4 years after complaint, Illinois university bans harassment of students for Zionist views
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign amends its code of conduct after a 2020 complaint alleging numerous antisemitic acts, but its timing amid the Gaza war is notable
Reporter at The Times of Israel
It’s now as much against the rules at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) to ostracize a Jewish student from a school club for identifying as a Zionist as it is to rip a Star of David chain off someone’s neck.
After four years of intense negotiations with representatives from Hillel International, Illini Hillel and the Jewish United Fund Chicago, UIUC leadership pledged to prohibit harassment and discrimination based on “Zionist aspects” of students’ Jewish identity.
The agreement is a bright spot amidst escalating antisemitism on campuses nationwide after thousands of Hamas-led terrorists invaded southern Israel from the Gaza Strip on October 7, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages, amid acts of brutality and sexual assault. Israel responded with an offensive in Gaza to destroy Hamas, return the hostages and prevent any security threat from the enclave going forward.
Since the October 7 Hamas onslaught, and amid the resulting devastating war, protests have roiled university campuses in the US and elsewhere. In several documented cases, demonstrators have expressed open support for Hamas and other terror groups.
“This is official recognition for Jewish students as human beings to be free to celebrate their Jewish identity. This helps take back a word [“Zionist”] that is being used in a derogatory way and sets up real, clear boundaries about what is antisemitism. It explains that Zionism is just like keeping kosher, just like keeping the Sabbath,” said Erez Cohen, executive director of the Illini Hillel, the university’s chapter of the Jewish student campus group.
Under the new policy it will now be considered a violation of the school’s conduct code to blame a student for the actions of other individuals of their actual or perceived shared identity. Likewise, one would be in violation of the code if they blamed another student for the policies of a particular government or country that the student is from or perceived to be from.
In short, standing outside the Hillel or a Jewish fraternity and chanting “Zionists get out” because of the Israeli government’s policies would be a campus violation. Similarly, it is against university rules to physically block any student from any part of campus because they are a Zionist or Jewish, or to verbally assail a Jewish student in class or on social media for their support of Israel.
Under the agreement, UIUC will also publish a monthly summary report of alleged antisemitic incidents, commit to mandatory antisemitism training for administration and students, and hire an individual with demonstrated expertise in campus antisemitism to enhance compliance and recommend changes to university practices and policies.
An agreement four years in coming
The agreement stems from a 2020 complaint filed on behalf of Jewish students by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Arnold & Porter law firm. It cited numerous incidents of alleged antisemitism that occurred — including a brick being thrown through the window of the campus Hillel, a Jewish student being told, “I wish my ancestors finished the job on you,” and flyers being strewn around campus reading, “Every single aspect of the COVID agenda is Jewish.”
Kenneth Marcus, founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, lauded the agreement, particularly for the training it will mandate.
“Critically, the university agrees that it will address anti-Zionism not only in its educational materials but also in compliance and enforcement work,” Marcus said. “In other words, it will ensure that its student conduct proceedings are aligned with its acknowledgment about the discriminatory character of anti-Zionism.”
UIUC chancellor Robert Jones said in a statement that the university is “deeply committed to implementing the Mutual Understandings we are announcing today and to working together to provide a safe and supportive educational environment for our entire Jewish student community and for all students at Illinois.”
The agreement comes on the heels of a finding by the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) that the atmosphere at UIUC contributed to a “possible hostile environment.”
According to the OCR, the university did not adequately address reports of antisemitism nor attempt to determine whether antisemitism represented a campus-wide problem. As such, the university failed to meet its federal civil rights obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin as well as shared ancestry, which includes antisemitism.
As part of its investigation, the OCR reviewed 139 incidents of discrimination from 2015 to 2023. Of those, 135 were determined to be anti-Jewish and four anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian, or anti-Arab.
In addition to UIUC, the OCR announced resolution agreements this summer with five other universities including Lafayette College in Pennsylvania and CUNY’s Hunter College in Manhattan. In each case, the OCR mandated that campus leaders must investigate for on-campus and off-campus harassment and intimidation if they are to avoid civil rights complaints.
It takes a village?
What sets the UIUC agreement with the three organizations apart are its specific commitments to the safety and inclusion of Jewish students that go beyond the terms of the OCR settlement.
“Too many universities take the position that attacking Zionism is simply a political disagreement over foreign policy issues, for example, and that Jewish students need to toughen up and take it,” said Mark Rotenberg, vice president for university initiatives and general counsel at Hillel International.
“The University of Illinois now states in declarative terms that harassment of Jewish students for having a Zionist identity will be protected to the same extent as any other minority student population, like LGBTQ, Latino or Black students,” he said.
This is different from New York University’s recent announcement that harassing someone for being a Zionist might violate university policy, as the UIUC agreement unequivocally declared that using such language to harass or intimidate a student is a violation of policy.
Nevertheless, threading the needle between preventing a hostile environment without infringing on students’ First Amendment rights could prove challenging — particularly when it comes to the OCR’s findings.
“When there is violent conduct, like at University of Illinois when an attacker said he ripped off a student’s Star of David necklace because he was Jewish, that crosses the line,” said Tyler Coward, lead counselor for government affairs at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
“On the other hand, the findings suggest that the schools didn’t do enough to respond to constitutionally protected speech and so could be violating Title VI. This could lead to schools censoring speech,” he said.
With that in mind, administrators must do more to educate students about what speech rights they do have on campus, Coward said.
About 29 percent of students nationwide said that they are “not very” aware of their school’s speech codes and 19% said they are “not at all” aware, according to the newly released FIRE 2024 report on student encampment protests.
Regarding concerns that it could be difficult to distinguish between what constitutes a hostile environment and what constitutes political debate, the Brandeis Center’s Marcus said the OCR provided an “unusually extensive array of guidance materials” for what is a complex topic that isn’t limited to antisemitism cases.
Lonnie Nasatir, president of the Jewish United Fund of Chicago, agreed.
“We draw a fine line between protected speech, what might be considered distasteful or offensive, and what crossed the fine line into hostility and intimidation,” Nasatir said. “We don’t want to squelch First Amendment rights, but when that speech turns into something else, it has to be stopped.”
