On June 17, the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced that it had reached an agreement with the City University of New York (CUNY), New York City’s public university system, regarding nine complaints of discrimination filed against CUNY by students, staff, and others.
According to OCR, the majority of the Title VI complaints allege violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on national origin. They allege that this conduct amounted to “creating a hostile environment for students of shared Jewish ancestry.”
The Title VI complaints against CUNY are just a handful of the hundreds that OCR has received since the October 7, 2023, attack by Palestinian militants from the Gaza Strip on Israel, which the department alleges has triggered a “nationwide rise in reports of antisemitism.” While this framing suggests the incidents under investigation occurred in the aftermath of the October 7 attack, one of the few published complaints against CUNY concerns incidents dating back to 2013, which OCR did not begin investigating until 2024.
A review of published Title VI complaints conducted for this article reveals that OCR has opened at least 10 such investigations into months- or years-old incidents of alleged antisemitism since the October 7 attack. Critics accuse OCR of using these investigations to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel, whose military bombardment of Gaza has killed more than 44,000 Palestinians—including 17,000 children.
Jonah Rubin, senior manager of campus organizing at Jewish Voice for Peace, which advocates for the end of both the Israeli genocide and occupation of Palestine, describes the OCR investigations as part of a broader campaign of suppression targeting the movement for Palestinian liberation in the United States.
“These cases are an attempt to suppress legitimate student protest on campuses across the country,” Rubin tells The Progressive. “Last year saw unprecedented, massive student protests against the ongoing genocide the Israeli government is committing in Gaza. Rightwing organizations know there is no defense of the Israeli government’s horrific attacks on civilians. Since they cannot compete on the field of ideas, the most extreme rightwing groups are turning to ‘lawfare’ to suppress young people’s demands for justice and peace.”
There is evidence to support Rubin’s claim that the recent Title VI investigations are a product of “lawfare,” or the manipulation of legal systems to undermine political opponents. At least some of the recent investigations appear to have been triggered by complaints from political groups outside of the respective universities, such as Campus Reform, a self-described “conservative watchdog” of higher education.
Zachary Marschall, the editor-in-chief of Campus Reform, tells The Progressive he filed 33 Title VI complaints between November 2023 and January 2024 against “universities that failed to protect Jewish students after October 7,” and that these complaints have resulted in fourteen open investigations, a resolution at Brown University, and a pending resolution at Temple University.
Similarly, the Anti-Defamation League and the Brandeis Center—both vocal supporters of Israel—have filed Title VI complaints against a number of schools. ADL Spokesperson Todd Gutnick explicitly connects the October 7 attack with an alleged “surge in antisemitism on college and university campuses across the country,” but denies that the complaints are political in nature.
“ADL firmly believes students have the right to freedom of speech and to protest, and we are certainly not calling on colleges and universities to discipline students for protected speech or suppress speech that is critical of the Israeli government or Israeli public officials,” Gutnick tells The Progressive. “That said, we recognize, as OCR does, that when harassment involves conduct that includes speech, a school may have an obligation under Title VI to respond—not by disciplining individual students, but rather by improving the climate for targeted students.”
The Brandeis Center declined to comment for this article.
Despite Gutnick’s assertion that schools should not respond to Title VI complaints by disciplining students, that appears to have been the response in at least some cases. At CUNY, for example, OCR reports opening three investigations from April 24 to 29. The following day, April 30, CUNY responded to a ceasefire demonstration on its City College campus by arresting more than 170 people, twenty-eight of whom were charged with felonies, according to The Indypendent.
From October 2023 to September 2024, OCR reports receiving 515 complaints alleging discrimination on the basis of shared ancestry. As of this writing, the office’s website lists 125 currently pending Title VI investigations—seventy-eight at post-secondary schools and forty-seven at elementary and secondary schools. OCR does not comment on pending investigations, but has published 123 redacted complaints that were filed since October 2023.
Of the Title VI complaints published by OCR, at least ten concern allegedly antisemitic incidents that occurred at colleges and universities prior to October 2023, but were investigated afterward. While two complaints concern incidents immediately predating the October 7 attack, occuring in September 2023, the rest include those from more than six months prior—up to eleven years earlier, in CUNY’s case.
Other belatedly investigated schools include Columbia University; University of California, Los Angeles; University of Michigan; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and University of Pennsylvania. (All of the aforementioned universities failed to respond to multiple interview requests from The Progressive.)
Although OCR stipulates that complainants must either file within 180 days of the last alleged incident of discrimination or request a waiver, there are no cut-offs for either the earliest alleged incident, nor for the office to open an investigation. The complaint against CUNY, for example, was submitted in July 2022 and included incidents from that month all the way back to February 2013, into which OCR opened an investigation in May 2024.
“We evaluate the case based on whether, at the time that we received the complaint, the last instance of harm had occurred within 180 days,” OCR Assistant Secretary Catherine Lhamon tells The Progressive. “If so—even if it’s four years later that we open the investigation—we have jurisdiction.”
Lhamon attributes the delays in opening investigations to both understaffing and the alleged prevalence of discrimination. Like DOE, she connects the recent increase in Title VI complaints directly to the October 7 attack.
“World events and national events can change the complaints that come into us,” Lhamon says. “We’ve all seen a proliferation of hate in schools following the Israel-Hamas war.”
Regardless of where the Title VI complaints originated, they are already having an impact on college campuses. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which advocates for freedom of speech protections, has been monitoring OCR’s Title VI investigations since the October 7 attack. Although FIRE has not considered the pattern of OCR belatedly opening investigations, it recently accused the office of redefining harassment to force school administrators to suppress legally protected political activity by students and staff—or lose their federal funding. Most schools, whether public or private, receive a significant portion of their operating budget from the federal government. CUNY, for example, reported receiving more than $299 million dollars—over 7 percent of its total revenue—from the federal government during the 2022-23 school year.
Tyler Coward, FIRE’s lead counsel on government affairs, says the “hostile environment” allegations made in the recent Title VI complaints would historically pertain to particular individuals crossing the threshold from speech to harassment against other individuals. Under a new cumulative theory referenced by OCR in some of its recent Title VI agreements, however, harassment is redefined to encompass behavior between loosely defined groups, such as “protestors” or “Jewish students.”
“OCR is now declaring that large amounts of people, on their own time, engaging in Constitutionally protected speech itself rises to the level of creating a hostile environment,” Coward tells The Progressive. He says the takeaway for school administrators is this: “If I don’t censor Constitutionally protected speech, we could be next, in terms of getting a Title VI complaint investigation from OCR—the result of which, if we don’t comply or if we decline to enter into a settlement agreement that requires us to police Constitutionally protected speech, would be a loss of federal funding.”