The U.S. Department of Education is calling colleges to account for racist and antisemitic incidents on campus — and its move to withhold taxpayer dollars from violators has gotten university officials’ attention.

The University of Michigan just disbanded its multi-year, multi-million-dollar boondoggle in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and Columbia University agreed to align the school with federal guidelines protecting free expression and addressing the harassment of Jewish students.

Next up: Harvard.

Earlier this week, the Education Department, the Department of Health and Human Services and the General Services Administration announced a review of the approximately $9 billion in federal grants and contracts awarded to Harvard and local Harvard affiliates like Boston-area hospitals. Federal taxpayers supply more than $255 million in contracts with the university and another $8.7 billion in multi-year grants.

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said, “Harvard’s failure to protect students on campus from antisemitic discrimination—all while promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry—has put its reputation in serious jeopardy.”

The Education Department’s review is the latest in a line of consequences it has enacted on schools that have violated civil rights laws, allowed for Jewish students to be verbally and physically abused, and declined to punish students who have damaged property as part of riots.

Previously, McMahon canceled some $400 million in federal money for Columbia due to Columbia students’ actions to wreck campus buildings and threaten or physically harm other students over the last year. To regain federal support, former interim President Katrina Armstrong recently outlined a set of changes to school policy, including the creation of advisory committees on free speech and student discipline.

McMahon’s team, though, has seen enough to not take schools at their word. She says the school must carry out these commitments before funding will be restored.

The message is resonating.

Two weeks ago, the Education Department included the University of Michigan on the agency’s watchlist of schools that may be violating civil rights law. Following that notice, university officials closed the school’s DEI office on March 27—likely to avoid the embarrassment of losing federal money first and then realigning school policies with the law to regain it.

The school says its “approach” to DEI is “evolving,” but there is little left to evolve. School officials had spent more than $250 million on DEI over the last decade, and the New York Times called the program a “vanguard” of the DEI movement. Now its DEI office is gone, along with the Office for Health, Equity, and Inclusion.

Recent appeals’ court decisions have upheld President Donald Trump’s executive orders supporting civil rights law and opposing DEI. School officials have little room to argue that DEI is anything but discriminatory.

Like Columbia and Michigan, Harvard has allowed discrimination and harassment to continue for years. Just recently, a Harvard employee was caught on video tearing down posters of Kfir Bibas, a child kidnapped by Hamas terrorists at just 9 months of age and held prisoner before being brutally murdered along with his mother and 4-year-old brother.

Pro-Hamas students later held a “die-in” on campus library steps, which would hardly be worth mentioning if not for the disgusting actions they were supporting. In an echo of tactics used to harass students last year, the protesters were instructed by organizers to wear masks to conceal their identities.

In January, Harvard settled a lawsuit with the Brandeis Center, a legal advocacy group, who had sued Harvard for “ignoring and tolerating” such actions. The center reported that “since 10/7 [the date of Hamas’s 2023 terrorist attack on Israel], Harvard students and professors have daily explicitly supported anti-Jewish and anti-Israel terrorism.”

As part of the settlement, Harvard administrators agreed to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism for use when evaluating campus incidents to decide whether actions constitute harassment.

It remains to be seen whether Harvard’s preemptive actions and those from the University of Michigan suffice to make school policies compliant with the law. But federal education officials have made one thing clear: Taxpayers will not be funding schools that allow harassment and violate civil rights.

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Jonathan Butcher is the Will Skillman Senior Research Fellow in education policy at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.

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