Editorial Note
31.07.25
Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies recently published a report by Graham Wright, Shahar Hecht, and Leonard Saxe titled “Ideology in the Classroom: How Faculty at US Universities Navigate Politics and Pedagogy Amid Federal Pressure Over Viewpoint Diversity and Antisemitism.”
This study explores how faculty at US universities think about contentious political issues and how they address them in the classroom. It is based on 2200 faculty who taught undergraduates in the 2024-25 academic year. The research was conducted in spring 2025.
The methodology is quite straightforward and includes several variables: faculty’s political identities and viewpoints, level of political activism, extent to which they hold hostile views about Jews and Israel, concerns about being targeted because of their political views, and strategies for addressing political controversies in the classroom.
The results are interesting: Only around 3% of non-Jewish faculty had a pattern of views about Israel that are generally described as antisemitic, such as denying Israel’s right to exist. An additional 7% of non-Jewish faculty had a pattern of explicitly hostile views toward Jews as a people. Faculty who were extremely liberal were the most likely to be hostile to Israel.
This study is interesting in light of the ongoing federal investigations on antisemitism and related funding cuts to university programs.
Currently, the US Congress is in the process of investigating incidents of antisemitism on college campuses. In a recent hearing on July 15, 2025, the House Education and Workforce Committee (HEWC) is illustrative. Titled “Antisemitism in Higher Education: Examining the Role of Faculty, Funding, and Ideology,” the HEWC looked at the DEI, foreign funding, unions, and faculty members who espouse antisemitism. According to reports, Committee members stated that, “The DEI ideology embraced by so many university bureaucrats categorizes Jews as white oppressors—and therefore excuses, or even justifies, antisemitic harassment. The violence, fear, and alienation felt by Jewish students is, at its core, a result of administrators and their staff lacking the moral clarity to condemn and punish antisemitism that is creating a hostile environment for Jewish students on America’s campuses.”
The hearing put several university leaders in a difficult spot.
Dr. Robert M. Groves, Interim President of Georgetown University, was asked whether Georgetown would allow members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to speak on campus. Groves replied with a non-committal “I don’t think we would.” A member of the Committee then asked, “if Georgetown would prevent white KKK bigots on campus, why would the university allow faculty and students to invite antisemitic bigots?”
Dr. Rich Lyons, Chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, was questioned about the decision to hire and continue to employ a professor who stated the unprovoked October 7th attack was justified. Lyons repeatedly defended this professor by describing him as “a fine scholar.” When asked whether he would commit to transparency of foreign funding, the Chancellor responded that several donors request anonymity and could not commit to transparency. One Committee member pointed out that such a policy deprives the American people of information about foreign influence on college campuses. The Committee members stated that Jewish students may not feel safe on his campus. His reply was telling: “Well, I think there are Jewish people that don’t feel safe in lots of parts… I think there is antisemitism in society.“
Dr. Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, Chancellor of The City University of New York, was asked about two faculty members who voiced support for Hamas and compared Zionists to Nazis. Matos Rodriguez stated, “I have been clear that Hamas is a terrible terrorist organization, and we have no tolerance at the City University of New York for anyone who would embrace that support of Hamas.“ However, when asked whether these professors were dismissed or reprimanded, he failed to answer.
The Committee summed up the hearing by stating, “Colleges and universities have failed to address the drivers of antisemitism on campus, leading to surging antisemitism and hostility toward Jews, decreased ideological diversity, and diminished discourse. Republicans are holding these schools accountable and working to protect Jewish students and faculty.”
Not surprisingly, pro-Palestinian groups in the U.S. are fighting the Committee.
Ahead of the Committee hearing, a petition was signed by groups of “Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine” at CUNY, Georgetown, and Berkeley, and Georgetown AAUP, as well as the National Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.
The petition says, “these show trials have been focused on cynically deploying false claims of antisemitism, specifically to silence and punish advocacy for Palestinian human rights and freedom.”
For the group, the “fallacious equation of Palestinian liberation with antisemitism is contested by many Jewish students and faculty.”
The group stated that these Congressional hearings “are not about actually addressing antisemitism in higher education. Rather, their agenda is to bring the higher education sector to heel. The hearings are part of longstanding and ongoing efforts to attack academic freedom, faculty governance, and higher education as a public good.”
The group spoke against “the patently false, hypocritical, and deeply anti-intellectual haranguing by members of the committee.”
The group then urged, “It is time to break this pattern.“
Another group, “Left Voice,” a revolutionary socialist news outlet, objected to the Committee ahead of the hearing.
Their article was titled “The Most Despicable Far-Right Politicians Are Leading the Congressional Education Hearings.”
It was published a day before the hearing, and claimed “The far-right politicians leading them don’t care about Jewish people, students, or education; they use these hearings to attack the Palestine movement, queer people, Muslim people, the Left, and universities. “
According to this outlet, “This is one of several witch-hunt hearings in which members of the committee endlessly grill university presidents about antisemitism, which they falsely conflate with anti-Zionism and the pro-Palestine movement.”
For this outlet, the HEWC, “don’t care about education. The HEWC wants to restructure the way that universities and their unions operate and to instill a new far-right norm at universities, which would be even more violently repressive.”
They ended by stating, “We must fight back, organized from below on university campuses… It is time to stand up.”
The level of antisemitism on campus is skyrocketing. Kenneth L. Marcus, Chairman and CEO of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, discussed the alarming rise in anti-Semitism on college campuses. He said, “The cultural and moral rot within higher education has gotten to the point where there are now large numbers of students and student organizations within elite institutions that are praising Hamas and attacking Israel, and who have become inflamed with the old hatred of Jews — anti-Semitism. This is something that requires a powerful response.”
The battle to undo antisemitism on campus is a long one and may not succeed. Too many elements are working against it. It would be interesting to see how it continues after the current administration’s term.
IAM will continue to follow this issue.
REFERENCES
Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies
Ideology in the Classroom: How Faculty at US Universities Navigate Politics and Pedagogy Amid Federal Pressure Over Viewpoint Diversity and Antisemitism
Graham Wright, Shahar Hecht, and Leonard Saxe
July 2025
This study explores how faculty at US universities think about contentious political issues and how these issues are addressed in the classroom. The report examines the political identities and viewpoints of faculty, their levels of political activism, their concerns about being targeted because of their political views, their approach to addressing current political controversies in the classroom (climate change, racism in America, Donald Trump and American democracy, Russia-Ukraine, and the Israel-Palestine conflict), and the extent to which they hold hostile views about Jews and Israel. The study is based on a survey conducted in spring 2025 of more than 2, 200 faculty at the 146 Carnegie-2021 classified R1 universities, who taught undergraduates in the 2024-25 academic year. This study provides insights about the role faculty play in shaping the climate on campus, in light of the intense focus on viewpoint diversity and antisemitism at US universities and ongoing related federal investigations and funding cuts to university programs.
READ THE REPORT
READ THE TECHNICAL APPENDICES
Key Findings
- Most faculty identify as politically liberal but have a wide range of views on controversial political issues. More than two thirds of faculty identified as liberal, while one third identified as moderate or conservative. However, their opinions differed with respect to specific political issues. There was overwhelming agreement among faculty that climate change is a crisis requiring immediate action and that President Trump is a threat to democracy. At the same time, less than half of faculty supported returning all land seized through colonization to indigenous peoples, and a substantial minority expressed conservative positions on issues related to gender identity, immigration, and DEI.
- Only a minority of faculty are politically active on issues related to climate change, racism in America, Donald Trump and American democracy, Russia-Ukraine, or the Israel-Palestine conflict. Notwithstanding their own political views, only a minority of faculty had been involved in activism or had posted on social media in relation to any of these five issues. Participation in political activism and posting on social media was highest with respect to Trump and American democracy (44%) and lowest with respect to Russia-Ukraine and the Israel-Palestine conflict (22% for Russia-Ukraine and 21% for the Israel-Palestine conflict).
- Many faculty members are concerned about the consequences of holding liberal political views. Half of liberal faculty members and 70% of extremely liberal faculty members expressed serious concerns about being targeted by the federal government for their political views.
- Many contentious issues that dominate news headlines do not come up often in college classes. For example, despite the intense focus on how faculty teach about Israel, more than three quarters of the faculty in our sample reported that, over the past academic year, the Israel-Palestine conflict never came up in class discussions, and less than 10% reported actively teaching about it.
- When teaching about contentious topics, most faculty say they would present arguments from a variety of perspectives and encourage students to make up their own minds. Whether they actively taught about these political topics or not, only a small percentage of faculty, less than 10% for most topics, said that they would teach as if there was only one legitimate perspective on the controversy.
- The vast majority of faculty do not endorse statements widely considered to be antisemitic. Only around 3% of non-Jewish faculty had a pattern of views about Israel that are generally described as antisemitic by formal definitions put forward by Jewish organizations and that Jewish students tend to see as antisemitic (such as denying Israel’s right to exist). An additional 7% of non-Jewish faculty had a pattern of explicitly hostile views toward Jews as a people. Faculty who were extremely liberal were the most likely to be hostile to Israel, while those with more conservative political views, including those who were the most critical of DEI, were the most likely to be hostile to Jews. However, those faculty with the strongest views on DEI, Israel, or decolonization were still unlikely to indicate hostility to either Jews or Israel.
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| Hearing Recap: “Antisemitism in Higher Education: Examining the Role of Faculty, Funding, and Ideology”WASHINGTON, D.C., July 15, 2025Today, the Education and Workforce Committee held ahearing to examine the main drivers of antisemitism on college campuses such as polices on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), foreign funding, unions, and faculty members that espouse antisemitism. Committee Chairman Tim Walberg (R-MI) discussed how DEI policies perpetuate antisemitic ideology. “The DEI ideology embraced by so many university bureaucrats categorizes Jews as white oppressors—and therefore excuses, or even justifies, antisemitic harassment. The violence, fear, and alienation felt by Jewish students is, at its core, a result of administrators and their staff lacking the moral clarity to condemn and punish antisemitism that is creating a hostile environment for Jewish students on America’s campuses,” he explained.Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT) highlighted how antisemitic speakers who have been welcomed on college campuses have played a role in spreading hatred. He askedDr. Robert M. Groves, Interim President of Georgetown University,whether Georgetown would allow members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to speak on campus. Dr. Groves replied with a non-committal “I don’t think we would.” Rep. Owens followed up and asked, “if Georgetown would prevent white KKK bigots on campus, why would the university allow faculty and students to invite antisemitic bigots?”In his line of questioning, Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) listed examples of antisemitic speech used by faulty and professors on each campus. He asked Dr. Rich Lyons, Chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley,why he hired and continues to employ a professor whostated the unprovoked October 7th attack was justified.Chancellor Lyons defended this professor multiple times by stating he is “a fine scholar.”Rep. Michael Baumgartner (R-WA) discussed foreign funding and called for increased transparency around foreign donations and partnerships. When asked whether he would commit to full transparency of foreign funding, Chancellor Lyons stated he has several donors who request anonymity and could not commit to transparency. “What do you think that says to the American people when you want to hide foreign influence on your college campus?” Rep. Baumgartner replied. In an exchange with Dr. Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, Chancellor of The City University of New York, Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) brought up two faculty members who voiced support for Hamas and compared Zionists to Nazis. “I have been clear that Hamas is a terrible terrorist organization, and we have no tolerance at the City University of New York for anyone who would embrace that support of Hamas,” Dr. Matos Rodriguez stated. However, when asked whether these professors were dismissed or reprimanded, he failed to provide an answer.Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) noted that antisemitism is so widespread at universities due to their political leanings. “Universities are just overwhelmingly Democrat, which is a breeding ground for this antisemitism because right now the progressive wing of the Democrat party…this anti-Israel feeling has become…the norm,” he said. Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI)asked Chancellor Lyons why some Jewish students might not feel safe on his campus and he replied with, “Well, I think there are Jewish people that don’t feel safe in lots of parts,” dismissing the concerns about antisemitism on campus. When she asked again, the Chancellor said, “I think there is antisemitism in society,” further undermining his credibility to take antisemitism on campus seriously.Bottom line: Colleges and universities have failed to address the drivers of antisemitism on campus, leading to surging antisemitism and hostility toward Jews, decreased ideological diversity, and diminished discourse. Republicans are holding these schools accountable and working to protect Jewish students and faculty. |
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UNITED STATES
The Most Despicable Far-Right Politicians Are Leading the Congressional Education Hearings
Tomorrow the House Education and Workforce Committee will hold yet another hearing on antisemitism at universities. The far-right politicians leading them don’t care about Jewish people, students, or education; they use these hearings to attack the Palestine movement, queer people, Muslim people, the Left, and universities.
Aisha Jena and Maria Aurelio July 14, 2025
Three university presidents from the City University of New York (CUNY), Georgetown, and University of California Berkeley have been called before the House Education and Workforce Committee (HEWC) to testify in a hearing on Tuesday, July 15, titled “Antisemitism in Higher Education: Examining the Role of Faculty, Funding, and Ideology.” This is one of several witch-hunt hearings in which members of the committee endlessly grill university presidents about antisemitism, which they falsely conflate with anti-Zionism and the pro-Palestine movement.
The committee’s 21 Republicans and 16 Democrats will each question the university presidents. The Republicans will attempt to paint the university presidents as soft on antisemitism and demand increased disciplinary measures on students and faculty. While the committee itself does not have disciplinary power, it relies on the threat of President Trump pulling federal funding, as well as working hand in hand with far-right and Zionist groups outside of the university to pressure universities to impose increasingly draconian measures on their campuses. It is clear that the federal government is connected to far-right groups like Canary Mission, which are targeting students for deportation.
As a result of these hearings as well as continued pressure by far-right and Zionist forces, several university presidents have been forced to step down, including Claudine Gay from Harvard and Liz Magill from University of Pennsylvania.
These hearings have nothing to do with antisemitism, nor do they have anything to do with supporting universities. They are attacks on anyone who is speaking up against the genocide in Gaza, and they are attacks on critical thinking, free speech, and the Left. The movement for Palestine is made up of people of different races and religions, including a significant sector of Jewish people who say “not in our name.” There is an international movement, an international call for justice for the Palestinian people and that is what the Far Right wants to crush.
These hearings are an attempt to force university leaders to enact harsher discipline on students and academic workers in the movement for Palestine, including against Jewish faculty and students. They are meant to demonize anyone who questions U.S. imperialism, racism, patriarchy, and capitalism and create an education system devoid of critical thinking and that erases the history of oppressed people. Further, they are used as an excuse to defund already limited federal support for universities.
HEWC is ruthlessly attacking all initiatives for oppressed and under-represented people at universities, from Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives to African-American and Gender Studies departments, as well as transgender athletes and anti-genocide mobilizations. They go further and also attack faculty and staff labor unions. Leading up to the July 15 hearing, the committee reposted a Zionist and anti-union op-ed with a tweet that reads:
Unions are promoting antisemitism. Instead of listening to dues-paying members, unions spout antisemitic propaganda and sideline workers with pro-Israel views. In many cases, workers are REQUIRED to fund these organizations that discriminate against them! The disease of antisemitism runs deep.
These people don’t care about education. The HEWC wants to restructure the way that universities and their unions operate and to instill a new far-right norm at universities, which would be even more violently repressive than the existing neoliberal order in higher education.
The Republicans in this committee consist of some of the most racist, transphobic, and white-nationalist members of Congress, who have no business investigating “hate.” We have compiled some of the worst members of the House Education and Workforce Committee and provided only a few examples of their hateful, right-wing ideology.
The Worst of the House Education and Workforce Committee
TIM WALBERG, CHAIR
As of this year, the new chair of the committee is Representative Tim Walberg (R-MI). He came into Congress in 2006 in a push to purge moderate Republicans from office, clearing space for the Right. He has consistently aligned with Trump, going so far as to vote against the certification of Biden’s 2020 electoral victory and lend credence to “election hoax” conspiracy theories.
His positions on Gaza dehumanize Palestinians and Muslims. Walberg has said the United States shouldn’t “spend a dime” on humanitarian aid in Gaza, and instead implied a nuclear bomb should be dropped on Palestine: “it should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.”
Walberg is also known for attacks against the LGBTQ+ community. He introduced legislation that would force schools to disclose students’ identities to parents and require parental consent for teachers to use students’ preferred pronouns. At Uganda’s National Prayer Breakfast, he voiced support for the country’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, which includes the death penalty.
VIRGINIA FOXX, FORMER CHAIR
Virginia Foxx (R-NC) was the previous chair of the committee and used her leadership as a weapon against the movement for Palestine and to pave the way for Trump’s attacks on the university. She perpetuates the far-right, populist perception of universities as out of control, expensive, and elite liberal institutions to demand more “accountability” from administrators. Here, “accountability” means privatizing education, disciplining the Left, and attacking LGBTQ+ people, all long-term goals cynically pursued under the guise rooting out antisemitism.
As chair of the HEWC, Foxx was able to help push Claudine Gay out of Harvard and Liz Magill out of the University of Pennsylvania, promoting the fallacy that they were allowing antisemitism to run rampant at pro-Palestine actions on their campuses.
In October 2024, under her leadership HEWC issued a report on antisemitism that continued the witch hunt on universities. A statement on the report read:
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.
She later stated that, “the Committee’s findings indicate the need for a fundamental reassessment of federal support for postsecondary institutions that have failed to meet their obligations to protect Jewish students, faculty, and staff.” In short, she works hand-in-hand with Trump to blatantly repress the movement for Palestine at universities through threats to cut their funding.
Foxx is a longtime supporter of private school vouchers and for-profit institutions. She has no interest in promoting public education for all, much less university for all. Instead, she wants to dismantle public funding for education and is hiding behind false claims of antisemitism in the Palestine movement to do it.
Foxx speaks out against anything that promotes diversity. Even before the Trump era, she stood against same-sex marriage and supported “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and other homophobic and transphobic measures.
ELISE STEFANIK
Elise Stefanik (R-NY) was widely considered a possible Trump pick for vice president. She describes herself as an “ultra-MAGA” warrior and is among the most far-right legislators in Congress. She peddles the Great Replacement theory, a white supremacist theory that claims white Americans are being replaced by Black and Brown immigrants. This theory also formed the basis for the dangerous antisemitic slogan “Jews will not replace us” — which was promoted in the far-right Charlottesville action in 2017. Of course, Donald Trump said there were “very fine people” on both sides, highlighting the Far Right’s hypocrisy and cynical weaponization of antisemitism. Antisemitism is real and it is coming from the Far Right.
Stoking conspiracy theories and election hoax lies, Stefanik accused “radical Democrats” of planning what she called a “PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION.” The ad read, “Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” She erroneously claimed that during the baby formula shortage, Biden was providing infant formula to undocumented immigrants while “American mothers” suffered, attempting to foster anti-immigrant hatred. She also called Democrats “pedo grifters” — a term used by QAnon conspiracy theorists who claim that a Satan-worshipping group of liberal pedophiles runs the Democratic Party.
Stefanik was also among the main attackers of the Harvard and University of Pennsylvania Presidents in 2023, promoting the lie that the movement for Palestine calls for the genocide of Jewish people. Despite being a Harvard graduate herself, she embraces Trump’s populist rhetoric against universities. She said, “This warped pseudo-intellectualism from the pinnacle of the ivory tower — Harvard, Penn and MIT — it is atrocious, and it’s a sad reflection of what’s happened in academia.” She has consistently sought to bully university Presidents into taking disciplinary measures against students and faculty.
A case in point: in the past week, she publicly harassed the CUNY chancellor online, claiming that he was trying to avoid testifying. Threatening to subpoena him, she wrote, “Please confirm your attendance immediately with the other college presidents to testify — and I would be remiss if I did not remind you that Congressional Republicans have subpoena authority and have used it extensively in our higher education investigations.”
RANDY FINE
Randy Fine (R-FL) is among the most blatantly hateful and Islamophobic members of Congress. Like Walberg, he called to drop nuclear bombs on Gaza. In a Fox news interview, he said:
In World War II, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Nazis. We did not negotiate a surrender with the Japanese. We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here.
As the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) explained, his statement,
[C]onstitutes an explicit incitement to violence, endangering American Muslims and Palestinians, by calling for nuclear genocide against more than two million Palestinians, half of whom are children. It represents one of the most dangerous and dehumanizing remarks ever made by a sitting member of Congress and marks an escalation of Fine’s long-standing pattern of inciting violence and bigotry.
Fine not only doubled down on these remarks, but continued to make disgustingly Islamophobic comments, saying “I recognize that half of people in Gaza are married to their cousins, so you’re going to find a lot of people with mental defects. But you’ve got to have a mental defect to interpret the comment that way.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has documented numerous other instance of Fine’s hate speech, including:
- Saying “Gaza must be destroyed.”
- Telling Palestinians to “eat rockets” and posting hashtags like #BombsAway and #StarveAway.
- Mocking a dead Palestinian child with “Quite well, actually! Thanks for the pic!”
- Telling a Muslim constituent to “go blow yourself up.”
- Referring to a Palestinian keffiyeh as a “terrorist rag” during a public hearing.
- Threatening to weaponize anti-protest and anti-boycott laws to silence dissent.
He also attacked fellow HEWC member Ilhan Omar, calling her a terrorist. Instead of apologizing, he doubled down, responding to Democrats who condemned the hateful and Islamophobic attack by saying “the Hamas Caucus is upset. Boo hoo.”
It is clear that Fine’s agenda has nothing to do with protecting Jewish people and everything to do with a hateful attack on Muslims, Palestinians, and the movement for Palestine.
GLENN GROTHMAN
Glenn Grothman (R-WI) is a long-time member of Congress, consistently representing the Far Right.
In 2024, he gave a profoundly misogynistic speech on the floor of Congress. He claimed that Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty programs,
took the purpose out of the man’s life, because now you have a basket of goodies for the mom. They’ve taken away the purpose of the man to be part of a family. And if we want to get America back to, say, 1960, where this was almost unheard of, we have to fundamentally change these programs.
Grothman went on to blame the “breakdown of the family” on “people like Angela Davis, [a] well-known Communist, people like the feminists who were so important in the 1960s.”
In short, Grothman was actively arguing to go back to a time when marital rape was legal in every state in the United States and to the expectation that women cook and clean, remaining in the home and dependent on men. He even opposed equal-pay legislation, saying“you could argue that money is more important for men.”
In 2023, he displayed a Christian nationalist flag outside his Congressional office, a flag often associated with white supremacy and flown by many who stormed the Capitol on January 6.
He also once criticized sex-ed classes because, as Grothman put it, some gay teachers “would like it if more kids became homosexuals.”
MARK HARRIS
Mark Harris (R-NC) is an evangelical pastor turned far-right politician. He is deeply Islamophobic and believes peace in Israel and Palestine can only be achieved if Jewish people and Muslims all convert to Christianity. In fact, he claimed Islam was “dangerous” and the work of Satan.
He also led anti-marriage equality initiatives in North Carolina, and was one of the proponents of the state’s 2016 “bathroom bill,” a precursor to the current wave of anti-trans legislation.
MARY MILLER
Mary Miller (R-IL) is part of the far-right Freedom Caucus and a strong Trump supporter. In 2021, she quoted Hitler, claiming that his views on indoctrinating youth should be emulated (after an uproar, she apologized). Someone who quotes Hitler in a positive sense cannot claim to be standing with Jewish people. In 2022, she said the overthrow of Roe v. Wade was a “victory for white life,” although her office claimed she misspoke. These aren’t mistakes — they are thinly-veiled dog whistles.
More recently, she argued that non-Christians ought not be allowed to lead the House of Representatives’ prayers, simultaneously misidentifying that morning’s Sikh prayer leader as a Muslim. She tweeted (and eventually deleted), “This should have never been allowed to happen. America was founded as a Christian nation, and I believe our government should reflect that truth, not drift further from it. May God have mercy.”
She has also repeatedly insisted on misgendering Sarah McBride, a trans congresswoman from Delaware. She supports abolishing birthright citizenship, and believes conservative Christian ideas should be taught in public schools.
The House Education and Workforce Committee’s Aim Is Hate, Austerity, and Control
The idea that any of these merciless bigots are capable of seeking out and rectifying “hate” is farcical. The House Education and Workforce Committee is about repressing the Left and appeasing the Right through attacks on oppressed communities, the Palestine movement and public funding for universities. The politicians in HEWC are not fighting antisemitism, but are instead part of a far-right, Christian nationalism that is antisemitic. As Jewish Voice for Peace writes, Christian nationalists “invoke Jewish protection only to advance a White supremacist, misogynist, imperial, and anti-LGBTQIA+ agenda that further endangers Jewish peoples in the U.S. and abroad.” This is precisely what is happening.
This new round of hearings recalls the McCarthy era, but repression now hides behind Zionist victimhood. The imperialist bipartisan consensus tried to paint Israel as the victim by erasing the real experience of Palestians starved, under constant fire from rockets, forced into ever smaller enclosures, and shot for desperately seeking aid.
The situation in the United States follows the same logic: this “education” committee parades inflated fears of Zionist students and faculty, all while it is the defenders of Palestine — many of whom are Jewish — who are fired, assaulted by police, and threatened with deportation.
A central function of these attacks is to eradicate leftist thought and anti-imperialist thought from the university. Further, the Far Right wants to enforce austerity and to build an excuse to defund universities. HEWC voted for the reconciliation bill to reduce eligibility for Pell Grants, making it more difficult for working class students to attend university. The majority of the politicians on the committee supported the Big Beautiful Bill, which is replete with attacks on working-class students, such as caps on how much students can borrow.
The House Education and Workforce Committee is a key tool of the Far Right to attack universities as we know it. While the university leaderships do not side with the movement for Palestine and have overseen neoliberal attacks on students and academic workers, they never go far enough to satisfy Trump and his goons. They want universities to ban protests, strip curricula down to job training, and convert whatever’s left to an ideological machine for their agenda, sacrificing the vulnerable to distract from real economic deterioration and widening inequality. The assault on the university is the tip of a new repressive spear that will only go deeper every time its excesses go unchecked. We cannot trust the courts or the Democrats, who have been complicit in these attacks. We must fight back, organized from below on university campuses, in our neighborhoods and workplaces. It is time to stand up.
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Statements and Letters
Statement on July 15
Congressional Hearing:
We Call Upon Our Institutional Leaders to Meet the Moment
July 3, 2025
On July 15, 2025, City University of New York Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, Robert M. Groves, Interim President of Georgetown University, and Rich Lyons, Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley will testify before the House Committee on Education and Workforce at a hearing on “Antisemitism in Higher Education: Examining the Role of Faculty, Funding, and Ideology.”
This will be the ninth hearing on antisemitism held by this committee. If the pattern from previous hearings holds, these university administrators will be shown examples of what the committee deems campus antisemitism and asked how they plan to combat it. They will be expected to explain why they have failed to sufficiently discipline, expel, suspend, or fire students, faculty, and staff—many of whom identify as Jewish—in the name of Jewish safety. And like prior instances, the House Committee will demand that these leaders ignore, bend, or break all university policies, contractual agreements, state and federal laws, and constitutional guarantees to due process, freedom of speech and expression, and academic freedom in order to eliminate what the committee considers to be antisemitism from their institutions.
The hypocrisy of the Republican members leading this committee is evident in their refusal to condemn rampant antisemitism within their own party, including by the very members of this committee. Instead, these show trials have been focused on cynically deploying false claims of antisemitism, specifically to silence and punish advocacy for Palestinian human rights and freedom. As David Cole, a professor of law and public policy at Georgetown University and former legal director at the ACLU, wrote of his experience at the last hearing on May 8: “I soon realized that neither the law nor the facts matter to the Committee on Education’s Republican inquisitors.” Instead, he noted, Republicans like Joe Wilson insisted that “‘Free Palestine from the river to the sea’ is a code for death to Israel, death to America. We know that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”
Yet this fallacious equation of Palestinian liberation with antisemitism is contested by many Jewish students and faculty. Our Jewish colleagues at Haverford College, another institution recently summoned to a hearing, characterized it as “an unacceptable way of policing, censoring, distorting and inhibiting our Jewish life and our Jewish identity, and the holy connection of our faith to humanity and justice.” A group of more than 100 Jewish faculty and staff at Northwestern University issued a similar statement, declaring: “The fact that U.S. government leaders are making unwarranted threats to our university and stripping rights from students, faculty, and researchers nationwide in the name of Jews is deeply offensive to us. We believe it should stop.” And almost 3500 Jewish faculty from across the country came together across differences to say:
We hold various views about Israel and Palestine, politics in the Middle East, and student activism on our campuses. But we are united in denouncing, without equivocation, anyone who invokes our name—and cynical claims of antisemitism—to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities. We specifically reject rhetoric that caricatures our students and colleagues as “antisemitic terrorists” because they advocate for Palestinian human rights and freedom.
Their concern is echoed in a statementby scholars of genocide and the Holocaust who decry “the cynical use of false claims of rampant antisemitism to strip members of our communities of their constitutional rights.”
Despite their stated purpose, then, these Congressional hearings are not about actually addressing antisemitism in higher education. Rather, their agenda is to bring the higher education sector to heel. The hearings are part of longstanding and ongoing efforts to attack academic freedom, faculty governance, and higher education as a public good. The scapegoating of Palestine advocacy is directly linked to the dismantling of racial and gender equity initiatives and of whole areas of critical scholarly inquiry, all in the service of an ideological makeover of the university system.
The hearings began with a targeted attack on some of the wealthiest private universities: Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania. For these institutions, with large endowments and federal grants, the leverage was clear and the retribution, despite capitulation by Columbia and others, swift. More recently, the focus has shifted to public institutions like Rutgers, UCLA, Berkeley, and CUNY. If the pattern holds, the leaders of these and other universities will prove unable or unwilling to stand up effectively to the patently false, hypocritical, and deeply anti-intellectual haranguing by members of the committee.
It is time to break this pattern.
We demand that the leaders of our universities do better than those who have previously gone before this committee, who through their acquiescence have advanced the federal government’s agenda of undermining institutional autonomy and exposing faculty and students to the violence of the security apparatus. At the very least, the leaders of our universities must defend our institutions from baseless attacks and affirm principles of academic freedom and free speech. They must oppose the weaponizing of antisemitism through the equation of Jewish safety with the silencing and exclusion of those who speak up for Palestinian freedom and an end to genocide. And leaders of public universities in particular must stand by the mandate of fostering accessible, inclusive, and equitable educational spaces in which critical debate is foundational to intellectual development.
We understand the immense political pressure university administrators are facing, but this is the time for all of us to stand up to that pressure. We join with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in warning against anticipatory obedience, and recognizing that, in the face of attacks on the very mission of universities, “it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and to actively defend its interests and its values.”
President Groves, Chancellor Lyons, and Chancellor Matos Rodríguez, we ask you to do more than defend our institutions from false accusations and unfounded attacks. We ask you to use that national platform to outline what you will do to protect the best of what our institutions already do. That includes securing full funding for our universities, especially our public institutions; insisting upon the need for reliance on the expertise of faculty, staff, and students, not outside political forces, in creating a culture of inclusion at our universities; and affirmatively nurturing freedom of speech, freedom of political expression, and academic freedom.
We are at an inflection point. Either we defend the rights of our students, faculty, and staff to learn, teach, and protest, or we surrender and permit the university to become an instrument of money power and government propaganda. We call upon our institutional leaders to meet the moment by demonstrating the power and value of higher education as a cornerstone of democracy and a counterweight to authoritarianism.
Signed by:
CUNY Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine
Georgetown Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine
Berkeley Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine
Georgetown AAUP
Endorsed by:
National Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine
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