CHICAGO — As another academic year begins, and universities face the specter of further division and antisemitism on campus, two prominent attorneys speaking on a panel on the sidelines of the Democratic National Convention offered a dire portrait of the state of hate at American universities. 

One of them is the dean of a top law school. The other is the most senior official tasked with implementing civil rights policy at the U.S. Department of Education. 

“I’m a 71-year-old Jewish man. I’ve heard antisemitic things throughout my life. But I’ve never seen the antisemitism on our campuses that’s been there since Oct. 7,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, a First Amendment expert and the dean of the University of California Berkeley law school. “My fear is that this isn’t going to get better anytime soon. We all hope that there’s going to be peace in Gaza and the release of all of the hostages, but what’s happened on campuses now is that the pro-Palestinian position has hardened to one that Israel should not exist at all.”

Chemerinsky described an antisemitic incident he faced in April, which garnered national headlines. He hosted an annual dinner at his home for students. Beforehand, some of them shared a flier with a caricature of Chemerinsky holding a blood knife. It read “No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza starves” — though the dean had never spoken about Israel publicly. At the dinner, a student berated him and his wife about the situation in Gaza and refused to leave.

“There was no basis for them targeting me other than that I was Jewish. I have no doubt that if it was a dean who wasn’t Jewish, they would have never done this,” Chemerinsky said at the event in Chicago, which was hosted by the advocacy group Zioness. “This is, of course, one incident on one campus, but representative of what we have seen so much across the United States.”

Seated on the panel with Chemerinsky was Catherine Lhamon, the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights. She leads the unit tasked with investigating whether universities have violated a legal doctrine known as Title VI, which looks at whether their handling of complaints about discrimination and harassment have created a hostile learning environment for students. Campuses put their federal funding at risk if they continue to tolerate antisemitism. 

“We are seeing a quantum of harm that we couldn’t have conceived before, and what we are confirming in the investigations in the office are that these actions happen, and that all too often, our schools are not standing for our kids. Our schools are not making sure that all of our kids understand that they’re welcome, that the schools are for them and that the schools intend to make sure that they are safe and inclusive environments for them,” Lhamon said. “I am very proud to disabuse any of you of the notion that it does not need to to act against hate.”

Lhamon’s office has 145 open investigations looking at schools’ handling of discrimination complaints on the basis of shared ancestry, which includes the targeting of Jewish students. The early results of its investigations, based on the few it has completed, have found that universities generally did not take students’ complaints of harassment seriously enough. (None of its post-Oct. 7 findings have yet determined that any school created a hostile environment, but nearly all of the cases remain open, a result of slow legal processes and chronic understaffing.)

“When we are hearing kids cannot go to class, kids cannot participate in particular parts of the education program because they’re Jewish, because of stereotypes about their their families, their values, who they are, that they are attacked, that they are harassed, that they are subject to notions that they don’t belong, that can rise to the level of a hostile environment,” said Lhamon. 

She and Chemerinsky attempted to offer guidance on the role of free speech in civil rights investigations — does Americans’ right to freedom of speech allow people on college campuses to make antisemitic statements? Yes, it does, they agreed. But that doesn’t mean that simply because speech is legally permissible that colleges have no obligation to address hateful conduct.

“There are instances where there can be a tension between Title VI and the First Amendment, but only if you assume what Title VI does is require punishment of protected speech. It doesn’t,” Chemerinsky clarified. “It requires that schools not be deliberately indifferent, and that’s what too many schools were last year.”

Both Chemerinsky and Lhamon argued that too much attention is paid to definitions of antisemitism, rather than addressing the issue head-on.

“I think we’ve spent too much time in the last year trying to argue over what’s the definition of the antisemitism, and it causes us to lose sight of those things that are so blatantly antisemitic,” said Chemerinsky. “My plea for all of us is perhaps to spend less time arguing over, What’s the right definition of antisemitism, and much more time identifying that which by any definition is antisemitism and threatening and unacceptable, and then to condemn that.” 

Lhamon and her team of attorneys are obligated to consider the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, according to an executive order issued by former President Donald Trump and affirmed by the Biden White House. But she agreed with Chemerinsky’s points that definitions alone are not enough to meaningfully fight antisemitism.

“There’s an executive order that requires my office to use the editorial definition when it is relevant to evaluating intent in discrimination. We comply with the law, and certainly our staff know how to do that,” Lhamon said. “But we know hate. That’s what we do.” 

American Jewish advocacy organizations have mounted a campaign for government agencies, municipalities, companies and universities to adopt the IHRA definition, which outlines examples of modern antisemitism, and has faced some criticism from the left for including forms of anti-Zionism in that list. Lhamon shared that many universities have technically adopted IHRA, but that doesn’t mean they abide by it, or even turn to it for guidance.

“Our files include universities that use the IHRA definition and miss it,” she said. “This question about which definition is right, and which is the best, etc., I think it’s well beside the point, because we have files where somebody says, ‘Well, this doesn’t violate the IHRA definition, so there’s nothing for us to do as a university in response.’ And I’m aghast when I look at that, because the kid deserved better.”

Instead, Lhamon argued, it’s more important to clearly and frequently call out hate.

“I think what we really need to be focused on in this moment where we are seeing this incredible proliferation, this incredible permission structure for hate to proliferate in our communities, we need to recognize hate,” she said. “We need to be clear about that. We need to stand against it, and we need to not be fine tuning any other question.”