At the House of Representatives hearings on alleged antisemitism on July 15, Georgetown president Robert M. Groves jumped at the chance to tell Republican vultures that one of his faculty members was under investigation. The professor had exercised his First Amendment right to do something experts everywhere were doing without provoking controversy: he expressed the hope that after the United States bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran would respond with a symbolic strike and the matter would end there. Presidents everywhere have been placing faculty, staff, and students under investigation for expressive activity that we all know is legally permissible.
The government instilled this degree of terror in university presidents with a handful of political appointees. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is all but completely wiped out. Seven of the OCR’s twelve regional offices overseeing equity and compliance investigations for the federal government have been shuttered. Many of the duties involved in adjudicating civil rights violations in postsecondary education have been assumed by the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division (CRD), and yet the Department of Justice (DOJ) has itself experienced a 70% reduction in workforce since January 2025. According to Guardian reporter Sam Levine, “the federal coordination and compliance section [of the DOJ], whose responsibilities include enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act – prohibiting those who receive federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, national origin and sex – now has zero permanent attorneys.”
Asked by Tucker Carlson how she’s operating under such reduced circumstances, political appointee and DOJ Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dillon responded, “So we’re in a DOGE period here in the government . . . For now I have some political appointees who are extremely dedicated and passionate.” Whatever astonishment we may feel that the Trump administration has wielded so much power over higher education while severely shorthanded gives way to the realization that it would not have been able to do so had these offices remained intact with career civil servants. University administrators and Boards acting courageously, or the courts stepping in, were not obstacles, as it turned out, but attorneys with years of experience performing civil-rights investigations almost certainly would have been. Employees with meaningful protections and a long habituation in nonpartisan professional ethics would have been reluctant to interpret noncompliance in the way that the political appointees wanted them to. The career civil service would have slowed down, if it could not stop, Trump’s wrecking ball.
Evidence-gathering appears to be largely outsourced to social media, lobbying groups, and Israel advocacy organizations. The multi-agency Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, which the Washington Post calls “the most powerful vehicle for the onslaught” of attacks on universities and colleges, pools top officials (political appointees) from the DOJ, Department of Education, Health and Human Services departments, and the General Services Administration. The head of the Joint Task Force Leo Terrell regularly uses his X account to repost aggressively pro-Israel sources. A favorite Terrell site is StopAntisemitism, an organization that equates calls for Palestinian liberation with antisemitism and which trawls social media to discover what it calls “antisemites of the week.” The Anti-Defamation League may defend StopAntisemitism, but credible authorities do not. According to the Washington Post, their work is seen as a “damaging form of online vigilantism” and doxxing. Reposting decontextualized, inflammatory content on his feed, and commenting in interviews with Fox News, Newsmax, and similar outlets, Terrell commits the cardinal sin of someone in charge of a Task Force claiming to conduct impartial investigations: he telegraphs his desired outcome for all to see, including employees in the DOJ.
Discussing the “complete gutting of all the traditional work of the civil-rights division” with a Wall Street Journal reporter, former senior civil-rights official Samuel Bagenstos said that “a rump of the civil-rights division [is] being used almost exclusively to pursue right-wing Trumpist agenda items.” The division won’t stay a rump forever. When just a little bigger, the division will be able to expand its investigations to hundreds more universities and minimize dependence on the claims of transparently biased outside sources.
It appears this broad expansion of Trump’s de facto political army will be happening as early as September.
According to government documents, around 50,000 civil servant positions will be moved under Schedule Policy/Career (formerly Schedule F) by September 30. This is happening as a result of a Trump executive order that allows the administration to reclassify federal employees and appoint politically friendly candidates in important positions. Experts suspect that many, many more than 50,000 will actually be moved. The number of politicized positions in the service will thereby be increased almost overnight. While this will insulate the administration from accusations of impropriety in their methodology of reshaping the federal government, it will not mean that impartiality will be restored. Why? Because the new employees, while possessing the same titles as their predecessors, will be accepting fundamentally altered positions that have been stripped of all protections, including the opportunity to appeal adverse decisions by their employer. Performance evaluations for these positions are explicitly based on the employee’s track record for furthering the President’s agenda. It goes without saying that inexperienced, at-will employees are more susceptible to compromising their principles than are employees with due-process protections and long habituation in nonpartisan professional ethics.
Trump’s reshaping of the civil service under Schedule Policy/Career has sweeping implications for higher education. Let’s take only the capacity created to massively scale up Title VI investigations. When the government threatens universities with the withdrawal of federal funds for violating discrimination law, it threatens the vast majority of universities and colleges with their demise. And though it has been widely noted that the crackdowns on protests in support of Palestine won Columbia few points with the Trump regime, administrators everywhere remain convinced that proving themselves zealous in suppressing anything that offends pro-Israel sentiment will spare them the worst-case scenarios. This—coupled with activist Board members and big-ticket donors aligned with the Trump administration—has led university actors (primarily equity and compliance officers) adjudicating cases regarding faculty, staff and student discipline for pro-Palestine speech to believe that they have no choice but to rule in ways they would have considered indefensible in the still-recent past.
I’m saying that even when individuals acting on behalf of the university understand full well that an incident does not implicate Title VI because it involves speech protected by the First Amendment, speech protected by academic freedom in the form of credible research and its dissemination, or speech that has not been severe or pervasive enough to constitute a hostile environment, they find themselves under incredible pressure to find some path towards punishment and discipline. They must look tough on speech that their employers—the University president or general counsel—or that even they themselves experience as threatening to the existence of their university. They are likely to tell themselves that compromised judgments–and ruined lives–are necessary under circumstances in which the entire institution might be at stake.
Such self-gaslighting may buoy them for a while, particularly when everyone around them seems to be doing it, but it is ultimately self-defeating. On some level they surely recognize that the Trump administration does not care about their investigation and that, even if it did, they are not the ones who pull the trigger on federal funds; the Trump administration is. They are the ones, however, to directly cause the expulsion of students, the firing of staff, and the termination of faculty members. They have direct moral culpability for the latter but not the former. It is also self-defeating because as more and more individuals adjudicate honestly regardless of the short-term consequences—and this time will come as more people stand up for the truth—they will see their own actions, retroactively, in a different and damning light.
A federal government armed with Title VI, which terrorizes administrators who, in turn, terrorize us, is what we face now. Looking towards September 30 and a fully ideologically aligned civil service under Schedule Policy/Career, we can expect that the army of new politically motivated civil servants will find creative ways to expand the options for threatening federal funding over alleged violations of civil rights. They may manipulate the moral panic around antisemitism to extend what is considered “severe harassment” to include the mere uttering of the phrase “From the River to the Sea,” the wearing of keffiyehs, a classroom discussion of the Nakba, and so on. This, in turn, means that many more of our institutions’ equity and compliance officers will find themselves sorely tested.
If you work at an institution of secondary or postsecondary education, please send this article to the investigators tasked with maintaining your institution’s compliance with Civil Rights law. “Now Hiring: Title VI Coordinators” is the recent headline of an Inside Higher Ed piece so you may find that this office has mushroomed overnight. Tell the employees that they need to rule according to what they know to be established civil rights law, not the funhouse version of law on offer from Trump’s DOJ, or by what their superiors think is best for mitigating institutional risk from a wrathful federal administration. Tell them that if they want to continue to carry their heads high, they will need to be willing to lose their job, a job some of them will have just taken. If they do get fired, they will find themselves in the excellent company of all the federal civil servants in the Department of Justice who have been fired or quit because they, too, chose integrity over complicity with fascism.
