At a meeting on Monday, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission voted 4-1 to recommend a number of steps to counter anti-Semitism on American university campuses. The move, reported by yesterday's New York Sun, follows reports that the U.S. Department of Education was questioning whether Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act protected Jews from discrimination. (See prior posting.) The Commission urged federal grant-making institutions to exercise appropriate oversight so that academic departments of Middle East Studies do not use federal funds to support discriminatory conduct. It also encouraged the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights to inform college students about their rights under federal civil rights laws. It said Congress should direct the Office of Post Secondary Education to collect more information on anti-Semitic and other hate crimes, and should amend Title VI to clearly ban discrimination against Jewish individuals as part of the law's prohibition against national origin discrimination.
Dissenting from the Commission's recommendations was its chairman, Gerald Reynolds, who insisted that it was inappropriate to collapse the concepts of religion and national origin in order to protect Jews under Title VI.
