Three Northwestern University students have filed a class-action breach-of-contract lawsuit against their school, alleging that the university violated its duty to abide by its own policies by allowing a climate of antisemitism on its campus.
Attorneys from the Chicago-based Much Shelist, P.C., who brought the suit in Cook County’s circuit court on Wednesday, wrote in the filing that the plaintiffs “expected Northwestern to fulfill a modest core promise it made to them and all other similarly situated, tuition-paying students: the conduct of your student peers and faculty will be governed by rules, and — once you enroll — you will be free to safely move about and avail yourself of our beautiful campus in accordance with those rules.”
“Rather than conduct the business of the campus in accordance with the clear rules of conduct that everyone signed up for,” the attorneys wrote, “Northwestern ignored those rules, opting instead to facilitate, encourage, and coddle a dystopia cesspool of hate in the school’s lush green center, Deering Meadow.”
The lawsuit comes after Northwestern leaders offered concessions to anti-Israel activists who violated university policies, including setting up tents and occupying a campus lawn. On Monday, the university announced an agreement with the encampment’s organizers, and unveiled, among other items, a promise to offer full-ride scholarships to Palestinian students and guaranteed faculty jobs for Palestinian academics.
Pointing to incidents like a student wearing a sweatshirt with an image of a Hamas member on the front demanding that passersby state whether they speak Hebrew; a sign bearing a drawing of university president Michael Schill, who is Jewish, with devil horns and drops of blood; and another with a struck-through Star of David, the attorneys described the antisemitism that has been allowed to flourish on campus. They also noted that Schill acknowledged antisemitism at Northwestern in an April 30 video message to the university community.
“Rather than enforce its express and implied promises to Plaintiffs that Northwestern is a place of civility where free expression is governed by transparent, content-neutral codes of conduct, Northwestern twisted itself into a pretzel to accommodate the hostile and discriminatory encampment, legislate around it, and ultimately reward it,” the attorneys wrote. “But Northwestern may not suspend its rules just because student organizations prefer to pitch tents and sleep on the central campus lawn, promoting discriminatory, terror-supporting ideologies until their ‘demands’ are met.”
The filing also includes examples of antisemitism experienced by the plaintiffs, referred to in the suit as “Jane Doe,” “John Doe 1,” and “John Doe 2.”
Jane Doe, according to the attorneys, missed out on participating in her graduate program because the university could not guarantee students’ safety. She also had two run-ins with protesters near the encampment, the filing states.
“Jane Doe was walking with a friend near the encampment when she was accosted by a demonstrator wearing a surgical mask and a keffiyeh. The woman struck Jane Doe’s friend with her protest sign and walked away,” the attorneys wrote. “The following day, when Jane Doe was walking near the encampment, protesters screamed at her to ‘burn in hell.’ As Jane Doe left the area near the encampment, she was followed by the protesters.”
John Doe 1, according to the filing, was told that Jewish students should “go back to Europe, to Poland.” As John Doe 2 “walked near the encampment with several friends, a protester physically harassed one of the people in his friend group,” prompting John Doe 2 to avoid the lawn going forward.
The plaintiffs requested that the court declare that the university administration’s actions constitute breach of contract, issue an injunction against Northwestern, and require the university to comply with its own policies.
One of the attorneys representing the students, Steven Blonder, told National Review that the purpose of the lawsuit is to change the environment on campus.
“We want Jewish students to be protected alongside all other students, so students can go to school to learn, to thrive, to grow, and to have the college experience,” Blonder said. “Right now, the situation at Northwestern is that Jewish students are scared. They’re being harassed. They’re being targeted. … One of the students said point-blank that, if he were making the decision today, he would not come to Northwestern because of the reputation of the school.”
He said the suit is about holding the university to its word.
“This lawsuit is not about dollars. It’s not about money,” Blonder said. “It’s not about anything else other than to get the university to uphold its agreement with students that it will give them the experience it promised — with policies, procedures, and rules in place to get there. They’re not enforcing them right now, and the result of that is Jewish students are on the losing end.”
The class-action lawsuit is only one of the potential legal problems Northwestern is facing. Legal experts told National Review that the promised full-ride scholarships for Palestinian students — which university leadership gave as a concession to protesters — may not be lawful.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits entities receiving federal funding from allowing discrimination, exclusion, or denial of benefits on the basis of race, color, or national origin. The scholarships could pose Title VI concerns for Northwestern, given that, according to Schill’s press release, they have been earmarked for students of a particular national origin, the lawyers said.
So far, at least two organizations have filed Title VI complaints against Northwestern.
The Equal Protection Project, a nonprofit organization that describes itself as being “devoted to the fair treatment of all persons without regard to race or ethnicity,” submitted its complaint to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights on Wednesday. The nonprofit’s founder and director, Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson, told National Review that he believes the scholarship and Northwestern’s declaration that it will “provide and renovate a house for MENA/Muslim students” violate the Civil Rights Act.
“The university is giving ethnic, national-origin, and shared-ancestry preference to what it described as ‘Palestinian’ and ‘MENA/Muslim’ students. I think that’s a clear violation,” Jacobson said. “They need to be called out on it and to have legal consequences. The hope is that the department of education will take this seriously, and I think they will. There is already an open investigation on the antisemitism problem on campus, and while this is not necessarily part of that, we think the [Office for Civil Rights] will take it seriously because Northwestern has problems that they’re already investigating.”
Jacobson said Northwestern’s decision to grant the encampment organizers concessions is a dangerous precedent to set.
“It’s worse than capitulation,” he said. “It’s encouragement, and it is giving them something they probably never even dreamed of when they established their campaign.”
The second complaint filed Wednesday, this one with the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, came from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, or WILL, which brought its complaint on behalf of Northwestern’s campus Young America’s Foundation chapter. WILL deputy counsel Dan Lennington told National Review that, like Jacobson, he believes the university will be out of compliance with Title VI by enacting its announced scholarships.
“If you give a benefit to someone for being Palestinian, that’s national-origin discrimination, and that violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” he said. “As a recipient of federal funds, Northwestern can’t discriminate based on race or national origin, and giving a benefit based on national origin — which is what ‘Palestinian’ is — is illegal.”
Lennington said that Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the 2023 United States Supreme Court case dealing with affirmative action in college admissions processes, provides an example of Title VI law in action.
“In that case, the Supreme Court was confronted with the idea of a university basically giving benefits based on race in the form of preferential treatment in admissions,” he said. “In that decision, the court said that, when a university gives a preference to someone based on race, it may be a positive for the people receiving that benefit, but it’s a zero-sum game.”
Meanwhile, on Northwestern’s campus, student activists are still occupying the lawn and staying overnight — just without tents — and many Jewish students, faculty, and staff seem to have lost faith in the school’s administration.
That discontent reached a high-water mark on Wednesday, when seven members of the university’s “Advisory Committee on Preventing Antisemitism and Hate” resigned, writing in a statement that they no longer felt Schill was operating in good faith after he neglected to consult them on the deal with encampment organizers. On Thursday, the eleven remaining members of the committee announced that the task force would cease operations.
Martin Eichbaum, an economics professor at Northwestern and a former member of the committee, told National Review that the decision to offer protesters concessions without discussing the move with the task force was the last straw.
“The agreement was reached during a period of widespread antisemitic activity on campus,” he said. “Yet the committee played no role in the deliberations. So, what was the point of the committee? We felt that we were just wasting our time.”
Efraim Benmelech, a professor of finance and real estate at the Kellogg School of Business and a former co-chairman of the committee, told National Review that, even before the mass resignations, the committee did not seem to be working.
In addition to antisemitism, Benmelech said, the committee was “also tasked with dealing with Islamophobia. I’m all for it. I’m all for eradicating any form of hate. And I was trying to make progress, though it wasn’t always easy because — as you can imagine — not everyone agrees on what constitutes antisemitism.”
Eichbaum said there were committee members who essentially blocked the drafting of a statement condemning antisemitism. That comes after three members previously signed an open letter opposing the formation of the task force in the first place. At least one student on the committee is a member of an organization that issued a celebration of Hamas immediately after the October 7 attack.
“The committee couldn’t reach a consensus on a simple condemnation of antisemitism episodes. Examples include a depiction by protesters of President Schill with horns dripping with blood and a Star of David crossed out,” Eichenbaum said. “We also couldn’t agree that chants calling for ‘intifada’ were threatening because one member pulled out an obscure reference offering an alternative interpretation of the word. Similarly, ‘from the River to the Sea’ was construed as not threatening despite its obvious meaning and the fact that Jews did, in fact, find it threatening.”
Eichenbaum also said the focus on Islamophobia is disproportionate.
“There was clearly a wave of antisemitic activity on campus,” he said. “Yes, there were isolated instances of anti-Islamic episodes. And I condemn those episodes. There is no room for antisemitic or Islamophobic behavior on campus. However, the scale of the two types of behavior was fundamentally different. Despite that fact, som committee members insisted on a false equivalence. At that point, I concluded that the committee was dysfunctional and was not serving any useful purpose.”
Benmelech, the committee co-chair, said the university had not taken his reports of threats toward Jewish students particularly seriously.
“My personal perspective — and here I don’t represent the others — is that Northwestern failed to protect Jewish students, faculty, and staff,” Benmelech said. “I was involved 24 hours a day with students who called me and were worried because some outside radicals and professional troublemakers could access the dorms. I was in touch with the relevant university authorities to make sure that they fixed any issues they had to solve. There was a naive view that the dorms can be entered by card access and hence are secured. I had to say, ‘Yes, but they’re giving them the cards. They’re holding the doors for them. You have to put security there.'”