The U.S. Department of Education sent notices to 60 colleges on Monday warning that they could face consequences if they fail to meet their obligations, under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to protect Jewish college students from harassment.
Linda McMahon, the U.S. education secretary, stated that university leaders must do more to combat Jew-hatred on campus.
“The department is deeply disappointed that Jewish students studying on elite U.S. campuses continue to fear for their safety amid the relentless antisemitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year,” she said. “U.S. colleges and universities benefit from enormous public investments funded by U.S. taxpayers.
“That support is a privilege and it is contingent on scrupulous adherence to federal anti-discrimination laws,” she added.
The 60 schools that received letters are under active investigation for alleged antisemitic harassment under the act, which prohibits institutions that receive federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color, and national origin. The latter has been interpreted to include Jewish ancestry.
The Education Department announced last week that it is committed to addressing a backlog of complaints about alleged Jew-hatred that went unaddressed during the Biden administration.
‘Enforce their own rules’
Kenneth L. Marcus, chairman of the Brandeis Center and a former U.S. assistant secretary of education, told JNS that receiving a letter from the Office for Civil Rights has a strong effect on a university administration, though not as strong as a letter from the Department of Justice, which announced last week that it will be visiting 10 universities to investigate campus Jew-hatred.
“You might say that a call from the DOJ concentrates the mind like the prospect of a hanging,” he said. “A call from the Office of Civil Rights is more like a heavy-duty laxative.”
Marcus told JNS that the Office for Civil Rights process is often slow and time-consuming, “especially for complex cases involving many parties, adding that “the Trump administration has cut through that process in various ways.”
“They have commenced proactive self-directed investigations,” he said, “rather than passively waiting for cases to arrive, and this is something that the Biden administration refused to do, despite repeated requests.”
The Trump administration has used a whole-of-government approach that enables them to use a much wider range of legal tools, including procedures that are available to the General Services Administration, according to Marcus.
“Universities should adopt all of the measures accepted by Harvard University in its recent settlement with the Brandeis Center, including using the IHRA working definition of antisemitism to ensure compliance with civil-rights laws,” he said.
They should make clear that shunning, exclusion, bullying and other mistreatment of Zionists will be treated as a serious violation of university rules, and they should adopt policies against masked protests,” he stated. “They should cooperate with law enforcement and immigration officials to ensure that anti-Jewish harassers are held accountable.”
“Most importantly, perhaps, they must vigorously enforce their own rules against students who harass Jews,” said Marcus.
Six of the eight Ivy League universities—Brown, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Columbia—were among those notified. (The Trump administration recently announced that it was cutting about $400 million in federal funding to Columbia for its lack of response to Jew-hatred.)
Some 15 of the 60 schools were private schools in the Northeast. “New England well represented,” wrote the conservative radio host Howie Carr.
Among the other 54 schools are Boston University, Johns Hopkins University, Rutgers University, the State University of New York, Ohio State University, the University of California (including Berkeley) and Arizona State University.
