The Biden-Harris Administration Has Failed to Combat Campus antisemitism

The Explosion of Campus Antisemitism After October 7

The violent protests and illegal encampments that severely disrupted more than 100 campuses in the spring of 2024 revealed a profound antisemitism problem in American higher education. For the last year, Jewish students have endured pervasive harassment at universities around the country as administrators have stood idle, apparently ambivalent to a coordinated effort to drive Jewish life underground.

• At least 1,854 antisemitic incidents were reported on college campuses in the 2023-24 school year (Hillel, 2024).
• In response to illegal encampments and menacing student behavior, schools moved classes online and canceled graduations—severely affecting students’ opportunities to learn and enjoy campus life.
• By the end of the spring term, more than 3,100 people had been arrested on U.S. campuses, problems that were concentrated at the wealthiest, most elite institutions (The New York Times, 2024).

Campus leaders that tolerate antisemitic harassment are not only failing to ensure that all their students have access to an environment conducive to learning—a gross moral and legal failing. They are also presiding over a campus that is inculcating hateful attitudes in their graduates, attitudes they will take into their communities, workplaces, and the families they build. Turning back the tide of Jew hatred that overtook elite American campuses in 2024 must be a national priority—for this administration and the next.

Government Levers to Combat Antisemitic Hate

U.S. taxpayers fund higher education lavishly through subsidized loans and Pell grants, billions in federal grants and contracts, and supremely favorable tax treatment. This gives the government broad authority and powerful enforcement levers to address the main drivers of campus antisemitism. The government can investigate universities that tolerate discrimination and harassment and require them to adopt better practices, it can scrutinize foreign gifts that fund antisemitic centers and faculty, and it can revoke the visas of foreign students at the center of many of the illegal campus encampments. Unfortunately, the Biden-Harris Administration has failed utterly to use these authorities to protect Jewish students. In fact, it has deliberately weakened accountability structures for universities that take foreign gifts from Gulf states.

1. Enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandates that “[n]o person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” Universities that fail to comply are subject to investigation by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Education and risk losing access to federal aid under Title IV of the Higher Education Act (Pell grants and federal student loans).

President Trump’s 2019 Executive Order on Combating Antisemitism clarified that Jews fall under the national origin classification because they have a common ethnic background and ancestry (Exec. Order No. 13899, 2019). The executive order encouraged executive agencies to consider the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism when identifying illegal discrimination in Title VI investigations.

Unfortunately, the Biden-Harris Administration’s Department of Education (ED) has done little to hold universities accountable and seems to be slow-walking open investigations.

• Instead of focusing on the epidemic of Jew hatred, the Biden-Harris Administration’s OCR has drawn a moral equivalency between antisemitism and Islamophobia and prioritized new efforts to investigate school boards that remove pornographic books from the library (Pidluzny, 2023).
• Ninety-two universities are currently under investigation at OCR for “national origin discrimination involving religion” (Office for Civil Rights, 2024).
• Some of those investigations have been open for four years, indicating a longstanding failure of resolve when the victims of campus discrimination and harassment are Jewish.
• The OCR resolution agreements that have been reached are profoundly disappointing and do not require universities to make meaningful changes that will improve the environment for Jewish students (Zionist Organization of America, 2024).

The Office for Civil Rights could do more by pursuing bold resolution agreements with universities that have failed their Jewish students. At a minimum, universities should be expected to bring the same urgency and commitment to fixing the problem that OCR would demand if the victims of unrelenting harassment were members of any other group. Concretely, universities could be asked to:

• Demonstrate that they have enforced their policies evenly when the victims of harassment are Jewish—in exactly the same way complaints of sex- and race-based harassment are handled;
• Wherever necessary, revise policies to ensure harassment targeting students or faculty based on national origin is not tolerated;
• Educate the campus about antidiscrimination and anti-harassment policies and take a zero-tolerance approach to enforcement—so that students understand what disciplinary measures the school will take in advance;
• Audit academic programs and DEI offices and the events they sponsor for anti-Israel bias;
• Develop better training programs to socialize foreign students to the norms of the campus on an ongoing basis;
• Ensure international recruiters are making every effort to avoid bringing pro-Hamas students onto campus;
• Audit foreign gifts and cease accepting funds from all foreign entities that seek to affect the content of academic programs, including by shaping how public affairs disciplines teach about Israel and the Middle East;
• Make leadership changes in university offices that have failed to act on complaints from the university’s Jewish students in the past; and
• Convene regular focus groups with Jewish students to gain a better understanding of their experience, the specific drivers of antisemitism on their campuses, and whether universities are improving over time.

In May, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act with a strong bipartisan vote (320-91; H.R. 6090). The measure would require the Department of Education’s OCR to “take into consideration the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA’s) working definition of antisemitism when reviewing or investigating complaints.” Unfortunately, the U.S. Senate leadership has refused to allow a vote on the bill in spite of the urgent need to improve enforcement at ED’s Office for Civil Rights when the victims of hateful harassment are Jewish.

2. Disclosure of Foreign Gifts and Department of Education Compliance Investigations

Foreign entities have funneled billions to U.S. universities for decades. Many gifts went undisclosed in recent administrations in violation of Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which requires universities to report gifts and contracts valued at more than $250,000. Noncompliance investigations during the Trump Administration provoked $6.5 billion in catch-up reporting for 2014–2019 (U.S. Department of Education, n.d.; Moore, 2023). It also revealed astonishing sums directed to elite U.S. universities from states with interests antithetical to ours, including $2.7 billion from Qatar and Qatari entities. These gifts fund many things, including radical faculty and academic centers that have, for decades, warped how campuses teach about Israel and the Middle East (Maeroff, 1978; Arnold, 2022). Those faculty and centers are one of the most important drivers of campus antisemitism and have been linked to higher levels of student-on-student harassment (Small et al., n.d.; AMCHA Initiative, 2017).

The Biden-Harris Administration has weakened foreign gift reporting by:

• Abandoning the outstanding investigations open at the end of the Trump Administration (Pidluzny, 2024);
• Ending a rulemaking that would have required universities to disclose the purpose of foreign gifts (U.S. Department of Education, 2020);
• Moving responsibility for enforcing disclosure requirements from the Office of the General Counsel to Federal Student Aid, which is obsessively focused on transferring student debt to taxpayers and ill-equipped to scrutinize foreign gifts and contracts; and
• Decommissioning the online accountability database that previously published disclosures to the department in an easily searchable format (Moore, 2024).

The House of Representatives passed Representative Michelle Steel’s (R-CA) DETERRENT Act last year (H.R. 5933). The measure, which garnered strong bipartisan support, would lower the disclosure threshold to $50,000, significantly improve transparency, and establish new penalties for noncompliance (Committee on Education & Workforce, n.d.). Unfortunately, almost a year later, Senate leadership has failed to act on the bill.

3. Revoking Visas of Pro-Hamas College Students

Foreign students studying on nonimmigrant visas have been at the center of the pro-Hamas encampments and violent demonstrations. It only takes a small number of radical students and the hateful student groups they lead to poison the campus environment against Jewish students and visiting Israelis.

Students who have espoused support for terrorism or otherwise participated in illegal encampments or who have assaulted other students have, in many cases, violated the terms of their student visas (Wolf, 2024).

• The State Department has broad authority to revoke student visas where those holding them have triggered grounds of inadmissibility by (i) espousing support for terrorism or providing material support to terrorist organizations, (ii) committing crimes that involve moral turpitude, (iii) adversely affecting U.S. foreign policy objectives, or (iv) making factual misrepresentations in the visa application process.
• The Department of Homeland Security can investigate foreign students who have been arrested for their participation in violent and illegal encampments and protests and, where warranted, make a finding that they are inadmissible. Once the State Department revokes those visas, the students who are poisoning U.S. campuses against Jewish students could be a top priority for removal by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Unfortunately, the Biden-Harris Administration has shown no willingness to exercise this authority. Action to remove—or simply to revoke the visas of—even a small number of the worst offenders would have a profound effect by signaling to all students that there are consequences for illegal activity that foments campus Jew hatred. As long as this egregious abdication of responsibility persists, however, the harassment of Jewish students is likely to continue on U.S. campuses.

Conclusion

The Biden-Harris Administration has powerful tools at its disposal to force universities to do more to protect Jewish students from discrimination and harassment. Its inaction on campus antisemitism not only places Jewish students in harm’s way; it also sends a message that Jew hatred is acceptable in the places we train tomorrow’s leaders. The next administration will have an opportunity to use the enforcement levers discussed in this brief to build a much better record. The stakes are high because the attitudes college graduates learn on campus today will radiate through American society for years and decades to come.