The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights was hit with a lawsuit for dropping an antisemitism complaint against the University of Pennsylvania, the latest sign of mounting frustration over what Jewish groups describe as the agency’s lackluster response to anti-Jewish hostility on campus.
The Brandeis Center accused the OCR in its motion filed Tuesday of violating its own rules in its “arbitrary and capricious” dismissal on Jan. 2 of an antisemitism complaint lodged against the university in Philadelphia.
The lawsuit filed in federal court seeks to have the agency reinstate the complaint and resume its investigation into Penn, as well as reinstate “all other OCR investigations unlawfully dismissed under Section 110 since October 7, 2023.”
“They are dumping some cases that should be pursued, like the University of Pennsylvania case and University of California, Berkeley case, and when they are issuing resolution agreements, they’re neither as strong nor as specific as they could be,” Kenneth Marcus, founder and chairman of the Brandeis Center, told The Washington Times.
Mr. Marcus, who headed the OCR under Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, said “it gives me no pleasure to sue the Biden OCR, given that we have so many cases before the agency.”
Others are similarly frustrated. The Zionist Organization of America blasted the OCR’s recent agreement resolving a complaint against the City University of New York, which included providing training to employees and campus officers investigating harassment; conducting a student “climate survey,” and reviewing its antisemitism policies.
“The small steps called for in the resolution agreement are not sufficient to fix the many antisemitism problems that the ZOA documented in detail going back to 2016,” said the organization in a June 20 statement. “Jewish students were unsafe then and they are unsafe today.
Jonathan Tobin, editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Service, called the CUNY agreement “barely a slap on the wrist.”
“The CUNY settlement is more evidence that those institutions that bend the knee to the antisemites are unlikely to face any repercussions from the federal government,” he said in a June 24 op-ed headlined “Federal probes of campus antisemitism have flopped.”
Certainly the department has its hands full. Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, more than 100 shared-ancestry complaints have been filed with the agency, the vast majority of which are believed to involve antisemitism.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona praised the office’s work in announcing the June 17 resolution agreements with CUNY and the University of Michigan, saying they “mark a positive step forward.”
“The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights continues to hold schools accountable for compliance with civil rights standards, including by investigating allegations of discrimination or harassment based on shared Jewish ancestry and shared Palestinian or Muslim ancestry,” Mr. Cardona said.
Catherine Lhamon, DOE assistant secretary for civil rights, said the fully executed CUNY agreement will “ensure that its students may learn in the nondiscriminatory environment federal law promises to them.”
Mr. Marcus disagreed, saying that the assistant secretary has “done some very good outreach toward the Jewish community, but the action that OCR is taking on antisemitism complaints is less than it should be.”
“Not only have some of their resolution agreements been weak, but they’re not even addressing some of the cases that they are legally compelled to address,” he said. “In the middle of an antisemitism crisis, OCR is dismissing some cases even where its rules do not permit it.”
In its Jan. 2 notice dropping the Penn investigation, the office said its rules allow dismissing a complaint when a parallel class-action lawsuit has been filed in federal court.
No such filing has been made against Penn, but the notice said the requirement was fulfilled by an antisemitism lawsuit brought by two undergraduates that contained “the same allegations” and also sought “systemic relief.”
“There was no class action lawsuit at the University of Penn or University of California at Berkeley,” Mr. Marcus said. “OCR claims that the rationale for dismissal is that the allegations are systemic, but that’s not what the rule says. The rule says ‘class action.’”
The Washington Times has reached out to the department for comment on the lawsuit.
The motion filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia cited a host of anti-Jewish incidents at Penn before and after Oct. 7, including a rally sponsored by the student group Penn Against the Occupation to “cheer for Hamas.”
At the Oct. 16 rally, a speaker told Jews to “go back to Moscow, Brooklyn … f——ing Berlin where you came from” and a participant shoved a Jewish student to the ground. The campus has also seen graffiti such as “The Jews R Nazis,” “F—- the IDF,” and “Intifada.”
A Hillel rabbi said some Penn staffers received “vile, disturbing, antisemitic” emails. Penn lecturer Dwayne Booth was accused of antisemitism for cartoons posted on his personal website, including a drawing of three individuals drinking blood out of a glass labeled “Gaza.”
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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