Columbia University president testifies at congressional antisemitism hearing

Allegations of antisemitism at a top US university are being heard in a widely anticipated congressional hearing on Wednesday, amid continuing unrest on American college campuses over Israel’s war in Gaza.

The president of Columbia University, Nemat Shafik, along with senior colleagues, will be grilled by the House of Representatives education and workforce committee in exchanges that promise to become heated and confrontational.

The hearing is expected to be a reprise of the committee’s previous cross-examination of the heads of three other elite universities, Harvard, Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, last December.

That hearing led to the resignation of Pennsylvania University’s president, Elizabeth Magill, after she gave what were deemed to be over-legalistic answers to pointed questions from the Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik over whether her institution’s rules on free speech permitted slogans that supporters of Israel interpret as calling for genocide.

It also intensified the pressure on Harvard’s then president, Claudine Gay, whose responses to Stefanik were similarly criticised. Gay survived the immediate outcry over the hearing but stepped down weeks later over plagiarism allegations.

Wednesday’s hearing follows months of rising tensions between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrators on the Columbia campus, amid disputes over what constitutes antisemitism and controversy about whether it should encompass anti-Zionism and opposition to Israel as a Jewish state.

The hearing is being staged under the emotive title of “Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University’s Response to Anti-Semitism.” A group of Jewish academics at the university have denounced the hearing in advance as