Jewish students filed a complaint Wednesday with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, alleging that American University, in Washington, D.C., failed to address antisemitism on campus and even punished those who came forward to report the harassment.
The complaint was filed on behalf of a dozen students by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and alleges that Jewish students have been targeted by “discrimination, harassment, and intimidation” because of their “ethnic identity and Israeli national origin.”
Students reportedly have been “shunned” in the classroom, dorm doors of Jewish students were vandalized with swastikas, one student was allegedly spit on several times and posters of hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7 have been torn down repeatedly.
“The University has failed to meet its legal obligations or enforce its own rules of conduct to protect these students, which, if enforced, would make AU’s campus a safer and more welcoming environment for its Jewish and Israeli students,” the complaint reads. “Even worse, the University has chosen to further harass and discriminate against several of these students by subjecting them to a baseless disciplinary hearing for alleged harassment and disorderly conduct based on their recording acts of vandalism.”
The complaint claims that several students, who filmed their peers tearing down posters showing Israeli hostages taken by Hamas, were subjected to disciplinary hearings in November 2023 after reporting the incidents to the school. School officials allegedly claimed that the “students tearing down hostage posters … were merely ‘removing unauthorized postings’” and charged the Jewish students with “harassment and disorderly conduct.”
The Brandeis Center disputes the claim in the complaint, arguing that only some of the posters were in an area the school considered “unauthorized” while the rest were all in “authorized locations.” They also noted that university policy states that only school staff may remove posters, not students and that students who tore down the posters in the “unauthorized” areas then replaced them with their own posters.
“This is an egregious case of anti-Semitism that has run rampant on American University’s campus. The university has failed in its legal obligation to protect its Jewish and Israeli students from discrimination and harassment and has instead chosen to retaliate and bully those students who were courageous enough to speak out,” Deena Margolies, the Brandeis Center lawyer overseeing the AU complaint, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Because the administration has been derelict in addressing the anti-Semitism on its campus, it is not surprising that the situation has only worsened and intensified following October 7, necessitating the filing of our complaint with the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Education.”
American University did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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