Is Your California College Among 17 Under Federal Antisemitism Investigation?

Swastika graffiti in a campus bathroom, chants of “death to Jews,” Hamas Hello Kitty stickers and the physical assault of Jewish students. These are among the incidents detailed in discrimination complaints against California universities since the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023.

Now, at least 17 colleges in the state are in the crosshairs of multi-pronged federal investigations into antisemitism in higher education.

The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating whether the University of California system has allowed antisemitism to create a hostile work environment for Jewish employees.

And the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights announced investigations into allegations that students of Jewish ancestry have been denied access to education at nearly a dozen schools in the state — including a handful of UCs, California State Universities at Sacramento and San Diego and private institutions such as the University of Southern California, Chapman University and Stanford University.

Across the country, President Donald Trump’s administration has gone even further by withholding federal funds from schools, including Columbia, Northwestern and Cornell. Immigration agents have arrested international students like Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil for their actions in support of Palestine. The latest news is that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is now monitoring the social media feeds of immigrants for evidence of antisemitism and “terrorist sympathizers.”

Some in civil rights law and academia warn that the extraordinary and even extralegal tactics and disregard for existing discrimination protections point to the administration’s true ambition: Not to create an inclusive campus climate for all, but to stir up fear and extract concessions from traditionally left-leaning centers of learning.

In the past month, UCLA and UCSB have announced new initiatives to address antisemitism, while some state lawmakers and faculty groups have called on university leaders to stand up to the federal government in order to protect privacy and free speech rights. With billions of dollars in federal research funding on the line, there’s no easy path forward: Columbia, which largely capitulated to the administration’s demands, still hasn’t seen its funding restored.

“What we have from this new task force from the federal government is an unprecedented, unique, coalition of federal agencies and they’re operating absent law,” said Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education under Biden and chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights between 2016 and 2021.

The federal actions announced since January have also largely ignored the fact that many of these universities were already under scrutiny — and in some cases, had strict compliance agreements with the federal government.

“It was theater for the current administration to list University of California schools as schools that are somehow newly under investigation [for antisemitism],” Lhamon said. “They’re already subject to federal monitoring.”

Gutting the Office of Civil Rights

After the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s subsequent devastating war in Gaza, campuses across the country became freshly embroiled in widespread protests, labor strikes and encampments.

Lhamon said her office received “a huge influx of new cases” including antisemitic complaints like those listed above along with allegations that Palestinian and Muslim students had been doxxed, physically assaulted and greeted with signs reading “Hamas will kill and rape you all.”

In response, the OCR opened cases against more than a dozen higher education institutions in California, requesting voluminous responses including school policies, the names of witnesses and complainants and disciplinary actions taken by the schools. In those investigations, “what we saw, to my shock and horror, was that lots of schools in K–12 and in higher education had not understood their legal obligations under Title VI,” Lhamon said.

The OCR has jurisdiction under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars the use of federal funds for programs that discriminate on the basis of “race, color, or national origin.” But Lhamon said Title VI also requires there be a process for the university to come into compliance before federal funds can be withheld — unlike the Trump administration’s move to withhold $400 million from Columbia without a full investigation or any kind of compliance process.

To that end, the UC reached a resolution agreement with the Department of Education in December to address discrimination against students with “Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim ancestry” and close nine open Title VI cases. While a March 10, 2025, letter from the incoming head of the OCR called resolutions like this toothless, it includes extensive reporting requirements, campus police training, and individual redress for specific students, including reimbursement of tuition.

But now, Lhamon wonders who is actually monitoring the agreement. On March 11, half of the OCR employees in the country were terminated, and the Office of Civil Rights in San Francisco, which had spearheaded investigations in California schools, was closed.

“There’s not a single investigator in the state of California anymore in the Office of Civil Rights,” Lhamon said. “Not a single person who was involved in those cases is still involved in those cases.”

And many other cases investigating discrimination against students with disabilities, Black, Palestinian and Muslim students are also in limbo, court filings show. California is among the states suing the department over the mass firings.

KQED reached out to OCR attorneys named in complaint documents posted on the DOE website, but none agreed to be interviewed. DOE officials did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

But Denise Katz-Prober of the Brandeis Center, a Jewish advocacy nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., which has filed numerous administrative complaints on behalf of students, said many resolution agreements haven’t gone far enough to address the “root causes” of antisemitism on campuses.

She said her group feels optimistic that the Trump administration is “ acting quite forcefully and vigorously to hold institutions, accountable.” So far, she doesn’t have concerns about the functioning of the OCR, which she said acted swiftly to open a new case after the center filed a complaint against Scripps College in February. Another case against Chapman, filed over a year ago, is still under investigation.

Santa Monica College, which has three pending complaints with the OCR, was among the 60 institutions that received letters from the Trump administration on March 10. A spokesperson said via email that the letter didn’t include any new information — or determination — about the three pending cases.

“If you actually care about kids, if you actually care about discrimination that’s occurring in school, you fully monitor the agreements that you have, and you look for the other places that need you,” Lhamon said.

So far, the Trump administration has made no mention of enforcing the parts of the agreement crafted to address discrimination complaints filed by Palestinian students.

UCLA distinguished professor Sherene Razack chairs the Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab and Anti-Muslim Racism, which has submitted three reports to university leaders. Razack said the consequences of this bias to faculty and students can be severe.

“Medical residents who even mention anything to do with the genocide are getting seriously doxxed,” she said. The consequences of doxxing range from death threats to people “writing to you and saying, ‘You’ll never get a job,’” she added.

But Razack said the administration has largely ignored her task force’s recommendation, instead adopting recommendations from the Antisemitism Task Force, perhaps in “anticipatory compliance” to escape federal repercussions.

Distinguished Professor Stuart Gabriel of the UCLA Anderson School of Management — who has been tapped to lead the Initiative to Combat Antisemitism — did not respond to KQED’s emails requesting comment.

‘False flag’

The DOJ investigation brought under Title VII, which prohibits workplace discrimination, has already begun contacting people, according to reporting by Politico. Faculty unions had urged the administration to fight the subpoena of the names and contact information of hundreds of UC employees who signed letters in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks.

A letter to members from the University Council — American Federation of Teachers, the union that represents almost 7,000 UC teaching faculty and librarians, called on university leaders to protect “worker privacy and due process of law at every turn,” and encouraged workers and students to “resist participating in investigations that are clearly motivated by politics and the intent to silence debate, dissent, and disagreement.”

The UC Office of the President did not answer questions about the compliance agreement or the actions of the federal task force. In an email, a spokesperson said the institution “unequivocally condemns antisemitism in all forms” and ”is committed to responding to all inquiries in good faith as we continue to take important steps to foster a welcoming and safe environment for all.” A spokesperson for the DOJ declined to comment on the status of the workplace investigation.

But while some faculty members see a sharp divergence between the Biden administration’s approach to civil rights enforcement and the Trump administration’s, others, like Leigh Kimberg, a UCSF professor of medicine, feel this is merely a continuation of the ongoing suppression of legitimate protest and pro-Palestinian voices, which includes many Jewish voices.

“ I have spoken out saying that actually the liberation of the Jewish people and the Palestinian people are inextricable,” Kimberg said.

As a result, she said she has been accused of antisemitism. After speaking about Palestine during a talk about trauma-informed care, she said she was banned from speaking in public courses.

Kimberg said students have shown incredible bravery even in the face of potential discipline, arrest and immigration enforcement actions. In the past month, dozens of students and faculty at California universities, including Stanford, UCLA and UCSB, have had their visas revoked by the State Department.

Katz-Prober said she’s not an immigration expert, but said the Brandeis Center appreciates the Trump administration taking antisemitism seriously and “that there are consequences.”

Poulomi Saha, a UC Berkeley associate professor of English who was faculty co-chair of an advisory committee on Muslim and Palestinian student life, sees these investigations as a “false flag mission” in an attempt by Trump to “control what happens on college campuses.”

“Today, it’s antisemitism. Tomorrow, it will be something else. This is an incursion into a project of free inquiry and free speech on college campuses,” they said.

Already, DOE has also set its sights on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at universities and K–12 schools. Cal-Poly Humboldt, California State University San Bernardino and UC Berkeley have received notice that the OCR is investigating “race-exclusionary” practices.

“The Department is working to reorient civil rights enforcement to ensure all students are protected from illegal discrimination,” wrote U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in a press release.