CUNY head tells Congress campuses have had 84 reports of antisemitism since start of 2024

Three university presidents are grilled about antisemitism on their campuses at a hearing in Congress.

The US House Committee on Education and the Workforce questions Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, the chancellor of the City University of New York; Robert M. Groves, the interim president of Washington, DC’s Georgetown University, and Rich Lyons, the chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley.

Rep. Tim Walberg, a Republican from Michigan, asks the university leaders to define antisemitism. All three define it as hatred or discrimination against Jews.

Rodríguez, under questioning, tells Walberg that CUNY received 68 complaints of antisemitism in 2024, and 16 since the start of 2025.

Rodríguez says CUNY has disciplined 18 students for antisemitism and 25 for inappropriate conduct during protests in the past two years. He says the university system does not have data on the hiring of Zionist professors or Jewish students transferring out of CUNY.

Asked if CUNY has antisemitic faculty, Rodríguez says, “We have faculty that might conduct themselves in antisemitic behavior, and we have no tolerance for it.”

Rodríguez rejects the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign targeting Israel, when asked if he supports BDS among the CUNY faculty union. The union operates independently from the CUNY administration and has been accused of discrimination by Jewish members.

“I have repudiated BDS and I have said that there’s no place for BDS at the City University of New York,” Rodríguez says. BDS is barred under New York State law.

He refrains from confirming whether union members have been disciplined for antisemitism, if the union president’s support for BDS is problematic, or if the union has an antisemitism problem.

The public CUNY system is the largest urban college network in the US, with more than 250,00 students on dozens of campuses around the five boroughs. The system has long grappled with allegations of campus antisemitism and has taken some measures to combat anti-Jewish discrimination. CUNY’s different campuses operate semi-independently, making system-wide changes difficult to enact.