Longtime higher ed leader Gordon Gee says fear, not free speech, is ruling America’s campuses

by Gabby Deutch
November 3, 2025
Read the original article in Jewish Insider.

Gordon Gee has served as president of more American universities than almost anyone, as far as he knows. Most recently he led West Virginia University, from which he retired in July; before that, he oversaw Ohio State, Vanderbilt, Brown and the University of Colorado over a span of 45 years. 

Alongside his various presidencies, Gee also helped open Hillel houses on two different campuses: Vanderbilt and Ohio State. It’s a distinction that makes him particularly well-suited to opine on the state of American higher education, which has been grappling with the thorny and sometimes intertwined issues of antisemitism, free speech and student conduct. 

A 2002 Wall Street Journal article attributed Vanderbilt’s decision to increase recruitment of Jewish students to Gee, himself a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. More than two decades later, under a successor Gee proudly claims, Vanderbilt is still courting Jewish students and positioning itself as a bastion of common sense amid the upheaval that followed the Oct. 7 attacks two years ago.   

As Gee, 81, looks back on his career and reflects on the state of academia, he sees a growing chasm between what he described as two different kinds of universities: those like Vanderbilt, that have held firm to the principles of institutional neutrality, and those like his alma mater, Columbia University, that have struggled to take an impartial stance in response to campus protests and antisemitism — and that are wary of making significant change. 

“One is the resistance. [They say] anything that comes out of the [Trump] administration, anything that they want, anything, it is just terrible,” Gee told Jewish Insider in an interview last week ahead of a keynote address at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. “The other are those institutions that are trying to determine a way to move forward and do so by knitting themselves together in different ways. Those are mainly the big public universities. Those are the real future of the American higher education system, and for Jewish students themselves.”

Immediately after Oct. 7, Gee called Rabbi Ari Berman, the president of Yeshiva University, and asked for help in recruiting other university presidents to sign onto a statement condemning the attacks, which was published in The Wall Street Journal as a full-page ad. But they were unable to get many of the big-name academic leaders they wanted. 

“That was when I really started to discover that there’s no moral high ground on this with a number of people. It was very distressing to me,” Gee said. “I think that so many people were walking on eggshells. They didn’t want to have disruptions. They also didn’t want to speak out.”

Although anti-Israel protests took place at West Virginia University, there was no encampment there in the spring of 2024, as happened on dozens of campuses around the country that semester. As Gee watched other university administrators fail to respond in clear ways to the protests that often crossed a line into harassment and targeting of Jewish students, he saw administrators afraid of upsetting stakeholders on campus. 

“The biggest challenge facing university presidents is fear,” said Gee. “I think the university presidents, in many ways, are paralyzed, and a lot of it is brought on by themselves, because of the fact that they allowed themselves to become kind of engaged in this ‘go along, get along’ response, and now all of a sudden, when they discover that they’ve got to take a stand, it’s becoming very difficult for many of them.”

Rather than protecting the free speech of pro-Israel students who were often cowed into silence by classmates, university leaders did little, Gee alleged. 

“They were silencing those who were intimidated by it, those who were pro-Israel, those who wanted to speak up in terms of balance,” said Gee. “University administrators were allowing that to happen.”

As President Donald Trump has sought to make his mark on higher education by targeting campus antisemitism and going after university diversity programs, Gee does not share the same skepticism toward Trump’s proposals that has characterized the responses of many university administrators who worry the administration’s actions are too heavy-handed.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has approached several top universities about signing onto a compact that would give them preferential access to federal funds. No university has yet signed on, with administrators claiming it amounts to government infringement on their academic freedom. Gee — generally a skeptic of federal meddling in higher education — isn’t entirely opposed.

“Three-quarters of it is exactly what universities ought to be doing. A quarter of it probably is a bridge too far,” Gee explained. “But the very fact that a political administration, this Republican administration, can take on universities, and successfully so in many ways, has shown how the relationship between universities and the general public has deteriorated.” 

While Trump’s approach may have come from a genuine concern about the academic environment, “they’ve used that not as a scalpel, but as a sledgehammer,” said Gee. Still, he thinks the vehement opposition in many corners of academia has to do with the messenger.

“If the Obama administration were doing exactly the same thing, people would cheerfully say, ‘Oh, that’s right, and that’s what we’re going to do,’” said Gee. “A lot of it has to do with the people in power, and I can understand that to some extent, but it doesn’t mean to say that the ideas are bad.” 

Gee described himself as “always the optimist,” and said the current uncertainty facing academia — budget cuts, public distrust, a lack of understanding of its purpose — can be a “clarifying moment.”

“We need to understand we’re about teaching and learning. We’re not about propaganda. We’re not about ostracism. We’re not about making people feel inadequate if they don’t toe the line,” said Gee.

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