On January 17th, Laura Rosenbury, the president of Barnard College, called sociology professor Debbie Becher into her office to discuss an event Becher was helping plan alongside several Jewish students: a screening and discussion of the documentary Israelism, which chronicles young American Jews’ disaffection with Zionism. Joined by provost and dean of the faculty Linda Bell, Rosenbury told Becher to “pause” the screening, according to notes of the meeting Becher kept. Rosenbury acknowledged at the outset that it was “hard to think of [Israelism] as an antisemitic film.” Nevertheless, she wanted the screening indefinitely postponed due to fears that it would trigger legal action against the school under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which bars schools receiving federal funding from creating or permitting a “hostile environment” for students on the basis of race or national origin—and mandates that colleges found to have violated the statute must come to an agreement with the federal government to change policies or risk being stripped of their federal funding.

Rosenbury’s concern was based on legal action that Israel advocates had recently taken against another school for alleged Title VI violations. At the meeting, she showed Becher a printed copy of a lawsuit from the prior week alleging that a screening of Israelism at Harvard had contributed to a “hostile environment” for Jews, and demanding damages and school policy changes—including the firing of deans and professors and the expulsion of students. In this context, Rosenbury noted that Barnard’s board, as “fiduciaries” for the school, had instructed her to notify them of anything on campus that could trigger a Title VI complaint or lawsuit, and with it litigation expenses and hefty fines; Bell told Becher that the screening was one such risk, and “just something that we can’t tolerate right now because we know that it’s a trigger; because we know that in Washington, they’re looking for that film.” Ultimately, Becher refused to stop planning the event, and Barnard officials allowed her to move ahead with it. Even after approval, though, a college official emailed Becher to note that audience reactions to the film at other schools had been alleged to contribute to a hostile environment in violation of Title VI, and asking that she “ensure that audience reactions and the ensuing panel discussion will remain respectful and inclusive at all times and devoid of any discrimination or hate speech.”

According to a Barnard College spokesperson’s statement to Jewish Currents, the film screening and panel ultimately “took place in February, consistent with our longstanding practice of allowing professors and academic departments to host events that represent a wide range of perspectives.” To critics, however, the whole episode was an alarming act of attempted censorship, with Miriam Nunberg, a former staff attorney at the Department of Education (DOE)’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR)—the principal agency that enforces Title VI in educational settings—telling Jewish Currents that the Barnard president’s invocation of Title VI to interfere with a film screening was a “misuse” of the law. “The film is produced by a Jew; it has Jewish protagonists; it discusses different viewpoints about Israel within the Jewish community in America,” said Nunberg. “It doesn’t seem to me that there’s anything in that film that inherently creates a hostile environment that would rise to the level of a Title VI violation for any Jewish student on campus.” Instead, Nunberg said, Title VI was being deployed as “a pretext for violating the right of free expression on campus.” Becher agreed, adding that by trying to censor campus speech in the name of legal compliance, university administrators are capitulating to groups that have “weaponized” Title VI to repress political expression about Israel/Palestine.

The case at Barnard is far from singular. Ever since students began protesting Israel’s devastating war on Gaza—which experts call a genocide—Title VI has been central to pro-Israel groups’ attempts to silence such dissent. In November 2023, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Hillel, the Brandeis Center, and the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher launched a new helpline to allow students to report what they define as antisemitic incidents, seven of which later became Title VI complaints. Since the threshold for filing a case at OCR is very low—anybody can file a civil rights complaint, even if they have no connection to a school—Zionist actors have rushed to use the complaint system for their own ends. For instance, Zachary Marshall, the editor of the conservative website Campus Reform, filed at least 30 civil rights complaints at multiple schools, most of which target pro-Palestinian statements, protests, and social media posts. “OCR has been completely caught off guard by this exploitation of Title VI,” said Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at the civil rights group Palestine Legal.

Amid the influx of new Title VI complaints, the OCR has opened an unprecedented 153 “shared ancestry” investigations—the category that encompasses cases of antisemitism as well as those of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim discrimination—since October 2023, a fivefold increase over the number of cases opened during the first Trump administration. OCR head and assistant secretary for civil rights Catherine Lhamon told Jewish Currents that “the fact of opening a case for investigation is no indication that the law has been violated.” However, university administrators have used the existence, or danger, of such investigations—as well as the risk of Title VI lawsuits—to justify cracking down on pro-Palestinian speech and protest. In April, Jodi Dean, a tenured professor of politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, was swiftly suspended and barred from teaching after she wrote an article that cast Palestinian militants’ October 7th attack as liberatory—with administrators writing that the school had an “obligation under federal anti-discrimination laws, including Title VI, to investigate and take prompt action” when there is a “possibility” of a Title VI violation. The same month, Columbia University’s then-president Minouche Shafik said that pro-Palestine protests at the school had created a “hostile environment” in violation of Title VI; she then called in the police to break up the students’ Gaza solidarity encampment and building occupation. “Title VI wasn’t designed to be used like this, but now it is being deployed as a lawfare tool to censor people speaking up for Palestinian rights,” said Sainath. Tyler Coward, lead counsel for government affairs at the free speech group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), concurred, noting that when universities are “caught between losing federal funding for falling out of compliance with Title VI or standing up for the First Amendment rights of their students,” many “choose to censor their students in order to continue to receive federal dollars.”

The misuse of Title VI is being driven not just by university administrators, but also by lawmakers. Already, politicians from both parties have repeatedly cited Title VI in efforts to clamp down on student protest. In November, more than three dozen state lawmakers in New York called on the governor to ban Students for Justice in Palestine, arguing that Title VI requires her to do so. At the federal level, too, such invocations are becoming common: During a December 2023 House Committee on Education and the Workforce (HCEW) hearing with university presidents, for instance, Rep. Bob Good suggested that Palestine solidarity activism at Harvard breached civil rights law, and asked the Harvard president why Congress should “continue to invest money in Harvard when Harvard clearly violates Title VI.” An October 31st report authored by GOP members of the HCEW similarly charged that universities that did not prevent pro-Palestine encampments and that negotiated with them may have violated Title VI, and suggested that federal funding for such universities should be reassessed. With Donald Trump poised to retake office in January, such patterns are set to intensify. Kenneth Marcus, the former head of OCR under Trump, predicted the new Trump administration would “take much more seriously the prospect of denying federal funds to colleges and universities that violate the rights of Jewish and other college students”—a policy that could effectively make federal educational funding contingent on repression of pro-Palestine protests. “There’s a lot of bipartisan consensus around Zionism, and it’s no surprise this is true at the DOE as well,” said Genevieve Lakier, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who is an expert on free speech law. Under a Republican trifecta, Sainath said, this consensus stands to become formalized in the realm of education, and “Title VI could become the Trojan Horse to codify the notion that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”