Olatunde Johnson (’97), Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59 Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Constitutional Governance at Columbia Law School, was quoted in a New York Times piece on The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights investigations into dozens of colleges and universities for potential violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (“Campus Protest Investigations Hang Over Schools as New Academic Year Begins,” Oct. 5). The inquiries stem from complaints about antisemitism and Islamophobia during the widespread campus protests that followed the October 7 attacks in Israel. “You have cases, certainly, involving epithets, slurs, actions that we’d all say are discriminatory, but then you also have situations where the advocacy for a particular point of view is making another group feel uncomfortable,” Olatunde said. “Those are harder claims to sort out, and the department has to figure out the line, and it’s not clear that it has any special competence in doing that.”
