Congressional Hearings on Campus Anti-Semitism Need to Have a Point

For Americans living in the age of social media and instant clicks, Washington often feels like a nonstop, partisan version of the Jerry Springer Show. A recent Time article about the long-running show—which aired from 1991 to 2018—described its format as a place “where guests went on to discuss their deepest, darkest secrets and confront their biggest enemies.” It’s hard not to see the same dynamic playing out in today’s Congressional hearings, where fierce partisanship and theatrical fireworks have made C-SPAN feel like Friday night entertainment. Congress and the Jerry Springer Show share something deeper than just spectacle—often, it feels like little of consequence actually comes from Congressional hearings. Unlike the show, however, Congress has a real responsibility to address critical national issues—and to do so effectively, which is often lacking. Nowhere is this more urgent than in Congress’s ongoing hearings on antisemitism in higher education.

This week, Congress dragged the presidents of Georgetown University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the chancellor of City University of New York (CUNY) to Washington for a hearing before the Committee on Education and the Workforce about the situation facing Jewish students on college campuses. The hearing, “Antisemitism in Higher Education: Examining the Role of Faculty, Funding, and Ideology,” had all of the characteristics of a good fight-com, complete with back-and-forth comments between Republican lawmakers demanding accountability for a campus culture and faculty that encourage anti-Semitism and Democratic counterparts seeking to defend the college administrators as their fellow-proponents of identity politics. Adding to the mix were intermittent outbursts from pro-Palestinian protestors who interrupted the proceedings.

Congressional hearings are not a product of the social media age, nor did they emerge in response to any modern scandal, such as Watergate. In fact, congressional hearings date back to 1792, following a frontier military defeat. Since then, hearings have been held on issues ranging from the Ku Klux Klan in the South during Reconstruction, the repeal of Prohibition, the Vietnam War, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), and a number of other issues of national importance. Today, campus anti-Semitism is a new addition to the list. Congressional hearings are healthy and useful, as they shed light on national crises when the country needs accountability, exposure, and closure. Hearings offer an image of the government taking needed action.

Unfortunately, for the fight against campus anti-Semitism, recent hearings show that the fight is a losing one.

In 2023, after the Hamas attack in Israel, Congressional hearings began with a bang when the House Committee on Education and the Workforce brought the heads of MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania in to account for anti-Semitism in the Ivy League. Congressional grilling helped the administrative careers of Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s own Liz Magill. At the time, it seemed that Congressional hearings were spearheading a forceful rollback of an anti-Semitic academic culture that had evolved from critical theory to the point of pure apologetics for terrorism.

If there was any momentum that began then, recent hearings cast doubt on whether any remains.

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The latest hearing on erudite anti-Semitism was the fifth since late 2023, and focused on things like professors’ social media posts that expressed support for Hamas or equated Israel with Nazi Germany. When Pennsylvania Republican Glenn Thompson asked about these kinds of postings, Georgetown’s interim president, Robert Groves, cited the First Amendment as a protection.  When New York’s Elise Stefanik asked about CUNY’s “legal clinic,” CLEAR, which is assisting pro-Hamas Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil, and whether or not it is problematic that “New York taxpayers are paying the salary” for Khalil’s “defense fund,” CUNY’s chancellor rejected any responsibility and stated “Those decisions are made in the clinics and are made in the individual campuses.”

As a form of political theater, these hearings are useful in that they shed light on how rotten academia has become.

Today, higher education’s professional culture is dominated by activism, and scholarship often devolves into ideological tirades. America and the West are usually caricatured as evil and not worthy of existing, Christianity is a boogeyman, Communism is sugar-coated, and Israel is responsible for widespread oppression, while resistance to it is somehow connected to anticolonial struggles that are not only ubiquitous but also never-ending. For Jews, whose identity is no longer useful to a Marxist agenda, they were shuffled into a category of “White oppressors” and demonized. Congress is doing necessary work here in highlighting not only the crisis of higher education, but also the problem of American taxpayers funding the bulk of it.

However, in terms of real policy outcomes and change, a looming question of relevance is haunting the whole affair.

Congressional hearings have become fashionable over the course of the Trump and Biden eras. For Americans who simply want fiscal responsibility, border security, and sanity in education, this era has been exhausting, as Congress has investigated issues such as the January 6, the hunt for Russian collusion with Trump’s first campaign, Hunter Biden’s corruption, and border security under Alejandro Mayorkas. To the outside world, any arrests, changes in practice, and criminal convictions somehow seem lacking. Instead, Washington is doing what it always does; namely, accountability theater. Eradicating anti-Semitism from America’s elite institutions is going to take a lot more than that for it to be successful.

All of this comes down to the question of the point of these Congressional hearings. Higher education activists who masquerade as scholars and hold a near monopoly on credentialism in America are not suddenly going to change their ways simply because of a newfound sense of shame. Even if American students shun universities, foreign students will happily fill any gap in tuition income and bring the anti-Semitism of their own cultures with them. For innocent American students, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, they will be subject to higher ed’s ever-increasing hostility and the output of the radicalization process. Finding the real-world consequence of university anti-Semitism requires looking no further than New York’s anti-Semitic mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, and his father, who is a radical professor at Columbia University.

If Congress is going to be serious about a solution to campus anti-Semitism, it should act quickly.

Image: “IMG_0009” by House Committee on Education and Workforce Democrats on Flickr