The New York University campus. Photo: Cincin12/Wiki Commons.

A nonprofit legal advocacy group is calling on the United States Department of Education (DOE) to continue monitoring New York University’s (NYU) anti-discrimination policies, two years after an arrangement for federal oversight began.

The DOE’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) began its review of NYU in September 2020 as part of a settlement to resolve charges that school officials declined to act on alleged incidents of antisemitism. Per the agreement, the administration pledged to reform its anti-discrimination policies, including to specifically address harassment of Jews related to their Zionist beliefs.

On Tuesday — as the end of the academic year marked the earliest that the monitoring period could be deemed complete — the Louis D. Brandeis Center argued in a letter to DOE Secretary Catherine Lhamon that the school had not yet met those obligations.

“In the current circumstance, it would be derelict to permit NYU to run out the clock on OCR oversight, and, thereby, undermine OCR’s critical work,” Brandeis Center President Alyza Lewin and Senior Counsel Arthur Traldi wrote.

The legal advocacy center said that although NYU updated its anti-discrimination policies, they still do not address the forms of antisemitism that prompted the OCR investigation, including “frivolous” noise complaints against Jewish students, vandalism, and activists disrupting pro-Israel events.

Lewin and Traldi also said that the polices do not proscribe acts like one that occurred this academic year — when a pro-Palestinian student activist group asserted that the “Zionist grip on the media is omnipresent,” among other statements that would fall under the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism.

“NYU students still feel emboldened to engage in precisely the sort of antisemitic conduct which prompted the agreement in the first place,” the pair continued, arguing that rising antisemitism on college campuses compounds the importance of enforcing civil rights protections.

Adela Cojab, a former NYU student who filed the original 2019 complaint against the school, said in a statement, “I, along with current and future Jewish students, am placing my trust in OCR to enforce Title VI, oversee university compliance, and ensure those under its protected classes, Jewish students included, have access to an academic environment free from discrimination and harassment.”

On Wednesday, NYU spokesman John Beckman said the school was “deeply disappointed” by the Brandeis Center’s “incorrect” allegations, maintaining that the university has “fulfilled its obligations under its agreement with OCR.”

“[NYU] met every mutually-agreed upon deadline; annually submitted reports to OCR about student conduct cases involving discrimination or harassment; and submitted its proposed revisions to its non-discrimination and anti-harassment policy for OCR’s review and approval on time, promptly adopted the approved version, and sent it to everyone on campus a year ago,” Beckman told The Algemeiner.

He added that New York University “utterly rejects antisemitism, and is a leader in combatting it on campus,” pointing to a prominent antisemitism summit recently hosted on its campus and its large academic presence in Israel.