The Biden administration is under fire for reaching last-minute anti-Semitism settlements with the University of California, Rutgers University, and Johns Hopkins University, with Rep. Tim Walberg (R., Mich.) saying the "toothless" agreements "shield schools from real accountability."
"It's disgraceful that in the final days of the Biden-Harris administration, the Department of Education is letting universities, including Rutgers, five University of California system campuses including UCLA, and Johns Hopkins, off the hook for their failures to address campus antisemitism," said Walberg, who chairs the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
"These so-called resolutions utterly fail to resolve the civil rights complaints they purport to address. The Department is shamefully abandoning its obligation to protect Jewish students, faculty, and staff and undermining the incoming administration."
Biden's Department of Education reached agreements with all three of the schools in the last month to settle civil rights complaints that alleged widespread discrimination against Jewish students. At UCLA, for example, anti-Semitic radicals physically prevented Jews from accessing portions of campus if they refused to denounce their religious beliefs. At Rutgers, an anti-Israel protester identified where a Jewish student lived and called for his killing. At Hopkins, a campus protester held a sign bearing a swastika that read, "Go hamas, from the river to the sea, finish the job."
The agreements to settle those complaints, however, do not include significant measures to combat anti-Semitism. Instead, university leaders made no admission of wrongdoing and agreed to provide "training" for campus employees and develop "climate surveys" meant to evaluate "the extent to which students are subjected to or witness discrimination."
The Biden administration opened dozens of civil rights investigations into universities accused of discriminating against Jewish students. But several of those probes have been open for years, and those that were resolved have brought insignificant changes. Lawmakers and policy experts have subsequently identified the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights as one entity that could take a more aggressive approach to campus anti-Semitism, and Walberg is no different.
"The Trump administration should closely examine these agreements and explore options to impose real consequences on schools, which could include giving complainants the opportunity to appeal these weak settlements," Walberg said in his Thursday statement.
"And certainly, no more complaints should be settled before President Trump takes office."