Students for Justice in Palestine called the hearing “a manufactured attack on higher education” as Republicans criticized universities for negotiating with protesters.
During a three-hour hearing on Thursday, May 23, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce grilled four university leaders on their response to student protests against US involvement in the Israel-Gaza war.
This round of questioning was the third installment in the Republican-led committee’s quest to probe university presidents. Previous hearings brought chaos to the tenures of other leaders who testified before the body. Last year, the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania resigned after being questioned by the committee and facing mounting public pressure to step down.
Committee Chair Rep. Virginia Foxx called the president of Northwestern University Michael Schill, chancellor at the University of California, Los Angeles Gene Block, and president of Rutgers University Jonathan Holloway to Capitol Hill following the formation—and subsequent removal—of pro-Palestinian Gaza solidarity encampments on their campuses. Student protesters demanded, among other measures, divestment of their university’s endowment from companies affiliated with Israel.
While many Republican and Democratic politicians have called these demonstrations antisemitic, the protestors—including many Jewish students who have participated—reject this charge. “This crisis is the carefully engineered climax of a long-standing project to conflate criticism of the Israeli state with racism against Jewish people; its aim is to discredit critics of Israel and, if possible, banish them from campuses across the United States,” wrote members of UCLA’s task force on anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim, and anti-Arab racism for The Nation.
During the hearing, entitled “Calling for Accountability: Stopping Antisemitic College Chaos,” Schill and Block drew on their own family histories of relatives who died in or survived the Holocaust. “My family’s story, which unfortunately is not unique among Amer