This brief for @beidelson.bsky.social & @hellmandeborah.bsky.social is excellent--it explains, better than Harvard's own brief does, why the vast majority of incidents alleged in the DOJ suit did not violate Title VI. [1]
Ben Eidelson@beidelson.bsky.social · 3w agoThe 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)
![Title VI’s restriction to ancestry-based harassment also means that the Government’s allegations about the intensity of anti-Israel or “anti-Zionist” sentiment on campus are mostly beside
the point. E.g., AC ¶¶ 9, 19–21, 51, 54, 56, 68, 79, 97. Drawing on the same Harvard report, for
example, the Government stresses that many Jewish survey respondents “indicated they had experienced some form of discrimination, stereotyping, or negative bias on campus due to their views
on current events.” Id. ¶ 85 (emphasis added). Those experiences certainly matter for a university
that aims to foster respectful engagement amid profound disagreements. But under Stand With Us,
the Government must allege facts suggesting that the hostility felt by these students was not simply
“due to their views on current events”—even if those views were despised by many of their peers—
but rather owed to their Jewish or Israeli birth. Assuming arguendo that many Harvard students
reject the legitimacy of a specifically Jewish state in the historic Land of Israel—and that many of
those anti-Zionist students exhibited intolerance toward everyone who disagreed with them—those
hostile students still would not have engaged in discrimination covered by Title VI. See, e.g., Kestenbaum v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, 743 F. Supp. 3d 297, 311 (D. Mass. 2024)
(“[V]iewpoint discrimination . . . is not actionable under Title VI.”).](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:tb2bwzxom5qv4542ru3zqcgu/bafkreie2f337gnqfn3vjul6n2vijue3zjnnluhdtg2xu4wuncv5ejie7iq)
