Councilwoman Vernikov Says CUNY Chief ‘Feigning’ Action Against Antisemitism at Congressional Hearing

The leaders of three major American universities, including CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez, faced heated questioning on Capitol Hill Tuesday, as the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce grilled them for hours over their administrations’ failures to curb rampant antisemitism.

Alongside Chancellor Rodriguez, the committee questioned Robert M. Groves, the interim president of Georgetown University, and Rich Lyons, the chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley.

All three universities saw an explosion of violent, antisemitic protests, which included threats, vandalism and assaults on Jewish students in the wake of the Oct. 7 massacre, though CUNY had serious problems in years prior.

While the hearing addressed issues at all three universities, the testimony from CUNY’s Chancellor drew a particularly sharp local reaction. Attending the hearing was Brooklyn City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov, who has been a vocal critic of the CUNY administration’s handling of antisemitism. Her office tells Belaaz she found the Chancellor’s performance to be exceptionally poor, believing he was feigning action while his answers remained unsatisfactory.

Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers confronted the university leaders with reports of a hostile environment for Jewish individuals on their campuses.

During one pointed exchange, Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) asked the presidents to define antisemitism, with all three defining it as hatred or discrimination against Jews. Under further questioning, Rodriguez provided specific data for the CUNY system, telling the committee that the university received 68 complaints of antisemitism in 2024 and 16 since the start of 2025.

He stated that CUNY has disciplined 18 students for antisemitism and 25 for inappropriate conduct during protests in the past two years, but did not delineate what the punishments were and for what specific offenses.

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

The intense scrutiny on Tuesday is the culmination of years of escalating incidents at CUNY. Among the most high-profile flashpoints were two consecutive commencement speeches at the CUNY School of Law that drew widespread condemnation. In 2023, student speaker Fatima Mohammed delivered an address that the CUNY Board of Trustees and Chancellor Rodriguez themselves labeled as hate speech. This followed a 2022 speech by Nerdeen Kiswani, an activist who also used the stage for anti-Israel rhetoric after gaining a name for herself by calling for the deaths of all Zionists and even threatening to burn a Jewish student alive.

Jewish CUNY faculty members filled a lawsuit alleging antisemitic bias against them in 2022, and this year, Jewish accounting professors in CUNY’S Queens College sued over being fired in favor of new, non-Jewish teachers.

Beyond these speeches, official reports have documented systemic failures at CUNY. A 2024 independent review commissioned by New York Governor Kathy Hochul and authored by former Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman described CUNY’s system for handling antisemitism as “ineffective” and in need of a “complete overhaul.” Furthermore, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has previously found that CUNY inadequately handled multiple complaints of antisemitism and discrimination.