For the fourth time in six months, the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce is summoning school leaders to Washington to be questioned about accusations of antisemitism at their institutions.
This time, on Thursday, the committee’s focus will be on how three diverse universities reacted when pro-Palestinian encampments sprung up on their lawns as part of an international wave of student activism against the war in Gaza.
Two of the schools whose leaders will testify — Northwestern and Rutgers — made deals with protesters to end their encampments peacefully. The third, the University of California, Los Angeles, called in the police to dismantle its encampment, but only after a violent attack by counterprotesters the night before caused the situation to veer out of control.
Representative Virginia Foxx, the chairwoman of the committee, has blasted Rutgers and Northwestern for negotiating with the demonstrators, whose views she has described as antisemitic and supportive of terrorism. But she has also derided U.C.L.A.’s chancellor for calling the police too late, saying he allowed his campus to become a “severe and pervasive hostile environment for Jewish students.”
“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,” Ms. Foxx said in a May 16 statement announcing the hearing. “No stone must go unturned while buildings are being defaced, campus greens are being captured or graduations are being ruined.”
The three college leaders do not dispute that Jewish students have faced antisemitism, both on and off their campuses. But all have largely defended their responses, saying that they have taken steps to stop it.
How aggressive they will be in pushing back against the committee’s claims, however, remains to be seen.
School leaders have taken different approaches at past hearings. The presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania were measured and legalistic; the president of Columbia was conciliatory. Three public school superintendents, who testified earlier this month, ceded little ground, sparring with lawmakers in ways rarely seen on Capitol Hill.
Those who distrust the committee’s motivations in grilling the college leaders hope Thursday will represent another moment of pushback. Many faculty members and students have seen the hearings as government intrusions motivated more by partisan politics than real concern for Jewish students.
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, the chair of religious studies at Northwestern, defended the school’s decision to end its encampment using negotiation as a model of constructive conflict resolution.
“We can be proud of our administration and we can be proud of our students,” she said. She added that it pained her to see Northwestern’s president “dragged up there and subjected to this inquisitorial process that is so reminiscent of McCarthyism.”
Thursday’s hearing represents the first time that leaders of public universities — U.C.L.A. and Rutgers — have been brought to testify about campus antisemitism since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. This changes the hearing’s context somewhat, as public universities must follow First Amendment principles of free speech on their campuses, while private universities have more freedom to restrict what can be said.
It is also the first time that university leaders have been questioned since the decision of Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, to call in the police to end a pro-Palestinian encampment on April 18, shortly after her own congressional testimony.
Since then, at least 65 other university leaders across the country have cracked down on pro-Palestinian student protesters by detaining or arresting them, with nearly 3,000 arrests so far, according to a New York Times tracker. But more than a dozen colleges have reached agreements with demonstrators, often by consenting to talk about their key demand: severing their school’s financial ties with companies that profit from Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
The university leaders speaking before the committee Thursday face a variety of circumstances at their campuses, and their testimony is likely to vary in style and focus.
Only months from a preplanned retirement, Gene D. Block, the chancellor of U.C.L.A. and an expert in neuroscience, may feel freer than the other two college leaders to parry with committee members.
His campus was thrown into turmoil three weeks ago amid a flurry of conflict over the pro-Palestinian student encampment there. The conflict culminated in an attack on the camp on April 30 by a group of pro-Israel counterprotesters. The following night, the police arrested more than 200 pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
Since then, Dr. Block and the university’s police force have faced criticism on multiple fronts. Many have questioned why the counterprotesters were allowed to attack students in the encampment for several hours before the police intervened, and why only members of the camp — and not those who attacked it — have been arrested so far.
“It wasn’t that we were arrested that bothered us — at least for me, it was, What is this unreal double standard?” said Aidan Doyle, a third-year student who was arrested in the pro-Palestinian encampment after being injured by counterprotesters.
The education committee has charged that U.C.L.A. did not act soon enough to clear the camp, allowing acts of harassment against some Jewish students.
In his written testimony to the committee, provided to The Times, Dr. Block mentioned his childhood as a Jewish boy growing up in the Catskills region of New York, with relatives who were Holocaust survivors. He described how as chancellor of a public university, he must both allow free speech and keep students safe from discrimination, a difficult balance.
He also took some blame, acknowledging that U.C.L.A. was insufficiently prepared with security resources when violence broke out around the encampment. He pledged reform.
“With the benefit of hindsight, we should have been prepared to immediately remove the encampment if and when the safety of our community was put at risk,” he said.
On Wednesday, the school removed the campus police chief, John Thomas, from his post and reassigned him, according to U.C.L.A. officials.
Michael Schill, the president of Northwestern University since September 2022, is a legal scholar who has made safeguarding free speech one of his core priorities.
On April 29, Mr. Schill became the first university president to strike a deal with students who had called on their school to sever financial ties with companies profiting from Israel’s military campaign.
Under the agreement, students dismantled their tent encampment and Northwestern promised to be more transparent about its financial holdings. It also agreed to award scholarships to five Palestinian students affected by the conflict and to create roles for two Palestinian professors.
The deal restored a sense of normalcy on campus, but it was met with vociferous criticism from pro-Israel groups, which accused Mr. Schill of condoning antisemitism. Mr. Schill, who is Jewish, is expected to face tough questions about the deal on Thursday.
“I used to say that it was very hard to make everyone happy,” Mr. Schill said in an interview days after the agreement was announced. “Today it’s virtually impossible to make anyone happy.”
Eman Hamed, a junior at Northwestern who helped organize the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, said lawmakers and university administrators had focused too much on allegations of antisemitism while glossing over instances of harassment and abuse directed at Arab students.
“There’s a single story being told right now by presidents like Schill, who only honor and condemn antisemitism with no regard for rampant anti-Arab sentiment,” said Ms. Hamed.
Jonathan Holloway, the president of Rutgers since 2020, is a historian specializing in African American history. One of his goals at Rutgers, he has said, is to foster “a beloved community,” a university culture defined by tolerance, diversity and the spirited exchange of opinions and ideas.
He has also come under considerable criticism since negotiating an end to a large pro-Palestinian encampment on Rutgers’s campus in New Brunswick, N.J., on May 2. Under the agreement, the university will welcome 10 displaced Palestinian students to finish their educations at Rutgers, plan for a new cultural center for Arab and Muslim students and allow protesters to formally present their divestment requests.
Two Democratic congressmen from New Jersey, Donald Norcross and Josh Gottheimer, denounced Dr. Holloway’s response in a letter.
“We are concerned that Rutgers appears to have incentivized people to act in a lawless and threatening manner by appeasing the demands of violent and hateful agitators,” they wrote of the deal.
But Dr. Holloway has defended his approach, noting on May 6 that “the result of our actions was a peaceful return to the normal course of business.” (He has also allowed a second, smaller tent encampment to remain at the university’s Newark campus for three weeks. On Tuesday, administrators told protesters to “leave now.”)
While some Jewish faculty members and students are upset by what they view as a capitulation to the protesters, others support Dr. Holloway.
“The negotiated agreement avoided the brutal confrontation with the police that we have seen unfold on other campuses across the country,” several Jewish Rutgers professors wrote in an open letter that has now been signed by more than 600 Jewish professors nationally.
