Holding schools accountable
OU Advocacy works to pass legislation in response to hate on campus
When the House of Representatives comes back into session on September 9, it will have the chance to vote on a bill that tackles universities’ responses to the antisemitism that many of them have faced since October 7, when Hamas’s terror attacks in Gaza unleashed protests on campuses that ranged from constitutionally protected free speech to unbridled Jew hatred.
That bill — the Civil Rights Protection Act — is the first of what may be “quite a few pieces of legislation that hold universities accountable,” Robin Tare of Englewood, OU Advocacy’s national development director, said. Accountable, that is, for the verbal abuse, the pushing and shoving that constituted physical abuse, the bullying, and being turned away from buildings and quads on their own campuses, for the crime of being perceived as being Zionist, or even for being perceived as being Jewish.
OU Advocacy is the Orthodox Union’s public policy division; its goal is to be nonpartisan and to work with other faith groups as it pursues legislation ensuring freedom of religion in the United States. Right now, one of its main foci is antisemitism on campus.
The Civil Rights Protection Act is designed to “hit universities in their wallets,” Ms. Tare said. “It’s designed to have financial repercussions, because we don’t believe that they care about anything else.
“The Civil Rights Protection Act creates parity between Title 9 and Title 6,” she continued. Title 9 of the education amendments of 1972 “is about sex discrimination on campus”; it forbids sex-based discrimination in a school’s academic offerings, other programs, and activities, including sports. A school can lose federal funding if it violates Title 9. “A school must have an office and a point person on campus, and it is clear what a student should do and how to file a complaint,” Ms. Tare said.
On the other hand, Title 6 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids intentional discrimination “based on race, shared ancestry, or nationality” does not have the same protections as Title 9, and it doesn’t have the same clarity.
“What we found this academic year is that students were going to the administration with complaints, but they didn’t know where to go. They went to the DEI office, and they were told that it didn’t cover them; they were told to go instead to the dean of student life, or some other office.
“They were given the runaround, and they still had lives to live, so after a while they gave up.
“This bill requires universities to be transparent, and to have direct places for students to report problems.
“And if they don’t have that, they can lose their federal funding. That would be a huge blow. It’s something they’d want to avoid at any cost.”
On September 17, an OU Advocacy mission to Washington will advocate for the bill, for the 2025 iteration of the federal nonprofit security grant program, which funds at-risk nonprofits to harden their buildings and beef up their security, and in general for more accountability about antisemitism on campus.
Nathan Diament is the Orthodox Union’s executive director for public policy.
The Civil Rights Protection Act is bipartisan, he said; it was sponsored by a Republican, Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon, in the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and passed with the help of a Democrat, Kathy Manning of North Carolina, who is Jewish, and a former chair of the Jewish Federations of North America.
“We are hoping that it will come up for a vote on the House floor in September,” Mr. Diament said. “If we can get it to the floor, we are pretty sure it will pass.
“It is designed basically to prescribe to universities a lot of what they should have been doing already but are not. One thing we heard over and over again from students last spring was how unclear or shrouded in secrecy their universities’ procedures about complaints were. Students didn’t get appropriate responses to their complaints.
“This bill is specific and prescriptive about what universities are mandated to do in terms of publishing their procedures, making sure that all students receive information about those procedures in their orientations, and the universities report in a timely way to the students who make complaints.”
Unless something radical changes — and of course completely unexpected changes are possible, as we all have learned over the course of the last year — this school year will be unlike last year.
“Last year, university administrators were surprised by October 7, and then by the protests and encampments that followed. Obviously, they are on notice this year. We have seen some universities take steps, announcing new rules and saying that they’re going to enforce them more appropriately this year.
“But we’ll have to see whether they actually follow through. We’ve seen anti-Israel groups openly state that they intend to pick up where they left off. So it’s going to be a real test of whether the university is serious about what it’s saying, and we’ll see what happens next.”
The Civil Rights Protection Act is the first piece of legislation that OU Advocacy has worked for since October 7, but more are coming, both Ms. Tare and Mr. Diament say.
Learn more about OU Advocacy at advocacy.ou.org.
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