After the House Committee on Education and Workforce released its report on Thursday, investigating how universities, including Northwestern, have handled on-campus antisemitism over the past year, the University promptly issued a statement disputing the report’s findings.
The 325-page Congressional report, dubbed “Antisemitism on College Campuses Exposed,” claimed that NU put “radical anti-Israel faculty” in charge of negotiations to end the encampment on Deering Meadow in April.
“Not only did President Schill empower these anti-Israel faculty members as negotiators: he did so while excluding Jewish members of his President’s Advisory Committee on Preventing Antisemitism and Hate (PASH) who had expressed concerns about the University’s response to the encampment,” the report read. “This reflects Schill’s poor judgment and flagrant disregard for Northwestern’s Jewish community.”
Among administrators called out was University Provost Kathleen Hagerty, who the committee claims to have quietly supported a proposal to boycott Sabra hummus — a leading food brand jointly owned by Strauss Group, an Israeli food company — to “satisfy student demands.”
The report also mentions an instance when students involved in the Deering Meadow encampment negotiations asked the University to hire “an anti-Zionist rabbi” — a demand that the committee later scrutinized University President Schill over during the committee’s hearings in May.
“Northwestern’s leaders, including Schill, actively entertained the encampment’s request. This raises grave questions of whether Schill violated his legal obligation to testify truthfully and completely before Congress,” the report read.
The University’s Thursday statement was quick to counter these claims, saying the University never “seriously considered hiring an ‘anti-Zionist’ rabbi or boycotting any Israeli company.”
The statement reiterated the University’s support behind Schill’s “accurate testimony” before the House committee in May and its actions to address discrimination and antisemitism on campus since then.
Furthermore, the University statement objected to what it called “unfair characterizations of our Provost and valued members of our faculty based on isolated and out-of-context communications” in the report.
“The Republican Staff Report remains focused on events that were fully debated in the committee hearing last spring, and it ignores the hard work our community has put in since then to improve our policies and procedures and create a safer learning environment for our students, faculty and staff,” the statement read.
The committee’s report also included allegations of antisemitism at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University and University of California, Los Angeles.
This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.
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