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Trump’s urge to suppress free speech may be about Israel today, but count on one thing: It will be about something else tomorrow.
Rooting out terrorism and antisemitism was the supposed reason that plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk on a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, after she coauthored an op-ed calling on Tufts University to divest from companies with ties to Israel due to the killing and starvation of Palestinian civilians. There is an international movement to boycott, sanction, and divest from Israel, but in the United States, President Donald Trump is imperiling the freedom even to publicly discuss such ideas, which should, in effect, be considered a test case for his larger attack on free speech. So far, the test is going well for Trump.
In what seems a long time ago, in 2024, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, released a blueprint for what it called “a national strategy to combat antisemitism” by addressing what it described as “America’s virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American ‘pro-Palestinian movement.’” In essence, and in what’s amounted to an extraordinarily effective work of political theater that has been sold to my own state, Massachusetts, among other places, that foundation dubbed its political opponents “supporters of terrorism.” It also labeled organizations working in opposition to its agenda a “terrorist support network,” and claimed for itself the noble mantle of “combating antisemitism”—even as it deftly redefined antisemitism from hatred of Jewish people to criticism of the US-Israel alliance. President Trump has put the Heritage Foundation strategy into action and gone even further.
It may be his most original idea. As political scientist Barnett Rubin put it in September, “President Trump always says he’s very creative and accomplishes things no one has ever done before. And now he is building a fascist regime which is legitimized by the fight against antisemitism. Nobody ever thought of doing that before.”
I attended Hebrew school as a child, and today, when I try to recall what I learned there about Israel and Palestine, I find in my memory an image of a desert, replete with flowers, and the pleasant recollection that the State of Israel was founded in that empty landscape. In 1998, I visited Israel with my family. My brother had his bar mitzvah at the mountaintop fortress of Masada overlooking the Dead Sea. Though I enjoyed an enviable private school education, I didn’t hear the word Nakba until adulthood. That Arabic word for catastrophe refers to the displacement of 700,000 Palestinian people for Israel’s founding in 1948. A majority of the population of the modern-day Gaza Strip descended from refugees of the Nakba.
According to Amnesty International and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, Israel has imposed a system of oppression on Palestinians across Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories through an enforced system of segregation that constitutes apartheid. For decades, Israel has controlled who could enter or exit the Gaza Strip and, from 2007 on, that 25-mile strip of land functioned as what Human Rights Watch called an “open-air prison.” As of 2022, the unemployment rate in Gaza had hit 45%, and 65% of the people there were living in poverty. On October 7 of the following year, an armed group broke out of Gaza and waged attacks on Israel that killed 1,195 people, 815 of whom were civilians.
The real question is whether Americans will accept his violations of the First Amendment or fight to protect free speech even when they dislike things other people have to say.
In the two years since then, Israel has responded by killing more than 67,000 Palestinians in Gaza in a military campaign of such horror that, as the head of Doctors Without Borders reported to the United Nations Security Council, children as young as five said that they preferred to die rather than continue living in fear while witnessing the slaughter of their family members. A girl named Sham was born in Gaza in November 2023 and survived smoke poisoning as an infant. As a toddler, she was diagnosed with acute malnutrition, before being killed on May 6 of this year when Israel dropped explosives on the shelter where she was living with her family. The United Nations and prominent experts, including Israeli-American professor of Holocaust and genocide studies Omer Bartov, have concluded that Israel’s war on Gaza is a genocide. The current ceasefire has slowed, not stopped, the death toll.
By 2024, the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, had ruled that Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem was illegal; that Israel needed to halt all settlement construction, evacuate its settlers, pay restitution to Palestinians, and allow them the right of return. It also indicated that all states and international organizations have a legal obligation not to assist Israel’s further occupation of the area.
However, since October 2023, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry and the Council on Foreign Relations, using 800 transport planes and 140 ships, my own country has delivered 90,000 tons of arms and equipment to Israel, including tanks, artillery shells, bombs, and rockets. The US government gives Israel billions of dollars annually in military aid, which that country spends mostly on purchases made through the US “Foreign Military Sales” program. According to a Defense Department website, that program sells “articles and services [that] will strengthen the security of the United States and promote world peace.”
Despite how, as Israeli historian Lee Mordechai described it, Israel has limited the flow of information out of Gaza and campaigned to discredit critical voices, a July Gallup poll found that 60% of Americans disapprove of Israel’s military actions there. Even more strikingly, a September Washington Post poll found that nearly half (48%) of Jewish Americans disapprove (and only 46% approve).
But according to recommendations issued by the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism, a group created by state law in 2024, a teacher discussing such polling in a classroom could precipitate an anonymous complaint filed with the state police on the grounds that the educator has rendered the learning environment in my state hostile to Jewish students.
Last February, Special Commission cochair and State Rep. Simon Cataldo (D-14) conducted an inquisition—yes, an inquisition—into the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (who is himself Jewish), including presenting a series of materials on Israel-Palestine that Cataldo had obtained from a database of educator resources. He displayed a graphic called “Born Unequal Abroad,” which lists the different rights afforded to an American Jewish child and the child of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The former can visit Israel and even become an Israeli citizen at any time, while the latter is barred from visiting and has no pathway to citizenship (even through marriage). Cataldo seemed to regard that graphic (and others like it) as self-evidently antisemitic and displayed it as a smoking gun that revealed the supposed antisemitism festering within the Massachusetts Teachers Association.
In other words, in my home state today, “combating antisemitism” means a governor- and legislature-appointed commission conducting an inquisition of a (Jewish) union leader for the offense of failing to suppress critical discussion of a foreign nation that the world’s leading human rights organizations have found to be upholding a system of apartheid and committing genocide. At the same time, actual antisemitism—that is, the hatred of Jewish people by xenophobic nationalists—has gone largely unexamined by the commission in the midst of its campaign to shut down criticism of Israel. (I imagine President Trump and the Heritage Foundation applauding in the background.)
Indeed, over the course of a year of hearings, the Special Commission has perhaps irreparably merged the concept of antisemitism with criticism of Israel, which seems to have been the point. State Sen. and Commission Cochair John Velis (D-2) actually uses the terms “anti-Israel” and “antisemitic” interchangeably, though they do have different meanings and anyone charged with the responsibility of leading a state panel on antisemitism should know that. Velis, who is not Jewish, has taken multiple trips to Israel paid for by the Israeli government as well as a charity affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the lobby group known as AIPAC.
The Special Commission has unveiled recommendations for Massachusetts schools that include utilizing a definition of antisemitism that, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, will have the effect of chilling free speech. It has also recommended launching a statewide reporting system in which anonymous allegations of antisemitism in schools would be collected by the state police.
Following the initial release of those recommendations, Gov. Maura Healey issued a statement applauding the commission’s work. Organizations like the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston have also sent out emails to their membership commending the commission.
Perhaps in response to the hours of dissenting public testimony that (mostly Jewish) people as well as scholars and education experts have offered, the commissioners wrote in their most recent report, “We should listen to and respect people who say that they have been harmed by antisemitism; we should not gaslight them or tell them that their experience is invalid.”
Who could argue?
After Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk was abducted from the street by ICE agents for the offense of cowriting an op-ed in the school paper asking the school to divest from companies with ties to Israel, a federal judge found that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem had violated the First Amendment through a policy of targeting for deportation noncitizens who criticized Israel or voiced support for Palestinians. The judge also found that executive orders issued by President Trump had relied on a definition of antisemitism that encompassed First Amendment-protected speech (the same definition recommended by the Massachusetts Commission!).
But will that federal court ruling even matter? According to the same judge, “The effect of these targeted deportation proceedings continues unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech to this day.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Benjamin Moser has noted that, after October 7, some American Jewish institutions not only supported Israel’s reign of terror over Palestinian civilians but also applauded the clampdown on free speech in order to sustain the killing. “The younger generations, people who have seen with their own eyes the crimes of the so-called Jewish state, and who feel the sacrilege, the impious desecration, of the values they thought were Jewish,” he wrote, “will never return to these institutions.”
But will it matter? Surely, it won’t stop Donald Trump from using his version of Jewish identity as a moral shield for his attack on free speech.
In Massachusetts, a coalition of organizations has publicly opposed the Special Commission’s recommendations and, in the western part of the state where I live, a group of residents has resorted to putting out yard signs with QR codes on them to call attention to this travesty. I’m part of that effort, but does it matter?
In California, a new law, ostensibly intended to protect Jewish students from discrimination, goes into effect on January 1. It has, however, put educators on alert that they may be accused of antisemitism if they share information deemed critical of Israel.
Meanwhile, the leaders of civil society organizations appear ill-suited to resist such suppression of free speech and, in some cases, seem to embrace it. In January, members of the American Historical Association voted 428 to 88 in favor of declaring their opposition to “scholasticide” (the deliberate destruction of an education system) in Gaza. But the association’s leadership council vetoed that vote. A similar episode occurred at the Modern Language Association.
Amy Hagopian, a professor emeritus of global health at the University of Washington, who for years taught a class on war and health, recently wrote about how she was expelled from the American Public Health Association after publicly protesting a decision by its executive board to halt consideration of a resolution on Palestinian health justice. (An anonymous complaint had alleged that the protest was antisemitic.)
The usual line-toeing of politicians in both major parties has involved reciting statements of support for Israel, whatever it does. By contrast, Zohran Mamdani was clear during his victorious campaign to become mayor of New York City that he supports an end to apartheid for Palestinians and opposes the crimes against humanity committed by Israel. In American politics, that represented a fresh playbook. He focused successfully on his city’s absurdly high cost of living and did so as part of a coalition that included people of the Jewish faith and other faiths, even as powerful moneyed interests lined up against him. And he won.
Keep in mind that a clear majority of Americans do indeed disapprove of Israel’s actions in Gaza, so it makes sense that there was an electorate for a candidate who would tell the truth about the oppression of Palestinians, while rejecting claims that it’s antisemitic to do so. Mamdani won a third of voters who specified Judaism as their religion (just as he won a third of Catholics). He also overwhelmingly won among those with no religious affiliation (a quarter of the electorate) and those whose religious affiliation was described as “Other,” which is where exit pollsters put people who are Muslim.
Trump’s urge to suppress free speech may be about Israel today, but count on one thing: It will be about something else tomorrow. The real question is whether Americans will accept his violations of the First Amendment or fight to protect free speech even when they dislike things other people have to say.
There are those who believe that Mamdani’s victory cannot be replicated outside New York City. But given that free speech itself may hang in the balance, it’s at least worth a try.
The university at large has sold out our students, but the university is not all of us. There are hundreds of faculty on this campus dedicated to the right of our students to learn, debate, protest, research, and report without fear.
On September 17, 2025, one month before I was to teach my annual social justice reporting class at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, the campus lowered its flag to half-mast in honor of far-right pontificator Charlie Kirk.
Nobody deserves to be murdered, as Kirk was, but to honor a man of his white supremacist, Christian nationalist, and misogynist beliefs was to spit in the face not only of all the women on campus, but of students and staff of color; the queer and trans students and employees whose identities he characterized as “abominations“; the Muslims whose religion, he said, “is a sword being used to slit the throat of America“; the immigrants he insisted will “replace us” with their “anti-white agenda”; and the Jews he accused of controlling America’s institutions.
Columbia did not have to lower that flag. President Donald Trump ordered federal institutions to do so, but the university is private, not part of the government. No, lowering the flag was a choice.
That Columbia made such a choice is nothing short of astounding, given that its past two years of capitulations to the Trump administration have rested upon the school’s promise to protect its Jewish students and staff from antisemitism. As our current acting president, Claire Shipman, wrote to the university community this past summer in classic Orwellian double-speak:
While Columbia does not admit to wrongdoing… the institution’s leaders have recognized, repeatedly, that Jewish students and faculty have experienced painful, unacceptable incidents, and that reform was and is needed.
So why honor a man who espoused Nazi conspiracy theories?
I bring this up because this flag business was only the latest example of the groveling submission Columbia’s trustees have shown toward this country’s proto-authoritarian government since the 2023 student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza gave Republicans the idea of using accusations of antisemitism to attack liberal arts colleges.
Allow me to illustrate with a brief history of this groveling.
In 2023, not long after the horrific Hamas attack on Israeli citizens and Israel’s insanely outsized retaliatory slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians, Columbia called in the police against our nonviolent student protesters, locked down the campus for the first time in history, and suspended both its own and Barnard undergraduates, most of them teenage girls, in punishment.
That same year, Columbia’s administration allowed Trumpian Christian nationalists to define who was antisemitic and who wasn’t. It succumbed to and accepted the right-wing false narrative that the campus was rife with Jew haters. And it refused to stand up for the Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, and Jewish students who were being harassed, threatened, and doxxed on and off campus for protesting Israel’s murderous policies.
In 2024, Columbia groveled even more. It kept the campus locked down (as it does to this day). It put in place so many rules governing protests that it effectively squashed the ability of students to voice their opposition to Israel’s genocide, or even to the government of President Donald Trump. And it refused to offer any support to Palestinian students Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi when they were arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in violation of their First Amendment rights, or when their visas were revoked.
Other universities have not been so cowardly. For example, when Bard College student and Afghan refugee Ali Sajad Faqirzada, who had fled the Taliban regime with his sister, was arrested and detained by ICE at his asylum hearing this October, Bard president Leon Botstein offered him instant support. He contacted the student’s family, mustered local officials to help the family, and sent a letter to the government advocating for Faqirzada’s release. He also issued a statement vowing to stand up for Faqirzada and informing other Bard students of their rights. These were the kinds of morally sound actions we have yet to see from any of our presidents or trustees at Columbia.
In 2025, after Trump and his minions snatched $400 million away from Columbia, crippling the ability of our scientists and medical researchers to do their work, the university’s capitulations plummeted to even greater depths.
It suspended and even expelled anti-war students for having protested on behalf of slaughtered and starving Palestinians by occupying the campus library.
It agreed to comply with Trump’s ban on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) by no longer using “race, color, sex, or national origin” when hiring anyone or even when admitting students, thus giving in to the Trumpian goal of creating a university largely filled with white, heterosexual, Christian men.
Columbia ought to haul itself up before the OIE for the act of lowering its flag for antisemite Charlie Kirk.
It put the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department under special provost supervision or receivership.
It agreed to pay more than $200 million over the next three years in blood money to the Trump administration to restore our funding. (Is it a surprise that my colleagues and I had our salaries frozen this year? And what will Trump do with our school’s money—build a villa in Gaza?)
Columbia also agreed to pay a further $21 million to—in the words of the White House PR machine—“resolve alleged civil rights violations against Jewish employees that occurred following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.” I am sure not a penny of that money will go to Palestinian employees and students whose family members were wounded or killed in Gaza, or who suffered from Islamophobic harassment from other students and outsiders. Nor is it likely that any of that money will be given to the many Jewish students who were manhandled, arrested, and punished for protesting genocide.
Columbia made other concessions as well, too numerous to list here. But among the most egregious was its incorporation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which conflates any criticism of the state of Israel with hatred of Jews. This set off alarms among many of our faculty members, Jewish and otherwise, who know that scholars have long rejected the IHRA definition as restricting free speech and academic freedom, and as nakedly antidemocratic.
Yet, in a summer letter to Columbia’s faculty and staff, president Shipman not only proudly announced the school’s incorporation of IHRA, but made it clear that any of us who don’t comply with that definition could be brought before the University’s Office of Institutional Equity (OIE) and censored or even fired.
Under that directive, Columbia ought to haul itself up before the OIE for the act of lowering its flag for antisemite Charlie Kirk.
Adding insult to injury, Columbia’s Task Force on Anti-Semitism, a committee of professors who spearheaded the dubious claim that our campus was riddled with anti-Jewish sentiment, offered not a peep of objection to the campus lowering of that flag. When I asked one of the Task Force’s architects why, he told me that the committee “does not issue statements.” The hypocrisy of a university that forms a task force against antisemitism and then honors a man like Kirk is, to put it mildly, mind-boggling.
Columbia’s faculty members have hardly remained silent in the face of all these capitulations. Many of us, including a large cohort of Jewish professors, have protested, rallied, held vigils, and met with our rapid rotation of presidents, as well as with the school’s trustees, to try to urge academic integrity for our campus and protect our students’ right to debate, question, and protest.
One of the most recent of these faculty actions occurred on September 29, when a group of professors, most of them Jewish, gathered at the sundial in the center of campus to speak out against this adoption of the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism. I joined to watch and listen, while the crowd around them grew.
The speakers explained why the IHRA makes it impossible for them to teach classes on the history of Israel and Palestine, on Islam, or even on Middle Eastern history in general, and leaves any of us who teach anything someone might deem critical of Israel vulnerable to being punished for discriminating against Jews—even if we are Jewish.
One of the speakers, Professor Emeritus Marianne Hirsch, a scholar of trauma and memory, pointed out the real-life dangers in IHRA’s conflation of criticism of Israel with the hatred of all Jews:
This conflation has made [IHRA] the preferred definition of the Israeli state, the Trump administration and authoritarian forces throughout the world who seek to silence those who stand in solidarity with Palestine. The IHRA definition has been cited as the basis for reporting international students, Trump’s travel ban, defunding universities, arresting protesters, and even targeting human rights organizations.
Hirsch then added, “Please note that the incorporation of IHRA was not part of Columbia’s deal with the Trump administration.”
In other words, its incorporation of IHRA was a preemptive concession. Like lowering that flag for Kirk, it was a choice.
To top off all these concessions, Columbia made a truly chilling move. Last summer, it agreed to appoint an “independent monitor” to play the Orwellian Big Brother role of watching to make sure that we faculty comply with all of the above rules. The agreement states that this monitor, chosen jointly with the Trump administration, will have access to “all agreement-related individuals, facilities, disciplinary hearings, and the scene of any occurrence that the monitor deems necessary,” as well as “all documents and data related to the agreement.”
The reaction of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the closest thing we have to a union, was swift and dramatic. Calling the appointment of this monitor an unprecedented disaster, AAUP issued the following statement:
Allowing the government to monitor and ultimately dictate decisions about the hiring of faculty and admission of students is a stunning breach of the independence of colleges and universities and opens the door for the ideological control this administration so eagerly craves. This is an extremely dangerous precedent that will have tremendous consequences for the sector.
In a clear-eyed assessment of what Columbia’s concessions really mean, several authors at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia wrote this last August:
The settlement is an astonishing transfer of autonomy and authority to… an administration whose disdain for the values of the academy is demonstrated anew every day. It will have far-reaching implications for free speech and academic freedom at Columbia.
The authors went on to say in academic jargon what many of us had been saying all along: When you give a bully what he wants, he only demands more. “Indeed,” they concluded, “the settlement itself gives the administration an array of new tools to use in the service of its coercive campaign.”
It makes me wonder what comes next. Flags with Trump’s face on them all over campus? Forced pledges of allegiance to him? After all, Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein did it. Why not Donald Trump?
For now, however, we faculty are stuck with Columbia as it is. In my case, this means that I must teach social justice journalism not only under the cloud of the Kirk aftermath, with professors and employees being fired or chased out of the country for daring to criticize that purveyor of hate, but with the IHRA sword of Damocles dangling over my head.
Social justice journalism is essentially about covering the ways in which the powerless are oppressed by the powerful—that is, a manifestation of Joseph Pulitzer’s mantra that journalism should “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” This means that just about every topic my students will cover flies in the face of all that the Trump government wants to suppress and might well come up against Columbia’s new rules, too.
What if one of my students should want to cover the deportation hearings for Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi, for instance? Or a speech by our former student, the once-imprisoned Mahmoud Khalil? Will even a mention of a Palestinian activist be deemed antisemitic now? Will quoting someone who criticizes Kirk or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be grounds for expulsion? Can we report on Planned Parenthood or transphobia, the ICE persecution of brown and Black immigrants, the ongoing climate catastrophe, environmental racism, violence against women, or Islamophobia? Can we talk about social justice at all?
Such students represent the generation that is going to have to claw back capitulations and hold onto integrity in the face of truly hard times.
However, the aspect of teaching that worries me the most is how Columbia’s capitulation will affect my students’ trust in one another. I don’t want anyone to be afraid that someone will snitch on them and get them punished, suspended, expelled, bullied online, deported, or otherwise silenced. I want to foster a culture of camaraderie and trust in my classroom, not suspicion and fear.
But students are afraid. Just a couple of weeks ago, I spoke on a campus panel to a group of young women undergraduates of color, several of whom are international students. They told us that (with reason) they’re afraid to protest, post anything political, or speak out at all. They’re afraid that their visas will be revoked, their degrees and futures whisked away. They’re afraid of being kidnapped from campus and disappeared by ICE.
This makes me worry that my students, too, will censor themselves out of fear, a dangerous scenario indeed. A journalist who is afraid to publish the truth or question power can’t be a journalist at all.
That said, there is nothing like sitting in a classroom full of journalism students to give one hope. It’s uplifting to know that there are still young people out there who want to be reporters, who are dedicated to evidence-based facts, who have compassion for the downtrodden and still see journalism as essential to upholding democracy. Such students represent the generation that is going to have to claw back capitulations and hold onto integrity in the face of truly hard times.
So, yes, the university at large has sold out our students. But the university is not all of us. There are hundreds of faculty on this campus dedicated to the right of our students to learn, debate, protest, research, and report without fear.
The task now is to keep up their courage—and our own fight.
The report shows how a landmark civil rights law "is being cynically misused to squash political dissent and speech that advocates for the human rights of Palestinians," said one AAUP leader.
Under both the Biden and Trump administrations, pro-Israel and far-right advocacy groups have driven a surge of federal civil rights investigations conflating true antisemitism with university professors and students' criticism of the US-backed Israeli government and its genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip.
That's according to Discriminating Against Dissent: The Weaponization of Civil Rights Law to Repress Campus Speech on Palestine, a report published this week by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).
"Our members, because of their expertise on the region, have long borne the brunt of allegations that falsely equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism," MESA president Aslı Bâli said in a statement. "Complaints like these penalize scholars for teaching basic facts about the region."
The report begins: "Over the past two years, the United States government has taken unprecedented steps to suppress campus speech—including scholarship, advocacy, and protest—opposing the state of Israel's genocidal war against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. This crackdown has paved the way for profound transformations in US colleges and universities."
"A long-standing 'Palestine exception' to the First Amendment now threatens to give way to a new reality: Palestine is less an exception to academic freedom than it is a pretext for erasing the norm altogether, as part of an authoritarian assault on the autonomy of higher education and on the very idea of racial and gender equity," the document warns.
The analysis comes as President Donald Trump continues his sweeping attack, aiming to shut down the Department of Education, deport foreign students critical of Israel, and bully campus leaders into signing an "extortion agreement" for federal funding.
"In effect, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is no longer being used to address racial discrimination in higher education," Bâli told the Guardian, which first reported on the findings. "Instead, Title VI has been repurposed as part of the administration's broader effort to remake higher education in line with its right-wing political and cultural agenda."
AAUP and MESA found that "more investigations were opened in the last two months of 2023 (25) than in all previous years combined (24). Investigations broke record numbers in 2024 (39) and are on track to do so again in 2025 (38, as of September 30)."
"All but one of the 102 antisemitism complaint letters we have analyzed focus on speech critical of Israel; of these, 79% contain allegations of antisemitism that simply describe criticisms of Israel or Zionism with no reference to Jews or Judaism; at least 50% of complaints consist solely of such criticism," the document states.
The report highlights that "the Biden administration opened more antisemitism probes against colleges and universities (65) than for all other types of racial harassment combined (38)," and "the Trump administration appears to have halted racial harassment investigations altogether."
The federal probes "are producing a new system of government surveillance and monitoring of campus speech," the report notes, with over 20 schools agreeing to share internal data on discrimination complaints with the government.
Examining Trump's Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, the researchers found that the Department of Education "has continued to open very high numbers of antisemitism probes even as its staff has been slashed by the Trump administration," and "in its high-profile campaigns against prestigious universities, the task force has systematically ignored the procedural requirements of Title VI, unlawfully cutting off vast sums of funding before any meaningful investigation, let alone findings."
For at least 78% of the complaints examined by AAUP and MESA, pro-Israel and right-wing advocacy organizations—including those without any campus presence—served as complainants or represented them. Such groups have also been involved with private lawsuits intended to redefine antisemitism as including criticism of Israel and restrict such criticism at universities.
"Antisemitism lawsuits surged after October 7, 2023 (two filed before that date, 26 since)," according to the analysis. "No court has yet made a final judgment in favor of plaintiffs. In nine cases, Title VI claims have been dismissed, including on free speech grounds; nine lawsuits have settled, some of which resulted in even more draconian policy changes on campuses than government investigations."
AAUP general counsel Veena Dubal said that "the findings in this report underscore how the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which passed in response to years of nonviolent civil disobedience against racial injustice—is being cynically misused to squash political dissent and speech that advocates for the human rights of Palestinians."
"This is a perverse outcome," Dubal declared, as AAUP prepares for Friday protests pressuring leaders at over 100 institutions to reject the president's "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education" and make schooling more affordable.
As AAUP president Todd Wolfson said in a statement about the day of action earlier this week, "From attacks on academic freedom in the classroom to the defunding of lifesaving scientific research to surveilling and arresting peaceful student protesters, Trump's higher education policies have been catastrophic for our communities and our democracy."
"We're excited to help build a coalition of students and workers united in fighting back for a higher education system that is accessible and affordable for all and serves the common good," he added. Other supporting groups include Campus Climate Network, College Democrats of America, Gen-Z for Change, Indivisible, Jewish Voice for Peace, March for Our Lives, and Sunrise Movement.