Congress Grills College Presidents with an Old Script and New Threats

Three college presidents apologized for not acting more aggressively to curb antisemitism on their campuses during a House committee hearing on Wednesday, in what Republicans billed as an effort to examine colleges beyond the Ivy League.

“I am sorry that my actions and my leadership let you down,” Wendy Raymond, the president of Haverford College, a Quaker college outside Philadelphia, said she would like her Jewish students to know. “I am committed to getting this right.”

The House Committee on Education and the Workforce has held a number of hearings with schools since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the war in Gaza that followed. In many ways the hearing echoed the first and most dramatic of them, in December 2023, which led to the resignations of the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and of Harvard.

During the hearing on Wednesday, the Republican majority threatened to withhold federal funding from uncooperative schools. The Democratic minority accused Republicans of tolerating antisemitism in their own party while using it as a political weapon against others. And university leaders tried to walk a delicate line between showing contrition and not antagonizing the committee, while not undermining academic freedom.

But it was also a very different moment for higher education and its relationship with the federal government.

The hearing looked back mostly to events from a year ago, when campuses across the country were reeling from protest encampments and mass arrests. The war continues, but protests have largely faded, with some notable exceptions.