It’s the first, but it may not be the last.
The DOE and three other federal government departments and agencies – Justice, Health and Human Services and General Services Administration (GSA) – have combined to cancel grants to Columbia totaling $400 million for failure to protect Jewish students on its campuses, the DOE said.
Cash isn’t the DOE’s only weapon.
In addition, letters have been sent to Columbia and 59 other colleges and universities warning of legal repercussions for possible violations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act for failure to protect Jewish students.
The Office of Civil Rights operates within the Department of Education and is one of the wings of oversight that will move elsewhere within the government if the DOE shuts down.
Potential violations by the schools include uninterrupted access to campus facilities and educational opportunities, the letters state.
“Anyway you look at that, that’s true,” Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, said on Washington Watch Tuesday.
Jewish students have reported fearing for their safety at numerous campuses across the country since anti-Israel protests heightened at the start of the Israel-Hamas war in the days following Oct. 7, 2023.
“There were encampments on these campuses for days,” Kilgannon told show host Tony Perkins.
At Columbia, some faculty have been supportive of the anti-Israel efforts of students. One professor, Conor Cullen, will be investigated for dismissing his philosophy class to allow students to attend a protest.
The Washington Free Beacon reports that Cullen led students in a “blind vote” as to whether classes should be held during the protest.
“They are not allowed to cancel classes for political activism,” Naya Lekht, an antisemitism expert with Institute for Global Studies of Antisemitism and Policy, told AFN. “I do believe that if you do not do your job, if you violate your contract, you lose your job.”
Canceling the class was damaging to all students “because a university is a place where you’re supposed to learn and study. If you’re a student wanting to learn about the Middle East, and your university has decided to cave in to the demands of FJP (Faculty for Justice in Palestine) or SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine), you’re violating the tenets of education,” Lekht said.
Among the schools receiving letters were Ivy League institutions Brown, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton and Yale, and prominent state schools like Rutgers (New Jersey), the University of Michigan, and the University of Virginia.
Free speech for the 'right' views
The universities in question worked hard to protect the free-speech rights of anti-Israel protesters, many with links to Hamas, at a time when conservative speech was discouraged or silenced on some campuses across the country.
Ian Howorth, a conservative writer and podcaster who attempted to address students at the State University of New York at Albany; writer Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire, in an address at California at Berkeley; and women’s sports advocate Riley Gaines in San Francisco, are a few notable examples.
Gaines, a leading advocate for all-female sports, was forced to flee from a violent mob of protesters when spoke at San Francisco State in 2023. Even with police protection, she said she was assaulted and barricaded herself in a campus facility over fear for her safety.
The irony of protesting an "anti-trans" speaker is the same left-wing mobs also chanted slogans that praise Hamas and its "intifada" against Jews.
The push against conservative speech on campuses was growing before Hamas attacked Israel, The College Fix reported.
“If you were a conservative organization on campus, or a Young Republicans club on campus, you couldn’t host a speaker because of security concerns,” Kilgannon said.
The college administrations “will tolerate some speech but not others,” Kilgannon said.
Federal spending on higher education has run into the billions for years. The spending for higher ed is even greater from state budgets, Pew Research shows.
“The American taxpayer is not obligated to send funds, send their hard-earned money to elite universities who are going to violate the civil rights of students, particularly Jewish students. That's not something that we're obligated to do,” Kilgannon said.
But the threatened loss of federal funds will not be met lightly, she said.
Expect pushback from the campuses
Colleges and universities have powerful friends in government, as shown in recent Senate confirmation hearings for Jay Bhattacharya as Donald Trump’s pick to lead the National Institutes of Health, Kilgannon said.
“One of the questions that he got continuously from senators was about grant-making from NIH to their university systems in their states. So, it shows you what a powerful lobbying arm the higher educational institutions are,” she said.
Kilgannon praised the early work of new Education Secretary Linda McMahon for moving quickly to respond to a long list of unanswered complaints for Title VI violations.
The DOE has made it clear that those investigations have become a priority.
“There were hundreds of campuses that had an issue with this in the last few years,” Kilgannon said. “They need to have their investigations cleared.”
