Courtesy of JNS. Photo credit: b52_Tresa/Pixabay
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(JNS) — U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is doing the right thing by pursuing universities and others who fail to protect Jews from assaults and discrimination, but is overplaying its hand at times, according to legal experts who support the president.
“In the Mahmoud Khalil case, they’ve missed 18 layups on how to get this guy deported for things that he has done,” a legal scholar, with specific expertise on Jew-hatred, told JNS of the anti-Israel, former Columbia University student, who was spokesman for antisemitic protests on campus.
“They’ve chosen to take the most extreme view and state that they don’t have to offer evidence,” said the expert, who declined to be named.
A panel in late July hosted by the conservative and libertarian Federalist Society addressed legal mechanisms that could be used more effectively in civil rights suits about Jew-hatred on campus.
“Half the game is to figure out a vehicle for attacking the problem of unregulated antisemitism that we saw in the last year and a half and assessing how each of those remedies works and what its long term impacts are,” Marc Stern, chief legal officer at the American Jewish Committee and a panelist at the event, told JNS.
Contractual agreements, which are being used in litigation against Harvard University, and laws designed to protect abortion clinics, regulate building permits and prosecute the mafia and the Ku Klux Klan were among the subjects discussed on the panel.
Though many see Title VI complaints under the 1964 Civil Rights Act as logical places to start, the panelists said such civil rights complaints don’t meet the current moment and its needs.
“No universities ever lose their federal funding because of Title VI complaints,” Mark Goldfeder, a rabbi and CEO and director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, said at the event.
The 1964 law addresses institutions, not individual antisemites, according to Goldfeder.
“I cannot speak for the administration, but I imagine that they thought the funding cut off was the quickest and most powerful tactic available to them,” Stern told JNS.
Another panelist, Robert Shibley, special counsel for campus advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said Title VI “predates the idea of hostile environment harassment.”
“It is an anti-discrimination law,” he said at the event. “It’s not an anti-harassment law.”
The Trump administration has been trying to pressure Harvard to protect Jews more by canceling research contracts, rather than through Title VI probes, according to Goldfeder. The administration would do better to use carrots than sticks, tying federal funding to compliance benchmarks, he said.
Stern told JNS that even if the Trump administration overplayed its hand by cutting off university funding through Title VI at other universities, “there’s no question that the use of a cutoff or the threat of a funding cut got people to pay attention.”
Even if the funding cut threats don’t hold up in court cases, the administration is “waking up other college administrators, who were hoping they could ride out all the controversy, and eventually, football and beer would take over worrying about Gaza.”
The legal expert who spoke anonymously with JNS said, in Title VI cases, “they could focus specifically on the most egregious actions that clearly don’t have anything to do with speech, that are beyond the pale.”
