In early December the Office for Civil Rights announced that it entered into a resolution agreement with Temple University. The Department of Education’s press release was fairly positive, calling the University’s processes “robust” and finding that the University responded proactively and responsively to harassment based on shared ancestry.
OCR did identify some compliance concerns that are reminiscent of those identified in previous resolutions. For example, concerns were addressed by multiple offices that did not necessarily coordinate or communicate. And OCR found that the University did not consistently assess whether incidents individually or cumulatively created a hostile environment for its campus community. Some of those incidents included students and a faculty being spit upon while attending a rally supporting Israel, Muslim students being called “terrorists” by a professor, and vandalism of an Israeli student’s art. OCR acknowledged that the decentralized reporting and lack of information-sharing among offices contributed to the failure to consider the cumulative impact of reports.
The resolution letter recounts more than a dozen reports of antisemitism and the University’s responses from 2023 and early 2024 before detailing incidents that occurred in the spring and summer.
The resolution agreement is typical. It requires training for students and employees, and specific training for those conducting investigations under the policies prohibiting discrimination on shared ancestry. The investigator training requires an assessment of the training’s effectiveness. Other requirements include a climate assessment and a review of files from previous years using the current legal standard to assess those incidents.
One takeaway here is that even when OCR acknowledges an institution’s many proactive efforts and appropriate responses to reports, OCR will likely still identify compliance concerns. Like other resolutions, this one serves as a reminder to ensure that reports of shared ancestry discrimination are tracked centrally and responded to consistently and cumulatively.