What the Congressional Hearings About Campus Antisemitism Revealed
By playing their parts, hostile Republicans and beleaguered college presidents once again left the public without answers
If you know someone who is interested in going beyond the headlines and thinking this through with us, please:
Since the Hamas terror attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, many American campuses have anchored angry, often violent, anti-Israel protests, manifestos, and statements that vilify, not just Israel, but supporters of Israel in the United States. Highly personal attacks are, unfortunately, now common at American colleges and universities, but the most recent explosion has legitimately terrified—and terrorized—many Jewish students, faculty, and administrators.
As Israel’s war on Hamas has decimated Gaza, protests have intensified, as have anxieties among those who feel, and in some cases have been, targeted as Jews. At Cornell, a student has been charged by police with posting online threats against Jewish students. At Cooper Union, Jewish students claimed they were forced to seek shelter in the school’s library as pro-Palestinian students banged on the doors. Although campus security said the Jewish students were not in danger, the students themselves reported that they were frightened. Student groups have described the gruesome Hamas attacks as a “counter-offense” and a war of liberation; many have denied that documented atrocities, including rapes, occurred.
Pro-Palestinian activists dismiss the notion that protests, many of which are intended to disrupt and bar students from classes, are antisemitic. But that’s not how many Jewish students (not to mention their parents) see it. As Gabriel Diamond, Talia Dror and Jillian Lederman, undergraduates from Yale, Cornell, and Brown, wrote recently:
A hostile environment that began with statements from pro-Palestinian student organizations justifying terrorism has now rapidly spiraled into death threats and physical attacks, leaving Jewish students alarmed and vulnerable.
On an online discussion forum last weekend, Jewish students at Cornell were called “excrement on the face of the earth,” threatened with rape and beheading and bombarded with demands like “eliminate Jewish living from Cornell campus.” (A 21-year-old junior at Cornell has been charged with posting violent threats.) This horror must end.
Free speech, open debate and heterodox views lie at the core of academic life. They are fundamental to educating future leaders to think and act morally. The reality on some college campuses today is the opposite: open intimidation of Jewish students. Mob harassment must not be confused with free speech.
Naturally, of course, instead of working with the Biden administration to help university administrations understand and address what is happening on campuses, the Republican House majority has decided to use these painful incidents as a political cudgel in an election year. On Tuesday, December 5, the presidents of Harvard University (Claudine Gay), the University of Pennsylvania (Liz Magill), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sally Kornbluth), responded to questioning about antisemitism on their campuses by the House of Representatives’ Education and the Workforce Committee. Chaired by 80-year-old Republican Virginia Foxx (NC-5). Foxx came to politics after a career as a businesswoman, a college teacher, and then an appointment as president of Maryland Community College in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. In other words, Foxx is a person who, in addition to owning several businesses with her husband, invested herself in education.
But Foxx’s experience in education is limited to the utilitarian. Maryland Community College specializes in, as its website states, “workforce development” and Community Education, both of which are necessary and laudable missions and a vital and accessible foundation for our national education infrastructure. But she and her colleagues made it quite clear, as Republicans do on the regular, that she doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the knotty problems that roil liberal arts institutions: political divisions inflamed by social media, how to encourage dissent but prevent abusive attacks by radicalized students, and how to preserve free speech while cracking down on hate speech.
It wasn’t even clear from the hearings that Foxx, or her Republican colleagues, even care about antisemitism, because the truth is they never have. As ranking member Bobby Scott (D, VA-03) noted in his opening remarks, a hearing on antisemitism “is an opportunity that my Republican colleagues denied us in 2017 when committee Democrats called for a hearing six years ago on campus discrimination when white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia grounds shouting, `Jews will not replace us.’” Scott continued:
And while my colleagues claim to be committed to combating discrimination on campus, they’re also contradictory and simultaneously stoking cultural wars that can be divisive and discriminatory. Moreover, House Republicans are proposing significant cuts to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, the very office responsible for upholding students civil rights and investigating discrimination claims. You can’t have it both ways.
You can’t call for action then hamstring the agency charged with taking that action to protect students with civil rights and saw a contrast that Biden administration has taken an active role in helping institutions protect students as part of the White House’s national strategy to compare antisemitism.
Scott also pointed out that the Biden administration had not only provided additional guidance to colleges and universities about how to combat bigotry on campus, but also that the Department of Justice has, in the last month, opened investigations on numerous campuses. Yet, as Representative Joe Courtney (D, CT-02), noted later, House Republicans want to cut $75 million from the Office of Civil Rights, the federal department that could support educational institutions in battling all forms of bigotry, including antisemitism, on campus.
Like so many congressional hearings, Foxx’s inquiry was not designed to elicit information, but rather create a platform for political theater that Republican congresspeople can take on the campaign trail in 2024. Questions were designed to humiliate, badger, and confuse the witnesses, and to allow Republican members of the committee to grind them under their heels. Notably, nearly all of them yielded part or all of their time to Elise Stefanik (NY-21) who is particularly good at this and whose misinformed and manipulative speechifying went viral.
Good theater needs a good set. Therefore, it was no an accident, I think, that all the university presidents subpoenaed before the committee were female; that Gay is the first Black and second woman president of Harvard, and that Kornbluth and Magill are only the second women to lead their institutions. It would have been much harder to make a table full of white men look weak and indecisive.
It seems to be consensus, across political lines, that these female presidents failed, and that they dug even deeper holes for their respective institutions than they were in already. Across party lines, members of the committee battered them about their DEI policies, repeatedly asserting that if similar threats were made to Black students, their institutions would have acted immediately. This may be true at the scale pro-Palestinian protests are operating at, but it’s also not true: Black students, faculty and administrators suffer numerous daily indignities that are invisible, ignored, and uncounted, and that Republican politicians (who would be happy if Harvard, Penn, and MIT never admitted another Black student again) probably think they deserve.
The presidents, for their part, both committed themselves to the fight against antisemitism and campus bigotry more generally, and—when asked direct questions about the boundary between free speech and hate speech, anti-Israel and antisemitic attacks—also said various versions of: “It’s complicated.” Which is the world intellectuals live in.
But the committee’s unwillingness to accept this response reveals a serious, and structural, disconnect between how we speak on campus and, not just how Congress functions, but how the world functions. And it is particularly unsatisfactory when it comes to antisemitism, an ideology that has been responsible for centuries of pain, death, and displacement; and is a foundational reason why the international community backed the creation of an Israeli state in the first place. For my part, I don’t buy it that being “anti-Zionist” and “anti-Israel” can be neatly separated from antisemitism, as student activists, their teachers, and their mentors in pro-Palestinian organizations insist that it can. Furthermore, it has long been a tenet of campus DEI offices that how words are received are as important as what the speaker means, and it is unclear to me why this principle does not apply to Jews.
The hearings revealed something else as well: nowadays, university leaders are more like CEOs than they are like educators, and no one knows this better than those of us who work for them. Contemporary universities like Harvard, Penn, and MIT are more like major corporations than they are like twentieth-century schools, with all that implies. Those presidents were not there to help the committee understand what is happening on their campuses any more than the committee was really invested in understanding those events. They were there to defend their institutions from scrutiny. It’s part of the job description.
This is true on campus as well. Today’s university presidents are as deliberately isolated from their faculties and students as Jamie Dimon is from the vast majority of workers and account holders at JPMorgan Chase. Tellingly, MIT’s Sally Kornbluth twice referred to videos that she had sent to the campus community: it is a little known fact that university presidents rarely communicate with their constituencies in person nowadays. Instead, they send short videos by email that are scripted, shot and edited, and needless to say, videos don’t take questions. And this communication style is moving down the chain. I am part of an academic organization where the lead administrator routinely Zooms into our meeting—while sitting in an office less than a hundred yards away.
Any flaws that the three presidents exhibited are, I’m afraid, endemic to contemporary academic leadership. As historian Timothy Burke observes, most university presidents have little practice “communicating in situations that aren’t one of two things: intensely controlled or entirely predictable.” What they do know how to do is “send intermediaries into the more fraught situations, or to simply avoid them entirely.”
Burke goes on to explain that testifying before hostile politicians committed to identifying weaknesses, demanding direct answers, and asking irrelevant questions for which there are no right answers draw on none of the skill sets that a university presidency requires. Instead, presidents and their staffs normally manage campus conflict by paying close attention to legal risks; putting the burden of articulating and resolving conflict on their opponents; soothing donors and board members; displacing responsibility on others; and being vague about how problems will be resolved while simultaneously articulating a rigorous commitment to process that sends all grievances to new or existing committees.
We who work in universities usually just throw up our hands because entropy is the state of play in most educational environments. But to those who work in highly competitive work cultures where open conflict is common (oh, let’s say politics!) the style of your average university president reads, in Burke’s words, “as evasive, as waffling, as confused, as indecisive.”
Unlike many of their critics, I don’t think these university leaders failed: like Burke, I think they did exactly what they know how to do, what they have been carefully coached to do, to protect their institutions from hostile actors like the Republican party. These women are, in fact, the best of the best. But even to the most sympathetic observer, they revealed a critical flaw that must be addressed in higher education: accountability. Currently educational institutions do not believe they need to be accountable to anyone but the Boards of Trustees that hired them. That’s changing.
And as higher ed comes under increasing pressure from conservatives and from the public, college presidents need to change too.
Follow up from DeSantis Land:
Here’s more on last week’s story about a rape accusation against Christian Ziegler, Ron DeSantis pal and chair of the Florida GOP. You may recall from last week’s story that Christian and his wife Bridget, a cofounder of Moms for Liberty, had previously enjoyed threesomes with the accuser.
Bob Norman of the Florida Trident reports that Sarasota police have recovered a video from Christian Ziegler’s phone which may be a recording of the alleged sexual assault (if you think this is nuts, it is not uncommon rapist behavior to retain visual souvenirs.) But here’s my favorite ironic twist to this story: Ziegler came over shortly after the accuser canceled their appointment, because apparently, she didn’t like him—she was into Bridget. “Sorry I was in mostly for her,” the cancellation text read. Why did this catch my eye? Because Bridget Ziegler, Moms for Liberty, and the DeSantis administration have made it a major project to get any representation of homosexuality out of the public schools and libraries, whether it is books, sex education, or teachers and administrators telling the truth about their private lives. (December 7, 2023)
Bill Britt of the Alabama Political Reporter notes that in a world where sexual tastes vary, lawmakers might want to reconsider banning and stigmatizing them. the Zieglers’ predicament should “serve as a cautionary tale about the dangers of public figures attempting to control the lives of others while leading a private life that contradicts their public stance.” Britt’s own state has passed many of the harsh anti-LGBTQ laws that are championed by Ron DeSantis and the Florida GOP and, he concludes, “Perhaps it’s time for some Alabama lawmakers and influencers to reconsider the divisions they perpetuate and empathize with those they target, even if it means metaphorically walking in their high heels.” (December 8, 2023)
Short takes:
Next Monday, December 11, former New York City mayor, Trump advisor, and election fraudster Rudy Giuliani will be in a DC courtroom facing defamation charges brought against him and One America News (OAN) by Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shay Moss. You may recall that OAN (which has since settled) and Giuliani slimed Freeman and Moss as leaders of an alleged conspiracy to flip Georgia to Biden. But essentially, there will be no trial, because Giuliani and his team fumbled discovery so badly. “In a blistering order in August, Judge [Beryl] Howell issued a default judgment against Giuliani, finding him liable for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and conspiracy,” writes Liz Dye at Public Notice. “The only issue left for the jury is to calculate how much he’ll have to pay in damages. In this case, it means that the only issue for trial is how much Rudy is going to have to fork over to Freeman and Moss after he ruined their lives.” (December 8, 2023)
Axios media analyst Sarah Fischer reports that in 2024 political and advocacy advertising is expected to grow by 31% over 2023 spending, to its highest threshold ever, $16 billion. The U.S. political sector will, in other words, be larger than total ad spending in Australia. Spending has already picked up speed, Fischer writes. “More than $100 million was spent through September on Republican primary races, faster than any previous cycle,” in part because “the internet offers infinite inventory for campaigns to place ads with few regulations. That has also contributed to the historic growth of political ad spend in the U.S.” And most of it is completely unregulated. (December 8, 2023)
At The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, Amy Walter asks whether the Republican presidential primary debates have been meaningless. The answer is yes—and no. Yes, because Trump’s standing in the polls has remained exactly the same. No, because the Biden campaign has potentially learned a lot about the strategies that don’t work against Trump: “go directly at him” (Chris Christie); “out-Trump Trump” (DeSantis); and “the soft sell” (Haley.) Of all the failed approaches, only the Christie strategy has any relevance for Democrats whatsoever, so I hope they have a few more ideas in the bag. (December 7, 2023)
This piece should be published in The New York Times beside the one I just read by Lauren Hirsch. Hirsch highlighted the role played by the law firm involved in the prep for testifying. To your point, the extent to which higher education has become corporatized presents a serious problem. Although, I must say it was stunning to watch all three presidents as they were unable to use common sense by saying, in that moment, what they said in the days after the hearing before diving into the nuances that govern speech on campus. I disagree with Hirsch. We can't just blame it all on WilmerHale.
Thanks for this thoughtful piece. I appreciate the insights throughout. However the evidentiary context that you evoke here is the violence of 10/7 but not of the last 70 years. One need not believe 10/7 was justified (and I do not) to understand that the present moment must be thought in relation to that long history of violence, yes some of it even state terrorism. I’m disappointed to read a thoughtful scholar such as you claim that the long brutal history of antisemitism was a “foundational reason” for Israeli statehood, ignoring that it was a concept that proved useful for geopolitical positioning. Considering this long history of violence I hope would make it harder to make claims like that you “don’t buy” that anti-Zionism can (and must) be separated from antisemitism. In fact this is precisely the type of thinking that we need at this time – to address the crisis in Israel-Palestine, and the one on our campuses, where we must help our students develop historical awareness, and critical capacities to attack ideas & ideologies, not people & identities.