What’s behind the antisemitism furor over college presidents’ testimony?

The controversy over the comments of three elite US university presidents made at a congressional hearing on antisemitism could reverberate far beyond their campuses.

On Tuesday, the Harvard Corporation, the school’s highest governing body, announced that the university’s president, Claudine Gay, would remain in her post after calls for her removal following the testimony. The news came days after another president, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, quit following backlash to her responses to combative questioning at the hearing from the New York Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik.

Related: Harvard board backs president amid calls for removal over antisemitism testimony

At issue is how campuses are handling accusations of antisemitism on college campuses following the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s air and ground offensive in Gaza that has triggered a wave of pro-Palestinian campus protests.

But the controversy has widened since last week’s hearing, with implications for free expression on campus. Supporters of Palestinian rights detect an effort to muzzle criticism of Israel, which has come under fire for the soaring civilian death toll in its military offensive against Gaza.

Why are college presidents facing calls to step down?

For giving what were widely regarded as feeble and legally parsed responses to Stefanik’s pointed questions at a congressional hearing on Capitol Hill on 5 December on whether their universities’ codes of conduct allowed students to call for the murder or genocide of Jews.

Magill became a particular target for calling it “a context-dependent decision” when asked if “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated her university’s rules.

Gay, Harvard’s first African American president, and Kornbluth, who is Jewish, offered similarly legalistic answers citing context, which were defended as technically correct by free speech advocates even while fuelling a political firestorm.

Related: The Harvard and UPenn presidents walked into a trap in Congress | Moustafa Bayoumi

Magill, before her resignation, and Gay both later apologised for their responses. Kornbluth has received MIT’s backing, and with Tuesday’s decision from the Harvard Corporation, so has Gay.

What role did Elise Stefanik play in the hearing?

Stefanik – a Harvard graduate and former Republican mainstream conservative who has rebranded herself as a pro-Trump Maga Republican – ambushed the university chiefs towards the end of five hours of testimony.

Demanding “yes or no” answers, she succeeded in making them appear ambivalent or equivocal on the issue of genocide by posing general, broad-brush questions whose terms were open to competing definitions.

In one particular line of questioning seen as tendentious by some, she linked the Arabic word “intifada” – a term generally translated into English as “uprising” – with genocide, a word originally coined to describe crimes of deliberate group-based mass destruction.

“You understand that the use of the term ‘intifada’ in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews,” Stefanik asked Gay.

The question was asked against the backdrop of chants – including at student demonstrations – to “globalize the intifada” in response to Israel’s Gaza onslaught.

Yet using intifada as a synonym for genocide looks highly dubious. The first Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s consisted largely of non-violent forms of civil disobedience. The second intifada of the 1990s and early 2000s saw a wave of suicide bombings that killed more than 1,000 Israelis and maimed many others. While segments of Israeli society were left traumatised, it appeared to fall short of the legal definition of genocide.

Gay did not contest or engage with Stefanik’s definitions but said “that type of hateful, reckless, offensive speech is personally abhorrent”.

More damaging still was Stefanik’s exchange with Magill, who eschewed straight answers to get bogged down in legalisms.

Asked by the congresswoman if “specifically calling for the genocide of Jews … constitute[d] bullying or harassment?”, Magill – already under fire by university donors for permitting a Palestinian literature festival on the Pennsylvania campus in September – replied: “If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment.”

What role are politicians and university donors playing?

The row is being driven by politics. Stefanik’s critics argued that her crusade against antisemitism reeks of hypocrisy, with the Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin asking on MSNBC: “Where does Elise Stefanik get off lecturing anybody about antisemitism when she’s the hugest supporter of Donald Trump, who traffics in antisemitism all the time? She didn’t utter a peep of protest when he had Kanye West and Nick Fuentes over for dinner,” referring to an event with the two avowed antisemites at the former US president’s Mar-a-Lago property last November.

Stefanik herself has been previously accused of echoing the antisemitic “great replacement” theory. White nationalist proponents of the theory charge that white people in the US are being usurped by people of color in a process at least partly engineered by Jews.

Her attack on the university presidents has already won vocal praise from Donald Trump. Yet it is being given added credence by support from some Democrats.

The three college presidents were condemned by a spokesman for the White House while Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, joined the clamour for Magill’s resignation. Magill’s ouster followed a letter authored by Stefanik and the Democratic representative Jared Moskowitz – and signed in total by 71 Republicans and three Democrats – that called for all three university chiefs to go.

Many millions of dollars are at stake, with donors at UPenn playing a vocal role in Magill’s departure, and many others demanding that Gay and Kornbluth step down. Ross Stevens, owner and founder of New York-based Stone Ridge Asset Management, announced the withdrawal of a $100m gift to the University of Pennsylvania, citing a “permissive approach to hate speech”.

Why are free expression advocates concerned?

Fire (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Free Expression) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have both argued that slogans such as those cited by Stefanik are protected speech, as defined in the first amendment of the US constitution.

Related: ‘It’s OK, we disagree’: as campuses boil over with rage, some seek elusive path to civil dialogue

“Phrases like ‘from the river to the sea’, ‘no ceasefire’, ‘make America great again’ and ‘no justice, no peace’ are protected,” the ACLU’s senior policy counsel, Jenna Leventoff said last week.

Elaborating on the faltering responses of the university heads in Congress, and warning against efforts by colleagues to take a more restrictive approach, she added:

“Speech that contains a serious and imminent threat of violence, incitement to violence, or that pervasively harasses someone based on their race, gender, ethnicity, religion, national origin or other protected characteristics is not protected by the first amendment or academic freedom principles … but Congress cannot expect university administrators to be in the business of deciding which deeply held beliefs may be censored and which views may be expressed,” she wrote.

Stefanik’s invocation of “intifada” may be a case in point: a word seen by Israel’s advocates as synonymous with violence against Israelis is hailed by champions of the Palestinian cause as a legitimate expression of national conviction. University heads now face being asked to referee this difference of perception.

What are students and faculty members saying?

At Harvard, Gay gained considerable support from colleagues, with hundreds of professors signing a petition opposing calls for her to stand down before the Harvard Corporation affirmed its own support. MIT has backed Kornbluth, praising her “excellent work in leading our community, including in addressing antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of hate”.

Students have given a mixed response. At UPenn, the campus newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, quoted some students as fearing the impact Magill’s forced resignation would have on free speech.

“I am alarmed at the implications for free speech and academic freedom as the far right uses this resignation as license to start policing calls for peace, ceasefire, and Palestinian rights,” one student said.

But the paper also quoted a senior student, Albena Ruseva, as hailing the president’s resignation as “a ‘small win’ for people who value free speech while at the same time opposing hate speech”.