On June 17, the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights issued its first two findings in investigations into campus hate incidents resulting from Hamas' horrific Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
According to the department's announcement, both the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Michigan "failed to respond promptly or effectively to alleged discrimination and antisemitic harassment by employees and students," thereby "creating a hostile environment."
At CUNY, Department of Education (DOE) investigators found that this has happened nine times since 2019. At Michigan, the investigation found 75 such cases since 2022.
Each incident, the DOE says, represents a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on actual or "perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics."
The penalty? Theoretically, the DOE has the power to deprive any offending school of all federal funds for violations of federal civil rights laws.
Catherine Lhamon, the assistant secretary of Education for Civil Rights under Barack Obama and now again under Joe Biden, directly threatened roomfuls of timid university administrators with just that fate if they failed to adopt her grotesque distortion of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 to encompass campus complaints of alleged sexual harassment.
The result has been a fiasco leading to thousands of kangaroo court prosecutions, almost all of which discriminatorily target men and many of which have led to successful lawsuits costing schools high-value judgments or settlements while sex-obsessed DOE bureaucrats who have nothing to do with the education of students in classrooms look on leeringly.
Despite saying that he finds reports of antisemitic harassment "deeply concerning" and "a challenging moment," however, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona is happy to let it all go in exchange for weak "resolution agreements," in which the offending schools admit no "liability, non-compliance, or wrongdoing."
All they have to do, according to the agreement's terms, is "review policies and procedures," provide anti-discrimination "training" to students and staff, administer a campus "climate assessment survey," and report on how they are handling Title VI-related complaints as they arise.
Almost all colleges and universities do this anyway, in part to comply with federal laws and policies, and in part to create busywork to justify the dubious employment of their own in-house diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) commissars and diversity propagandists.
For all their obsession with sex, which the Biden administration's new directives will amplify to include transgender ideology and reduced protections for those accused of sexual harassment, DOE apparatchiks are in no particular hurry to protect Jews or put an end to their harassment on campus. Under the terms of the resolution agreements, the schools have a generous amount of time to comply, with the "climate assessments" not coming due until a year and half from now, in December 2025.
What if the schools do not follow through with even these mild requirements? In that case, according to the agreement's terms, the DOE could "initiate enforcement proceedings or refer the complaint to the U.S. Department of Justice for judicial proceedings." But before that happens, the alleged offenders will receive "written notice of the alleged breach and 60 calendar days to cure" it before any further action is taken.
New York City residential code violators should be so lucky.
More than a hundred other investigations of schools for Title VI violations relating to the Oct. 7 attack are currently in progress at the Department of Education, with the results due to be announced soon. Its well-funded bureaucrats should do a lot more than issue meaningless slaps on the wrist for failing to stop violent antisemitic harassment even as they menace the might of state power to persecute men.
Our failing colleges and universities must be held fully to account.
Paul du Quenoy is president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Georgetown University. Read more — Here.