At a time in which we all seem to have followed Alice through the looking glass, some comments from the most recent hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workplace might not rank very high on our list of puzzlements. Certainly not as high as, say, MAGA followers describing Hunter Biden’s conviction on two felony counts as further proof that the rigged Justice Department was actively engaged in covering up the “true crimes” of the “Biden Crime Family.” But the comments caught my attention, nonetheless.

The committee hearings were the fourth set convened in the wake of the brutal October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the support which some student organizations at Harvard had shown for the assault. In its first two hearings, Republican committee members had succeeded in humiliating the leaders of Harvard, Penn, and MIT, and in providing the president of Columbia a stage on which she could humiliate herself. Claiming that university presidents had allowed antisemitism to thrive on their campuses, Republicans charged the campus leaders with everything from a failure to provide Jewish students with a safe environment to maintaining silence in the face of a call for Jewish genocide. (At a third hearing, the superintendents of three liberal-leaning school districts in New York City, Berkeley, and Montgomery County, Maryland, successfully avoided the traps that had ensnared their university colleagues and demonstrated a much clearer sense of how to uphold their educational mission while also supporting their staff and students.)