If you didn’t know what was really going on at US college campuses, the congressional hearing on Thursday – in which the presidents of Northwestern and Rutger’s and the chancellor of UCLA were called to testify before a Republican-controlled House committee – would do little to inform you.

The House committee on education and the workforce has held six – yes, six – public events to draw attention to the supposed crisis on campus in the months since the 7 October attack on Israel. They’ve hauled university presidents to Washington to harangue them, allegedly for not being sufficiently punitive toward pro-Palestinian students and faculty. These hearings have been used to belittle and antagonize university faculty and students and have fed racist and anti-intellectual moral panics that have led to the resignations of several of the university presidents who have been called to testify, notably including Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Claudine Gay of Harvard.

The hearings have aimed to pressure colleges and universities to crack down on a wide variety of politically disfavored speech, particularly pro-Palestinian and anti-war speech, and particularly that of students and faculty of color. In many cases, this pressure seems to have yielded the desired results: at Columbia, Minouche Shafik, the university president, twice ordered the NYPD onto campus to conduct violent mass arrests of anti-genocide student protesters; the first of these raids came the day after Shafik testified before the House committee and disparaged her own students in degrading terms.

But on Thursday, at least, the university administrators seemed less nervous, a bit more subdued – even if they were not willing to defend the rights of their anti-war........

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