Trump Administration Announces New Antisemitism Investigations Into 55 Universities
Linda McMahon, US education secretary, during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, DC, on Feb. 26, 2025. Photo: Al Drago/Pool/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
The US Department of Education has added dozens of colleges and universities to the list of institutions it will investigate for civil rights violations stemming from their alleged failure to address campus antisemitism.
“The department is deeply disappointed that Jewish students studying on elite US campuses continue to fear for their safety amid the relentless antisemitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said on Monday in a statement. “US colleges and universities benefit from enormous public investments funded by US taxpayers. That support is a privilege, and it is contingent on scrupulous adherence to federal antidiscrimination laws.”
McMahon named 55 institutions, public and private, in total that were not included in the administration’s February announcement of five investigations of antisemitism at Columbia University, Northwestern University, Portland State University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
The new schools include: Harvard University, Swarthmore College, Drexel University, and Princeton University — all of which have struggled with antisemitic anti-Israel activity and pro-Hamas agitation, as The Algemeiner has previously reported.
Since Hamas’s invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Harvard has seen its law school student government issue a resolution which falsely accused Israel of genocide; its students quote terrorists during an “Apartheid Week” event held in April; and dozens of its students and faculty participate in an illegal pro-Hamas encampment attended by members of a group that shared an antisemitic cartoon.
Additionally, many Harvard students openly cheered Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, which included sexual assault and child abduction, and a mob led by the president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review followed, surrounded, and intimidated a Jewish student, screaming “Shame! Shame! Shame!” into his ears.
After these incidents and more, Harvard fought tooth and nail to discredit lawsuits which alleged that its response to campus antisemitism amounted to the enabling of discriminatory behavior in violation of federal civil rights law. Harvard eventually settled multiple complaints out of court, but at least one plaintiff, Harvard alumnus Shabbos Kestenbaum, refused to be a party to the agreements, arguing that they allowed the university to evade accountability for its alleged indifference to antisemitism.
At Swarthmore College, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) recently raided and occupied the college’s Parrish Hall dressed like Hamas fighters, their faces wrapped with and concealed by keffiyehs. By the time the college formally warned the students that their behavior would trigger disciplinary measures, they had shouted slogans through bullhorns, attempted to break into offices that had been locked to keep them out, and pounded the doors of others that refused to admit them access. Meanwhile, SJP collaborators reportedly circumvented security’s lockdown of the building to smuggle food inside. Several students then grew impatient and attempted to end the lockdown themselves by raiding the building, and in doing so caused a physical altercation with security, whom they proceeded to pelt with expletives and other imprecations.
The Swarthmore administration responded to the incident by barring SJ from operating on its campus while school officials investigate the incident.
In May, a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” installed at Drexel University in Philadelphia forced school officials to lock down the campus to protect it from a flood of non-students who joined the demonstration. The previous month, the Raymond G. Perelman Center for Jewish Life was vandalized, with agitators removing large channel letters spelling out Perelman’s name from a brick structure near the entrance to the building. The disturbing act, perpetrated by masked individuals, occurred amid an explosion of antisemitic hate crimes across the US.
Princeton University has drawn scrutiny for, among other reasons, what it teaches students about Israel. In 2023, the International Legal Forum (ILF), a nonprofit organization based in Tel Aviv which advocates for equality in Israel and the Middle East, noted that a syllabus for a course taught at Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies included a book that accuses the Israel Defense Forces of “maiming” Palestinians and harvesting their organs — a claim that critics described as a disturbing blood libel which serves no other purpose than to promote antisemitic conspiracies and tropes.
The Trump administration has moved rapidly to address campus antisemitism since taking office in January.
On Friday, it canceled $400 million in funding to Columbia University as punishment for the school’s alleged harboring of antisemitic faculty, students, and staff and shielding them from disciplinary sanctions. Prior to that, US President Donald Trump issued a highly anticipated executive order which calls for “using all appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise … hold to account perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.”
A major provision of the order authorizes the deportation of extremist “alien” student activists, whose support for terrorist organizations, intellectual and material, such as Hamas contributed to fostering antisemitism, violence, and property destruction on college campuses. That policy is currently being challenged in the courts, as a federal judge in Manhattan has halted its application to the case of a male alumnus of Columbia University who was arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after being identified as an architect of the Hamilton Hall building takeover, which took place during the closing weeks of the 2023-2024 academic year.
Trump has defended the attempted deportation and argued that more are forthcoming.
“This is the first of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other universities across the country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antisemitism, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.”
