HANOVER, NH — President Joe Biden’s education chief planned to meet with Dartmouth College students on Wednesday to discuss anti-Semitism and Islamophobia on college campuses amid the war between Israel and Hamas.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona will hold a roundtable discussion with Jewish and Muslim students as part of the recently launched Dartmouth Dialogues, an initiative that aims to spark conversations that bridge political and personal divides.
The fallout from the war between Israel and Hamas has roiled campuses across the US and reignited the debate over freedom of expression. College leaders have struggled to define the line where political speech turns into harassment and discrimination, with Jewish and Arab students expressing concern that their schools are doing too little to protect them.
The issue took center stage in December when the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT testified at a Congressional hearing about anti-Semitism on campus. When asked by Republican lawmakers whether calls for genocide against Jews would violate campus policy, the presidents gave legal answers and declined to say unequivocally that it was prohibited speech.
Their answers sparked weeks of backlash from donors and alumni, ultimately leading to the resignations of Liz Magill from Penn and Claudine Gay from Harvard.
Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks killed 1,200 people in Israel, mostly civilians, and kidnapped about 250 others, nearly half of whom were released during a weeklong ceasefire in November.
Since the war began, Israel’s assault in Gaza has killed more than 23,200 Palestinians, roughly 1% of the territory’s population, and injured more than 58,000 people, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza. About two-thirds of the dead are women and children.
The Department of Education has repeatedly warned colleges that they must combat anti-Semitism and Islamophobia on their campuses or risk losing federal money. The agency has opened civil rights investigations at dozens of schools and colleges following complaints of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, including at Harvard, Stanford and MIT.
Cardona met with Jewish students at Baltimore-area colleges in November and vowed to take action to keep them safe. He later met with the leaders of national Muslim, Arab and Sikh organizations to discuss the rise of Islamophobia on college campuses.
The war also led to the resignation of two government officials.
Last week, Tariq Habash, an appointee of the Biden administration who worked in the Education Department to help overhaul the student loan system and address inequality in higher education, resigned. He resigned in protest at the government’s crucial military support for the war and the government’s handling of the consequences of the conflict at home and abroad.
In his resignation letter, Habash wrote: “The Ministry of Education must play an active role in supporting institutions that respond to the needs of students, faculty and staff. This includes protecting all students who choose to exercise their First Amendment right to engage in nonviolent action, including expressing solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza.”
State Department veteran Josh Paul resigned in October as the administration accelerated arms transfers to Israel.
In the earlier months of the war, some administration staffers signed petitions and open letters urging Biden to call for a ceasefire.