The House Committee on Education and Workforce has released a damning antisemitism report focused on higher education, and the findings confirm what Jewish students and their families have known for years: the rot isn't coming from the fringes. It's coming from the faculty lounges.
The federal probe found that professors and university centers are, in the committee's words, "legitimizing and amplifying antisemitism on college campuses." Not tolerating it. Not failing to prevent it and actively fueling it.
The report's most damaging conclusion is its most specific. According to Fox News, the committee found that faculty members across multiple universities didn't just look the other way while Jewish students were harassed. They participated.
"Faculty members sought to strip Jewish students of protections against harassment, incited or celebrated violence, and left Jewish students isolated and alienated."
That's not a failure of oversight. That's institutional hostility with a tenure track.
The committee identified a particular pipeline for this ideology: university centers, especially Middle East studies departments, that frame Israel exclusively through a "settler colonialist" lens. The report noted that these centers "perpetuate antisemitism" by offering "a one-sided view of Israel as a 'settler colonialist' enterprise."
The intellectual framework underneath this is worth understanding because it explains how antisemitism has been laundered through the language of social justice. The report laid it out plainly:
"This race-centric paradigm vilifies Israel and denies the legitimate existence of the Jewish state. It also views Jews as White and the privileged 'oppressor,' rather than a diverse minority that has been persecuted for thousands of years."
So the same academic left that claims to center marginalized voices has built a framework that erases thousands of years of Jewish persecution by recasting Jews as privileged oppressors. The same institutions that will shut down a lecture over a misused pronoun have created entire departments dedicated to denying Jewish students their history and their homeland.
The contradictions don't end there. These teachings, the committee found, "play on historically antisemitic themes such as 'greed, appropriation, unmerited privilege, and hidden power' and fuel antisemitism on college campuses." Medieval blood libels dressed up in academic jargon still produce the same result.
The report singled out Students for Justice in Palestine as a central driver of the problem. The committee called SJP groups "ringleaders for the antisemitic harassment faced by Jewish students on campus, often with the support of faculty members."
Lawmakers cited a study finding that campuses with Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine groups are seven times more likely to experience violence against Jews. The Anti-Defamation League has described FSJP as a "decentralized national network of anti-Zionist academics and university staff that organizes anti-Israel activities across campuses in the United States."
Seven times more likely. That's not correlation. That's a pattern with a return address.
The explosion of campus hostility traces back to the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel. Universities across the country faced intense protests, and some demonstrators set up encampments. However, the committee's findings suggest that the problem predates the encampments and extends far deeper than student activism. When faculty members organize the infrastructure and provide intellectual cover, you're no longer dealing with protests. You're dealing with an institutional culture.
The committee didn't spare university administrators. Its conclusion on leadership was blunt:
"University leaders are still failing to show strong, decisive leadership to address antisemitism on college campuses."
The report found that in every case examined, strong leadership proved critical to stopping antisemitic harassment. And at school after school, that leadership was absent. Instead, administrators "caved to the radical demands of faculty and student groups."
This is the pattern that has defined higher education's response to ideological pressure for a decade. Administrators who will expel a student for a Title IX allegation based on an ambiguous text message suddenly discover the virtues of institutional neutrality when Jewish students report threats. The same deans who mandate bias training for incoming freshmen cannot bring themselves to tell a tenured professor that celebrating violence against Jews crosses a line.
The committee held a hearing in July 2025, calling in university leaders to testify, including interim Georgetown President Robert Groves, City University of New York Chancellor Dr. Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, and University of California, Berkeley Chancellor Dr. Rich Lyons, among others. That these leaders had to be summoned before Congress to account for conditions on their own campuses tells you everything about how seriously they were taking the problem on their own.
The Trump administration has signaled it won't treat campus antisemitism as an abstract policy debate. In November, it announced an agreement with Northwestern University requiring the school to pay $75 million and protect students and staff from any "hostile educational environment directed toward Jewish students."
Seventy-five million dollars. That's the price tag when a university allows a hostile environment to fester and then has to answer for it. Other major schools, including the University of Michigan, Columbia University, and Emory University, have faced similar scrutiny over hostile environments on their campuses.
For years, the higher education establishment operated on the assumption that no one with real power would force accountability. Federal funding flowed regardless. Accreditation was never at risk. Administrators could issue statements about "values" and "dialogue" while Jewish students walked to class past crowds chanting for the destruction of their homeland.
That calculus is changing. Congressional investigations produce public records. Public records produce political pressure. And $75 million settlements concentrate the mind in ways that diversity statements never will.
The committee's report documents something more troubling than a policy failure. It documents an ideological capture. When academic departments exist to teach students that the Jewish state is illegitimate, when faculty organize networks dedicated to anti-Israel activism, when student groups that drive antisemitic harassment operate with institutional support, the problem isn't a few bad actors. The problem is the institution itself.
American universities have spent two decades building DEI bureaucracies, bias response teams, and speech codes designed to protect every conceivable identity group from every conceivable slight. Jewish students watched all of that machinery activate for others and go silent for them.
The committee's findings don't describe a system that failed. They describe a system working exactly as its architects intended, with one group excluded from the protection it promises to everyone else.