Since Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, there have been record levels of anti-Semitism and Jewish hatred on college campuses across the nation. In a November 14 letter to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), U.S. Representatives Kevin Kiley and Burgess Owens urged the office to take a more proactive approach is combatting anti-Semitism. Owens’ involvement is significant, because he chairs the key House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees American higher education. During the House Judiciary Committee hearing “Free Speech on College Campuses” on November 8, Brandeis Center Chairman Kenneth L. Marcus was asked about OCR’s actions, or lack thereof, and offered the following recommendations: “There’s more that the Department can be doing, and it can do it tomorrow. The Department has sent out links for Jewish students to file complaints It has added language to its compliant forms. That’s fine. But there is no reason why the Department needs to wait for Jewish students to come to them. The Department has the authority to initiate self-directed investigations. Anytime it opens the newspaper and sees that there is a problem at an institution that received Federal funds, and that’s every single day if they are reading the papers… These are things that can be done quickly that don’t require significant infusions of funds. They can be done with the current resources and that can be done with the authority that the Secretary of Education already has.” Marcus first pioneered the use of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to combat anti-Semitism in 2004, when he served as the U.S. Dept. of Education OCR Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights. Since then, ten executive agencies, including the Department of Education, have adopted this framework – now known as the Marcus Doctrine. However, even with Title VI protections recently applied to Jewish students, college administrators lag behind in the promptness and enforcement of actions to keep Jewish students safe. Threats to Jewish students on college campuses are at an all-time high and need to be addressed with decisive action by OCR. The need for new regulations that explicitly enforce the combination of the Marcus Doctrine and IHRA Definition – as done in 2019’s Executive Order 13899 on Combating Antisemitism – and not weaker instruments, such as Dear Colleague letters or acknowledgement of lesser anti-Semitism definitions, could not be more urgent. Download