EDUCATION
Rutgers president should be ‘ashamed,’ lawmaker says in fiery hearing on pro-Palestinian protests

Updated: May. 24, 2024, 3:05 a.m.|Published: May. 23, 2024, 4:37 p.m.

Rutgers president Jonathan Holloway testifies at House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Washington D.C., Thurs. May 23, 2024.courtesy of YouTube

By Tina Kelley | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
Rutgers University president Jonathan Holloway defended the state university’s actions in ending a four-day pro-Palestinian encampment earlier this month in tense testimony before a Congressional committee Thursday.

Holloway was peppered with questions from members of the U.S. House Education and the Workforce Committee in Washington, D.C., about Rutgers’ decision to agree to some of the demands from pro-Palestinian protesters before they peacefully took down their camp May 2.

Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., the committee’s chairwoman, started the hearing by addressing the presidents of Rutgers, University of California-Los Angeles and Northwestern University as “so-called university leaders.”

“Each of you should be ashamed of your decisions that allowed antisemitic encampments to endanger Jewish students,” Foxx said.

“You should be doubly ashamed for capitulating to the antisemitic rule-breakers,” she said to Holloway and Michael Schill, the president of Northwestern University in Illinois, where a student pro-Palestinian protest also ended peacefully after negotiations.

Holloway defended his actions, noting that “if ever there was a time for dialogue and a focus on civil discourse, it is now.”

“We made a choice: that choice was to engage our students through dialogue as a first option instead of police action. We had seen what transpired at other universities and sought a different way. Without compromising on my fundamental stance against divestment and boycotts, we agreed to talk and to listen,” the Rutgers president said.

After student protesters disrupted the first morning of final exams on the New Brunswick campus, university administrators gave students a 4 p.m. deadline on May 2 to dismantle their encampment. The university had 125 officers from the Rutgers and New Brunswick Police Department and the State Police, among other departments, ready to remove the protesters, Holloway previously told the state Assembly Budget Committee.

But, the protesters and university reached agreement on eight of the encampment’s ten demands, and the protest ended without incident. A similar encampment remains at Rutgers-Newark, though university officials have asked that group to leave.

Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October, many university presidents have tried to find a middle path between protecting students’ rights to protest, and maintaining safe campuses free of antisemitism and Islamophobia.

The presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania resigned in the wake of their testimony before Foxx’s committee earlier this year following backlash on their campuses about their statements.

Thursday was the first time the committee heard from presidents of public universities. The Congressional committee spent significantly more time questioning the presidents of Northwestern and UCLA, but also criticized Holloway for how Rutgers handled the New Brunswick encampment.

When Rep. Lloyd Smucker, R-Pa., accused Holloway of giving in to protesters at the expense of the rest of the student body, the Rutgers president pushed back.

“I was not negotiating with the mob, but I was talking with students,” Holloway said.

Smucker also asked why the university met demands of the protesters in May, after taking little action in response to requests for remedies to antisemitism that Jewish faculty and administrators presented in December.

“We were acting in a state of emergency in the case of the encampment,” Holloway said. He added the Rutgers administration should have “responded more quickly, more robustly and we always will be trying to do better, sir.”

Holloway also came under fire regarding social media posts from officials at the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers Law School, which was formed in part to address causes of Islamophobia and other forms of bias. Rep. Bob Good, R- Va., cited tweets from the center that called Israel’s government genocidal, among other statements.

In response to heated questions from Good, Holloway said that he did not think that the university should be funding anti-Israel advocacy, but he stopped short of saying he would seek the center’s closure.

“If you’re unwilling to close and defund the cesspool of hate, the state of New Jersey should,” Foxx said to Holloway.

Before the hearing began, a tweet on the House Education and the Workforce Committee’s social media account criticized Rutgers for responding to its request for documents on how the school handles antisemitism with 1,500 documents, including 2/3 that were completely blacked out and redacted.

“This obstruction is an affront to taxpayers and the Jewish students who have been abandoned by Pres Holloway,” said the committee’s message on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Rutgers spokeswoman Dory Devlin responded in an email, “We produced 74,000 pages of documents to send to the committee. Our redactions were minimal and only to protect student privacy or other privacy purposes.”

Politics were at play throughout the hearing, with some representatives noting that this was the committee’s fifth hearing on the issue of antisemitism in educational institutions, yet the Republicans on the committee had voted for a 25% cut in funding to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which investigates allegations of antisemitism and other forms of discrimination.

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Ore., called out her Republican colleagues for not addressing antisemitism expressed by their presidential candidate, Donald Trump, for his recent social media post with Nazi overtones, referencing a “unified Reich.”

Bonamici said, “It baffles me that some people are opposed to antisemitism when it’s politically convenient, instead of whenever it rears its ugly head.”

Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez, D-N.M., called on the committee instead to work on solutions like proposed bipartisan laws fighting antisemitism.

The House education committee is also investigating Rutgers’ response to claims of antisemitism on campus. The U.S. Department of Education is separately investigating charges of Islamophobia and antisemitism at the school.

Ahead of Thursday’s testimony, Jewish faculty members issued open letters weighing in on both sides of Holloway’s handling of the protests. Jewish students and alumni called on him to address antisemitism, while the faculty union warned him against limiting free speech.

Shortly after the three-hour hearing, Todd Wolfson, the president of the Rutgers faculty union, joined with faculty and graduate school unions from Northwestern and UCLA in criticizing the hearing as reminiscent of the McCarthy era, when legislators grilled academics and others suspected of being Communists.

“The Ed-Workforce Committee hearings are a witch-hunt that echoes some of the worst times in this country’s history, where small-minded politicians are let loose to spread fear and attack those they disagree with,” Wolfson said.