WASHINGTON FREE BEACON: --------------------------- A graphic from a Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance Report outlines plummeting Jewish enrollment at Harvard and Yale, and growth at Brown. Harvard is following Brown University’s lead in recruiting students from Jewish day schools in the wake of a new report showing a steep decline in Jewish enrollment. That’s according to previously unreported remarks from Harvard College’s dean of admissions and financial aid William Fitzsimmons made at a Harvard Chabad shabbat dinner on Feb. 20. Weeks later, the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance found that Harvard’s Jewish undergraduate enrollment “stands at 7 percent today, the lowest level recorded since World War II and the lowest level of any Ivy league institution with reliable data.” The author of the report, Adrian Ashkenazy, said in an interview with our Ira Stoll that other universities “have not seen such severe drops,” and asked, “Why is Brown succeeding where Harvard failed?” Stoll writes: Since Fitzsimmons himself is not hostile and was in place both at Harvard’s Jewish peak and at its recent low ebb, it’s worth considering what or who else may be driving the decision making. There’s a pincer of anti-Israel students and faculty that are involved. Harvard’s anti-Israel student activists have infiltrated the admissions office and at one point even were posting pictures of themselves in keffiyehs from the main Harvard College admissions Instagram account. And there is a faculty standing committee on Admissions and Financial Aid in Harvard College. Its members include Ali Asani, who signed a statement demanding “an end to US support for Israel’s apartheid regime,” condemning Israel’s “state aggression,” and expressing “support for the Palestinian liberation struggle.” Another member is Maya Jasanoff, who said she brought oranges and bananas to the anti-Israel protesters who erected an encampment in Harvard Yard in violation of university policies. Asani and Jasanoff are both on leave this academic year. President Trump recently posted a link to a Washington Free Beacon article about Jasanoff, who was expected to take over as the next chair of Harvard’s history department, proclaiming, “Harvard should not hire this misfit!” Some prospective Jewish applicants to Harvard, seeing what a circus it is, may decide not to even apply. Or, if they do apply and get in, they may choose to go somewhere else instead. It’s that second risk that might drive even a nondiscriminatory admissions officer to go with a more sure-bet-to-attend applicant instead of a Jewish student who might decide that there’s less hostility at Vanderbilt, the University of Florida, Yeshiva University, Brown, Yale, the University of Chicago, West Point or Annapolis, or Washington University in St. Louis. The University of Florida and the University of Texas at Austin are both offering 4-year, full-tuition scholarships via the Rosenthal-Levy Scholars Program for “exceptional undergraduates interested in the great ideas of Jewish and Western civilization and the responsibilities of American civic leadership.” As I observed in 2018 about Stephen Schwarzman, a Jewish student rejected when he applied to Harvard College in the pre-Fitzsimmons era who later became a significant donor to Yale and MIT, the genuinely scarce resources aren’t the slots at Harvard College but the future Stephen Schwarzmans. For all of the constructive interventions by Stefanik, Trump, and others, and for all the ways that endowments and federal financing make it less than a purely free market, the most powerful forces for quality and improvement in higher education are competition and choice. That’s part of why Harvard’s Fitzsimmons and Ashkenazy are both suddenly talking about Brown. READ MORE: Harvard to Recruit at Jewish Day Schools After Study Finds Steep Decline in Jewish Enrollment