The new chairman of the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce has excoriated several recent civil rights settlements that, he says, allow colleges to evade accountability for being derelict in their handling of campus antisemitism after Hamas’s attack on Israel last Oct. 7.

“It’s disgraceful that in the final days of the Biden-Harris administration, the Department of Education is letting universities, including Rutgers, five University of California system campuses including UCLA, and John Hopkins, off the hook for their failures to address campus antisemitism. The toothless agreements shield schools from real accountability,” Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) said in a statement issued on Thursday. “The Trump administration should closely examine these agreements and explore options to impose real consequences on schools, which could include giving complainants the opportunity to appeal these weak settlements. And certainly, no more complaints should be settled before President Trump takes office.”

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR), a division within the US Department of Education, has spent the past year and a half investigating universities accused of allowing an open season of hate on Jewish students. Such inquiries, if they are not closed due to insufficient evidence, may result in settlements in which higher education institutions admit to having violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and commit to enacting policies which remedy their noncompliance.

For example, Rutgers University recently agreed, as part of an OCR settlement, to train employees to handle complaints of antisemitism, issue a non-discrimination statement, and conduct a “climate survey” in which students report their opinions on discrimination at the school and the administration’s handling of it. In that case, OCR identified “compliance concerns” regarding the university’s handling of violent threats against Jewish students, the desecration of Jewish religious symbols, and discrimination targeting a predominantly Jewish fraternity, Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi).

Additionally, Temple University agreed last month to implement “remedial” policies for past, inadequately managed investigations of discrimination and to apprise OCR of every discrimination complaint it receives until the conclusion of the 2025-2026 academic year. It also agreed to conduct a “climate” survey to measure students’ opinions on the severity of discrimination on campus, the results of which will be used to “create an action plan” which OCR did not define but insisted on its being “subject to OCR approval.”

In Thursday’s statement, Walberg denounced these and other similar settlements, which were spearheaded by a US presidential administration that refused to recognize anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism, as little more than a pantomime.

“These so-called resolutions utterly fail to resolve the civil rights complaints they purport to address. The department is shamefully abandoning its obligation to protect Jewish students, faculty, and staff, and undermining the incoming administration,” he said.

Nothing short of a revolution of the current habits and ideas which constitute the current higher education regime can prevent antisemitism and extreme anti-Zionism on college campuses, the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce has previously argued. An overturning of the current order, it wrote in a report published before the winter holidays, would involve reforming aspects of the campus culture which do not appear immediately connected to the issue of antisemitism. Fostering “viewpoint diversity,” for example, would prevent echo chambers of ideological zeal which justify hatred and violence as a means of overcoming one’s political opponents, the report said. It also argued that restoring “academic rigor,” undermined by years of dissolving educational standards for political purposes, would guard against the reduction of complex social issues into the sloganeering of “scholar activism,” in which faculty turn the classroom into a soapbox.

In lieu of so momentous a change, the report encouraged the executive branch of the US government, which is awaiting the arrival of a new administration headed by President-elect Donald Trump, to enforce colleges’ applying Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to incidents of antisemitism and punish those that do not by, for example, freezing their access to federal funds.

Nearly two years of an epidemic of campus antisemitism unlike any ever seen in the US is what has caused Walberg and his committee colleagues to be suspicious of resolutions which maintain the status quo in American higher education. Since Oct. 7, 2023, anti-Zionist activity on college campuses has increased by 477 percent, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — a trend which has resulted in Jewish students being spit on, assaulted, and pelted with hate speech not uttered openly in the US since the 1950s at America’s most prestigious universities. Holding them accountable, the committee has said, has been difficult due to their ability to mobilize their immense legal and social capital against any action which threatens their power.

“Rather than treat the antisemitic hate plaguing their campuses as a serious problem, they handled it as a public relations issue,” the committee said in its report, citing one example of the corruption it identified. “Penn [University of Pennsylvania] administrators [tried] to orchestrate media coverage depicting members of Congress as ‘bullying and grandstanding’ and Columbia Board of Trustees leaders dismissing congressional oversight on campus antisemitism as ‘capital hill [sic] nonsense.’”

Moreover, it added, university leaders have heaped opprobrium on those who investigate campus antisemitism and openly wished that the Democratic Party would win a majority in the US Congress, an outcome they believed would quell any further inquiries into the matter.

“The findings expose a disturbing pattern of defensiveness and denial among institutions,” the report concluded. “Rather than confronting the severity of the problem, many institutions have dismissed congressional and public criticism and abdicated responsibility for the hostile environments they have enabled. This refusal to acknowledge or address the issue has allowed antisemitism to root and thrive in spaces that contravene the values of this great nation.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

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