JNS
The committee is “concerned about the role of administrators and faculty in potentially contributing” to an anti-Jewish environment on campus, it said.
The House Education and Workforce Committee sought documents on March 27 from Sarah Lawrence College, a nearly 100-year-old private liberal arts school in Bronxville, N.Y., about how it responded to Jew-hatred on campus.
The school responded, but in the interim, new questions have been raised, so Reps. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) and Burgess Owens (R-Utah), chairs respectively of the committee and its subcommittee on higher education and workforce development, wrote to the school asking for more documents.
The new request “comes amid reports of a hostile antisemitic environment, in which faculty and administrators are reportedly contributing to antisemitic harassment of Jewish students on the Sarah Lawrence campus,” the committee said.
The congressmen noted reports that a Jewish student, Sammy Tweedy, had “been harassed and bullied throughout the 2022-23 academic year” and “received violent and threatening text messages from members of Sarah Lawrence’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine” following the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
One such note told him that he “should have been killed in Israel,” the congressmen wrote.
“He left Sarah Lawrence, in part because of the college’s ‘refusal to protect him.’ Multiple other students have also left Sarah Lawrence or considered doing so because of antisemitism on campus,” they wrote.
The committee leaders added that students reportedly “targeted” a Jewish professor at the school and “waged a boycott campaign and pressured others individually not to take the professor’s class.”
“The committee is concerned about the role of administrators and faculty in potentially contributing to this environment,” the congressmen wrote. (JNS sought comment from the college.)
“When administrators and faculty show support for Hamas’s actions, or when they show support for student groups that support Hamas, Jewish students perceive these statements as threatening not only to the state of Israel but to the Jewish people more broadly,” they wrote.
Such an anti-Jewish environment runs afoul of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, they said. They sought documents from Sarah Lawrence about how the school disciplined students or professors involved in a November 2024 “takeover and occupation of Westlands and the accompanying encampment.”
Among the things the committee sought are documents and communications related to “the cancellation of classes by faculty or the modification of course materials in support of the Westlands occupation or encampment,” social media posts by college professors that celebrate “violence against Jews, Israelis or Zionists, including posts that applaud the Oct. 7 attack,” information about “bullying or harassment” of Tweedy and “coordinated efforts to pressure students not to register for classes taught by Jewish professors.”
The committee asked for the new materials by June 25.
