A congressional panel investigating antisemitism on US college campuses on Wednesday was accused of trying to chill constitutionally protected free speech and likened to a cold-war era committee notorious for wrecking the lives of people suspected of communist sympathies.
The comparison was made by David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University law centre, who told the House education and workforce committee that its proceedings resembled those staged by the House un-American Activities Committee (Huac) during and after the second world war.
Cole, a former national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, accused the present-day committee of “broad-based charges of antisemitism without any factual predicate”.
“These proceedings, with all due respect, have more in common with those of the House un-American Activities Committee,” he told committee members. “They are not an attempt to find out what happened, but an attempt to chill protected speech.”
HUAC, originally formed in 1938 to investigate Nazi subversion, switched focus to communism after the war and grew infamous after its high-profile hearings – including into suspected communism in Hollywood – led to blacklists and people losing their jobs.
Cole’s criticism came in the eighth hearing held by the committee, which has previously looked into antisemitism sparked by anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian protests at elite universities, including Harvard, Columbia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Trump administration has demanded sweeping changes in the governance of some of the country’s leading universities, including Harvard – prompting a backlash from academics and administrators, who believe antisemitism is being used as a pretext to curtail academic freedom.
Pervious hearings had led to the resignations of several university heads after they were deemed to have given legalistic responses to questions – mainly posed byRepublicans– over whether certain anti-Israeli slogans were genocidal or protected by free speech.
Wednesday’s hearing included presidents from Haverford College in Pennsylvania, DePaul University in Chicago and California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo.
Even before it began, questions were raised about how truly concerned some members of Congress were prejudiced against Jews.
A memo signed by Haverford academics– most of them Jewish – and reported by the Guardian expressed concern that one had quoted Adolf Hitler, others had failed to condemn antisemitic activity in their districts, and Tim Walberg, the committee’s Republican chair, had links to a Christian group that “trains students to convert Jewish people to Christianity”.
Jewish Voice for Peace, a leftwing group, took nine Jewish students from Columbia to Capitol Hill to meet members of Congress on Tuesday, while condemning the hearings as “McCarthyite” and more concerned with suppressing pro-Palestinian protest than antisemitism.
Walberg told the hearing campus antisemitism “continues to traumatize students, faculty and staff”. He cited a letter from a group of Jewish students at Haverford who claimed to have been “marginalized, ostracized and at times, outright attacked. College officials reacted with “indifference”, he said.
Cole, who had been called as a witness by the committee’s ranking Democrat, Bobby Scott, said the hearings were flawed on free speech grounds and for focusing on the 1964 Civil Rights Acts, which – under Title VI – outlaws discrimination in education on the grounds of race, colour or national origin in institutions receiving federal funding.
“Antisemitic speech, while lamentable, is constitutionally protected, just like racist speech, sexist speech and homophobic speech,” he said, adding that the US supreme court had defended the rights of the Nazi party to march in a town where Holocaust survivors lived.
On civil rights, he said: “Title VI does not prohibit antisemitic speech. An antisemitic slogan at a protest or online does not deny equal access to education any more than a sexist or a racist comment.”
More broadly, Cole said, committee members had not conducted proper investigations into specific incidents.
“Getting to the bottom of what happened requires fair hearings where both sides are heard about specific incidents,” he said. “This committee has not held a single hearing looking into a specific incident, having the perpetrator and the complainant testify.”
Suzanne Bonamici, a Democratic representative from Oregon, who is Jewish, cited a letter from 100 Jewish faculty members at Northwestern University in Illinois expressing “serious concerns” about how the committee was addressing antisemitism.
“We are united by the conviction that our Jewishness must not be used as a cudgel to silence the vigorous exchange of ideas that lies at the heart of university life,” she quoted them as saying.
She added: “As an active member of my synagogue for more than 25 years, I can no longer pretend that this is a good-faith effort to root out antisemitism.”
Elise Stefanik, a Republican representative from New York, who rose to prominence in December 2023 with a high-profile cross-examination that prompted the resignation of the former president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, tried a similar tack with Haverford’s head, Wendy Raymond.
“Is calling for the genocide of Jews protected speech on your campus?” Stefanik asked.
Raymond replied that it was not, but struggled to answer when asked if students or staff had been disciplined or investigated for using such language. Stefanik said: “Respectfully, president of Haverford, many people have sat in this position who are no longer in the positions as president of universities for their failure to answer straightforward questions.”
She added: “For the American people watching, you still don’t get it. Haverford still doesn’t get it. It’s a very different testimony than the other presidents who are here today, who are coming with specifics. This is completely unacceptable. Higher education has failed to address this gorge of antisemitism, putting Jewish students at risk at Haverford and other campuses across the country.”