Anti-Semitism on College Campuses: Laws, Court Cases, and Title VI

Antisemitism on college campuses in the United States spiked sharply after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, and while tracked incidents have fallen from their 2024 peak, they remain several times higher than they were before the war. The response has reshaped higher education: congressional hearings pushed out university presidents, the Trump administration froze billions in federal research funding and negotiated nine-figure settlements with major universities, dozens of schools are under Title VI investigation, and courts are actively testing where discriminatory harassment ends and protected political speech begins.

How Widespread the Problem Is

The Anti-Defamation League’s 2025 audit recorded 583 antisemitic incidents at colleges and universities, a 66 percent decrease from the 1,694 logged in 2024. Anti-Israel protest-related incidents on campuses fell 83 percent as the encampment movement collapsed, vandalism dropped 51 percent, and assaults fell 72 percent.¹²

The 2025 campus numbers still ran roughly three to four times higher than in 2021.¹ Hillel International, using a broader methodology, recorded 2,334 incidents during the 2024–2025 academic year, its highest total since it began tracking in 2019, and 1,662 through mid-May of the 2025–2026 year.³ Across all settings, the ADL counted 6,274 antisemitic incidents in 2025, down 33 percent from the 2024 record of 9,354, although physical assaults on Jewish people hit a record high of 203.²

What Jewish Students Say They Experience

The American Jewish Committee’s 2025 report, based on a nationally representative fall 2025 survey, found that 42 percent of Jewish college students said they had experienced antisemitism during their time in school. Twenty-eight percent said they had felt uncomfortable or unsafe at a campus event, rising to 55 percent among students who had personally experienced antisemitism. A quarter said they had been excluded from a campus group or event because of their Jewish identity.⁴

Self-censorship is common. Thirty-four percent said they had avoided visibly displaying their Jewish identity out of fear, and 38 percent had avoided expressing views on Israel with classmates. Among students who had directly experienced antisemitism, those figures climbed to 60 and 68 percent. Eighty percent of parents of Jewish high school students said reports of campus antisemitism were a factor in their college selection.⁴

An ADL survey of non-Jewish undergraduates conducted in early 2026 found that 48 percent said they had witnessed or experienced anti-Jewish behavior in the previous year, and nearly the same share endorsed at least one anti-Jewish attitude.⁵

The 2024 Encampments

Spring 2024 pro-Palestinian encampments became the crisis’s most visible flashpoint. Columbia was the epicenter. Student organizers set up encampments and occupied Hamilton Hall demanding divestment from companies linked to Israel, and then-president Minouche Shafik authorized police to clear the encampments twice, with hundreds of arrests. A Columbia task force later described antisemitism at the university following October 7 as “pervasive.”⁶

Encampments spread. At UCLA, administrators were criticized for failing to act against an encampment that Jewish students said blocked their access to parts of campus, a response a federal court later called “unimaginable” and “abhorrent.”⁷ Penn police cleared a 16-day encampment, arresting 33 people. MIT cleared its encampment with 10 arrests. Harvard placed protesters on involuntary leave. Wisconsin-Madison negotiated a resolution while acknowledging that the encampment had made Jewish community members “feel uncomfortable and unseen.”⁸

Congress Steps In

The December 5, 2023 hearing before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce was the political turning point. Representative Elise Stefanik asked the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT whether calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their campus conduct policies. All three gave answers widely perceived as evasive. Claudine Gay of Harvard called such calls “at odds with the values of Harvard” but pointed to the university’s “commitment to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.”⁹

Penn’s Liz Magill resigned four days later. Gay resigned on January 2, 2024, in what became the shortest presidency in Harvard’s history, after the hearing combined with plagiarism allegations against her dissertation. MIT’s Sally Kornbluth kept her post with board support. Columbia’s Shafik testified in a later round and then resigned. Rutgers’s Jonathan Holloway stepped down citing “toxic politics.” Of the seven presidents who ultimately testified across three hearing rounds, only Kornbluth and Northwestern’s Michael Schill remained in their roles as of mid-2026.¹⁰

The committee’s investigation produced reports in October 2024 and March 2026 built on more than 400,000 pages of documents, the first subpoenas issued to universities in the committee’s 157-year history. The reports concluded that university leaders had failed to protect Jewish students, that faculty had “legitimized and amplified” antisemitism, and that groups like Students for Justice in Palestine acted as “ringleaders” of hostility.¹¹¹²

Federal Funding as Enforcement

President Trump signed Executive Order 14188, “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” on January 29, 2025. It directed federal agencies to inventory pending Title VI campus antisemitism complaints, encouraged the Attorney General to use civil rights enforcement authorities, and instructed universities to monitor and report activities by foreign students that could warrant deportation proceedings. The order built on a 2019 executive order directing agencies to consider the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism when enforcing Title VI.¹³

Federal grant funding became the administration’s main enforcement tool. Grants and contracts were frozen at multiple universities, and settlements followed:

Columbia had the majority of its $1.3 billion in federal research funding frozen. It agreed to pay $221 million (with $200 million to the government and $21 million to an EEOC claims fund) and accepted a “Resolution Monitor,” Bart Schwartz, with authority to oversee hiring, admissions, and the Middle Eastern studies department.¹⁴¹⁵
Northwestern agreed to pay $75 million over three years to unlock about $790 million in frozen funds, implement mandatory antisemitism training, and terminate an agreement with student groups negotiated during the 2024 encampment.¹⁶¹⁷
Cornell agreed to pay $60 million over three years.¹⁵
Brown agreed to pay $50 million over 10 years after the administration threatened to freeze $510 million.¹⁵
Penn reached an agreement after $175 million in funding was frozen.¹⁵

Harvard did not settle. It sued and won. In September 2025, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs issued a permanent injunction ordering the government to unfreeze more than $2 billion in research grants, ruling that the administration had used antisemitism as a “smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically motivated assault” on the university in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, the First Amendment, and Title VI.¹⁸ The administration appealed.¹⁹ A separate judge indefinitely barred the administration from fining the University of California system in November 2025.¹⁵

The Justice Department also stood up a Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, which announced visits in February 2025 to 10 campuses including Columbia, Harvard, Northwestern, NYU, UCLA, UC Berkeley, and George Washington.²⁰ In August 2025, the DOJ found George Washington “deliberately indifferent” to antisemitism during a 2024 encampment and found UCLA in violation of civil rights law, freezing $584 million in its federal funding.²¹ In May 2026, the DOJ filed a separate suit against UCLA seeking return of federal grants.⁷

Title VI Investigations

The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights investigates campus discrimination based on shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics under Title VI. As of early 2025, 60 colleges and universities were under active investigation for alleged antisemitic harassment and discrimination, and OCR sent formal warning letters to all 60 about potential funding consequences. Six of the eight Ivy League universities were on the list.²²

OCR maintains a public, weekly-updated list of open investigations covering large research universities and smaller institutions alike.²³ Several investigations have already produced resolution agreements requiring policy changes: the University of Washington resolved 140 harassment reports and agreed to establish a Title VI coordinator, Rutgers resolved three complaints involving more than 400 reports, and the University of California system resolved nine complaints across five campuses.²⁴ Brown entered a resolution agreement in January 2024 after receiving about 75 reports of national origin discrimination, centralizing Title VI functions into a new Office of Equity Compliance and Reporting.²⁵

The Fight Over the IHRA Definition

At the center of the policy response is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism, developed in 2004. It includes examples that classify certain forms of criticism of Israel as antisemitic, such as denying Jewish self-determination or calling Israel’s existence a “racist endeavor.” The 2019 executive order directed federal agencies to consider the definition in Title VI enforcement, and the 2025 order reinforced that mandate.¹³

Several major universities have formally adopted it. NYU was first, beginning to treat Zionists as a protected class in 2024.²⁶ Harvard adopted the definition in January 2025 as part of a settlement of two Title VI lawsuits, agreeing to post guidance that “For many Jewish people, Zionism is a part of their Jewish identity” and listing examples of antisemitic conduct such as “excluding Zionists from an open event” or “applying a ‘no Zionist’ litmus test for participation in any Harvard activity.”²⁷ Columbia formally incorporated the definition in July 2025.²⁸ Yale also adopted it.²⁹

Adoption has drawn strong opposition. Faculty groups, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and pro-Palestinian organizations argue the definition functions as a speech code that conflates political criticism of the Israeli government with anti-Jewish bigotry.³⁰ Kenneth Stern, who helped draft the original definition, has publicly warned against codifying it into policy, arguing it could be used to “suppress — rather than answer — political speech.” More than 1,200 Jewish university professors have voiced similar concerns.³¹ Supporters counter that the definition gives institutions clarity for recognizing when hostility toward Israel crosses into hostility toward Jewish people.²⁷

Pending Federal Legislation

The Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would require the Department of Education to consider the IHRA definition when investigating Title VI violations, passed the House in May 2024 by 320 to 91. It was reintroduced in the 119th Congress as S.558 (Senator Tim Scott) and H.R.1007. The Senate version underwent committee markup in April 2025 but has not passed either chamber or become law as of mid-2026.³²

A separate bill, the Stop Antisemitism on College Campuses Act (H.R.2446) from Senator Scott and Representative Mike Lawler, would prohibit federal funding for any university that “authorizes, facilitates, provides funding for, or otherwise supports events promoting antisemitism,” using the IHRA definition.³³

Key Court Cases

Frankel v. Regents of the University of California

Jewish students alleged that UCLA violated the Free Exercise Clause by allowing an encampment to exclude them from parts of campus. A federal court found UCLA had likely violated the First Amendment and called its conduct “abhorrent.”⁷ UCLA settled in July 2025, agreeing to a 15-year injunction against allowing the exclusion of Jewish individuals from campus areas, contributing $2.33 million to organizations combating antisemitism, and funding $320,000 for a campus initiative.³⁴

Khalil v. Trump

Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate and U.S. permanent resident married to an American citizen, was detained by ICE in March 2025. His legal team argued the arrest targeted his pro-Palestinian advocacy and violated the First Amendment and due process. A federal judge initially blocked his deportation, but the Third Circuit ruled 6 to 5 in May 2026 that the district court lacked jurisdiction, keeping the case in immigration court. The Board of Immigration Appeals issued a final removal order in April 2026, and Khalil’s attorneys have announced they will seek Supreme Court review.³⁵³⁶

Taal v. Trump

A Cornell professor and two graduate students filed a federal lawsuit in March 2025 challenging Executive Orders 14161 and 14188, arguing the orders violated First and Fifth Amendment rights by enabling immigration consequences for political advocacy. A federal judge in the Northern District of New York denied their request for a temporary restraining order, and plaintiff Momodou Taal subsequently left the United States voluntarily.³⁷

Complaints From Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Students

Federal civil rights complaints have run in more than one direction. Since April 2024, Palestine Legal has filed nine federal Title VI complaints alleging anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim discrimination at universities including UMass Amherst, Emory, UNC Chapel Hill, and Columbia.³⁸ The federal government settled an anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian bias complaint against Emory in January 2025.³⁹ Columbia’s Office of Institutional Equity reported that of 305 discrimination allegations tagged as involving antisemitism, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, or Islamophobic conduct during the 2024–2025 academic year, 55 percent were categorized as antisemitism and roughly 30 percent as anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian, or Islamophobic.⁴⁰

State-Level Measures

States have moved separately. California enacted Assembly Bill 715 in October 2025, establishing an antisemitism prevention coordinator for K-12 schools and requiring that instruction be “factually accurate” and free from “advocacy, personal opinion, bias, or partisanship.” An earlier version that would have defined an antisemitic learning environment to include instruction denying Israel’s right to exist was stripped during the legislative process after opposition from teachers unions, school boards, and Muslim organizations who argued it would censor pro-Palestinian viewpoints.⁴¹

New York’s state Senate Higher Education Committee blocked two bills in May 2026: one that would have prohibited state funding for SUNY and CUNY schools that permit “terrorist organizations” on campus, and the Dismantling Student Antisemitism Act, which would have required mandatory sensitivity training and new reporting requirements.⁴² Florida moved further than any state in 2023, ordering the deactivation of all Students for Justice in Palestine chapters in its public university system, an action that drew an ACLU lawsuit.⁴³

Where Speech and Harassment Divide

The legal question underneath every dispute is where antisemitism ends and protected political expression begins. There is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment. Antisemitic speech is constitutionally protected unless it constitutes a true threat, incitement to imminent lawless action, or harassment. Courts have upheld the right to display offensive symbols, and the Supreme Court has affirmed that politically motivated boycotts are protected activity.³¹

On campuses, speech and conduct often intertwine. Universities have tried to draw lines by enforcing time, place, and manner restrictions, such as banning encampments, requiring identification at protests, and restricting demonstrations in libraries and classrooms, while avoiding direct regulation of viewpoint. Legal scholars have argued the approach should distinguish protected speech from conduct that is not speech (building occupations, vandalism) or that violates neutral rules, rather than treating offensive opinions as themselves creating a hostile environment.⁴⁴ With Supreme Court review sought in the Khalil case, active DOJ litigation against UCLA, an ongoing government appeal of the Harvard ruling, and legislation stalled in Congress, those fights will keep shaping higher education policy for years.

1
ADL. Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2025
2
Courthouse News Service. ADL Reports a Sharp Drop in U.S. Antisemitic Incidents in 2025, Driven by a Steep Fall on Campuses
3
Hillel International. Antisemitism on College Campuses Incident Tracking
4
AJC. New Survey: Four in 10 Jewish College Students Report Experiencing Antisemitism
5
ADL. ADL’s 2026 Campus Antisemitism Report Card Reveals Significant Progress
6
PBS NewsHour. Columbia University, Epicenter of Protests Against Israel, Braces as Students Return to Campus
7
Reason. DOJ Sues UCLA for Allegedly Tolerating Discrimination and Harassment Against Jews and Israelis
8
CNN. College Campus Protests: Encampments Cleared
9
NPR. After a Disastrous Testimony, Three College Presidents Face Calls to Resign
10
Inside Higher Ed. What’s Become of the Presidents Who Testified to Congress
11
House Education and Workforce Committee. Committee Releases Investigative Report on Antisemitism on College Campuses
12
House Education and Workforce Committee. Committee Report on Antisemitism on College Campuses
13
The White House. Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism
14
Inside Higher Ed. Breaking Down the Columbia-U.S. Settlement
15
NPR. Trump Settlements With Colleges and Universities
16
Northwestern University. Federal Agreement
17
NPR. Northwestern Trump Funding Settlement
18
American Council on Education. Federal Court Harvard Ruling
19
The Harvard Crimson. White House Appeal
20
U.S. Department of Justice. Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism Announces Visits to 10 College Campuses
21
The GW Hatchet. DOJ Finds GW Acted Deliberately Indifferent to Campus Antisemitism
22
CNN. Department of Education Warning on Title VI Antisemitism
23
U.S. Department of Education. Discrimination Based on Shared Ancestry or Ethnic Characteristics
24
Grand River Solutions. Biden’s Department of Education Issues a Flurry of Resolutions and Resources Before Inauguration
25
U.S. Department of Education. Brown University Resolution Agreement
26
Inside Higher Ed. IHRA Antisemitism Definition Adopted at Harvard Prompts Backlash
27
NPR. Harvard Antisemitism Lawsuits Settlement
28
Columbia University. Combating Antisemitism
29
The Guardian. Antisemitism: University Spikes Worry Jewish Scholars
30
The Harvard Crimson. CAIR Harvard IHRA Adoption
31
First Amendment Encyclopedia. Antisemitism and Zionism
32
U.S. Congress. Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2025, S.558
33
Rep. Lawler. Stop Antisemitism on College Campuses Act
34
University of California. University of California Announces Settlement of Litigation Related to Antisemitism on Campus
35
The Guardian. Mahmoud Khalil Supreme Court Appeal Deportation
36
ACLU. Khalil v. Trump
37
Duke Law. Momodou Taal v. Donald J. Trump
38
Palestine Legal. Media Roundup: Title VI Complaints
39
Reuters. U.S. Settles Anti-Muslim, Anti-Palestinian Bias Complaint Against Emory University
40
Columbia Spectator. OIE Reports a 122 Percent Increase in Discrimination Allegations in 2024-25 Academic Year
41
CalMatters. School Antisemitism Bill Signed
42
New York State Senate. Senate Democrats Reject Efforts to Combat Antisemitism
43
Jewish Currents. The Push to Deactivate Students for Justice in Palestine
44
Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Supporting Free Speech and Countering Antisemitism on American College Campuses