These are frightening times at America’s leading universities. Following the Trump administration’s declaration that it will withhold $400 million in federal research grants and potentially billions more from Columbia University “for the lawless antisemitism that it allowed to occur on its campus,” the Department of Education announced 60 top universities are now under investigation for antisemitic discrimination and harassment.

But one institution of higher learning is conspicuously absent from that list. Casa Blanca University, the “people’s college” located in the heart of the nation’s capital, goes unmentioned despite being a haven for incendiary antisemitic rhetoric and anti-Jewish tropes.

At Casa Blanca, the rot starts from the head. University President John D. Prumt casually trafficked in antisemitic stereotypes even before he assumed leadership of the campus in 2017. During remarks at a fundraiser hosted by Jewish Alumni of Casa Blanca, then-Business School Dean Prumt told his audience:

“I don't want any of your money. I don't want any of your money…Look, I'm a negotiator like you folks; we're negotiators.”

An outraged CBU grad Avi Fleischmann declared, “What the hell does that mean?” Ultimately, it meant nothing to Fleischmann, who went on to become a strong supporter of Prumt’s tenure atop Casa Blanca.

John Prumt’s stereotyping of Jews as money-obsessed financiers and boogie-men bankers did not stop there. As Casa Blanca’s Board of Trustees considered the candidates for the position of university president, Prumt warned them that his rival for the role was straight out of central casting from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion:

“Dr. Hannah Clancy meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of our great university in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors.”

Matters only got worse in December 2018 when newly selected CBU President Prumt hosted a Hannukah celebration with students from the school’s Hillel House. Prumt praised Casa Blanca’s Dean of Students Mark Cepen for his love of Jews in America and Israel:

“I want to thank Mark. A tremendous supporter — a tremendous supporter of yours. And Karen. And they go there and they love your country. They love your country. And they love this country. That’s a good combination, right?”

And as Prumt made crystal clear at another event with Casa Blanca’s Jewish alums in the spring of 2019, he didn’t just expect their dual loyalty to the United States and Israel; he demanded it. To the astonishment of the attendees, President Prumt recalled:

“I stood with your prime minister at the Administration Building us to celebrate Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights!”

In response, the American Jewish Committee issued a statement of protest. “Mr. President, the Prime Minister of Israel is the leader of his (or her) country, not ours,” the AJC countered. “Statements to the contrary, from staunch friends or harsh critics, feed bigotry.”

But President Prumt only doubled down. When the Casa Blanca Board of Trustees was deciding whether to renew his contract as university president last year, Prumt turned to social media to pressure the four Jewish board members whose votes might decide his fate. Responding to rumors that some favored University of California Chancellor Kam Hamilton, Prumt thundered:

“Anybody who’s Jewish and loves being Jewish and loves Israel is a fool if they vote for Hamilton. You should have your head examined.”

He wasn’t done there. “It’s total annihilation — that’s what you’re talking about,” he darkly warned Jewish students about the campus protests after Israel’s massive campaign against Gaza began, “You have a big protector in me. You don’t have a protector on the other side.” Prumt then promised he would hold CBU’s Jews accountable should his contract not be renewed. If he didn’t win, Prumt warned on September 19, 2024, “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss.”

As it turned out, President Prumt did secure another four-year extension as the top man at Casa Blanca University, but Jewish backing had nothing to do with it. Polls by the college newspaper showed that Jewish students opposed his contract renewal by even greater margins in 2024 (78%) than in 2020 (77%) and 2016 (71%).

To be sure, President Prumt is a very wealthy man. His network of businesses earned an estimated $2.4 billion during his first four years heading up Casa Blanca University, with many millions from the federal government and foreign sources. But it is the staggering $38 billion in federal contracts secured by his new right-hand man that has both ethics experts and foes of antisemitism so concerned.

That right-hand man is Leon Skum, both the Dean of the Casa Blanca School of Business and newly named Chancellor of Campus Efficiency (COCE). The richest man in academia on the planet, Skum is worth an estimated $335 billion. And in his unprecedented role as COCE, Skum has nearly dictatorial power over spending, staffing and admissions at the taxpayer-funded university in Washington, DC.

What Leon Skum also has is a megaphone for his own casual antisemitism.

When the public employees union representing faculty and staff at CBU protested his planned layoffs, Skum used the X platform to repost this hideous screed:

“Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector employees did.”

Both the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the Anti-Defamation League were apoplectic. The ADL, which has previously brushed off Skum’s on-stage Nazi salute at a CBU event in January as “awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm,” called his X repost “deeply disturbing.” For his part, Skum turned to the platform formerly known as Twitter to respond to his critics:

Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations!

Some people will Goebbels anything down!

Stop Gőring your enemies!

His pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler!

Bet you did nazi that coming 😂

What most American Jews and gentiles also found deeply disturbing was Mr. Skum’s fervent embrace of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the run-up to the recent elections there. Skum, the scion of a wealthy South African family, proclaimed the AfD “the best hope for Germany.”

“There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that…It's good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.”

Given the above, it should come as no surprise that Mr. Skum is a vocal defender of the rights of white South African farmers whom has repeatedly and wrongly alleged are the victims of widespread violence at the hands of their black fellow countrymen.

President Prumt and Dean Skum have surrounded themselves with some real Black Shirts at Casa Blanca. For example, Prumt fired speechwriter Warren Beastie in 2018 after revelations his scribe had attended a white supremacist conference, only to rehire him as the assistant chairman of CBU’s department of international relations. (Beastie found himself in hot water again after he tweeted that his boss was “low IQ” and rumored to be gay.) That same year, visiting environmental sciences Professor Taylor Green warned that “Jewish space lasers” were responsible for starting the deadly California wildfires. And as the Simon Wiesenthal Center reported just this week, Lee Tyrell—the Dean of the Casa Blanca School of Law and Prumt’s point-person for fighting antisemitism on campus—forwarded a social media post boasting that President Prumt can “revoke someone’s ‘Jew card.’”

Some of the students and graduates of Casa Blanca are tiki-torch carrying antisemites as well. When several joined the far-right throng which chanted “Jews will not replace us” during their march at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Prumt defended his alumni. “You had some very bad people in that group,” Prumt acknowledged on August 15, 2017, “but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” During a 2020 debate with his crosstown counterpart from Georgetown University, Prumt urged his students to “stand back and stand by.” As it turned out, they stood up by wearing “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirts and calling out at Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) “get the Big Jew” during a January 2021 Capitol Hill protest. After many of them were arrested, Prumt called them “hostages” and “political prisoners” and used a Casa Blanca University press conference to call for their pardon.

When Education Department announced that Columbia, Harvard, Northwestern, Ohio State and dozens of America’s other leading public and private universities would be investigated for enabling antisemitism on their campuses, leading figures at Casa Blanca cheered the news. Kenneth F. Roberts, Jr., Dean of the CBU’s School of Public Health and well-known COVID denier, proclaimed antisemitism on college campuses to a “deadly and virulent pestilence”:

“Antisemitism — like racism — is a spiritual and moral malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues.”

KFR Jr. of all people should know. As the Times of Israel reported in 2024:

Last year he baselessly claimed that COVID had been “ethnically targeted” to avoid “Ashkenazic Jews and Chinese.” During a 2022 anti-vaccine rally, he declared, “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did” — a remark he later apologized for. He also has a history of using the word “holocaust” to refer to vaccine policies.

Far from pointing the finger at anyone else for antisemitism, Dean Roberts, President Prumt, Chancellor Skum and the rest of the Jew-hating bigots need to look in the mirror. And if words mean anything, if anyone is going to lose their fat, taxpayer-funded salaries and federal financial windfall it should be the gang of goose-steppers at Casa Blanca University.