Biden Admin Issues New Guidance Addressing Campus Antisemitism Amid Pro-Hamas Demonstrations, Violence

The Biden administration has issued a new “Dear Colleague” letter that included guidance aimed at addressing rising antisemitism on university campuses, a problem that has exploded since the Hamas terror group’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7.

“Today’s new actions build on the work of the President’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism,” the White House said in a statement. “This guidance is meant to ensure that colleges and universities do a better job of protecting both Jewish students and all of their students.”

The latest steps came amid criticism that US President Joe Biden has not forcefully condemned the recent takeovers of college campuses by pro-Hamas demonstrators. The Dear Colleague letter said that universities must not ignore bigoted speech and action that creates a “hostile environment,” citing several examples of conduct that could prompt a civil rights investigation and jeopardize a school’s public funding. It described a scenario in which an Israeli student is harassed by classmates and professors but their complaints are ignored by the administration, concluding that the US Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) “would  have reason to open an investigation based on this complaint.”

Evidence of “different treatment,” such as denying services or other normal aspects of the college experience — for example, rejecting a student club because it is pro-Israel — on the basis of race, color, or national origin would also draw the federal government’s scrutiny.

“I continue to be deeply concerned by the repeated reports of antisemitic and anti-Israeli, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian harassment on our campuses and in our communities,” US Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, whose office oversees OCR, said in a press release. “The administration will continue to develop and provide resources and support to ensure safe, supportive school environments.”

On Tuesday, Kenneth Marcus, a former assistant secretary of education and founder of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, told The Algemeiner that, while the new guidance is not the Education Department’s long promised codification of an executive order  — issued in 2019 by then-President Donald Trump — that explicitly defined anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism, it is significant for its potential to make campuses safer for Jewish students.

“The promised regulations would be stronger and more durable; they would have force of law and could be rescinded only by a formal rule-making. They would also be more likely to receive deference from the courts,” Marcus said. “On the other hand, the new letter, while more informal, probably has greater breadth, detail, and timeliness than one might expect from a formal regulation”

In the months that have passed since Oct. 7, anti-Zionist activists inspired by Hamas’ barbarity have bullied and even assaulted Jewish students while demanding that universities implement a full boycott of Israel — an action that would likely purge schools of Jews and Zionists, experts have told The Algemeiner.  According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents on college campuses, which The Algemeiner covered extensively, rose 321 percent in 2023, disrupting the studies of Jewish students and leaving them uncertain about the fate of the American Jewish community.

Across the US, antisemitic incidents surged a harrowing 140 percent in 2023, with 8,873 incidents — an average of 24 every day — amounting to a year unlike any experienced by the American Jewish community since the organization began tracking such data in 1979. Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all spiked by double and triple digits, with California, New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Massachusetts accounting for nearly half, or 48 percent, of all that occurred.

Middle East experts and scholars have told The Algemeiner that campus antisemitism has been caused in large part by the dominance of progressive ideology and activist faculty in higher education.

Asaf Romirowsky, executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), explained that since the 1960s, far-left “scholar activists” have gradually seized control of the higher education system, tailoring admissions processes and the curricula to foster ideological radicalism and conformity, which students then carry with them into careers in government, law, corporate America, and education. This system, he concluded, must be challenged.

“The cost of trading scholarship for political propagandizing has been a zeal and pride among faculty who esteem and cheer terrorism, a historical development which is quite telling and indicative of the evolution of the Marxist ideology which has been seeping into the academy since the 1960s,” Romirowsky said. “The message is very clear to all of us who are looking on from the outside at this, and institutions have to begin drawing a red line. The protests are not about free speech. They are about supporting terrorism, about calling for a genocide of Jews.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.