Nearly a week after President Trump signed an executive order aimed at combating campus antisemitism, the Education Department opened civil rights investigations into five colleges “where widespread antisemitic harassment has been reported.”
The investigations, announced Monday, include Columbia University; Northwestern University; Portland State University; the University of California, Berkeley; and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and will likely offer some key insights into how the department is planning to address campus antisemitism. The Trump administration has signaled it would take a harder line on colleges that don’t, in its view, sufficiently protect Jewish students’ civil rights.
“Today, the Department is putting universities, colleges, and K-12 schools on notice: this administration will not tolerate continued institutional indifference to the wellbeing of Jewish students on American campuses, nor will it stand by idly if universities fail to combat Jew hatred and the unlawful harassment and violence it animates,” said Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights, in a statement.
Republicans and current Trump administration officials have critically described the Biden administration’s handling of the issue as “toothless.” And as part of his broader campaign to crack down on campus antisemitism, Trump promised to take accreditation away from any institution that violated a student’s civil rights.
Although the antisemitism order, which was signed last Wednesday, doesn’t implicate a college’s accreditation status, the president did command the Department of Justice to crack down on campus protests. He also directed the Education Department to review pending and closed antisemitism investigations and declared that so-called pro-Hamas activists holding student visas should be deported from the country.
Jewish advocates and some faculty members who have watched tensions over the Israel-Hamas war play out on college campuses since Oct. 7, 2023, say the order is necessary. But for free speech groups and many other college and university leaders, the order raises a number of concerns about academic freedom, the safety of international students and scholars who support Palestine, and even potential financial penalties.
Like many of the executive orders Trump has signed so far, the guidance on antisemitism is broad and leaves many questions unanswered. Seth Gilbertson, a partner at Bond, Schoeneck & King, PLLC, who specializes in higher education, said it will likely force college and university leaders to walk a fine line between scaremongering and practical concern.
“Utilizing immigration law to address what, in some cases, may be seen as protected activity under First Amendment and academic freedom principles hasn’t been done yet,” he said. “So while not being alarmist, we want to be prepared for various requests, actions, directives, etc., and think through how an institution is going to respond, not only when it is directed to do something, but when one of its peer institutions is.”
Institutions will learn more as the Education Department and other agencies continue to carry out the order, he added. For instance, the Justice Department announced Monday that it will be forming a multi-agency antisemitism task force and said the group’s “first priority will be to root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses.”
In the meantime, all administrators have to go on is the 800-word order and a fact sheet, which state that there will be “vigorous” steps taken “using all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.”
Republicans on the Hill are echoing the same tone. Dr. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican and chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, re-introduced the Protecting Students on Campus Act last month, empowering students to file civil rights complaints if they experience violence or harassment due to their heritage. He also pointed to combating antisemitism as a key priority in his opening remarks to the HELP Committee that same day.
“The threats and attacks against Jewish students since Oct. 7 are despicable. No one should fear for their safety at school because of who they are,” Cassidy said in a news release. “This bipartisan bill holds universities accountable to address discrimination and maintain a safe learning environment for all students.”
‘Open Questions’
Although the executive order is broad in scope, Gilbertson said there are four key sections he will be paying close attention to. Two of the order’s provisions came as “no big surprise,” he said, but the other two were far less expected.
In an unexpected move, Trump ordered the Department of Justice to increase its involvement in campus civil rights complaints, many of which involve pro-Palestinian protesters, by turning them from civil cases into criminal ones. He does so by invoking a law known as the Conspiracy Against Rights statute, which says that when two or more individuals conspire to suppress the civil rights of someone else, it can lead to criminal charges, and penalties can include time in prison.
“To see that invoked with regard to campus protest activity, not all of which, but much of which has been peaceful, is probably going to alarm some,” Gilbertson said.
In another provision, the president extends the criminalization of recent protests by saying students and scholars who are in the U.S. on a visa and support Palestine, and potentially Hamas, should be deported. He does so using a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that says that any international individual who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization” can be removed from the country. The U.S. government considers Hamas a terrorist organization.
“This particular statute is going to be one of the most concerning pieces for some,” Gilbertson said. “Applying this kind of statute specifically to campus protest activity, that’s new,” and the order suggests that colleges may even be asked to become “partners with federal enforcement authorities in identifying potential members of their communities who may be subject to removal.”
To some extent, the exact implications will remain unclear until the Justice Department takes action for the first time, he added, but at the same time, Trump’s rhetoric so far offers an indicator of what to expect.
“When the president of the United States is essentially directing the attorney general to employ ‘appropriate civil rights enforcement authorities,’ it seems unlikely to me that the attorney general is going to take that directive lightly,” he said. “How aggressively that will be used, how many times that will be used and in what types of cases that will be used? Those are all open questions. But it would surprise me if it’s not used at all.”
Other provisions in the order raise some concerns but were expected. One reaffirms that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on shared ancestry, applies to antisemitism and specifies that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism is Trump’s preferred determinant. The other instructs the Department of Education to create a report on current activities and investigations surrounding antisemitism so that the president can give further directions on how to move forward.
Gilbertson said it is not abnormal for a new administration to rethink its approach to enforcing federal civil rights law, from how it interprets the statute to what issues it prioritizes. What is uncertain, he said, is exactly how the Trump administration’s approach to antisemitism complaints and investigations at universities will differ from the Biden administration, which opened dozens of inquiries into allegations at colleges. In nearly all of the publicly resolved investigations, the Biden administration said the universities’ responses didn’t fully comply with the requirements under federal law.
“We normally expect there to be changes,” he said. “To be frank, I don’t think anybody saw the Biden administration as being soft on these complaints … And so what does an even harder line look like?” The million-dollar question, Gilbertson added, will be whether the Trump administration decides to fine institutions or cut colleges off from federal financial aid, which would be an unprecedented step.
Reactions Fall on Religious Lines
Some Jewish advocates and faculty members who have closely analyzed their colleges’ response to antisemitism post–Oct. 7 say Trump’s order is a positive use of executive power.
Kenneth Marcus, founder of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights, a Jewish organization, described the order as “Hanukkah in January.”
“Everything that we’ve asked for when it comes to addressing campus antisemitism is being provided and provided quickly,” he said. “The Education Department can initiate its own investigations of campus antisemitism. It can reopen old investigations. And it can more forcefully address the cases that are currently pending.”
Or Hen, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-founder of Kalaniyot, a faculty-led initiative focused on deepening ties between MIT and Israeli researchers, said that he has witnessed systemic failures in discipline for protesters and protection for Jewish students.
“Universities … have demonstrated a striking inability to handle Title VI complaints—often to the point of losing control of their own campuses and accepting repeated violations of their codes of conduct,” he said. “Addressing such an extreme and unprecedented challenge requires an equally decisive and unprecedented response. Under normal circumstances, I would oppose federal intervention in university governance. However, given the severity of this crisis and universities’ failure to address it internally, such action has become necessary.”
But others, including Muslim advocacy groups and free speech organizations, condemn the order and the way it broadly targets all protesters by calling them “Hamas sympathizers.”
Trump’s order is “a dishonest, overbroad and unenforceable attempt to smear college students who protested against the Israeli government’s genocidal war on Gaza in overwhelmingly peaceful ways,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations wrote in a news release. “The broad language of the order appears to threaten deportation based on unprovable ideological tests and for mere participation in any anti-genocide protests, which the order’s fact sheet broadly mischaracterizes as ‘pro-jihadist,’ ‘violent’ and ‘antisemitic.’”
In a statement released shortly before the order was signed, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a First Amendment advocacy group, said that Trump’s orders and their intention to filter out ideas disfavored by the federal government would violate protections of the First Amendment.
“The strength of our nation’s system of higher education derives from the exchange of the widest range of views, even unpopular or dissenting ones,” FIRE said on X and explained in depth in a public statement. “Students who commit crimes—including vandalism, threats, or violence—must face consequences, and those consequences may include the loss of a visa. But if today’s executive order reaches beyond illegal activity to instead punish students for protest or expression … it must be withdrawn.”
