The war broke out on the morning of October 7th, and the war about the war broke out later that day.

The next day, October 8th, the Battle of Ideas, Narratives, and Counter-Narratives was already being waged on college campuses across the country.

The protests gained intensity throughout the fall and winter, and come spring of 2024,

led to encampments, student takeover of administrative buildings.

Then there were congressional hearings, which led to university trustees firing their presidents.

Throughout it all, Jewish students were distracted,

disrupted, threatened, and in some cases subject to physical intimidation and abuse.

The academic year of 2023-24 was an Anus Horribilis for Jewish students on American campuses.

But for all the coverage and social media attention paid

to the Columbia's and UCLA's of the world, we might zoom out and ask whether the protest activity

was evenly distributed across American colleges and universities, or whether kinds of

activity like that were more common and tended to concentrate at certain kinds of schools.

Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. My guest this week is Mark Novikoff,

the associate editor of the Washington Monthly and a freelance writer. He is the author of an

article from this past June that asked that question, and found that the protests and

encampments correlate unmistakably to the tuition price, the level of student-body wealth,

and prestige of the university. As the school year begins once again, Mark sits down this week

to explain his findings and describe how he tested the proposition

that elite colleges are much more likely to be the home of pro-Gamas anti-Israel demonstrations.

One can draw all manner of conclusions about why that is, and we get into that sum,

briefly, near the end of our conversation.

But Mark's purpose here is to dispassionally explain the data he discovered,

...