Representatives Mike Lawler (R., N.Y.) and Ritchie Torres (D., N.Y.) touted a recently introduced piece of legislation on Wednesday that the pair believes will serve as a remedy for campus antisemitism. The College Oversight and Legal Updates Mandating Bias Investigations and Accountability (COLUMBIA) Act would allow the United States Department of Education to send monitors to college and university campuses that receive federal funding should that educational institution show signs of allowing antisemitism to flourish and detract from Jewish students’ ability to learn.
Should the colleges and universities fail to comply with the monitorship, they would lose federal funding.
Torres said during the American Enterprise Institute event on Wednesday that, despite the Title VI guidelines available to the Department of Education, its office of civil rights is “too disconnected from what is happening on college campuses and too chronically under-resourced to be an enforcement mechanism.” The COLUMBIA Act, he said, would aim to rectify the problem.
“The purpose of the COLUMBIA Act is to provide an enforcement mechanism where none exists to empower the federal Department of Education to appoint a monitor — at the expense not of the taxpayer but of the college or university — and to have someone who’s on the ground, seeing the facts on the ground with their own eyes,” Torres told the audience. “I think we have to come to grips with the fundamental failure of Title VI enforcement in relation to combating antisemitism.”
Lawler agreed, saying higher-education administrators have “failed miserably” in their responsibility to provide adequate learning environments for all students, and argued that the COLUMBIA Act is “aimed at making sure the federal government does its job to enforce the law.”
Torres took care to note that the idea of a federal monitorship is not new.
“There’s nothing unusual or unprecedented about monitors. Police departments and labor unions have been subject to federal monitorships, and higher education should be no exception,” he said. “It would not happen in every case. If there’s a reason to suspect that a particular college or university has a pattern of practice of harassment or discrimination against their Jewish students, then the DOE would have the authority to impose a monitor.”
One concern with the establishment of campus monitors is that they might ultimately serve to provide cover for antisemitism. A similar phenomenon can be seen at colleges and universities that established antisemitism task forces. Northwestern University’s committee, which disbanded after seven members resigned in the wake of the administration’s concessions to encampment organizers, included three faculty members who signed an open letter opposing the creation of such a task force in the first place and one student leader of a campus organization that issued a statement celebrating Hamas on October 8.
Responding to National Review‘s question about whether there is a risk of the monitorship program becoming captured by antisemitism apologists, Lawler conceded that “there is no perfect solution” but argued that the strict guidelines n Title VI should help to prevent that from happening.
“What we have seen over the past many years is a complete failure on the part of school administrators to crack down, and there are a lot of reasons why, but I believe this has generally been allowed to persist under the guise of the Israel-Palestinian conflict,” Lawler told NR. “The objective of both the Antisemitism Awareness Act and the COLUMBIA Act is to give the Department of Education more teeth . . . If given the tools, I’d like to think the Department of Education would take it very seriously and make sure that the person they are appointing is there to enforce the Title VI provisions under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”
The Antisemitism Awareness Act has been the subject of much debate that both Lawler and Torres believe to be in bad faith. The bill, if signed into law, would codify a Trump-era executive order directing the Department of Education to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. Lawler said some criticism from within the Republican Party has been meritless.
“Many of my colleagues on the Right have attacked me, [saying] that I wrote a bill to ban free speech and the Bible,” Lawler said. “I’m a practicing Catholic. I’m not looking to ban the Bible . . . what we are trying to do by passing this law is give more clarity.”
Torres contended that arguments from many on the Left who have said that the bill would stifle free expression if signed into law are laughable, given their overall positions on freedom of speech.
“It’s disingenuous because very few people are absolutist in favor of free expression. None of the people who are screaming ‘free expression’ believe in neutral enforcement of those rights. If those encampments were advocating a view that offended them, they would be advocating for the shutdown of those encampments,” Torres said.