Chancellor Lyons Testified in House Hearing on UC Berkeley Antisemitism Policies

Updated 12:30 p.m. Tuesday

It was UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons’ turn in the hot seat on Capitol Hill Tuesday, as he testified on the school’s efforts to prevent antisemitic discrimination and harassment on campus.

Lyons appeared before the Committee on Education and Workforce, in a hearing titled: “Antisemitism in Higher Education: Examining the Role of Faculty, Funding, and Ideology.” The committee has held a number of hearings with university leaders since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the war in Gaza that followed. The interim president of Georgetown University and the Chancellor of the City University of New York also testified.

“This hearing will focus on the underlying factors instigating antisemitic upheaval and hatred on campus,” committee chair Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Michigan, said in a press release, “Until these factors — such as foreign funding and antisemitic student and faculty groups — are addressed, antisemitism will persist on college campuses.”

At the start of the meeting, Walberg identified a number of groups that he said “incite antisemitism on college campuses,” including faculty and student groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, faculty unions and Middle East Studies centers, as well as DEI policies and funding sources from outside the United States.

Walberg said the hearing marked the “next phase” of the committee’s work.

Lyons was questioned by the committee on several issues, including collective bargaining with pro-Palestinian labor groups, foreign investments in the university, progressive leanings in higher education, doxxing and student safety. He was also repeatedly asked about Ussama Makdisi, a UC Berkeley history professor who was made the inaugural chair of Palestinian and Arab Studies.

The hearing is part of a crusade by the Trump administration to root out what it describes as pervasive antisemitism at some of the top universities in the country. UC Berkeley now joins a list of schools that have appeared before the committee, which includes Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, both of whose presidents resigned after their hearings in December 2023.

During these and other hearings, the Republican House majority has also threatened to revoke federal funding if some schools don’t comply with requested reforms.

But it also comes at a time when institutions of higher education are under a flurry of investigations by the administration — not just for antisemitism, but also for race and sex based hiring practices, and other programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion. Critics of the administration see it as a thinly veiled attempt to exert influence on higher education and an attack on academic freedoms.

During the hearing, Rep. Andy Harris (R-Maryland) characterized diversity, equity and inclusion practices as fundamentally divisive. He questioned the chancellors about whether a practice that categorizes people on the basis of “oppressor or oppressed” makes college campuses safer for Jewish students. Similar language appeared in President Donald Trump’s executive order on so-called “radical indoctrination” in K-12 schools.

“ This whole crusade against antisemitism is a Trojan horse,” said Amanda Goldstein, a Jewish associate professor of English at UC Berkeley and a member of the group Berkeley Faculty for the Freedom to Learn. “ They feel threatened by our form of free inquiry and free thought, and they’re using antisemitism as a pretext to crack down on very many aspects of our legitimate and rigorous research and teaching.”

Goldstein said BFF2L formed in the spring in response to what she calls an escalation of the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education, including revoking student visas based on their perceived political views and making federal funding contingent on things like the “severe curtailment of faculty input and governance.”

A group of Jewish faculty members from UC Berkeley has penned an open letter to Lyons ahead of his testimony.

“This letter does not dismiss the real challenges Jewish students, staff, and faculty have faced, including moments of unease and, at times, physical threats. Isolated incidents of hostile speech and even acts of violence have occurred,” the letter said. “However, as Jewish faculty who frequently engage with campus leadership and remain vigilant about the well-being of the Jewish campus community, we reject the claim that Berkeley is an antisemitic campus or that widespread antisemitism exists here.”

Goldstein called the previous hearings by the Committee on Education and Workforce a “bad-faith show trial.”

“We feel that that capitulation has not worked to protect the important work of education and research that we do in our universities, and we hope that our chancellor will continue to clearly and forcefully defend the research, teaching and scholarship that we do at UC Berkeley.”

In a reflection of the tensions that have existed on college campuses since Oct. 7, 2023, the hearing was punctuated by multiple interruptions from pro-Palestinian protestors.

“Chancellor Lyon, you are complicit in the genocide of Palestinians. Free Palestine, free Palestine,” shouted one protester, who was quickly removed from the room. Another shouted, “You’re burning children alive.”

Some former Justice Department employees are alarmed at how the Trump administration is using its authority to extract concessions out of universities.

“Everything that the Trump administration is doing right now is subverting institutional norms,” said Jen Swedish, a former lawyer with the employment litigation section of the Civil Rights Division at the DOJ. “It’s weaponizing the department and in this situation, it’s using civil rights laws as a way to bully employers and other entities into doing what it wants them to do.”

Swedish pointed to a recent example: the Trump administration successfully demanded the resignation of the president of the University of Virginia as a condition to settle a civil rights investigation into the school’s diversity practices.

“The idea of threatening a university president to resign as a way to settle a Title VII case is completely out of the norm,” Swedish said.

The DOJ is currently investigating whether the UC system allowed an “antisemitic hostile work environment” to exist for professors, staff and other employees, while UC Berkeley itself is one of 60 schools being investigated by the U.S. Department of Education for allegedly failing to “fulfill their obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to protect Jewish students on campus, including uninterrupted access to campus facilities and educational opportunities.”

Lyons is the second Berkeley education official to be called before the committee to testify about antisemitism in schools. In May 2024, Enikia Ford Morthel, the superintendent of the Berkeley Unified School District, firmly denied accusations that antisemitism had become “pervasive” in the district.

Lyons took the helm as chancellor of Berkeley just over a year ago in July 2024. He inherited a UC system that has beefed up rules preventing student encampments and restricted how students can protest on campuses.

“In universities, there is a freedom to express one’s views — even if there’s some learning that needs to happen through that process,” Lyons said during his testimony. “If somebody is expressing pro-Palestine views, that’s not necessarily antisemitism.”

Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Michigan) and several other representatives questioned Lyons on statements Makdisi had made regarding the Hamas attack on Israel. McClain said the professor previously described the attack as an act of “resistance” and said he could have been one of the people “who broke through on the siege.”

“It was a celebration of the terrorist attack on Oct. 7,” Lyons said after being questioned by McClain on the subject for several minutes. He also referred to Makdisi several times throughout the hearing as a “fine scholar,” and acknowledged the professor’s academic contributions to the university.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, university campuses across the Bay Area have become hotbeds for student-led demonstrations decrying Israel’s ongoing offensive in Gaza. During the 2023–24 school year, students led monthslong encampments calling for divestment from companies that supported Israel’s military, among other demands.

Jewish students and allies on those same campuses responded with marches and demonstrations of their own, claiming they felt unsafe at school due to outspoken activism against Israel and Israeli soldiers.

In his first month in office, Trump signed an executive order aimed at fighting antisemitism, particularly on college campuses. The administration’s DOJ formed a multi-agency task force to combat antisemitism shortly after.

While Lyon’s testimony isn’t explicitly linked to the multitude of investigations into the UC System and UC Berkeley itself, it certainly is related, according to Swedish.

Swedish said if the UC system is found to have engaged in a pattern or practice of workplace discrimination against Jewish employees, the DOJ would enter into a settlement agreement with the UC System “ to take certain measurable steps that we believe would prevent it from happening again.”

The crackdown on Harvard University may foreshadow other potential impacts upon the UC system or UC Berkeley itself.

On June 30, the DOJ’s joint antisemitism task force notified Harvard that its investigation found that the university was in “violent violation” of the Civil Rights Act for failing to adequately protect Jewish students from antisemitism on campus.” The task force said in a press release that “failure to institute adequate changes immediately will result in the loss of all federal financial resources.”

The Department of Justice does not currently have an open investigation into whether the UC system or UC Berkeley has violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by failing to prevent antisemitism on campus. But if it were to open one, “revocation of federal funds is a potential remedy,” according to Swedish.

UC Berkeley received $419 million in research funding from the federal government for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2024, according to Assistant Vice Chancellor Dan Mogulof, a university spokesperson.