EDITORIAL NOTE
Antisemitism on college campuses is real, and pretending otherwise does nobody any favors. Jewish students have described harassment and intimidation, universities have faced legitimate questions about how they responded, and civil-rights laws exist for exactly the reason their name suggests. The issue here isn’t whether antisemitism should be investigated. It’s whether the people doing the investigating were allowed to follow the evidence wherever it led.
There’s a pretty basic rule to conducting an investigation: you don’t get to know the answer before you ask the questions. It shouldn’t matter whether you’re investigating a university, a corporation, a police department, or the guy down the street who keeps selling suspiciously inexpensive televisions out of his garage. You collect the evidence, apply the law, and see where you end up.
According to a newly released whistleblower complaint from former Justice Department attorney Haley Van Erem, that isn’t what happened when federal officials investigated allegations of antisemitism at Brown, Columbia and Harvard. Van Erem, who spent nearly a decade in the DOJ Civil Rights Division before being assigned to assist with the Title VI investigations, alleges that investigations were rushed, normal procedures were ignored, and attorneys were pressured toward conclusions before the factual and legal work was finished. Her complaint says some outcomes were “predetermined, without regard to the evidence.” (Associated Press | CBS News)
That allegation alone would be serious. What makes this story difficult to shrug off is that Van Erem didn’t simply say somebody was applying “political pressure,” which is vague enough to cover everything from an angry phone call to an asshole with a title throwing his weight around. She described specific investigations, specific findings, and occasions when the people actually doing the work allegedly reached conclusions their bosses didn’t want.
Brown may be the cleanest example because the complaint says investigators did the work and came back without the answer leadership apparently wanted. They interviewed witnesses, reviewed documents, and did not find evidence supporting a Title VI violation, instead concluding that Brown had responded appropriately to the incidents examined. According to Van Erem’s disclosure, leadership refused to permit a notice of no violation and continued seeking some form of settlement anyway. (Associated Press)
Read that again, because that’s the whole damn story in miniature. The investigators allegedly looked for a violation and didn’t find one. Instead of that ending the matter, the unacceptable result apparently became the investigators coming back with the wrong answer.
That’s not how this is supposed to work. You don’t get to send people out looking for evidence and then get pissed off because they didn’t bring back the evidence you ordered. That’s not an investigation. That’s DoorDash for predetermined conclusions.
Brown ultimately reached an agreement with the federal government that included $50 million for Rhode Island workforce-development organizations. The university did not admit wrongdoing, and Brown said it had not been informed that any government agency had found it in violation of federal law. Meanwhile, the funding fight had put enormous pressure on an institution heavily dependent on federal research money. (Associated Press)
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Columbia was different because investigators apparently did find evidence of discrimination. That should have made it the easier case — follow the evidence, document the violations, give the university due process and take whatever enforcement action the law supports. Instead, the whistleblower complaint says attorneys were pushed to issue findings on an accelerated schedule before adequate factual development and legal review were complete, sometimes relying on unsupported allegations, news reports, litigation filings, and conduct implicating First Amendment protections. (Associated Press)
That distinction matters. Finding evidence of a legitimate problem doesn’t give the government permission to stop following the rules and start winging it because somebody upstairs is in a hurry. If anything, a real violation makes careful investigative work more important, because sloppy enforcement hands the accused an argument that the process was political instead of legal.
At Harvard, according to the complaint, officials were discussing major funding freezes and sweeping settlement demands before investigators had completed the work necessary to establish Title VI violations. One official allegedly said he thought Harvard would settle because the university was “over a barrel.” There are not many charitable interpretations of that phrase when the federal government is simultaneously holding billions of dollars in funding over somebody’s head. (Associated Press)
“Over a barrel” is not exactly the language of a government calmly waiting to see what the evidence says. It sounds a hell of a lot more like somebody who already knows what he wants and is figuring out how much leverage he has to get it. Maybe there’s an innocent explanation for that. I’d love to hear the damn thing.
Harvard fought instead of settling, and one significant piece of the government’s case has since fallen apart in court. On August 13, U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns dismissed a federal lawsuit alleging Harvard had failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students because the government had not plausibly alleged an ongoing Title VI violation. Stearns found that the later incidents cited by the government were too isolated and episodic to support the claim it was making. (Reuters)
That ruling does not prove Van Erem’s whistleblower allegations. A dismissed lawsuit and a corrupted investigation are two different things, and it would be irresponsible to pretend otherwise. What the ruling does is make it harder to wave away her account as nothing more than the disgruntled recollections of one former employee, because a federal judge independently concluded that one major piece of the government’s case did not meet the legal standard required to proceed.
The Justice Department denies Van Erem’s allegations and says it stands behind the integrity of the investigations. A DOJ spokesperson also said Van Erem “did not work on university investigations” while she was at the department. That answer gets interesting because the complaint says Van Erem and other DOJ lawyers were involuntarily detailed to the Department of Health and Human Services specifically to work on the Title VI university investigations. (CBS News)
Maybe DOJ has a fuller explanation coming. It should provide one, because arguing about which agency’s organizational chart Van Erem technically appeared on while she did the work doesn’t answer the allegation that investigators were pressured toward predetermined outcomes. Government can play bureaucratic Twister all afternoon if it wants; eventually somebody still has to explain Brown.
And frankly, that kind of word game is exactly the shit that makes people stop trusting institutions. If somebody was detailed to another agency to perform investigative work, quibbling about whether she technically “worked on” the investigations sounds like an answer designed for lawyers instead of human beings. Fine. Answer the actual allegation.
That’s why this story is bigger than three universities. Civil-rights enforcement carries enormous power, including the ability to investigate institutions, threaten federal funding, and drag defendants into court. We tolerate that power because there’s supposed to be a process between the accusation and the punishment.
Take away that process, and you’ve changed the nature of the whole damn thing. If the accusation already determines the verdict, investigators become stagehands, interviews become scenery, and evidence becomes a prop. The final report is just something written backward to justify a decision somebody made before the professionals ever opened the file.
You can call that enforcement if you want. You can also call professional wrestling a competitive sporting event, but somebody probably ought to tell the guy hiding under the ring with the folding chair.
And here’s the part that should scare the hell out of everybody: once government gets comfortable doing that to people or institutions you dislike, it doesn’t magically forget how to do it later. Powers like this never come with a little sticker that says FOR USE ONLY AGAINST ASSHOLES YOU PERSONALLY DISAPPROVE OF. Eventually the machine points somewhere else.
There’s another reason this should bother people regardless of where they stand politically. Abusing an antisemitism investigation ultimately makes fighting actual antisemitism harder, because every legitimate investigation now has to drag around the suspicion that the government may be using Jewish students and civil-rights law as cover for some unrelated political fight. That’s a hell of a thing to do to a serious problem.
This is where political tribalism usually screws up everybody’s thinking. People who despise Ivy League universities may be tempted to shrug because Harvard, Brown and Columbia aren’t exactly short on money or lawyers. People sympathetic to the universities may be tempted to minimize the antisemitism that triggered these investigations in the first place.
Both reactions miss what matters. Due process isn’t something we extend only to institutions we like, and civil-rights enforcement isn’t supposed to depend on whether the target has good politics. The entire purpose of an investigative process is to put some distance between what government officials want to be true and what they can actually prove is true.
Once that distance disappears, everybody should get nervous. Eventually the government investigates somebody you like. When that happens, “trust us, we already know what happened” is going to sound like one hell of a shitty standard.
THE RECORD
Haley Van Erem spent nearly a decade as an attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and says she was among DOJ lawyers involuntarily detailed to HHS to work on university Title VI investigations. Her whistleblower disclosure was filed with the inspectors general at the departments of Justice and Health and Human Services and with the Office of Special Counsel. (Associated Press)
Her complaint focuses principally on Brown, Columbia and Harvard. It alleges Brown investigators found no evidence supporting a Title VI violation, but leadership still sought a resolution; Columbia findings were pushed forward before adequate factual and legal review; and investigators working on Harvard faced extraordinary political and procedural pressure. (Associated Press | CBS News)
Columbia eventually agreed to pay $200 million as part of a deal restoring access to federal funding. Brown agreed to provide $50 million to Rhode Island workforce-development organizations while denying wrongdoing. (Associated Press)
DOJ denies the allegations and says it stands behind its investigations. No inspector general or court has ruled that Van Erem’s broader allegations are true, which is why they remain allegations — serious ones that now deserve an independent investigation of their own. (CBS News)
FROM OFF SCRIPT: THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR
The internet has once again demonstrated that the distance between “somebody said this” and “thousands of people now believe it” can apparently be measured with a fucking stopwatch.
THEY DIDN’T JUST MISS THE POLL. THEY MADE THE DAMN POLL UP.
A mysterious outfit called Median Strategies released purported election polls in California, Wisconsin and Nevada, including one showing Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass ahead of challenger Nithya Raman by roughly 12 points. Bass’s campaign shared the favorable result, but major polling aggregators had declined to include Median’s numbers because the organization wouldn’t provide enough information about who was behind it or how its surveys were conducted. Then came the punchline: Median acknowledged that the polls were fabricated as part of what it called a “social experiment” examining how unverified polling information could spread through politics. (Associated Press)
Apparently we’ve reached the point where you can invent a polling company, invent the voters, invent their answers, and watch actual political campaigns start bragging about the results. I’m not sure the experiment proved what its creators thought it proved. Mostly it demonstrated that bullshit wearing a necktie and carrying a clipboard still gets invited into the building.
FOX NEWS FOUND A NEW WAY TO LOWER GAS PRICES: CHANGE LAST YEAR’S NUMBER
A Fox News graphic compared the current national average gasoline price of about $4.06 with what it labeled as $4.13 one year earlier, making it appear prices had actually declined. There was one rather inconvenient problem: the comparable price a year ago was about $3.14, not $4.13. Snopes confirmed the graphic aired and rated the implied comparison false. (Snopes)
That’s certainly one way to solve high gas prices. Just add a dollar to last year’s number and declare progress. If somebody at Fox figures out how to apply the same technique to my electric bill, I may finally have found a use for it.
RFK JR. SAYS THERE’S A NEW STUDY. SCIENTISTS WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHERE THE HELL IT IS.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently said a study had “just come out” that very strongly supported splitting the combined measles-mumps-rubella vaccine into separate shots. FactCheck.org searched the medical literature and consulted vaccine researchers who said they knew of no credible new study supporting that claim; HHS did not identify one when asked. In fact, a recent study involving electronic medical records from more than 2.5 million American children found no association between the combined MMR vaccine and autism, consistent with a much larger body of existing research. (FactCheck.org)
When the Secretary of Health cites exciting new medical research, “What study?” really shouldn’t be a trick question. Maybe the paper is hiding behind the couch with Jimmy Hoffa, and everybody’s missing socks. Until somebody produces the damn thing, “there’s a new study” isn’t evidence. It’s a sentence.
NO, MASSACHUSETTS DEMOCRATS DID NOT BUILD A STATUE TO A CHILD-SACRIFICING PAGAN GOD
The Babylon Bee published a satirical story claiming Massachusetts Democrats had unveiled a statue of Molech at the state Capitol, complete with an image of the supposed monument. That would be unremarkable enough — the Bee is a satire site — except the claim and imagery began circulating outside their original context as though Massachusetts Democrats had actually decided that what state government really needed was a monument to an ancient deity associated in biblical accounts with child sacrifice. Snopes checked. No, they didn’t. (Snopes)
We have apparently reached the stage of American political literacy where satire needs safety rails and a guy walking alongside it waving an orange flag. Before sharing a story about elected officials unveiling a giant pagan child-sacrifice statue at the Capitol, maybe give yourself five seconds and ask whether there is even the faintest possibility somebody is fucking with you.
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ONE QUESTION BEFORE YOU GO
If government investigators conclude the evidence doesn’t support a violation, should political appointees ever be able to overrule them and pursue punishment anyway?
I’d really like to hear where you draw that line.
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