With hostility toward Jews and Israel overtaking many American college campuses, Jewish students are wondering: What schools are best for them to attend?

As application deadlines approach this fall, Jewish parents and their children are poring through the news and consulting each other to avoid universities where antisemitic activity has surged. They can see that last year’s cohort of Jewish applicants was steering away from colleges in the Northeast, Upper Midwest and California in favor of those in the South.

Many are attracted to public schools like the University of Florida and the University of Texas. Both have a critical mass of Jewish students, which is necessary for maintaining essential Jewish institutions and practices on campus. And both have responded positively to state policymakers by cracking down on organizations and instructors who promote Jew-hatred.

Some Jewish students, however, seek a private university experience. If you rule out Ivy League institutions, and “private Ivies” like Stanford and Northwestern universities, are there any selective institutions that would be welcoming for Jews?

Happily, there are: Vanderbilt University in Nashville and Washington University in St. Louis, bridging the South and the Midwest, stand out as attractive options.

What have they done differently to become safe havens when other academically competitive institutions have become overrun with Jew-hatred?

According to Rabbi Shlomo Rothstein of the Chabad of Vanderbilt, one of the keys to success has been the willingness of the university to articulate and consistently enforce neutral rules about student conduct. “This is not a favor for the Jewish community,” he says. “It’s about treating all communities with equality and civility across the board.”

Among the rules Vanderbilt enforces are prohibitions on disrupting classes or speakers, occupying university buildings or building encampments.

At Wash U, Chancellor Andrew Martin has emphasized protection for freedom of speech while warning students away from engaging in incitement or harassment. Chanting slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is not forbidden, but Martin denounced the phrase, saying that “the hatred associated with [it] is well understood by most in our community” and “to use that phrase, particularly in circumstances where we know it will have a harmful impact, is well beneath the dignity of every member of our community.”

As Rabbi Hershey Novack, of the campus Chabad House there, put it: “Wash U remains a fierce believer in free speech. They also hope that people will act like menschen.”

But maintaining a civil free-speech environment requires more than hopes. Both schools have promptly had students crossing the line from speech into rule-breaking behaviors arrested and punished.

At Vanderbilt, students attempting to occupy the chancellor’s office were arrested, with three of them expelled and prosecuted for assault. At Wash U, 23 students and four employees were arrested when they tried to build a tent encampment in violation of the rules, despite repeated warnings to cease their activity.

As Wash U’s statement described it: “Everyone arrested is facing criminal charges for trespassing and, for some, potentially resisting arrest and assault. For those who are students, we also have initiated the university student conduct process.”

The situation has been decidedly different at other U.S. institutions of higher learning.

At Harvard, administrators coddled the radical students occupying a university building. Not only did they face zero consequences for violating university rules, but senior administrators also personally delivered burritos and Twizzlers to them while they occupied the building. When two students blocked a Jewish student from crossing campus and were charged with assault, Harvard not only refused to cooperate with the prosecution—they actually rewarded the assailants. One was given the honor of serving as marshal at commencement, while the other was positively featured on Harvard’s law school admissions website.

At Columbia, months of encampments blocking Jewish students from crossing campus and multiple building occupations were met with little or no punishment until the university decided to settle with the Trump administration. At UCLA, a weeklong encampment blocked Jewish students from areas of their own campus before violent clashes forced the police to be called in.

The primary difference between colleges that are welcoming for Jewish students and those that are not is a willingness to articulate and enforce reasonable rules for student conduct while still protecting free speech.

The divide between universities that are good or bad for Jewish students also revolves around how they understand the missions of their institutions. At places like Vanderbilt and Wash U, they envision themselves as intellectual institutions focused on the world of ideas.

The places that have become inhospitable to Jews have become more interested in action that applies ideas to improve the world. As Claudine Gay said when she was appointed to lead Harvard: “The idea of the Ivory Tower, that is the past, not the future, of academia. We don’t exist outside of society, but as part of it. Harvard has a duty to lean in and engage, and to be in service to the world.”

If universities think they have “a duty to lean in and engage,” they don’t find it unscholarly or inappropriate to hire and advance faculty who use their positions to engage in political activism. They favor creating or expanding various “oppression studies” departments to promote social justice. And they are not averse to having universities adopt official positions on political and social issues as a method for engaging and improving the world.

Both Vanderbilt and Wash U have rejected this role for their universities by adopting policies that protect free expression, as well as what is called “institutional neutrality,” in which they refuse to adopt official institutional positions on political and social issues. By contrast, Chris Eisgruber, president of Princeton University, opposes institutional neutrality, embracing the idea of taking official stands on a variety of issues, including diversity and sustainability. He argued, “We got to do it. … We’re speaking out on behalf of those things. So I think institutional neutrality is just a misleading formulation.”

The reason why institutional neutrality, in particular, matters for Jewish students is that universities that adopt official positions create a potential reward for aggressive protesting. If they can bully and intimidate enough people on campus, they might receive official endorsement of their views. The lack of institutional neutrality and robust free-speech protections that are applied the same way to all students are policy failures that essentially declare open season on Jewish students. But if universities maintain institutional neutrality, there is no prize to be won and therefore less reason to engage in bullying and intimidation.

Some universities that have run into trouble have recently adopted at least a partial version of institutional neutrality, including Harvard. Still, they lack the credibility that they will always remain neutral when faced with organized pressure from students and faculty. Vanderbilt and Wash U have a longer track record of demonstrated commitment to neutrality that more effectively deters aggressive protesting.

Jewish applicants have many options when it comes to higher education. And they are taking notice.