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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is now among 23 colleges and universities under investigation for alleged discrimination on the basis of shared ancestry, according to the Education Department’s updated list of open inquiries.
The department said Tuesday that it had opened investigations into MIT; the University of California, Davis; Drexel University; and the University of Illinois at Chicago. The list doesn’t specify what the investigations are about, other than that they focus on possible shared-ancestry violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which requires federally funded institutions to protect students from discrimination based on race, color or national origin.
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has seen an influx in complaints alleging antisemitism or Islamophobia on college campuses since the Israel-Hamas war began in early October. Since then, the department has opened 33 investigations into complaints about a K-12 school district or a college. The agency began publicly listing institutions under investigation in mid-November.
MIT president Sally Kornbluth was one of the three presidents who testified before a congressional committee about how her institution was responding to incidents of antisemitism and student protests in support of Palestine.
In early November, MIT students supporting the Palestinian people occupied a building on campus for hours and clashed with counterprotesters. Some protesters on the pro-Palestinian side were eventually suspended. Videos of the protest went viral on social media, boosted by conservative media outlets that said Jewish students had been blocked from attending class. MIT officials said later that while some students felt afraid to walk through the protest, they weren’t aware of “any ongoing issues” that prevented a student from moving around the campus.
