DePaul University President Robert Manuel was pummeled by Congressional Republicans Wednesday during more than three hours of heated questions about alleged antisemitism related to Gaza war protests on the school’s Lincoln Park campus.
Meanwhile, a civil rights attorney also testifying before the hearing in Washington compared the proceedings to a long-discredited Cold War-era anti-communism campaign famously waged by U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.
“We did ultimately recognize that Joe McCarthy made a mistake, and I think history will show that this committee followed and repeated that same mistake,” David Cole, the former legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, told the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Cole accused the Republican members of “engaging in broad based charges of antisemitism without any factual predicate.” He added that the proceedings “are not an attempt to find out what happened, but an attempt to chill protected speech.”
Several student groups at DePaul set up a large and long-running encampment on the school’s quad to protest Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. After 17 days, university leaders sent in Chicago Police officers to forcibly tear down the encampment without agreeing to any of the demonstrators’ demands.
The university is being sued by two Jewish students who police say were attacked last fall while they were showing their support for Israel. The students say DePaul failed to protect them and other Jewish and Israeli students.
At several points during Wednesday’s hearing, conservative members appeared to threaten Manuel and two other college presidents who were called to testify, Wendy Raymond of Haverford College in Pennsylvania and Jeffrey Armstrong of California Polytechnic State University .
“For anyone who doubts my commitment to fighting on these issues, no matter what side of the aisle they’re on, they can go talk to the two chairmen of the board and the one university president in Florida who no longer have their jobs because of me,” Randy Fine, a Republican congressman from Florida, told the university presidents across the witness table. “So I encourage you to keep that in mind when you answer my questions.”
Fine was one of several GOP committee members who pressed the university presidents for information on how many faculty members and students were fired, suspended or expelled as a result of Palestinian solidarity encampments or for statements made criticizing Israel.
Committee Chairman Tim Walberg, a congressman from Michigan, accused Students for Justice in Palestine of being at the center of DePaul’s “antisemitism problem.”
Manuel later pushed back against the depiction that his campus is a “hotbed of antisemitism.” But Walberg asked Manuel if he would commit to permanently banning the group from campus.
Students for Justice in Palestine “has been suspended,” Manuel said, adding that the group is on probation over a social media post and told Walberg he’d “be happy to report back” about the results of an upcoming hearing.
DePaul junior and group member Henna Ayesh, who watched Manuel’s testimony with other Palestinian students, said she and her friends cried.
“We have publicly seen our own president, who we have been paying to protect us, submit to right wing fascist politicians and [testify] openly and proudly that he has sanctioned and silenced us as Palestinian students on campus for the sake of protecting other students,” said Ayesh, a political science major. “He could have protected freedom of speech … and [instead] he gave into Trump’s agenda. He gave into exactly what that committee wanted to hear.”
In a statement, the Anti-Defamation League Midwest said they welcomed Manuel’s testimony and the steps taken at DePaul “to address discrimination toward Jewish students, faculty and staff on campus.”