WASHINGTON – In a recent letter to Northwestern University President Michael Schill, the U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce Chairman Tim Walberg, R-Mich., accused Schill of failing to keep his promise to discipline students involved in antisemitism on campus and demanded that he participate in an upcoming interview with the committee.
“[D]espite Northwestern’s claims to the contrary, the Committee has not seen your commitments to discipline, enforcement, and security come to satisfactory fruition,” Walberg wrote in a Monday letter.
Schill was questioned by the committee in May 2024 about the pro-Palestinian protests on campus earlier that school year. The committee then launched an official investigation into antisemitism at the university, and so did the Department of Education.
Walberg’s letter said Schill’s interview would be part of a larger-scale probe into “the rise of antisemitism on college campuses.” The letter also cited multiple recent incidents of harassment directed at Jewish students at Northwestern, including graffiti on university structures during Passover. The Crown Family Center was among the buildings spray-painted with bloody red handprints and words that read “Death to Israel,” according to the Daily Northwestern.
“The Committee seeks to understand both this disturbing climate of antisemitism at Northwestern as well as the University’s apparent failure to protect Jewish students,” Walberg wrote in the letter.
David Shyovitz, associate professor and the director of the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies at Northwestern, witnessed the graffiti.
“The vandalism happened right outside of my own office,” said David Shyovitz, associate professor and the director of the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies at Northwestern. “It’s in the center of campus, right by the rock, which is kind of the center of campus life and expression. That’s where tabling happens and clubs meet to get the word out, and so it’s clear that somebody was trying to get attention with this.”
Shyovitz said he opposes the multiple federal investigations of Northwestern, but believes the university should do more to protect Jewish students and faculty. He co-wrote a statement signed by 118 of Northwestern’s Jewish faculty and staff as of Tuesday.
“The fact that U.S. government leaders are making unwarranted threats to our university and stripping rights from students, faculty, and researchers nationwide in the name of Jews is deeply offensive to us. We believe it should stop,” the statement reads.
In an interview, Shyovitz told Medill News Service that the treatment of Jews on campus started troubling him after Israel’s war in Gaza in response to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks.
“A lot of stuff happened last year that I felt really uncomfortable with personally, but also that I thought needed to be addressed in a different way,” said Shyovitz. “There were violations of some policies that were not just kind of violating the spirit of the letter of the law in some technical form, but were (also) deeply problematic.”
In March, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights sent letters to 60 universities, including Northwestern, to notify the schools accused of discrimination towards Jewish students of potential federal government involvement if actions were not taken to combat antisemitic rhetoric.
Although Northwestern received no official notice, early April news reports said that the federal government would freeze $790 million of funding for the university.
“Taking away all of this important funding, actually, now we do less of the teaching about the issue of antisemitism itself, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, than we could have done before,” said Shyovitz. “So it just seems like it’s predicated on false assumptions, and then the response, the punitive response, is just so deeply counterproductive to what I think needs to be done to address these issues.”
The removal of federal funding included cuts to the Feinberg School of Medicine’s ongoing research and grant programs.
The group of professors released their statement on behalf of Northwestern’s Jewish faculty and staff after the announcement of the federal funding freeze.
“Some of us have been disappointed at times by Northwestern’s response to campus events. We recognize that antisemitism is present on college campuses, as it is in the world. Yet a fair-minded assessment would reveal a faculty and a university administration committed to the education of our students through rigorous and respectful debate,” the statement from Jewish faculty and staff at Northwestern University said.
Several bills on antisemitism and protests on college campuses were making their way through Congress. Last week, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions debated two bills called the Antisemitism Awareness Act and the Protecting Students on Campus Act of 2025.