The Trump administration said Wednesday it would use a law typically meant to investigate racist practices within police departments to examine whether the University of California system had engaged in a pattern or practice of antisemitic discrimination.
The move by the Justice Department comes two days after other federal agencies announced a review of Columbia University’s federal contracts to determine if such funding should be taken away over an alleged failure to protect Jewish students and faculty on campus.
President Trump has long railed against American colleges and universities for their policies toward on-campus protests against Israeli military actions in the Gaza Strip.
Some Jewish faculty and staff have complained that such protests, some of which featured antisemitic rhetoric, have made them feel harassed, and that the encampments impeded their ability to freely go to and from classes.
“This Department of Justice will always defend Jewish Americans, protect civil rights, and leverage our resources to eradicate institutional antisemitism in our nation’s universities,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement.
The University of California system said in a statement that it was “unwavering in its commitment to combating antisemitism and protecting everyone’s civil rights. We continue to take specific steps to foster an environment free of harassment and discrimination for everyone in the university community.”
Pattern or practice inquiries by the Justice Department are not criminal investigations but rather study broad conduct by institutions to see if they allow or encourage mistreatment of certain groups. For decades, the pattern or practice law has been used primarily to investigate local and state police departments for unfair treatment of people of color.
Settlements in such cases typically involve a department agreeing to make specific changes to training and policies in order to root out problematic behavior or practices.
Republican administrations generally take a less aggressive approach to such investigations than Democrats, and the Trump administration paused such work in late January. By using the law to investigate a university system rather than a police department, the Trump administration is pressing arguments Mr. Trump first made during the campaign, that Democrats have fostered racist treatment of white people.
The Department of Education announced investigations last month into “widespread antisemitism” at five universities: Columbia; Northwestern; Portland State; the University of California, Berkeley; and the University of Minnesota.
At a confirmation hearing last month for Linda McMahon as education secretary, Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana and chairman of the Senate education committee, pressed her to focus on what he said was a backlog of antisemitism cases in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. “I’d look forward to doing that,” Ms McMahon said. She was confirmed to the post on Monday.
Writing on his social media site on Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump underscored what he considered appropriate penalties regarding pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
“All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests,” Trump wrote, adding that the protesters would be “imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came,” and that American students would be permanently expelled or even arrested.
The Justice Department investigation will seek to determine whether the U.C. system violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, and religion. That law authorizes the Justice Department to launch investigations of state and local government employers where it has reason to believe that a “pattern or practice” of discrimination exists.
The Trump administration created a multiagency task force to combat antisemitism, and both actions this week were billed as the first major moves of that work. Last month, Trump administration officials announced that members of the task force would visit 10 schools around the country to discuss concerns about antisemitism on campus toward staff and students.
On Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education identified some $51.4 million in contracts between Columbia and the federal government that could be cut off as a result of what the Trump administration said was the school’s “ongoing inaction in the face of relentless harassment of Jewish students.”
Columbia said in a statement on Monday evening that it was reviewing the announcement and that it looked forward “to ongoing work with the new federal administration to fight antisemitism.”
More than a quarter of Columbia’s $6.6 billion in annual operating revenue comes from federal sources, according to its 2024 financial statements. Much of that comes from federal research grants.
Michael C. Bender contributed reporting.
