With a new academic year well underway, more than 60 colleges and universities are still under federal investigation over antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents during the campus protests that swept the United States after the Oct. 7 attacks in Israelps88, according to the Department of Education.
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has opened inquiries into dozens of schools over the past year, checking for violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on ethnicity or race.
Overall, violent crime fell 3 percent and property crime fell 2.6 percent in 2023, with burglaries down 7.6 percent and larceny down 4.4 percent. Car thefts, though, continue to be an exception, rising more than 12 percent from the year before.
But the move backfired in a way that few supporters expected. Californians in 2021 actually tossed nearly 50 percent more plastic bags, by weight, than when the law first passed in 2014, according to data from CalRecycle, California’s recycling agency.
Documents released by the department show that around 80 percent of the Oct. 7-related investigations it undertook stemmed from complaints about antisemitism, and that many of those complaints came to the department through conservative and pro-Jewish legal advocacy groups, including several founded by high-ranking former Education Department officials.
Under federal scrutiny, which carries the risk of losing federal funding, dozens of schools still facing government inquiries have moved quickly to pre-empt large campus disruptions and enforce stricter limits on certain types of speech and demonstrations.
But with anger simmering on college campuses about the violence in Gaza ahead of the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack, the volume of unresolved investigations has worried some civil rights experts who warn that pressure from the department could make school administrators eager to shut down protected speech.
‘Administrators listen to this’As campus demonstrations began to roil college campuses last year, a network of conservative and Jewish advocacy groups — such as the Brandeis Center, the Defense of Freedom Institute, StandWithUs and the Lawfare Project — mobilized, lodging complaints against many prominent colleges and universities.
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