campuses; they cannot separate how much of that is a real concentration of events from how much is a concentration of attention.
Methodology and limitations
This report presents an original Hanover Institute analysis built entirely on documented, third-party records; it generates no new survey data.
Provenance and sample. Three measures were compiled for 20 US universities. Foreign funding is each institution’s cumulative total of reported foreign gifts and contracts from the US Department of Education’s Section 117 disclosure dataset, a primary federal record. Antisemitic-incident counts are each campus’s record in the AMCHA Initiative database, which tracks campus antisemitic incidents from 2015 to the present; AMCHA is an advocacy-mission monitoring organization, labeled as such, and its counts reflect what it records, not an exhaustive census. Protest mobilization is the documented arrest count at each campus’s spring-2024 Gaza-solidarity protests, drawn from contemporaneous news reporting and arrest trackers; these counts are approximate. Enrollment figures are each institution’s published undergraduate total.
The 20 campuses were assembled in an earlier pass that deliberately oversampled both high-mobilization and high-Jewish-presence schools, so they are a canonical, illustrative set, not a random or representative sample; the correlations describe this group and do not generalize to American higher education.
Method and limitations. Correlations are Pearson coefficients between each measure and the incident count, reported raw and per 1,000 students; the funding figure is institution-wide while incidents are campus-wide, so the per-student funding figure is a rough normalization. The analysis is correlational and establishes no causation. The incident window (2015 to 2026) both predates and postdates the spring-2024 arrest window, which rules out any reading in which the 2024 protests produced the earlier incidents; the most likely source of the co-movement is the shared prominence that draws both larger protests and more thorough incident-tracking. Two confounds are load-bearing and are stated rather than corrected: institutional prominence drives protest scale, incident-reporting intensity, and news coverage together, so part of every correlation is attention; and the incident database and the arrest counts each carry their own coverage and definitional limits. The relationship between criticism of Israel and antisemitism is a contested question measured in a separate Institute report and is not adjudicated here; protest arrests and antisemitic incidents are treated only as two separately documented quantities. The one peer-reviewed study to test the funding-incident link directly (Bass and colleagues, 2024, across 349 institutions) found a correlation and explicitly disclaimed causation, a ceiling this smaller analysis respects.
Conclusion
So is campus antisemitism where the headlines and the funding debate place it? The records say no on both counts. The named-school rankings track size and prominence more than climate, and the foreign-money explanation, the loudest one, is the weakest of the three measures, mid-pack at the best-funded campus and high at several campuses with no foreign money at all. What moves with the incident counts is the protest-arrest tally, at 0.81 against funding’s 0.40, on the same prominent campuses that draw both the protests and the scrutiny, with Columbia, 493 incidents and 55 per 1,000 students, the documented outlier that anchors the pattern.
Why those two move together is the question the data opens and does not close. It might reflect a shared cause, the prominence that draws both the protests and the scrutiny; it might reflect something about the climate on the most mobilized campuses; it might be both. The measurement establishes the coincidence, not its cause, and it assigns no blame: protest activity and antisemitic incidents are counted here as separate documented things that happen to concentrate on the same campuses. That pattern matters because the public conversation concentrates on the measure that tracks the incidents least, the money, and little on the one that tracks them most, the protest-arrest count, though, as above, co-occurrence is not cause and prominence may drive both. What the records cannot say is why, and on a question this charged, the distance between what coincides and what causes is the whole point.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does this mean the protests cause antisemitic incidents?
No. The report measures only that protest arrests and antisemitic-incident counts are high on the same campuses, a correlation between two separately recorded numbers. It makes no causal claim, and a major shared driver, institutional prominence, inflates both at once.
Are the protests being equated with antisemitism here?
No. Protest activity and antisemitic incidents are counted here as distinct, separately documented things. Whether opposition to Israel shades into antisemitism is a contested question the Institute measures in a separate report and does not settle here.
So foreign funding has nothing to do with it?
Not what the records show. Foreign funding correlates with incidents weakly (0.40) and with many exceptions across these 20 campuses; a larger peer-reviewed study found a stronger association across 349 institutions but disclaimed causation. The funding is real and documented; what is not established is that it explains where incidents concentrate.
Why use a per-student rate instead of the raw counts?
Because raw counts reward size and prominence. A large, closely-watched university accumulates more recorded incidents than a small one with the same underlying climate, so the headline totals compare institutions on the wrong axis. The per-1,000-student rate is the like-for-like comparison.
How were the 20 campuses chosen, and can the findings generalize?
They were assembled to include both heavily mobilized campuses and campuses with large Jewish populations, so they are an illustrative set, not a representative sample. The correlations describe these 20 schools; they are not population estimates for US higher education.
Where do the numbers come from?
Foreign funding is from the US Department of Education’s Section 117 federal disclosure dataset; antisemitic-incident counts are from the AMCHA Initiative database (an advocacy-mission monitor, labeled as such); arrest counts are from contemporaneous news reporting on the spring-2024 protests.
Sources
- AMCHA Initiative, 2026. Antisemitism Tracker, campus antisemitic-incident database, 2015 to present. amchainitiative.org. Monitoring organization (advocacy mission).
- Bass, Michael, and colleagues, 2024. Foreign funding of U.S. higher education relates to sanctioning of scholars and antisemitism. Frontiers in Social Psychology, vol. 2. DOI 10.3389/frsps.2024.1408913. Peer-reviewed.
- Hanover Institute, 2026. What tracks campus antisemitic-incident counts: foreign funding, mobilization, and size across 20 campuses. Original analysis of third-party records. Institute research.
- US Department of Education, 1986 to present. Section 117 Foreign Gift and Contract Disclosures. foreignfundinghighered.gov. Primary federal record.