How Universities Should Respond To Revelations That The Trump Administration’s Antisemitism Charges Were a Sham
At the start of his second term, President Trump opened fire on some of America’s most prestigious universities. His administration cut off or threatened to cut off millions of dollars in federal funding unless they agreed to unprecedented levels of federal oversight of their operations.
To accomplish this purpose, the administration highlighted the problem of campus antisemitism and pointed to the way they handled protests in the wake of the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack in Israel. Working together, the Justice Department and the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services charged that Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Northwestern University, the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Pennsylvania, and others had violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Faced with those allegations, some of them sued seeking restoration of their federal funds. Others, including Brown, Cornell, Columbia, Northwestern, and Penn, negotiated settlements with the administration. As NPR notes, “Some universities paid the government millions of dollars; others paid nothing but agreed to policy or personnel changes.”
This week, we found out that administration officials knew that there was no evidence that those places had violated Title VI or any other law. They proceeded, nonetheless.
This information was disclosed to the House Committee on the Judiciary by Haley Van Erem, a whistleblower, who worked in the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Civil Rights Division (CRT) on August 17. She alleges that the administration’s “Title VI investigations, legal analysis, and findings were subordinate to political priorities rather than the enforcement of civil rights and were implemented at the expense of regular decision-making and enforcement processes…”
Van Erem reports that administration decisions to withhold federal funds from universities “were unrelated to any Title VI violations,” and that allegations to the contrary were “tactics to drive settlement.”
If a private individual had engaged in such deception, lawyers might call it fraud, namely “an act, expression, omission, or concealment calculated to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right.” The remedy would normally be for the perpetrator to return their ill-gotten gain.
In this case, universities may be reluctant to pursue such a remedy lest they further antagonize the administration. But at the very least, Congress should investigate and provide the American people a full accounting of what the administration did in its efforts to discredit universities by weaponizing antisemitism allegations.
It is clear that universities entered into settlement agreements with the Trump Administration because of allegations that they had violated Title VI. Take Columbia, for example.
On May 22, 2025, Anthony F. Archeval, Acting Director of the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services and Craig W. Trainor, Acting Assistant Secretary of Education in its Office for Civil Rights wrote to Columbia detailing its violations of Title VI. Among other things, they highlighted “harassment and discrimination that Jewish students experienced at Columbia University (which) denied them equal access to educational opportunities or benefits by creating a hostile environment.”
They accused the university of “act(ing) with deliberate indifference” toward the plight of its Jewish students.
Two months later, the university announced that it had “reached an agreement with the United States Government to resolve multiple federal agency investigations into alleged violations of federal anti-discrimination laws. As part of the resolution, Columbia will pay a $200 million settlement over three years to the federal government.”
It added that “the University has agreed to settle investigations brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for $21 million….Under the agreement, a vast majority of the federal grants which were terminated or paused in March 2025 will be reinstated, and Columbia’s access to billions of dollars in current and future grants will be restored.”
The White House called the settlement with Columbia , “a significant win for accountability in academia.” It noted the “alleged civil rights violations against Jewish Columbia employees that occurred on its campus following the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks.”
The White House added that this is “the largest ever settlement for victims of anti-Semitism and for workers of any religion.”
To take one other example, Brown University, which was also targeted by the administration for its alleged violations of Title VI, explained in July, 2025 that it “reached a voluntary agreement with the federal government to restore funding for the University’s federally sponsored medical and health sciences research and resolve three open reviews assessing Brown’s compliance with federal nondiscrimination obligations.”
The settlement agreement included a commitment by the university to “Codify… Brown’s sustained commitment to initiatives, programs and services to ensure a thriving Jewish community….” The university agreed to “pay $50 million over ten years to state workforce development organizations that comply with anti-discrimination laws….”
The White House again crowed about the success of its efforts to combat campus antisemitism. “Today,” it said, “President Donald J. Trump secured a historic settlement with Brown University… (about) Brown’s failure to address anti-Semitism and ensure fair treatment for all students….”
But the whistleblower complaint suggests that such a rationale was just a cover for another agenda that had little to do with campus antisemitism. As the whistleblower points out, investigators found no Title VI violations at Brown.
Maryland Congressman and Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee summarized the whistleblower complaint this way: “The whistleblowers describe political appointees overruling career investigators, pursuing investigations with ‘predetermined’ outcomes and findings unsupported by the evidence, targeting professors based on religion and ethnicity without allegations of wrongdoing, and threatening to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to pressure universities into politically driven settlements.”
Raskin called the complaint “credible” and observed that “From the start of the Trump Administration’s ferocious attack on universities, it has been apparent that its investigations have been structured deliberately to harass and intimidate rather than protect anyone from discrimination.”
The Trump Administration’s use of antisemitism as a cover for its attacks on universities not only extracted concessions and money from them, but it also made life on campus more difficult for Jewish students, faculty, and staff. As Wesleyan University President Michael Roth argued in March, “’It’s just obvious to Jewish Americans and others that this is not about protecting Jews…This is about attacking institutions with which the president has a beef.’”
Haley Van Erem’s whistleblower complaint suggests that Roth was right and that the administration did not care about the damage its allegations would do.
Austin D. Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is an internationally renowned scholar whose interdisciplinary work examines law in relation to culture, violence, and the liberal arts. His academic foundation includes a B.A. from Providence College (1969), an M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. (1973) from the University of Wisconsin, and a J.D. from Yale Law School (1988). He has also received honorary degrees, including an LL.D. from Providence College (2008) and an A.M. from Amherst College (1984). Sarat has also been awarded the Jeffrey B. Ferguson Memorial Teaching Prize at Amherst in 2022 and the Ronald Pipkin Service Award as well as many others
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