The House Education and Workforce Committee is set to hold the latest in its series of hearings on campus antisemitism with college presidents on Wednesday, this time focusing on colleges and universities outside of the most elite circles.

The hearing will feature the presidents of Haverford College, California Polytechnic State University (San Luis Obispo) and DePaul University. David Cole, the former national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, is also set to testify.

“This isn’t just an Ivy League issue,” Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI), the new chair of the House Republican Conference, told Jewish Insider on Tuesday. “This is a widespread issue across academia. This shouldn’t be about partisanship, this is about public safety … My hope for tomorrow is that we get some actionable change from the universities.”

McClain is a member of the committee and staking out a prominent role ahead of the hearing. Her predecessor as the GOP conference chair, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), earned plaudits from the Jewish community for her aggressive questioning of college presidents in the previous Congress.

McClain lamented to JI that bringing university presidents before the committee has seemed to be one of the few pathways to achieving actionable changes on college campuses, and said that the House and the committee are committed to continuing such hearings if necessary.

She added that, by bringing some of these less prominent universities before the committee, it will put every school on notice that they could be next. “Don’t kid yourself: everyone’s watching and everyone’s praying, ‘Please don’t pick me. Please don’t ask me to come in for a hearing,’” she said.

She added that the committee is prepared to pursue legislation to address the issue if necessary — potentially codifying some of President Donald Trump’s executive orders on antisemitism — although “my hope would be that we don’t have to.”

The top GOP leader said she plans to grill the university presidents on why they failed to enforce their own procedures that she argued would have been applied in other cases, such as if members of the Ku Klux Klan had set up an encampment in the middle of a college campus, “but for some reason, it’s OK for those [anti-Israel] groups to do that. Why is that? Why the discrimination? Why the bias?”

Asked whether the House will take action on the Antisemitism Awareness Act following its collapse in the Senate last week, McClain said that the House is “committed to take action” and that “if the Senate is not going to take action, everything is on the table, we will take action.”

Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), the committee chair, said at a press conference earlier Tuesday that Haverford had played host to “some of the worst atrocities that you could [exact] upon human beings, Jewish students and supporters of Jewish students on their campus,” and failed to take action until the past few weeks. The school’s president, Wendy Raymond, acknowledged in an email to the campus community last week that the administration “came up short” in addressing antisemitism at the school, which included the protesting and disruption of an Anti-Defamation League workshop on antisemitism that occurred in the presence of the school’s administrators.

At Cal Poly, Walberg decried the “violence that is going on there,” which he said has come in spite of pledges from the university to step in. He said that students have been blocked from classes and parts of campus, with the cooperation of some faculty.

“We have to show it’s not just at the elite Ivy League institutions or Northwestern University or some that we had in front of us. But it’s all over,” Walberg said. “Every one of us is impacted if we allow this to continue.”

He highlighted that there had been physical assaults on Jewish students at DePaul — including Michael Kaminsky, a junior at the university, who attended and spoke at the press conference. 

Kaminsky said he and a friend were ambushed and attacked by masked individuals on DePaul’s campus, while campus security and other students stood by. He said only one person has been arrested.

“It is clear that Jewish students are still unsafe on their campus. Now is the time we finally hold our institutions accountable,” Kaminsky said.

Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT), an Education and Workforce subcommittee chairman who spoke at Tuesday’s press conference, described campus antisemitism as a “public safety issue” and a “moral” issue, “not a free speech issue.” He said that any college that fails to take action should lose all of its federal funds, and every president and trustee that fails to step in must step aside.

Owens compared Jewish students standing up to antisemitism to Black students in the 1960s who spoke out during the Civil Rights Movement. “Thank you for your courage,” he said.

Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL), a newly elected Jewish lawmaker who previously served in the Florida legislature, said that he often felt alone in his efforts to fight antisemitism in Florida, but has found “leaders that were as committed, if not more committed to fight for this issue” when he came to Congress.

“No child should walk through campus today and wonder if they will make it from their dorm room to their classroom or their classroom to the library or the library to the dining hall, and they will be attacked,” Fine said. “And that is not only happening, it is excused — and I would say encouraged — at many of our institutions around the country.”

He described the issue as deeply personal, given that his son will be attending college next year.

McClain said at the press conference that if the colleges that come before the committee on Wednesday fail to take action, they should lose federal funding and should face penalties targeting their endowments, which are currently tax-exempt. 

She also suggested that the presidents visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to understand why lawmakers are “so adamant that they do something to protect these students.”

Asked by JI about the concerns that some Jewish groups such as the ADL and the American Jewish Committee have raised that the Trump administration may be overreaching in its efforts to tackle campus antisemitism in ways that could fuel further antisemitism, McClain referenced Owens’ comments comparing the current moment to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

“It looks the same, it walks the same, it talks the same. We have to protect students,” McClain said. “I don’t care if you’re Jewish, African American, Arab American, pick a label. You have to be safe on campus. One particular group can’t be allowed not to go to class. And if there’s violence towards any particular group, that should not be allowed. This is a protection issue.”