Columbia University; the University of California, Berkeley; Portland State University; Northwestern University and University of Minnesota, Twin Cities are the first targets of the new Department of Education

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U.S. Department of Education headquarters building in Washington, DC.
The Department of Education is taking its first major action under the new administration to combat antisemitism, launching investigations into alleged antisemitic discrimination at Columbia University; the University of California, Berkeley; Portland State University; Northwestern University and University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
The Department of Education under the Biden administration pursued antisemitism cases after complaints had been filed by students and organizations representing them. These new cases, however, are being launched proactively, giving the Department of Education broader investigative latitude.
“Too many universities have tolerated widespread antisemitic harassment and the illegal encampments that paralyzed campus life last year, driving Jewish life and religious expression underground,” Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary of education for civil rights, said in a statement. “The Biden Administration’s toothless resolution agreements did shamefully little to hold those institutions accountable.”
Trainor said the announcements serve to put “universities, colleges, and K-12 schools on notice: this administration will not tolerate continued institutional indifference to the wellbeing of Jewish students on American campuses, nor will it stand by idly if universities fail to combat Jew hatred and the unlawful harassment and violence it animates.”
In a press release, the Department of Education described the new investigations as a response to the Trump administration’s executive order last week on combating antisemitism, and said they would “build upon the foundational work” done by the House Education and the Workforce Committee since the Oct. 7 attack.
In a letter to the interim president of Columbia University obtained by Jewish Insider, Trainor noted that the university has been accused of a “longstanding pattern of tolerating antisemitic harassment, intimidation, and acts of violence” and of failing to implement disciplinary policies. He noted that Columbia faculty allegedly had “extensive” involvement in campus encampments and the break-in at the school’s Hamilton Hall.
A Columbia spokesperson said in a statement that the school is reviewing the letter and that the school “strongly condemns antisemitism and all forms of discrimination,” adding that “calling for, promoting, or glorifying violence or terror has no place at our University.”
“Since assuming her role in August, Interim President Armstrong and her leadership team have taken decisive actions to address issues of antisemitism, including by strengthening and clarifying our disciplinary processes,” the spokesperson said. “Under the University’s new leadership, we have established a centralized Office of Institutional Equity to address all reports of discrimination and harassment, appointed a new Rules Administrator, and strengthened the capabilities of our Public Safety Office. We look forward to ongoing work with the new federal administration to combat antisemitism and ensure the safety and wellbeing of our students, faculty, and staff.”
Kenneth Marcus, the founder of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and a former assistant secretary of education for civil rights in the first Trump administration, told JI that the investigations are “a big deal … every bit as important as the executive orders.”
He said he repeatedly pressured the Department of Education under the Biden administration to open such proactive cases, to no avail.
“There’s a world of difference between simply waiting for complaints to pile up versus proactively announcing initiatives,” Marcus explained. “They’re viewed very differently within the higher education community and also among OCR investigators. When the secretary of education decides to highlight an issue by developing a proactive initiative, it sends a clear message that the department is prioritizing the matter.”
He said that opening a proactive investigation also gives the department more latitude to pursue its case “in any way that it thinks is appropriate,” instead of relying on the sometimes-incomplete information presented by individual complainants.
He added that administration’s choice of schools to investigate signals it will be scrutinizing both elite institutions with highly publicized antisemitism issues and less prominent ones such as Portland State and the University of Minnesota.
“This is a way of making sure that every university president realizes that if they don’t clean up their act, they could be next,” Marcus said.
Prior to the announcement, the Department of Education had open investigations into alleged antisemitism at the University of Minnesota, as well as alleged anti-Palestinian discrimination at Columbia, Portland State and Northwestern. It previously dismissed an antisemitism case at Berkeley, deferring to pending litigation on the subject in federal court.
Marcus said he anticipates the administration will open more proactive investigations, as well as potentially seek to renegotiate some of the “controversial” settlement agreements the Biden administration inked to close antisemitism cases before the end of its term.
The announcements of new investigations come even as Trump administration officials are reportedly considering pathways to shrink or eliminate the Department of Education entirely.
He said the Department of Justice may also get more involved in campus antisemitism — it has the ability to join pending lawsuits against schools, can file its own complaints against schools, can go to court to enforce existing settlements with schools and can get more involved in a law enforcement capacity on campuses.
In a possible sign that the Department of Justice does plan to be more aggressive, the Department of Justice announced on Monday that it was launching an interagency task force, to include the Department of Education, which would focus on campus antisemitism.
University of California Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon spoke on the sidelines of the DNC

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Catherine Lhamon, nominee to be assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education, testifies during a Senate Health, Education Labor and Pensions Committee confirmation hearing in Dirksen Building on Tuesday, July 13, 2021.
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.”
Carol Christ said her engagement with the protesters was ‘quite valuable’ and praised the group’s ‘efforts to maintain a professional, organized, and productive approach during a very difficult time’

Jessica Christian/San Francisco Chronicle via AP
UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ speaks alongside NASA Ames Research Center director Eugene Tu and Daniel Kingsley of SKS Partners as they announce the creation of the 38-acre Berkeley Space Center at NASA Research Park at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., Monday, Oct. 16, 2023.
University of California Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ is retiring in just over a month, but nothing about her job is quieting down in her final days. Instead, the English professor is facing blowback from some in the local Jewish community regarding a series of actions she took this week to try to end the school’s Gaza solidarity encampment.
On Tuesday, Christ sent a letter to the “Free Palestine Encampment” outlining an agreement she had reached with the protest leaders in exchange for them ending their encampment. The letter quickly raised eyebrows among Jewish leaders for its concessions to the protesters and language it used around antisemitism. The next day, after the tents were taken down, several dozen pro-Palestine activists occupied a campus building that was not in use. They hung up the Palestinian flag and drew antisemitic graffiti that said “Zionism = Nazism” and equated the Jewish star to the swastika.
Amid all of the tumult, Christ reached out on Wednesday to the members of the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Jewish Life and Campus Climate, a group consisting of Jewish faculty members, students and local leaders, to schedule a meeting for Thursday. The advisory committee had not been consulted in the course of Christ’s negotiations with the anti-Israel protesters, despite several reported instances of antisemitism on campus, one person who was at the meeting told Jewish Insider.
The person who attended the meeting, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the conversation, said it “went badly,” with “students crying [and] professors angry.”
“She started the meeting by saying our primary objective was trying to not disrupt the semester, to make sure people continue to study and take their finals. But what about the Jewish students whose lives had been upended by this?” the attendee told JI. “It felt like we were slighted. And then the public statements that she’s made, and the way that we were engaged, was just really a lack of respect.”
In Christ’s Tuesday letter to the encampment leaders, she described their conversations as “quite valuable” and recognized the group’s “efforts to maintain a professional, organized, and productive approach during a very difficult time.” She responded politely to the protesters’ demands while seeming to absolve them of the antisemitic behavior that university officials acknowledge took place.
She said the university is prohibited from divesting from Israeli businesses by state law, but that she will investigate whether the school’s investments “continue to align with our values.” She also said she opposes academic boycotts, but that she will review the school’s academic partnerships and ensure that none exhibit anti-Palestinian discrimination. (The protesters, in their own public post explaining what happened, call this provision a “pathway to boycott of Israeli university programs on grounds of anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab discrimination,” a charge that a university spokesperson denied.)
Christ’s letter did not refer to any of the protesters’ hardline language targeting Zionists, or instances of antisemitism perpetrated by the activists. She told the encampment leaders that she plans to make a public statement “sharing my personal support for government officials’ efforts to secure an immediate and permanent cease-fire. Such support for the plight of Palestinians, including protest, should not be conflated with hatred or antisemitism.” The letter made no mention of the Israeli hostages, Hamas’ attack, or any Israeli victims of the current conflict.
Dan Mogulof, assistant vice chancellor for communications, told JI on Thursday that “there’s no doubt that there were individuals in the encampment who engaged in antisemitic expression, and that some of the signs that went up were antisemitic expression.” But, he added, choosing not to engage with the group because of “antisemitic expression emanating from certain individuals” would have “amounted to collective punishment.”
In another Tuesday letter, to the university’s academic Senate, Christ said she was “greatly relieved that we were able to bring this protest to a peaceful end.” But less than a day later, a group of anti-Israel demonstrators had taken over Anna Head Alumnae Hall. Mogulof insisted that the protesters in the occupied building were not the same ones that Christ had negotiated with.
“All the information we have [is] we don’t see the same people. We’ve spoken to them and they say we didn’t have anything to do with getting this started,” said Mogulof, who called the incident a “crime scene.” Police were dispatched there on Thursday night.
The leaders of the encampment took to Instagram to cheer on those who had occupied the building and called on supporters to go defend it from police. Berkeley’s graduate student chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which was also heavily involved in the encampment, expressed a “statement of solidarity” with those at the occupied building, and explicitly condemned Mogulof’s language, calling his separation of the two groups “inaccurate, untrue, and destructive.”
Christ, who has served as chancellor at Berkeley since 2017, has enjoyed a close relationship with the Bay Area Jewish community for much of that period. The Jewish Community Relations Council of the Bay Area honored her with their “Courageous Leadership Award” at the group’s 2020 gala.
She faced a different reaction from the group this week. After the Thursday meeting with the Jewish life advisory committee, the JCRC released a statement expressing “no confidence” in Christ’s leadership. “We call on the UC Board of Regents to take swift action amid this leadership vacuum to restore order to campus, and safety for Jewish campus life,” the statement said.
“She’s retiring at the end of this academic year, so she only has a few weeks left,” JCRC executive director Tyler Gregory told JI. “I think our statement would have been different if she weren’t leaving already.”

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Students and residents camp outside Northwestern University during a pro-Palestinian protest, expressing solidarity with Palestinians with banners in Evanston, Illinois, United States on April 27, 2024.
Good Wednesday morning.
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we look at how administrators are addressing protests, encampments and clashes on campus, and report on today’s expected vote on the Antisemitism Awareness Act. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Sheryl Sandberg, Ofir Akunis and Amy Schumer.
Secretary of State Tony Blinken is in Israel today for meetings with top officials, including President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Blinken’s visit to Israel follows a two-day trip through the region that included meetings in Jordan and Saudi Arabia aimed at discussing cease-fire negotiations and a day-after plan for Gaza. The trip comes as Israel prepares for a Rafah operation, following Netanyahu’s comments earlier this week that such a move was imminent, “with or without a deal” to reach a cease-fire and free the remaining hostages. More on Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s comments about a potential Rafah invasion below.
“Bringing the hostages home is at the heart of everything we’re trying to do,” Blinken tweeted earlier today. “We will not rest until every hostage — woman, man, young, old, civilian, soldier — is back with their families, where they belong.”
Thousands of miles away from high-level diplomatic conversations aimed at ending a monthslong war, American college administrators are conducting their own negotiations — with anti-Israel student protesters — in an effort to restore calm on campuses across the country in the waning weeks of the spring semester.
With final exams and commencements around the corner, this time of year is usually one of packed libraries, graduation celebrations and senioritis. Not so this year on a number of campuses, where student protesters from Columbia to Northwestern to the University of North Carolina to UCLA continued to sow chaos on campus, in some cases moving from the encampments they constructed last month to take over university buildings, as they did with the takeover of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall. In other cases students commandeered university property, as students at UNC did when they took down an American flag and hung a Palestinian flag in its place.
At UCLA, overnight protests turned violent, with clashes between pro- and anti-Israel student demonstrators breaking out in the area around the encampment. At Columbia, police with riot shields arrested dozens of protesters in Hamilton Hall, effectively bringing an end to the protesters’ siege of the administrative building. Overnight, the campus encampment was cleared after two weeks.
Administrators from Evanston, Ill., to New York to Chapel Hill, N.C., have varied in their approaches to the demonstrators and their demands. Read below for more on the concessions that administrations have made to campus protesters below.
Following Columbia protesters’ takeover of Hamilton Hall earlier this week, White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates released a statement condemning antisemitism and the extreme tactics of the students.
“President Biden has stood against repugnant, antisemitic smears and violent rhetoric his entire life. He condemns the use of the term ‘intifada,’ as he has the other tragic and dangerous hate speech displayed in recent days,” Bates told JI. “President Biden respects the right to free expression, but protests must be peaceful and lawful. Forcibly taking over buildings is not peaceful — it is wrong. And hate speech and hate symbols have no place in America.”
Bates did not say whether Biden planned to speak about the issue publicly, or to meet with Jewish students. In a proclamation announcing Jewish American Heritage Month, which begins today, Biden addressed the situation on many campuses.
“Here at home, too many Jews live with deep pain and fear from the ferocious surge of antisemitism — in our communities; at schools, places of worship, and colleges; and across social media. These acts are despicable and echo the worst chapters of human history,” Biden said in the proclamation.
Meanwhile, a new Harvard/Harris poll found that 80% of Americans support Israel in its war against Hamas; that number drops to 57% among the 18-24 year-olds surveyed. Those numbers are perhaps best reflected in a statement released by College Democrats of America on Wednesday, showing support for the encampments and anti-Israel protesters.
Today in Washington, Jewish students from Northwestern will meet with legislators to discuss their experiences on campus in recent days, ahead of a House vote on the Antisemitism Awareness Act. More on the legislation from JI’s Marc Rod below.
The events on campus are raising concerns among congressional lawmakers. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Tuesday called on Columbia administrators to “bring order to their Manhattan campus” and compared the behavior of Columbia’s student protesters to the “brand of aggressive lawlessness” shown by “the student Nazis of Weimar Germany.”
A day prior, a group of 21 pro-Israel House Democrats sent a letter blasting Columbia and accusing administrators of failing to break up the campus’ anti-Israel encampment. The legislators alleged that failing to do so constitutes a violation of Jewish students’ civil rights. The letter, led by Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Dan Goldman (D-NY), describes the encampment as “the breeding ground for antisemitic attacks on Jewish students, including hate speech, harassment, intimidation, and even threats of violence.”
Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) is preparing a measure to censure Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) for her comments last week referring to Jewish students as either “pro-genocide or anti-genocide”; the Minnesota congresswoman made the comments while visiting Columbia University.
House Education and Workforce Committee Chair Virginia Foxx (R-NC) invited the heads of Yale, UCLA and the University of Michigan to speak at a hearing later this month focused on “Calling for Accountability: Stopping Antisemitic College Chaos.”
Meanwhile, House and Senate Republicans’ campaign arms are planning to use footage that has emerged in recent days in ads targeting vulnerable Democrats who have not condemned the protests. Among those the NRSC and NRCC plan to target: Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Bob Casey (D-PA) and Jon Tester (D-MT), as well as Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), who is mounting a Senate bid in Michigan.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said yesterday at a Senate hearing that “what is happening on our campuses is abhorrent.”
“Hate has no place on our campuses and I’m very concerned with the reports of antisemitism,” Cardona said. He added that “unsafe, violent” protests and attacks on students are not protected by the First Amendment.
Cardona said that support for Hamas, the “from the river to the sea” slogan and calls for Jews to go back to Poland or be killed are “absolutely not” acceptable. He told lawmakers the department needs additional funding and investigators for its Office of Civil Rights to respond to the spike in incidents and investigations.
northwestern negotiations
Jewish leaders slam Northwestern agreement with anti-Israel protesters

After an anti-Israel encampment was erected at Northwestern University last week, the school’s president on Monday reached an agreement with protesters to end the encampment — acceding to several of their demands in the process, which drew strong condemnation from many in the Chicago and national Jewish communities, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports.
Message received: In a letter to university President Michael Schill, the Jewish United Fund — Chicago’s Jewish federation, which also oversees Northwestern Hillel — excoriated the administrator for embracing “those who flagrantly disrupted Northwestern academics and flouted those policies. The overwhelming majority of your Jewish students, faculty, staff, and alumni feel betrayed. They trusted an institution you lead and considered it home. You have violated that trust,” the letter said. “You certainly heard and acted generously towards those with loud, at times hateful voices. The lack of any reassuring message to our community has also been heard loud and clear.”
Resignation call: The Anti-Defamation League, StandWithUs and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law joined together to call for Schill’s resignation after the agreement was announced. “For days, protestors openly mocked and violated Northwestern’s codes of conduct and policies by erecting an encampment in which they fanned the flames of antisemitism and wreaked havoc on the entire university community,” the groups said in a statement. “Rather than hold them accountable – as he pledged he would – President Schill gave them a seat at the table and normalized their hatred against Jewish students.”
Notes from New England: Brown University administrators reached an agreement with encampment organizers to put the issue of divesting from Israel up for a vote when its largest governing body, the Corporation, meets in October.