Hillel International doubled down last week on its Campus Climate Initiative, a program focused on working with and educating university administrators on antisemitism, believing that this style of cooperation is the best path forward to protect Jewish students, despite some calls in the Jewish world for a more aggressive response.

“Jewish people, Jewish leaders, have never had to confront this before. We have not developed, up until now, robust, targeted responses to a phenomenon of this scale,” Mark Rotenberg, Hillel’s senior vice president for university initiatives and general counsel and one of the developers of the program, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “And it’s not only Jewish students —- administrators are facing unprecedented problems and dilemmas.”

“It’s a long, long process,” he said. “We just have to put the shoulder to the wheel here and commit ourselves to sticking with this program and normalizing concern for Jewish student needs at the highest levels of colleges and universities. That’s really the only way that we’re going to see long-term improvements in the climate for our students.”

Last week, Hillel kicked off the sixth annual cohort of the Campus Climate Initiative, bringing more than 100 university administrators from 19 campuses to Washington for a conference. By collecting data, convening university administrators for learning and training opportunities and providing recommendations, CCI — which started in 2020 with seven schools — hopes to bridge gaps in understanding about antisemitism that Hillel believes has prevented universities from adequately protecting Jewish students. 

In August 2023, two months before Oct. 7 initiated a wave of antisemitic incidents across college campuses, CCI received $500,000 from the Pew Charitable Trusts for its work to combat antisemitism. At the time, CCI had only reached 50 campuses. The initiative has since ballooned, this year reaching a milestone of 100 participating campuses, with over 80 campuses participating in CCI’s presidential summit last fall. 

Rotenberg has found that as campus clashes and incidents of antisemitism have skyrocketed over the past year and a half, demand for the program has risen as well. In 2024-2025, the program had a cohort of 28 campuses, and last week, the conference had a waiting list, according to Rotenberg. “Now we’re at the stage where we get applications from schools that we didn’t even recruit,” Rotenberg said. 

After the Oct. 7 terror attacks in Israel, rapidly worsening campus dynamics meant CCI had to develop or rapidly accelerate a number of educational opportunities, according to Rotenberg. “This was really an emergency for many campuses,” he said. “The encampments and the vandalism and the obstruction of buildings and, frankly, criminal activity that was going on in these campuses last winter and spring was something that caught almost all administrators by surprise.”

In response, CCI rolled out a number of training opportunities for campus administrators, addressing the encampments, free speech law, academic freedom and providing guidance on the articulation and the enforcement of policies related to protests and demonstrations. “The simple message that we offered these schools is that while they have a very proud tradition of open inquiry, free expression and intellectual pluralism, those principles are negated when some members of their community are silenced, harassed, intimidated and threatened, and when the university’s normal teaching and learning and research activities are disrupted by others,” Rotenberg said. 

Since then, dozens of campuses across the country have adjusted their time, place and manner policies related to protest activity and free speech. According to Rotenberg, around half of them are schools that work with CCI. 

University of Michigan, one of several schools investigated by the Education Department for breaches of Title IV compliance post-Oct. 7 —- ultimately resulting in a settlement —  is a member of this year’s CCI cohort. According to Rabbi Davey Rosen, CEO of University of Michigan’s Hillel, the university’s administration has been enforcing its rules more consistently this year, and administrators have expressed interest in better understanding antisemitism. “There has been some positive change, but there’s a ways to go,” Rosen told eJP. 

According to Rosen, while the University of Michigan struggled when confronted with chaos on campus, many missteps were rooted in a lack of understanding, which he hopes CCI will be able to address. 

“There’s plenty of moments where there’s just a lack of awareness, and once there’s awareness, then I see people saying, ‘OK, I get it. I see it now. I understand. What can we do about it?’” Rosen said. “I think that’s been a part of why there’s an openness to participating in CCI. It took a lot of conversations for people to understand, but the president of the university wants to see this move forward.”

According to Rotenberg, especially after the upheaval of the last year and a half, real change in campus climate is going to take time. “This is a long process, changing the climate on campus for certain specific student segments. And the Jewish community must appreciate that making significant changes and improvements in the campus climate for Jewish students is a long-term necessity,” he said.