On Friday, the Trump administration announced it was canceling approximately $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University because of what the Department of Education called “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” The decision is rich in irony, given the Trump administration’s promotion of antisemitism.
I am not referring to Elon Musk’s Nazi-adjacent “hand gestures,” or Vice President JD Vance’s speech supporting Germany’s far-right AfD party, or the president’s decision to grant clemency to openly antisemitic perpetrators of the Jan. 6 riots — as alarming as all those actions were. Rather, even as the administration blasts Columbia for failing “to protect students from anti-Semitic harassment,” it is simultaneously pushing colleges and universities to gut the programs and policies they use to fight antisemitism and other forms of discrimination.
Already, over 250 schools in 36 states have taken steps to change or dismantle some of their DEI programs.
According to the Education Department, the administration is canceling grants to Columbia “in light of ongoing investigations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.” Title VI prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin in federally funded institutions. Since 2004, the Department of Education has extended Title VI protections to Jews, Muslims and other religious groups that “face discrimination on the basis of shared ethnic characteristics.”
In the weeks and months after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, the Department of Education in President Joe Biden’s administration opened dozens of Title VI investigations into antisemitism. These probes seek to determine whether students have faced a hostile environment because of their membership in the law’s protected categories. In some cases, a school may be found responsible for creating such an environment, but even absent that, schools that fail to ameliorate these environments stand in potential violation of Title VI.
What tools can schools use to fix hostile campus climates? The same ones that President Donald Trump’s Department of Education have now branded toxic and impermissible according to a “Dear Colleague Letter” and a subsequent FAQ issued last month.
The two documents amount to a wholesale assault on the programs and policies schools have created over the last half-century to comply with Title VI. In the letter, acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor characterizes universities as the source of “pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences” and pledges that the Education Department will no longer tolerate any explicit or implicit program that “treats a person of one race differently than it treats another person because of that person’s race.” Pointing to the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling that struck down racial preference in admissions, Trainor takes particular aim at DEI programs as “a shameful echo of a darker period in this country’s history” and slams discussions of “systemic and structural racism” themselves as agents of discrimination.
New offices to safeguard Jewish students who believe they are victims of antisemitism; mandatory training programs for staff or students to gain sensitivity about antisemitism; anti-bias response teams installed to handle antisemitism complaints: All of these efforts, according to the letter and FAQ, would appear impermissible.
The Trump White House has put schools in a ‘can’t win’ situation.
Trainor’s citation of the Supreme Court is tendentious at best. The court’s decision was limited to admissions, and anti-discrimination initiatives remain valid and are even required under both federal law and Supreme Court precedent. But scared of reprisals to come, many institutions may feel they have no choice but to comply. Already, over 250 schools in 36 states including the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, and the University of North Carolina have taken steps to change or dismantle some of their DEI programs.
In other words, in an attempt to abide by the government’s directive, colleges and universities are cutting the offices and programs that hosted many of their proactive efforts to address antisemitism. And as the cancelation of Columbia’s grants shows, not only is the Trump administration prohibiting schools from using the tools many instituted at the behest of Title VI to fight antisemitism, it is also putting them on notice that they will be penalized for failing to act.
The Trump White House has put schools in a “can’t win” situation. Schools that are rushing to shutter DEI programs can later be investigated for violating Title VI, yet those that preserve their programs or create new ones to fight discrimination can also be accused of violating Education Department guidelines. Taken together, Title VI will surely be hollowed out, as the Trump administration plans to abolish the Department of Education and endorses policies to criminalize student protest and free expression.
Make no mistake, the Trump administration is using antisemitism as an excuse to obliterate Title VI, undermine civil rights and incapacitate higher education. If Jewish safety were the point, then the constructive efforts to improve universities’ responses to incidents and allegations of antisemitism would be sacrosanct. If Jewish safety mattered, our government would seek to strengthen universities where Americans can learn about the past and think about how to create a better future, and our elected officials would fight to preserve democracy. American Jews may disagree about the best way to combat antisemitism, but there should be no disagreement from our elected officials that American Jews are American and deserve equal protection — no more and no less.