Three university presidents from the City University of New York (CUNY), Georgetown, and University of California Berkeley have been called before the House Education and Workforce Committee (HEWC) to testify in a hearing on Tuesday, July 15, titled “Antisemitism in Higher Education: Examining the Role of Faculty, Funding, and Ideology.” This is one of several witch-hunt hearings in which members of the committee endlessly grill university presidents about antisemitism, which they falsely conflate with anti-Zionism and the pro-Palestine movement.
The committee’s 21 Republicans and 16 Democrats will each question the university presidents. The Republicans will attempt to paint the university presidents as soft on antisemitism and demand increased disciplinary measures on students and faculty. While the committee itself does not have disciplinary power, it relies on the threat of President Trump pulling federal funding, as well as working hand in hand with far-right and Zionist groups outside of the university to pressure universities to impose increasingly draconian measures on their campuses. It is clear that the federal government is connected to far-right groups like Canary Mission, which are targeting students for deportation.
As a result of these hearings as well as continued pressure by far-right and Zionist forces, several university presidents have been forced to step down, including Claudine Gay from Harvard and Liz Magill from University of Pennsylvania.
These hearings have nothing to do with antisemitism, nor do they have anything to do with supporting universities. They are attacks on anyone who is speaking up against the genocide in Gaza, and they are attacks on critical thinking, free speech, and the Left. The movement for Palestine is made up of people of different races and religions, including a significant sector of Jewish people who say “not in our name.” There is an international movement, an international call for justice for the Palestinian people and that is what the Far Right wants to crush.
These hearings are an attempt to force university leaders to enact harsher discipline on students and academic workers in the movement for Palestine, including against Jewish faculty and students. They are meant to demonize anyone who questions U.S. imperialism, racism, patriarchy, and capitalism and create an education system devoid of critical thinking and that erases the history of oppressed people. Further, they are used as an excuse to defund already limited federal support for universities.
HEWC is ruthlessly attacking all initiatives for oppressed and under-represented people at universities, from Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives to African-American and Gender Studies departments, as well as transgender athletes and anti-genocide mobilizations. They go further and also attack faculty and staff labor unions. Leading up to the July 15 hearing, the committee reposted a Zionist and anti-union op-ed with a tweet that reads:
Unions are promoting antisemitism. Instead of listening to dues-paying members, unions spout antisemitic propaganda and sideline workers with pro-Israel views. In many cases, workers are REQUIRED to fund these organizations that discriminate against them! The disease of antisemitism runs deep.
These people don’t care about education. The HEWC wants to restructure the way that universities and their unions operate and to instill a new far-right norm at universities, which would be even more violently repressive than the existing neoliberal order in higher education.
The Republicans in this committee consist of some of the most racist, transphobic, and white-nationalist members of Congress, who have no business investigating “hate.” We have compiled some of the worst members of the House Education and Workforce Committee and provided only a few examples of their hateful, right-wing ideology.
The Worst of the House Education and Workforce Committee
TIM WALBERG, CHAIR
As of this year, the new chair of the committee is Representative Tim Walberg (R-MI). He came into Congress in 2006 in a push to purge moderate Republicans from office, clearing space for the Right. He has consistently aligned with Trump, going so far as to vote against the certification of Biden’s 2020 electoral victory and lend credence to “election hoax” conspiracy theories.
His positions on Gaza dehumanize Palestinians and Muslims. Walberg has said the United States shouldn’t “spend a dime” on humanitarian aid in Gaza, and instead implied a nuclear bomb should be dropped on Palestine: “it should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.”
Walberg is also known for attacks against the LGBTQ+ community. He introduced legislation that would force schools to disclose students’ identities to parents and require parental consent for teachers to use students’ preferred pronouns. At Uganda’s National Prayer Breakfast, he voiced support for the country’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, which includes the death penalty.
VIRGINIA FOXX, FORMER CHAIR
Virginia Foxx (R-NC) was the previous chair of the committee and used her leadership as a weapon against the movement for Palestine and to pave the way for Trump’s attacks on the university. She perpetuates the far-right, populist perception of universities as out of control, expensive, and elite liberal institutions to demand more “accountability” from administrators. Here, “accountability” means privatizing education, disciplining the Left, and attacking LGBTQ+ people, all long-term goals cynically pursued under the guise rooting out antisemitism.
As chair of the HEWC, Foxx was able to help push Claudine Gay out of Harvard and Liz Magill out of the University of Pennsylvania, promoting the fallacy that they were allowing antisemitism to run rampant at pro-Palestine actions on their campuses.
In October 2024, under her leadership HEWC issued a report on antisemitism that continued the witch hunt on universities. A statement on the report read:
Our investigation has shown that these ‘leaders’ bear the responsibility for the chaos, likely violating Title VI and threatening public safety. It is time for the executive branch to enforce the laws and ensure colleges and universities restore order and guarantee that all students have a safe learning environment.
She later stated that, “the Committee’s findings indicate the need for a fundamental reassessment of federal support for postsecondary institutions that have failed to meet their obligations to protect Jewish students, faculty, and staff.” In short, she works hand-in-hand with Trump to blatantly repress the movement for Palestine at universities through threats to cut their funding.
Foxx is a longtime supporter of private school vouchers and for-profit institutions. She has no interest in promoting public education for all, much less university for all. Instead, she wants to dismantle public funding for education and is hiding behind false claims of antisemitism in the Palestine movement to do it.
Foxx speaks out against anything that promotes diversity. Even before the Trump era, she stood against same-sex marriage and supported “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and other homophobic and transphobic measures.
ELISE STEFANIK
Elise Stefanik (R-NY) was widely considered a possible Trump pick for vice president. She describes herself as an “ultra-MAGA” warrior and is among the most far-right legislators in Congress. She peddles the Great Replacement theory, a white supremacist theory that claims white Americans are being replaced by Black and Brown immigrants. This theory also formed the basis for the dangerous antisemitic slogan “Jews will not replace us” — which was promoted in the far-right Charlottesville action in 2017. Of course, Donald Trump said there were “very fine people” on both sides, highlighting the Far Right’s hypocrisy and cynical weaponization of antisemitism. Antisemitism is real and it is coming from the Far Right.
Stoking conspiracy theories and election hoax lies, Stefanik accused “radical Democrats” of planning what she called a “PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION.” The ad read, “Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” She erroneously claimed that during the baby formula shortage, Biden was providing infant formula to undocumented immigrants while “American mothers” suffered, attempting to foster anti-immigrant hatred. She also called Democrats “pedo grifters” — a term used by QAnon conspiracy theorists who claim that a Satan-worshipping group of liberal pedophiles runs the Democratic Party.
Stefanik was also among the main attackers of the Harvard and University of Pennsylvania Presidents in 2023, promoting the lie that the movement for Palestine calls for the genocide of Jewish people. Despite being a Harvard graduate herself, she embraces Trump’s populist rhetoric against universities. She said, “This warped pseudo-intellectualism from the pinnacle of the ivory tower — Harvard, Penn and MIT — it is atrocious, and it’s a sad reflection of what’s happened in academia.” She has consistently sought to bully university Presidents into taking disciplinary measures against students and faculty.
A case in point: in the past week, she publicly harassed the CUNY chancellor online, claiming that he was trying to avoid testifying. Threatening to subpoena him, she wrote, “Please confirm your attendance immediately with the other college presidents to testify — and I would be remiss if I did not remind you that Congressional Republicans have subpoena authority and have used it extensively in our higher education investigations.”
RANDY FINE
Randy Fine (R-FL) is among the most blatantly hateful and Islamophobic members of Congress. Like Walberg, he called to drop nuclear bombs on Gaza. In a Fox news interview, he said:
In World War II, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Nazis. We did not negotiate a surrender with the Japanese. We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here.
As the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) explained, his statement,
[C]onstitutes an explicit incitement to violence, endangering American Muslims and Palestinians, by calling for nuclear genocide against more than two million Palestinians, half of whom are children. It represents one of the most dangerous and dehumanizing remarks ever made by a sitting member of Congress and marks an escalation of Fine’s long-standing pattern of inciting violence and bigotry.
Fine not only doubled down on these remarks, but continued to make disgustingly Islamophobic comments, saying “I recognize that half of people in Gaza are married to their cousins, so you’re going to find a lot of people with mental defects. But you’ve got to have a mental defect to interpret the comment that way.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has documented numerous other instance of Fine’s hate speech, including:
- Saying “Gaza must be destroyed.”
- Telling Palestinians to “eat rockets” and posting hashtags like #BombsAway and #StarveAway.
- Mocking a dead Palestinian child with “Quite well, actually! Thanks for the pic!”
- Telling a Muslim constituent to “go blow yourself up.”
- Referring to a Palestinian keffiyeh as a “terrorist rag” during a public hearing.
- Threatening to weaponize anti-protest and anti-boycott laws to silence dissent.
He also attacked fellow HEWC member Ilhan Omar, calling her a terrorist. Instead of apologizing, he doubled down, responding to Democrats who condemned the hateful and Islamophobic attack by saying “the Hamas Caucus is upset. Boo hoo.”
It is clear that Fine’s agenda has nothing to do with protecting Jewish people and everything to do with a hateful attack on Muslims, Palestinians, and the movement for Palestine.
GLENN GROTHMAN
Glenn Grothman (R-WI) is a long-time member of Congress, consistently representing the Far Right.
In 2024, he gave a profoundly misogynistic speech on the floor of Congress. He claimed that Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty programs,
took the purpose out of the man’s life, because now you have a basket of goodies for the mom. They’ve taken away the purpose of the man to be part of a family. And if we want to get America back to, say, 1960, where this was almost unheard of, we have to fundamentally change these programs.
Grothman went on to blame the “breakdown of the family” on “people like Angela Davis, [a] well-known Communist, people like the feminists who were so important in the 1960s.”
In short, Grothman was actively arguing to go back to a time when marital rape was legal in every state in the United States and to the expectation that women cook and clean, remaining in the home and dependent on men. He even opposed equal-pay legislation, saying “you could argue that money is more important for men.”
In 2023, he displayed a Christian nationalist flag outside his Congressional office, a flag often associated with white supremacy and flown by many who stormed the Capitol on January 6.
He also once criticized sex-ed classes because, as Grothman put it, some gay teachers “would like it if more kids became homosexuals.”
MARK HARRIS
Mark Harris (R-NC) is an evangelical pastor turned far-right politician. He is deeply Islamophobic and believes peace in Israel and Palestine can only be achieved if Jewish people and Muslims all convert to Christianity. In fact, he claimed Islam was “dangerous” and the work of Satan.
He also led anti-marriage equality initiatives in North Carolina, and was one of the proponents of the state’s 2016 “bathroom bill,” a precursor to the current wave of anti-trans legislation.
MARY MILLER
Mary Miller (R-IL) is part of the far-right Freedom Caucus and a strong Trump supporter. In 2021, she quoted Hitler, claiming that his views on indoctrinating youth should be emulated (after an uproar, she apologized). Someone who quotes Hitler in a positive sense cannot claim to be standing with Jewish people. In 2022, she said the overthrow of Roe v. Wade was a “victory for white life,” although her office claimed she misspoke. These aren’t mistakes — they are thinly-veiled dog whistles.
More recently, she argued that non-Christians ought not be allowed to lead the House of Representatives’ prayers, simultaneously misidentifying that morning’s Sikh prayer leader as a Muslim. She tweeted (and eventually deleted), “This should have never been allowed to happen. America was founded as a Christian nation, and I believe our government should reflect that truth, not drift further from it. May God have mercy.”
She has also repeatedly insisted on misgendering Sarah McBride, a trans congresswoman from Delaware. She supports abolishing birthright citizenship, and believes conservative Christian ideas should be taught in public schools.
The House Education and Workforce Committee’s Aim Is Hate, Austerity, and Control
The idea that any of these merciless bigots are capable of seeking out and rectifying “hate” is farcical. The House Education and Workforce Committee is about repressing the Left and appeasing the Right through attacks on oppressed communities, the Palestine movement and public funding for universities. The politicians in HEWC are not fighting antisemitism, but are instead part of a far-right, Christian nationalism that is antisemitic. As Jewish Voice for Peace writes, Christian nationalists “invoke Jewish protection only to advance a White supremacist, misogynist, imperial, and anti-LGBTQIA+ agenda that further endangers Jewish peoples in the U.S. and abroad.” This is precisely what is happening.
This new round of hearings recalls the McCarthy era, but repression now hides behind Zionist victimhood. The imperialist bipartisan consensus tried to paint Israel as the victim by erasing the real experience of Palestians starved, under constant fire from rockets, forced into ever smaller enclosures, and shot for desperately seeking aid.
The situation in the United STates follows the same logic: this “education” committee parades inflated fears of Zionist students and faculty, all while it is the defenders of Palestine — many of whom are Jewish — who are fired, assaulted by police, and threatened with deportation.
A central function of these attacks is to eradicate leftist thought and anti-imperialist thought from the university. Further, the Far Right wants to enforce austerity and to build an excuse to defund universities. HEWC voted for the reconciliation bill to reduce eligibility for Pell Grants, making it more difficult for working class students to attend university. The majority of the politicians on the committee supported the Big Beautiful Bill, which is replete with attacks on working-class students, such as caps on how much students can borrow.
The House Education and Workforce Committee is a key tool of the Far Right to attack universities as we know it. While the university leaderships do not side with the movement for Palestine and have overseen neoliberal attacks on students and academic workers, they never go far enough to satisfy Trump and his goons. They want universities to ban protests, strip curricula down to job training, and convert whatever’s left to an ideological machine for their agenda, sacrificing the vulnerable to distract from real economic deterioration and widening inequality. The assault on the university is the tip of a new repressive spear that will only go deeper every time its excesses go unchecked. We cannot trust the courts or the Democrats, who have been complicit in these attacks. We must fight back, organized from below on university campuses, in our neighborhoods and workplaces. It is time to stand up.