The letters were sent from the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), citing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act which obligates institutions to protect Jewish students on campus, including “uninterrupted access to campus facilities and educational opportunities”.
The letter comes just days after the Donald Trump administration announced on Friday that Columbia University will lose $400m in federal grants and contracts over accusations it has not done enough to combat antisemitism.
The letter states that all 60 universities they reached out to were already under investigation for Title VI violations relating to antisemitic harassment and discrimination.
“US colleges and universities benefit from enormous public investments funded by US taxpayers. That support is a privilege and it is contingent on scrupulous adherence to federal antidiscrimination laws,” the DOE’s press release said, quoting Secretary of Education Linda McMahon.
The OCR announced it has the authority to enforce Title VI, which prohibits federal funding from any institution that discriminates on the basis of race, colour or national origin.
“National origin includes shared (Jewish) ancestry,” according to the press release.
Universities have been accused of allowing antisemitism on their campuses after a series of protests and encampments erupted last year that were sparked by Israel’s war on Gaza. After Columbia students held an encampment, universities across the country followed suit.
Both the Joe Biden and Trump administrations have sought to characterise anti-Israel and anti-Zionist protests as “antisemitic”, leading to congressional hearings, with members of congress grilling university administrators and law enforcement forcefully shutting down protests on campuses.
Initially, the OCR pursued investigations against five universities where “widespread antisemitic harassment had been reported”, including Columbia University, Northwestern University, Portland State University, The University of California-Berkeley, and The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
The 55 other universities that received a letter on Monday are under “investigation or monitoring” in response to complaints filed with the OCR. The list includes six prestigious Ivy League universities (Columbia University, Brown University, Yale University, Princeton University, Cornell University, and Harvard University). There are a total of eight universities which fall into the Ivy League category.
The expanded list of universities being monitored or investigated resulted from the OCR’s directive last week to resolve a “backlog of complaints” alleging antisemitism at dozens of universities, making it an “immediate priority”.
A federal task force has notified Columbia that it would conduct “a comprehensive review” of the university’s federal contracts and grants as part of its ongoing investigations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which resulted in the cancellation of $400m in federal funding so far.
Four government agencies, including the Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, DOE, and the US General Services Administration make up the “Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism”.
The task force was set up in February following Trump’s executive order, “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism”, signed at the end of January. The Task Force announced last week it would visit ten university campuses which have experienced antisemitic incidents since October 2023 after the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel and the subsequent war on the besieged Strip.
In a joint press statement on Friday, the agencies said the funding cuts at Columbia were due to “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students”.
“Since October 7 [2023], Jewish students have faced relentless violence, intimidation, and anti-Semitic harassment on their campuses – only to be ignored by those who are supposed to protect them,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon stated in the press release.
The statement warned that the cancellations represent the first round of action and additional cancellations are expected to follow. Columbia University currently holds more than $5bn in federal grant commitments. The amount announced was almost eight times more than the amount the federal task force announced it was considering halting on Monday.
In the wake of the political backlash, universities like New York University and Harvard have scrambled to adopt the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism as they come under federal scrutiny.
Since coming into office, Trump ordered a pause on federal grants and loans, which has since been blocked by a judge. The Associated Press reported in February that the Trump directive has universities nationwide “scrambling to determine how a funding freeze could affect their research programs, students and faculty”.
