Congress Demands Answers From Sarah Lawrence College About Antisemitism on Campus

Congress Demands Answers From Sarah Lawrence College About Antisemitism on Campus

If you have watched some of the things that have happened at Sarah Lawrence College recently, you know this is justified.

Minding the Campus reports:

Sarah Lawrence Must Answer to Congress—And Rightly So

In the winter of 2024, the U.S. Department of Education announced that an investigation is underway at Sarah Lawrence College (SLC) over its anti-Semitic environment. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights wrote in a December 23 letter that it will examine “whether the College failed to respond to alleged harassment of students on the basis of national origin … in a manner consistent with the requirements of Title VI.”

Now, SLC will have to answer to the U.S. Congress, too.

On March 27^th, the House Education and Workforce Committee and the Higher Education and Workforce Development Subcommittee sent letters to five colleges and universities “demanding answers regarding their lackluster response to the rise in antisemitism on their campuses.” SLC, where I have been on faculty for over 15 years, was deservedly on this list.

Since Cristle Judd took over as the college’s President in 2017, SLC has declined in national rankings. As of 2024, U.S. News & World Report ranked Sarah Lawrence at 108 out of 211 liberal arts colleges, significantly declining from its top 40 position when I joined the school. In her tenure, Judd has ignored core collegiate values of open inquiry and the centrality of searching for truth. The school has taken a dangerous illiberal turn, earning Congressional and Executive scrutiny.

Judd’s March 2025 letter to the community, for instance, proclaims that the school will “continue to vigorously uphold and defend … free expression” and declares that “academic freedom and free inquiry [are] cornerstones of higher education.” She also “[ensures] that every student at Sarah Lawrence has full and unimpeded access to our transformative education, regardless of … ethnicity … or religion.”

But such words have proven hollow. If Judd truly believed them, she would not have allowed an environment where Jewish and Zionist students were forced to leave campus for safety, take classes remotely, and lose equal access to our school’s Dewey-inspired, individualized education.

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