Testifying before Congress, Rutgers president defends decision to negotiate agreement with pro-Palestinian protesters

Three more college presidents found themselves in an uncomfortable national spotlight Thursday at a congressional committee hearing on the handling of antisemitism on campus.

Unlike the charged exchanges that happened in December, after which two Ivy League presidents resigned, no viral moment seemingly emerged from this latest hearing, though calls for the resignation of one of the three — Michael Schill, president of Northwestern University — had begun making the rounds by the afternoon.

For Rutgers University president Jonathan Holloway, the hearing offered a platform to defend the school’s decision to negotiate an agreement with pro-Palestinian protesters who erected an encampment on campus, while reassuring lawmakers and others concerned about antisemitism that they also had his attention.

Even as the hearing was still going on, the university issued a news release saying it had notified Students for Justice in Palestine — the group involved in the encampment — that it had “initiated a conduct process” and that the group’s “alleged actions may have violated the terms of their current probation status.” That step appears to be responding to a request from a group of Jewish faculty, administrators, and staff that called for the equal enforcement of campus policies against hatred, intimidation, and harassment.

» READ MORE: Rutgers faculty defend the university in advance of Thursday’s GOP-led congressional hearing on antisemitism on campus

“We were acting in the state of emergency in the case of the encampment,” Holloway said during questioning. “With [concerns about antisemitism], I will absolutely say we could have responded more quickly, more robustly, and we always will be trying to do better.”

The university declined to comment further on the conduct process for the pro-Palestinians protesters; during testimony, Holloway said that cases were under investigation and that since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel, four students had been suspended and 19 others disciplined in some other way.

» READ MORE: Rutgers president to testify before congressional committee probing antisemitism on college campuses

Critics have said the hearings, which feature indignant questions from lawmakers who often don’t wait for witnesses to respond before moving to their next point, are largely political theater. During Thursday’s more than three-hour hearing in Washington, Holloway, Schill — whose campus also negotiated an agreement with protesters — and Gene Block, chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles, were peppered with rapid-fire queries phrased as accusations. Both Schill and Block are Jewish and spoke of family members who survived the Holocaust. They were asked why they negotiated with the protesters, queried on what they have done to combat antisemitism on campus, and even shown videos, including one of a UCLA student being denied access to an area of campus by protesters, and asked to respond.

“Each of you should be ashamed of your decisions that allowed antisemitic encampments to endanger Jewish students,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), chair of the committee, said in her opening statement. “Mr. Schill and Dr. Holloway, you should be doubly ashamed for capitulating to the antisemitic rule-breakers.”

Holloway maintained that his university made the right choice when it decided against calling in law enforcement to end the encampment. He pointed out that the activists were not terrorists, as one lawmaker implied, but were students enrolled in the public university.

”We made a choice: That choice was to engage our students through dialogue as a first option instead of police action,” Holloway said at the hearing convened by the GOP-led Committee on Education and the Workforce. “We had seen what transpired at other universities and sought a different way.”

That point in particular was praised by several Democrats present at the widely streamed hearing, a highly partisan affair.

“I really appreciate your focus on negotiation and a peaceful resolution and protecting all students,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.).

Unlike the hearing in December when the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology testified, there didn’t seem to be one moment that stood out as particularly embarrassing for the presidents. Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York who played a major role in the grilling last time, didn’t have much involvement Thursday.

» READ MORE: Penn president Liz Magill has resigned following backlash over her testimony about antisemitism

At the December hearing, Liz Magill, then Penn’s president, and Claudine Gay, then president of Harvard, said it depended on the “context” when asked whether calling for the genocide of Jewish people represented a violation of their codes of conduct. Facing a backlash, both Gay and Magill resigned from their jobs in the aftermath.

One point emerged as a bit dicey for Holloway. He answered that he didn’t have an opinion when asked whether he thought Israel’s government was genocidal.

“I think Israel has a right to exist and protect itself,” Holloway said.

Later in the hearing, when all three presidents were asked if they thought Israel was a genocidal state, Holloway, like the other presidents, unequivocally answered no.

Asked about the difference, Rutgers spokesperson Dory Devlin said: “He clarified the response with the second statement.”

Holloway, in his testimony, acknowledged the heavy impact that events in the Middle East have had on both Jewish and Palestinian communities at Rutgers, home to one of the largest populations of Jewish students and Muslim or Arab students in the nation.

“We find ourselves here today because of the devastation that the Hamas terrorist attacks have wrought,” he said. “It is heartbreaking to think about the senseless and horrific violence of October 7, about the hostages still held captive by Hamas 230 days later, about the thousands of Palestinian children killed in the war, about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza that gets worse every day.”

In the Oct. 7 assault in southern Israel that triggered the war in Gaza, Hamas-led fighters killed 1,200 people and took about 250 hostage. Israel’s ensuing offensive has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Holloway’s appearance before the committee came less than three weeks after the university negotiated a deal with students who had erected the pro-Palestinian encampment on the 43,859-student Rutgers-New Brunswick campus. The 75-tent encampment went up in late April and came down peacefully three days later after the agreement was reached.

Rutgers agreed to review, as part of the regular university process, a demand that the university divest its financial holdings from any firm connected to Israel. The agreement also included commitments for the president and chair of the joint committee on investments to meet with up to five students to discuss their request for Rutgers to divest, the establishment of an Arab Cultural Center, and staff training in anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racism.

In the face of criticism, Holloway said at a board of governors meeting earlier this month that he was confident in the decision, which “allowed us to maintain a safe and controlled environment, to protect Rutgers students and Rutgers property, and to assure that our students’ academic progress — taking finals and completing the semester — was not impeded.”

Holloway during his testimony noted the university did not compromise on its stance against divestment or boycotts against Israel.

But the deal had quickly drawn bipartisan criticism, including from New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat. Some Jewish faculty and students at Rutgers also were critical of it and said the university had not done enough to quell antisemitism on campus.

Others, however, including the Rutgers faculty union and a group of Jewish professors, supported the agreement and asserted that the school has not been rampant with antisemitism. During testimony, Holloway also asserted that Rutgers was not a “hotbed of antisemitism.”

During the hearing, faculty members from the three universities in the spotlight called the congressional hearings a “kangaroo court” and a “McCarthyite campaign” in a news conference in front of the U.S. Capitol.

”They are manufacturing lies and weaponizing painful riffs in our community as part of an assault on higher education,” said Todd Wolfson, president of the AAUP-AFT chapter at Rutgers and a professor of journalism and media studies there. “Their goal is to control our campuses, and tell us what we can research, what we can teach, and what we can learn.”

The professors and union members who spoke criticized the political theater of the exchanges.

A professor of English at UCLA, Mia McIver, noted to the laughs and cheers of the crowd that Foxx began her testimony by quoting from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, a book that McIver described as containing “one of the most notorious antisemitic caricatures in American literature.”

”I teach English and I give them an F,” McIver said.

This article contains information from the Associated Press.