The United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into Lehigh University’s handling of antisemitism on its campus Tuesday.
The investigation comes after a series of actions undertaken by the nonprofit organizations StandWithUs and Alums for Campus Fairness, beginning with a joint letter the groups wrote to Lehigh’s administration documenting a campus environment hostile to Jewish students.
Among the incidents detailed in the letter is an episode in which a Jewish student in an on-campus dormitory found that the mezuzah affixed to his dorm room door frame had been torn down. When the student reported the vandalism to university police, the department found that, while there was an apparent anti-Jewish motivation behind the crime, it could not identify a perpetrator.
It took three weeks, according to claims in the letter, for university president Joseph Helble to address the incident. Responding to an email from the student long after the vandalism, Helble professed that antisemitism “cannot be something we accept at Lehigh” but told the student that “it cannot be the responsibility of our Muslim and Palestinian students alone to say that Islamophobic acts also have no place,” implying that Jewish students had a responsibility to defend Muslim students from on-campus attacks, though he cited no such incidents.
Helble and the administration, according to the letter, have made no effort to identify the perpetrator, even after someone posted a “Stand With Palestine” sticker on the same Jewish student’s doorframe opposite the spot where the mezuzah once hung. The administration never sent a message to the school community regarding the two instances of vandalism.
As the letter notes, this response contradicts previous university practice. In 2013, after a student vandalized a residence hall with racial slurs, Lehigh launched a months-long investigation and expelled the culprit.
The letter also alleges potential violations of Lehigh’s policies regarding the use of residential and classroom resources. For instance, a resident adviser at the university promoted an October 26 event titled “Contextualizing Gaza” during which a speaker downplayed the October 7 attack and argued that support for Israel after Hamas attacked had only to do with Palestinian Arabs’ skin color. Had the resident adviser not received permission from the administration to advertise the event, that RA would appear to have violated Lehigh’s policies stating that “unapproved, inappropriate, or improper postings may result in . . . a referral to the University conduct process.”
During a December 5 “teach-in” about the broader conflict, which Lehigh advertised as a discussion requiring “all participants to keep mutual respect and intellectual honesty for each other,” speakers rationalized the events of October 7 with arguments like, “as long as Palestinians are occupied, there is going to be this . . . violence,” the letter states.
The StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice filed a formal complaint with the Department of Education on February 27 requesting that the department’s Office of Civil Rights look into the university’s failure to address the problem. In a press release issued Tuesday, StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice assistant director Gadi Dotz said the organization welcomes the news that the OCR has opened an investigation.
“We are proud of the courageous students who have come forward to share their experiences of anti-Jewish bigotry at Lehigh and who are taking action to hold the administration accountable to its obligations to protect its Jewish and Israeli students from harassment and discrimination based on their shared ancestry and national origin,” Dotz said in the statement. “We are hopeful that OCR’s investigation will reward these students’ efforts by requiring the Lehigh administration to take the necessary steps to remedy the hostile antisemitic climate on its campus.”
Aside from the items detailed in the letter, National Review recently obtained a petition being circulated around the Lehigh community that, among other things, calls on the university to shut down pro-Israel groups on campus and issue a statement accusing Israel of committing a genocide backed by the United States.
“Lehigh-supported programs such as TAMID and Israeli study abroad normalize relations with a far-right, settler-colonial, and genocidal state,” the petition reads. “These programs must end, in line with the BDS movement.”
National Review has reached out to Lehigh for a response to the civil-rights investigation.