‘We Need Accountability’: US House Report Condemns Universities’ Response to Rising Antisemitism

Antisemitism is surging in higher education, but universities have chosen to protect their brands rather than fight the targeting of Jewish and pro-Israel members of their campus communities, according to a new report by US House Republicans.

Six House committees and Republican leadership helped to compile the joint staff report, which was released on Thursday amid crisis levels of antisemitic activity in American higher education, a trend which has seen pro-Hamas students harass their Jewish peers, extremists pen manifestos calling for revolutionary violence, and an unprecedented politicization of the university by faculty for the purpose of spreading anti-Zionist and anti-Western beliefs. To make matters worse, according to the House report, university officials could seldom be counted on to preserve order and protect Jewish students.

“The committee found that so-called university leaders deliberately chose to withhold support from Jewish communities on campus, demonstrating a refusal to address the hostile environments at their institutions,” the report said. “Jewish students, faculty, and staff often felt abandoned by administrators’ passive and muted responses to the explosion of antisemitic hate on campus. The committee’s investigation found that these failures to act were not mere oversights but intentional decisions.”

Part of their failure was messaging, the report explained. Harvard University, for example, declined to condemn the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s atrocities during its invasion of Israel last Oct. 7 — a massacre that, amid the ensuing war in Gaza, has unleashed an ongoing surge of global antisemitism that has seen antisemitic incidents spike to record levels in the US and other countries over the past year.

Meanwhile, the report also noted other cases, including when Columbia University allowed the proliferation of stories about a “chemical attack” involving Jewish students discharging “fart spray,” a fictitious incident which resulted in those students being suspended for as long 18 months while no one accused of antisemitic conduct received a comparable punishment.

Some schools, such as the University of Pennsylvania, pantomimed corrective action to disruptive behavior, assuring the public that it took rules violations, including the commandeering of campus property with “Gaza Solidarity Encampments,” seriously — but it punished very few students for misconduct and those it did were given slaps on the wrist, according to critics.

Egregious conduct which prompted civil litigation evaded disciplinary action, the report continued, explaining that nearly 100 students who participated in an encampment which barred Jewish students from accessing sections of campus at the University of California, Los Angeles “signed resolution agreements allowing them to escape disciplinary consequences” and “none were disciplined.”

Harvard University, despite talking tough during the peak of the spring encampments, ultimately amnestied everyone involved in the unrest, overturning suspensions and reducing probationary periods to the extent that they meant nothing.

Moreover, the report added, university leaders were contemptuous of public officials who investigated campus antisemitism and discussed their wish that the Democratic Party would win a majority in the US Congress, an outcome they hoped would quell any further inquiries into the matter.

“Rather than treat the antisemitic hate plaguing their campuses as a serious problem, they handled it as a public relations issue,” the report said. “Penn [University of Pennsylvania] administrators [tried] to orchestrate media coverage depicting members of Congress as ‘bullying and grandstanding’ and Columbia Board of Trustees leaders dismissing congressional oversight on campus antisemitism as ‘capital hill [sic] nonsense.'”

Nothing short of a revolution of the current habits and ideas which constitute the current higher education regime can prevent similar episodes of unrest from occurring in the future, the report concluded. Colleges need equal enforcement of civil rights laws to protect Jewish students from discrimination, and they should “forcefully reject antisemitism.” They should also, it added, reform aspects of the campus culture which do not appear immediately connected to the issue of antisemitism.

Fostering “viewpoint diversity,” for example, could prevent echo chambers of ideological zeal which justify hatred and violence as a means of overcoming one’s political opponents, the report found. It also said that “academic rigor,” undermined by years of dissolving educational standards for political purposes, would guard against the reduction of complex social issues into the sloganeering of “scholar activism,” in which faculty turn the classroom into a soapbox.

In lieu of so momentous a change, the report encouraged the executive branch of the US government, which is awaiting the arrival of a new administration headed by President-elect Donald Trump, to enforce colleges’ applying of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to incidents of antisemitism and punish those that do not by, for example, freezing their access to federal funds.

Congress has its role as well, the report continued, recommending that the legislative body combat foreign influence in higher education and withhold public funds from colleges which adopt the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

“On Oct. 8, the world saw that antisemitic hatred was alive and well at American institutions of so-called’‘higher’ education. As a result, the reputation of many of these schools has been in free fall,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, said in a statement accompanying the report. “Stopping that free fall comes down to one word: accountability. We need accountability because without it, we cannot guarantee that Jewish students have the safe learning environment they deserve.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

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