House Education Committee issues scathing report on college antisemitism at elite schools

A year-long investigation by the U.S. House Education and the Workforce Committee found college administrators at elite schools are greatly responsible for rising antisemitism on campus.

“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,” said  committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx, R-North Carolina, about the report.

While the report details the rise of antisemitism in general on college campuses, it has a special focus on protests that erupted as a result of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks on Israel. 

“On October 7, 2023, more than 1,200 men, women and children, including 46 Americans and citizens of more than 30 countries, were slaughtered by Hamas – the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Girls and women were sexually assaulted. The depravity of Hamas’s crimes is almost unspeakable,” said an official account of the attack by the U.S. State Department. 

Hamas also took 254 hostages, including at least 12 Americans. Of that total, so far 73 hostages have been killed, including four Americans, while another four to seven Americans remain hostage, according to the statement released by the State Department. 

Incredibly, the Hamas terror attacks were the impetus for pro-Palestine protests at elite college campuses around the U.S. by a minority of progressive-left allies who supported the attacks. The protests include the illegal occupation of campus areas from which Jews and other people opposed to Hamas have been harassed. 

The universities’ alleged antisemitic bias in favor of the protesters made national news when the heads of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania appeared before Congress and refused to say that advocating genocide against Jews was a violation of the schools’ codes of conduct. 

Those comments prompted a wider investigation which culminated in the release of the House report. 

Foxx said that while Jewish students displayed courage during the antisemitic protests that have rocked campuses around the country since the attacks, university leaders and faculty displayed cowardice by enabling and encouraging anti-Jewish mobs.  

“Our investigation has shown that these ‘leaders’ bear the responsibility for the chaos likely violating Title VI and threatening public safety,” Foxx added, citing federal laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin.  

The 325-page report detailed more than a dozen findings showing that elite university leaders looked at antisemitic protests as a public relations problem that needed to be covered up or downplayed, rather than as violations of the law. 

Even worse was a finding by the report that universities often put prominent anti-Israel leaders in charge of dealing with the protests, which signaled acceptance of antisemitism. 

University leadership was shockingly subservient to protesters who established illegal encampments that occupied areas on campus from which antisemitic protesters could harass Jewish and other students who did not take a pro-Hamas position, said the report. 

The report found, for example: 

• At Northwestern, administrators put radical anti-Israel faculty in charge of negotiations with the protesters.  

• Northwestern’s President Michael Schill also may have misled Congress in testimony regarding how the university handled the protests.  

• At Columbia University, administrators offered greater concessions to protesters who illegally occupied the campus than they admitted publicly. 

• At UCLA, administrators simply “stood by” and let protesters trespassing on university campuses illegally occupy property, putting students and staff at risk.  

University leaders also intentionally declined to express support for Jews on campus. They equivocated because they did not want to offend students and faculty who supported Palestine, the report found.  

At Harvard, for example, the administration’s “failure to condemn Hamas’ attack in their widely criticized October 9 statement was an intentional decision,” by then-Harvard President Claudine Gay’s regime, said the report.   

Gay also refused to allow Harvard to condemn some rhetoric as antisemitic because “doing so would create expectations Harvard would have to impose discipline” on illegal protesters, according to the House report. 

The report found that in several other cases universities’ administrators, faculty or bureaucracies “successfully thwarted meaningful discipline” for antisemitic behavior that violated both school rules and the law, exactly as Gay did at Harvard.  

Foxx called on President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and the federal government to step in and restore order at the universities. 

“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 said.