Republican Staff Report: Antisemitism On College Campuses Exposed

Following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, a House Committee report highlighted extensive failures by prominent U.S. universities, including Harvard, Columbia, and UCLA, in addressing a surge of campus anti-Semitism. The investigation revealed weak disciplinary responses to anti-Semitic harassment, violent encampments, and even illegal takeovers of university property. Some universities made troubling concessions to antisemitic groups, with radical faculty members sometimes obstructing disciplinary actions. Additionally, university leaders often treated anti-Semitism as a PR issue, not a serious campus problem, avoiding clear condemnations to appease groups supporting anti-Jewish rhetoric. The Committee’s findings stress a lack of accountability and leadership, endangering Jewish students and violating Title VI obligations.

The report’s executive summary is below.

To read the full report, click here. 

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On October 7, 2023, a terrorist attack orchestrated by Hamas resulted in the murder of nearly 1,200 people in Israel, including more than 40 American citizens. In the aftermath of that horrific event, American institutions of higher education were upended by an epidemic of hate, violence, and harassment targeting Jewish students.

For nearly a year, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce (Committee), led by Chairwoman Virginia Foxx, has conducted a wide-reaching and intensive investigation into this explosion of campus antisemitism. In December 2023, the Committee’s hearing on campus antisemitism revealed stunning failures of leadership and character at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and prompted a national reckoning when the three school presidents shockingly refused to unequivocally state that calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their institutions’ codes of conduct. In subsequent hearings, the Committee called leaders from Columbia University, Rutgers University, Northwestern University, and the University of California, Los Angeles to account for their dramatic failures in confronting antisemitism on their campuses.

The Committee’s investigation has been unprecedented in its depth and scope. For the first time in its 157-year history, the Committee issued subpoenas to postsecondary institutions for obstructionist, dilatory responses to document requests made in furtherance of the Committee’s consideration of potential legislative solutions to address campus antisemitism. The Committee has collected more than 400,000 pages of documents over the course of its investigation. Now, the Committee is releasing key findings in this report.

Information obtained by the Committee reveals a stunning lack of accountability by university leaders for students engaging in antisemitic harassment, assault, trespass, and destruction of school property. At every school investigated by the Committee, the overwhelming majority of students facing disciplinary action for antisemitic harassment or other violations of policy received only minimal discipline. At some schools, such as Columbia and Harvard, radical faculty members worked to prevent disciplinary action from being taken against students who violated official policies and even the law.

Around the country, extremist antisemitic encampments were allowed to form in direct contravention of institutional policy and the law. At Columbia, students who engaged in the criminal takeover of a university building were allowed to evade accountability. At Northwestern, radical faculty members were put in charge of negotiating with their own ideological allies in that campus’ encampment, leading to a stunning capitulation to the encampment leaders’ demands. At Rutgers, protesters faced no consequences for an encampment that disrupted exams for more than 1,000 students. UCLA’s leadership was unwilling to directly confront a violent, antisemitic encampment, even when antisemitic checkpoints denied Jewish students access to areas of campus.

These individual incidents and others that this report highlights are evidence of a broader environment on these campuses that is hostile to Jewish students. Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VI), universities that receive federal funds have an obligation to prevent and

address hostile environments based on race, color, or national origin (including a hostile environment against religious groups based on shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics). Instead of fulfilling these legal obligations, in numerous cases, university leaders turned their backs on their campuses’ Jewish communities, intentionally withholding support in a time of need. And while university leaders publicly projected a commitment toward combating antisemitism and respect for congressional efforts on the subject, in their private communications they viewed antisemitism as a PR issue rather than a campus problem.

The findings in this report are based on documents produced to the Committee, as well as hearing testimony and transcribed interviews of university leaders and advisors.

KEY FINDINGS

• Key Finding: Students who established unlawful antisemitic encampments—which violated university polices and created unsafe and hostile learning environments—were given shocking concessions. Universities’ dereliction of leadership and failure to enforce their rules put students and personnel at risk.

  • Finding: Northwestern put radical anti-Israel faculty in charge of negotiations with the encampment.
  • Finding: Northwestern’s provost shockingly approved of a proposal to boycott Sabra hummus.
  • Finding: Northwestern entertained demands to hire an “anti-Zionist” rabbi and Northwestern President Michael Schill may have misled Congress in testimony regarding the matter.
  • Finding: Columbia’s leaders offered greater concessions to encampment organizers than they publicly acknowledged.
  • Finding: UCLA officials stood by and failed to act as the illegal encampment violated Jewish students’ civil rights and placed campus at risk.

• Key Finding: So-called university leaders intentionally declined to express support for campus Jewish communities. Instead of explicitly condemning antisemitic harassment, universities equivocated out of concern of offending antisemitic students and faculty who rallied in support of foreign terrorist organizations.
  • Finding: Harvard leaders’ failure to condemn Hamas’ attack in their widely criticized October 9 statement was an intentional decision.
  • Finding: Harvard President Claudine Gay and then-Provost Alan Garber asked Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker not to label the slogan “from the river to the sea” antisemitic, with Gay fearing doing so would create expectations Harvard would have to impose discipline.
  • Finding: The Columbia administration failed to correct false narratives of a “chemical attack” that were used to vilify Jewish students, but imposed disproportionate discipline on the Jewish students involved.