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Connecticut College replaces president mired in antisemitism scandal with interim president who has one of his own
(JTA) – Jewish students at Connecticut College celebrated in March when they successfully pressured their school’s president to step down over her plans to host a fundraiser at a golf club with an alleged antisemitic and racist history.
But some recoiled this week when they learned who their new interim leader would be: a university administrator holding antisemitism baggage of his own.
The liberal arts college in New London announced Thursday thay it was appointing Leslie Wong, a member of its board of trustees, as its interim president beginning July 1 until the board identifies a permanent hire. Jewish student activists noted a key point on Wong’s resume: his seven-year tenure as president of San Francisco State University, which was marred by accusations that the school had propagated “institutional antisemitism.”
“I find it unbelievable that Connecticut College chose to hire an antisemitic interim president right after our previous antisemitic president resigned,” Davi Schulman, a Connecticut College undergraduate and co-president of the university Hillel, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“I feel extremely disappointed in the administration’s continued disregard toward students of all identities, and Jewish students in particular,” Schulman said. “I worry about what the incoming Jewish students will think when they learn about their new president’s history.”
Wong is a Chinese-Mexican psychologist who has worked in higher education for more than four decades, and led San Francisco State from 2012 to 2019. During that time, local Jewish groups charged, he failed to respond forcefully enough to a series of incidents affecting Jewish life on campus, including a protest by anti-Zionists who had disrupted a campus visit by the mayor of Jerusalem, and a school information fair for marginalized students that had deliberately excluded the campus Hillel from participating.
An investigation by J. The Jewish News of Northern California showed that, while Wong had decried these incidents, ordered investigations into the school’s handling of them and met several times with Jewish representatives, he also resented spending so much time addressing Jewish concerns. The investigation found that he partially blamed Hillel for the incident involving the mayor of Jerusalem’s visit, and told Jewish groups he would “not play favorites.”
In a 2017 interview with the paper amid the controversy, Wong also declined to say whether Zionists were welcome on campus, saying, “Am I comfortable opening up the gates to everyone? Gosh, of course not. I’m not the kind of guy who gets into absolutes like that.” He later apologized for his comments.
Students at the university Hillel wrote an email to Wong saying the school had “a problem with institutional anti-Semitism,” and that he had failed to address it; the Hillel’s executive director, the local Jewish Community Relations Council and a Jewish studies professor on campus also spoke out against him. California State University’s chancellor and the state’s Jewish legislative caucus also got involved; pro-Israel students also filed a lawsuit against Wong and the university, which was settled in 2019.
That year, Wong retired from university leadership and joined the Connecticut College board.
The college defended his appointment in a statement to JTA. “Dr. Wong is a nationally respected leader in higher education whose commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion has been evident throughout his academic career,” it said, noting the board “considered the entirety of his tenure at SFSU and determined that when difficult issues arose on campus, they were handled professionally, including through extensive direct dialogue with the affected parties.”
The college added, “These efforts allowed concerned parties to be heard, provided accountability, and enabled the university to move forward.”
Wong will assume the interim presidency at a time when Jewish students on campus are on edge — and newly organized. The campus Hillel leaders had helped found a coalition of student groups who organized against the previous president, Katherine Bergeron, over the golf club fundraiser controversy and a litany of other complaints tied to administrative support of campus diversity initiatives. To oust Bergeron, the students had staged a 10-day sit-in on a campus administrative building. The campus Hillel building also served as a gathering place for student activists staging actions against Bergeron.
Whether that kind of activism can be repeated with Wong is unclear, Schulman said. The college is now on summer break, making organization a challenge. Wong will only be in this leadership role for a short while. And he comes in with a strong track record of promoting diversity and inclusion in other matters, including serving in a diversity-focused role with the NCAA board of governors.
“I think that the Jewish population has the most reason to be angry,” Schulman said. “I’ll be interested to see: Does everyone come together in the same way we did when all marginalized students were under attack? I think it’s possible.”
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Georgetown Newspaper Editorial Board Accuses Israel of ‘Genocide,’ Calls for Divestment
Georgetown University students on March 23, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo: Andrew Thomas via Reuters Connect
A Georgetown University-affiliated student newspaper last week issued an editorial which argued that the school has been “complicit in Israel’s genocide,” describing the world’s lone Jewish state as an illegitimate entity that should be isolated.
“There is no doubt in the mind of The Georgetown Voice‘s Editorial Board that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza,” proclaimed The Georgetown Voice, an alternative, far-left publication founded in 1969. “There is no critical mass or breaking point at which elites — including the administrative elite at Georgetown — will suddenly reform their conscience.”
The editorial board condemned what it falsely labeled as Israel’s “decades-long settler colonial project and apartheid system” and appeared to blame the entirety of the Gaza conflict on Israel while absolving Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that started the war with its Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis, of wrongdoing.
“We must ask ourselves why every person in Gaza or the West Bank does not elicit the same righteous anger (and frenzied whitewashing or bigotry and divisiveness) that erupted after the assassination of Charlie Kirk,” the paper charged, referring to the American conservative activist who was assassinated in September. “While some — certainly not all — members of Congress have half-heartedly called for a ‘pause’ in the violence at some point, the vast majority of them were simultaneously voting to arm Israel.”
The editorial continued, “The morally bankrupt acts of our representatives made Americans complicit in this genocide. That should enrage and galvanize something in all of us. Sadly, at Georgetown, that’s not what we see.”
Capping off its philippic, the Voice broadsided the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — accusing the civil rights organization of “anti-Palestinian advocacy” and drifting “rightward … under the leadership of current CEO Jonathan Greenblatt” — and calling for Georgetown’s divestment from Israel on the grounds that Israel is an “apartheid regime” in the same mold as Afrikaner-dominated South Africa until the 1990s.
“If the school gives any weight to the values it claims to represent, it will reconsider its rejection of the divestment referendum from last spring and move to cut all ties with Israeli and Israel-supportive institutions immediately,” the Voice concluded, hinting at the expulsion from campus of Jewish groups such as Hillel and Chabad. “We do not say this lightly; taking action is challenging; however, in the face of such atrocities, there are no excuses for inaction.”
The Voice is not the first student newspaper to promote anti-Zionism while curating facts, sources, and quotes to confect a negative image of Israel.
In 2022, The Harvard Crimson, the official newspaper of Harvard University, endorsed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to isolate the world’s lone Jewish state on the international stage as a step toward its eventual elimination.
“BDS remains a blunt approach, one with the potential to backfire or prompt collateral damage in the form of economic hurt. But the weight of this moment — of Israel’s human rights and international law violates and of Palestine’s cry for freedom — demands this step,” it said. “As a board, we are proud to finally lend our support to both Palestinian liberation and BDS — we call on everyone to do the same.”
At Georgetown, anti-Zionism may be fostered by foreign influence in the form of exorbitant donations.
According to a report published in June by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism Policy (ISGAP) — titled, “Foreign Infiltration: Georgetown University, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood” — Georgetown University has received over $1 billion in funding from the Qatari government over the last two decades. The 132-page document revealed dozens of examples of ways in which Georgetown’s interests are allegedly conflicted, having been divided between its foreign benefactors, the country in which it was founded in 1789, and even its Catholic heritage.
“The Qatari regime targets Georgetown due to its unrivaled access to current and future leaders. Over two decades, that investment has paid off — embedding Muslim Brotherhood scholars and narratives deep within the American academic and political culture,” Dr. Charles Asher Small, executive director of ISGAP, said in a statement on the report. “This masterful use of soft power is not only about Georgetown. It is how authoritarian regimes are buying access, narrative control, and ideological legitimacy — and too many universities are willing sellers.”
The ISGAP report called on policymakers to take action now and prevent the university’s becoming any closer to a country whose ideals may threaten US interests and ideals.
“It is time to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. As we saw, pro-Hamas antisemitism in the US has moved from rhetoric to outright terrorism on the streets of Washington,” Small said, referring to the antisemitic shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in May. “Just three miles from the site of the murders outside the Jewish Museum, Georgetown has been the center of a 50-year indoctrination campaign aimed at infiltrating the highest echelons of US society with murderous antisemitism.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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‘Hamas in a Suit’: Melanie Phillips Says the US Must Stop Treating Qatar as an Honest Broker
British author and journalist Melanie Phillips speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in Brussels, Belgium in April 2024. Photo: Nicolas Landemard / Le Pictorium via Reuters Connect
The war against terrorism will never end “until the West stops pretending Qatar is neutral,” according to British author and journalist Melanie Phillips.
The prominent commentator told The Algemeiner that Doha’s patronage of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and its influence on Western media and universities are among the many reasons not to trust the Middle Eastern monarchy.
“Qatar is Hamas,” Phillips said in a conversation on the “J100” podcast with host David M. Cohen, the CEO of The Algemeiner. “It sponsors Hamas, it shelters Hamas, it protects Hamas’s leadership.”
Speaking from Jerusalem, Phillips called Qatar’s role “the great unspoken scandal” of modern diplomacy, describing how the regime has bankrolled Hamas while posing as a mediator in negotiations with Israel over the Gaza war.
“You can end this war tonight,” she said, “by doing what should have been done long ago: throw Qatar overboard.”
Negotiations have hit several hurdles in recent weeks to halt the advancement of last month’s Israel-Hamas ceasefire, including the refusal of the terrorist group to disarm in accordance with US President Donald Trump’s pace plan for Gaza.
Despite Qatar’s support for Hamas and far-reaching financial entanglements within American institutions, the US has designated the country as a major non-NATO ally and committed, via executive order, to defend it if attacked.
For Phillips, the danger runs deeper than money or politics. “It’s Hamas in a suit,” she said. “A power that wears respectability while advancing terror by other means.”
Since 2012, Doha has housed Hamas’s political bureau and funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into Gaza, often with Western approval. Simultaneously, it has built vast soft-power influence, financing Al Jazeera, sponsoring academic programs on Middle Eastern studies, and endowing think tanks and universities across the West.
That dual role, Phillips argued, has distorted the world’s moral compass. “You cannot be both patron and peacemaker,” she said. “That is moral incoherence masquerading as strategy.”
She connected Qatar’s reach to what she called the “eighth front” of Israel’s war against Iran’s terrorist network including Hamas — the cognitive front, where perception and truth are under siege. By funding educational and media institutions that frame Israel as the aggressor, Phillips said, Doha helps export the same ideological rot that excuses terrorism.
“You cannot build coexistence on a curriculum of hatred,” she warned. “And you cannot defend civilization if you reward the people funding its destruction.”
Cohen noted that Washington’s posture toward Doha remains contradictory. “You can’t confront a sponsor of terror,” he said, “while treating it like an ally at the same time.”
Phillips concluded that lasting peace requires more than military victory — it demands confronting the global enablers that dignify extremism. “If the West continues to pretend Qatar is neutral,” she said, “then Hamas will never truly be defeated.”
The full conversation — “The Eighth Front Is the Mind” — is available now on “J100” via Apple Podcasts, Substack, and YouTube.
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Australia Lists Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard as State Sponsor of Terrorism
Commanders and members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps meet with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran, Iran, Aug. 17, 2023. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Australia has listed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a state sponsor of terrorism, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said on Thursday, following an intelligence assessment that it had orchestrated attacks against Australia‘s Jewish Community.
Australia in August accused Iran of directing two antisemitic arson attacks in the cities of Sydney and Melbourne and gave Tehran’s ambassador seven days to leave the country, its first such expulsion since World War II.