In the past, though, these same officials were much more varied in their responses during other protests, whether they were about climate action, Black Lives Matter protests, or, in some limited circ*mstances, the Occupy Movement, which was especially prevalent at the University of California Berkeley.
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Back then, administrators may have felt they had more options. This time it appears they don’t.
The reason: Republicans control the US House and are using that position to shape public opinion.
While the narrow House Republican majority can’t agree even who should lead them or whether they should impeach a president without evidence of a crime, they have done one thing very well. They were able to successfully frame the national debate playing out on college campuses about the very real humanitarian crisis in Gaza as actually being entirely about the very real rise in antisemitic rhetoric. And in their view, university presidents must act to stop the antisemitism or they should resign.
The House Republican power play is all at once deeply cynical, classic “us versus them” politics, and a wedge issue to divide Democrats. But, so far, it has worked. And looking back, it’s easily the biggest accomplishment for House Republicans since they took power after the 2022 midterm elections.
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Consider the latest Harvard CAPS-Harris poll, which found 80 percent of Americans support Israel over Hamas. This after weeks of some protesters expressing their support for Hamas, a terrorist organization according to the US government. Granted 70 percent of those same respondents also backed a cease-fire.
There is a direct line between the moment then Harvard President Claudine Gay was grilled by the House Education and the Workforce Committee on Dec. 5 to the moment students were physically handled and arrested at Emerson College and all over the country last week.
Back in December, the House Education Committee hauled in Gay along with Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth and then University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill to discuss what they found was a rise in antisemitism on their college campuses following the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas on Oct. 7.
Gay testified that her role as a university president was to balance a need to “confront hate” while at the same time “preserving free expression.”
“This is difficult work, and I know that I have not always gotten it right,” said Gay.
New York Representative Elise Stefanik, a Harvard graduate and Republican member of the committee, seized on this concept of balance to rebuke Gay.
“Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment,” asked Stefanik.
Gay answered that it “depends on the context.”
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“It does not depend on the context — the answer is yes,” said Stefanik to Gay.
“This is why you should resign,” Stefanik said to all three presidents.
Four days later Magill resigned from UPenn. A month later so did Gay at Harvard, after questions rose about plagiarism once the knives were out following her appearance in Congress.
The message was clear to university presidents around the country. While there was still something of a balance between confronting hate and preserving free speech, appeasing protesters came with peril while confronting them forcefully did not.
The tonal change was evident when Columbia University President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik appeared in front of the same House Education Committee in mid-April on the same topic: the alleged rise of antisemitism on her New York City campus.
When Stefanik asked why a Columbia professor was hired who shared pro-Hamas and pro-Intifada statements less than a week after the Oct. 7 attacks, Shafik said she had just fired him.
“I share with you your repugnance at those remarks. I completely understand that. On my watch, for faculty who make remarks that cross the line in terms of antisemitism, there will be consequences,” said Shafik, who noted that she also just fired four additional professors for the same reason.
A day later, Shafik confronted a growing pro-Palestinian encampment on the private university’s lawn. Her response: ask the New York Police Department to arrest roughly 100 for trespass.
Shafik was heavily criticized for the boldness in seeking the arrests. On campus, it galvanized the encampment to come back stronger and her school was now the leading national news story.
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The unrest attracted Republican leaders like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who showed up on campus to denounce the protests and, in doing so, used the drama at Columbia to both deflect from the GOP’s internal problems and strengthen his own standing among his colleagues.
That Johnson’s visit to Columbia would unify Republicans while putting on display the divide among Democrats in their separate visits was simply icing on his political cake. Prior to his visit, several Democratic Jewish representatives went to Columbia to talk about antisemitism. Days later, Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, also came to campus and while there, suggested some Jewish students on campus were “pro genocide,” setting off a firestorm among her Democratic colleagues. Omar’s daughter, a Barnard College student at Columbia, was among the 100 initially arrested and suspended for being at the encampment.
Back in Washington, the House is scheduled to take up a resolution dubbed the “Antisemitism Awareness Act” this week that seeks to define antisemitism so that other laws can be used to address the hate speech, a measure that is expected to put the divide among Democrats on the record.
But as for colleges, Shafik’s actions set a model for university presidents over the weekend in Texas, California, Indiana, Illinois, Arizona, Massachusetts, and at Washington University in St. Louis where Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein was among those arrested on Saturday.
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(A notable exception came Tuesday when Brown University reached a deal with protesters by agreeing the college board will vote on divestment from Israel item in exchange for closing an encampment on the Providence campus.)
By Tuesday morning even the White House weighed in and focused entirely on antisemitic rhetoric first and not even mentioning the plight of Gazans.
“Hate speech and hate symbols have no place in America,” wrote White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates in a statement about the evolving situation at Columbia where protesters broke into a building on Monday night.
Still, the situation at Columbia and around the world is fluid. Spring semesters are set to wind down in the coming weeks, and talks over a six-week cease-fire appear to be making progress in the Middle East. Come the fall semester, the pendulum could swing back, but the incentives for college administrators might be the same.
The issue isn’t going away any time soon, particularly if House Republicans have anything to do with it. On Tuesday, Republicans on the House Education Committee announced they are asking the presidents of Yale, UCLA, and the University of Michigan to appear before the panel on May 23.
James Pindell can be reached at james.pindell@globe.com. Follow him @jamespindell and on Instagram @jameswpindell.
