On Title VI, Discrimination, and Academic Freedom

Published September 2025.

The report that follows was prepared by a subcommittee of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and approved for publication by the parent committee in August 2025.

The issue of discrimination in higher education is once again claiming public attention. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal funding—now occupies the headlines. A recent surge in Title VI investigations by the US Department of Education at more than sixty colleges and universities has played no small role in catapulting events on campus to the center of public consciousness. Investigated charges range from Title VI allegations against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs to the alleged failure of universities to combat antisemitism on their campuses. The increase in Title VI investigations began late in the Biden administration, primarily in response to pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the aftermath of October 7, 2023. But the use of Title VI has intensified under the second Trump administration. Many have questioned the motivation and legality of these investigations, noting the Trump administration’s disregard of legal process and asking whether the targeted speech, expression, and programming qualify as legally actionable discrimination.

At their core, questions about discrimination in higher education are questions of how to explain and address histories of educational exclusion and differential access. The Civil Rights Act of 1964—a monumental piece of bipartisan legislation—was, for all its shortcomings, designed to counteract structures of discrimination, or the policies and practices grounded in explicit or unacknowledged bias that raise obstacles for disfavored groups to employment or educational opportunities. Yet today, as we write about the recent spate of Title VI investigations, we must directly address the severity and scale of the Trump administration’s attempts to redefine discrimination and, in the process, to erode democratic norms on and off campus. We are no longer debating how best to interpret, apply, and enforce the provisions of a single federal law, as we were in 2016, when Committee A investigated Obama-era interpretations of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 in its report The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX.¹

While the relationships between DEI, antisemitism, and federally prohibited discrimination may certainly be subject to good faith debate, there is no doubt that the Trump administration has wielded Title VI with the goals of discrediting institutions of higher education, undermining academic freedom and institutional autonomy, and unmooring the Civil Rights Act from its foundational commitments to addressing structures of discrimination that prevent or limit educational access.² The Trump administration’s attempt to unmake the Civil Rights Act by hijacking the language of discrimination is nothing less than an attempt to rewrite the history of the nation.³

In response, Committee A examines why Title VI investigations into colleges and universities under the Trump administration have increasingly focused on national origin involving religion, also referred to as “shared ancestry.” This report offers a discussion of the AAUP’s long-standing approach to antidiscrimination and academic freedom, an analysis of the Trump administration’s interpretations of Title VI, and an evaluation of the effects of the new Title VI investigations on speech and expressive activity protected by the First Amendment and academic freedom. The report also considers how Title VI, like Title IX, has been used to create an enforcement apparatus that sidesteps long-established AAUP-recommended procedures of shared governance. We conclude with a series of recommendations for faculties, administrations, and governing boards.

Discrimination in Higher Education

The AAUP has long opposed invidious discrimination in higher education.⁴ The history of its opposition can be read as a history of the social and legal meanings of discrimination itself. Controversies have ensued as overt material barriers to education—for example, admissions bans based on race and sex—have given way to the fraught, necessary task of assessing whether a campus climate is inhospitable to student learning. The AAUP has not shied away from these debates, insisting that “academic freedom and antidiscrimination initiatives can and should be pursued simultaneously. Equity and nondiscrimination will not be achieved if freedom of speech and academic freedom are compromised or legislated out of existence.”⁵

The Association’s opposition to racial discrimination began before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when access to restaurants, transportation, and other public facilities was severely restricted for people of color. In the South, Jim Crow laws prohibited Black people from enrolling in or attending almost all colleges and universities, and the few segregated institutions of higher education that Black students could attend were often underfunded and lacked resources. Racial exclusion by colleges and universities in other regions was carried out through a combination of state laws and institutional policies and practices. In 1956, in this social context, and in the wake of the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the Association’s Forty-Second Annual Meeting declared that the AAUP 

endorses the principles set forth by the United States Supreme Court in decisions providing for the elimination of racial segregation in publicly-supported institutions of higher education. In addition, the Association expresses its belief that these principles should be adhered to by privately-supported institutions of higher education. The right to teach and the right to learn are vital and inseparable aspects of academic freedom. Consequently, free access to every kind of educational opportunity, measured only by the aptitude and achievement of the individual teacher or student, must be safeguarded to all Americans, of whatever race. Any interference with such access imperils the right of the teacher to teach, as well as the right of the student to learn.⁶

Nor did this opposition to racial discrimination disappear. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, as AAUP President Ralph Fuchs testified in 1962 to a House of Representatives subcommittee, annual meetings of the AAUP continued to reaffirm and extend the ideas represented at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting.⁷

After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Association reaffirmed its support for the law’s effort to eliminate racial discrimination in higher education and argued for a recognition of the need for colleges and universities to take positive steps to eliminate all remaining forms of discrimination. The Fifty-First Annual Meeting declared “its special appreciation to the 88th Congress for its enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and to the Administration for its intensive interest and efforts to implement the provisions of the Act with its underlying objectives of fair and equal treatment and opportunity for all without regard to race or color. The Fifty-First Annual Meeting pledges full and unreserved support to the furtherance of the programs of the Act.”⁸ Successive annual meetings continued to emphasize the importance of ensuring that higher education was open to all regardless of race or color. The Association also expressed its support for properly structured practices of affirmative action. In 1973, the AAUP Council’s Commission on Discrimination expressed its conviction “that the further improvement of quality in higher education and the elimination of discrimination due to race or sex are not at odds with each other, but at one. What is sought in the idea of affirmative action is essentially the revision of standards and practices to [en]sure that institutions are in fact drawing from the largest marketplace of human resources in staffing their faculties, and a critical review of appointment and advancement criteria to ensure that they do not inadvertently foreclose consideration of the best qualified persons by untested presuppositions which operate to exclude women and minorities.”⁹

Given the challenges faced in overcoming discrimination and the resistance of individuals and organizations to taking affirmative action to overcome discrimination, the AAUP reaffirmed this commitment in 1983.¹⁰ Importantly, the AAUP continued to challenge the notion that affirmative action constituted a new form of discrimination. Instead, the Association’s Committee W on the Status of Women in the Academic Profession proposed, and the Council approved, carefully considered guidelines to ensure that proper procedures were in place to expand the realm of opportunity. In 2024, the Association reiterated these fundamental commitments in On Eliminating Discrimination and Achieving Equality in Higher Education.¹¹

The AAUP also early declared its concern about campus repression of students’ actions in support of civil rights. In 1960, the Forty-Sixth Annual Meeting condemned “the action of college and university authorities who have disciplined, suspended, or expelled students for protesting in peaceful ways against racial discrimination” as being “an abuse of academic authority.” Especially relevant to the current moment, the Association “call[ed] upon the authorities of colleges and universities not to be misled by public pressures into [taking] punitive action which impairs the learning process and destroys the civil liberties of students.”¹² This insistence that neither protest nor controversial speech should subject students to discipline continued in the Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students.¹³

The relationship between antidiscrimination and academic freedom produced new challenges during the 1990s. In particular, the creation of campus speech codes—designed to ensure that previously marginalized groups were free from abuse on campus—raised difficult issues concerning the policing of speech. In response, On Freedom of Expression and Campus Speech Codes reasserted the AAUP’s insistence that no speech may be prohibited simply because it is unpopular or might cause offense. Whether inside or outside the classroom, the university’s mission to “interpret, explore, and expand . . . knowledge . . . often inspires vigorous debate on those social, economic, and political issues that arouse the strongest passions. In the process, views will be expressed that may seem to many wrong, distasteful, or offensive. Such is the nature of freedom to sift and winnow ideas."¹⁴ Instead of proscribing ideas, the statement averred, campuses should focus on behavior and conduct—seeking to restrict only actual discriminatory actions and not ideas that some might think were discriminatory.

The attacks on September 11, 2001, and the government’s expansion of its security apparatus placed increased stress on academic freedom and opened new tensions in the relationship between academic freedom, free speech, and antidiscrimination. In 2002, recognizing that the AAUP had not responded appropriately to government repression during World War I or rapidly enough during the early Cold War, the AAUP appointed a Special Committee on Academic Freedom and National Security in a Time of Crisis. Particularly relevant here, the committee insisted that even during a time of crisis “the need is for more freedom, not less.” The committee expressed concern over the elevated scrutiny and restrictions imposed on international students and faculty and “note[d] with alarm, as a further threat to transnational scholarship, the apparent expansion of academic subjects and foreign nations to which intensive surveillance applies."¹⁵

The AAUP’s long commitment to overcoming discrimination leads us to address the current administration’s misuse of Title VI, which is aimed not at ending discrimination but at silencing political speech and reinforcing structures of inequality. 

The Uses and Misuses of Title VI

At its origins, Title VI aimed to dismantle structures of racial discrimination. As the 1964 Congressional Record averred, “There is no mystery or vagueness about the word discrimination as used in the bill. It means a distinction in treatment given to different individuals because of their different race, color, or national origin.”¹⁶ In the Title VI discussions, examples of disparate treatment were material and practical: school budgets, access to federal school lunches, voting requirements (literacy, poll taxes), and health care (infant and maternal mortality rates). In the realm of education, Title VI was meant to eliminate the vestiges of the doctrine of “separate but equal,” which the Supreme Court had ruled unconstitutional in 1954 but which was still in effect in many Southern states. As they debated the reach of the law and of Title VI specifically, legislators did not make speech an object of concern. The notion of a hostile environment—when unwelcome and offensive behavior (including speech) creates an intimidating or abusive workplace—as evidence of discriminatory treatment came later. In the 1980s and 1990s, the theory of hostile environment took root through a series of court decisions and administrative guidance involving sexual harassment under Title VII, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or sex. It has since become a feature of civil rights jurisprudence, including the interpretation and enforcement of Title VI.¹⁷ It is important to note that changes to the meaning, for example, of hostile environment under Title VI—which we discuss below—have the potential to reverberate across all of federal antidiscrimination law, changing the meaning of actionable discrimination subject to federal enforcement.

Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in programs or activities of any institution that receives federal funding. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is responsible for enforcing and implementing Title VI in educational institutions.¹⁸ The enforcement process usually begins with an investigation of a complaint filed with the OCR to determine whether a covered entity—including colleges and universities—violated Title VI and whether that entity has fulfilled its obligation to “take prompt and effective steps” to address the unlawful discrimination. Title VI enforcement could lead to a loss in federal funding, although it is highly unusual for the Department of Education to take such action as part of this process. A 2019 Congressional Research Service analysis could not find any OCR orders to terminate federal funding under Title VI in the prior twenty-five years.¹⁹ This is not surprising. Historically, the OCR has favored negotiating with a college or university to reach agreement about the steps it will take to remedy any specific issue of alleged discrimination or harassment. These may include general actions the college or university agrees to take to improve the campus climate, such as creating or improving educational activities or training programs about protections and prohibitions under Title VI.

Although Title VI does not include religion as a protected category, federal guidance since 2004 has interpreted the statute to include religion as part of protected shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics under any program or activity that receives federal financial assistance. Such federal guidance is communicated publicly through “Dear Colleague” letters. While “Dear Colleague” letters are generally considered to lack the force of law or the power to create new legal standards, they nonetheless affect legal interpretation and signal the federal government’s position. In a “Dear Colleague” letter issued in September 2004, the OCR explained that “[g]roups that face discrimination on the basis of shared ethnic characteristics may not be denied the protection of our civil rights laws on the ground that they also share a common faith . . . . Thus, for example, OCR aggressively investigates alleged race or ethnic harassment against Arab Muslim, Sikh and Jewish students.”²⁰ In its 2024 “Dear Colleague” letter, the OCR describes “shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics” as protecting students who are “Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, Arab, Sikh, South Asian, Hindu, Palestinian, or any other faith or ancestry.”²¹

Unlawful discrimination by educational institutions under Title VI falls into two categories. The first concerns the discriminatory denial of or limit on a person’s ability to participate in or benefit from an institution’s education program or activity, such as a refusal to admit students to an academic degree program based on race, color, or national or shared ancestry. The second is hostile environment discrimination, which the OCR describes as “unwelcome conduct based on race, color, or national origin that, based on the totality of circumstances, is subjectively and objectively offensive and is so severe or pervasive that it limits or denies a person’s ability to participate in or benefit from a school’s education program or activity.”²² Where an institution knows or should have known about the hostile environment, it has the legal obligation to take prompt and effective steps reasonably aimed at eliminating it and preventing it from recurring. Private plaintiffs may also file Title VI hostile environment lawsuits for damages in federal court directly against colleges and universities. These plaintiffs must prove that conduct is “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” (emphasis added) and that the institution “was deliberately indifferent to the harassment such that its response (or lack thereof) is clearly unreasonable in light of the known circumstances.”²³ According to the OCR, the offensiveness of the conduct and the unreasonableness of the response must be proved both subjectively and objectively.

The subjective factor in a hostile environment case ensures that the OCR considers the complainant’s perspective in evaluating whether conduct is unwelcome and offensive. However, the OCR also recognizes that “[t]he offensiveness of a particular expression as perceived by some students, standing alone, is not a legally sufficient basis to establish a hostile environment under Title VI.” Therefore, a hostile environment finding also requires consideration of “the perspective of a reasonable person in that student’s position, considering all the circumstances.”²⁴ In the context of higher education, the objective factor in defining a hostile environment is essential to protecting the ability of faculty members, students, and staff to address controversial or sensitive topics. For faculty members, this ability is crucial to their academic freedom to teach, research, and engage in extramural speech and university-related governance matters. Students must have academic freedom and the right to learn, which includes the ability to engage in classroom discussions and debates and to be evaluated solely on an academic basis, not on the basis of opinions or conduct in matters unrelated to academic standards. Students must also be able to exercise freedom of expression and association outside the classroom and in campus governance. Staff, too, must be protected from hostile environment charges based only on a subjective response to their speech. Since 2003, the OCR has recognized the need to incorporate freedom of expression and association as a basic principle of Title VI interpretation, reiterating this position in its 2024 “Dear Colleague” letter: “Nothing in Title VI or regulations implementing it requires or authorizes a school to restrict any rights otherwise protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. OCR enforces the laws within our jurisdiction consistent with the First Amendment.”²⁵

In the second Trump administration, however, the OCR has emphasized antisemitism to the exclusion of other aspects of hostile environment harassment, relying on Executive Order 13899, issued during the first Trump administration, which requires that federal agencies “shall consider” the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism and accompanying examples of antisemitism “to the extent that” any such “examples might be useful as evidence of discriminatory intent.”²⁶ While it includes criteria that accurately describe antisemitism, the IHRA definition also includes as examples of antisemitic speech certain types of criticism about the state of Israel and Zionism. This conflation of political critique with antisemitism lays the foundation for enforcement of Title VI against speech that is protected by the First Amendment and academic freedom. For example, the IHRA provides examples of potential antisemitic speech, such as “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” and speech “applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”²⁷ Kenneth Stern, one of the authors of the IHRA definition, has objected to what he has called the “weaponizing” of the definition, arguing that its misuse undermines efforts to detect and combat real instances of antisemitism.²⁸

Even before Trump’s second term, in 2024, university administrations were pointing to Title VI as a general justification for their harsh responses to campus protests against Israeli actions in Gaza. Apparently based at least in part on their fear of congressional committees and donors, university administrations called police to campus to arrest protesters, seriously escalated the severity of discipline for low-level and nonviolent violations of student codes of conduct, and unilaterally adopted new and repressive expressive activity policies. University administrations (among them Harvard’s and Columbia’s) have exacerbated the situation by conflating political criticism of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism.²⁹  As Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, explains, under the IHRA definition, “which absurdly conflates criticism of a nation-state, Israel, and a political ideology, Zionism, with the ancient evil of Jew-hatred, it is impossible with any honesty to teach about topics such as the history of the creation of Israel, and the ongoing Palestinian Nakba, culminating in the genocide being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza with the connivance and support of the US and much of western Europe.”³⁰

The conflation of antisemitism and political criticism of Israel has also affected the courts’ interpretation of Title VI in private lawsuits brought by students against colleges or universities. In a decision in a lawsuit brought against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a federal district judge declared that “on-campus protests . . . in some instances, posed a genuine threat to the welfare and safety of Jewish and Israeli students, who were at times personally victimized by the hostile demonstrators, including the chanting of the slogan, ‘Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea.’”³¹ In contrast, in a private lawsuit brought against California State University in 2018, another district court stated that student protesters’ “statements and anti-Zionist efforts can only be considered hostile if I assume . . . that anti-Zionist comments are inherently hostile to Jewish identified students or students of Israeli ancestry. . . . The concept of whether anti-Zionist statements are necessarily anti-Jewish or anti-Israeli is, as noted by defendants and the proposed Amici, hotly disputed.”³²

With the second Trump administration have come new executive orders that further weaponize the use of Title VI. Executive Order 14161, “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats,” prohibits noncitizens lawfully living in the United States from engaging in constitutionally protected speech that officials from the Trump administration may subjectively interpret as expressing a “hostile attitude” toward US “citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles,” on penalty of deportation.³³ Like Executive Order 13899 from 2019, Executive Order 14188, “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” conflates antisemitism with political criticism of Israel and Zionism. This latter executive order declares that “[it] shall be the policy of the United States” to use “all available and appropriate legal tools . . . to prosecute, remove or otherwise hold to account” citizens and noncitizens who engage in activity that the Trump administration labels as “unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.” The executive order also incorporates the use of Title VI to target expression about Israel and Palestine, requiring that the secretary of education submit an inventory and analysis of all Title VI complaints and administrative actions in the OCR “related to anti-Semitism . . . after October 7, 2023.”³⁴

On February 14, 2025, building on the use of executive orders to weaponize Title VI, the OCR issued a “Dear Colleague” letter that uses Title VI as a means of advancing Trump’s political agenda against DEI in educational institutions, including colleges and universities.³⁵ DEI programs were meant to address precisely those systemic biases based on race, color, and national origin that Congress intended to counteract when it passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In a perverse reading of DEI, the administration makes it an instance of racial discrimination rather than an attempt to dismantle the structures of discrimination based on race.

The February 2025 “Dear Colleague” letter stretches the US Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision far beyond the holding that colleges and universities violate the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI if they use race as a factor in student admissions processes. The letter makes a frontal attack on academic freedom to teach about race in the United States, including teaching about DEI and critical race theory. It further declares the OCR’s intent to use Title VI to investigate colleges and universities for DEI programs that “deny students the ability to participate fully in the life of a school” when they “stigmatize students that belong to particular racial groups” based on “crude racial stereotypes” and teach that students of those racial groups “bear unique moral burdens that others do not.” In its March 1, 2025, FAQs, the OCR referred to these provisions by reinforcing its caricature of teaching about the history of race in the United States: “[T]he First Amendment rights of students, faculty, and staff, and the curricular prerogatives of states and local school agencies do not relieve schools of their Title VI obligations not to create hostile environments through race-based policies and stereotypes; nor does it relieve them of their duty to respond to racial harassment that creates a hostile environment.” White students are clearly the protected group at issue, according to Trump’s OCR, since in this caricature they are thought to bear “moral burdens [for slavery and racism] that others do not.”³⁶

The Trump administration has also escalated its partisan use of Title VI by creating a multiagency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, which has imposed an additional layer of federal coercion on higher education institutions. The new task force is led by the Department of Justice and includes representatives from the US Department of Education and the US Department of Health and Human Services. In a politicization of the law, the task force is enforcing Title VI by making unproven general allegations of antisemitism on campuses without following any of the due-process requirements of Title VI to assess whether evidence exists to support such claims under Title VI legal standards. Using these unproven allegations as a pretext for further action, the task force has threatened or imposed massive federal funding cuts against universities, including Columbia and Harvard, if they do not agree to extreme demands for federal intrusion and oversight, including “demands to overhaul the University’s governance and leadership, academic programs, admissions system, hiring process, and discipline system,” which would destroy university institutional independence and faculty academic freedom.³⁷

Organizations including the national AAUP, campus AAUP chapters, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association have brought multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration, alleging that these executive orders, “Dear Colleague” letters, and actions against Harvard and Columbia fail to follow Title VI standards and processes and are unconstitutional under the First and Fifth Amendments.³⁸ In other words, the Trump administration is running roughshod over the requirements of Title VI itself. In the national AAUP’s lawsuit with its Harvard chapter, the Association noted the importance of the Title VI implementing regulations and the government’s current disregard of them:

Under Title VI and its implementing regulations, the government may accelerate an investigation to the stage of terminating funding only after complying with several specific steps: issuing findings of noncompliance; making an effort to obtain voluntary compliance and determining that voluntary compliance is impossible; giving notice to both the university and Congress; providing a hearing; and ensuring that any changes demanded as a condition of avoiding termination are tailored to the findings of noncompliance. These procedures exist because Congress recognized that allowing federal agencies to hold funding hostage, or to cancel it cavalierly, would give them dangerously broad power in a system in which institutions depend so heavily upon federal funding. . . . Defendants have not followed any of these regulations.

In this litigation, federal District Court Judge Allison Burroughs issued a permanent injunction against the Trump administration’s withholding of federal funds from Harvard, finding that “the government-initiated onslaught against Harvard was much more about promoting a governmental orthodoxy in violation of the First Amendment than about anything else, including fighting antisemitism.”³⁹

Even as these lawsuits make their way through the courts, some universities—including the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and Brown University—have reached “deals” with the Trump administration to restore federal funding in exchange for university agreements to make institutional changes in programs, curricula, admissions, and hiring.⁴⁰ It is important to understand that these deals include measures that could not have been ordered by a court as remedies for a Title VI violation. Consider the case of Columbia University. Columbia made its deal on July 24, 2025, immediately after suspending or expelling students for participation in pro-Palestinian protests.⁴¹ Under the agreement, which Secretary of Education Linda McMahon described as “an excellent template for other universities,”⁴² Columbia agreed to pay $200 million to the US government, plus $21 million to an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claims fund, in exchange for the government’s restoring $400 million in grant funds and closing pending Title VI and Title VII investigations or compliance reviews. The agreement further imposes extensive restrictions on Columbia, beginning with formalizing its earlier agreements to change academic programming and its code of conduct and discipline. New provisions include Columbia’s agreement to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism and its accompanying examples; restructure programs and hiring in regional area studies, starting with the Middle East; decrease international student enrollment; accept oversight by an external “Resolution Monitor” to ensure its compliance with the agreement, including a requirement that its hiring and admissions do not promote “unlawful DEI goals”; and establish processes to ensure all students’ commitment to “longstanding traditions” and “fundamental values” as determined by the resolution monitor.⁴³

Yet, as a group of Columbia law professors has written, “There has been no allegation—much less a finding—of noncompliance in the many parts of Columbia from which funding has been cut, including from urgent medical and scientific research.”⁴⁴ And while “any permissible remedy would not only have to be tailored to address the instance of unlawful discrimination,” they continue, “the agencies’ demands exhibit no such tailoring and on the contrary, effectively tell Columbia to rewrite its policies on free speech, student discipline, public safety, undergraduate admissions, and more.” The remedies of “the deal” thereby “not only exceed the power of the agencies under Title VI; they also raise serious constitutional concerns.” In stating its opposition to the agreement, the Columbia AAUP chapter summarizes the Columbia administration’s further capitulation to the Trump administration’s coercion: “The Agreement is, in short, the blunt instrument through which the Trump Administration has demonstrated its power to bludgeon American universities into undermining the traditions of free and open inquiry, robust political speech, and shared governance that have long distinguished them. Despite the university’s leadership’s claims that Columbia has held true to these fundamental principles, it has not.”⁴⁵

Academic Freedom and Antidiscrimination

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed with a bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress, was a crucial step toward a more equal and democratic society. Its provisions, including Titles VI and VII, combined with social activism and later congressional civil rights acts, helped make US society and US higher education both more equitable and more excellent. The AAUP has long shared this vision of the mutually reinforcing process of equity and excellence. It is a journey that was begun but remains unfinished. Today it is under attack by attempts to use Title VI to undo the progress that Title VI has helped to stimulate.

We wish to be clear. Where there are genuine issues of discrimination and lack of access, they must be addressed. The Title VI process, as it has developed across decades of practice, litigation, and debate, could offer clearly defined means to address those issues in ways that can reinforce the educational mission of higher education and deepen the learning of students. But that is not what is happening today. Instead, federal antidiscrimination law has become the site of a gross overreach of executive power as the language of Title VI is being used to force students and faculty members, colleges and universities, to repress views and practices that the Trump administration does not favor.⁴⁶ As stated in a recent public letter signed by 550 US rabbis and cantors, “We cannot allow the fight against antisemitism to be twisted into a wedge issue, used to justify policies that target immigrants and other minorities, suppress free speech, or erode democratic norms.”⁴⁷

The AAUP has long maintained that the prevention of discrimination can best be achieved when academic freedom and free expression are protected and when professionally approved standards of evaluation are in force. In its 2024 statement On Eliminating Discrimination and Achieving Equality in Higher Education, the AAUP emphasized the interdependence of academic freedom, academic excellence, and equality in the academy. As the report states, “Broad representation of faculty members—in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity—is essential to fulfill the promise of academic freedom to deepen existing disciplinary approaches and open new disciplinary paths, including the study of inequality and discrimination, methods for dismantling them, and strategies for reform and fundamental change.”⁴⁸

The AAUP’s history of commitment to the fundamental principles of academic freedom, free speech, antidiscrimination, and equality informs the national AAUP’s active opposition to the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education and on democracy itself. This includes the AAUP’s decision to file or join lawsuits challenging the unlawful and unconstitutional actions of the Trump administration’s executive orders, “Dear Colleague” letters, and abuses of Title VI. The introductory remarks in the AAUP’s lawsuit filed with its Harvard chapter, quoting from two seminal US Supreme Court cases, conclude, 

“Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and . . . is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment.” Keyishian v. Bd. of Regents of Univ. of State of N.Y., 385 U.S. 589, 603 (1967). “To impose any straitjacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation.” Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234, 250 (1957). Our country’s greatness depends in meaningful part upon the continued independence and intellectual freedom of its universities and colleges. The Court should act to ensure free speech and academic freedom by enjoining Defendants’ acts and declaring them unlawful.

In keeping with our long commitment to antidiscrimination, free speech, and academic freedom, Committee A condemns the misuse of Title VI by the current administration. We offer some suggestions about how to protect individuals and institutions from its illegal incursions. 

Recommendations

Committee A makes the following recommendations:

1. Faculties, administrations, and governing boards must refuse to comply with unlawful federal government demands based on Title VI investigations that impinge on institutional autonomy, faculty academic freedom (including the faculty’s role in governance), student academic freedom, and freedom of expression of faculty members, students, and staff.
2. Administrations and governing boards must publicly affirm their commitment to defending academic freedom—defined as the protection of teaching, research, and intramural and extramural speech—and support faculty members under attack.
3. Administrations and governing boards must respect the importance of faculty involvement in shared governance processes when creating or changing institutional policies and in determining responses to governmental demands for information or institutional actions. They must entertain faculty resolutions that protect unpopular teaching and research as well as controversial speech and forms of expressive activity.
4. Administrations and governing boards must commit to ensuring that internal grievance and complaint procedures (including those based on Title VI) provide adequate procedural safeguards. For example, people should not be locked out of their campus housing or denied email access while being subject to a Title VI investigation. Prehearing suspensions and dismissals must not occur.
5. Faculties, administrations, and governing boards must not engage in anticipatory obedience, including by eliminating programs; scrubbing websites; removing particular words or phrases from syllabi, course materials, and course titles and descriptions; or reporting on community members—faculty members, staff, or students—whose political speech or intellectual work may make them targets for governmental discipline or deportation. Pressure from politicians, donors, and trustees must be resisted because it creates a slippery slope for other forms of censorship and control.
6. Administrations and governing boards must provide support for international faculty members, staff, and students who are subject to governmental discipline or threatened with deportation.⁴⁹
7. Administrations and governing boards must reject overly broad definitions of antisemitism, including the IHRA definition, and consider instead alternative formulations, including the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism.⁵⁰ Rules prohibiting certain words and phrases, attributing a determinate meaning to a word or phrase (for example, treating genocide, settler colonialism, intifada, or from the river to the sea as antisemitism per se), and utilizing such definitions to impose disciplinary measures for their use must be rejected. Such rules violate academic freedom and contradict basic understandings of the use and meaning of language, which is always subject to interpretation and context. 

As faculty members—those on contingent appointments and those in tenure-track and tenured positions—as well as students and staff face censure and punishment for protected activity, Committee A again insists that allegations of discrimination must not be used to undermine entire bodies of knowledge; to demonize student, staff, and faculty protest; to undercut or eliminate shared governance; and otherwise to destroy the possibility of democratic higher education. Especially in times of controversy, campus antidiscrimination efforts demand renewed and explicit dedication to the principles of academic freedom, shared governance, and free expression. Faculty members must remain stewards of knowledge for the good of the public—all of the public—not those who would deny or opportunistically exploit the complexities of free inquiry to suit their interests alone. 

Notes

1. “The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX,” Academe 102 (July–August 2016): 69–99. Back to text.

2. The Office of the Attorney General’s July 29, 2025, memorandum to all federal agencies is a case in point. Cast as “guidance for recipients of federal funding regarding unlawful discrimination,” the memorandum promotes a concept of “equality” without any historical context. It rails against “segregation based on protected characteristics,” which it defines broadly as programs, services, or resources “that separate or restrict access based on race, sex, or other protected characteristics.” If this sounds benign enough, the examples of potential discrimination the memorandum provides extend beyond existing legal interpretations of discrimination and turn the foundation of antidiscrimination on its head. The motivations of the memorandum become clearer through its attacks on “stated goals” like “promoting inclusion or addressing historical inequities.” The memorandum defines attempts to promote inclusion or address historical inequities as impermissible discrimination, as illegitimate goals that produce “unequal treatment . . . reinforcing stereotypes.” See Office of the Attorney General, “Guidance for Recipients of Federal Funding Regarding Unlawful Discrimination,” July 29, 2025, https://www.justice.gov/ag/media/1409486/dl. Back to text.

3. These ideological attempts to restrict teaching and research date back several years. See also the following AAUP statements: “Statement on Efforts to Restrict the Teaching of History,” January 29, 2001, https://www.aaup.org/news/statement-efforts-restrict-teaching-history; “Academic Freedom and Attacks on Disciplinary Knowledge,” March 31, 2025, https://www.aaup.org/news/academic-freedom-and-attacks-disciplinary-knowledge; “Statement on Political Interference in Higher Education, January 2024, https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/aaup-policies-reports/policy-statements/statement-political-interference; “In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education,” Academe 106 (Summer 2020): 10–14. Back to text.

4. On Discrimination, a brief statement adopted by the AAUP’s Council in 1976 and revised in 1994 and 1995, declared, “The Association is committed to use its procedures and to take measures, including censure, against colleges and universities practicing illegal or unconstitutional discrimination, or discrimination on a basis not demonstrably related to the job function involved, including, but not limited to, age, sex, disability, race, religion, national origin, marital status, or sexual orientation” (https://www.aaup.org/discrimination). This statement distilled numerous statements, reports, and proposed policies and procedures through which the Association had supported civil rights and the opening of higher education to a more democratically representative population. Back to text.

5. “Censorship Will Not Defeat Antisemitism,” December 12, 2023, https://www.aaup.org/news/censorship-will-not-defeat-antisemitism. Back to text.

6. “The Forty-Second Annual Meeting,” AAUP Bulletin 42 (Summer 1956): 352–53. Back to text.

7. Ralph Fuchs, “The Association and the Desegregation Controversy,” AAUP Bulletin 48 (June 1962): 167–69. Back to text.

8. Bernard F. Haley, “Fifty-First Annual Meeting,” AAUP Bulletin 51 (June 1965): 317. Back to text.

9. “Affirmative Action in Higher Education: A Report by the Council Commission on Discrimination,” AAUP Bulletin 59 (June 1973): 178. Back to text.

10. “Affirmative Action Plans: Recommended Procedures for Increasing the Number of Minority Persons and Women on College and University Faculties,” Academe 68 (January–February 1982): 15A–20A. Back to text.

11. “On Eliminating Discrimination and Achieving Equality in Higher Education,” Policy Documents and Reports, 12th ed. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025), 341–46. Back to text.

12. “Forty-Sixth Annual Meeting,” AAUP Bulletin 46 (June 1960): 219. Back to text.

13. “Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students,” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025), 359–64. Back to text.

14. “On Freedom of Expression and Campus Speech Codes,” Academe 78 (July–August 1992): 30–31. Back to text.

15. “Report of an AAUP Special Committee: Academic Freedom and National Security in a Time of Crisis,” Academe 89 (November–December 2003): 34–35. Back to text.

16. 110 Cong. Rec. S7477 (daily ed. Apr. 9, 1964). Back to text.

17. See US Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, “Racial Incidents and Harassment Against Students,” March 10, 1994, https://www.ed.gov/laws-and-policy/civil-rights-laws/harassment-bullying-and-retaliation/racial-incidents-and-harassment-against-students (citing Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57 [1986] and Harris v. Forklift Systems, Inc., 114 S.Ct. 367 [1993]). Back to text.

18. 34 C.F.R. Part 100. Back to text.

19. AAUP and AFT v. US DOJ et al. (complaint filed in federal district court, Mar. 25, 2025), 37. Back to text.

20. US Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, “Title VI and Title IX Religious Discrimination in Schools and Colleges,” September 13, 2004, https://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/religious-rights2004.html. Back to text.

21. US Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, “Dear Colleague Letter: Protecting Students from Discrimination, such as Harassment, Based on Race, Color, or National Origin, Including Shared Ancestry or Ethnic Characteristics,” May 7, 2024, https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-202405-shared-ancestry.pdf. Back to text.

22. “Dear Colleague Letter: Protecting Students from Discrimination.” Back to text.

23. See StandWithUs Ctr. for Legal Just. v. Mass. Inst. of Tech., 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 134141 (D. Mass. 2024); Gartenberg v. Cooper Union for the Advancement of Sci. & Art, 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 20844 (S.D.N.Y. 2025); Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, 526 U.S. 629 (1999). Back to text.

24. “Dear Colleague Letter: Protecting Students from Discrimination.” Back to text.

25. “Dear Colleague Letter: Protecting Students from Discrimination,” citing 2003 “Dear Colleague” letter. Back to text.

26. Exec. Order No. 13899, 84 Fed. Reg. 68779 (Dec. 11, 2019). See also US Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, “Questions and Answers on Executive Order 13899 (Combating Anti-Semitism) and OCR’s Enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” January 19, 2021, https://www.ed.gov/media/document/faqs-executive-order-13899-combating-anti-semitism-and-ocrs-enforcement-of-title-vi-of-civil-rights-act-of-1964-2021-33939.pdf. Back to text.

27. International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “Working Definition of Antisemitism,” https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism. Back to text.

28. Kenneth Stern, “I Drafted the Definition of Antisemitism. Rightwing Jews Are Weaponizing It,” The Guardian, December 3, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/13/antisemitism-executive-order-trump-chilling-effect. Back to text.

29. On April 29, 2025, Harvard issued two reports: the Report of the Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias (https://www.harvard.edu/task-force-on-antisemitism/) and the Report of the Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias (https://www.harvard.edu/task-force-on-anti-muslim-and-anti-arab-bias/). The IHRA definitions influence the first report’s examples of perceived antisemitism. Former Harvard professor Atalia Omer, who is Israeli and Jewish, characterized the report’s reliance on the IHRA definition as both flattening the Jewish tradition and risking the policing of Jewish dissent. Omer, who taught for several years in the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at Harvard’s Divinity School, was disturbed to see her pedagogy, discussion, and research—which often foregrounded the work of Jewish scholars from different intellectual traditions—cited as evidence of a crisis of antisemitism at Harvard. As Omer puts it, “Harvard’s report does not just mischaracterize a program. It attempts to redraw the boundaries of Jewish legitimacy.” See Atalia Omer, “I’m an Israeli Professor. Why Is My Work in Harvard’s Antisemitism Report?” The Guardian, May 9, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/09/im-an-israeli-professor-why-is-my-work-in-harvards-antisemitism-report. Other university administrations have not formally adopted the IHRA definition but have simply labeled protected speech as antisemitic because it uses slogans such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” See also AAUP, “Academic Freedom and Tenure: Muhlenberg College (Pennsylvania),” Academe 111 (Summer 2025): 2–33. Back to text.

30. Rashid Khalidi, “I Spent Decades at Columbia. I’m Withdrawing My Fall Course Due to Its Deal with Trump,” The Guardian, August 1, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/01/columbia-historian-rashid-khalidi-open-letter. Back to text.

31. StandWithUs Ctr. for Legal Just. v. Mass. Inst. of Tech., 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 134141 (D. Mass. 2024), 3, 13. Back to text.

32. Mandel v. Bd. of Trs. Of the Cal. State Univ., 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 185871 (N.D. Cal. 2018), 59–60. Back to text.

33. Exec. Order No. 14161, 90 Fed. Reg. 8451 (Jan. 20, 2025). Back to text.

34. Exec. Order No. 14188, 90 Fed. Reg. 8847 (Jan. 29, 2025). Back to text.

35. US Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, “Dear Colleague Letter: SFFA v. Harvard,” February 14, 2025, https://www.ed.gov/media/document/dear-colleague-letter-sffa-v-harvard-109506.pdf. Back to text.

36. US Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, “Frequently Asked Questions About Racial Preferences and Stereotypes Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act,” https://www.ed.gov/media/document/frequently-asked-questions-about-racial-preferences-and-stereotypes-under-title-vi-of-civil-rights-act-109530.pdf. The Department of Education has announced that because of a federal district court injunction issued on April 24, “the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights will not take any enforcement action, or otherwise implement, the February 28, 2025, Dear Colleague Letter, associated FAQs, the End DEI Portal, or the certification requirement until further notice.” See also National Education Association, et al. v. United States Department of Education, et al., 779 F. Supp. 3d 149 (D.N.H. 2025) (preliminary injunction issued based on First Amendment and Fifth Amendment challenges). Back to text.

37. AAUP–Harvard Faculty Chapter and AAUP v. U.S. DOJ et al., (complaint filed Apr. 11, 2025), 4. See also AAUP, “Academic Freedom and Attacks on Disciplinary Knowledge.” Back to text.

38. President and Fellows of Harvard College, et al. v. US Dept of Health And Human Services, et al.; AAUP-Harvard Faculty Chapter, AAUP v. U.S. Dep’t of Justice, 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 171326 (D. Mass. 2025); AAUP and AFT v. U.S. Dep’t of Justice, 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 114591 (S.D.N.Y. 2025); National Education Association, et al. v. United States Department of Education, et al., 779 F. Supp. 3d 149 (D.N.H. 2025) Nat’l Ass’n of Diversity Officers in Higher Educ., et al., v. Trump, et al., 767 F. Supp. 3d 243 (D. Md. 2025). Back to text.

39. President and Fellows of Harvard College, et al. v. US Dept of Health and Human Services, et al.; AAUP-Harvard Faculty Chapter, AAUP v. U.S. Dep’t of Justice, 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 171326 (D. Mass. 2025), at 79. Back to text.

40. “Tracking Trump’s Higher-Ed Deals,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 8, 2025, https://www.chronicle.com/article/universities-are-making-deals-with-trump-heres-how-they-stack-up. Back to text.

41. Associated Press, “Columbia University Says It Has Suspended and Expelled Students Who Participated in Protests,” July 22, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/campus-protests-columbia-discipline-trump-administration-f009b90113fe0ba7847c54ffc9197bd1. Back to text.

42. Deirdre Heavey, “Education Secretary Linda McMahon Touts Columbia University’s $200M Settlement ‘Template,’” Fox News, July 25, 2025, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/education-secretary-linda-mcmahon-touts-columbia-university-200m-settlement-template. Back to text.

43. Francine Diep and Sarah Huddleston, “In Extraordinary Deal with Trump, Columbia U. Agrees to Pay $200 Million to Restore Funds,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 23, 2025, https://www.chronicle.com/article/in-extraordinary-deal-with-trump-columbia-u-agrees-to-pay-200-million-to-restore-funds. Back to text.

44. Kate Andrias, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, Jamal Greene, Olatunde Johnson, Jeremy Kessler, Gillian Metzger, and David Pozen, “A Title VI Demand Letter That Itself Violates Title VI (and the Constitution),” Balkinization, March 15, 2025, https://balkin.blogspot.com/2025/03/a-title-vi-demand-letter-that-itself.html. Back to text.

45. Columbia University Chapter of the AAUP, “An Agreement That Settles Nothing,” Academe Blog, July 29, 2025, https://academeblog.org/2025/07/29/an-agreement-that-settles-nothing/. Back to text.

46. See AAUP and AFT v. US DOJ, et al. (complaint filed Mar. 25, 2025): “Far from enforcing this civil rights statute, the Trump administration has instead weaponized Title VI, using the threat of massive and indiscriminate funding cuts as a cudgel to coerce universities into policing free speech and academic inquiry.” Back to text.

47. Yonat Shimron, “550 US Rabbis Sign Letter Condemning Trump’s Antisemitism Policy,” Religion News Service, April 28, 2025, https://religionnews.com/2025/04/28/550-rabbis-sign-letter-condemning-trumps-antisemitism-policy/. Back to text.

48. “On Eliminating Discrimination,” 342. Back to text.

49. See AAUP, “Institutions Should Support Students Under Visa Threats with Legal Aid and Housing,” May 20, 2025, https://www.aaup.org/news/institutions-should-support-students-under-visa-threats-legal-aid-and-housing. Back to text.

50. Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, https://jerusalemdeclaration.org/. Back to text.