(The Center Square) – Gradually and suddenly, like a Hemingway novel’s moment on bankruptcy she said, antisemitism has grown on university campuses.
Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., said the Committee on Education and the Workforce will continue getting to, and ending, the “roots of antisemitic hatred, including anti-Israel DEI bureaucracies, and questionable foreign funding” that enabled a group to be found – the Jews – that “fit neatly” into the oppression matrix of diversity, equity and inclusion.
“Over the course of years, decades even,” Foxx said, “universities gradually nurtured a campus culture of radicalism in which antisemitism grew and became tolerated by administrators.”
Foxx, chairwoman of the committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, drew an analogy with the American novelist’s 1926 classic, The Sun Also Rises. On bankruptcy, one character tells the other it happened two ways: gradually, then suddenly.
“No three words better apply to the decline in post-secondary education,” Foxx said.
In more than three hours of testimony, Presidents Michael Schill of Northwestern and Dr. Jonathan Holloway of Rutgers, and UCLA Chancellor Dr. Gene Block testified along with Frederick Lawrence, secretary and CEO of Phi Beta Kappa. Presidents from Yale and Michigan, originally scheduled, avoided the panel when pro-Palestinian protestors reached deals on the Evanston, Ill., and New Brunswick, N.J., campuses of Schill and Holloway, respectively.
In all, since December seven university presidents have come before the committee led by Foxx. The first were leaders at Harvard, Penn and MIT. In April, Columbia President Minouche Shafik appeared.
Foxx said, “The committee has been steadfast in its dedication to attacking the roots of antisemitic hatred, including anti-Israel DEI bureaucracies, and questionable foreign funding. Then suddenly, over the course of weeks, days even, universities burst into antisemitic chaos. Oct. 7 ignited a powder keg of pro-terror campus fervor, a shocking spectacle for the American public.”
She said a group was found, the Jews, that “fit neatly” into the oppression matrix of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Foxx said university leaders are being called for accountability. She added in her opening remarks, “I want to make one thing clear. The purpose of these hearings is not to enact right-wing cancel culture as purported by the left. The purpose is to end antisemitic violence and harassment on campus. Full stop.”
Typical of congressional hearings, questions were straight-forward, answers not so much over more than three hours.
Among the key points were Holloway saying Rutgers will continue to be a partner with Birzeit University in Palestine, colloquially known as Hamas U. It has barred Jewish students for 10 years. And, as Foxx was respecting time limits, Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., finished with Schill by saying, “Four billion dollars has gone to your university. We shouldn’t give you another taxpayer dollar for the joke your university has become under your leadership.”
Schill had mostly taken a five-minute lashing from Banks about his faculty keeping their jobs after confrontations with police and joining antisemitic encampments. A student appointed to a committee related to antisemitism was also brought up since the student was supportive of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack.
Even at seven presidents thus far, Foxx assured the committee was not done in its work on the matter. She chastised Schill for “the condescension and contempt” toward the committee; called on the state of New Jersey to help defund the “cesspool of hate” at Holloway’s campus; and condemned Block’s actions as “too little, too late” with regard to illegal checkpoints and violence on the Los Angeles campus.
