The 43-day U.S. government shutdown slowed investigations into campus Jew-hatred, Harmeet Dhillon, U.S. assistant attorney general for civil rights, told JNS on the sidelines of the Jewish Federations of North America annual conference in Washington.
The Trump administration nonetheless continued to reach agreements with schools, including Cornell University and University of Virginia, Dhillon said on Monday.
“We just came out of six weeks of a government shutdown, which restricted our ability to do new investigative work,” Dhillon told JNS. “The new model is that schools are self-certifying, at the highest levels, their compliance with federal civil rights laws under penalty of perjury, and that gives us the ability under the False Claims Act and other federal laws, potentially, to have enforcement actions that are much easier to prove when we have incidents come to us.”
The Trump administration reached agreements with UVA and Cornell in October and earlier in November, respectively, regarding alleged discrimination on campus. In Cornell’s case, the settlement included a $30 million fine and an agreement to invest a further $30 million in agricultural research.
Dhillon told JNS that fighting Jew-hatred on campus continues to be a “high priority” for the administration despite court challenges and resistance from some universities in agreeing to settlements.
“I meet regularly with the White House and others to make sure that we’re covering all the angles of these settlements, and sometimes you won’t settle,” she said. “There’s ongoing discussions with Harvard, for example, which continues to deny that it’s had a problem of antisemitism.”
“It’s been a tough nut to crack,” she said, of Harvard.
Dhillon also pointed to a federal judge’s decision on Friday to block the administration from imposing a $1.2 billion on the University of California.
“We’ve had to hit a pause button on our enforcement work at the UC system while we appeal that,” she told JNS. “That’s the kind of unfortunate interference that we get from the federal courts and from groups of professors, who don’t want to see our federal civil rights laws enforced, apparently.”
“That’s kind of shocking and disappointing, or that’s the kind of thing we’ll deal with and the courts,” she said.
“I get calls from the president and the attorney general about these issues regularly, and it is among the top priorities of this administration,” she added.
