Published by Jewish Insider on 03/21/2025 Just hours before President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to start dismantling the Department of Education, the department’s Office for Civil Rights opened its latest batch of antisemitism investigations into several universities. Jewish legal and education experts were left divided over how the cuts will impact the newest Title VI complaints — and the government’s ability going forward to hold schools accountable for rising antisemitism. “We have heard directly from OCR that complaints that we have filed — some of them a while ago and some of them more recently — are being opened for investigation,” Denise Katz-Prober, director of legal initiatives at the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, told Jewish Insider. “The opening of these investigations does signal that the Department of Education and OCR are being active and forceful in addressing the antisemitism that’s plaguing so many campuses,” she said. Katz-Prober is overseeing a number of complaints filed by her organization that the OCR opened on Thursday. These include investigations into Yale University, the University of Massachusetts — Amherst, Scripps College, American University and the Fulton County School District. The Brandeis Center has filed dozens of complaints on behalf of Jewish students alleging violations of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks. Based on the OCR’s promptness in opening the investigations, Katz-Prober sees the executive order as a “positive signal about their commitment and ability to address the pending complaints” despite the administration’s intent to eliminate parts of the department, contrasting this with a backlog of “languishing” Title VI complaints during the Biden administration. The executive order, signed by Trump at the White House on Thursday afternoon, directs the secretary of Education to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the States, while continuing to ensure the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.” As of Thursday night, the department’s website — where Title VI complaints are filed — appeared to be taken offline, with a message that it is “undergoing routine maintenance.” K-12 schools could also benefit from the dismantling of the department, according to David Bernstein, head of the North American Values Institute, a group that focuses on “radical social justice” ideology in classrooms. “Without a doubt, the Department of Education has been part of politicizing the classroom,” Bernstein told JI. The department, which was established in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter, has “funded some really extremist education initiatives in places like California,” Bernstein said. At the same time, Bernstein argued that there could be issues with turning the funds over to states, as the president suggested in his executive order announcement, because “[states] are just as susceptible to extreme ideological influence as the federal government, [which] could make the situation worse,” he said. Matt Nosanchuk, who served as deputy assistant secretary for operations and outreach in the OCR during the Biden administration, lambasted the executive order, saying it “ultimately hurts students.” “Our view [in the Biden administration] was that withdrawing funds is something for which there’s a process,” Nosanchuk said, calling Trump’s cuts a move to “weaponize antisemitism to further an agenda that is anti-higher education” as well as “silencing freedom of speech.” The Trump administration cut more than half of the department’s OCR staff and regional offices earlier this month. On Thursday, it said that “critical functions” of the department would continue. “If [the Trump administration] really wanted to combat antisemitism, why would they get rid of seven of the 12 regional offices?” Nosanchuk said. “There’s a real problem that needs to be addressed but the way that they are using the issue — including cutting important medical research — speaks volumes about punishment for what they believe is failure to address antisemitism effectively.” Congressional approval would be needed to fully abolish the department. Trump said in his speech on Thursday that he hoped Democrats would vote in favor of legislation to shutter the department, which Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, said shortly afterward he intends to introduce. The president did not directly address whether the part of OCR involved in handling Jewish students’ claims of antisemitism would be gutted — and what would happen to the office if it were. The “most logical approach” would be to move some or all of OCR’s functions to the Department of Justice, Kenneth Marcus, founder of the Brandeis Center and former U.S. assistant secretary of education in the George W. Bush and the first Trump administrations, told JI. The DOJ announced a multi-agency task force last month aimed at “root[ing] out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses.” “The question then would be whether the new entity would continue to pursue administrative cases or whether instead to beef up the use of lawsuits,” Marcus pondered. Another possibility, he suggested, “would be to delegate responsibilities, and provide federal funding, to state civil rights agencies that have substantially identical laws.”