On “Home Front” of U.S./Israel War on Gaza

Congressional Witch Hunt
Comes to CUNY

Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez of the City University of New York (second from left) testifies at House Committee on Education hearing, 15 July 2025, flanked by Georgetown’s Robert Groves and Rich Lyons of UC Berkeley. McCarthyite spectacle evoked 1950s “Un-American Activities” inquisition.
(Photo: Haiyun Jiang / The New York Times)

By Carmen and Jacob

“So will this person be fired?” demanded one of the lead inquisitors at a Congressional hearing on July 15. In this episode of the witch hunt staged by the House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and the Workforce on Capitol Hill, the City University of New York and two other universities were the targets. The witness being interrogated: CUNY chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez. The inquisitor: self-styled “ultra-MAGA” Representative Elise Stefanik, from upstate New York. The person she wanted fired: CUNY Law professor Ramzi Kassem. His supposed offense: serving as a lawyer helping to defend Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian rights activist that the Trump administration is hell-bent on deporting.

Professor Kassem was doing his job as a lawyer and the founding director of CUNY CLEAR (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility), which since 2009 has provided free legal representation and other services to communities, movements and activists targeted by government repression. It was this that made him one of the targets – though far from the only one – in scenes that evoked the red-scare rantings of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the notorious hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s.

Three university heads took the witness stand in the windowless Congressional chamber on July 15: Matos Rodriguez of CUNY; Rich Lyons, chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley; and Robert Groves, interim president of Georgetown University. The hearing, titled “Antisemitism in Higher Education: Investigating the Role of Faculty, Funding, and Ideology,” was the latest in a series aimed at regimenting and purging colleges and universities, while providing opportunities for right-wing politicians to advance their careers by browbeating “eggheads” (as the McCarthyites used to call liberal academics) on TV. It was the ninth such hearing to take place over the past two years.

The pretext for this ongoing witch hunt is the vile slander that it is “antisemitic” to protest the genocidal war on Gaza, defend the Palestinian people or oppose Zionism (the official ideology of the state of Israel).¹ At the July 15 hearing, this smear was repeated ad nauseam. One after the other, Republican committee members hurled hostile queries and accusations at the university administrators. The interrogation often consisted of the kind of “questions” framed in such a way that the witness is made to look “guilty” no matter how they answer. (The classic example of this kind of loaded question is, “Have you stopped beating your wife, yes or no?”)

So it was no surprise when Stefanik asked: “Chancellor Matos Rodriguez, does CUNY have an antisemitism problem, yes or no?” Congressman Rick Allen of Georgia was intent on finding out “Were they [student protesters] put in prison?” Committee chairman Tim Walberg of Michigan asked: “How many students has CUNY suspended or expelled for antisemitic conduct” and “Does CUNY have any antisemitic faculty?” The grotesque nature of the barrage is highlighted by the record of the accusers, many of whom have trafficked in actual antisemitic themes wielded by “great replacement theory” promoters, Christian nationalists, anti-immigrant bigots and white supremacists. (See box below.) Moreover, equating opposition to the Gaza genocide with antisemitism can only help breed actual antisemitism.

While the witch-hunters, with their blatant bullying and theatrics, made no pretense of “fairness” or objectivity, there was a clear purpose to the charade. As Rep. Burgess Owens of Utah put it at the beginning of the hearing: “The message to college administrators is very simply this: either eradicate this cancer, or there will be consequences. This is coming from the top down.” In other words, it’s part of the drive for U.S. universities’ forced “synchronization” – Gleichschaltung in German. (See “Trump, White House Witch-Hunters Besiege Academia: The Gleichschaltung of American Universities” in Revolution No. 22.)

In obviously well-rehearsed statements, the university heads answered their inquisitors by demonstrating their commitment to witch-hunting pro-Palestinian speech and activism on college campuses. Confronted with the nationwide wave of pro-Palestine solidarity encampments in the spring of 2024, the administrations of each school scrambled to show their compliance with ruling-class demands for repression on the home front of the U.S.-armed and funded war against the Palestinian people. New regulations were promulgated at each school restricting protest and beefing up disciplinary measures against campus activists – a point each of the administrators was at pains to emphasize before their belligerent inquisitors.

Of the three university tops, Chancellor Matos Rodríguez of CUNY was most eager to highlight the measures taken against student protest. He testified that since calling in the New York Police Department in April 2024 to disperse the Gaza solidarity encampment at City College, resulting in 170 arrests,² CUNY has developed a “zero tolerance policy” against encampments, sharply increased the numbers of “security” personnel and conducted trainings for the campus cops specifically on “how to handle demonstrations and protests.”

Bipartisan Repression and Censorship

At protests and speak-outs at the City University of New York (many of which have been initiated by the CUNY Internationalist Clubs), and elsewhere, we denounce the blatant McCarthyism of the ongoing repression and censorship offensive. Others denounce the “new McCarthyism” too – and of course it’s good that they do. But as Marxists who call for building a revolutionary work­ers party, we make a point that others often leave unsaid: what’s commonly called “McCarthyism” did not start with Republican senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s.

At what is now the CUNY system, the 1940s kicked off with the bipartisan Rapp-Coudert hearings that witch-hunted hundreds of “subversive” faculty members, students and staff at Brooklyn, City, Hunter and Queens colleges.³ Before the end of WWII, liberal Democrats like Minne­sota’s Hubert Humphrey launched red-baiting and anti-communist purges, which directly paved the way for McCarthy’s Cold War red scare. (Humphrey went on to sponsor the Communist Control Act of 1954 and serve as Lyndon Johnson’s VP during the Vietnam War.)

And today? At the July 15 hearing on Capitol Hill, Democratic members of the House committee criticized the ravings of their Republican colleagues. But the witch hunt against pro-Palestinian demonstrators has been very much a bipartisan effort, which from the beginning came “from the top down.” This fact was front and center at the height of the Gaza solidarity encampments last year. At an event in the U.S. Capitol on 7 May 2024, Democratic president “Genocide Joe” Biden unleashed a torrent of denunciations and smears against the campus protests, calling them part of a “ferocious surge of antisemitism.” Side by side with Biden (literally) at the same event was hard-right Republican House speaker Mike Johnson, who followed him at the podium, ranting that campuses had been infected by an “antisemitic virus.”

In late April 2024, Johnson had gone to Columbia University to call for the National Guard to be sent in against the Gaza solidarity encampment there. This was preceded by a deluge of statements from Democratic officials smearing the protest encampment as “antisemitic,” including Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams, senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, attorney general Letitia James, House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries and representatives Jerry Nadler, Adriano Espaillat and Dan Goldman, plus various city council members (Columbia Spectator, 23 April; cityandstatenewyork.com, 29 April 2024). On April 29, 21 House Democrats sent Columbia a letter stating: “It is past time for the University to act decisively [and] disband the encampment…. The time for negotiation is over; the time for action is now.” The major NYPD operation sweeping the Columbia and CCNY encampments came the next day. So yes, the vicious slander, mass arrests, beat-downs and expulsions of NYC students – for protesting genocide in Gaza – were truly an example of Democratic/Republican bipartisanship in the service of U.S. imperialism.

The repression and demonization of pro-Palestinian protest by Biden & Co. in 2023-24 is one of the many ways in which the Democrats paved the way for Trump – again. Now he wields ever-widening executive orders, decrees and witch hunts to make educational and cultural institutions obey his administration’s reactionary ideological dictates. Liberals hoped and prayed that university administrators would stand up to Trump – but these capitalist appointees were already working to curb free speech rights and academic freedom well before then. Now one liberal university head after another – CUNY’s chancellor being a prominent case in point – scrambles to display their willingness to partner up with MAGA against basic rights of the “university community” they claim to speak for.

Today, even many bourgeois figures who long denied it admit that Israel has been carrying out genocide in Gaza. Yet revolutionary Marxists, who fight for international workers action to defend the Palestinian people, have told the truth about the genocide since the beginning. This special issue of The Internationalist documenting the facts in depth, including the central role of U.S. imperialism in this monstrous crime, is an important resource in the struggle.
To order a copy, send a check/money order to Mundial Publications, Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, NY 10008, USA.
Price: US$2 including shipping 
To read PDF online click here or on image.

In New York State, witch-hunting has yet again come “from the top,” with a leading role repeatedly played by Governor Hochul (who recently bestowed her endorsement for NYC mayor on fellow Democrat Zohran Mamdani). In December 2023, the day after Elise Stefanik led the interrogation of the Harvard, Penn and MIT presidents, Hochul jumped on the bandwagon, stating she was “shocked” by their testimony and would carry out a probe of CUNY and the State University of New York, pledging “aggressive enforcement action” against antisemitism, which she claimed was rife on their campuses.

The following year saw Hochul avidly advocating the repression of campus protests, then this year in late February, her office announced that “Governor Hochul directed CUNY to immediately remove” a job posting for a Palestinian studies position at Hunter College and to “conduct a thorough review of the position to ensure that antisemitic theories are not promoted in the classroom,” adding, “Hateful rhetoric of any kind has no place at CUNY or anywhere in New York State.” Why? Because the job posting “called for scholars who could ‘take a critical lens’ to issues including ‘settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid’ and other topics,” as reported by the New York Times (27 February).

In response to the Democratic governor’s flagrantly anti-democratic order, the American Association of University Professors declared that “political interference into academic research, scholarship, teaching, and academic decision making violates basic principles of academic freedom and governance,” adding: “If academic freedom in teaching and scholarship can be overridden by the dicta of politicians and administrators, then the right to learn will not survive our present moment.”

Hochul’s egregious diktat definitely was a sign of the times – and the assault on education workers’ rights goes beyond higher education. A bipartisan bill (AB-715) for censorship in California’s K-12 schools has been promoted under the guise of “antisemitism prevention.” In May, the state Assembly passed it in a 68-0 vote; the state Senate followed suit with a 35-0 vote in September. In early October, Democratic governor Gavin Newsom signed it into law.

The California Faculty Association (CFA) joined the California Teachers Association, the ACLU and other labor and civil liberties groups in opposing AB-715. The CFA warned that it will “have a chilling impact on classroom teachers who are already facing lawsuits, censorship, and threats to their ability to facilitate critical discussions on important and timely current events.” A CFA spokesperson, quoted in the union’s 18 September statement, said that the law means:

“Teacher discourse on Palestine or the genocide in Gaza will be policed, misrepresented, and reported to the antisemitism coordinator. Today, it’s Palestine. Tomorrow, will it be the ‘rainbow flag,’ your ‘Black Lives Matter poster,’ or your ‘ICE out of LA’ t-shirt? The question of equal protection for all students remains a concern.”

As the assault on educational rights continues to broaden, it’s important that students, teachers and staff organize and connect up with the power of the multiracial working class. To bring out that power requires a political struggle, since labor – from strategic blue-collar sectors to university unions like the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) at CUNY – continues to be hitched to the cart of the bosses’ Democratic Party. Events keep underlining the elementary Marxist point that breaking from the parties and politicians of capital is crucial to the fight to defend our rights.

“Beyond the Ivy League”

When the Congressional inquisitions on higher ed revved up in December 2023, the focus was on prestigious élite private universities. In the first hearings, the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania were called before the committee. Subsequent pressure from politicians and alumni donors led two of the three to resign. In April 2024, the then-president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, appeared before the Washington witch-hunters. Her groveling testimony rewarded purveyors of rightist “populism” while revolting large numbers of students (as well as faculty and staff) across the country, fanning the flames of discontent amidst the wave of encampments against the genocidal war on Gaza.

Though Shafik’s genuflections did not save her from the same fate that befell her Ivy League peers – she resigned her post that summer – the televised rituals of humiliation and repentance signaled further escalations of repression against pro-Palestinian demonstrators. In total, 3,100 people would be arrested at the campus protests nationwide. Meanwhile the presidents of Rutgers and Northwestern universities, and the chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), were hauled before the Committee in May 2024.

The hearings began with Ivy League and other elite colleges, long central to preparing the next generation of the ruling class to rule. These institutions’ role in promoting the power of U.S. capitalism is also reflected in the fact that nearly 30% of Ivy League attendees are international students. The Trump-loyal witch-hunters targeted elite universities first because of their outsized importance in setting the tone of culture and norms both in higher education and in U.S. politics. This is a central reason for the Trump administration’s obsession with purging liberals from the academy – and why back in November 2021, JD Vance gave a keynote address to the National Conservatism Conference titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.”

Vance, now Trump’s VP, got his law degree from Yale (the alma mater of innumerable Republican figures), while Elise Stefanik, Steve Bannon, Christopher Rufo, Ted Cruz and a host of others went to Harvard. But shaping a “new” elite is a central objective for the Trumpists and their strategists such as Russell Vought, the Office of Management and Budget director who plays a major role in the administration. Backed by a sector of top U.S. capitalists – Peter Thiel, Vance’s sinister far-right backer, is among the most prominent – they see liberalism as an impediment to untrammeled profiteering and ruthlessly restoring the dominance of the American “homeland.”

While their initial focus on witch-hunting the Ivies was in sync with this outlook, moving “beyond the Ivy League” was the next step, and this was the title of the sixth of the inquisitorial higher-ed hearings. Held on 7 May 2025, it brought in the heads of DePaul and California Polytechnic universities as well as Haverford College, a shift to scrutinizing administrators’ repressive efforts at public higher ed institutions and smaller liberal arts colleges. This was followed by the July 15 hearing, which included Georgetown and UC Berkeley (a prestigious school with a high-profile activist history) while featuring the public grilling of the chancellor of the largest urban public university system in the country: the City University of New York, which is attended by close to 240,000 students.

The interrogation of CUNY’s Chancellor Matos alongside the heads of other colleges was meant to intimidate basically everyone in public higher education. Moreover, the Trump administration has pulled about $25 million in federal grant money from CUNY (according to estimates by the University Faculty Senate), and this will cause real damage. However, CUNY and many public colleges are much less dependent on federal money than the leading private schools. (Columbia received almost $900 million in federal research funding in 2024, nearly 20% of its total budget.) The fact that CUNY is, overall, less susceptible to financial blackmail by the federal government means that its faculty and staff are potentially in a stronger position to resist the attacks on basic rights.

The City University’s student body comes mainly from New York’s multiracial, multi­national and largely immigrant working class. The racist ruling class has long left CUNY chronically underfunded, while its students struggle to make ends meet and are all too familiar with police repression and other daily realities of capitalism in NYC. But the demographics of CUNY can help unlock a lot of social power: that’s the potential when the daily life of a quarter million students is so closely connected to the city’s working class and oppressed communities. For this potential to be realized requires a class-struggle program and leadership, which is what we’re fighting to build, at CUNY and beyond.

CUNY Chancellor Vows “Zero Tolerance”

In his July 15 testimony to the Congressional star chamber, Chancellor Matos Rodríguez was eager to “highlight” (his word) how, “with the help of the New York City Police Department,” the CUNY administration “ended” the Gaza solidarity encampment at City College in April 2024. “We have zero tolerance for encampments at CUNY right now,” he said, “have doubled down” on enforcing “time, place and manner” restrictions on campus protest. “We’ve also hired more than 150 full-time security employees and contracted with an additional 250 security personnel.” And “our approach has shown results,” he boasted. “This past spring, we applied our zero tolerance policy and worked with CUNY Public Safety to prevent an encampment” – in other words, he’s helping make our rights increasingly unsafe from censorship and repression.

One committee member after another mouthed the talking points provided by their staffers, stumbling over terms and titles in their zeal for naming names, demanding arrest and firing numbers and that the chancellor list disciplinary measures and denounce specific faculty members’ views. Not even pretending to defend CUNY against the McCarthyite inquisition, he dutifully responded, “we have terminated individuals in the faculty and staff”; “there were four” faculty fired (at Brooklyn College); he will investigate and “take action” against more at CUNY schools if needed. What about students, Walberg wanted to know: how many were thrown out so far this year? “Seven,” Matos Rodríguez replied, with a meekness that outdid his counterparts from UC Berkeley and Georgetown, who now and again pushed back. But his efforts to ingratiate himself with the inquisitors got him no sympathy; they just demanded more.

Union-Busters on the Prowl

CUNY faculty/staff union PSC and American Association of University Professors poster shows 1950s witch-hunter Joe McCarthy and today’s “Ultra MAGA” inquisitor Elise Stefanik. 

Much of the House Committee’s ire was directed at education workers unions at CUNY and the University of California: the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) and United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 4811 respectively. That they have defended academic freedom and free speech rights, and protested repression against student demonstrators, was portrayed as an intolerable outrage by representatives from states with anti-union “right-to-work” laws in particular.

In his opening remarks, committee chair Walberg set the tone with the openly anti-labor lie that “unions across the country” supposedly “encourage anti-Semitic activism.” How? “Through protests, demands and workshops,” he said – the repressive intent of this smear could not be more clear. Members of the committee have long been active on the anti-union front, and last year its former chair, Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, launched a “probe” of 12 unions for supposed fraud and other offenses. This year not long before the July 15 hearings, committee members Walberg and Allen launched an initiative for “strengthening” one of the key anti-labor laws passed during the Cold War period: the Landrum-Griffin Act.

So it was no surprise that the targeting of universities with a high-profile union presence would whet the appetite of zealous union-bashers on the committee. The website of Rep. Bob Onder of Missouri, for example, describes him as a “strong supporter” of charter schools and “school choice” (translation: he wants education to be privatized). At the July 15 hearing he launched a diatribe against UAW Local 4811, which represents graduate student workers across the University of California system. In Spring 2024, the union went on strike to protest the brutal repression of the encampment at UCLA.⁶ The UC Board of Regents took the union to court, resulting in a temporary restraining order that led to the end of the strike; the case against the union remains in litigation. Lyons leapt at the chance to denounce the union at the July 15 hearing and provocatively “asked” whether “the UAW contributes to antisemitism.”

The PSC also came under fire from the congressional witch-hunters. PSC activists have been among the targets of vicious doxxing campaigns for defending Palestinian rights, and over the past period the union has helped reverse the cancellation of a pro-Palestinian film at Hunter College, protested the police repression of the City College encampment and organized protests for the rehiring of the “Fired Four” adjunct faculty members at Brooklyn College. (See articles in this and previous issues of Revolution.) Here too, anti-labor rightists on the House committee went out of the way to bait, smear and encourage attacks on the union during the hearing. Rep. Foxx, for example, tried to get the CUNY chancellor to “admit” that the PSC has an “antisemitism problem” and asked if he supports “forcing” Jewish faculty to be represented by it.

In a statement on the July 15 hearing, PSC president James Davis wrote that Congressional committee members “got their facts wrong today in their attempt to smear CUNY and our union as antisemitic,” adding:

“CUNY administrators have investigated faculty for the terms in which they discuss the war in Gaza in their classes, limited the time, place, and manner for exercising the right to free expression on campus, invited police violence against non-violent student protestors, and even fired faculty in apparent retribution for their political activism. It is still not enough to satisfy the new McCarthyites.”

Since Revolution’s first issue back in September 2003, we have documented the CUNY administration’s and Board of Trustees’ nefarious services to the ruling class, from doing away with open admissions and ramping up tuition to actively collaborating in militarization, witch-hunting, repression and attacks on academic freedom and free speech rights. Joining the chorus of slander and incitement against CUNY students, faculty and staff for protesting the Gaza genocide; unleashing NYPD violence against them at City College last year and Brooklyn College this spring; then promising “zero tolerance” to a panel of rabid rightist witch-hunters – these are just the latest reasons why the CUNY administration and Board of Trustees need to be abolished. In their place, the university should be governed by those who study and work here, through elected councils of students, faculty and staff.

This basic democratic demand is part of the overall Marxist program to take education at all levels out of the hands of the capitalist class, its appointees and forces of repression. To open the way for free, high-quality education for all – freed from the mounting repression, bigotry and backwardness bred by capitalism in decay – we need a socialist revolution.  ■

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