BY ANNA FEDER
This post was published previously on Academic Freedom on the Line, a Substack of the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.
Counterintuitively, the most important legal tool of repression against campus speech has been civil rights law—specifically, Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits institutions that receive federal financial assistance from engaging in discrimination on the basis of “race, color, or national origin.” Over the past two decades, pro-Israel actors inside and outside the government have pushed for a reinterpretation of Title VI to include a broad notion of antisemitism that can be easily used to recast many criticisms of Israel as unlawful discrimination.—Discriminating Against Dissent: The Weaponization of Civil Rights Law to Repress Campus Speech on Palestine
When I began recording interviews with faculty who faced repercussions for their Palestine advocacy last spring, I recognized a pattern: administrators and external actors using Title VI to attack the core tenets of higher education. The AAUP and Middle East Studies Association (MESA) documented this trend in the November 2025 report: “Discriminating Against Dissent.” This was the first systematic empirical study of government investigations and private lawsuits against US colleges and universities under Title VI. The most significant finding of this report is that pro-Israel groups have “flooded school administrators and the federal government with claims of antisemitism, which have prompted a wave of investigations; in parallel, these organizations have filed numerous private lawsuits in federal court.”
Since October 7, 2023, MESA has tracked lawsuits and investigations on its website, providing access to the original dataset and visual summaries of its findings. MESA also identifies key external actors in these lawfare cases, including the Brandeis Center, Campus Reform, Stand With Us, and the Anti-Defamation League. In a follow-up report released earlier this month, “Lessons in Repression: Silencing Campus Workers on Palestine Since October 7, 2023,” MESA highlights the weaponization of Title VI as a central strategy. The report concludes that all categories of academic workers are affected, with a disproportionate impact on people of color. It further notes that not all investigations result in termination and that “universities use the facade of anti-discrimination investigations to pursue politically motivated retaliation.”
At the beginning of the year, the Brookings Institution published a report titled “How the US Department of Education Has Turned Civil Rights Enforcement into a Discriminatory Tool,” addressing the weaponization of Title VI. The report concluded that, under the Trump Administration, the Office for Civil Rights discontinued investigations into claims of racial or gender discrimination. Since January 2025, investigations have primarily addressed claims of reverse racial discrimination, antisemitism, and policies designed to protect and include transgender students. The report also asserted that the Department of Education has “disregarded legal precedent and due process by withholding federal funding without following required statutory steps.”
Last month, two prominent civil rights organizations published reports on this issue: the United States Commission on Civil Rights’ “The Federal Response to Antisemitism on American College and University Campuses” and the ACLU’s “Student Speech Under Attack: Suppression of Pro-Palestine Speech and Dissent on Campus.” The bipartisan USCCR report concluded that, although antisemitism remains a significant concern, institutions must conduct investigations consistently and safeguard “political speech, peaceful protest activity, academic freedom, and other forms of expression covered by the First Amendment and central to effective higher education.” The ACLU report advises that colleges and universities “craft and implement anti-discrimination policies that prevent student discrimination and harassment and that appropriately balance principles of academic freedom, free speech, and educational equality.”
Given the increasing frequency of investigations targeting free speech and academic inquiry, I collaborated with the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom to develop practical resources for faculty under attack; I compiled guidance from MESA and partner organizations, including Palestine Legal, the ACLU, and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Additionally, I incorporated insights from faculty featured in the Faculty on the Front Lines series who have experienced campus investigations. The resulting printable guide features quotes from Michel DeGraf (MIT), Maura Finkelstein (formerly of Muhlenberg College), Corinna Mullin (CUNY), Mohja Kahf (University of Arkansas), Judith Norman (Trinity University), Andrea Brower (formerly of Gonzaga University), Cynthia Franklin (University of Hawaii), and Jodi Dean (William and Hobart Smith Colleges). These quotes are organized with relevant resources under headings such as “building solidarity,” “getting support from your union,” and “getting legal advice.”
The legal advice section contains a link to a worksheet developed by AAUP legal fellow Taylor Fox. This printable resource outlines recommended actions and cautions for the first week after notification of an investigation. It provides guidance on identifying the rules governing your case, best practices during the investigation, and relevant legal theories. The worksheet also includes sections to document AAUP chapter and legal support contacts, along with key dates and deadlines.
The AAUP is developing additional resources to release in the coming weeks. These resources include a one-page Title VI explainer for allies and administrators, as well as a talk by Afshan Jafar, chair of AAUP’s Committee on College and University Governance and a Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom fellow, addressing consulting firms that are shaping Title VI policies used to challenge academic freedom and shared governance. These materials will be incorporated into the newly created section of the AAUP website, under Issues in Higher Education, titled “The Weaponization of Title VI.”
Maura Finkelstein, whose termination from Muhlenberg in 2024 was the subject of an AAUP investigation, shared a particularly useful framing in our interview:
“I think that the siloing and individualizing of these cases are strategies and tactics to silence us and to shame us. The most important thing that I think people need to be doing is to make sure that they are in constant communication and conversation with like-minded comrades, both who are politically aligned and also who are going through or have gone through similar things. We’re each dealing with our own individual contexts and our own individual actions, but it’s within this larger landscape of repression. There’s a playbook.”
Please share these resources with your colleagues and community allies. Learn the playbook and build solidarity with your “like-minded comrades.” As always, information is the antidote to repression, and we are stronger together.
Anna Feder is a consultant for the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.
