ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The Trump administration has notified Harvard University that it has violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. That section prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin in programs that get federal assistance. A task force from the Department of Health and Human Services claims Harvard has been, quote, "deliberately indifferent" and even a willful participant in antisemitic harassment of Jewish students, faculty and staff. This comes after Trump indicated that his administration and the school were making progress at the negotiating table. NPR's domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef is here. Hi, Odette.
ODETTE YOUSEF, BYLINE: Hey, Ari.
SHAPIRO: The administration already froze or canceled more than $2 billion in federal funds for Harvard. Now it's threatening to cut off what remains. Tell us about the new grounds that it is citing for this.
YOUSEF: Well, many of the examples it cites of campus hostility towards Jewish and Israeli students, Ari, actually come from Harvard's own investigation. Harvard convened task forces to look at antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias at the school. Those reports came out in April. And so the administration is using information that the university found to punish the university. It also only focuses on antisemitism, so it doesn't show concern about findings of hostility toward Muslim, Palestinian or Arab students on campus.
But this escalation comes even after Harvard has been credited with improving conditions for Jewish and Israeli students. You know, the - even the Anti-Defamation League has acknowledged progress in this area and even called out the Trump administration for, quote, "imposing or suggesting extremely severe penalties that don't tie to the issue of reducing antisemitism." And so this is where the question comes in, Ari, of what's really the goal here, and it's useful to put it in a larger historical context of attacks on higher education.
SHAPIRO: Tell us more about that context.
YOUSEF: I spoke with Isaac Kamola about this. He teaches political science at Trinity College in Hartford. He says it goes back to the mid-20th century. Access to higher ed really expanded. Colleges were accepting more women, people of color, first generation and low-income students, people studying under the GI Bill. And in turn, that led to new areas of study, like Black studies and gender studies.
ISAAC KAMOLA: Starting in the 1980s, you get a massive backlash against those kinds of shifts by those who want to reproduce hierarchy, that want to reproduce this vision of America as a white nation - as a white Christian nation - that want to push back against the directions of racial justice that the society was going in in general and higher education played a large role in.
YOUSEF: So universities, Ari, kind of became the vanguard in the pursuit of inclusive democracy. And Kamola says, you know, conservative attacks on universities are really like a counter-revolution fighting against that.
SHAPIRO: And how does that tie back to the issue of antisemitism?
YOUSEF: Well, Kamola says antisemitism is a real and serious issue, but he sees the administration using it for other goals, namely rolling back civil rights - or DEI, as we hear more often now - and rolling back inclusive democracy. This has been incredibly concerning to many whose life's work is to fight antisemitism because they say the administration's goals could actually make the problem worse. The way Jonathan Jacoby of the Nexus Project explained it to me is - he says nothing has been more important to the safety of American Jews than democracy.
JONATHAN JACOBY: Living as a free people in an open society is essentially unprecedented in Jewish history. And it's kept us safe, and our relationships with other Americans have kept us safe. And so standing against the weaponization of antisemitism to undermine democracy is part of standing against antisemitism.
SHAPIRO: What does he suggest when it comes to safety concerns of Jewish and Israeli students?
YOUSEF: Well, what Jacoby and others have emphasized to me is that the only way is by pursuing policies that make campuses safer for everybody, including Muslim and Arab students, students of color and women. Because otherwise, singling out Jewish people as uniquely deserving of safety could feed conspiracy narratives, and it could lead to Jews being scapegoated for damage ultimately done to America's higher education system.
SHAPIRO: NPR's Odette Yousef, thank you.
YOUSEF: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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