The Biden administration is letting a Pennsylvania university off easy for allowing repeated civil-rights violations of Jewish students.
A university in Philadelphia has come under scrutiny for its mishandling of antisemitic activity on campus. This time, though, it’s not the University of Pennsylvania, whose former president had to resign in the aftermath of her disastrous attempt to explain to Congress why she had no choice but to tolerate rabid discrimination on her campus. Rather, Temple University, situated just a few miles northeast of Penn in our nation’s birthplace, has been the site of a startling set of antisemitic incidents in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks against Israel.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) catalogued the scandals while also announcing a resolution with the university in early December, closing the government’s investigation. Jewish students, it announced, found swastikas and the word “Jew” graffitied on their property. Students for Justice in Palestine gathered outside the campus Hillel house and used megaphones to harass those inside. AEPi, the Jewish fraternity, had its Israeli flag stolen and “free Palestine” spray-painted on its roof. OCR acknowledged that every one of these discriminatory incidents — some of which are crimes — were perpetrated at least in part by Temple students.
So, did the government close its investigation by ensuring that Temple had expelled the perpetrators? Would Temple risk losing all federal funding, as the Civil Rights Act requires, if it continued to respond to discriminatory harassment on the basis of national origin (against Israeli-Americans and Jews) with just a slap on the wrist?
Continue reading the entire piece here at the National Review Online (paywall)
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Tal Fortgang is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He was a 2023 Sapir Fellow.
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