Less than a week after throwing out a lawsuit filed by Jewish students at MIT alleging that the school didn’t do enough to curb antisemitism on campus, U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns ruled on Tuesday that a similar suit against Harvard will go to trial.

The suit against Harvard was filed in federal court by six Jewish Harvard students who allege the school has not protected them from “severe and pervasive” campus antisemitism. Both cases allege violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; Stearns ruled that the MIT students hadn’t shown that their civil rights were violated, but that the Harvard students had.

Shabbos Kestenbaum, a recent Harvard Divinity School graduate, was the only named plaintiff in the lawsuit. “Today’s decision affirms that Jewish students are well within their right to hold their universities accountable,” Kestenbaum told Jewish Insider. 

In the 25-page ruling, Stearns, a federal judge in Massachusetts, wrote that “in many instances” Harvard did not respond to “an eruption of antisemitism” on campus, citing its failure to take disciplinary measures against “offending students and faculty.”

“In other words, the facts as pled show that Harvard failed its Jewish students,” Stearns wrote.

Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard, noted the significance of Stearns’ Harvard ruling. “Very significant that a highly respected progressive federal judge… who dismissed the anti Semitism lawsuit against MIT has allowed the case against Harvard to proceed saying that ‘the facts as pled show that Harvard failed its Jewish students,’” Summers wrote on X.

Summers said that it remains to be seen how the Harvard Corporation, the university’s main governing body, will respond. “The challenge is before Harvard President Alan Garber. I hope, trust and expect he will move beyond the tepid and inadequate preliminary task force report,” he said of a six-page set of preliminary recommendations released in June by a university task force focused on combating antisemitism at the school. Several Jewish leaders told JI at the time that they were disappointed by the suggestions. 

The lawsuit comes on the heels of a separate case, filed in January, that alleged Harvard violated Title VI. In May, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Right Under Law filed a federal lawsuit stating that since the Title VI complaint, “things have only gotten worse.” 

Stearns wrote in Tuesday’s decision that the plaintiffs “plausibly establish that Harvard’s response failed Title VI’s commands.”

Kestenbaum expects there to be a deposition ahead of trial — as long as the university does not settle — and told JI that a date had not yet been set.

“People have often asked me, when looking at antisemitism on college campuses, if the golden age of American Jewry is over,” he said. “My answer is simple: not without a fight.”