Harley Lippman, who serves as a board member at Yale University and Columbia University, on Wednesday ripped into the university presidents who last week dodged questions about whether students should be disciplined if they call for the genocide of Jews.
"Genocide starts with words," Lippman told the Washington Examiner.
"It's a lack of courage, a lack of moral clarity," he added. "It's a lack of decency. It's this woke, extreme leftist distortion of history where they want to demonize Jews in Israel. That's what this is about.
"They have a responsibility. And they have Jewish students who are frightened and don't feel safe on campus, and they are completely ignoring the rights of this minority," Lippman said, reiterating that "words do matter."
Leaders at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania seemed to evade a question posed to them by Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., during a congressional hearing on antisemitism last week.
Penn's president has since resigned over a backlash to comments that she said did not go far enough to condemn hate against Jewish students. And Harvard's president weathered calls for her resignation for nearly a week until the university's governing board declared its support for her Tuesday.
While the Israel-Hamas war has deepened rifts at campuses across the country, the three leaders were invited to testify as the public faces of universities embroiled in protest and complaints of antisemitism.
The Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce chose the three presidents because their schools "have been at the center of the rise in antisemitic protests," a committee spokesperson said in a statement.
Lippman on Wednesday told the Examiner that the "damage is done."