By Susan B. Tuchman, Esq. and Morton A. Klein
(NOVEMBER 27, 2021 / JPOST) If you’re worried about rising campus antisemitism and its impact on young Jews, you’ll be alarmed to know that the one federal agency tasked with addressing this problem – the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) – has spent years dragging its feet. It’s time for OCR to promptly and vigorously protect Jewish students’ legal right to a campus environment that’s physically and psychologically safe.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits racial and ethnic discrimination in federally funded programs, which includes all public and almost all private universities. Under Title VI, a school must promptly and effectively address antisemitic harassment and prevent it from recurring, or risk losing its federal funding.
The antisemitic hostility on campus is frightening; the results of a recent Anti-Defamation League/Hillel International survey bear that out. Some 43% of Jewish college students experienced and/or witnessed antisemitic activity in the past year, and most who experience antisemitism don’t report it.
This should set off alarm bells at OCR. But several student-supported Title VI cases are stagnating. One, against Rutgers University, has been sitting at the agency for more than 10 years, and we have not been able to get OCR even to respond to our repeated requests for information about the case’s status.
The Zionist Organization of America filed its complaint against Rutgers in 2011. After we waited three years for a decision, OCR closed the case in 2014 for insufficient evidence. Four years later, OCR finally accepted the ZOA’s appeal, vacating its earlier decision and reopening the case, to determine whether a hostile environment had existed at Rutgers in 2011 and exists today.
