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Campaigners who have sued Harvard and other US universities over alleged antisemitism on campus are raising millions of dollars to go after other prominent schools.
“We have a number of others who we’re going to be suing, and it’s going to be soon,” said Marc Kasowitz, a high-profile litigator and partner with the firm Kasowitz Benson Torres, which has brought recent actions in federal courts against New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and Columbia.
The well-funded campaign threatens to keep an issue that has cost the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania their jobs in the headlines. It also imposes more cost and pressure on elite institutions that have struggled to satisfy the conflicting demands of donors, faculty and students since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7.
“We are not willing to wait. We have students on these university campuses whose lives are at stake,” Kasowitz said.
Ken Marcus, chair of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights and former president Donald Trump’s assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education, said he was also preparing a lawsuit in the courts and “a handful” of complaints with his former department.
Since October 7, his centre has sued Berkeley Law School in federal court in California, and lodged claims against Wellesley College, American University and the University of Pennsylvania with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
They allege violations of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for discrimination on the grounds of race, colour or national origin, which could lead to the withdrawal of federal financial support.
“We don’t go into who our funders are,” Marcus said: “A wide range of people have supported us. Not just wealthy people. [They include] families of students we assist and professors.”
The comments follow the launch of the Combat Campus Antisemitism Foundation, a non-profit group “formed to combat — through litigation under federal, state and local civil rights laws and other measures — increasingly rampant antisemitism on our country’s leading university campuses and at other institutions”.
The organisation provides no details of its backers, but it says it is funding the lawsuits brought by Kasowitz and is soliciting fresh donations. Kasowitz would not comment on the sources of funding.
The cases cite examples of antisemitic slogans chanted by student protesters, plus threats and hostile social media comments, claiming that the universities took insufficient measures to intervene.
A separate lawsuit has been launched by 10 Harvard alumni seeking remediation for antisemitism and compensation for “reputational damage”, saying that the value of their degrees has been reduced.
The universities and some external legal experts have questioned the likelihood of the actions succeeding, but Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law School, said they would require hiring external legal counsel to defend.
“The complaint filed by the Brandeis Center paints a picture of the law school that is stunningly inaccurate and that ignores the First Amendment,” he said. “Although there is much that the campus can and does do to create an inclusive learning environment, it cannot stop speech even if it is offensive.”
Frederick Lawrence, a distinguished lecturer at Georgetown University’s Law Center, said he was sceptical that either the lawsuits or the Title VI complaints would succeed.
“The question is whether the students were deprived of educational opportunities. I don’t think any of the schools can be accused of standing by and doing nothing,” he said. “What Congress and its committee on education could have done is use its awesome convening authority to put people in the same room to work out a set of best practices.”
However, people involved in the lawsuits predicted that the universities would settle for large sums before the cases reached trial, to avoid the potential embarrassment of their internal communications being made public.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups have launched their own legal actions seeking to tackle alleged Islamophobia, including cases to defend suspended teachers and students expressing pro-Palestinian views.
Kasowitz said that students named as plaintiffs in the antisemitism lawsuits his firm is bringing would pay nothing. The litigation “will cost millions”, he said, “but we’re not only committed to going all the way, we’re going all the way.”