On February 27, Columbia University announced that it had reached an agreement with the StandWithUS Center for Legal Justice, Students Against Antisemitism Inc. and a number of Columbia students. The agreement provided for an out-of-court settlement of a lawsuit alleging that Columbia violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act during a student camp protesting Israel’s war in Gaza. The lawsuit specifically alleged that the university failed to protect Jewish students from harassment, threats and physical harm, resulting in a “second-class education.”
As part of this agreement, Columbia committed to “further planning on antisemitism and scholarships for students who have worked, studied or lived in Israel.” The release of information about the confidential settlement agreement follows Columbia’s July 2025 formal acceptance of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism for the work of its Office of Institutional Equity and its announcement, earlier in February, of recommended changes to its curriculum, including new investments in Israeli studies.
The planned curriculum changes and investment in faculty positions follow a review of the Middle East curriculum that Columbia agreed to as part of its July 2025 deal to end a deal with the Trump administration over alleged anti-Semitism in schools.
Somehow, the latest fix never happened. It is perhaps the only context in which foreign ties form a valid basis for positive discrimination in the United States today. However, in some ways, this solution represents a wider national pattern in which the abuse of human rights law on antisemitism has led to forcing universities to accept a controversial and biased definition of antisemitism (such as that of the IHRA) and to change both their academic curriculum and their mandatory non-discrimination training on the basis of that definition.
A recent joint report by the Middle East Studies Association and the American Association of University Professors, “Racism Against Dissenters: The Weaponization of Civil Rights Law to Repress Campus Speech on Palestine,” shows that the effort to weaponize civil rights law against critics of Israel dates back to at least 2004. That year, the Department of Education commissioned the State Office of Education—a State Office for Civil Rights with the primary mission of the Department of Education responsible for the work of the Civil Rights Office. and other civil rights provisions in educational institutions—issued a Dear Colleague letter redefining civil rights law to protect religious groups against discrimination “on the basis of shared racial characteristics.”
This was a departure from the text of Title VI, which specifically prohibited discrimination based on “race, color, or national origin.” As the MESA-AAUP report notes, DCL successfully brought antitrust claims under Title VI.
Another early development was the American Commission on Civil Rights holding a 2005 forum on “Campus Anti-Semitism.” Both the 2004 DCL and the 2005 forum were chaired by Kenneth L. Marcus, a civil rights attorney and pro-Israel activist who was the 2004 head of OCR and the 2005 staff director of the US Commission on Human Rights.
It was in this context, according to the MESA-AAUP report, that there was the first real attempt to use Title VI to “police the Middle East to study programs and eliminate speech critical of Israel on campus.” In 2004, the Zionist Organization of America filed a complaint with the OCR against the University of California, Irvine, alleging that student activists who support Palestinian rights had created a hostile learning environment for Jewish students. OCR closed the investigation in 2007 without finding any human rights violations by the university.
Such efforts by ZOA, Marcus and others were unsuccessful at first. According to the MESA-AAUP report, available data shows that between October 2004 and Oct. 6, 2023, the Department of Education conducted the 24th anti-law enforcement investigation at colleges and universities in general. After the Hamas attack on October 7, the Department of Education of the Biden administration opened 25 new investigations into alleged anti-Semitism in the remaining months of 2023 – which exceeds the total of less than three months in the last two decades. In his last year in office, in 2024, the Biden administration launched 39 such investigations into colleges and universities.
This trend continued apace during the first year of the Trump administration. By the end of September 2025, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights had opened a new Title VI 29 investigation into alleged anti-Semitism on campuses. On top of this, as the MESA-AAUP report explains, the creation of the new Multiagency Task Force to Combat Antisemitism “brought together the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services to launch their own Title VI investigation of schools alongside the Department of Education.” The report lists nine additional investigations of colleges and universities opened by the DOJ, HHS or task force in 2025, making the total number of new investigations, from September 30, 2025, to 38.
How can we make sense of such an explosion of Title VI antisemitism investigations? The MESA-AAUP report carefully documents important trends that can help us answer that question. First, the majority (at least 78 percent) of these investigations were in response to complaints filed by off-campus pro-Israel advocacy groups and human rights groups, some of which are off-campus, these groups represent the plaintiffs or act as plaintiffs themselves.
In addition, of the 102 objection complaints sent to the Department of Education and analyzed in the MESA-AAUP report, all but one focused on speech criticizing Israel: “Of these,” the report said, “79 percent contained allegations of objection that simply described criticism of Israel or Zionism without reference to Jews or Judaism; at least 50 percent of the complaints. only of such criticism.”
The implications of such results are significant. They go beyond the repression of student activists who oppose Israeli policies towards the Palestinians. At the time in question, student activists were criticizing Israel in a situation where the US human rights organization, Human Rights Watch, concluded that Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians amounted to the crime of apartheid and the United Nations Commission of Inquiry ruled that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Attributing a racist motive to those who criticize Israel under these circumstances narrows freedom of speech and association in the United States in a very troubling way.
Recent media reports claim that the Democratic National Committee’s “autopsy” of the 2024 election found that the Biden administration’s support for Israel in its war on Gaza played a major role in Kamala Harris’ loss. A large part of that support involved the social demonization and suppression of student activist centers opposed to Israel’s war on Gaza and US support for it. Suppressing student speech and activism that reflects criticism of Israel that is widely shared in the American political establishment means using non-discrimination law to silence political debate in this country.
As the MESA-AAUP report documents, the Biden administration helped realize what has been a more than two-decade campaign by pro-Israel actors to reinterpret Title VI to expand the definition in such a way that discrimination laws can be used to ban and punish criticism of Israel on campuses. So the Biden administration is allowing civil rights law to become one of the most powerful legal tools in the suppression of institutional speech. The Trump administration is now using that tool to advance a broad right-wing agenda in higher education: cutting research funding, limiting academic freedom, undermining free speech and reshaping institutional politics. As the report states, “In most cases, the Task Force [to Combat Antisemitism] he has used anti-Semitism as a boundary to make a series of other demands that reflect the right view of higher education.”
Nowhere is this more clear than in the accompanying statistics of the MESA-AAUP report that highlights. The weaponization of civil rights law in the face of heightened antisemitism helped drive the dismissal of “traditional methods of civil rights enforcement in higher education.” The report says that the number of antisemitism investigations launched at colleges and universities by the Biden administration between October 7, 2023, and the end of 2024, over 60 years, exceeded the 38 investigations opened “due to all other types of racial harassment combined” – while “the Trump administration seems to have stopped racial investigations.”
In addition, the investigation of antisemitism “generates a new system of government surveillance and monitoring of institutional speech.” To resolve antisemitism complaints and investigations, more than 20 colleges have entered into agreements to share internal information that they would not be required by law to share with the government, including the identities (and potentially other information) of students, faculty and staff named in internal complaints and disciplinary proceedings, regardless of the final results of those proceedings.
The MESA-AAUP report provides a definitive archive of the past and present of this effort to use civil rights law to campaign against colleges and universities across the country. By showing how the federal government has legalized the long-declared “Palestinian exception” to free speech, it also exposes the extent to which any exception is a violation of the law. The Biden and Trump administrations have institutionalized a strategy that uses the logic and language of civil rights to reshape higher education in ways that run counter to the original intent of protecting rights, and increasingly in ways that promote forms of authoritarian oppression.
