Students fight antisemitism at colleges using federal Title VI

University of Pennsylvania senior Eyal Yakoby wasn’t going to sit idly by as antisemitism crept across campus this fall.

The Israeli American wrote to President Liz Magill to warn about the hostile environment for Jews on campus following the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. Instead of studying for finals, he went to Congress on Dec. 5 for a news conference.

“There’s times when people have to stand up for those that can’t speak,” Yakoby, 21, said in an interview. “I’d definitely prefer that there was no hatred and no antisemitism and I could just go to class and hang out with my friends.”

On the day he went to Congress, Yakoby and another student also sued Penn, claiming the school fostered a hostile environment that left them feeling unsafe in class or crossing the campus.

Their lawsuit is one of several filed in recent weeks against universities by students citing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The law may become the most powerful legal tool to force universities to change how they balance free speech with the need to protect students from discrimination.

The U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights oversees enforcement of the law and is using it to impose changes through a less confrontational method. Instead of suing, it typically negotiates with schools as it makes nondiscrimination a condition of receiving federal funding.

“The ultimate Title VI threat is that the university will lose federal funding,” Kenneth Marcus, the chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the former assistant U.S. secretary of education for civil rights. “That is very rare.”

But it would be a massive hit to universities, which receive vast sums from the Education Department and other agencies, he said.

Title VI bars all federally funded programs, institutions and activities from intentionally treating individuals worse because of their race, color or national origin. It covers public and private campuses at all educational levels, and it’s now being used by Jewish students facing the worst antisemitism on campuses since before World War II.

Reports of antisemitism and Islamophobia have come amid campus protests about the Hamas massacre of 1,200 people in Israel, prompting an Israeli military response in Gaza that’s killed more than 20,000 people, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry.

While Title VI has been around for six decades, Jewish students are using it to sue New York University, the University of California at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University. Yakoby’s law firm, Kasowitz Benson Torres, expects to file more cases against schools, including Harvard and Columbia.