FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The House Education and Workforce Committee has released an investigative report that identifies how university administrators facilitated the historic rise of antisemitism after the Oct. 7 Islamic terror attacks.
“Over the past several years, we’ve seen university leaders surrender to the radical demands of terror-supporting mobs targeting Jewish students and faculty,” House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg, R-Mich., told The Daily Signal. “This weakness has emboldened hatred and allowed campuses to devolve into hotbeds of radical antisemitism.”
The committee’s report singles out the ways in which university leadership, faculty, student groups, and foreign funding play a vital role in materializing the antisemitic climates at their respective institutions.
For example, the committee noted that groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine have acted “as ringleaders” in “antisemitic harassment and hostility.”
Faculty, the report adds, has enabled such student organizations to harm Jewish students by “legitimizing and amplifying antisemitism on college campuses” and even seeking in some cases “to strip Jewish students of protections against harassment.”
The committee, for example, referenced that the Middle Eastern Studies Center at Georgetown University serves as a “beachhead” of “activist faculty who foment antisemitism,” who “lend institutional legitimacy to narratives that demonize Israel and justify violence.”
The committee also noted Harvard’s Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights as a “hotbed of antisemitism.”
The center, the report noted, has previously hosted lectures that pushed a “highly politicized approach to the question of Jewish origins.”
In addition, the report also accused faculty of “inciting or celebrating violence,” and leaving “Jewish students isolated and alienated.”
Regarding foreign funding, the committee noted just how American universities that have campuses in the Middle East have failed “in critical ways to fulfill their stated goal of promoting American values.” Instead, they host events with faculty and students “that perpetuate antisemitism without apparent consequence” and also “struggle to uphold free speech principles.”
The committee then “issued recommendations to address each of the problems it singled out.”
For instance, after the committee examined numerous cases of antisemitism, the report noted that “strong leadership” is “critical to stopping antisemitic harassment,” which it notes can serve as a remedy to the “lack of decisive leadership [that] allowed antisemitism to spread as leaders caved to the radical demands of faculty and student groups.”
“Time and again, school leaders appeared before my committee and failed to take responsibility for the hatred they let spiral out of control,” Walberg concluded. “Let the release of this report serve as an important reminder: If university leaders forget their legal responsibility to address discrimination of any form on campus, my colleagues and I will remind them.”