On Feb. 27, Columbia University announced it had reached an agreement with StandWithUS Center for Legal Justice, Students Against Antisemitism Inc. and a number of Columbia students. The agreement provided for an out-of-court settlement to a lawsuit claiming that Columbia had violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act during the student encampment protesting the Israeli war on Gaza. The lawsuit specifically alleged that the university failed to protect Jewish students from harassment, threats and physical danger, resulting in a “second-class education.”
As part of the settlement, Columbia committed to “additional programming 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 adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance 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 Israel studies.
The planned curricular changes and investments in faculty positions follow a review of Middle East studies programs that Columbia agreed to as part of its July 2025 settlement agreement with the Trump administration over alleged antisemitism on campus.
In some ways, the most recent settlement is unprecedented. It is perhaps the only context where ties to a foreign country form a permissible basis for positive discrimination in the United States today. Yet in other ways, the settlement is representative of a broader national pattern in which misuse of civil rights law around antisemitism has resulted in coercing universities to adopt a contested and tendentious definition of antisemitism (like that of the IHRA) and alter both their academic curricula and their compulsory antidiscrimination training on the basis of that definition.
A recent joint report by the Middle East Studies Association and the American Association of University Professors, “Discriminating Against Dissent: The Weaponization of Civil Rights Law to Repress Campus Speech on Palestine,” demonstrates that the effort to weaponize civil rights law against critics of Israel dates back to at least 2004. That year, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights—which is the primary government body tasked with enforcing Title VI and other civil rights provisions in educational institutions—issued a Dear Colleague letter reinterpreting federal civil rights law to protect religious groups when they face discrimination “on the basis of shared ethnic characteristics.”
This was a departure from the text of Title VI, which specifically outlawed discrimination on the basis of “race, color, or national origin.” As the MESA-AAUP report notes, the DCL effectively brought antisemitism claims under the purview of Title VI.
Another early development was the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights holding a 2005 briefing on “Campus Anti-Semitism.” Both the 2004 DCL and the 2005 briefing were spearheaded by Kenneth L. Marcus, a conservative movement lawyer and pro-Israel activist who was head of the OCR in 2004 and staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 2005.
It was in this context, according to the MESA-AAUP report, that there was the first real attempt to use Title VI to “police Middle East studies programs and crack down on 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 activism in support of Palestinian rights had created a hostile learning environment for Jewish students. The OCR closed the investigation in 2007 without a finding of a civil rights law violation by the university.
Such attempts by the ZOA, Marcus and others proved unsuccessful at first. According to the MESA-AAUP report, available data indicates that between October 2004 and Oct. 6, 2023, the Department of Education conducted 24 antisemitism investigations into colleges and universities in total. After the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, the Biden administration’s Department of Education opened 25 new investigations into allegations of antisemitism in the remaining months of 2023—exceeding in less than three months the total from the prior two decades. In its last year in office, 2024, the Biden administration launched 39 such investigations into colleges and universities.
The trend continued apace during the first year of the Trump administration. By the end of September 2025, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights had opened 29 new Title VI investigations of alleged antisemitism on campuses. On top of this, as the MESA-AAUP report explains, the creation of a new multiagency Task Force to Combat Antisemitism “mobilized the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services to launch their own Title VI investigations of schools alongside the Department of Education.” The report documents nine additional investigations into colleges and universities opened by DOJ, HHS or the task force in 2025, bringing the total of new investigations, as of Sept. 30, 2025, to 38.
How can we make sense of such an explosion of Title VI antisemitism investigations? The MESA-AAUP report meticulously documents important trends that can help us answer that question. First, the vast majority (at least 78 percent) of these investigations have been in response to complaints filed by off-campus pro-Israel and conservative advocacy groups, some of which lack any campus presence, with these groups either representing the complainants or acting as the complainants themselves.
Moreover, of the 102 antisemitism complaints sent to the Department of Education and analyzed in the MESA-AAUP report, all but one focused on speech critical of Israel: “Of these,” the report states, “79 percent contain allegations of antisemitism that simply describe criticisms of Israel or Zionism with no reference to Jews or Judaism; at least 50 percent of complaints consist solely of such criticism.”
The implications of such findings are significant. They extend well beyond the suppression of student activism in opposition to Israeli policies toward Palestinians. During the period in question, student activists were criticizing Israel in a context in which a premier U.S. human rights organization, Human Rights Watch, concluded that Israeli policies toward Palestinians amounted to the crime of apartheid and a United Nations Commission of Inquiry determined that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. To attribute discriminatory intent to those who criticize Israel under these circumstances circumscribes freedom of speech and association in the United States in a deeply 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 large role in Kamala Harris’s loss. A big part of that support involved the public demonization and institutional repression of student activism opposing the Israeli war on Gaza and U.S. support for it. Repressing student speech and activism that reflects criticisms of Israel so widely shared in the U.S. body politic means using antidiscrimination law to silence political debate in this country.
As the MESA-AAUP report documents, the Biden administration helped realize what had been more than a two-decade-long campaign by pro-Israel actors to reinterpret Title VI to broaden the definition in such a way that antidiscrimination laws could be used to deter and punish criticism of Israel on campuses. Thus the Biden administration allowed civil rights law to become one of the most potent legal tools in the repression of campus speech. The Trump administration is now wielding that tool to advance a broader far-right agenda in higher education: cutting off research funds, curtailing academic freedom, undermining free speech and reshaping the terms of campus politics. As the report states, “In several high-profile cases, the Task Force [to Combat Antisemitism] has used antisemitism as a wedge in order to make a series of other demands reflecting a right-wing vision for higher education.”
Nowhere is this clearer than in the corollary statistics the MESA-AAUP report highlights. The weaponization of civil rights law around expanded notions of antisemitism has facilitated the displacement of “traditional forms of civil rights enforcement in higher education.” The report states that the number of antisemitism investigations launched into colleges and universities by the Biden administration between Oct. 7, 2023, and the end of 2024, at more than 60, exceeded the 38 investigations opened “for all other types of racial harassment combined”—while “the Trump administration appears to have halted racial harassment investigations altogether.”
Furthermore, antisemitism investigations are “producing a new system of government surveillance and monitoring of campus speech.” To settle antisemitism complaints and investigations, more than 20 colleges have entered into agreements to share internal data they otherwise would not be legally required to share with the government, including the identity (and potentially other information) of students, faculty and staff who have been named in internal complaints and disciplinary processes, irrespective of what the final outcomes of those processes were.
The MESA-AAUP report offers the definitive archive of the past and present of this effort to use civil rights law to wage a campaign against colleges and universities across the country. By demonstrating how the federal government has formalized the long-decried “Palestine exception” to free speech, it also lays bare the degree to which any such exception swallows the rule. The Biden and Trump administrations have institutionalized a strategy that instrumentalizes the logic and language of civil rights to reshape higher education in ways inimical to the original purpose of protecting rights, and increasingly in ways that instead advance forms of authoritarian repression.
Ziad Abu-Rish is associate professor of human rights and Middle East studies at Bard College. He is a member of the Middle East Studies Association’s Committee on Academic Freedom.
