Across four different New Jersey campuses, Rutgers leadership ‘appear not to have evaluated whether reported or investigated harassment created a hostile environment for such students,’ investigators wrote.

By Andrew Lapin, JTA

Rutgers University likely failed to properly protect Jewish, Israeli and pro-Palestinian students from a hostile environment after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack that launched the war in Gaza, according to a new Title VI resolution agreement reached between the school and the U.S. Department of Education.

The school must review its anti-discrimination policies, the agreement says.

The agreement is the latest in a flurry of such deals to be reached with schools involving allegations of antisemitic harassment in the waning weeks of the Biden administration.

The administration spent the better part of the last year immersed in dozens of antisemitism-related Title VI campus cases.

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to shutter the Department of Education, but has also promised a tougher line against universities for fostering antisemitism.

If the department is closed, responsibility for enforcement of Title VI, which prohibits discrimination at federally-funded institutions, would move elsewhere, possibly to the Justice Department.

The Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights announced in its report on Rutgers that “The university likely operated a hostile environment based on national origin/shared ancestry in university programs or activities without redress,” adding that the school “subjected some students to discriminatory different treatment based on national origin.”

At Rutgers, federal investigators reviewed more than 400 reported cases of hostile environments for students during the 2023-24 academic year, 293 of which involved allegations of antisemitic or anti-Israel behavior.

These included social media threats made by students against members of AEPi, a Jewish fraternity, culminating in the fraternity’s members being egged; a professor allegedly supporting Hamas on social media; and Jewish students fleeing from a meeting with the school president after protesters broke out in anti-Zionist chants.

Across four different New Jersey campuses, Rutgers leadership “appear not to have evaluated whether reported or investigated harassment created a hostile environment for such students,” investigators wrote.

They added that university administrators “appear not to have taken effective action in response to the existence of a likely hostile environment,” and faulted the school for addressing the reported incidents individually, instead of examining their cumulative effect on campus.

Rutgers’ New Brunswick campus has the second-highest population of Jewish students of any public university in the country, according to Hillel International, which estimates its Jewish student body at more than 6,400 out of 36,357 total undergrads.

Last year hundreds of Jewish Rutgers students and staff decried what they described as an intimidating environment for Jews in an open letter.

Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway, who testified before Congress about his handling of campus antisemitism, has said he plans to step down at the end of this academic year. Congress has also launched a probe into the school’s handling of antisemitism.

As part of its agreement, the school agreed to similar steps as others before it: Additional Title VI training for staff and campus police, a thorough review of all student conduct violations from the previous academic year, and a promise to “conduct listening sessions” and develop a campus climate assessment.

Rutgers this summer tried to incorporate the handling of protests into its new-student orientation sessions, but those sessions were themselves targeted by pro-Palestinian protests.

For the proposed listening sessions, the agreement names Rutgers Hillel and the school’s Jewish law student association — the same one pro-Palestinian students accused of doxing them — as relevant “affinity groups” to the campus Jewish community.

Rutgers currently participates in Hillel-led antisemitism training seminars; the school also previously announced an internal antisemitism task force, but unlike other universities it has yet to release a report.

In December 2023, the school became one of a long list of universities to suspend its chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine; it re-upped the group’s suspension in August.

The agreement was praised by the New Jersey chapter of the American Jewish Committee, whose director, Rabbi David Levy, said the level of complaints against Rutgers was “abhorrent and unacceptable.”

“Rutgers must now make an unequivocal commitment to meaningful reform, which can be achieved without infringing on academic freedom and the right to assemble and protest,” Levy said in a statement.

“The Rutgers community stands firmly against discrimination and harassment in all its forms, and the university will always strive to strengthen the policies and practices that protect our students, faculty, and staff,” a spokesperson for the university told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a statement. “Rutgers is grateful to the Office of Civil Rights for its guidance.”

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The universities have agreed to review or re-open investigations of alleged Jew hatred on campus and report to OCR about the actions they’ve taken to remedy the problem.

By Andrew Bernard, JNS

The U.S. Department of Education released a pair of agreements on Monday with the University of Michigan and the City University of New York to address their failure to protect the civil rights of Jewish students.

The resolution agreements are the outcome of civil rights investigations by the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights into complaints that the universities violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by allowing the creation of a hostile environment for Jewish students.

“In OCR’s review of university documentation of 75 reports the university received alleging shared ancestry harassment and/or discrimination from the 2022-23 school year through February 2024, OCR found no evidence that the university complied with its Title VI requirements,” the Department of Education stated of its investigation of University of Michigan.

Title VI prohibits discrimination based on “race, color or national origin,” and the Education Department notes that bias based on “shared ancestry” includes religion.

As part of the resolution agreements, the universities have agreed to review or re-open investigations of alleged Jew-hatred on campus and report to OCR about the actions they’ve taken to remedy the problem.

Rabbi Asher Lopatin, director of community relations at the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor, told JNS that the agreements are a good first step, but the universities need to do more to directly address antisemitism on campus, including unsanctioned anti-Israel protest encampments.

“They have policies that are in place,” Lopatin said. “This encampment was against the rules. I don’t know why they have to re-examine their policies. They just have to follow through on their policies.”

“I think the university believes that if they ignore what’s going on, it’ll go away,” Lopatin told JNS. “That’s never a good policy, usually, and I don’t think it’s going to happen this time.”

Universities across the country have been at the forefront of the explosion of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel discrimination since Oct. 7, and many have struggled to deal with mass anti-Israel demonstrations that many Jewish and Israeli students allege have created a hostile environment and violated their civil rights.

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona addressed that wider wave of discrimination on college campuses since Oct. 7 in a statement on the resolution of the CUNY and Michigan investigations.

“Sadly, we have witnessed a series of deeply concerning incidents in recent months,” Cardona stated. “There’s no question that this is a challenging moment for school communities across the country.”

One of the challenges that schools have faced is drawing the line between discriminatory behavior and protected free speech, an issue that repeatedly comes up in complaint letters to universities alleging discrimination.

“The complainant stated that shortly after the beginning of each of the two class sessions, a group of students in attendance changed their Zoom backgrounds to the Palestinian flag and their visible screen names to ‘Free Palestine: Decolonize’ and read aloud a statement ‘defaming and demonizing Israel through false accusations of colonization, ethnic cleansing, genocide and more,’” the CUNY letter says.

CUNY’s Hunter College took no action as it concluded that the statement was protected free speech, according to the complaint.

Cardona stated that the Department of Education would continue to pursue solutions in the dozens of other open investigations into discrimination at universities across the country.

“The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights continues to hold schools accountable for compliance with civil rights standards, including by investigating allegations of discrimination or harassment based on shared Jewish ancestry and shared Palestinian or Muslim ancestry,” Cardona added.

The Education Department lists 111 open Title VI investigations against schools and educational districts that receive federal funding, based on what it calls “discrimination involving shared ancestry.”

(Another listing on the department’s website identifies 149 open probes of schools under Title VI based on “national origin discrimination involving religion.”)

Lopatin told JNS that the urge to lump in the condemnation of anti-Muslim or anti-Palestinian bigotry, including in Monday’s resolution disagreements, risks missing the acute threat that currently faces Jews.

“I’m very much against saying it’s all the same,” Lopatin said. “It gets into this ‘All Lives Matter’ thing. This is a time to say Jewish lives matter.”

“There was a time when we had to say, ‘Black Lives Matter,’ because there was a particular issue of discrimination against African Americans, and now is a time where people have to say ‘Jewish Lives Matter,’” he added. “The emphasis has to be that it’s become a hostile environment for many Jews on campus.”

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