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The Education Department is investigating allegations of shared-ancestry discrimination at another five colleges and universities, including the University of California, Berkeley, according to the agency’s updated list of open inquiries.
The department’s list of colleges, universities and K-12 school districts under investigation doesn’t specify what the investigation is about beyond a possible violation 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.
Illinois Wesleyan University, Middlebury College, Swarthmore College and Rockland Community College in New York also joined the list of nearly 50 institutions that have faced civil rights investigations related to shared-ancestry discrimination since the Israel-Hamas war began in October.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that the Berkeley investigation stems from a Feb. 26 incident in which protesters disrupted a planned lecture from Ran Bar-Yoshafat, deputy director of the Kohelet Policy Forum, an Israeli libertarian think tank. The event was canceled and evacuated. The department’s Office for Civil Rights typically takes at least a few weeks or months to open an investigation, so the quick turnaround on this incident is a shift.
StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice, a nonprofit focused on combating antisemitism, said in a news release that the department’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into Middlebury in response to its complaint. The organization alleged that Jewish students at Middlebury experienced “a pervasively hostile campus climate.”
