Washington University in St. Louis

1. Washington University’s great books infrastructure is in a period of transition. For much of the past decade, the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities offered students a coherent liberal arts honors major with a required Western civilization sequence, a language requirement, and a quantitative methods requirement—one of the better integrated liberal arts programs available at a major research university. In the 2024-25 academic year, the IPH was absorbed into a new and broader Comparative Literature and Thought department. The curriculum has been diluted: students are now required to replace some of their Western civilization credits with a world literature requirement, the faculty affiliation has changed substantially (with around half the previous IPH faculty no longer participating), and the overall structure is broader and less focused.
2. What survives is the Texts & Traditions program, a freshman-year requirement for participating students that begins with Classical to Renaissance Literature and Early Political Thought — a two-course introduction to the Western intellectual tradition. Students who continue through the T&T minor take three additional courses drawn from the former IPH curriculum. This is a worthwhile foundation, and faculty like Eric Brown (Greek and Roman ethical philosophy) and Philip Purchase (literature and classics, described as an old-fashioned British academic) continue to teach the courses that made the IPH valuable. But the institutional momentum behind serious Western civilization study at WashU is weaker than it was, and the absorption into a larger comparative literature structure represents a real loss.

WashU’s Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies department (JIMES) offers substantial Hebrew language instruction and coursework in Jewish civilization, though its overall orientation is uneven. The department has a poor reputation among some Jewish undergraduates, with several faculty whose scholarly orientations tend toward gender and sexuality studies and social justice frameworks.

Pamela Barmash

The faculty member primarily responsible for Hebrew Bible and Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic courses at WashU, and she carries a significant portion of the JIMES department’s Hebraic civilization curriculum. Her courses provide students with serious biblical textual instruction and are the most direct route to engagement with the Hebraic tradition within the department. She is very highly regarded by students.

Mark Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer is a prominent journalist, and hosted Tablet Magazine’s “Unorthodox” podcast. He now edits the journal of WashU’s John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, and he teaches courses on journalism and religion for undergrads.

WashU offers a Hebrew language major and minor, with four levels of modern Hebrew instruction and courses taught by instructors whom the Jewish student community evaluates positively. The university’s Israel programs—the Israel Summer Business Academy through the Olin business school (a six-week program in Tel Aviv focused on Israeli entrepreneurship), study abroad at Hebrew University’s Rothberg International School, and intensive Hebrew ulpan at the University of Haifa—are currently on pause due to safety concerns but represent an ongoing and significant institutional investment in Israel engagement.

WashU’s humanities strengths are concentrated in individual scholars rather than in strong departments taken as a whole. The Classics department is solid, with faculty who teach the courses a serious classics department should offer. The History department has a reasonable number of traditionally-oriented scholars alongside the standard postcolonial contingent.

Amy Gais

A lecturer in the Comparative Literature and Thought and Political Science programs, Gais is a political theorist who studied with Bryan Garsten and Steven Smith at Yale—two of the most serious scholars of political theory in the country.

Krister Knapp

A national security historian focused on the Cold War. His work in the history of American grand strategy provides some counterweight to the more critical-theory-oriented historians in the department. Students highly recommend his courses.

Joseph Loewenstein

The former director of the IPH and now a co-director within the Comparative Literature and Thought department. His continued presence provides institutional memory and intellectual continuity, but the structural change he has overseen represents a dilution of what the IPH offered.

Eric Brown

Teaches Greek and Roman ethical philosophy and the ancient half of one of the core Western civilization courses. His scholarly work in ancient Greek ethics provides students with philosophical engagement with the classical tradition.

Chabad

Chabad hosts extremely well-attended Friday night Shabbat dinners, drawing around 400 students on a given Friday night, with a crowd that is mostly non-Orthodox. Its role is to provide infrastructure and reach rather than religious leadership for the observant community.

1. Programming: Chabad runs weekly Jewish classes for less-affiliated students and hosts Shabbat lunch every week, though most Orthodox students go to JSA at Hillel instead. The JSA holds a weekly learning event at Chabad called Open Beit Midrash. The Chabad Student Organization is a student-run group drawing a mix of Orthodox and non-Orthodox students.
2. Minyan: Chabad tries to hold its own minyan on Shabbat, but without the Orthodox students it is hard to form one.
3. Assessment: Chabad does not provide much religious leadership to Orthodox students, but it gives great Jewish infrastructure overall.

WashU Hillel

Hillel provides the physical Shabbat infrastructure and the social programming, while the religious programming runs through the JSA and the JLIC couple.

1. Leadership: WashU does not currently have a Hillel rabbi. The previous rabbi, who was Conservative, left recently.
2. Orientation: The Hillel is explicitly Zionist. It hosts many Israel-themed events with almost no pushback. Most of its programming is Jewish social activity rather than religious services.
3. Shabbat: Following Shabbat services, Hillel provides free Shabbat dinner and lunch to students—Friday night dinner every other week, Shabbat lunch every week. JSA students volunteer as mashgiach each week for the Shabbat meals. Hillel also offers Jew-It-Yourself grants to support student-hosted Shabbat and holiday meals.
4. Learning: The Shabbat Hosting Lab is a five-week program giving students an in-depth learning experience around Shabbat meals, with a $300 stipend on completion.
5. Affiliated Student Organizations: The Hillel Advisory Board is the principal student leadership group. First Year Students of Hillel is mostly Reform or Conservative students. Staam is WashU’s Jewish a cappella group, open to non-Jewish members but with a repertoire focused on Jewish artists and songs. Challah for Hunger also operates at WashU.

The Jewish Students Association and OU-JLIC

The JSA runs most of the Jewish student life at WashU, especially for Orthodox students. It uses Hillel as a space to run its services, but Hillel itself is not involved in them.

1. Programming: JSA organizes the daily minyan at Hillel, Shabbat services, and Jewish learning. Every week the Orthodox students go to Hillel for services and lunch, typically drawing about 100 students at roughly a 60-40 Orthodox to non-Orthodox ratio.
2. Orientation: JSA strives to be welcoming to all types of Jews but is self-selecting for Orthodox students. A subset of students occasionally runs egalitarian services, but most services are Orthodox.
3. Institutional Flexibility: The JSA can switch between using Chabad and Hillel for services from year to year. A few years ago it operated primarily out of Chabad for Shabbat and minyanim; it now uses Hillel.
4. OU-JLIC: Rabbi Shlomo and Kyra Ashkenazy serve as the OU-JLIC couple. Rabbi Ashkenazy is from Chicago, made aliyah, served in the Givati Brigade of the IDF, and received smicha from World Mizrachi’s Musmachim program. Kyra Ashkenazy is from Woodmere, New York, attended Shaalvim Seminary in Jerusalem, and graduated from Stern College with a degree in psychology and public health. The couple are the most effective leaders for the Orthodox students, who bring them their halachic questions. Rabbi Shlomo attends the JSA minyanim and runs several weekly classes geared toward Orthodox students.

Religious Infrastructure

WashU has approximately 1,850 Jewish students with a large contingent of Orthodox students. The kosher infrastructure operates without a formal meal plan but is extensive, and the Shabbat infrastructure is close to complete.

1. Kosher Dining: There is no kosher meal plan, but a kosher food station called L’Chaim in the main dining hall, Bear’s Den, serves hot kosher meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner most days of the week, prepared by Sodexo under the supervision of the Vaad of St. Louis. Kosher prepackaged meals are available in almost every eatery on campus. Chabad hosts Shabbat meals every Friday night and Saturday, and Seuda Shlishit is often hosted at the OU-JLIC director’s home. St. Louis has a full complement of certified kosher eateries. Most upperclassmen cook for themselves in their apartments, and virtually all observant upperclassmen choose to live in apartments.
2. Eruv: WashU has an eruv encompassing most of campus, with an eruv map provided by campus Chabad.
3. Shabbat Keys: Students may request Shabbat keys through a form. One issue observant students have run into is the presence of automatic lights in the dorms on Shabbat.

Pro-Israel Engagement

The atmosphere on campus is quite friendly toward Israel and Zionism, and most students are comfortable being outwardly Zionist. There were almost no protests on campus after October 7; the one that did occur, in April 2024, was shut down by police. The head of WashU has been very supportive of Zionist Jews on campus since October 7.

1. WashU Students for Israel
   • The campus’s main pro-Israel student group, offering educational, social, and cultural programming about Israel.
2. WIPAC (WashU Israel Public Affairs Committee)
   • An AIPAC-trained Israel advocacy group. It meets regularly with political leaders and engages campus leadership on issues pertaining to Israel and the Middle East, with the goal of promoting ties between WashU and Israel. WIPAC events are very well attended.
3. Jewish Advocacy Council
   • A pro-Israel student group involved in campus issues concerning Israel.
4. Campus Environment
   • Most observant students’ close friend groups comprise other Jews, which is by choice, but plenty of observant students have non-affiliated friends as well. The campus environment is not restrictive in that sense.

1. Tikvah Campus Chapter
   • Students run a Tikvah-affiliated chapter at WashU to organize reading groups and events.

Chancellor Andrew Martin’s response to October 7 and its aftermath represents one of the most philosophically principled administrative records in American higher education. On October 10, 2023, Martin issued a statement specifically calling out “violence perpetrated by Hamas against the Israeli people”—one of the earliest and most direct institutional condemnations at any major university. When his own Student Union issued a statement on October 12 drawing a moral equivalence between Hamas and the Israeli government, it was deleted within days with a public apology.

In Martin’s November 29 statement on free speech and responsibility, he affirmed that protests had been conducted in ways that “respect our community standards,” condemned the phrase “from the river to the sea” as an example of irresponsible speech, and articulated the distinction between the expansive legal right to speech and the moral obligation to use that right responsibly.

When encampment activity arrived in April 2024, the administration acted quickly. A 50-person encampment attempt on April 20 was dispersed within an hour. A larger 250-person encampment on April 27, organized in collaboration with the St. Louis branch of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, was cleared within three hours; police called in from across the region arrested over 100 individuals, including 23 students and four faculty members. Six faculty members were placed on paid leave pending investigation—including four who were arrested and two who allegedly used university IDs to allow outside activists into campus buildings. Student sanctions were initially firm, and four organizers were ultimately expelled—placing WashU as one of the few schools to impose the highest available disciplinary sanction.

The aftermath has been clean by national standards. The March 2025 university report produced nine policy recommendations and the university has revised protest policies, explicitly banned outdoor camping, and is considering non-medical masking restrictions. No significant protests have occurred on campus since April 27, 2024.

1. Manhattan Institute/City Journal— In Fall 2025, the Manhattan Institute/City Journal produced a new system of college rankings assessing schools on intellectual seriousness, cultural sanity, and overall educational value. The MI/City Journal methodology offers cumulative rankings as well as category-specific rankings.
   • WashU ranks 54th overall.
   • It ranks 87th in Educational Experience and 75th in Curricular Rigor, reflecting a lack of strong, required liberal arts or civics coursework, or even a sufficiently developed, optional liberal arts coursework.
   • WashU ranks 45th in Heterodox Infrastructure. The lack of an institutionally backed center with its own faculty and academic majors leaves WashU well behind schools like the University of Florida and UT Austin.
   • WashU ranks 39th in Leadership Quality, 49th in Commitment to Meritocracy, and 67th in Resistance to Politicization—reflecting its large DEI bureaucracy and activist institutional commitments.
   • WashU ranks 50th for “Jewish Campus Climate.”
   • WashU ranks 50th in Outcomes, outperforming its overall position. It ranks 43rd in “Payback Education Investment” and 50th in “Value Added to Career.”
2. Wall Street Journal — The WSJ rankings weight outcomes heavily (70%), with salary impact (50%) and graduation rate impact (20%) the dominant factors.
   • WashU is currently 39th in WSJ rankings. It scores very highly on salary impact but is brought down substantially by a mediocre graduation rate, a low diversity score and uneven survey results.
3. ACTA’s “What Will They Learn?” — ACTA grades schools on the strength of their college-wide liberal arts curricula, scoring universities on how many of seven core subjects are required of all undergraduates.
   • WashU earns a D. Of the seven core subject areas, WashU only requires one: composition. It also receives half-credit for math and science requirements.
   • ACTA does not recognize any Oases of Excellence at WashU.
4. ADL Campus Antisemitism Report Card — In response to the troubled campus environments in the wake of October 7, the ADL has been grading schools on antisemitism from F to A.
   • ADL gives WashU an A (marked as an improvement). WashU receives the highest possible scores in publicly disclosed administrative actions (above expectations), in Jewish life on campus (excellent), and in campus conduct and climate concerns (low to none).
   • WashU only receives demerits for lacking explicit mentions of anti-Semitism in its code of conduct, and its failure to institute an advisory council to address anti-Semitism. Given the lack of conduct and climate concerns found by the ADL, these do not seem to be glaring issues.
5. U.S. News & World Report — WashU is 20th in the USNWR national university rankings.
6. FIRE — The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ranks WashU 56/261 on free speech, up 16 places from 2025, in part due to recently adopting institutional neutrality. WashU receives an overall grade of D, with a “yellow” spotlight rating, and F grades for political tolerance and administrative support.
7. Forbes — WashU is 25th on the Forbes list, reflecting high median salaries, high graduation rates, and a lack of famous graduates when compared to Ivy League schools.