The Department of Education Isn’t Addressing Antisemitism Complaints Urgently. Two GOP Senators Aim to Fix It

With a spike in discrimination and harassment against Jewish students on American college and university campuses after Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel, Jewish individuals and organizations have come to believe the best course of action is filing civil-rights complaints with the Department of Education.

While the department’s Office of Civil Rights has opened investigations into dozens of institutions of higher education, the department has moved slowly and sometimes arbitrarily, often without any transparency. With a new piece of legislation introduced on Wednesday, Senators Bill Cassidy (R., La.) and Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) aim to change that.

The Restoring Civility on Campus Act would require the OCR to begin investigations into Title VI complaints filed on or after October 7 immediately. In a move toward increased transparency, the Act would also mandate that the department conduct an annual audit of documented “crimes motivated by prejudice” at educational institutions that have received a Title VI complaint. It would require university leadership to meet with OCR investigators in the event that a complaint is filed.

The bill, if signed into law, would also increase the penalty for failure to disclose crimes motivated by antisemitism to $1 million, up from $69,733 per violation.

Cassidy and Ernst both said they believe the Department of Education has not acted with  urgency in addressing Title VI complaints.

“The threats and violence against Jewish students demand action,” Cassidy told National Review in a statement. “No student should be afraid to walk around campus because of who they are. Universities and the Department of Education have failed to meet their legal obligation to protect Jewish students from harm. This bill forces accountability and ensures discrimination is never ignored.”

Ernst, for her part, told National Review in a statement that the current administration has not provided sufficient explanations as to why it has, in her view, dragged its feet on dealing with complaints related to antisemitic discrimination and harassment on campus.

“I have been demanding answers from this administration about what they are doing to combat the abhorrent and un-American spike in antisemitism on college campuses, and their inaction speaks volumes,” she said. “Jewish students should not be forced to risk their safety in pursuit of an education. The Restoring Civility on Campus Act will force the Department of Education to stop sitting on its hands and comply with the law to protect students from the hate and violence that have exploded across the country.”

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the law Ernst referenced, mandates that entities receiving federal funds may not allow discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin. An executive order signed by former president Donald Trump in 2019 clarified that Jewish ancestry falls under the statute.

As if to provide ammunition for Cassidy and Ernst’s point, the Brandeis Center, a nonprofit organization that represents Jews in the fight against antisemitism, filed a lawsuit against the Department of Education earlier in July over its dismissal of a Title VI complaint.

The Brandeis Center lodged an initial complaint with the OCR in November against the University of Pennsylvania, alleging that administrators failed to take action against antisemitic harassment both before and after the October 7 attack.

Incidents detailed in the November complaint include the university’s sponsoring, hosting, and funding of a “Palestine Writes Literature Festival.” The event included few Palestinian speakers but many other speakers with histories of endorsing conspiracy theories about Jews, including former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, who has intimated that Israelis are not human, accused Jews of controlling American media, and has referred to a “Zionist cabal.”

In the days leading up to the conference, the Brandeis Center noted in its complaint, graffiti of a swastika appeared on a classroom wall and a man broke into and vandalized the campus Hillel building, accompanying himself with screams of “F–k the Jews.”

Students at UPenn held rallies at which they chanted in support of an “intifada revolution” and one undergraduate described how the Hamas attack made her feel “so empowered and happy.” Faculty members joined in, with assistant professor of Arabic literature Huda Fakhreddine clapping when a speaker told Jews they can “go back to Moscow, Brooklyn, Gstaad, or f–king Berlin where you came from” and promoted “resistance by any means necessary.”

Ahmad Almallah, an instructor of creative writing, led demonstrators in the chants for “intifada,” while Mohammed Alghamdi, a professor at Penn’s medical school, was caught on camera destroying posters of hostages held in Gaza.

Also mentioned in the November complaint were incidents of vandalism at the Alpha Epsilon Pi — a Jewish fraternity — house and an off-campus Orthodox home that often hosts Jewish students for dinners and events.

In its complaint, the Brandeis Center argued that the University of Pennsylvania has failed to enforce its own code of conduct where Jewish students are concerned, a failure that has not occurred to the same degree when the administration faces reports of harassment or discrimination against other groups.

OCR dismissed Brandeis’s filing in January, citing the existence of a separate lawsuit filed in December against UPenn under Title VI, breach-of-contract, and state-level consumer protection laws. If that December suit had been a class-action filing, the Brandeis Center explained in a statement, the Department of Education would have acted in accordance with its own procedures.

But, as Brandeis Center founder and chairman Kenneth Marcus, told National Review, that is not the case.

“OCR acknowledges that no such class action had been filed,” Marcus said. “They explain, however, that, because a third party had raised systemic claims, they would treat it as if a class action had been filed rather than administering their own rules as they had written them.”

Despite the issues with OCR and its lack of urgency, Marcus said, its existence is still important in the effort to ensure American colleges and universities take action instead of allowing harassment and discrimination on their campuses.

“Even with weak approaches, OCR is able to provide something that other avenues cannot,” he said. “Lawsuits are important, which is why we’re filing them, and they can create incentives that aren’t available through OCR. OCR, however, can send very important signals from a presidential administration to universities around the country.”

Something is better than nothing, Marcus argued, and though OCR has not been particularly proactive in addressing civil-rights complaints, he and the Brandeis Center will continue to utilize the office as one avenue — though, importantly, not the only avenue — through which they can fight against higher-education administrators sitting on their hands and enabling antisemitism.

“Its actions provide a remedy that’s not otherwise available, and yet they’re not doing what they need to do,” Marcus said. “We are not going to stop filing with OCR in the face of these disappointing actions by the current administration, but it is definitely necessary to hedge one’s bets given that the agency has not been as consistently reliable as they should be, especially during the current crisis.”

Both Marcus and the pair of Republican senators who introduced legislation dealing with OCR hope for a similar outcome: More thorough and transparent action on the part of the Department of Education.

“OCR needs to stop dismissing cases that are well-founded on the law and the facts,” Marcus said. “It needs to make sure that it’s investigating all appropriate cases within its jurisdiction.”

He then turned his attention to the broader Biden administration and its inaction on Title VI, specifically writing the Trump-era executive order on antisemitism into federal regulation. That order itself stemmed from work Marcus did as staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights during the second Bush administration and built on as Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights under Trump.

To Marcus, the Biden administration has done a good job of reaching out to Jewish communities across the country, but its actions have not necessarily backed up its words.

“OCR has been slow to complete its investigations, has issued few resolutions, and has botched some of the resolutions it has issued,” he said. “The bigger picture is that the Biden administration has now been promising — for three-and-a-half years — to issue regulations that would codify the Trump executive order on combating antisemitism. That would be the biggest single thing that the Biden administration could do when it comes to policy approaches to antisemitism.”

Despite agreeing in public with Marcus’s sentiments, the White House and Department of Education have not taken that step.

“While outreach is good, they need to handle their investigations more quickly and correctly and issue the regulations that they’ve long promised,” Marcus said.