The three college leaders testifying in front of a congressional committee on Thursday will arrive well aware of the high-profile crises that can be born from a misstep or a verbal fumble. Other higher education leaders who sat in the same seat over the last several months came away facing worsening problems, including intensified criticism from an array of constituents and spreading protests. Two eventually resigned.
The latest group, which for the first time includes two public university leaders, are likely to be asked similar questions from the Republican lawmakers who invited them, but the agenda has shifted.
Two of the schools, Northwestern and Rutgers, cut deals to end pro-Palestinian encampments on their campuses — agreements that resulted in intense backlash from some politicians and Jewish organizations. The third school, the University of California, Los Angeles, has faced criticism from across the political spectrum for failing to prevent a violent clash in which pro-Israel counterprotesters violently attacked the demonstrators.
The hearing before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, scheduled for 9:45 a.m., will be the fourth time in recent months that education leaders have been called to testify about accusations of campus antisemitism. Two of those hearings, which focused on elite private universities, did not go well for the educators, leading to resignations, criticism from donors and broadening unrest.
Here’s what to expect:
This is the first hearing involving university leaders since a wave of protest encampments over the war in Gaza swept over American college campuses. The leaders are expected to acknowledge some incidents of antisemitism occurred in these campus protests, but also to defend much about how they dealt with the situation and tried to make Jewish students feel safe.
The leaders of U.C.L.A. and Rutgers, both public universities, will probably bring up how public universities are required to follow First Amendment principles of free speech on their campuses. That makes them different from private universities, like Northwestern, that have more freedom to restrict what students are allowed to say.
Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, is expected to provide some of the most pointed questioning, as she did at a December hearing when the leaders of Harvard, Penn and M.I.T. gave evasive, legalistic answers to some of her most direct questions. Criticism of their performance helped lead to the resignations of Claudine Gay from Harvard and Elizabeth McGill from Penn.
Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, took a different approach in April, promising to crack down more on faculty and student conduct that she deemed antisemitic. The arrests of more than 100 demonstrators at the university the next day led to a cascade of student activism nationwide. The leaders appearing Thursday will almost certainly seek to avoid reigniting those passions.
The presidents may seek to learn from the example of three public school leaders who testified earlier this month. They pushed back against lawmakers in ways rarely seen on Capitol Hill. Many faculty members and students have questioned the motives of Republicans leading the hearings, suggesting they are motivated more by attempts to score partisan points than by genuine concern for Jewish students.
Democrats, in their turn, may question Gene D. Block, the chancellor of U.C.L.A., about why an attack by counterprotesters there lasted for several hours before the police intervened, and why only pro-Palestinian demonstrators — and not those who attacked them — have been arrested so far. On Wednesday, U.C.L.A. temporarily reassigned its campus police chief, John Thomas, during an investigation.
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