The presidents of Northwestern and Rutgers Universities and the University of California at Los Angeles will face congressional questioning on Thursday, in the latest act in what many are calling political theater.
The House Committee on Education and the Workforce summoned the presidents to answer for reports of what some legislators describe as rampant antisemitism amid student protests over the Israel-Hamas war.
University presidents could learn from K-12 leaders’ handling of their congressional interrogators, says one professor.
“The Committee has a clear message for mealy-mouthed, spineless college leaders: Congress will not tolerate your dereliction of your duty to your Jewish students,” said Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina and chairwoman of the committee, in a news release ahead of the hearing. “No stone must go unturned while buildings are being defaced, campus greens are being captured, or graduations are being ruined.”
Previous hearings led to widespread criticism of higher-education leadership and the resignations of two university presidents.
After the April 17 hearing featuring Nemat (Minouche) Shafik, Columbia University’s president, thousands of student protesters at colleges across the country staged protests and set up encampments, resulting in multiple arrests and the destruction of campus property. That gave conservative politicians more ammunition to paint college campuses as unruly environments. But fallout from this week’s hearing may be more muted: Fewer students remain on campuses. Presidents have also had the opportunity to prepare for congressional questioning. They have seen their peers answer in remarkably different ways and watched a third hearing in May that featured leaders from K-12 school districts engaging Republican lawmakers’ questions and capably avoiding being cornered.
The Chronicle spoke with several experts about the previous hearings and what to watch for at Thursday’s. Here’s what they said.
Negotiations with protesters will be under scrutiny.
Politicians will focus on the ways college leaders have responded to the recent wave of student demonstrations that began in late April.
Pro-Palestinian students set up encampments on more than 90 campuses, many refusing to leave until administrators agreed to, among other things, cut colleges’ financial ties with Israel.
Some institutions cracked down, arresting or disciplining thousands of students, faculty members, and other protesters. Other colleges negotiated, agreeing to adhere to some student demands if they either followed campus protest policies or packed up their encampment before graduation weekend. Some public officials have said administrators violated students’ and professors’ right to free speech. Others say they allowed protests to go on for too long and placed students in harm’s way.
Initially, the committee called on the presidents of the University of Michigan and Yale University to testify. However, congressional leaders asked for Jonathan Holloway and Michael Schill, the leaders of Rutgers and Northwestern, respectively, to testify instead after they reached agreements with protesters. Though neither Holloway nor Schill said they’d cut university ties to Israel, both agreed to provide more services for Middle Eastern and Palestinian students if the demonstrators dismantled their encampments. Northwestern also said it would set up a committee to help students and staff learn more about the university’s investment strategies.
Both presidents have already faced backlash from state politicians and advocacy groups for working with student groups that some view as antisemitic. Many said negotiating, even if it didn’t involve divestment, showed students that the university would still work with them even if they broke university policy and held what some regard as antisemitic beliefs.
“Over the last several days, the presidents of Northwestern and Rutgers have made shocking concessions to the unlawful antisemitic encampments on their campuses,” Foxx said in a news release announcing the change. “They have surrendered to antisemitic radicals in despicable displays of cowardice.”
At UCLA on April 30, a group of counterprotesters attacked the university’s encampment with sticks, chemical spray, and fireworks. The students rallied to protect their encampment, leading to hours of violence before the police intervened. Two days after the outbreak, the police broke up the demonstration and arrested more than 200 people.
The committee has opened an investigation into the university for its “inadequate response to antisemitism and failure to protect Jewish students.” While Foxx acknowledged in a May 15 letter to the UCLA administration that the university had dismantled the encampment, it came “far too late,” she wrote. Disruptions have continued since then, she added, causing the university to move all classes online for more than a week.
Defending your actions won’t work.
During December’s hearing, the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took a defensive posture before their interrogators.
The lawmakers asked about the definition of antisemitism and whether certain pro-Palestinian phrases should be allowed or censored. The presidents fell back on the complexities of free speech, arguing they had an obligation to protect First Amendment rights.
The campus leaders didn’t understand that they were players in a political spectacle, said Sigal Ben-Porath, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The politicians were angling for moments that could negatively depict colleges rather than looking for solutions to combat antisemitism and hate.
By trying to reason with the lawmakers and explain themselves, the presidents came off as ill-equipped and unfit to lead their institutions. “They weren’t prepared to respond to what was actually happening in the room,” Ben-Porath said.
Politicians leaned into the presidents’ legalistic answers, asking progressively more specific and combative questions. Several of the exchanges went viral, including one where two presidents said that calling for the genocide of Jewish people could be antisemitic depending on the “context” of the situation. These sound bites fueled public outrage and contributed to the eventual resignations of Elizabeth Magill and Claudine Gay from their respective presidencies at Penn and Harvard.
Agreeing with politicians also leads to trouble.
During the second hearing, in April, Shafik seemed to cater her responses to what she felt lawmakers wanted to hear.
Politicians probed Shafik’s handling of faculty and student discipline. They asked how many students had been suspended over antisemitic incidents and called out specific professors who’d made controversial remarks about the war. Pressed for details, Shafik said that two of them were under investigation and one was terminated. After the hearing, though, the professors said they were unaware of any disciplinary actions.
To Silke-Maria Weineck, a professor of German studies and comparative literature and a former chair of the Faculty Senate at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Columbia’s president threw her own students and faculty members under the bus, which only seemed to lead to more outrage from pro-Palestinian student protesters, many of whom called on Shafik to resign.
Weineck pointed to one moment when Rep. Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana, questioned why “ashkenormativity” was defined as “a system of oppression that favors white Jewish folx based on the assumption that all Jewish folx are ashkenazi or from western Europe” in an orientation packet for the university’s School of Social Work. Shafik said the packet was prepared by students and therefore “not a product” of the university. She added, with a laugh, that maybe the students who wrote it “didn’t know how to spell” when Banks pushed her further on why the word “folks” was spelled with an “x” in the definition. (“Folx,” an alternative spelling of “folks,” is sometimes used to be more inclusive of people from marginalized backgrounds.)
“To me, your first job if you’re in a position like that is to defend the people you are called upon to lead,” Weineck said. “I think the failure to do so has been absolutely shocking.”
Shafik’s response also led to increased violence and turmoil on campus, said Debbie Becher, an associate professor of sociology at Barnard College. During the hearing, students at Columbia set up the first pro-Palestinian encampment. The next day, Shafik called the police to clear the tents. More than 100 students were arrested. To Becher, that response resulted in part from the pressures of lawmakers and Shafik’s deference to their demands.
“Since the day after the hearing, we’ve seen the beginning of what the committee and these politicians are asking for,” Becher said. And what happens “when a president doesn’t stand up for education and democracy.”
Though Shafik has remained in her position, she’s faced calls to resign from pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli students, faculty members, and lawmakers. Some say she failed to protect protesters by calling the police to campus while others have accused her of allowing students to build the encampment, which Jewish students have said made them feel unsafe.
Calling out the politicians may be the way to go.
In early May, the committee turned its attention to three K-12 leaders from New York, Maryland, and California.
The lawmakers accused the school leaders of allowing “pervasive antisemitism” to exist in their districts. They responded that they’d taken disciplinary actions and called for more awareness of antisemitism in schools.
The leaders also agreed that chants like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” could be antisemitic, but Enikia Ford Morthel, the superintendent of the Berkeley Unified School District, pointed out that such phrases could have different meanings for different people.
David Banks, the chancellor of New York City Public Schools, then called out the lawmakers for trying to trip up education leaders.
“This convening, for too many people across America in education, feels like the ultimate gotcha moment,” Banks said. “It doesn’t sound like people are actually trying to solve for something that I believe we should be doing everything we can to solve for.”
The hearing with school leaders offered some of the best guidance for how to respond to congressional questioning, Ben-Porath said. Unlike college leaders, those in the K-12 space are used to responding to critical and sometimes combative constituents. That prepared them for the politicians’ tactics, Ben-Porath said.
College leaders need to demonstrate that “they will not be bullied by politicians, no matter how much power they have and by their threats of bringing down the power of the Department of Education or federal funding,” Becher said, and “call them out for what they are doing.”
