The sentence:

“The correct ask in this report is not the ask of an institution being condemned. It is the ask of an institution being held to its own standard by people who still believe it can meet it.”

That authentic frontier gibberish—I’m still not sure what it means, and I’ve read it a dozen times—is in “A Narrowing Gate, Jewish Enrollment at Harvard and its Peers | 1967-2025,” a report by the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance. The report found that that Jewish undergraduate enrollment at Harvard University has dropped to about 7% in 2025, its lowest level since before World War II and the lowest among Ivy League schools with reliable data.

I was going to write about the report itself, but if Jewish alumni of Harvard end up writing like that, maybe its a good thing not as many Jewish students are attending Harvard.

This is the Executive Summary. The report seems to be implying that anti-Semitism at Harvard has to be the reason for the unexplained drop, because none of the other possible factors it identifies explain it. Apparently Jewish applications to the school haven’t fallen off sufficiently to cause a 50% reduction, though I don’t know why. On national television Harvard’s then-president Claudine Gay told a Congressional committee that she considered anti-Jewish demonstrations in Harvard Yard to be acceptable free speech, and was unable to articulate a basic truth, which is that anti-Semitic demonstrations on a college campus constitute unethical and intolerable conduct that creates a hostile environment for Jewish students. Gay’s eventually firing for scholarly misconduct (not mealy-mouthed acceptance of campus enmity toward a minority) could not have provided aspiring Jewish applicants much confidence.

We also learn from the report that Jewish alumni had to gather the data for the report because Harvard no longer compiles data on Jewish students.

All of that is interesting, but when I read that statement, I lost interest in examining the report further, and lost any confidence in the people who prepared it. Maybe it’s a hangover from listening to Kamala Harris and Joe Biden for four years and Donald Trump for a decade, but if someone can’t communicate clearly, I can’t have confidence that they are thinking clearly either.