Or at least one of the reasons: Indoctrination by Iranians in the universities.
Extracts from the linked article:
“Iran, you make us proud” and “Yemen, Yemen make us proud, turn another ship around,” were among the chants by the pro-Hamas college students on U.S. campuses. They declared a “student intifada,” conducted a Hamas-inspired “Day of Rage”, bowed down to Allah, and called for “Death to Israel” and “Death to America”.
In 2016, Harvard employed Ali Akbar Alikhani – who had warned about “the Jewish threat” – from Tehran University’s Faculty of World Studies, which is reportedly closely tied to the Iranian regime, as a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern studies. At Harvard, he claimed to be a “professor of peace,” centered on a project about “peaceful coexistence in Islam”.
Hezbollah’s Deputy Secretary-General Sheikh Naim Qassem praised the pro-Hamas protests on American campuses. He appeared almost taken aback at the eagerness of students on US campuses to join Hamas in its call for the genocide of Jews, and was hopeful about the ability of America’s students to help Hezbollah destroy Israel by turning the U.S. against its ally. [He said,] “One of these days, America will no longer support Israel to such an extent. Without support, Israel is nothing. We would not have to work hard in order to destroy Israel. Without support, it will be destroyed."
In November 2023, the U.S. House Committee of Education and the Workforce launched an investigation into former Iranian official Seyed Hossein Mousavian, who is a Middle East Security and Nuclear Policy Specialist at the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University.
Mousavian served as Iran’s ambassador to Germany from 1990-1997, during which time the Islamic Republic assassinated Iranian dissidents living in Germany. He remains employed at Princeton, while continuing to have close ties to the Iranian regime.
During his time at Princeton, Mousavian has continued to support the Iran regime’s hostile foreign interests. During a 2016 interview, Iran’s then-foreign minister Javad Zarif told state television that he worked closely with Mousavian for many years, and that the professor is “completely tied to the regime and is currently working hard for it”.
Oberlin College employed Iran’s former UN ambassador, Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, who reportedly covered up the mass murder of 5,000 Iranian political prisoners in 1988 when he was the regime’s ambassador to the UN. While at Oberlin, he called himself the "professor of peace”. He taught students support for Hamas.
Hooshang Amirahmadi, the founder of the American Iranian Council (AIC), has admitted that the lobbying organization was created by the Islamic Republic of Iran to work for its interests in the US.
Amirahmadi continues to enjoy a successful academic career at Rutgers University, where he is Distinguished Service professor, former director of the Rutgers’ Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the founder of the Rutgers Center for Iranian Research and Analysis, on which he served as director for many years. Some faculty members at Rutgers recently called for the genocide of Jews.
The list of Iranian professors working [in the US] on behalf of Iran’s regime continues to grow. Iran can only be rejoicing at the moral and educational collapse they have helped create on American university campuses, which are grooming America’s future teachers, judges and political leaders. Now, however, these campuses appear to be incubating America’s future terrorists and creating a national security threat.