WASHINGTON — Political science lecturer emeritus Jeff Rice (Weinberg ’72) was a sophomore at Northwestern at the height of anti-Vietnam War protests. The day after students voted to end a schoolwide strike, he and a group of peers broke into the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps’ campus headquarters.
The University did not take them to court. Instead, an internal board questioned the students and fined about a third of them.
Rice said this quiet approach protected NU from a “lingering legacy of repression.” He paralleled the past and present, praising current University administrators for negotiating with pro-Palestinian protesters at the April Deering Meadow encampment instead of escalating tensions with police confrontations.
“If you don’t fight them, if you let the protesters have their space, you are protecting free speech,” Rice said. “You are also limiting violence, and violence can come back and smack the administration in the face.”
But for President Donald Trump’s administration and some lawmakers in Washington, NU remains a target.
Following a yearlong congressional investigation and Trump’s presidential victory, the White House escalated its investigation into the University’s response to pro-Palestinian protests. Several students and scholars told The Daily these probes fall under a broader, politicized effort to stymie academic speech and expression — and, in turn, undermine NU and other “elite” universities.
On Feb. 3, the Education Department named NU as one of five schools it would investigate for “widespread antisemitic harassment” following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. As of Monday, the department had opened investigations into antisemitism at 60 universities nationwide.
Additionally, the Justice Department announced Feb. 28 that its Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism would visit NU and nine other colleges to investigate reports of antisemitism and determine “whether remedial action is warranted.”
The probes allege NU and other colleges violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination based on “race, color or national origin.” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon on Friday directed her department’s Office for Civil Rights to prioritize addressing Title VI complaints about antisemitism, even as ProPublica reported the office had placed thousands of other complaints on hold.
“I would want to make sure that the presidents of those universities and those colleges are taking very strong measures not to allow (acts of violence) to happen,” McMahon said at her Feb. 13 confirmation hearing. “They can call in the police. They can do whatever they need to do to set standards and to make sure those standards are upheld.”
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told The Daily it was too early to determine potential fallout from the executive branch’s probes. However, he and other Democrats have questioned whether the Education Department can effectively carry out its investigation through the Office for Civil Rights, which has laid off an unspecified number of employees under Trump.
At her confirmation hearing, McMahon floated the idea of moving that office to the Justice Department if Trump acts on his intent to dismantle the Education Department. These changes would align with conservative political movement Project 2025’s previously outlined plan.
“I’m trying to resolve in my mind the notion that we are all committed to stopping antisemitism while at the same time, the funding of certain agencies which have that responsibility is being cut dramatically,” Durbin said at a Wednesday hearing on antisemitism.
An Education Department spokesperson declined to comment on the timeline or potential consequences of pending investigations.
Investigations use narrow definition of antisemitism
The Trump administration adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism in a 2019 executive order. It defined “the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity” as a form of hate against Jewish people, and a list of sample antisemitic acts included calling Israel’s existence a “racist endeavor” and comparing policies between Israel and Nazi Germany.
NU recently adopted this definition to comply with Trump’s executive orders on antisemitism, including one signed Jan. 29.
One attorney who helped draft IHRA’s working definition, Kenneth S. Stern, has since opposed governments and universities strictly enforcing it. Stern said those institutions risk censoring anti-Zionist ideas and coercing supposed dissidents into silence.
“When you’re telling people that certain ideas you’re going to label as bigoted, you’re not teaching — you’re telling people that groupthink is a valuable idea and that you’re going to get into trouble for even thinking something, let alone articulating it,” Stern said in a February episode of the podcast “Banished.”
History Prof. David Shyovitz, director of the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies, echoed Stern’s criticism. But he also remained concerned about certain statements from students and colleagues regarding Israel’s history and relationship with Palestine.
Shyovitz said people at universities would benefit from debating and discussing these ideas — including those he found inaccurate or problematic, such as the claim that all Jewish people are European colonizers.
He warned against governments enforcing “overly ambitious” definitions or policies on antisemitism, even amid the need to address harassment of Jewish students.
“If that’s illegal, then it ought to be dealt with in a targeted way, in a surgical way, not in a way that throws the baby out with the bath water,” Shyovitz said.
Students, lawmakers divided over necessity of investigations
Weinberg senior and Hillel President Sari Eisen said she was unsurprised that the executive branch singled out NU since she knew peers who felt uncomfortable or unsafe with some of the rhetoric from pro-Palestinian protesters last spring.
Eisen added that she and other Hillel leaders were optimistic about the government addressing antisemitism and other forms of hate.
“We’re hoping that this investigation continues to enhance the campus climate for Jewish students and for all students at Northwestern,” she said. “We are happy with how this year has gone so far and hope that this continues no matter how the investigation goes.”
Lawmakers like Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) have pushed for legal efforts to fight college antisemitism, including the Education Department’s investigation. Cassidy and Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) reintroduced a bill in January that would make it easier for students to file Title VI discrimination complaints while requiring colleges and the Education Department to report data tied to those complaints.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) told The Daily that the investigation came amid the “dangerous normalization of radical ideology.” She criticized Elon Musk, who has overseen many staff and funding cuts under Trump, for aligning himself with groups like far-right political party Alternative for Germany.
“We cannot allow the voices of hate to be amplified and legitimized in the halls of power,” she said in a statement. “Any attempt to score political points with an issue as serious as this will not keep students safe.”
One student who participated in several pro-Palestinian protests said criticisms of Israel and calls to “free Palestine” did not target anyone’s Jewish identity.
The student, who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, added that he prioritized “always keeping the focus on Palestine.” He cited Trump’s proposal to forcibly displace Palestinians from Gaza and seize the land.
Trump, Congress target higher education
The Education Department said in a Feb. 3 press release that its investigation would build on a previous probe into college antisemitism conducted by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
An October report following that investigation accused NU of, among other things, appointing “radical anti-Israel faculty” to negotiate with encampment organizers. The University objected to the report’s findings in a subsequent statement.
In an op-ed published in Inc. last May, history Prof. Kevin Boyle called the committee’s investigation “the McCarthyism of the moment” — referencing Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.), who presided over hearings about alleged communists in the U.S. government and other institutions in the early 1950s.
Boyle told The Daily that the House committee used its antisemitism investigation to forward a broader attack on higher education, stoking fear in a similar manner as McCarthy.
“They were trading on this unhappiness with protests to then attack a very easy target of elite college presidents at expensive, exclusive private schools,” Boyle said. “That’s exactly the same tactic.”
These attacks on universities now come from the White House: In a March 4 post on Truth Social, Trump threatened to cut all federal funding to any university that “allows illegal protests,” and he said he would imprison or deport so-called “agitators” who participate in those protests.
Boyle called Trump’s executive actions against universities “unusual” — more direct than former President Richard Nixon’s “rhetorical criticism” of anti-Vietnam War protesters and more public than the FBI’s illegal surveillance of political organizations in the 1950s and 1960s.
A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from reducing support for grants issued by the National Institutes of Health Wednesday. However, other funding threats remain for schools like NU.
Reps. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) and Troy Nehls (R-Texas) have introduced bills that would increase the tax on university endowments from 1.4% to either 10% or 21%, respectively.
And after over a year of pro-Palestinian protests where students and police frequently clashed, Columbia University lost $400 million in federal grants and contracts Friday, according to the Trump administration.
History Prof. Leslie Harris called the Trump administration’s probes into student protests and diversity, equity and inclusion programs a “smoke screen” for its effort to make colleges less diverse.
While a conservative-leaning Supreme Court rolled back racial diversity by striking down race-based college admissions, Harris said threats to funding reflect an attack on “diversity of thought.”
NU ‘capitulating’ to government through compliance
NU administrators have not shared specific plans to address the antisemitism investigations or other Trump-era mandates affecting higher education. In a Thursday statement, University President Michael Schill and Provost Kathleen Hagerty said NU valued “free expression and vigorous debate” and that “all students, faculty and staff deserve to be free from discrimination, hate and intimidation.”
A University spokesperson previously told The Daily that the school would “fully comply” with federal investigators.
Rice said NU was being “protective” of its interests by preemptively removing web pages about diversity, equity and inclusion — especially with Republicans like Trump cracking down on ideologies deemed “radical” or “woke.”
“Nobody’s being thrown off campus, but the University is playing a game of walking a fine line between members of Congress who want to repress that (speech) and keep it out,” Rice said.
One student in NU’s chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, who requested to remain anonymous due to fear of retribution in light of federal investigations, remained skeptical about the University’s approach toward student protesters.
The student said that even before NU removed DEI pages and instituted a new bias training to comply with Trump’s orders, its revised demonstration policies already made it “more risky” to protest.
“Northwestern is not necessarily committed to any values but rather committed to just doing what the government tells them to do,” the student said.
Nitasha Tamar Sharma, professor of Black studies and Asian American studies, helped organize a Thursday event about political threats to universities.
She said that with NU supposedly “capitulating in advance” to Trump’s orders, students and faculty needed to learn about the importance of higher education and voice their concerns to University administrators.
Sharma compared planned teach-ins across the coming days to events anti-Vietnam War activists held on college campuses.
“Professors and people on campus used what we know, which is that knowledge is power,” she said. “(Community members) can come to see experts in the academy, people who are informed, distill this harangue of information — distill it down into concrete things and learn and then see where it is that they want to join.”
