As the date of the Wendy Raymond’s congressional hearing draws closer, student and faculty communities across the Tri-Co are bracing themselves for potential retaliation from the Trump administration over the ongoing protests of the Israeli war in Palestine.
On April 10, The Committee on Education and Workforce announced that Haverford College President Wendy Raymond had been summoned to appear before Congress on May 7 to address allegations of fostering an unsafe and discriminatory environment for Jewish students on campus. She will testify alongside other university presidents, including Dr. Jeffrey Armstrong, President of California Polytechnic State University (San Luis Obispo), and Dr. Robert Manuel, President of DePaul University.
In response to her summons, the Tri-Co chapter of the American Association of University Professors has put out a statement condemning Trump’s reach into private universities and maintaining their full support of President Raymond. You can read their full letter to the Bi-Co News below:
Our Tri-Co campuses are under attack. The Trump administration’s funding threats have been used as a cudgel to force ideologically driven changes to US institutions. These changes threaten academic freedom, the safety of our communities, our governing of ourselves and the stewardship of our colleges. Meanwhile, detention, detainment, and deportation of students and faculty cast a pall over our ability to function as communities now and in the future.
Last year, a small group of Haverford faculty began our AAUP chapter anew, as another line of defense at our college against these assaults. We write to you now, standing together to assert the public value of the liberal arts and higher education.
As an AAUP chapter, we stand for education as a civil right and for the academic freedom to teach and learn. We demand that worker autonomy be defended and that dissent and critical thinking be protected. A robust higher education is an essential foundation for a resilient democracy, civil freedom, the cultivation of closely knit intellectual communities, and any hope for a future not grounded in violence and racism.
The only way to achieve the goals that underpin our vision of education in the Tri-Co is to band together. We must care for our shared communities, affirm our values, and renew our bonds of connection if we are to survive. Our institutions have taken a principled stand against federal overreach before. Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore all refused to take part in a federal student loan program in the late 1950s, because it required a loyalty oath. Haverford faculty once wrote in the AAUP Bulletin that the “special features” of a liberal arts education required not shying away from “divergent yet passionately held philosophical convictions.”
On May 7, President Raymond will appear before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Although these hearings are allegedly intended to investigate the handling of antisemitism on college campuses, we have repeatedly seen them instead exploited to embarrass college presidents, especially women and people of color. Presidents appearing before this and related committees have subsequently been forced out of office under threat of targeted funding cuts; those cuts have then been imposed anyway.
In advance of this hearing, the Haverford AAUP chapter wishes to express our support for Wendy’s and the entire senior administration’s leadership of the college and their efforts to address antisemitism, Islamophobia, and all forms of bias, harassment, discrimination, or hate on campus. We encourage our faculty and staff colleagues as well as our current and former students to rally behind Wendy and to express their support however they feel able to do so.
With this call, we assert that our communities, which include undocumented people, trans people, students and faculty on visas, students of color and other marginalized students and faculty, must and will continue to exist. We can only care for each other and ourselves by working in community, and ensuring that our college stands boldly for these justice-based principles. Join us!
