In late January, about 60 college and school officials shuffled into a stuffy hotel ballroom outside of Las Vegas for an all-day training. The topic: Title VI, the federal antidiscrimination law that had higher ed in a tizzy.
Daniel C. Swinton, chief consulting officer at the education consulting firm TNG, which manages the Association of Title IX Administrators, or ATIXA, kicked off the session by acknowledging the elephant in the room: the new Trump presidency.
“I would ask how we are,” Swinton said, “but the world is crazy.”
At the time, a week into the new administration, President Trump had already blasted out executive orders saying that the government would only recognize two sexes, and taking aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the public and private sectors.
Attendees wondered when they’d get a similar signal of Trump’s interest in Title VI, which bars discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin, including shared ancestry. The outbreak of war in Gaza had prompted a surge in reports of discrimination from Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, Palestinian, and Arab college students. Trump, like many Republican politicians, had focused squarely on what he saw as colleges’ tolerance of rampant antisemitism from pro-Palestinian activists.
The day after the training, campus officials got the start of an answer: Trump signed an order directing agency leaders to identify measures for fighting antisemitism, and threatening to deport international students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests. Then, in February, the Education Department issued a “Dear Colleague” letter adopting a broad interpretation of Title VI — that the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision outlawing the consideration of race in college admissions should apply to virtually all aspects of campus life. The letter is not binding but a strong statement of intent. Several associations and labor unions are suing to block the Education Department from enforcing it.
Now those administrators, activists for both Jewish and Muslim communities and advocates for DEI programs are waiting to see how exactly Trump will use Title VI as an instrument for cracking down on colleges. On the campaign trail, Trump said colleges that abide antisemitism could lose federal funding and even accreditation. (Accreditation is handled by external agencies that must maintain federal recognition.)
In March, the Trump administration sent its clearest signal yet that it plans to make good on those campaign promises: It said it was canceling about $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University, with the possibility of more cuts to follow, over what Linda McMahon, the education secretary, described as “appalling inaction” in the face of widespread antisemitism.
Just days earlier, the administration had announced that a new task force focused on antisemitism would probe more than $5 billion that Columbia received in federal grants and would consider placing stop-work orders on $51.4 million that Columbia held in federal contracts. The Ivy League institution is under Education Department investigation for Title VI compliance concerns.
The cancellation notice made clear that the administration intended the action to be a warning to other institutions. Some Jewish organizations and students are hopeful that the Trump administration’s plans will correct wrongs and make college campuses more hospitable to Jewish students. But free-speech groups and advocates for Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian students worry that colleges will respond to Trump’s warnings by squashing pro-Palestinian speech.
It feels very much like Title IX in the early 2010s.
Colleges, meanwhile, are navigating both immediate concerns and long-term ramifications. After the Dear Colleague letter, which told higher ed to get in line with the Trump administration’s expansive view of Title VI or else, some institutions quickly wiped references to race and diversity from their websites.
In the meantime, a handful of colleges have already steeled themselves for heightened enforcement by installing Title VI coordinators or forming Title VI offices to handle complaints, conduct climate surveys, and educate students on discrimination and harassment.
The harbingers of a nascent bureaucracy, and the fusion of policy and politics, have critics and compliance experts wondering whether Title VI will be the new Title IX.
For most of its 53-year history, Title IX was largely regarded as a sports law. But in 2011, the Obama Education Department issued a Dear Colleague letter instructing colleges to use the gender-equity statute to investigate sexual assault and harassment or risk losing their federal support.
Colleges hustled to create Title IX offices and hire coordinators to receive reports and manage investigations. In 2013, Obama tapped Catherine E. Lhamon to lead the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights and investigate colleges for their Title IX compliance; she established guidelines for Title IX adjudication that emphasized victims’ rights. Those were later reversed by the education secretary Betsy DeVos, who made due process for the accused a core tenet of her leadership. When Lhamon retook her position under Biden, she issued rules going back on many of DeVos’s changes. Those rules were eventually thrown out. Despite all the back-and-forth, the department’s decision to emphasize Title IX enforcement, and expand its scope, left a lasting mark on colleges, raising the stakes for what complaints colleges must adjudicate and how they adjudicate them.
What Trump’s pick for OCR director, Kimberly Richey, will do, and how much she will make antisemitism a part of her platform, remains to be seen.
“Right now, we are in a field of uncertainty,” says Melissa Carleton, a higher-education lawyer at Bricker Graydon. “It feels very much like Title IX in the early 2010s.”
When the Israel-Hamas war broke out in October 2023, antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents on college campuses skyrocketed. Protests condemning Israel’s conduct in the war, including encampments, left colleges grappling with exceptionally complicated debates over what counted as hate speech. Presidents were dragged before Congress to explain their responses to students and professors critical of Israel.
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights was flooded with complaints that campus officials had not taken antisemitism and Islamophobia seriously enough.
- According to a 2023 complaint, a Rutgers University freshman posted on social media that Palestinian protesters should kill an Israeli fraternity member. The university, the complaint said, hadn’t yet announced the student’s expulsion.
- A 2023 complaint criticized Wellesley College for failing “to take prompt and effective steps reasonably calculated to address and undue the exclusion of Jewish students” from a dorm where residence staff had said in an email that “there should be no space, no consideration, and no support for Zionism” on campus.
- A 2024 complaint said the University of Massachusetts at Amherst was “extremely slow” to act on reports filed by 18 students who were subjected to anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racial slurs, death threats, and assault. Instead, UMass “stonewalled and exacerbated the hostile environment by engaging in its own anti-Palestinian actions,” including by arresting pro-Palestinian advocates and putting them through a disciplinary process.
Between October 7, 2023, and the end of the Biden administration, about three dozen Title VI shared-ancestry investigations of colleges were resolved via resolution agreement, according to a Chronicle review of online data; most of the investigations had been opened after October 7, and they all concerned antisemitism, anti-Israeli bias, anti-Palestinian bias, Islamophobia, or anti-Arab bias. Almost 60 investigations opened after October 7 remained unresolved by mid-January, when a ceasefire took hold in Gaza and Biden left office.
“The office took the most aggressive approach to civil-rights enforcement related to shared ancestry that the office had ever in history,” Lhamon says.
In letters sent to presidents at the conclusion of investigations, the Biden Education Department repeatedly called colleges out for apparently not assessing whether incidents created a hostile environment — for both Jewish and Muslim communities — that could prevent students from accessing their education. Resolution agreements laid out the steps colleges agreed to take to resolve Title VI concerns, including reviewing and revising policies, offering training on discrimination, administering climate surveys, and providing OCR with documentation of how the colleges would respond to discrimination complaints going forward. No institution lost its federal funding; before Trump’s Education Department and several other agencies announced a $400-million hit to Columbia, the department had never pulled that lever in its enforcement of Title VI.
The deals between Biden’s Education Department and colleges caught flak from lawmakers and advocates for Jewish students, who believed that institutions were being let off with slaps on the wrist after permitting antisemitism to fester.
Kenneth L. Marcus, founder of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, served as assistant secretary of education for civil rights during the first Trump administration. Marcus says that while the Biden resolution agreements successfully communicated a focus on antisemitism, they weren’t as accountability-driven as the agreements he expects to see in Trump’s second term.
Generally speaking, colleges’ core civil-rights obligations don’t change when the president turns over. When administrators become aware of “potentially hostile activity” toward a protected group of students, Marcus says, they should consider whether their conduct codes necessitate any action, assess the campus climate for broad hostility, and offer support services to targeted groups and individuals.
But Marcus predicts that the Trump administration “might look to make an example out of one or more institutions” in resolving cases. He says he could see the Education Department taking actions far stronger than any pursued by the Biden administration — threatening to withhold federal funding, for example, or demanding personnel changes. (The Chronicle interviewed Marcus before Trump took office.)
In early February, the Education Department announced investigations into five institutions for antisemitic harassment. Each of the institutions — Columbia, Northwestern, and Portland State Universities, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities — had experienced high-profile pro-Palestinian protests, encampments, or building occupations. Several of them had ongoing Title VI investigations opened under Biden.
“Too many universities have tolerated widespread antisemitic harassment and the illegal encampments that paralyzed campus life last year, driving Jewish life and religious expression underground,” said Craig Trainor, now the acting assistant secretary for civil rights, in a February statement.
Trainor indicated in a separate email to The Chronicle that the Office for Civil Rights plans to prioritize “the disgraceful backlog of antisemitism cases” in addressing the remaining shared-ancestry investigations opened after October 7.
“The OCR will vigorously investigate all allegations of unlawful discrimination within its purview,” Trainor wrote.
What might the more vigorous Title VI enforcement that Trainor promises look like? Advocates for Jewish and Muslim communities are eager to see.
Some Jewish students hope to see the Trump administration threaten to withdraw federal funding from more colleges, to try to compel them to take antisemitic discrimination more seriously.
Aidan Herzlinger, a student at the City University of New York’s Baruch College and vice president for its Hillel chapter, was present at a Hillel-sponsored dinner off campus last fall when protesters from an unrecognized Baruch student group showed up and harassed attendees. He says Baruch took months to investigate the incident, and the most support he received was an email from a dean offering mental-health counseling.
“When you have these slow processes, you have the lack of [action] from administrations, it emboldens students to go out and increase their rhetoric and increase their protest and continue to threaten and harass Jewish students,” Herzlinger says. A spokeswoman for Baruch College said in a statement that the institution is taking disciplinary action against those involved but cannot reveal specifics because of privacy law.
Noa Fay, a graduate student at Columbia University, was an undergraduate resident adviser at Barnard College when the war in Gaza began. Once she made clear that she was a Jewish Zionist, Fay says, the harassment began. People banged on her dorm-room door in the middle of the night and wrote on her whiteboard and bulletin boards that she supported genocide and terrorism. Fay reported these incidents to the nondiscrimination and Title IX office.
“Other than taking down the bulletin boards, there was no disciplinary action,” Fay says. A spokeswoman for Barnard College said in a statement to The Chronicle that the nondiscrimination and Title IX office “takes all allegations of discrimination seriously.”
Colleges that don’t protect Jewish students, Fay said, “should not have the federal funding that they’re allowed to have because they’re compliant with federal regulations.”
The Trump Education Department could also tighten the screws by taking a more expansive view of what constitutes antisemitism, or by prioritizing complaints about antisemitism over anti-Palestinian discrimination. During his first administration, Trump signed an order directing government enforcers of Title VI to consider the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which says some forms of criticism of Israel can be antisemitic.
The issues that are of greatest concern to Jewish and Israeli students are not about speech. They are about conduct.
Biden kept the definition but never codified it, and federal legislative efforts to force the Education Department to use the IHRA definition were unsuccessful.
Miriam Nunberg, an educational-rights lawyer and OCR employee during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations, says she expects Trump to attempt to formally adopt the IHRA definition.
“If that is adopted more stringently than ‘they just have to consider it,’ then ‘from the river to the sea’ and all of those things criticizing Israel are going to possibly in and of themselves create a hostile environment,” Nunberg says, adding that she would expect litigation challenging the definition on First Amendment grounds.
While pro-Palestinian advocates are wary of what’s coming under the Trump administration, they say the Biden administration’s guidance and warnings, plus congressional investigations and contentious hearings with college presidents, had already pressured institutions to clamp down on pro-Palestinian speech.
In November, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University sued the Biden Education Department to release the Title VI guidance it had provided to colleges. A complaint stated that such records “would help explain why institutions of higher education have responded to student protests in the way they have, and what obligations the DOE believes institutions of higher education have in relation to student protests taking place now.”
The Biden administration also didn’t do enough to chastise colleges for letting anti-Arab hate, anti-Palestinian racism, and Islamophobia go unchecked, said Sabiya Ahamed, a lawyer at Palestine Legal, which pursues cases on behalf of pro-Palestinian advocates in the United States, in an interview toward the end of Biden’s presidency. Now she fears that Trump’s government will not even review complaints of anti-Muslim bias.
“For these students, it’s like, where do we go?” Ahamed asked. “‘We’re trying all these different avenues, and no one’s taking us seriously.’”
Since October 7, Palestine Legal has filed about 10 Title VI complaints with the department, Ahamed said.
“It’s either the universities being delayed in their response to students or completely ignoring students’ requests,” Ahamed said of the compliance failures described in Palestine Legal’s complaints. “In many instances, it’s also direct discrimination and harassment from administrators or from those who are affiliated with the university.”
Ahamed echoed a criticism Jewish students levied against the Biden administration’s Title VI enforcement — that the remedies articulated in its agreements with colleges were too general, not taking into account the specific harms faced in this case by Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students. (The exception, Ahamed added, was a resolution reached at the very end of Biden’s tenure at George Washington University, which she felt included more appropriate remedies for Palestinian students and their advocates.)
Asked about the criticism that ramped-up Title VI enforcement will chill speech, officials from Hillel said they didn’t see a conflict.
“The issues that are of greatest concern to Jewish and Israeli students are not about speech,” said Adam Lehman, Hillel’s chief executive. “They are about conduct. They are about the targeted harassment of individual students. They are about hundreds of cases of hateful vandalism, targeting and sometimes torturing individual students. They are about physical assaults.”
All those hopes and fears about enforcement are falling on the shoulders of a federal office that has never had the capacity to do everything people want it to do.
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has long been plagued by understaffing. While OCR is supposed to help provide remedies to students who experience discrimination, investigations can take longer to resolve than the typical tenure of a college student. As a result, students who file complaints often don’t see the outcomes while they are still on campus.
“Every year they issue an annual report talking about how they’re understaffed and they need more people,” Carleton, at Bricker Graydon, says of the OCR. “The cases sit there for year after year after year. And the investigators will switch out multiple times before a case ends because they just don’t have enough people on staff.”
Staffing levels are all but guaranteed to get worse under Trump, whose Department of Government Efficiency continues to scorch the federal work force and has identified the Education Department as one of its many targets for job cuts. If the department shutters, as Trump and his allies have proposed, civil-rights enforcement could end up residing in the Department of Justice. But that agency, which already has more responsibilities than it can keep up with, has also been roiled by firings and resignations in the first weeks of the Trump administration.
Even if the current OCR continues to exist, the office may have its hands full cracking down on colleges it suspects of maintaining race-conscious programs and facilities. The Dear Colleague letter issued in February signaled that it would begin Title VI compliance reviews in March, aiming to target colleges that are operating campus programs or activities based on race.
At the Atixa conference, Swinton and his co-leader, Sharon Perry Fantini, a partner at TNG, emphasized that there were more gray areas in Title VI than in Title IX.
For example, there aren’t Title IX-style regulations that establish guardrails for adjudication or specify prohibited behaviors. Colleges’ procedures for handling reports of discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin vary widely: Complaints might go to the Title IX office, a centralized civil-rights department, human resources, student affairs, or another compliance-focused unit.
As Title VI comes into greater focus, however, it could follow a similar path to Title IX in terms of both political volatility and administrative obligation.
If the Education Department proposed shared-ancestry regulations, they would carry the force of law. A rule could, for example, adopt a definition of antisemitism that included criticism of Israel, and institutions that disregarded it would do so at their peril.
Mark Rotenberg, Hillel’s general counsel and a former university counsel, says the organization hopes to see protections for ethno-religious groups under Title VI codified in federal regulations and the toolkit for the federal government to enforce Title VI expanded.
“Hillel has been advocating for some time that there needs to be a more modulated and incremental and hence more effective set of enforcement tools so that a general counsel … will not say to the president or chancellor, ‘Well, you want to know what the government can do to us? They essentially can do nothing unless they threaten to take away all of our federal money,’” Rotenberg says.
Does the department plan to draft such a rule? A spokesman says the department will “review and use all of its available tools to ensure that Jewish students are never again subjected to the antisemitic harassment on college campuses allowed during the Biden administration.”
In resolution and settlement agreements, including at New York University, some institutions have been compelled to designate Title VI coordinators. In Maryland, a state lawmaker has introduced a bill to require colleges to have Title VI coordinators on staff.
Some institutions have named Title VI officials even though they didn’t have to.
In September, the University of Pennsylvania announced it was starting an Office of Religious and Ethnic Inclusion to investigate complaints of discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, shared ancestry, and national origin, assess the campus climate around these issues, educate community members, and mediate conflict. (Title VI doesn’t protect against discrimination based solely on religion, but Penn’s policies do.)
The office does not have the power to punish students or staff but can make recommendations to campus authorities if it finds that a policy has been breached.
“A Title VI office really needs to make education a primary focus,” says Majid Alsayegh, one of the office’s interim co-directors. “There is such a need for people to understand bias … whether it’s personal bias, community bias, [or] cultural bias; understand how to manage around that; understand how to de-escalate a conflict when it happens rather than escalate; and understand the importance of building community that is supportive of the educational process.”
Alsayegh and the office’s other interim co-director, Steve Ginsburg, say other institutions have reached out to learn more about Penn’s approach.
“We’re all sharing best practices,” Ginsburg says. “Title IX offices were started years ago, and then they became this whole world unto [themselves]. Title VI will be developing some of its own best practices, but there’s definitely a real focus on it right now and learning from what Title IX offices do, adopting what makes sense in this area.”
Lehman, the Hillel chief executive, says the organization supports the hiring of dedicated Title VI administrators. Many existing civil-rights compliance offices, he adds, don’t fully understand the requirements of Title VI, leading to “misinterpretation and inaction.”
Some worry that a more structured Title VI bureaucracy on college campuses will also carry over some of Title IX’s baggage. Critics say the Title IX investigation process fails to achieve justice for victims, entraps innocent students, and relies on inexperienced staff members to handle sensitive cases. They fear those same shortcomings will follow a Title VI office.
I am quite concerned that we’re going to see some really harsh penalties adopted through Title VI processes that are devoid of the normal procedural protections that we would want.
“Many times, these sorts of university offices can just be a way to bring in more Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab students for protesting,” says Ahamed, of Palestine Legal.
Shirin Sinnar, a professor at Stanford Law School who wrote a piece for the Knight First Amendment Institute about the dearth of Palestinian perspectives on college campuses, says she is concerned that students will not be able to defend themselves from complaints brought against them.
“There have been so many demands on the political right for stepped-up enforcement and harsher punishment and the kinds of penalties that are really out of step with what colleges and universities have traditionally imposed for students engaged in civil disobedience,” Sinnar says. “I am quite concerned that we’re going to see some really harsh penalties adopted through Title VI processes that are devoid of the normal procedural protections that we would want.”
Another wrinkle is that it’s hard to know if the Trump administration would encourage the hiring of such administrators. At the Atixa conference, it was not lost on the audience — which included many diversity, equity, and inclusion, student-affairs, and Title IX administrators — that new Title VI coordinator positions sound an awful lot like the DEI work Trump was trying to shut down.
There is no broad mandate yet for colleges to hire Title VI coordinators or stand up Title VI offices, says Carleton, the Bricker Graydon lawyer. But she expects that colleges will come to view devoting more resources to Title VI enforcement as a wise practice.
Whether from fear, altruism, or both, a new bureaucracy may grow.
“The bottom line is we can’t have people doing the discrimination,” Carleton said. “We have to have some system for addressing it.”
