UC Berkeley chancellor faces House questions on campus antisemitism

San Francisco Chronicle​

11 hours ago

UC Berkeley Chancellor Richard Lyons is expected to defend his university's handling of campus antisemitism Tuesday when he and the leaders of two other universities become the latest to be grilled on the subject by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Joining Lyons in Washington will be Robert Groves, interim president of Georgetown University, and Felix Matos Rodriguez, chancellor of the City University of New York.
Ahead of the hearing, committee chair Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Michigan, characterized antisemitism as 'festering at schools across the country.'
Earlier this year, the Trump administration announced an investigation of UC Berkeley and other universities into whether an 'antisemitic hostile work environment' exists. It's unclear what the investigation turned up, if it happened at all.
Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice had already opened investigations into antisemitism at the school in 2024. In December, a House report noted that UC Berkeley had 'issued no suspensions and placed only one student on probation' after student protests that year.
The committee has held several such hearings with campus leaders since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas militants attacked Israel and triggered the ongoing war in Gaza. The conflict prompted college students across the country to demonstrate throughout 2024 for Palestinian rights and against Israel. Their tent encampments and entrenched protests rocked the usual campus equilibrium, as university leaders struggled to navigate students' right to protest while trying to guard against hate speech and occasional violence targeting Jews and Muslims alike.
The committee's Republican majority has focused on antisemitism alone and typically has taken a harsh tone toward the academics, pushing for missteps during their testimony.
At stake is much of the federal funding that helps power the universities, and even whether the leaders' responses to the questioning could topple them from their posts.
The presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania resigned after the first such hearings in Dec. 2023 when their answers failed to deliver the sharp condemnations of antisemitism that committee members were looking for.
Since then, the presidents of Columbia and the University of Virginia have also stepped down, as the Trump administration has withheld billions of dollars from Harvard and Columbia, demanded operational changes at the universities — including the hiring of more conservative employees — and threatened to halt hundreds of millions of dollars more to other universities.
Committee member Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican known for her aggressive questioning of campus leaders, appeared to take glee in the resignations, remarking at one point: 'Three down, so many to go.'
At the most recent hearing in May, as the committee reiterated threats to halt federal funding over the schools' allegedly tepid response to antisemitism, the presidents of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Haverford in Pennsylvania and DePaul in Chicago each apologized to the committee for not doing more to tamp it down.
During the same hearing, David Cole, a former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union who testified with the presidents, likened the antisemitism hearings to those of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s aimed at routing out hidden Communists.
Like those hearings, today's 'are not an attempt to find out what happened but an attempt to chill protected speech,' Cole said.
UC Berkeley has been the site of notable incidents, including the violent shut-down in Feb. 2024 of a speech by an Israeli lawyer invited by Jewish students to speak at Zellerbach Playhouse. Protesters broke a window, called an attendee a 'dirty Jew' and grabbed another by her neck.
For years, pro-Palestinian students have periodically set up mock Israeli checkpoints — used in Israel to prevent passage of Palestinians — at Sather Gate, a main campus entry, forcing students to detour if they did not want to pass through. After the Hamas invasion, such incidents prompted law Professor Steven Solomon to pen a widely read essay titled 'Don't Hire My Antisemitic Law Students,' and political science Professor Ron Hassner to stage a sit-in against campus antisemitism.
Student Karin Yaniv is also suing her campus union, UAW Local 4811, which represents graduate student workers, accusing it of repeatedly excluding and mocking Jewish members who tried to participate in meetings. Union leaders deny the allegations.
On Monday, as a counterweight to the perception of UC Berkeley as a pit of antisemitism, 82 Jewish faculty and senior staff submitted a letter to the hearing committee praising the way campus leaders — including Lyons, who took the helm a year ago, and his predecessor, Carol Christ — have handled the shifting landscape for Jewish students since Oct. 7, 2023.
'Teaching and research were not hindered, protests were confined, and the UC Berkeley administration made significant and impactful efforts to ensure that Jewish students, staff, and faculty were safe on campus and felt accepted and integral to the university community,' said the letter that commended leaders for negotiating a peaceful end to students' protest encampment and for supporting Jewish life on campus.
'We reject the claim that UC Berkeley is an antisemitic environment,' said the letter, which acknowledged that Jews on campus do face 'real challenges.' But the letter writers affirmed: 'We feel secure on campus and support the administration's efforts to balance safety with respect for free speech.'
A fact sheet provided by the campus lists many of them, including regular meetings between senior leaders and the university's Jewish community, and public statements condemning antisemitism. Other efforts include:
Financial support for the 'Antisemitism Education Initiative,' which helps campuses across the country tackle anti-Jewish discrimination.
Mandatory antisemitism training during new student orientation and for resident assistants in campus housing.
A new 'Berkeley Bridging Fellowship' Israel and Palestine dialogue group.
Since the Zellerbach violence, the school has spent more than $10 million on additional security 'to ensure all events can safely proceed as planned.'
UC Berkeley has not seen anti-Israel protests since about a year ago, when the University of California's systemwide President Michael Drake said that all campuses would enforce a policy banning tent encampments and masks intended to hide the identity of protesters. UC Berkeley officials have said they never arrested anyone in the Zellerbach incident because, even after studying footage, they could not identify any perpetrators.
In New York, anti-Trump and pro-Palestinian protesters from City University of New York criticized their chancellor, Matos, for skipping a scheduled talk on economic mobility in that city to 'capitulate to the federal government' by testifying before Congress.
Meanwhile, it's unclear how the committee selected Lyons and the other participants, who were not subpoenaed, but simply 'invited,' said a UC Berkeley spokesperson. Neither the university nor the committee would provide a copy of the invitation.