The House Committee on Education and the Workforce will investigate three medical schools over their “failures to address antisemitism,” Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), the chair of the committee, announced on Monday.  

The three schools targeted in the probe are the University of Illinois College of Medicine (UICOM), University of California, San Francisco and University of California, Los Angeles Geffen School of Medicine. 

The investigations come as medical schools and the medical profession have faced increasing scrutiny over rising antisemitism since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. 

In letters sent to the leaders of each institution, Walberg requested that the administrators send a lengthy list of documents to the committee, including materials related to complaints of antisemitism, any discussion of antisemitism among DEI staff after Oct. 7 and all guidelines for antisemitism training and investigations that are utilized on campus. 

“The Committee has become aware that Jewish students, faculty, and patients have been experiencing hostility and fear at the university, and it has not been demonstrated that the university has meaningfully responded to address and mitigate this problem,” Walberg wrote to each institution, followed by a list detailing alleged incidents of antisemitism. 

The allegations at UCLA date back to 2021, when UCLA’s medical school reportedly instituted a mandatory first-year seminar about “structural racism and health equity” that described Jews as “white” and showed them alongside images of “oppressors” and “capitalists” with “long hooked noses.” Other incidents include a student writing in the UCLA Class of 2025 group chat that Hamas’ actions on Oct. 7 were akin to a “slave rebellion” and a professor in the mandatory equity class requiring students to chant “free Palestine” with her.

Last year, the House Energy and Commerce Committee warned UCSF that its federal funding could be at risk if it didn’t do more to address antisemitic harassment. In June, UCSF fired a medical school professor who had posted antisemitic content online and targeted a Jewish faculty member — more than a year after she first made the posts.

Jewish students at UCSF have hidden parts of their Jewish identity, “including removing identifiers on social media,” and the Jewish patients have done the same, according to the letter from Walberg. It also lists several instances of UCSF faculty and staff expressing support for Hamas. 

The allegations at UICOM include the removal of Oct. 7 hostage posters from campus, a student group hosting a lecture with a speaker who expressed support for Hamas and a UICOM surgeon comparing Israel to the Islamic State and to Nazis in social media posts. In a Slack channel, which is used to share information about campus events, multiple posts reportedly rejected the claim that Hamas terrorists raped Israeli women on Oct. 7. Walberg also said the medical school staff member tasked with addressing antisemitism is “not suited” to help the school deal with the problem, because he has “made light of the rise [of] antisemitism on college campuses.” 

Dr. Yael Halaas, a plastic surgeon in New York and the founder and president of the American Jewish Medical Association, praised the investigations.

“We are physicians and healthcare professionals because we believe in healing the sick and helping the vulnerable. Hate has no place in healthcare,” Halaas told Jewish Insider. “Equally, as educators, we know that indoctrination — whether political, antisemitic, or any ideology of hate — has no place in medicine. The practice and teaching of medicine must be grounded in science, compassion, and respect for human dignity.”

The letters request the universities to submit relevant documents to the committee by Sept. 8. 

Text messages obtained by the House Committee on Education and Workforce published in a letter on Tuesday revealed that Claire Shipman, acting president of Columbia University, suggested that a Jewish trustee should be removed over her pro-Israel advocacy and called for an “Arab on our board,” amid antisemitic unrest that roiled the university’s campus last year. 

“We need to get somebody from the middle east [sic] or who is Arab on our board,” Shipman, then the co-chair of Columbia’s Board of Trustees, wrote in a message to the board’s vice chair on Jan. 17, 2024. “Quickly I think. Somehow.” 

Shipman said in a follow-up message days later that Shoshana Shendelman, a Jewish board member who frequently condemned campus antisemitism, had been “extraordinarily unhelpful” and said, “I just don’t think she should be on the board.”

In another communication on April 22, 2024, according to the texts obtained by the committee, Wanda Greene, vice chair of the board of trustees, asked Shipman — referring to Shendelman — “do you believe that she is a mole? A fox in the henhouse?” Shipman agreed, stating, “I do.” Greene added, “I am tired of her.” Shipman agreed, “so, so tired.”

The messages were referenced in the letter, first obtained by Free Beacon, sent to Columbia on Tuesday by the committee’s chairman, Tim Walberg (R-MI), and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) as part of the committee’s ongoing investigation into whether the school is violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by allowing harassment of Jewish students.

The lawmakers wrote in the letter, which was addressed to Shipman, “These exchanges raise the question of why you appeared to be in favor of removing one of the board’s most outspoken Jewish advocates at a time when Columbia students were facing a shocking level of fear and hostility.” 

Columbia responded to the letter, in a statement to Free Beacon, claiming that the text messages were taken out of context. 

“These communications were provided to the Committee in the fall of 2024 and reflect communications from more than a year ago,” the university said. “They are now being published out of context and reflect a particularly difficult moment in time for the University when leaders across Columbia were intensely focused on addressing significant challenges.”

Shipman, a former ABC News reporter, stepped into the role in March after interim President Katrina Armstrong’s abrupt resignation. At the time, Stefanik called the choice of Shipman “untenable.” On campus, the news of Shipman’s hiring was met with cautious optimism from pro-Israel student leaders.

Last April, Shipman testified at a congressional hearing regarding antisemitism at Columbia alongside then-Columbia President Minouche Shafik, who resigned from her post in August, and board co-chair David Greenwald. Shipman told members of the House Committee at the time that she knew Columbia had “significant and important work to do to address antisemitism and to ensure that our Jewish community is safe and welcome.”

The House Education and Workforce Committee threatened on Monday to subpoena Bowdoin College, accusing the school of failing to comply with the committee’s requests for information regarding antisemitism on campus.

A letter from Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), the committee chair, and Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT), a subcommittee chair, states that the Maine liberal arts college failed to comply with the committee’s repeated requests for documentation regarding disciplinary action taken against those involved with an encampment on the school’s campus earlier this year, as well as all students disciplined for antisemitic incidents since Oct. 7, 2023.

The committee leaders provided a June 16 deadline for the documentation requested, and stated they would pursue subpoenas if the deadline is not met.

The letter states that “Bowdoin provided a narrative response that briefly summarized the administration’s conversations with the encampment participants, but it did not provide documents related to any disciplinary action, documents related to any understanding it reached to disband the encampment, or a list of student disciplinary or conduct cases relating to alleged antisemitic incidents or encampments.”

After being pressed further, the school provided a “a brief summary of Bowdoin’s actions addressing the encampment and noted that the College revoked the charter of Students for Justice in Palestine for the remainder of the 2024-2025 academic year and the next academic year.”

The school subsequently provided 225 pages of documents, including summaries of the school’s actions regarding the encampment, “a generalized summary of disciplinary measures taken against 66 students, and a summary of actions taken against Students for Justice in Palestine.”

According to the committee, the vast majority of the documents included were “publicly available policies and procedures, none of which are directly responsive to the Committee’s requests,” lacked the “individualized detail requested” or were public emails from administrators to the campus community about the encampment.

A group of top House Republicans wrote to Harvard University on Monday, questioning the school about alleged work on research funded by the Iranian government, as well as members of the Chinese government.

The letter accuses Harvard researchers of working with Chinese academics on research funded by the Iranian National Science Foundation, an entity chartered by the Iranian government and ultimately controlled by the Iranian supreme leader.

It states that such work occurred at least four times since 2020, as recently as last year.

The letter was signed by Reps. John Moolenaar (R-MI), Tim Walberg (R-MI) and Elise Stefanik (R-NY). Moolenaar is the chair of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Walberg chairs the Education and Workforce Committee and Stefanik is the chair of House Republican Leadership.

“As you may know, under the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations, the Office of Foreign Assets Control has specifically disallowed transactions incident to publication when they involve the Iranian government and its instrumentalities,” the letter reads. “This funding from an Iranian government agent raises serious concerns and may violate U.S. law.”

The lawmakers emphasized that the 2024 research took place following the imposition of wide-ranging U.S. sanctions on Iran, after Iranian proxies killed U.S. servicemembers and in the midst of intense U.S. government attention on Iran’s malign activities.

They requested a list of all collaborations between Harvard affiliates and anyone receiving funding from the Iranian government or Iranian government entities.

The letter as a whole focuses primarily on alleged connections between Harvard and Chinese researchers and programs, characterizing such work as a national security threat. 

Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), the new chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, blasted the Biden administration’s Department of Education for a series of recent settlement agreements with colleges and universities over antisemitism complaints — and suggested that the incoming Trump administration should seek to alter those agreements.

The Department of Education, Walberg noted in a statement on Thursday, reached settlement agreements in recent weeks with Rutgers University, five University of California campuses and Johns Hopkins University, which Walberg described as failing to provide sufficient accountability.

“It’s disgraceful that in the final days of the Biden-Harris administration, the Department of Education is letting universities, including Rutgers, five University of California system campuses including UCLA, and Johns Hopkins, off the hook for their failures to address campus antisemitism,” Walberg, who took over leadership of the committee this year, said. “The toothless agreements shield schools from real accountability.”

The statement described the agreements as “an obvious effort to shield universities from real accountability by the incoming Trump administration.”

Walberg said that the agreements “utterly fail to resolve the civil rights complaints they purport to address” and accused the department of “shamefully abandoning its obligation to protect Jewish students, faculty, and staff and undermining the incoming administration.”

He demanded that the Department of Education not sign any further agreements in the remaining days of the Biden administration, and urged the incoming Trump team to “closely examine these agreements and explore options to impose real consequences on schools, which could include giving complainants the opportunity to appeal these weak settlements.”

Walberg’s statement, one of his first as chairman, indicates that antisemitism will continue to be a focus for the committee in the new Congress.

In a new letter to interim Harvard President Alan Garber sent on Monday, 28 Republican House members, led by Reps. Tim Walberg (R-MI) and Elise Stefanik (R-NY), said that the Harvard antisemitism task force’s recent preliminary recommendations on responding to campus antisemitism don’t go nearly far enough to address the situation on the campus.

The lawmakers said they have “serious concerns regarding the inadequacy” of the recommendations, which are “weaker, less detailed, and less comprehensive” than those presented by a previous task force in December 2023. Harvard Jewish leaders and alumni have said they’re disappointed by the recommendations, released in late June.

“Instead of offering a tangible plan to address antisemitism at Harvard, the task force’s most specific and actionable recommendations are to organize public talks on respectful dialogue and religious relations, increase the availability of hot kosher meals, and to circulate guidance about accommodating Jewish religious observance and a calendar of Jewish holidays,” the letter reads.

It calls the recommendations “particularly alarming given that Harvard’s leaders had already received a strong, detailed, and comprehensive set of recommendations” from the previous task force, arguing that the current group should have built on that framework.

The lawmakers said that Garber needs to “publicly address” criticisms of the task force from Jewish community members, adopt and begin to implement the recommendations from both task forces before the next semester and sever Harvard’s relationship with Birzeit University in the West Bank, whose student government and administration have expressed support for Hamas.

The letter states that the task force was correct to support disciplinary action and condemnation in response to the “serious problem with antisemitism” on Harvard’s campus but did not “offer real solutions for doing so.” It also accuses the task force of giving “insufficient attention” to Harvard’s “failures in imposing discipline for antisemitic misconduct.”

The lawmakers said that the task force “left numerous other significant issues wholly unaddressed,” such as academic programs that have seen significant issues with anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiment, student groups’ violations of Harvard rules, failures by Harvard’s Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging office to address antisemitism, falling Jewish enrollment, a lack of viewpoint diversity among faculty on the Middle East, masked protests and possible foreign influence.

They further said that the university “has a consistent practice of balancing statements and efforts regarding antisemitism with similar ones regarding Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias.”

“While hatred and discrimination against Muslims and Arabs is deplorable and must be addressed, there is simply no comparison between the explosion of pervasive antisemitism on Harvard’s campus and instances of Islamophobia or anti-Arab bias,” the Republicans continued. “These constant attempts at balancing serve to trivialize antisemitism and distract from the urgency and severity of the problem.”

Other signatories to the letter include Reps. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND), Jim Banks (R-IN), Aaron Bean (R-FL), Gus Bilirakis (R-FL), Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR), Anthony D’Esposito (D-NY), Randy Feenstra (R-IA), Russell Fry (R-SC), Lance Gooden (R-TX), Michael Guest (R-MS), Erin Houchin (R-IN), Ronny Jackson (R-TX), Nick LaLota (R-NY), Nick Langworthy (R-NY), Mike Lawler (R-NY), Mariannete Miller-Meeks (R-IA), Burgess Owens (R-UT), Keith Self (R-TX), Pete Sessions (R-TX), Jason Smith (R-MO), Lloyd Smucker (R-PA), Michelle Steel (R-CA), Claudia Tenney (R-NY), Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ), Randy Weber (R-TX) and Rudy Yakym (R-IN).