In the six years since her inauguration as Haverford’s 16th president, Wendy Raymond has weathered protests, strikes, and numerous forms of campus tension. But on May 7, 2025, her leadership will face its first test before a national audience.
Raymond is set to testify before the Republican-headed Congressional Committee on Education & Workforce, where she will be questioned regarding the accusation that the Haverford administration fostered a hostile campus environment towards Jewish students in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks. The hearing comes amidst a legal battle between the college and a group of students, identified as the Jews at Haverford, over allegations of campus-wide discrimination. The lawsuit is sponsored by the Deborah Project, a non-profit legal organization which claims to “defend the civil rights of Jews experiencing discrimination in education.”
In Dec. 2023 presidents from the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology were all questioned by the same committee on allegations of campus antisemitism. The hearing garnered wide-spread condemnation of UPenn and Harvard’s leadership after the presidents of both institutions did not offer a definitive answer on whether calling for the “genocide of Jews” violated university policy. Instead, the two presidents said that speech, regardless of content, is protected, until it veers into harassment-like conduct. Both presidents resigned only days later, following a fire-storm of media coverage and criticism from key donors.
While Raymond could have rejected the committee’s invitation to testify, like the former Columbia University President Minouche Shafik did (who has since resigned), the move would have come with great risk to Raymond’s reputation. But the position she occupies now is equally precarious.
A letter sent to Raymond on April 21 by the committee chairman Tim Walberg (R-MI) outlined three separate events, all mentioned in the Deborah Project’s lawsuit, which Raymond will most likely be questioned on during the testimony.
One of the events, a teach-in held by Bi-Co Covid Co, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Haverford Students for Peace, garnered significant attention, both on campus and nationally, when it was held in March of 2024. Initially titled “Mass Death On All Fronts,” student organizers issued an alternative title (“COVID In Times of Genocide”) following a request from Raymond.
At the time, the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia called the teach-in a “new form of the antisemitic blood libel trope,” and the group Jewish On Campus criticized Haverford’s administration for not taking adequate action to protect Jewish students. Following the event, student organizers told the Bi-Co News that the teach-in was centered around academic perspectives on Israel’s covid-19 vaccine rollout, which previously has been criticized by international human-rights organizations as discriminatory towards Palestinians living in the occupied territories.
The other events which Raymond will likely be questioned on includes two workshops sponsored by Haverford’s Meeting The Moment: Communities in Dialogue initiative, which Raymond organized in an effort to mend campus tensions following a tumultuous academic year.
In October of last semester, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) held a workshop in Haverford’s dining center (DC), titled “Antisemitism 101.” That event saw widespread campus protests, some which were cited in Walberg’s letter. The protests veered into confrontation at points, and were partly organized by Bi-Co JVP, a Jewish anti-Zionist advocacy group. Students banged on the windows, zip-tied the DC blinds to remain open prior to the event, and disrupted the presentation at multiple points by reading aloud criticism against the ADL.
Multiple students faced disciplinary action according to Haverford’s Dean McKnight, although it is unclear what repercussions students may have faced due to privacy policies.
The second event was by a talk held by Rebecca Alpert, a professor of religion at Temple University. Alpert, a rabbi, led a discussion entitled “Judaism Does (Not) Equal Zionism: Exploring American Jews’ Complicated Relationship to Israel/Palestine.”
According to Walberg’s letter, multiple whistleblowers informed the congressional committee that the talk “promoted a culture of antisemitic discrimination.”
“These antisemitic incidents,” Walberg wrote, “coupled with Haverford’s failure to confront, address, and mitigate them, raise the specter that Haverford is currently in violation of federal civil rights laws and subjecting its Jewish students to unlawful discrimination.”
The committee is made up of primarily Republican congress representatives, many of whom, including Chairman Walberg, are supportive of President Donald Trump’s controversial crack-downs on pro-Palestinian speech on U.S. campuses. Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a particularly visible Republican on the committee, has recently praised the Trump administration’s move to defund institutions of higher education like Harvard University, which just had over $2 billion of federal funding pulled. Some academic leaders, including Harvard president Alan Geber, have described Trump’s legislation as an infringement on the first amendment.
