Republicans in the House of Representatives want to expand investigations into higher education beyond anti-Semitism

When Rep. Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina and chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, convened a hearing on anti-Semitism on college campuses, she said her goal was not to force the nation’s top college presidents out of their jobs.

But after the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania gave evasive answers about whether calls for genocide against Jews violated their schools’ codes of conduct, sparking a national outcry that led to their resignations, Ms. Foxx and other Republicans in the House of Representatives decided to seize the political moment they helped create.

House Republicans are now embarking on an aggressive and sweeping investigation into America’s higher education institutions, targeting the academic elites they have long seen as avatars of cultural decay—all in the name of combating anti-Semitism.

“We want students to feel safe on their campuses, that is our No. 1 issue, and Jewish students have not felt safe,” Ms. Foxx said in an interview Friday. She said she wanted to broaden the investigation with a deep dive into what she has described as a “hostile takeover” of higher education by partisan administrators and political activists.

The committee, which has hired new staff to beef up the investigation, now plans to focus on other Ivy League schools, as well as some public universities, as it brings in more witnesses — using subpoenas if necessary — to to testify, according to people familiar with the developing plans who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Republicans in the House of Representatives plan to investigate efforts to improve campus diversity — known as diversity, equity and inclusion programs, or DEI — and the impact on Jewish students. (There has long been division within the Jewish community on this issue, with some calling for the elimination of DEI initiatives altogether, while others pushing for the inclusion of Jews as protected minorities who would be helped by such programs.)

Republicans on the committee also want to explore the issue of accreditation, and whether federal aid can be withdrawn from a school that fails to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitic actions on campus.

Targeting elite institutions of higher education was a conservative preoccupation long before former President Donald J. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party. For example, William F. Buckley Jr., a founder of modern American conservatism, accused Yale University of rejecting God and teaching liberalism in its classrooms. Former President Richard M. Nixon was recorded railing against Ivy League presidents and saying he wanted to ban them from the White House.

Today, critiques of universities continue to serve as powerful ways for leaders to turn Republican Party voters against what they call “woke” elites while sowing doubt about institutions.

But by framing the research surrounding anti-Semitism on campuses and university administrators’ inadequate responses to it, House Republicans have grounded what many see as an opportunistic right-wing attack on an issue that cannot be dismissed outright as partisan.

“There are partisan oversight hearings on Capitol Hill, where the other side doesn’t show up at all,” said Ira Stoll, a former president of the Harvard Crimson who worked at the Harvard Kennedy School as editor-in-chief of an education policy magazine. “That’s not what’s happening here.”

Still, the research is troubling to many academics, who fear that Republicans are merely trying to legitimize a broader attack on higher education by rooting it in concerns about anti-Semitism.

“I know weaponized congressional hearings and the politicization of academic standards to advance a partisan political agenda when I see it,” Irene Mulvey, the president of the American Association of University Professors, wrote on social media. “That’s what I see now.”

Ms. Mulvey added that “continued political interference poses an existential threat to America’s world-leading system of higher education,” and she called on “anyone who cares about higher education as a public good in a democracy” to fight back.

Republicans in the House of Representatives argue that the education panel’s job is to hold higher education institutions accountable. With Harvard in particular, the committee plans to investigate “academic integrity” and governance on campus, examining how the administration came to hire the ousted president, Claudine Gay, in the first place, and how it went about investigating claims of plagiarism about her academic work.

William A. Ackman, the billionaire investor who has led a crusade against Harvard, Dr. Gay and DEI, claimed in an online post after her dismissal that Dr. Gay was hired despite the fact that she was “not qualified to serve therein.” role.”

Dr. Gay, Harvard’s first black president and the second woman to lead the university, was a central figure in a heated debate over DEI for the entire six months she led the university, a period that coincided with the Supreme Court upholding the practice of race-conscious confessions.

House Republicans have hired an oversight staffer to focus solely on the ongoing investigation into college campuses and have pushed other committee staffers to devote themselves solely to the issue. They have also set up a hotline and inbox for Jewish students who have experienced anti-Semitism on their college campuses to report these incidents directly to the committee.

Ms. Foxx said she and her colleagues were still in the early stages of planning the investigation, but she said there was no doubt it would delve into DEI, a favorite target of the right.

“The majority of people in this country want everyone to be treated equally,” Ms. Foxx said. “What we see with DEI is that this is not the case. Affirmative action is a good thing. DEI, I’m not sure.”

Ms. Foxx added that “we need diversity, but what has happened is that diversity has been limited to race and gender.”

“There is no diversity of ideologies on campuses,” she said. “And that’s not right.”

Federal campaign financial data compiled by OpenSecrets shows that 88 percent of political contributions from people in the education sector went to Democrats during the 2021-2022 campaign cycle.

But Alvin Tillery, director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, said Republicans’ public hand-wringing over anti-Semitism on college campuses rang hollow.

“On most of these campuses, no Jewish students have really been victims of violence,” Mr. Tillery said, citing two notable exceptions: the attack of an Israeli student at Columbia University and a bomb threat against a Jewish center at the campus of Cornell University.

Instead, he said, the debate focused on pro-Palestinian chants and signs at campus protests over ending Israel’s deadly offensive in Gaza. “There is a huge generational divide on campuses, and young Jews are active in the movement to support Gaza,” he said. “It’s really hard to see how this still has traction.”

Mr. Tillery also noted that Republicans who position themselves as the champions of Jewish students “all serve a master in Donald Trump, who quotes Hitler in his stump speeches; people see through that.” (Mr. Trump recently said that migrants coming to the United States were “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing the language of Adolf Hitler.)

Yet the alarm about rising anti-Semitism does not only come from Republicans. In November, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, gave a deeply personal speech in the Senate, saying that pro-Palestinian chants such as “from the river to the sea” conveyed a “violently anti-Semitic message, loud and clear.” for the Jewish people.

But some Democrats said Republicans’ efforts to use the issue to launch a broader attack on diversity efforts would fail. Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster, said he was angry about it diversity initiatives was prevalent within a small portion of the Republican base, but not among the middle electorate, or among young voters.

In a recent poll he conducted among a national cross-section of voters, 67 percent of them said they viewed DEI in businesses as a good thing.

For them, Mr. Garin said, “these attacks confirm the perception that Republicans are a backward-looking party obsessed with playing the race card whenever they can.”