House Speaker Mike Johnson and top Republican leaders on Tuesday said they were stepping up their efforts to combat antisemitism on college campuses, including by holding additional hearings with top university administrators and potentially withholding millions of federal dollars from universities that fail to keep Jewish students safe.
“The federal government plays a critical role in higher education, and we will use all the tools available to us to address this scourge,” said Mr. Johnson, who last week visited Columbia University and said he would support the National Guard being deployed there if pro-Palestinian protests, which he said had grown violent and antisemitic, continued.
A news conference called to discuss what was billed as a “House-wide crackdown on the virus of antisemitism spreading throughout college campuses” was the latest example of Republicans finding fresh ways to publicly condemn the unrest that has erupted on campuses across the country over Israel’s war in Gaza, and to exploit the divisions the conflict has exposed among Democrats.
It was a House hearing Republicans called in December to discuss antisemitism on campuses that intensified public scrutiny of how university administrators were dealing with the pro-Palestinian protests, and the G.O.P. has missed few opportunities since then to spotlight those issues.
Attacking elite institutions of higher education has long been a conservative preoccupation. But in the current moment, Republicans also see immediate political advantages. It has given them an attack line against President Biden and Democrats, who they argue have been unwilling to condemn protests that veer into antisemitism or move to shut them down for fear of angering their progressive base, much of which sympathizes with the pro-Palestinian protests.
At the same time, the issue has united a fractured Republican Party that has tried to position itself as the true friend of Jewish Americans and of Israel.
Mr. Johnson said there had been “lawlessness and chaos” on campuses throughout the country, and that at Columbia University in particular, “pro-Hamas agitators” had taken over the campus, which he said had become a bastion of “anti-Jewish hatred.”
Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the No. 3 Republican, said his goal was to “deliver a message to the university administrators who have chosen to be complicit in these movements for hate.”
Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina and chairwoman of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, said she had summoned administrators from Yale, U.C.L.A. and the University of Michigan to appear before a House panel on May 23.
“We have come to take our universities back,” said Ms. Foxx, who was with Mr. Johnson at Columbia last week.
Representative Frank Lucas, Republican of Ohio and chair of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology, said the universities that had allowed the protests to grow were no longer in compliance for funding from the National Science Foundation. He said his committee would study whether they had violated the conditions for receiving taxpayer dollars.
