The Courage to Talk: How Elon University Found Calm in a Year of Campus Chaos

Real Clear Education ^ | October 23, 2025 | Samuel J. Abrams

[E. Pluribus Unum]

In the years since Hamas’s October 7 attack, America’s universities have become moral barometers, and many have failed the test. At Columbia, encampments replaced classrooms. At Harvard, statements multiplied while courage evaporated. At Elon University, a small private college in North Carolina, something different happened: people talked.

A recent feature in The Forward praised Elon as one of the few campuses where Jewish students felt secure and respected after October 7. The Anti-Defamation League gave Elon an “A” in its inaugural campus antisemitism report card - one of only two institutions nationwide to earn that distinction. Yet Elon did not achieve that success through bureaucratic controls or ideological policing. It did so by cultivating a culture of conversation and trust rather than fear and compliance.

That culture was not inevitable. In the 1990s, Jewish students at Elon struggled for recognition and fought for funding to hold Shabbat dinners, while the school’s mascot—the “Fighting Christian”—symbolized a very different kind of campus identity. Its transformation into one of the nation’s most dialogical universities shows that institutional character can change with intention.

While elite institutions reached reflexively for bureaucracy, Elon leaned in on dialogue. Faculty organized open forums and teach-ins about Israel and Gaza. Administrators resisted the temptation to moralize or issue sweeping pronouncements. When controversy erupted over a Palestinian human-rights speaker, Elon refused to cancel; instead, it hosted dinner discussions and reflection sessions. Students protested, sometimes passionately, but within a framework that prized discourse over denunciation.

The university also made a crucial definitional choice. It adopted the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism—a narrower, speech-protective standard—rather than the more expansive IHRA definition that some universities use to restrict expression. The result was not moral relativism, but moral confidence: the conviction that open exchange, not administrative decree, is the best path toward understanding.

[marktwain]

Not connected with Elon Musk.

[Getready]

Wake up world... it’s islamacists raising the ruckus, using idiotic woke mindset as cover....why else would wokesters be so anti-jewish only, and not protesting Nigerian Christians being slaughtered by Muslims, or Gazans executed in the streets by Hamas? Why else would wokesters not be admitting that the October 7 massacre was just that?
It’s an agitprop , media enhanced psyop by islamicist groups .