President-elect Donald Trump ran on a promise that, if reelected, U.S. universities would lose accreditation and federal support over the unprecedented level of antisemitism that has roiled campuses nationwide since the Oct. 7 terror attacks in Israel. 

“Colleges will and must end the antisemitic propaganda or they will lose their accreditation and federal support,” Trump said in virtual remarks in September at the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas. 

While the federal government does not directly accredit universities, it plays a significant role in overseeing the organizations that give colleges accreditation. 

Following Trump’s landslide victory over Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday night — as well as Republicans winning control over the Senate and possibly the House — campus leaders who worked with Trump during his first term largely expressed relief that the likelihood of increased congressional investigations into universities over allegations of antisemitism will be “prominent on the agenda,” a contrast, they say, to how the Biden administration has handled campus antisemitism. 

“President Trump has spoken forcefully and repeatedly about campus antisemitism so we know that this is an issue that is going to be prominent on the agenda of the incoming administration,” Kenneth Marcus, founder and chairman of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, and former U.S. assistant secretary of education in the Bush and Trump administrations, told Jewish Insider. An example, Marcus said, is that Trump has been “very clear” about how he would deal with campus demonstrators who break the law and are not U.S. citizens. “I think we can expect to see responses there,” Marcus said. 

But the leader of a study ​​group that analyzes issues related to antisemitism voiced concern that targeting funding for higher education “exploits” real concern for the safety of Jewish students. 

“Trump will use the idea of fighting antisemitism as the idea of free speech and breaking up coalitions. One of the most important things to ensure Jewish safety is to have strong coalitions with people who are also fighting hatred,” Jonathan Jacoby, director of the Nexus Task Force, told JI. “By exacerbating division, Trump is only going to make us less safe.” Nexus has put forth a definition of antisemitism favored by progressives as an alternative to the widely-embraced International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition, which they say chills free speech when it comes to criticism of Israel.

At his White House Hanukkah reception in December 2019, then-President Trump signed an executive order that expanded the protections covered under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include antisemitic acts. 

“I would expect to see that order used in a clearer and more forceful way than in the past,” Marcus said, adding that “behind closed doors, Biden administration officials would say that the Trump executive order remains enforced, but they rarely mentioned it other than in private meanings.”

“It would not be cited, for example, in the places you would expect to see it cited,” Marcus said. “The Biden Office of Civil Rights might have issued some decisions that were consistent with the Trump executive order, but they certainly didn’t spell out the standards that were being used. It was almost as if Biden officials were fearful of giving too much attention to an order that bears the name of President Trump.” 

When the executive order was signed, Adela Cojab, then a senior at New York University, was in the midst of suing her school for what she called “two years of extreme antisemitism on the NYU campus.” After Cojab had felt ignored by campus leaders for months, just days after Trump’s executive order was signed, NYU settled her lawsuit. “When I went through what I did at NYU, I was one student against one school where there was one flag burning and one assault,” reflected Cojab, who spoke alongside Trump at the 2019 Israeli American Council conference. “That made it to the ears of the president. I felt seen,” she said. 

“It happens to be that my case was a perfect example of how the executive order can change how Jewish people — in my case Jewish students— are protected, by defining Judaism as an ethno-religion under Title VI. That is concrete action,” Cojab told JI. Under the terms of the resolution, NYU was required to revise its non-discrimination and anti-harassment policies to include shared ancestry and ethnic characteristics, including antisemitism, as factors that cannot be discriminated against.

Cojab noted that in the wake of Oct. 7, when campuses hit with a wave of Gaza war protests and antisemitism, “there was not a word from the Biden-Harris administration. They didn’t meet with Jewish students, not even offering a venting session. Nothing symbolic, nothing concrete,” Cojab said. “It’s like we always say in dating, if he wanted to he would. If the administration wanted to do something, they would.” 

Jacoby argued that “an enormous amount” of concrete action was taken to protect students under the Biden administration, “given the lack of funding from the Republican-controlled House,” he said. 

“Our kids, our students, deserve to feel safe and that means to have the actual problems addressed,” Jacoby continued. “That means to address violence, whether it is antisemitic or not. That means to foster a safe environment for learning. Those things should be the No. 1 priority of any administration. What concerns me about what Trump did the last time around was that he saw campuses as a petri dish for a larger effort to build political support for his policies. Campuses, for him, are a way of dividing coalitions, dividing Jews from other minorities and capitalizing on places where there are divisions and not in order to come to a common understanding.” 

For example, Jacoby said, “the question should be ‘how do you improve the fundamental importance of an inclusive environment,’ rather than ‘how do you attack the system of diversity, equity and inclusion?’” 

“I am feeling very confident,” Cojab, a recent graduate of NYU’s law school, said about the incoming Trump administration. “It’s not about whether you like Trump or not. I judge by track record and opportunity to act.” 

Cojab said she anticipates movement on Title VI under the Trump administration, including on preexisting cases, and is frequently asked the following question: “If Trump protected Jewish students on campuses, why did we see what we saw after Oct. 7?” 

“It’s because Title VI is not proactive, it’s retroactive. You have to experience discrimination and then file a complaint,” she said. 

Title VI complaints are filed with the Department of Education and Office of Civil Rights, which is headed by administration appointees. (Cojab’s case was filed under Marcus).

Under the Biden administration, the Office for Civil Rights has around 400 investigative staff, the same number it has had since the Bush administration. Complaints, especially in the wake of Oct. 7, have surged, however, from 6,000 per year to 19,201 in 2023, a record it is set to easily surpass this year, with more than 24,000 so far. Four hundred of those complaints were related to discrimination based on shared ancestry or national origin, some of those being antisemitism complaints.

OCR currently has 162 such cases under investigation and many more go unreported, Catherine Lhamon, the assistant secretary of education for civil rights, told lawmakers in September at a roundtable with congressional Democrats, where she said that Congress “has never” provided sufficient funding. Before seeking to revoke university funding, Lhamon said that her department must first investigate and communicate a finding that the subject of an investigation has violated civil rights law, at which point she’s required to give schools the opportunity to voluntarily come into compliance. Lhamon said that she does not have the authority to require schools to dismiss problematic faculty.

“We saw no movement because the administration’s OCR and DOE weren’t necessarily instructed to act on this,” Cojab said. “I think Trump will place people in the DOE and OCR who will actually enforce Title VI,” which would include an observation period, investigation and two years of monitoring universities in question. 

“University leaders were getting mixed signals from the Biden administration about the status of the Trump executive order. That should stop under a Trump administration,” Cojab said.

Marcus echoed the expectation that the OCR and DOE will “take much more seriously the prospect of denying federal funds to colleges and universities that violate the rights of Jewish and other college students.”

“That has always been, theoretically, the available remedy but I would expect to see it invoked in a more serious way,” he said. “That means we would see not only OCR administrative investigations, but also federal cases being brought to either administrative law judges or federal district courts.”

While the Education Department cannot cut off funding to a university without going through a substantial process, Marcus said “this is not impossible and I would expect to see greater efforts to do it.” 

“There are certainly statutory as well as political reasons why it has been rare in the past, but we’re also in an exceptional set of circumstances right now so I don’t think that one should by any means consider that this would be off the table,” he said. “I would anticipate that the incoming administration would look very carefully as options for eliminating funds to those institutions that have most recklessly been permitting antisemitism on their campuses.” 

Marcus also expects to see the Justice Department take more of an active role, which he said has been “oddly silent in the face of antisemitism in recent months.” This could include, according to Marcus, pursuing its own investigations and potentially joining some of the active lawsuits, such as an ongoing federal lawsuit against Harvard University that alleges the school has ignored the harassment of Jewish students for more than a year. He added that there could also be “more forceful activity” in terms of enforcing the rules around the funding of Middle East studies. 

Jewish Insider’s senior congressional correspondent Marc Rod contributed reporting.