Mounting political pressures are forcing colleges to try to answer a remarkably subjective question: whether criticism or conduct related to Israel qualifies as harassment under campus policies.
Where institutions land could reshape the landscape for speech and student discipline.
In October, P., an undergraduate student at the University of California at Berkeley and a pro-Palestinian activist, was involved in a tense interaction. As P. was helping to set up a teach-in on the war in Gaza, another student standing a few feet away started filming. The other student reported to the police that P. knocked a cellphone out of his hand.
Hours later, while cleaning up the event with a friend, P. — who requested The Chronicle use only her middle initial for fear of being doxxed and because of vulnerabilities related to being an immigrant — said she heard a man behind her say he wanted to talk and that she should stop what she was doing. She didn’t turn around.
“Then I felt myself get pulled by my backpack,” P. told The Chronicle. “The guy starts screaming at me. He says that I’m resisting him.”
A group of police officers suddenly surrounded her and her friend and demanded to see their IDs, per P.'s account. One police officer asked P. if she had noticed the Star of David necklace on the student who’d been recording the teach-in and targeted him because of his identity. P. said no.
P. did not get arrested, but a month later, she received a letter from Berkeley’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination notifying her that she was under investigation for allegations of harassment based on ancestry and had potentially violated the University of California system’s nondiscrimination policies.
Since then, the office has repeatedly asked P. for the names and contact information of fellow organizers. A staff member at Palestine Legal acts as her adviser. P. denies knocking the phone out of the other student’s hands.
P. is one of many college students entangled in the web of campus bureaucracy as colleges flex their civil-rights-enforcement muscles amid scrutiny from President Trump.
The Trump administration has promised to pull funding from colleges that don’t punish people for criticizing Israel, on the basis that it is antisemitic. Last month, the U.S. Department of Education sent letters to 60 institutions reminding them of their obligations to protect Jewish students under the civil-rights law Title VI. A multi-agency task force has singled out a handful of institutions for funding reviews and campus visits.
Rises in antisemitic, anti-Israeli, anti-Arab, Islamophobic, and anti-Palestinian incidents following the start of the war in Gaza have been well documented. Conservative activists and Republican lawmakers have pointed to the serious harassment and violence that some Jewish students and staff have faced as justification for cracking down on colleges.
But P. says the targeting of pro-Palestinian activism by administrative offices charged with enforcing Title VI “pulls the veil on the reality that free speech is not allotted to everyone equally.” She says she has no faith in the ability of Berkeley’s antidiscrimination office to support marginalized students. (A spokesman for Berkeley wrote in an email that the office “strictly adheres to all relevant rules and policies without regard to the identities or perspectives of complainants or respondents.”)
This, coupled with the attempted deportations of noncitizen students and staff who advocate for Palestinian rights, has deepened the climate of fear on college campuses around engaging in pro-Palestinian advocacy. Students who have gone through or are going through antisemitism investigations say their due-process and free-speech rights have been violated and that discrimination against Arab, Muslim, or Palestinian students is going unchecked.
“Free speech goes one way for Berkeley,” said a Berkeley Ph.D. student and colleague of P.’s who requested anonymity because of concerns for her family’s safety. “They have these free-speech cafes over here. Meanwhile, we’re being disciplined with all of these obscure laws that they’re putting into practice.”
Broad Discretion
While the heightened attention on Title VI is new, government pressure on colleges to combat discrimination is not.
Administrators and higher-ed lawyers told The Chronicle the focus on Title VI today reminded them of the treatment of Title IX, the federal gender-equity law, in the 2010s. When the Obama administration sent colleges a strongly worded letter about their responsibilities to investigate sexual assault in 2011, Title IX offices became ubiquitous.
Today, many of those same offices are managing the wave of complaints of antisemitic, anti-Israeli, anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, or Islamophobic discrimination during the war in Gaza. Some colleges have opened Title VI offices or hired Title VI coordinators, but those remain relatively rare. Reports of racial or ethnic discrimination are also sometimes handled by human-resources or student-affairs departments.
There’s no Title IX-style regulatory framework for adjudicating cases, which gives individual colleges a lot of discretion in how they treat cases of racial or ethnic discrimination. That could change if the Trump Education Department formalizes a Title VI rule, which could, for example, require that colleges use a definition of antisemitism that accounts for criticism of Israel.
“With Title VI, there isn’t as much to base what we have to do because it hasn’t been dictated to us in the same way, but we kind of know how to do it because of the work that we do with Title IX,” said Elizabeth Trayner, assistant vice president for institutional equity at Seattle University. “It doesn’t have to be as prescriptive and legalistic because we don’t have the regulations to guide us, but those foundational principles still remain constant.”
In both Title VI and Title IX administration, Trayner said, the core obligations are straightforward: Colleges should “stop, prevent, [and] remedy” discriminatory conduct.
“I think that understanding the various civil-rights laws helps inform other civil-rights laws,” Trayner said. “I think it can also confuse people who don’t know how to keep it straight in their mind.”
Indeed, some critics say the way colleges are handling Title VI issues replicates some of the longstanding due-process concerns with Title IX, leaving students accused of harassment without an adequate chance to defend themselves.
“They are engaged in a really opaque process, trying to make determinations about what’s happening on campus … without the sort of procedural safeguards you’d like to see,” said Robert Shibley, special counsel for campus advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Title VI and Title IX investigations are fact-intensive and not easy to resolve quickly, Shibley said. But that’s effectively what the federal government is asking colleges to do. For example, the Trump administration demanded that Columbia expel or suspend student protesters involved in the encampments and building occupation of last spring as a condition for ongoing federal-funding negotiations. (Columbia did expel some of those students the same day that it received Trump’s demand letter.)
“The reason that you have a procedure where you hear from both sides or you give somebody proper notice of what they’re accused of doing, and why you have a neutral tribunal to make the decision, is because in each individual case, you need to be careful about whether or not the person who is standing before you accused is actually responsible for the thing of which they’ve been accused,” Shibley said.
And when the people handling Title VI cases are the same people who handle Title IX ones, they may carry over strategies that don’t make sense. A lack of transparency can be justified when it comes to adjudicating sexual-misconduct allegations, Shibley said. But Title VI tends to involve more public, political speech.
“You’ve got these secretive tribunals trying to handle arguments that are already happening out in the open,” Shibley said. “And so they’ve gotten used to not sharing certain information that is actually really destructive not to share when it comes to determination about race discrimination on campus.”
‘Working Against Them’
Another challenge for campus Title VI enforcement is that the civil-rights law itself also protects students from discrimination based on Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian identity.
In practice, some lawyers argue, colleges’ Title VI investigations are silencing dissent and ignoring discrimination against students from those backgrounds.
It’s not that there hasn’t been discrimination against Jewish students, said Miriam Nunberg, an educational-rights attorney and former employee of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. But, she said, “it’s a distortion of Title VI to claim that political speech inherently creates a hostile environment.”
Nowhere have these dynamics played out more visibly than at Columbia University. In March, the online publication Drop Site News reported that a new office at Columbia was investigating students involved in pro-Palestinian activism for discriminatory harassment. A spokeswoman for Columbia said the university does not comment on individual matters or pending investigations.
Columbia’s Office of Institutional Equity (OIE) was formed in the summer of 2024, as the Ivy League institution tried to move past the spring encampments. Lawmakers and Trump, then a candidate for office, had accused Columbia and other colleges of abiding antisemitism and promised to take action if the situation didn’t improve. The OIE would be a centralized hub to manage reports of racial, ethnic, and sex discrimination, including violations of Title VI, Title VII, and Title IX.
Instead, critics say, the office has subjected students to months-long investigations and restricted their access to information, and even accused bystanders of rules violations. (A spokeswoman for Columbia said the institution requires that students involved in investigations sign a privacy agreement to “protect students from disclosing to others the information they learn that could lead to doxxing or retaliatory behavior by others, to protect the integrity of the investigation, and ensure information is not being shared with others that would impact the investigation.”)
“Columbia is essentially saying … if you engage in pro-Palestinian advocacy of a certain kind strong enough, there’s a good chance we’re going to treat that as a discriminatory act,” said Genevieve Lakier, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, in an interview with The Chronicle. “That is deeply disturbing from a free-speech perspective.”
Private institutions like Columbia aren’t bound by the First Amendment, but many choose to respect free-speech protections anyway.
Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia graduate student and green-card holder who was arrested by immigration authorities in March, had been investigated by the university’s Office of Institutional Equity for actions related to his pro-Palestinian activism. Shortly before his detention, Khalil told the Associated Press that he believed OIE was “mainly an office to chill pro-Palestine speech.”
Kay, a Columbia graduate student and pro-Palestinian activist who requested The Chronicle only use their first name because they work for the university, said students feel like the office that is supposed to be a repository for their complaints is instead “working against them.” Kay said they have helped friends file complaints, but the reports haven’t been taken seriously.
“It’s an office of institutional equity,” Kay said. “It’s supposed to be making sure that harassment doesn’t get levied against anyone. And instead it works on this institutional mandate policing people rather than addressing feelings of endangerment.”
