John Washington is a journalism senior and opinion columnist for Mustang News. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Mustang Media Group.
On Wednesday, Cal Poly President Jeffrey Armstrong testified in front of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce as part of a hearing titled “Beyond the Ivy League: Stopping the Spread of Antisemitism on American Campuses.”
Testifying alongside him were the presidents of Haverford College and DePaul University. The committee claimed all three schools failed to protect Jewish students on their campuses. Former ACLU lawyer and current Georgetown University law and public policy professor David Cole also testified.
Over the course of the three-hour hearing, Armstrong escaped much of the criticism. Armstrong only spoke for eight minutes. It felt like a waste of a trip to D.C., and I’m not sure why he was called to testify in the first place.
A Jewish student leader, who requested not to be identified, shared my sentiment regarding Armstrong’s presence at this hearing.
“There’s no denying that antisemitism is a growing problem nationally, and it’s important to take it seriously. But it’s frustrating to see our campus dragged into a national political fight that doesn’t reflect our lived reality,” the Jewish student leader wrote to Mustang News.
Republican representatives instead unleashed a torrent of loaded questions the way of Haverford’s Wendy Raymond and DePaul’s Robert Manuel, who both condemned antisemitism on their campuses.
To me, this hearing was completely unnecessary — and not just for Armstrong’s sake. Republican congresspeople are taking this stand against antisemitism with little authenticity and armed with ulterior motives; they want to better position themselves to attack higher education and free speech.
Their reasoning is disingenuous on this topic, like it is on too many others to count. These Republican representatives who were bombarding the university presidents with accusatory questions about the antisemitism on college campuses do not actually care about the students or their safety.
When the Trump Administration cut the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which handles complaints of antisemitism, they said nothing.
Rep. Mike Takano said half of the regional offices nationwide were closed, leaving the OCR with an even taller task of responding to the thousands of backlogged cases. If these elected officials truly cared about antisemitism in the U.S., they would object to this mass shutdown that renders the OCR effectively useless.
I’m not saying antisemitism is nonexistent in this country. It’s a real issue. But this committee doesn’t seem to want to meaningfully address it. Nor will they touch complaints about sexism, homophobia, transphobia or ableism. You won’t see this committee on education calling university presidents from all over the nation to accuse them of being complicit in allowing that sort of discriminatory speech.
While there are 12,000 backlogged Title VI cases, just 144 of them can be labeled antisemitism, according to Rep. Bobby Scott. Republican leaders have inflated the issue to make it seem as prevalent as possible.
That’s because the current administration running this country does not want students speaking out about the United States government’s financial support for atrocities committed by Israel against the Palestinian people. And if they do speak out, then that is the perfect opportunity to withhold funding from the universities the students attend.
Either way, as Georgetown’s Cole explained, “Antisemitic speech, while lamentable, is constitutionally protected.” Schools committed to free speech should tolerate antisemitic speech, like they do any other form of bigoted speech. It does not implicate Title VI, the law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in programs with federal funding assistance.
While true antisemitic hate should not be allowed to flourish, it is also often not a crime. Worse, many actions have been labelled as antisemitic that might not meet the definition. Government officials do not get to have the power of censorship by, say, labelling an op-ed by an international student as antisemitic and dangerous to justify revoking their green card.
At one point, Rep. Tim Walberg asked Raymond if the phrase “resistance is not terrorism” was protected speech on campus. Of course it is! This is an embarrassing question for the chairman of the education committee to ask.
At the very least, if this phrase were to inspire hate or discrimination, traditional free speech advocates would argue it should be combated with more discussion instead of censorship. For years, Republicans claimed this viewpoint. Now that they have control of Congress, things have seemingly changed.
This was never really about antisemitism. If Republicans wanted to tackle that, as Rep. Gregorio Casar pointed out, they would be up in arms when the Trump administration cuts back on the OCR, anti-hate crime programs and programs for the security of Jewish nonprofits and synagogues.
In reality, this committee is delegitimizing higher education by pressuring colleges to exert power over their students that they should not have.
Freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution are now being called into question, and even simply ignored. When elected officials slowly chip away at these basic civil liberties — the core values of this nation — democracy crumbles. And it seems like that’s the goal.
Update: This column was edited at 1:09 p.m. to remove the name of the Jewish student leader quoted.