In October, the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into possible antisemitism at Drexel University after the door of a suite where a Jewish student lived caught fire.
Ultimately, federal civil-rights investigators concluded that the incident wasn’t motivated by antisemitism, and the university was credited with handling it properly.
Yet Drexel still landed in trouble with the Office for Civil Rights.
The reason: Officials found that, more broadly, “the university generally failed to fulfill its obligations to assess whether incidents of shared-ancestry discrimination and harassment reported to it created a hostile environment, and where the university did conduct this assessment it misapplied the legal standard.”
The Office for Civil Rights laid out that standard in writing to Drexel, asserting that a hostile environment is formed by “unwelcome conduct that, based on the totality of the circumstances, is subjectively and objectively offensive and is so severe or pervasive that it limits or denies a person’s ability to participate in or benefit from a recipient’s education program or activity.”
Officials identified what they called “growing evidence of a hostile environment for over 18 months” at Drexel.
Earlier this month, the university entered into a resolution agreement with the Office for Civil Rights.
The university promised to conduct a review of its response to complaints and reports of antisemitic and other shared-ancestry discrimination, revise its policies and procedures, and provide employees with specialized training, among other actions.
In June, the Office for Civil Rights announced discrimination-related resolution agreements with the City University of New York and the University of Michigan. Those investigations, too, included findings of a “hostile environment.”
At Michigan, the federal agency reviewed 75 complaints alleging discrimination or shared-ancestry harassment. It “found no evidence that the university complied with its Title VI requirements to assess whether incidents individually or cumulatively created a hostile environment for students, faculty, or staff, and if so, to take steps reasonably calculated to end the hostile environment.”
Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza has inflamed tensions on college campuses across the nation while also fueling a sharp rise in antisemitism complaints to the Office for Civil Rights, commonly known as OCR. The Drexel case, and others, show that as colleges respond to discrimination complaints, they must be mindful of systemic issues and the larger environment on campus — or face potential problems with the federal government.
“Even if something happens off campus, OCR’s view is if it creates a hostile environment on campus, then the school has to respond,” said Howard Kallem, who previously worked as a chief regional attorney for OCR. Social-media posts, which the university has no control over, can also contribute to a hostile-environment finding.
The issue of “hostile environments” on campus came to rise in the 1990s, Kallem said, after employment lawsuits brought it to the forefront during the prior decade.
“It’s whether or not the harassing conduct was serious enough … to interfere with a student’s ability to learn and participate in the education program,” Kallem said.
Kallem said the federal government has taken the position that even First Amendment-protected speech can contribute to, or create, a hostile environment. So it’s important, he said, for colleges to “look into things.”
“It puts the schools on that knife edge of taking some action to try to deal with the effects of the speech without doing anything that could be seen as suppressing speech,” Kallem said.
Liz King, senior director of the education-equity program at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said a hostile environment effectively denies educational access to certain groups of students.
In the days of segregation, students of color were physically excluded from certain educational spaces, King said. But “those barriers … are not always physical,” she said.
At Drexel, OCR noted that a student “filed a complaint with Student Conduct that she received threatening messages after making a social-media post regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In response to her story on Instagram in support of Israel, the respondent sent her a message stating: “F–k you and f–k Israel. Palestine free forever.”
Other hostile-environment examples included graffiti saying “F— the Jews” that included a swastika, several student reports that mezuzot — small scrolls placed on doorframes in Jewish homes — were removed from their dormitory doors, and repeated social-media threats.
King credited the Biden administration with emphasizing systemic investigations of discrimination on college campuses, which she said were less likely to happen during former president Donald Trump’s tenure.
“The Drexel case is just a really good example of why we need this emphasis on systemic investigations,” King said. If federal officials had simply closed the case after determining the door fire was not an antisemitic incident, King said, the other issues “would not have been uncovered and Drexel would not have been making the commitments it is now making.”
Kenneth L. Marcus, who led OCR under Trump, disputed that Drexel would have avoided a thorough investigation during the Trump years. Marcus said the Trump administration avoided “unnecessarily” expanding individual civil-rights cases into systemic investigations, but that OCR would broaden inquiries when it was warranted.
Marcus said current OCR leadership is treating discrimination complaints from Jewish students as an urgent and important issue, and he applauded that aggressive posture by the federal government.
“It is clear that they are sending a message to universities that they need to take antisemitism allegations very, very seriously,” Marcus said.