Henry Abbott

Last Thursday, under the pretense of combating antisemitism, the House Committee on Workforce and Education asked Bowdoin President Safa Zaki and Board of Trustees Chair Scott Perper for three tranches of unredacted student disciplinary files.

The House Committee letter is not motivated by genuine concerns for the safety of Jewish students but by a desire to eradicate criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, an ongoing crime against humanity that the Committee’s majority members have universally supported. Committee Chair Tim Walberg (R-MI), for example, has advocated for detonating nuclear bombs on the besieged Palestinians of Gaza: “We shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid. It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.” The Committee’s majority members have not just unanimously supported unconditional military aid to Israel—in violation of multiple U.S. laws—but they have also unanimously voted to censor information about the genocide by banning the State Department from citing the only reliable source of the Gazan death toll and to sanction any person who so much as assists an International Criminal Court investigation into Israeli war crimes.

The current investigation of peaceful campus protests—which at Bowdoin and elsewhere were disproportionately led and attended by Jewish students—under the guise of antisemitism is thus a continuation of a long-standing campaign to muzzle criticism of Israel. The Committee’s majority is so unified in their obsessive commitment to silence critics of Israel’s genocide that seven of its 12 most senior members shared the same largest financial contributor to their 2024 re-election campaigns: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

If the Committee’s majority members were dedicated to rooting out antisemitism, they would not have unanimously voted to keep Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on this committee after her history of propagating florid antisemitic conspiracies came to light.

Moreover, they would have followed Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in condemning Trump’s 2022 dinner with Nick Fuentes (a Holocaust denier) and Kanye West (who had called for “death con 3 on Jewish People” only a month prior). They would oppose Trump’s ongoing elevation of Elon Musk, who—in his first days after acquiring Twitter—reinstated the platform’s most prominent neo-Nazi accounts, publicly supported theories that Jewish people have pushed for “dialectical hatred against whites,” told Germany’s far-right AfD Party that Germany has “too much focus on past guilt” for the Holocaust and recently made two Nazi salutes, which he followed with “jokes” about Hitler and Goebbels. The Committee would also oppose Trump’s dismantling of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights—the primary vehicle for investigating anti-semitism on American college campuses.

In each case, the Committee’s majority members have remained silent. Yet, as Representative Jerry Nadler (D-NY) said earlier this week regarding President Trump, the Committee is now “weaponizing the real pain American Jews face” to “wield control over the truth-seeking academic institutions that stand as a bulwark against authoritarianism.”

To best protect Bowdoin students, the College must not comply with this legally non-binding letter. First, complying would be illegal; the requested disclosure would violate the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) protections of over 50 students who completed a disciplinary process. Complying would also reveal personally identifying information about students who have exercised their right to free speech to a committee that blatantly disregards this constitutional protection. Moreover, no matter how Bowdoin handled those processes, the House Committee will manufacture the story they want to tell from any files they receive.  Lastly, as the recent Columbia University concessions demonstrate, compliance with right-wing investigations is no guarantee against further punitive federal action.

Fortunately, compared to other educational institutions, Bowdoin is extremely insulated from the financial threats that the federal government has used to coerce other schools into compliance. Per Bowdoin’s audited financial statements and federal tax filings, the College has received an average of $5.6 million annually in government funding over the past four years. Should the federal government threaten to withhold such funds, Bowdoin College, with its annual budget of $226 million and an endowment of $2.6 billion, would be in the fortunate financial position to withstand such an attack on our academic independence.

We are not yet at that point—we have only received a letter. The question now is: Will Bowdoin administrators stand for our institution’s integrity and protect our close-knit community from this witch hunt, or will they illegally cede the privacy of our classmates to comply with the legally non-binding requests from a House Committee acting in bad faith?

Caleb Packard is a member of the Class of 2026.

Correction 4/9/2025 8:15 p.m.: An earlier version of this article placed Bowdoin College’s endowment at $3.2 billion. It is actually worth $2.6 billion.