“The inmates are running the asylum” at Columbia University, Congresswoman Virginia Foxx tells the Sun, fresh off a visit to the campus whose leaders have struggled to put an end to the anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian encampment pitched by students and teachers nearly two weeks ago.

“Columbia University is in a free fall,” says Ms. Foxx, the chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, after joining Speaker Johnson and Congressman Anthony Esposito in meeting with Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, on Wednesday. “The trustees and the president are clearly not in control, and that should never be the case at an institution of higher learning.” 

Malign actors could also be fueling the well-organized and long-running demonstrations that erupted at Columbia and other universities almost immediately after Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel. Ms. Foxx cites “a direct correlation between the amount of money coming in from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, some of the Middle Eastern countries, and the amount of antisemitism on the campuses.” 

Prominent figures on the political right took the lead in rooting out antisemitism on elite campuses after October 7. Democrats, though, now are also piling on the effort. Congressmen Dan Goldman and Josh Gottheimer sent a letter on Monday imploring Columbia’s trustees to take action to end the encampment, which they say violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act — or else resign. “Those who violate the law cannot dictate the terms of the University’s ability to comply with that law.” 

In a Monday notice, Columbia leadership asked students to evacuate the tents covering the campus greens by 2 p.m. and sign a form agreeing to adhere to university policies through next June or by their graduation. Ms. Shafik asserted in a statement that the university “will not divest from Israel,” a demand many protesters had made. Following failed negotiations with the protesters last week, Ms. Shafik said that the administration is exploring “alternative internal options to end this crisis.”

The 2 p.m. Monday deadline came and went without any visible change in the situation at Columbia.

Yet some on Capitol Hill aren’t satisfied. All ten House Republicans from New York on Monday are calling on Ms. Shafik to resign. The charge was led by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who asserted that Columbia’s campus has been overrun by “anarchy.” 

Ms. Foxx says she doesn’t believe the Columbia president is doing all she can to quell unlawful protests. “She should take a much stronger stand against the students and the faculty that are violating every single rule of the university.” (At Paris’s Sorbonne University, in contrast, police dragged student protesters out of tents set up in their own “Liberated Zone.”)

Asked by the Sun whether Congress might intervene, Ms. Foxx says, “there does come a time when we may need to take action, but what we’re planning to do is go step by step with our investigation.” She’s referring to the inquiry her committee launched in February into Columbia’s response to antisemitism on campus. The administration has so far provided 4,000 documents as part of this probe, and Ms. Foxx says she will follow up on that request in the coming months. “We want high quality information, not quantity.”

Columbia’s disciplinary system prevents timely action for students who are threatening their classmates, Ms. Foxx asserts. Many students who were suspended for protesting in recent weeks have appeared to return to campus. “We need to know that there are consequences for that behavior,” she says.

Otherwise, Columbia and other universities under scrutiny by the education committee could face their own set of consequences. Ms. Foxx says the committee could move to pull federal funding from Columbia, where nearly one in five incoming undergraduates receive Pell Grants, a federal subsidy for the highest-need college students in the country. The university is the second-largest recipient of federal grants behind Harvard.

Accreditation, which is necessary for schools to offer federal financial aid, could also be called into question, Ms. Foxx says. “The administration has a responsibility to the taxpayers. It has a responsibility to the accreditors. It has a responsibility to the students, first and foremost.”