Based on a year-long investigation, the Congressional Committee on Education and the Workforce majority, under Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC), has released findings on how antisemitism engulfed college campuses while administrators put the wants of terrorist sympathizers over the safety of Jewish students, faculty, and staff.
“For over a year, the American people have watched antisemitic mobs rule over so-called elite universities, but what was happening behind the scenes is arguably worse. While Jewish students displayed incredible courage and a refusal to cave to the harassment, university administrators, faculty, and staff were cowards who fully capitulated to the mob and failed the students they were supposed to serve,” said Chairwoman Foxx. “Our investigation has shown that these ‘leaders’ bear the responsibility for the chaos likely violating Title VI and threatening public safety. It is time for the executive branch to enforce the laws and ensure colleges and universities restore order and guarantee that all students have a safe learning environment.”
The report’s findings clearly support four conclusions:
- University administrators made astounding concessions to the organizers of illegal encampments. For example, in the case of Northwestern University (Northwestern), administrators entertained demands to hire an “anti-Zionist” rabbi and divest from and remove Sabra Hummus from campus cafeterias.
- University administrators deliberately chose to withhold support from Jewish students. Harvard University’s (Harvard) decision making was particularly egregious, as demonstrated by choices to intentionally omit condemnation of Hamas and acknowledgment of hostages in its widely-criticized equivocal statement on the October 7 attacks, and then-President Claudine Gay asking Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow not to call the phrase “From the River to the Sea” antisemitic hate speech.
- University administrators overwhelmingly failed to impose meaningful discipline for those who engaged in antisemitic conduct. Across the board, enforcement of campus rules was wildly uneven, from Harvard and Columbia faculty playing key roles in derailing discipline toward antisemitic conduct violations and Rutgers University (Rutgers) actually disciplining Jewish students who spoke out against the harassment, to the overall lack of consequences for those involved in encampments at schools including the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), Yale University (Yale), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
- University administrators considered Congressional oversight a nuisance at best and with open hostility at worst. Administrators at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), for instance, attempted to orchestrate negative media coverage of Members of Congress who scrutinized the university while Harvard president Claudine Gay disparaged U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik’s (R-NY) character to the university’s Board of Overseers.
Independent of Congress, private organizations have reached similar conclusions.
Recently Brooke Goldstein, the founder and executive director of The Lawfare Project, who also served as the founder of the #EndJewHatred civil rights movement, addressed antisemitism on campuses, using DePaul University as an example.
Brooke’s opinions were published in a campus paper, the Algemeiner https://www.algemeiner.com/2024/11/25/depaul-university-enabled-violent-attacks-and-brain-injury-on-jewish-students/
Goldstein noted that even before the horrific October 7 tragedy, problems were identified. She directly criticized the University’s administrators, stating in her article that “The unprecedented wave of hatred launched against Jews and Israelis at DePaul University over the past year is a direct result of the administration’s failure — not just to help its Jewish community feel safe, but to actually keep its Jewish students safe.”
She didn’t indicate that this was an issue confined to any one university, pointing out that “Jew-hatred has become systematized in higher education, and we are now seeing the consequences playing out on campuses across the country — including at DePaul University. Radicalized agitators who openly support foreign terrorist organizations target Jewish students with calls for their genocide.
“From the river to the sea” is a call for genocide…“Globalize the intifada” is a call for worldwide violent attacks on Jews, like we see in the streets of New York City and Amsterdam, and on campus here at DePaul…”