U.S. civil rights laws are being exploited to suppress pro-Palestine speech in an authoritarian assault on academic freedom, finds a report by two academic groups.
Students inside the gates of Columbia University in New York wave Palestinian flags through the bars, April 22, 2024. (SWinxy, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
By Jessica Corbett
Common Dreams
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 U.S.-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 Asl 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 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 universities 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 percent contain allegations of antisemitism that simply describe criticisms of Israel or Zionism with no reference to Jews or Judaism,” 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.
U.S. Department of Education building in Washington, 2005. (Chris Zubak-Skees, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
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 percent 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.
Jessica Corbett is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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The congressional witch hunts revealed yet another example of white-collar welfare: private ivy league schools get enormous amounts of public funds!! It was no surprise that the cronies at the top bent over and sold out their students and faculty, but as the wealth/power structure of this country gets even more top-heavy, it gets more unstable.
The Jewish supremacists get to do whatever the hell they want and you’re going to keep your mouth shut about it or be thrown out of work, blacklisted, and kicked out of college. Genocide means nothing to them, and it’s going to mean nothing to you if you desire your livelihood. Got it?
The censorship and self-censorship of speech about the Zionist Holocaust is killing Western Universities. Imagine if Western universities had prohibited discussion of the Nazi Holocaust during WWII, as that Holocaust was happening. This is the situation today, regarding the Zionist Holocaust. And university administrators are smug and smarmy about it. They just don’t care about the ongoing Holocaust, and they don’t care about open debate and inquiry. They had rejected traditional academic values. They have rejected common decency and morality as well. They have embraced an unconscionable and unsupportable position on administrative ethics: they have embraced nihilism, and the idiotic notion that power is more important than morality.