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      Conservatives fighting ‘antisemitism’ are actively targeting US Jews. Why? | Josh Schreier

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      The Trump administration claims that its moves to defund universities, arrest and deport students and force schools to demote or monitor professors are meant to combat antisemitism, protect Jewish students and remove “Hamas-supporting” foreign nationals from the country. American pro-Israel groups including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Hillel International, Aipac and the Heritage Foundation have united behind Republican measures to crack down on higher education and its putative antisemitism. Religiously identified groups such as the Orthodox Union and Christians United for Israel have joined the chorus, celebrating the punishment of supposedly antisemitic students and professors. Whatever their varied pasts, today’s pro-Israel groups are not about protecting American Jews. Instead, they are allies in Maga’s war on free speech, academic freedom and the US’s democratic society itself.To be clear: the pro-Israel campaign to “protect” Jews by punishing anti-Zionist speech often targets Jews. After a student complaint about a tenured Jewish professor’s Twitter post, Muhlenberg College fired her. The ADL has rewarded Muhlenberg by grading it “better than most” colleges for fighting “antisemitism”. The ADL also accused Jewish Voice for Peace, a large, anti-Zionist Jewish group with chapters on many American campuses, of “promot[ing] messaging” that can include “support for terrorists”. Under pressure from the Trump administration, Columbia University expelled a Jewish graduate student and United Auto Workers local president who demonstrated against the war in Gaza.Most chillingly, the Trump administration recently sent all staff at Barnard College a questionnaire inquiring if they were Jewish, ostensibly to gauge campus antisemitism. For many, the experience of being asked by the government to self-identify as a Jew was terrifying; as one historian put it: “We’ve seen this movie before, and it ends with yellow stars.”Canary Mission, a pro-Israel website that publishes information on students and professors who supposedly “promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews”, has been targeting an Israeli American scholar of the Holocaust along with many other Jews (including the author of this piece). Project Esther, an initiative launched by the conservative Heritage Foundation – the thinktank behind Project 2025 – blames the “American Jewish community’s complacency” for the “pro-Palestinian movement’s” ability to continue working for “the destruction of capitalism and democracy”. Maga’s pro-Israel partners do not protect Jews; they help Trump in his war on our academic freedom and open society more generally.Of course, unlike some pro-Israel groups, the Trump administration has a broader antipathy toward higher education. As JD Vance put it, “the professors are the enemy”. But the pro-Israel movement furnishes Maga with a crucial weapon in their war on this “enemy”: charges of antisemitism. The entire “US education system”, according to Project Esther, has been “infiltrated” by “Hamas-supporting organizations” that now “foster antisemitism under the guise of “‘pro-Palestinian,’ anti-Israel, anti-Zionist narratives … within the rubric of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and similar Marxist ideology”. Of course, by linking Palestinian solidarity with longstanding rightwing bogeymen like antiracism and communism, Project Esther gives away the game; their “antisemitic” charge is a tool to silence Maga’s left-leaning critics in higher education.Meanwhile, many pro-Israel groups seem to tolerate Maga’s proximity to antisemitism. If they didn’t, we might expect to hear more about Vance’s meeting with Germany’s neo-Nazi-linked AfD, Steve Bannon’s singling out of “American Jews that do not support Israel and do not support Maga” as “the number one enemy to the people in Israel”, or Trump’s claim that the Democratic senator Chuck Schumer is “not Jewish” but “Palestinian”.The ADL went so far as to defend Elon Musk’s apparent Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration. True, the ADL rightfully criticized some of these other incidents, as well as Trump’s antisemitic advertisements, and his meeting with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes. But these cases do not seem to merit breaking with Maga. Why? Because the pro-Israel movement advocates for Israel, not American Jews.For this reason, the American pro-Israel movement has been collaborating in the Trump administration’s campaign to roll back everyone’s constitutional rights. By now, most of us have seen the footage of Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, both students at American universities, being surrounded by groups of government agents and forced into the backs of unmarked vehicles. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, promised that hundreds of other students have been stripped of their visas. Neither Khalil nor Öztürk have any demonstrated ties to Hamas. Khalil even spoke out against antisemitism, declaring that “antisemitism and any form of racism has no place on this campus and in this movement”. Furthermore, as a permanent resident and a student visa holder, both Khalil and Öztürk are guaranteed first amendment protections. Yet Hillel International failed to condemn the arrests, and the ADL outright celebrated Khalil’s.Ultimately, Trump and many in the pro-Israel movement have allied against free speech in higher education because it is a pillar of an open society that threatens both of them. The right has long had it out for universities. The pro-Israel movement, meanwhile, saw the campus encampments with horror; a wide cross-section of students and professors from a variety of religious, racial and ethnic backgrounds came together to speak out against Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of people.Even more galling for the pro-Israel movement, Jews actively participated in the protests – even conducting Passover seders, as well as Kabbalat Shabbat and Havdalah services amid them. These young Jews are not alone; less than half of Americans now sympathize with Israel, and one-third believe Israel is committing genocide. These facts do not threaten American Jews, but they do threaten Maga and the heavily evangelical pro-Israel movement. As long as increasing numbers of students, professors and many others speak out for Palestinians’ humanity, the pro-Israel movement, armed with disingenuous accusations of antisemitism, will aid Maga’s war on American higher education and democracy itself.

      Joshua Schreier is a professor of history and Jewish studies at Vassar College. More

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      They staged protests for Palestine. The consequences have been life-changing

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      EK was completing a take-home exam on 6 March when the dean of student conduct at Swarthmore College emailed her about an urgent Zoom meeting. On the video call, she said, the dean told her that she would be suspended for one semester for staging a protest at the college’s trustees’ dinner in December 2023. Using a bullhorn, EK had interrupted the event to demand that the school divest from products that fuel Israel’s war on Gaza.A panel of students and school employees had found her responsible for assault, among other code of conduct violations for the incident. EK, a final-semester senior who is using a pseudonym out of fear of retaliation, recalled being in shock: “I’ve been really distraught by all of this,” EK said. “I used to be unhoused before I came to Swarthmore, so to be put into this situation again is very disturbing.”She filed an appeal in mid-March and remained in campus housing until the school came to a decision on 10 April. A first-generation, low-income college student on financial aid, EK had been forbidden from campus housing pending the appeal decision, and lost crucial finances when she was let go from her school job. She said she also fears she may be vulnerable to attacks from the Trump administration, which has penalized pro-Palestinian protesters: “I’m worried that this is not the end, and only the beginning, especially now that it’s on my record. It could be the case that I could face further punitive measures from the federal government, and the college is not doing anything to protect students.”In March, the Trump administration listed Swarthmore College as one of 60 schools at risk of losing hundreds of millions of federal dollars for allowing what it considered antisemitic harassment on campus. Colleges and universities across the country were already quashing pro-Palestinian protests by suspending and arresting students, and several revised their policies to ban encampments prior to Trump’s inauguration. But some have gone even further to penalize students in light of the government’s threats to pull their funding.In some cases, those preventive measures have been for naught. Columbia announced that it expelled students who occupied a building last year and revoked alumnis’ diplomas at the same time the federal government still cancelled $400m worth of contracts and grants to the university. Harvard University placed the undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee on probation and temporarily banned the pro-Palestinian group from hosting events, only for the Trump administration to freeze $2.2bn in federal grants to the school two weeks later.Though Columbia and Harvard have received the most attention for their responses to activists, campus crackdowns have been widespread. The Guardian spoke to 1o student protesters in Pennsylvania, California, Wisconsin and New York who have faced disciplinary action from their colleges and universities. They said that the process is often arbitrary and marked by fear tactics aimed to discourage them from protesting in the future. Building a defense for disciplinary hearings, they said, distracted them from their studies and caused anxiety, as the processes can last months.In some cases, the disciplinary process has no conclusive end, causing students to languish while being banned from campus or otherwise limited from participating in student life. Following pushback from students and faculty, EK said, Swarthmore College agreed to pay for her off-campus housing until the end of the semester. She is taking virtual classes and will be allowed to graduate on time, but she is still barred from attending on-campus events or from walking with her peers during graduation.In a statement to the Guardian, Swarthmore College spokesperson Alisa Giardinelli said that the school repeatedly warned student protesters that their actions were in violation of the college’s code of conduct, and that they would face disciplinary action if found responsible. Despite the college’s efforts to discuss the students’ demands, including that the school divest from weapons manufacturers that fuel Israel’s war on Gaza, “some students chose to continue to engage in – and in some cases escalated – behaviors that violated the Code”, Giardinelli said.Guardian interviews with student activists, attorneys and researchers reveal an increased sense of hostility on campuses since 7 October 2023, which has stoked fear and anxiety and resulted in financial concerns for some pro-Palestinian student protesters. Some attorneys have said that Palestinians, Arab Muslims, and people of color have been universities’ primary targets when repressing pro-Palestinian free speech. In March, the federal government went even further in targeting pro-Palestinian scholars and students of color by arresting and detaining the Georgetown University professor Badar Khan Suri and the Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil.“A majority of students who are contacting us for support are either Palestinian, Arab Muslim or other students of color,” said the advocacy group Palestine Legal’s staff attorney, Tori Porell. Additionally, low-income students or those who rely on financial aid are hardest hit by disciplinary actions, she said: “Students who live on campus might rely on campus meal plans. If they are abruptly suspended, they are losing access to housing, to their food, to healthcare, and they might not have funds to just fly home the way some students with more resources would.”In 2024, Palestine Legal received more than 2,000 requests for legal assistance, with about two-thirds coming from students, staff or faculty on college campuses.While schools have long served as stages for mass protests including against the Vietnam war and South Africa’s apartheid, activists say that the universities’ actions toward them have had a chilling effect on civil disobedience this academic year. Still, students such as Dahlia Saba, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, see it as their duty to continue pushing universities to divest from Israel, whose war on Gaza has killed at least 62,000 Palestinians since October 2023.Saba was at a conference in Colorado last July when she received a concerning text message from her schoolmate Vignesh Ramachandran. The two were being investigated by the University of Wisconsin-Madison for a May 2024 op-ed that they had written in a local publication. The article criticized the university’s failure to respond to a student-led proposal around transparent and ethical investment, and demanded that it divest from arms-manufacturing companies fueling Israel’s war on Gaza.She pulled up an email from the university about the charges that she faced, which included allegedly refusing to comply with rules about no picnicking or camping. (Wisconsin state statute prohibits tents or camping on undesignated parts of university land.) Saba, a graduate student in electrical engineering, recalled her thoughts in that moment: would the charges jeopardize her career, or prevent her from being vocal about Palestinian rights in the future?“For me, it’s still important to speak up,” Saba, a Palestinian American, told the Guardian, “because the point of these repression tactics is to try to silence us. And so I think that makes it all the more imperative to refuse to be silenced.”A ‘Palestine exception’ to free speechSince October 2023, many schools have responded to pro-Palestinian campus protests in an outsized way compared with demonstrations going back several decades, say attorneys. In a Harvard Crimson series, 11 former student activists said that Harvard’s response to pro-Palestinian protesters had been more violent and punitive than the treatment they experienced for protesting against South Africa’s apartheid, against fossil fuel divestment, and for university workers to be paid living wages.Race and political views may account for universities’ stricter policies and punishments since last year. Pointing to the Orange county district attorney’s list of people who had been suspended and arrested, Thomas Harvey, a California attorney who represents pro-Palestinian students facing criminal charges, said: “It’s very rare that it’s anyone other than people of color.” Harvey said he knows many of the students on the district attorney’s list because he’s represented them or provided them pro bono legal support. “It seems very obvious that race, combined with political viewpoints about being pro-Palestinian, are the targets of the most severe punishment.”UT, a Muslim woman of color and Swarthmore College senior, said that she was alarmed to learn how closely the college surveilled her during pro-Palestinian protests. On 6 March 2025, UT, who is using her initials out of fear of being doxxed, received an email from the school that she would be on academic probation until she graduated for violating the college’s code of conduct during rallies between October 2023 and March 2024. Last spring, she received a packet from the university on the evidence they had against her, including CCTV footage of her walking on a path next to the woods on campus.“It was a real moment of realization that there is so much surveillance on this campus, and especially out of the students that were charged, very few were white students. Most students were students of color, and first-generation, low-income students. And to learn that the college is so meticulously tracking these students – it was a very scary moment.”Giardinelli of Swarthmore College told the Guardian that “sanctions are based solely on alleged misconduct, without regard to race, socioeconomic standing, or identity”. Of the surveillance, she said: “CCTV images are only used, when available, to verify involved parties and behaviors that are suspected to be, or are alleged violations of, the Student Code of Conduct or of state and federal law.”Schools’ crackdowns on pro-Palestinian student protesters are indicative of a “Palestine exception” to free speech, said Farah Afify, a research and advocacy coordinator at the civil rights group Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair). As the co-author of Cair’s analysis on how universities target pro-Palestinian protesters, Afify consolidated incidents found in newspaper reports and education-related complaints that Afify received from October 2023 to May 2024.“Students who support Palestinian rights,” Afify said, “tend to face harsher discipline, harsher criticism, more challenges by people who would otherwise encourage that kind of expression because it meets the standard principles of what we’d expect of our institutions of higher education.” Cair has since launched a website where students can report their campuses to be investigated and placed on the organization’s “institutions of particular concern” list for targeting pro-Palestinian protesters.‘There’s a genocide, and we need to be organizing against it’While Saba was found responsible for violating the University of Wisconsin’s policies by a student-conduct investigating officer last August, her charges were dropped in October after she appealed them before a committee consisting of a student and university employees. Palestine Legal also sent her school a letter demanding that they end disciplinary proceedings against students in September, which assisted in Saba and another unnamed student’s charges being dropped.In a statement to the Guardian, University of Wisconsin-Madison spokesperson Kelly Tyrrell said that the school “does not disclose details related to individual student conduct cases”, and weighs each case based on a person’s conduct history and the circumstances surrounding the offense. She said the university seeks to create a campus “where all students feel supported, can pursue their educational goals without disruption, and are free to express themselves and engage across difference on complex topics, whether in their local community or around the world”.Despite the intimidation and disciplinary action that student protesters say they faced by their universities, they remain resolute in their fight to speak against their schools’ ties to Israel.Saba said she feels vindicated that her charges were dropped, though she thinks that the university’s system was flawed for finding her co-author, Ramachandran, culpable on the same limited evidence. Still, she holds onto hope that her school will eventually disclose its investments to the public and divest from companies that contribute to or profit from Israel’s war on Gaza.“This university, like many other universities, has lost its sense as a moral institution, an institution of ethics and an institution that aspires to do good in the world,” Saba said. “I want to see a university that actually responds to the demands of its students, rather than restricting their rights, and that prioritizes acting as a force of justice in the world, rather than just a machine that takes in money and spits out degrees.”Additional reporting by Adria R Walker More

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      Trump administration investigating California university over foreign gifts

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      The Trump administration launched an investigation into the University of California, Berkeley, on Friday centered on foreign funding, making it the latest university to be targeted by the federal government.The investigation revives criticism from several years ago about the university’s partnership with China’s Tsinghua University. It comes after Donald Trump earlier this week signed a series of executive orders focused on universities that he views as liberal adversaries to his political agenda.One order called for harder enforcement of Section 117, a federal law requiring colleges to disclose foreign gifts and contracts valued at $250,000 or more.The Department of Education’s office of general counsel will investigate “UC Berkeley’s apparent failure to fully and accurately disclose significant funding received from foreign sources,” education secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement.UC Berkeley denied the government’s claims, saying that for the last two years “UC Berkeley has been cooperating with federal inquiries regarding 117 reporting issues, and will continue to do so.”The department cited media reports from 2023 about UC Berkeley failing to disclose “hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from a foreign government” but didn’t mention the country.On May 2023, the Daily Beast reported that UC Berkeley failed to report it got $220m from the Chinese government to build a joint Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (TBSI), which UC Berkeley and Tsinghua University opened in 2014 in the city of Shenzhen to focus on “strategic emerging industries”, according to the institute’s website.Last year, a report by the Republican members of the House select committee on the Chinese Communist party found that US tax dollars have contributed to China’s technological advancement and military modernization when American researchers worked with their Chinese peers in areas such as hypersonic weapons, artificial intelligence, nuclear technology and semiconductor technology.In response to the report, UC Berkeley said Berkeley’s researchers “engage only in research whose results are always openly disseminated around the world” and the school was “not aware of any research by Berkeley faculty at TBSI conducted for any other purpose”. The university also said then it would unwind its partnership.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe university said on Friday it’s no longer affiliated with TBSI.Last week, the Department of Education demanded records from Harvard over foreign financial ties spanning the past decade, accusing the school of filing “incomplete and inaccurate disclosures”. Trump’s administration is sparring with Harvard over the university’s refusal to accept a list of demands over its handling of pro-Palestinian protests as well as its diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. More

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      The Guardian view on Trump v universities: essential institutions must defend themselves | Editorial

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      Enfeebling universities or seizing control is an early chapter in the authoritarian playbook, studied eagerly by the likes of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. “Would-be authoritarians and one-party states centrally target universities with the aim of restricting dissent,” Jason Stanley, a scholar of fascism at Yale, wrote in the Guardian in September. Last month, he announced that he was leaving the US for Canada because of the political climate and particularly the battle over higher education.It is not merely that universities are often bastions of liberal attitudes and hotbeds for protest. They also constitute one of the critical institutions of civil society; they are a bulwark of democracy. The Trump administration is taking on judges, lawyers, NGOs and the media: it would be astonishing if universities were not on the list. They embody the importance of knowledge, rationality and independent thought.In a typically brazen reversal, Donald Trump has accused his administration’s top target – Harvard – of being the “threat to democracy”. The administration is attacking diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and says it is tackling the failure of universities to root out antisemitism – a claim widely challenged. Most Trump supporters are unlikely to take issue with cutting billions of dollars of public spending on wealthy elite institutions. A pragmatic counter-argument would be that much of that money goes to scientific and medical research that will enrich the US as a nation and benefit vast numbers of people who have never ventured near an Ivy League university.The administration’s outrageous demands of Harvard include federal oversight of admissions, the dismantling of diversity programmes, an end to recruitment of international students “hostile to American values”, and the compelled hiring of “viewpoint diverse” staff.Harvard has commendably chosen to fight back. “The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” wrote its president, Alan Garber. It is suing the government over the freeze on $2.2bn in federal funding, part of a threat to withhold $9bn. That is encouraging others to speak out. Over 150 university presidents have signed a joint letter denouncing “unprecedented government overreach and political interference”.Many have pointed out that the world’s richest university can afford to stand firm thanks to its unrivalled $53bn endowment and sympathetic billionaire alumni. But its the same prestige and power that have surely made it the primary target: force it to fold, and weaker institutions will follow. It’s worth noting that Harvard toughened its position after faculty, students and alumni pushed hard for it to do so, warning that concessions would only encourage the administration. Columbia acquiesced to an extraordinary list of demands but $400m of withheld funding has yet to be restored, and the administration is reportedly seeking to extend control over the university.Whatever comes of Harvard’s suit, this is an administration that has already chosen to ignore court rulings. It may step up its assault, by revoking charitable status and clamping down on international students. (Many may already be concluding that studying in the US, however eminent the institution, may not be worth the hostile immigration environment.) But Harvard is fighting back not just because it can, but because it must. In doing so, it is defending not only academic freedom, but democracy more broadly – and inspiring others to do so.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      US federal agency texts Barnard College employees to ask if they’re Jewish

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      Employees from Barnard College received text messages this week from the federally run Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) on their personal phones linking to a voluntary survey asking recipients if they are Jewish or Israeli and whether they have been subjected to harassment or antisemitism.The text, which was reviewed by the Guardian, states that the civil rights agency is “currently reviewing the employment practices at Barnard College” and invites current and former employees to complete the linked survey. It is not clear how many college employees received the survey, but it appears to have been sent to a sizable portion of the faculty and other staff.The survey, which appeared to be part of the Trump administration’s aggressive investigations into American colleges and universities over antisemitism allegations stemming from pro-Palestinian protests, sparked anxiety among some recipients.View image in fullscreen“Regardless of the stated intent, this survey in effect creates a list of Jewish faculty, staff and students at Barnard,” said Elizabeth Bauer, a Barnard professor and chair of the college’s biology department, who said she was alarmed by the message.“The government is also now requiring undocumented immigrants, including children, to register with DHS. I’ve seen this movie before and I’m horrified.”The survey asked whether the respondent currently works at Barnard or has ever been employed there and prompted respondents to select all that apply of the choices: “I am Jewish”, “I am Israeli”, “I have shared Jewish/Israeli ancestry”, “I practice Judaism” and “Other”.Another question asked: “While working at Barnard College, were you subjected to any of the following because you practice Judaism, have Jewish ancestry, are Israeli, and/or are associated with an individual(s) who is Jewish and/or Israeli?”Respondents could select from options including, “unwelcome comments, jokes or discussions”, “harassment, intimidation”, “pressure to abandon, change or adopt a practice or religious belief” and “antisemitic or anti-Israeli protests, gatherings or demonstrations that made you feel threatened, harassed or were otherwise disruptive to your working environment”.Other questions asked the respondents’ employment details, supervisor name, date of hire and more.Elizabeth Hutchinson, an associate professor of American Art History at Barnard, a women’s college affiliated with Columbia University, said when she received the message on her personal phone at 5.39pm ET on Monday, her initial reaction was: “This must be some kind of scam, because, how could the EEOC have my contact information.”The message addressed her by name and, initially, Hutchinson said, she didn’t open the links.“I was frightened, and wasn’t sure what it entailed,” she said.Celia Naylor, a professor in the Africana studies department at Barnard College, also received the message on Monday. She quickly discovered that “a lot of people I know – faculty and even some staff – also received it”.View image in fullscreenAs many faculty and staff tried to verify the message’s legitimacy in group chats on Monday evening, Barnard’s general counsel, Serena Longley, sent an email about the messages.Longley explained in the email, which was viewed by the Guardian, that the college had “received multiple reports that some employees have received text messages from the EEOC inviting them to complete a voluntary survey”. She also said Barnard, Longley “was not given advance notice of this outreach”.“Participation is entirely voluntary. If you choose to respond, please know that both federal law and Barnard policy strictly prohibit any form of retaliation,” she continued.Longley sent a follow-up email to Barnard employees on Wednesday, which was also reviewed by the Guardian, explaining that the EEOC launched an investigation last summer against Barnard “concerning whether or not the College discriminated against Jewish employees on the basis of their national origin, religion and/or race in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964”.“Barnard prides itself on being an inclusive and respectful workplace for all people, including our Jewish employees, and has been robustly defending the College against this EEOC inquiry,” Longley wrote, adding that the EEOC was “legally entitled to obtain the contact information of Barnard employees so that it could offer employees the option to voluntarily participate in their investigation”.“Barnard complied with this lawful request,” she said.The college heard from current and former employees in recent days who asked to be notified in advance before their contact information is shared, the email also noted.“Going forward,” she said, “if and when we are required to provide information about staff in connection with an investigation or litigation, we will provide you with advance notice unless we are subject to a court order that prohibits us from doing so.”Longley also emphasized that participation in the EEOC survey was voluntary.A spokesperson for the EEOC said: “Per federal law, we cannot comment on investigations, nor can we confirm or deny the existence of an investigation.” Barnard did not respond to a request for comment.After hearing others discuss its content, Hutchinson finally opened the survey on Wednesday and found it “utterly shocking”.“It’s very clearly a fishing expedition,” she said, before noting that the survey “is clearly presuming guilt and looking for very specific kinds of evidence for their case”.Hutchinson also said that while she was grateful for the information provided in Barnard’s emails this week, she felt that they did not “acknowledge the reality that the faculty are experiencing a heightened surveillance of our campus that is now intruding into our personal devices on our personal time”.To Hutchinson, the message on Monday was “unprecedented” has “really ramped up the unease on campus”, with faculty now feeling vulnerable both in their classrooms and now in their private spaces too.Naylor echoed that faculty, students and staff were concerned about how their personal information was being used by Barnard, and shared with federal agencies. They are unsure of what other personal details have been provided.Debbie Becher, a Barnard sociology professor who is Jewish, spoke to the New York Times this week about the text message and survey, saying that she found it “a bit terrifying” that the federal government “wants to know who the Jews are through some text message and Microsoft Office form”.Bauer said that not all of the Barnard faculty and staff received the message, adding that it was “unclear” why some did not receive it and others did.“It was obvious that the survey was a fishing expedition by the EEOC to find Title VII violations,” Bauer said.Colin Wayne Leach, a professor of psychology and Africana Studies at Barnard College, said that “as a dean focused on supporting our faculty”, he had been hearing from many colleagues this week who are upset about the messages.They were “surprised” that the EEOC “would choose this informal, unannounced, and intrusive way to ask employees to complete a survey on their experiences of such an important topic as anti-semitism at their place of work”.The Spectator, Columbia’s University paper, reported on Wednesday that several members of Columbia’s faculty also received the text message from EEOC.Rebecca Kobrin, co-director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies (IIJS), told the Spectator that she and other members of IIJS received the message. More

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      Trump signs orders cracking down on diversity and inclusion at US universities

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      Donald Trump signed executive orders on Wednesday targeting universities as his administration seeks to reshape higher-education institutions and continues to crack down on diversity and inclusion efforts.The actions address foreign gifts to universities, directing the federal government to “enforce laws on the books” related to the disclosure of large donations, and college accreditation, which the president has referred to as his “secret weapon” to upend US universities. While reading the orders to Trump, the White House staff secretary Will Scharf said that the third-party groups that accredit universities have relied on “woke ideology” rather than merit.Linda McMahon, the education secretary, added during the signing in the Oval Office: “We should be looking at those who have real merit to get in, and we have to look harder at those universities that aren’t enforcing that.”Trump’s administration has been engaged in an all-out attack on US universities since the president took office in January, seeking to dramatically alter institutions he has claimed have been taken over by “Marxist maniacs and lunatics”. The federal government has sought to cut billions in funding from universities unless they comply with administration demands; banned diversity initiatives; and detained international students in retaliation for their activism.This week, more than 150 US university presidents signed a statement condemning the Trump administration’s “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” in higher education. Meanwhile, Harvard University – which Scharf mentioned by name when introducing the order related to foreign gifts – has sued the government in response to the threatened funding cuts.The president has referred to accreditation as a “secret weapon” in his fight against universities.“I will fire the radical-left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics,” he said last summer. “We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again and once for all.”According to a statement from the White House, the order directs McMahon to hold accreditors accountable with “denial, monitoring, suspension, or termination of accreditation recognition, for accreditors’ poor performance or violations of federal civil rights law”. It also orders administration officials to investigate “unlawful discrimination” in higher education.The White House alleges accreditors have imposed “discriminatory diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)-based standards”, which it describes as a violation of federal law and an abuse of their authority.While signing orders on Wednesday that Scharf said would direct schools out of the “whole sort of diversity, equity and inclusion cult”, the president said that the US was “getting out of that … after being in that jungle for a long time”.Despite his condemnation of diversity and inclusion efforts, Trump also signed an order establishing a White House initiative on historically black colleges and universities to promote “excellence and innovation”. The order facilitates the creation of a presidential advisory board on HBCUs and seeks to address funding barriers and increase affordability and retention rates.The president also signed orders related to workforce development and artificial intelligence education to ensure the future workforce is “adequately trained in AI tools”, Scharf said. More

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      ‘National disgrace’: US lawmakers decry student detentions on visit to Ice jails

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      Congressional lawmakers denounced the treatment of Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, the students being detained by US immigration authorities for their pro-Palestinian activism, as a “national disgrace” during a visit to the two facilities in Louisiana where each are being held.“We stand firm with them in support of free speech,” the Louisiana congressman Troy Carter, who led the delegation, said during a press conference after the visits on Tuesday. “They are frightened, they’re concerned, they want to go home.”Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student, and Khalil, a graduate of Columbia, have been detained for more than a month since US immigration authorities took them into custody. Neither have been accused of criminal conduct and are being held in violation of their constitutional rights, members of the delegation said.The delegation included representatives Carter, Bennie Thompson, Ayanna Pressley, Jim McGovern, Senator Ed Markey, and Alanah Odoms, the executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana. They visited the South Louisiana Ice processing center in Basile, where Öztürk is being held, and traveled to the Central Louisiana Ice processing center in Jena to see Khalil.They met with Öztürk and Khalil and others in Ice custody to conduct “real-time oversight” of a “rogue and lawless” administration, Pressley said.Their detention comes as the Trump administration has staged an extraordinary crackdown on immigrants, illegally removing people from the country and seeking to detain and deport people for constitutionally protected free speech that it considers adverse to US foreign policy.“It’s a national disgrace what is taking place,” Markey said. “We stand right now at a turning point in American history. The constitution is being eroded by the Trump administration. We saw today here in these detention centers in Louisiana examples of how far [it] is willing to go.”McGovern described those being held as political prisoners. He said: “This is not about enforcing the law. This is moving us toward an authoritarian state.”Late last month, officials detained Öztürk, who co-wrote a piece in a Tufts student newspaper that was critical of the university’s response to Israel’s attacks Palestinians. The 30-year old has said she has been held in “unsanitary, unsafe, and inhumane” conditions in a Louisiana facility and has had difficulty receiving medical treatment.Öztürk was disappeared when she was detained, Pressley said, adding that she was denied food, water and the opportunity to seek legal counsel. Khalil missed the birth of his first child, she said. She described Donald Trump as a dictator with a draconian vision for the US.“They are setting the foundational floor to violate the due process and free speech of every person who calls this country home, whatever your status is,” she said. “It could be you tomorrow for suffering a miscarriage. It could be you tomorrow for reading a banned book.”Those in custody are shaken and were visibly upset and afraid, the delegation said. They have said they are not receiving necessary healthcare and that the facilities are kept extremely cold.“We have to resist, we have to push back. We’re a much better country than this,” McGovern said.Earlier this month a judge ruled that Khalil, who helped lead demonstrations at Columbia last year and has been imprisoned for more than a month, is eligible to be deported from the US.The Trump administration has argued that Khalil, a lawful permanent resident of the US and child of Palestinian refugees, holds beliefs that are counter to the country’s foreign policy interests.On Monday, Senator Peter Welch of Vermont met with Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian green-card holder and Columbia student who was detained while at a naturalization interview. More