When Rep. Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican and chairwoman of the Education and Workforce Committee, hosted a hearing on anti-Semitism on college campuses, she said, her goal was not to force the nation’s top college presidents to give up their positions.
But after the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania gave evasive answers about whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated their schools’ codes of conduct, sparking a national uproar that led to their resignations, Ms. Foxx and other House Republicans decided to take advantage of the political moment they helped create.
House Republicans are now embarking on an aggressive and sweeping investigation into higher education institutions in the United States, targeting academic elites they have long seen as avatars of cultural decline, all in the name of fight against antisemitism.
“We want students to feel safe on their campuses, that’s our number one problem, and Jewish students have not felt safe,” Foxx said in an interview Friday. He said he wanted to expand the investigation to include a deep dive into what he described as a “hostile takeover” of higher education by partisan administrators and political activists.
The committee, which hired new staff to push the investigation, now plans to focus on other Ivy League schools, as well as some public universities, while attracting more witnesses (through subpoenas if necessary) to testify, according to people familiar with the matter. issue. plans still evolving who spoke about them on condition of anonymity.
House Republicans plan to investigate efforts to improve diversity on campuses (known as diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs) and the impact on Jewish students. (There has long been a split in the Jewish community on the issue, with some arguing that DEI initiatives should be eliminated entirely and others pushing to include Jews as protected minorities who would be helped by such programs.)
Republicans on the committee also want to explore the question of accreditation and whether federal aid can be withdrawn from a school that fails to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitic actions on campus.
Attacking elite higher education institutions was a conservative concern long before former President Donald J. Trump took power in the Republican Party. William F. Buckley Jr., founder of modern American conservatism, for example, accused Yale University of rejecting God and teaching liberalism in its classrooms. He recorded former President Richard M. Nixon criticizing Ivy League presidents, saying he wanted them barred from the White House.
Today, criticism of universities still serves as a potent means for leaders to exalt the Republican Party’s base voters against what they call “woke” elites, while also casting doubt on the institutions.
But by framing the investigation around anti-Semitism on college campuses and university administrators’ inadequate responses to it, House Republicans have grounded what many see as an opportunistic right-wing attack on an issue that cannot be be dismissed outright as partisan.
“There are partisan oversight hearings on Capitol Hill where the other side doesn’t show up at all,” said Ira Stoll, a former president of the Harvard Crimson who worked at Harvard Kennedy School as editor-in-chief of an education policy journal. “That’s not what’s happening here.”
Still, the research is troubling to many academics, who fear that Republicans are simply trying to legitimize a broader attack on higher education by rooting it in a concern about anti-Semitism. Public and private colleges and universities are eager to find favor with Congress, which approves federal spending, including the tens of billions of dollars that go to higher education each year.
“When I see it, I know the weaponization of Congressional hearings and the politicization of academic standards to advance a partisan political agenda,” Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors, wrote on social media. “That’s what I see now.”
Ms. Mulvey added that “the current political interference poses an existential threat to the globally preeminent American higher education system,” and called on “anyone who cares about higher education as a public good in a democracy” to fight back.
House Republicans maintain that the education panel’s job is to hold higher education institutions accountable. With Harvard in particular, the committee plans to investigate “academic integrity” and governance on its campus, investigating how the board came to hire ousted president Claudine Gay in the first place and how it went about investigating allegations of plagiarism. about his academic work.
William A. Ackman, the billionaire investor who has been leading a crusade against Harvard, Dr. Gay and DEI, claimed in an online post after her resignation that Dr. Gay was hired even though she “was not qualified.” to serve in that position.” role.”
Dr. Gay, Harvard’s first black president and the second woman to lead the university, was a central figure in a heated debate over DEI during the six months she led the university, a period that coincided with the rejection of the Supreme Court’s use of race-conscious admissions.
House Republicans hired an oversight staffer to focus exclusively on the ongoing investigation into college campuses and moved other committee aides to work solely on the issue. They have also created a hotline and inbox for Jewish students who have experienced anti-Semitism on their college campuses to report those incidents directly to the committee.
Foxx said she and her colleagues were still in the early stages of planning the investigation, but said there was no doubt it would delve into DEI, a favorite target of the right.
“Most people in this country want everyone to be treated equally,” Foxx said. “What we are seeing with DEI is that that is not the case. Affirmative action is a good thing. DEI, I’m not sure it is.”
Ms. Foxx added that “we need diversity, but what has happened is that diversity has been reduced to race and gender.”
“There is no diversity of ideologies on campuses,” he said. “And that’s not right”.
Federal campaign finance data compiled by OpenSecrets shows that 88 percent of political contributions from people in the education industry during the 2021-22 campaign cycle went to Democrats.
But Alvin Tillery, director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, said Republicans’ public lamentations about anti-Semitism on college campuses rang hollow.
“No Jewish students have actually been subjected to violence on most of these campuses,” Tillery said, noting two notable exceptions: the assault on an Israeli student at Columbia University and a bomb threat against a Jewish center on the Columbia University campus. Cornell University.
Instead, he said, the debate has focused on pro-Palestinian chants and signs at university protests over the end of Israel’s deadly offensive in Gaza. “There is a huge generational divide on campuses, and young Jews are in the movement to support Gaza,” she said. “It’s really hard to see how this continues to have traction.”
Tillery also noted that Republicans who are positioning themselves as advocates for Jewish students “all serve a master in Donald Trump, who quotes Hitler in his speeches; “People realize that.” (Trump recently said that immigrants coming to the United States were “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing language used by Adolf Hitler.)
Still, alarm about rising anti-Semitism isn’t just coming from Republicans. In November, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, gave a deeply personal speech on the Senate floor in which he said that pro-Palestinian chants like “from the river to the sea” conveyed a “strong, violently anti-Semitic message.” of course”, to the Jewish people.
But some Democrats said Republican efforts to use the issue to launch a broader attack on diversity efforts would fail. Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster, said anger over diversity initiatives it was prevalent among a small portion of the Republican base, but not among half of the electorate or among young voters.
In a recent survey he conducted with a nationally representative sample of voters, 67 percent of them said they considered DEI in corporations to be a good thing.
For them, Garin said, “these attacks confirm the perception that Republicans are a retrograde party obsessed with playing the race card whenever they can.”