Tensions are boiling over as America's top colleges respond to Hamas' terrorist attack on Israel

• Tensions have boiled over around how colleges are responding to Hamas' terrorist attack on Israel.
• Top institutions like Harvard, Yale, and Penn are facing backlash, including from major donors.
• The war has reignited the conversation around cancel culture and free speech on college campuses.

Tensions are running high at America's top colleges, as students, professors, and well-connected, wealthy alumni respond to Hamas' terrorist attack on Israel.

The long — and very complicated — story short: Backlash is brewing against a campus culture that some people say is taking open dialogue or free speech too far.

Israel has long been a contentious issue on college campuses, causing protests and counter-protests covered by college newspapers and discussed by alumni. But the brutal attack on Israel, and the war that has followed, has brought the conversation off the quads and into the spotlight.

As is often the case, Harvard took the main stage. On Sunday, following Hamas' terrorist attacks, a group of more than 30 student organizations, together dubbed the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups, released a joint statement that said the Israeli government was "entirely responsible for all unfolding violence." 

While the statement ignited dialogue among the Cambridge community Monday, it reached a fever pitch Tuesday, when billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, a Harvard alum and donor, called on the university to release the names of students in the groups that signed the letter, "so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members."

Other CEOs echoed Ackman's sentiment, and by Wednesday, a truck was seen driving through Harvard's campus with a digital billboard claiming to display the faces and names of students associated with the letter, calling them "Harvard's leading antisemites."

The University of Pennsylvania, another Ivy, has also been at the center of the conversation.

The CEO of Apollo Global Management — and a major Penn donor — Mark Rowan called on his fellow Penn alumni to "close their checkbooks" until the school's president and chairman of its board of trustees stepped down. His denouncement followed a month-long back-and-forth between the alumni, students, and the university around the Palestine Writes Literary Festival that took place on Penn's campus last month.

Other schools have also been caught up in the discourse, which shows no sign of stopping.

An online petition calling for the removal of a Yale professor who seemed to celebrate Hamas' attacks on Twitter has garnered more than 40,000 signatures; Stanford suspended a lecturer who was accused of singling out Jewish students in class; and opposing protests at Indiana University ended in a tense clash, according to the school's student newspaper.

At Columbia University in New York, an Israeli student was beaten with a stick after he said he confronted a woman who was tearing down flyers with names and pictures of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas, the campus's student newspaper first reported. A New York Police Department spokesperson confirmed the report to Insider. Police arrested and charged a suspect with one count of assault, the spokesperson said.

The very "real world" backlash to these campus conversations has, itself, caused a backlash.

Former US treasury secretary Larry Summers, a Harvard alum who also served as the school's president, criticized the school for its "silence" around Hamas' attacks and the student groups' letter. But Ackman, Summers said, was "getting a bit carried away." He called the investor's request for a list of names "the stuff of Joe McCarthy" during an appearance on Bloomberg TV.

Harvard economic professor Jason Furman also criticized Ackman, saying that "two wrongs do not make a right" and that a number of the students in the groups that signed the statement likely had nothing to do with it. He pointed to one Harvard alum who claimed they were harassed after being accused of contributing to the statement — despite graduating in 2021.

Call it cancel culture, consequence culture, or an attack on free speech, the public backlash has already resulted in changes.

At Harvard, the much-maligned student letter has been deleted, after several student groups retracted their support for it. An NYU law student publicly lost their post-grad job at a blue-chip firm after penning a statement blaming Israel for Hamas' attacks over the weekend. And at the University of Arizona, a pro-Palestine group cancelled a planned protest after it was condemned by the school's president.

As long as the war rages on in Israel and Gaza, so will the conflict on college campuses.

"If a university takes any position on these issues they're going to make people angry," Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told Insider. "But worse than that, they move themselves away from their core mission, which is to be the host of debates on campus."