11/ As the report makes clear, current law does not support most of the threats being made based on alleged tolerance for anti-Israel protests and the like, and the First Amendment offers robust protection for schools & universities willing to invoke it.

10/ This restatement of the law of Title VI & the First Amendment—offered unanimously by a bipartisan commission created by Congress—should offer a legal roadmap for schools and universities facing pressure to suppress student speech for fear of litigation.

9/ All of that is before we even get to the question of when a university can be liable for failing to *curb* qualifying peer harassment. On that issue, the Commission agrees courts "must defer to colleges’ decisions to err on the side of academic freedom" in policy & discipline.

7/ The report also stresses that an actionable “hostile environment” is not simply an alienating campus climate. The standard is much more demanding: severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive harassment, where "objective" offensiveness is informed by the First Amendment.

6/ Namely, even if subjective intent weren't necessary, the protesters' message would at least need to be "demeaning of the protected class (i.e., people of Jewish ancestry) as such and not simply of ideas or institutions that [they] are more likely … to value."

5/ The report then explains why—contrary to the pending Trump administration lawsuit— events like the anti-Israel "study-ins" at Harvard aren't plausibly covered as harassment: ...

4/ At the same time, anti-Zionism can be a pretext for anti-Jewish discrimination. Excluding “Zionists” by picking out people with Jewish-sounding names, for example, is ancestry discrimination. The report rightly acknowledges that this is a point of broad agreement too.

3/ That distinction matters for Zionism. Rejecting claims of some, the report says my "reluctance to treat Zionism as a protected facet of Jewish ancestry appears to align with current law”; beliefs about who should govern a certain territory are distinct from anyone's ancestry.

1/ The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights just released its report on campus antisemitism and Title VI. I testified at the hearing. The report is unanimous, bipartisan, & debunks the main legal theories behind recent attacks on universities for allegedly tolerating antisemitism. 🧵

The brief explains why these lawsuits are foreclosed by both Title VI and the First Amendment. It also highlights some striking distortions in the govt's version of events at Harvard—like blatantly misquoting an email, & apparently defining opposition to speech restrictions as "anti-Israeli". (2/2)