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Leaders from Georgetown, the City University of New York and the University of California, Berkeley, said they are working to protect Jewish students but also free speech on their campuses.
July 15, 2025Updated 3:22 p.m. ET
Republican lawmakers grilled university leaders on Tuesday over accusations that they failed to do enough to combat antisemitism on their campuses, assertions that the educators strongly rejected.
Members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which oversees the Department of Education, questioned the leaders of Georgetown University, the City University of New York and the University of California, Berkeley in the latest hearing on campus antisemitism.
The three-hour hearing hit familiar notes. Over the last two years, a series of similar Congressional panels have been called in response to a wave of pro-Palestinian campus protests over the war in Gaza.
On Tuesday, Republicans accused the university leaders of fostering an antisemitic climate and failing to rein in professors and students the lawmakers said were antisemitic. Democrats on the committee argued the hearing was part of a crackdown on speech that attempted to scapegoat academia for a broader societal problem.
The university leaders, meanwhile, seemed to have learned from the past. They attempted, with apparent success, to avoid the kinds of viral moments that have characterized previous antisemitism hearings and brought down other university presidents.
And they tried to walk a fine line. They said that language seeming to call for violence against Jews was unacceptable. But they largely declined to discuss the details of discipline for individual incidents and argued that professors and students have speech rights.
