The Trump administration has sued over accusations of antisemitism at Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles. Its investigators have surveyed people at Cornell University to find evidence of discrimination, and argued in court that the University of Pennsylvania should turn over names and contact information of Jewish people.
The administration’s antisemitism task force has largely faded from public view, and the government’s steady tempo of attacks on elite universities, including investigations and funding cuts, has slowed since last spring. The last month, though, has shown the administration remains willing to cite antisemitism to pressure schools nationwide.
Its tactics are driving debates on and off campuses, including among Jewish people, with some arguing that the government is using its campaign against discrimination as cover to force universities to adopt more conservative ideas and to exact revenge on perceived political enemies.
On Friday, the Trump administration accused Harvard of abetting antisemitism. The university, whose president has sometimes invoked his own Jewish faith in response to the government’s yearlong bombardment, said it was “yet another pretextual and retaliatory action by the administration for refusing to turn over control of Harvard to the federal government.”
Other critics note that the government has not publicly shown nearly as much interest in investigating acts of antisemitism tied to campuses friendlier to President Trump, or those that have happened since Mr. Trump began his second term.
The administration has frequently argued that it is important to punish past misdeeds to deter potential future wrongdoing, and it has used research funding as a cudgel, contending that it is not an entitlement. Some Jewish students and professors have said the government’s efforts show how the president is making good on campaign pledges to protect them.
“This is promises made, promises kept,” said Shabbos Kestenbaum, a recent Harvard graduate who filed a civil rights lawsuit against the school in 2024 and reached a confidential settlement last year.
Harvard allowed Jewish students to be discriminated against for years, said Liz Huston, a White House spokeswoman.
“The Trump administration stepped in to end it and is finally delivering long-overdue accountability,” Ms. Huston said. “Harvard should stop deflecting, right these wrongs, and work with the administration to ensure every student is safe and able to achieve their academic goals.”
The administration has harnessed multiple levers of power, including threats to Harvard’s tax-exempt status and the specter of criminal inquiries, to challenge universities since Mr. Trump re-entered the White House. A year ago on Saturday, Columbia University agreed to demands the antisemitism task force had made as preconditions for talks about restoring research funding. It later reached a settlement that included terms that went well beyond fighting antisemitism, touching on matters like locker rooms and admissions data.
The task force has faded into the background, but the Trump administration is still using its cause to target universities.
About a month before Friday’s lawsuit against Harvard, the administration went to court over accusations of antisemitism at U.C.L.A. and asked for, among other consequences, damages for “aggrieved Jewish and Israeli U.C.L.A. employees.” This month in Philadelphia, it aggressively defended an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission subpoena for information about Jewish employees at Penn.
And the E.E.O.C. recently asked people at Cornell whether they had been subjected to “antisemitic or anti-Israeli protests, gatherings or demonstrations” that had left them feeling threatened “because you practice Judaism, have Jewish ancestry, are Israeli,” or are associated with an Israeli or Jewish person.
The commission declined to comment on the Cornell survey, which included a range of other questions, but it has defended the Penn subpoena as an appropriate investigative tool.
The moves have still attracted skepticism.
A representative of the American Academy of Jewish Research, for example, said in a court filing that the Penn demand “endangers the privacy, safety and freedoms of Jews.”
A ruling about the Penn subpoena is pending, but the misgivings around it and other tactics are fueling debates over whether the administration is earnestly investigating antisemitism or wielding its inquiries as weapons against universities Mr. Trump has long seen as cradles of political opposition.
“It’s just obvious to Jewish Americans and others that this is not about protecting Jews,” said Michael S. Roth, the president of Wesleyan University and the first Jew to hold the post. “This is about attacking institutions with which the president has a beef.”
Some Jewish students have signaled that they want the government to do more to fight antisemitism at schools that draw less attention than their elite peers.
Jonah Chizinsky, a sophomore at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights at a February hearing that there had been seven antisemitic attacks in recent months at Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity.
Mr. Chizinsky, the fraternity’s president, told the commission, an independent arm of the federal government, about a January episode in which someone broke into the fraternity house and drew a swastika on a mirror.
He did not criticize the Trump administration, but suggested more needs to be done to offer “the basic protections that federal civil rights guarantees every single student in this nation.”
Dr. Roth, Wesleyan’s president since 2007, suggested it was notable that the administration did not appear vigorously committed to rooting out antisemitism at all institutions. Although the government is investigating the University of California system, it has not, for instance, announced federal inquiries into Florida universities where antisemitic episodes tied to Republicans recently exploded into public view.
“They’re not actually trying to improve the lives of Jewish students, I don’t think,” Dr. Roth said. “They’re trying to inflict pain.”
Allison D. Burroughs, a federal judge in Boston who is Jewish, reached a similar conclusion last year. She ruled in favor of Harvard in a case it brought to challenge the government’s hasty effort to strip research funding, writing that it was “difficult to conclude anything other than that defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”
Still, Judge Burroughs allowed the government to use more deliberate means to investigate and challenge Harvard.
It is now doing so. Although some anti-discrimination scholars questioned the underpinnings of Friday’s lawsuit, litigation is a more traditional strategy from the government than sudden funding cuts.
Kenneth L. Marcus, the Education Department’s civil rights chief during Mr. Trump’s first term, saw Friday’s litigation as “a sign of a potential shift from the White House” to a more tried-and-true approach. He said that the administration’s following of that process was evidence of its sincerity.
“The Trump administration is not inventing this,” Mr. Marcus, now the chairman and chief executive of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, said of the legal strategy. “It is not something entirely novel and creative like we saw from the administration last year.”
Like other schools, Harvard has acknowledged that antisemitism had gained a foothold on its campus, and a university report — often cited in Friday’s lawsuit — last year described “severe problems.”
“The more time we spent on this problem, the more we learned about how demonization of Israel has impacted a much wider swath of campus life than we would have imagined,” the report’s authors wrote. They also said that “the bullying and attempts to intimidate Jewish students were in some places successful.”
Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, said last year that no one should endure “bias, intolerance or bigotry,” and that the university would pursue steps that he predicted would “go far toward eradicating those evils on our campus.”
The executive director of Harvard Hillel, Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, offered a careful assessment of the government’s lawsuit against the university.
“We hope that the Department of Justice will zealously protect the rights of Jewish students and of every community here at Harvard,” he said in a statement.
“In revisiting this question almost a year after the initial government threats to Harvard’s funding,” he added, “it’s important to understand the major steps that Harvard, under President Garber’s leadership, has taken to fundamentally remake itself.”
Harvard has not yet begun to detail its legal defense against Friday’s lawsuit, which seeks to claw back past research funding.
Benjamin Eidelson, an expert on anti-discrimination law at Harvard Law School, said that the “complaint boils down to a litany of anti-Israel protests, plus a bare assertion that the real intention of all that must have been to harass peers for being Jewish or Israeli.”
The assertion that the intent was to discriminate would likely not withstand legal scrutiny he said. Federal law, he added, protects people against discrimination based on their race or ancestry. It covers racial antisemitism, not religious or political convictions about the Middle East.
Some nevertheless welcomed the tough approach from Washington.
Mr. Kestenbaum pointed to how the Obama administration had dangled the potential loss of federal funds to press universities to more thoroughly investigate accusations of sexual assault. On Friday, he questioned why Mr. Trump’s approach to civil rights enforcement was being jeered.
“I cannot understand why those same progressive allies, when the exact same logic is applied, are against it just because it applies to a different minority group,” he said.
Alan Blinder is a national correspondent for The Times, covering education.
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