Academic Felons: The Top Ten Colleges and Universities That Have Violated Federal Law
#1: Columbia University
#2: Harvard University
#3: University of California-Los Angeles
#4: The University of Pennsylvania
#5: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
#6: The University of Louisville
#7: Cornell University
#8: San Jose State University
#9: The University of Arizona
#10: Golden West College
Introduction:
A culture of rampant lawlessness has been steadily growing in American academia. Our colleges and universities—institutions which should be guided solely by the search for truth—have instead become hopelessly corrupted by leftist ideology. University faculty view their role not as scholars and guides to the world of knowledge, but as advocates for their own radical philosophies, eager to disseminate leftist dogmas to impressionable students.
This atmosphere of self-congratulatory narcissism has led to an appalling climate of disdain towards our civic values and disregard for the rule of law. Harvard and Columbia—two of our nation’s most prestigious universities—have grabbed headlines for their failure to comply with some of our nation’s most important laws, notably their failure to shut down Jew hatred that violates federal civil rights law. But they are far from alone.
From coast to coast, universities across the nation have flouted the law—and not just any laws, but those that enshrine some of our most cherished principles.
These elite institutions have allowed men to compete in women’s sports, violating Title IX which mandates equal opportunities for female students. They have skewed admissions and hiring policies to prioritize race and nationality over merit, violating the Civil Rights Act. They have refused to enforce federal immigration law, boldly declaring themselves to be “sanctuary campuses” and welcoming foreign nationals who support terrorist organizations and call for the overthrow of the United States. They have allowed Jewish students to face bullying, harassment, and restrictions of their free movement on campus, violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Our nation’s universities have shamelessly put their pursuit of woke leftist ideology ahead of their loyalty and obedience to the laws of the United States of America and the principles of freedom and equality of opportunity that inform them. The following report on “Academic Felons” will expose the worst perpetrators of this illegal conduct and lay their crimes bare for the world to see.
#1: Columbia University
During the spring semester of 2024, as pro-Hamas demonstrators took over the campus quad, creating an encampment that persisted for weeks, and then laying siege to Hamilton Hall, Columbia University became the poster child for how not to respond to campus Jew haters.
The basic facts of the case bear repeating as they prove that Columbia blatantly and willfully violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, by failing to ensure that Jewish and Israeli students and faculty were granted equal and unfettered access to campus, and by further failing to protect their physical safety.
As Israel’s defensive war against the Palestinians in Gaza raged (a justified defense for Hamas’s barbaric October 7 attack on civilians), pro-Hamas students, aided by radical faculty and outside organizers, created an illegal encampment on the South East Lawn of Columbia. They labeled this area the “Gaza solidarity encampment” or the “liberated zone” and denied entry by means of physical force and violence to anyone they judged to be a Zionist. Upwards of 85% of American Jews consider themselves to be Zionists and the core tenant of Zionism—that the Jews should reestablish a nation for themselves in their ancestral homeland of Israel—is a core tenet of the Jewish faith.
Yet Zionists—and therefore nearly all Jews—were forcibly excluded from the vast encampment on campus. As the anti-Semitism watchdog organization, the Amcha Initiative, reports:
The protestors had defended their encampment by encircling it and chanting, “we don’t want no Zionists here,” called for an intifada, and physically intimidated Jewish students that were observing or recording. Professors spoke at a “faculty solidarity teach in,” where Professor Mahmood Mamdani stated, “The response to Zionist power is to criminalize anti-Zionism as antisemitism”… The Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine group praised and promoted support for the encampment online, even going so far as to illicit donations for the protestors violating university policy.
Furthermore, as Amcha has documented, “multiple Jewish students were assaulted” in the so-called “liberated zone” and elsewhere on campus: “Protestors off campus threw fake blood at Jewish students. According to the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Workforce, a photographer wearing a ‘bring them home necklace’ had coffee thrown at him by a protester while simply standing nearby. A Jewish student was accosted when walking home wearing a Star of David necklace, and a hostage tag when a woman began screaming at the student, calling the Jewish student a Zionist and a murderer while banging what appeared to be a pot on the barricade, and after being told by a police officer to stop, accused Jewish students of ‘killing her people’ and said ‘We are Hamas’ which was caught on video. A Jewish Columbia student reported to the Committee that many Jewish students ‘who [live] right next to the campus couldn’t sleep due to screams of Intifada until 1AM.’”
Instead of responding to these blatantly illegal acts of discrimination and assault with a show of force, Columbia administrators coddled the pro-Hamas demonstrators. They spent weeks on futile negotiations and entreaties, only emboldening the radicals who had lawlessly disrupted campus life and threatened Jewish students who were just trying to get to class. As a result, the illegal demonstrations persisted, eventually shutting down campus entirely, forcing classes to be moved online, and necessitating the cancellation of graduation ceremonies.
An incomplete list of offenses committed by the pro-Hamas rioters compiled by the Amcha Initiative includes:
- A protestor holding a sign saying “Al-Qasam’s [sic] next target” who stood in front of a group of Jewish students holding Israeli flags and singing.
- A Jewish student wearing a yarmulke being shoved and screamed at by protestors, “you’ve got blood on your hands!” when he attempted to recover an Israeli flag stolen by a protestor, who then ran to a cheering crowd of anti-Israel protestors that attempted to burn the flag. (The student additionally claims a rock was thrown at his face and protestors screamed, “Kill the Zionist”).
- Protestors screaming “go back to Poland!” and “yehudim, yehudim [which translates to Jews, Jews]” at Jewish Columbia students trying to leave campus.
- Protestors circling around the main gates and entrance to campus, with one stating, “I am Hamas,” which was documented in video.
- Crowds screaming “tear down the gates” and various hateful chants in English and Arabic as individuals unaffiliated with the university climbed the University’s gates.
- A Jewish Columbia student being splashed with water by a protestor.
- Protestors chanting, “Al-Qassam you make us proud! Take another soldier out!,” “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!,” and “Hamas we love you. We support your rockets too!”
- A protestor delivering a speech on campus that exclaimed, “We are here today because on October 7 the Palestinian resistance in Gaza broke through the walls of their open air prison, shattering the illusion of the invincibility of their occupiers. [Cheers from the crowd.] By setting up this encampment in the heart of the Zionist stronghold of Columbia University, we intend to do the same.”
- A protestor standing immediately outside Columbia’s gates leading a crowd in Arabic chants glorifying terrorism and encouraging students to become terrorist “martyrs” after which he explained in English that the chant translated to “mother of the shahid, mother of the martyr, I wish my mother was in your place.”
Bearing witness to these acts, Columbia’s Orthodox rabbi, Elie Beuchler, emailed Jewish students on campus to say that though it “deeply pains” him, he recommended that Jewish students remain at home and not attend class on campus “until the reality in and around campus has dramatically improved.”
The University also failed entirely to prevent outside agitators and known terrorism supporters, as well as individuals previously banned from campus, from participating in the pro-Hamas riots. As Amcha reports:
“numerous unauthorized individuals, including ones explicitly banned from campus, have been documented at the encampment, including: Within our Lifetime organizer Nerdeen Kiswani, who was banned from campus for speaking in support of terrorism at “Resistance 101,” was recorded as being on campus and leading chants of “there is only one solution, Intifada revolution”; Shellyne Rodriguez, who was fired from faculty positions at CUNY Hunter College and the School of Visual arts after threatening a New York Post reporter with a machete, was photographed on campus at the protests; a student that had been suspended for involvement with the terrorist-associated “Resistance 101” event and who also has defied an eviction order from Columbia; and visiting professor Mohamed Abdou, who President Shafik promised was being terminated, was also photographed at the encampment.
Foreign nationals also played a leading role in the pro-Hamas riots. Graduate student, Mahmoud Khalil is an Algerian citizen with a green card, which gives him “lawful permanent residency” in the United States, but not all the protections of citizenship. He was one of the key instigators of the Columbia encampment and one of the negotiators who met repeatedly with the Columbia administration and refused to comply with their orders to dismantle the encampment. In March of 2025, Khalil was arrested by agents of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and President Trump sought to have him deported on the grounds that he “willfully misrepresented” facts on his green card application, and that his involvement in leading pro-Hamas protests at Columbia poses a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests. The case to deport him remains ongoing in the courts.
Throughout weeks of chaos in the spring of 2024, during which Jewish students feared for their lives and safety merely walking across campus, the Columbia administration attempted to appease the pro-Palestinian mob and refused to allow city police to enter the private campus. It was only after the pro-Hamas demonstrators seized control of Hamilton Hall—taking hostage members of the janitorial staff and causing widespread damage to university property—that the university finally called in the New York City police. Millions watched on live national television as police officers in riot gear entered the building through an upper story window, finally retaking control of the campus. Protests and demonstrations continued to disrupt campus life over the course of the next months, resulting in the cancellation of graduation ceremonies in 2024.
Throughout this entire, highly public, ordeal, Columbia’s top administrators, led by then-president Minouche Shafik, attempted to negotiate with the pro-Hamas radicals who had overrun the campus and made Jewish students abandon it in fear of their lives and safety. Despite the imminent danger to Jewish students and the direct calls for terrorism and genocide emanating from the campus quad, the administration repeatedly adopted a policy of appeasement toward the pro-Hamas rioters, claiming that allowing them to threaten Jews and enact a hostile takeover the campus quad was an exercise of “free speech.”
While the Biden administration was all too happy to ignore these violations of federal law, the Trump administration took clear and decisive action against Columbia. In May of 2025, Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued a press release announcing its determination that “Columbia University violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VI) by acting with deliberate indifference towards student-on-student harassment of Jewish students from October 7, 2023, through the present.”
“OCR enforces Title VI, which prohibits a recipient of Federal financial assistance from discriminating in its programs and activities on the basis of race, color, or national origin, which includes discrimination against individuals that is based on their actual or perceived Israeli or Jewish identity or ancestry,” the release stated. “OCR’s Notice of Violation articulates extensive factual findings that span a period of over 19 months in which the University continually failed to protect Jewish students. The findings are based on information and documents obtained during the investigation, including witness interviews; examination of written policies and procedures; reliable media reports that contemporaneously capture antisemitic incidents and events at Columbia University; and reports from Columbia University’s own Task Force on Antisemitism.”
OCR’s specific allegations against Columbia included the university’s failure in each of the following areas:
- To establish effective reporting and remediation mechanisms for antisemitism until the summer of 2024,
- To properly abide by its own policies and procedures when responding to Jewish students’ complaints,
- To abide by its only policies and procedures governing student misconduct against Jewish students,
- To investigate or punish vandalism in its classrooms, which include the repeated drawing of swastikas and other universally recognized hate images, and
- To enforce its time, place, and manner restrictions for protests held on campus, such as inside and around its academic buildings, residence halls, and libraries since October 7, 2023.
This HHS determination that Columbia violated federal law by permitting rampant anti-Semitism on campus was accompanied by additional action from the Trump administration which froze $400 million in federal funds earmarked for the university.
“Freezing the funds is one of the tools we are using to respond to this spike in antisemitism. This is only the beginning,” commented Leo Terrell, head of the Justice Department task force to combat antisemitism. “Canceling these taxpayer funds is our strongest signal yet that the Federal Government is not going to be party to an educational institution like Columbia that does not protect Jewish students and staff.”
Finding itself between a rock and a hard place, Columbia finally caved in to the pressure to do the right thing. In an historic settlement with the federal government, the university agreed to enact immediate changes to protect Jewish students and employees. Among the provisions of the agreement were that “Columbia will not engage in unlawful racial discrimination in hiring, admissions, or university programming,” that “Columbia will pay the United States $200 million to settle claims related to discriminatory practices,” and that “Columbia will also pay the largest employment-discrimination public settlement in almost 20 years” by providing over $20 million “to resolve alleged civil rights violations against Jewish Columbia employees that occurred on its campus following the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks.”
Columbia’s rapid capitulation to the Trump administration is proof that that the university was well aware of its repeated violation of Civil Rights Law through its failure to protect its Jewish students and employees. The university deserves its place atop the list of Academic Felons.
#2: Harvard University
Harvard University is arguably America’s most prestigious university. It is unsurprising then that when President Donald Trump began his campaign to combat the relentless anti-Semitism pulsing through our nation’s universities and force them to comply with federal law, that Harvard was one of his first targets.
In a letter to Harvard President Alan Garber, the Trump administration charged that the university has “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.”
The over 300-year-old academic institution is clearly guilty of violating federal law in a myriad of ways, not only through its dismal failure to suppress anti-Semitic activism that violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, but by knowingly discriminating against white, Jewish, and Asian applicants who apply to matriculate at Harvard.
Like many colleges and universities across the nation, Harvard played host to outrageous displays of Jew hatred over the past two years since Hamas’s October 7th massacre of over 1200 innocent Israeli Jews.
A report on anti-Semitism commissioned by Harvard itself found that Jewish students faced hatred, ostracism, and discrimination from both students and faculty on campus due to their faith and beliefs.
The Harvard Crimson reports:
Jewish and Israeli students told task force members that they experienced social shunning and hostility from peers who blamed them for the Israeli government’s actions. Some said peers would refuse to talk with them because they came from “a genocidal country” or attend social gatherings where Israeli students were present. Several reported dropping classes they felt were one-sidedly anti-Israel.
One anecdote featured in the report and recounted in the Crimson concerns “an anonymous Jewish student intended to speak at a conference about being a grandchild of Holocaust survivors who helped tens of thousands migrate to Israel. But the conference directors rebuffed the speech, laughing in the student’s face and saying the speech was not ‘tasteful’ even though it had no mention of Zionism or the current war in Gaza, according to the account in the report.”
A pair of federal lawsuits filed against Harvard by a group of Jewish students and by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education also alleged that Harvard’s failure to combat anti-Semitic behavior and discrimination on campus created a hostile environment for Jewish students. The university ultimately settled both lawsuits.
In July 2025, the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) found Harvard in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “by acting with deliberate indifference towards harassment of Jewish and Israeli students by other students and faculty from October 7, 2023, through the present.”
“OCR’s findings document that a hostile environment existed, and continues to exist, at Harvard,” states a release from that office. “This hostile environment includes harassing speech, threats, and intimidation targeting Jewish and Israeli students, including calls for genocide and murder. OCR’s findings also extensively detail acts of physical intimidation and violence between students. This hostile environment denied, and continues to deny, students’ fundamental educational opportunities. Such educational opportunities denied include safe class attendance, access to campus facilities such as libraries, dining halls, dorms, and other common areas, participation in extracurricular activities, and overall physical and emotional well-being on campus.”
Harvard’s illegal failure to combat the Jew hatred permeating the university is matched by its blatant discrimination in university admissions.
Harvard’s admissions procedures have been proven to be racist in court by the Supreme Court’s determination in 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College that affirmative action based on race violates the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution along with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. But Harvard’s discriminatory admissions procedures towards whites, Jews, and most particularly Asian applicants, went far beyond even typical collegiate affirmative action programs in breaking the law.
In 2014, Harvard was sued in federal district court by a coalition titled Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) for allegedly violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits all schools which receive federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race. Through an examination of Harvard’s previously secret admissions data, SFFA was able to show that Asian-American applicants to Harvard face rampant racial discrimination.
Peter Arcidiacono, an economist at Duke University who testified in court on behalf of SFFA, concluded that Asian-American applicants have the lowest chance of admission to Harvard despite scoring highest in all objective measurements of achievement.
“Race plays a significant role in admissions decisions,” Arcidiacono wrote in his expert report. “Consider the example of an Asian-American applicant who is male, is not disadvantaged, and has other characteristics that result in a 25% chance of admission. Simply changing the race of this applicant to white—and leaving all his other characteristics the same—would increase his chance of admission to 36%. Changing his race to Hispanic (and leaving all other characteristics the same) would increase his chance of admission to 77%. Changing his race to African-American (again, leaving all other characteristics the same) would increase his chance of admission to 95%.”
“Despite being more academically qualified than the other three major racial/ethnic groups (whites, African Americans, and Hispanics), Asian-American applicants have the lowest admissions rates,” Arcidiacono continues. “In fact, data produced by Harvard show that this has been true for every admissions cycle for the classes of 2000 to 2019.”
Professor Arcidiacono was able to trace this discrepancy in admissions rates to the highly subjective “personal rating” which admissions officers at Harvard assign to applicants. “Asian-American applicants, however, do not score as well on the Personal Rating and the Overall Rating relative to other racial/ethnic groups—especially when compared to other groups within the same academic index deciles,” he writes. “But there is no observable reason why this should be so; the testimony from officers and leaders of the Admissions Office is that there is nothing about Asian Americans as a group that would suggest they have less attractive personal qualities. Ratings given by alumni interviewers do not show this pattern.”
“It turns out that the suspicions of Asian-American alumni, students and applicants were right all along,” Students for Fair Admissions concluded in a court document. “Harvard today engages in the same kind of discrimination and stereotyping that it used to justify quotas on Jewish applicants in the 1920s and 1930s.”
“What Harvard will not admit (but the record shows) is that race is not only an important factor, it is the dominant consideration in admitting Hispanics and African Americans,” William Consovoy, who represents Students for Fair Admissions, stated in a court filing.
After appealing the case all the way to the Supreme Court, SFFA scored a victory—resulting in the Court’s determination that any racially-based preferences in admissions decisions are unconstitutional and a violation of Title VI.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts explained how Harvard’s policies and similar ones employed by other universities violate “the Equal Protection Clause’s twin commands that race may never be used as a ‘negative’ and that it may not operate as a stereotype.”
“The First Circuit found that Harvard’s consideration of race has resulted in fewer admissions of Asian-American students,” Roberts continued. “Respondents’ assertion that race is never a negative factor in their admissions programs cannot withstand scrutiny. College admissions are zerosum, and a benefit provided to some applicants but not to others necessarily advantages the former at the expense of the latter.”
Following the Supreme Court’s ruling, Harvard changed its admissions procedures to include five short-answer questions, one of which states: “Harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a diverse student body. How will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard?”
The Harvard Independent notes:
Regardless of this shift in admission questions, the College’s racial demographics still changed after the ruling. For the Class of 2028, the percentage of newly enrolled African American students fell from 15.3% to 14%, while Hispanic or Latino enrollment fell from 16% to 11.3%. In contrast, the proportion of Asian American students rose up to 37% from 29.9%. While still of note, these changes were minor in comparison to similar institutions—MIT, for instance, saw the percentage of Black students enrolled drop from 15% to 5%.
Given this curiously small drop in black and Hispanic admissions compared to rival MIT, it seems questionable whether Harvard is continuing to violate the law by using racial preferences to bias admissions decisions. For its blatant Jew hatred and its failure to comply with constitutional and civil rights law in admissions decisions, Harvard deserves its high ranking on the list of Academic Felons.
#3: University of California-Los Angeles
The acts of anti-Semitic exclusion recently perpetrated by UCLA were so blatant a violation of federal civil rights law, that the university felt compelled to grant a $6 million settlement to Jewish students and faculty who sued the university over its felonious conduct which violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
The lawsuit which was filed by three Jewish students and one professor argued that UCLA allowed and facilitated the creation of a “Jew Exclusion Zone” on campus during pro-Hamas demonstrations in the spring of 2024.
The merit of their claim is undeniable. During the mass protests that roiled the UCLA campus, radical student activists aided by outside agitators took over an enormous swath of campus, labeling it the “Palestine Solidarity Encampment.” Students policed entry to this encampment, denying entry to “Zionists” (an estimated 80-90% of Jews are Zionists) or anyone who refused to condemn Israel’s defensive response to Hamas’s brutal October 7th massacre of over 1200 innocent Israelis. Those pro-Israel students who attempted to breach the wooden and metal barricades surrounding the encampment were turned away with either words or brute force.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which took up the legal complaint on behalf of the plaintiffs, described the specifics of the case in clear and concrete terms:
In spring 2024, extremist students and outside agitators at UCLA set up barricades in the most popular area of campus and established an encampment in violation of the school’s policies.
Those agitators refused to let students through unless they disavowed Israel’s right to exist. The effect of this encampment was to segregate Jewish students and faculty with religious and ethnic obligations not to condemn Israel, preventing them from accessing the encampment and other parts of campus, including the campus’s most popular undergraduate library and classroom buildings. The activists used checkpoints, built barriers, and often locked arms to prevent Jews from walking through the encampment. They also created an identification system, giving wristbands to those who had passed their anti-Israel ideological test and preventing those without one from entering.
For a full week, UCLA’s administration failed to clear the Jew Exclusion Zone and instead ordered campus police to stand down and allow the illegal encampment to stay. The administration even stationed security staff around the encampment to keep students unapproved by the protesters out of the area. Even after the first encampment was cleared, activists have continued to stage encampments and occupations of public spaces at UCLA.
Donald Trump’s Department of Justice led by Pam Bondi reached the same conclusion in July 2025. A letter from the DOJ directed to University of California President Michael V. Drake, concluded that “Jewish and Israeli students at UCLA were subjected to severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive harassment that created a hostile environment by members of the encampment.”
“This disgusting breach of civil rights against students will not stand: DOJ will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system,” Bondi commented.
The federal laws at stake in the matter are crystal clear. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal aid. In an executive order issued in 2019, then-president Donald Trump directed federal agencies to enforce this law against institutions that discriminated against Jews, since Judaism is both a religion and a nationality/race.
UCLA has a clear and undeniable obligation under federal law to ensure that all tuition-paying students—Jewish or not, Zionist or not—are granted equal access to the university campus and facilities.
Instead of protecting the rights of its Jewish students, UCLA instructed its security guards to do exactly the opposite. They stood by and allowed the pro-Hamas insurgents to deny Jewish students free access to their own campus.
The Amcha Initiative, a watchdog group dedicated to tracking and combatting anti-Semitism on campus, documented some of these horrific confrontations on the public university campus and the resultant violations of Title VI.
As Amcha reports:
- A Jewish counter demonstrator at the anti-Zionist encampment on campus was beaten. After her 13-year-old sister dropped her Israeli flag, the counter demonstrator bent down to pick it up and at least five kefiyah-clad protestors accosted her, first by stomping on the flag and then by knocking her to the ground, repeatedly kicking her in her head and causing her to lose consciousness and apparently suffer a concussion. When she awoke she was bleeding from her head, disoriented, and unable to recognize her family.
- A pro-Israel counter-protester was attacked by an anti-Zionist encampment protestor who attempted to rip the sign from his hand, grabbed his hat and flashed a taser.
- Also, the same day, a moving barrier of protesters was formed to block a Jewish student, who wears a Star of David necklace, from entering campus while as a security officer stood nearby. The Jewish student told protesters, “I’m a UCLA student, I deserve to go here, we pay tuition, this is our school, and they’re not letting me in. My class is over there, I want to use that entrance … will you let me go in?” The protesters simply told him that they’re “not engaging” and blocked the Jewish student every time he attempted to go through the entrance.
- Additional incidents occurred with anti-Zionist protesters affiliated with the SJP and JVP encampment blocking Zionist students from walkways and accessing the library, using wristbands to identity anti-Zionists, with many of these incidents documented on video. In one video, protestors have taken over access to an area near the school library, demanding wrist bands and approval to each student passing, with one Jewish student attempting to enter and upon being denied asking, “So you won’t let me in because I’m Jewish?” The anti-Zionist protester responses, “Ummm no… we have a couple Jewish students here… are you a Zionist?” The Jewish student responds, “Yes of course I am” to which the protester retorts, “Well yeah, we’re not gonna let Zionists in.”
Even professors were not guaranteed unfettered access to the campus. UCLA Professor Nir Hoftman reported to Fox News that he was assaulted by the pro-Hamas demonstrators merely for attempting to walk across campus. “They literally assaulted me on the way over here. I was walking to give the interview to a news station and two or three thugs tried to block my approach to the open area. I ignored them and one of them stood in front of me and said, ‘you can’t walk this way.’” One of the demonstrators then tackled him from the side and pulled his earbud from his ear before fleeing.
Hoftman related that campus security officers were present but did not take any action to protect him. “The security people who were there, were watching, not doing anything,” he reported, describing the state of the campus as “anarchy, it’s like the wild, wild west.”
The settlement UCLA will pay to settle the lawsuit amounts to an acknowledgment of their horrifying failure to protect the civil rights of their Jewish students. That settlement includes:
- A $6.45 million payment, including $50,000 to each plaintiff and $3.6 million for legal fees.
- $2.33 million in charitable donations to organizations like Hillel at UCLA, the Anti-Defamation League, and Chabad of UCLA.
- $320,000 for a UCLA initiative to combat antisemitism.
The settlement also mandates that in the future, UCLA will ensure that Jewish students, faculty, and staff are not excluded from any areas of campus.
UCLA’s failure to protect the civil rights of a vulnerable minority earn it one of the top spots of the list of Academic Felons.
#4: The University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania has been one of the most critically scrutinized institutions of higher education over the past several years—and for good reason. The Ivy League university has repeatedly violated federal law, both by failing to protect its Jewish students from a hostile environment as is demanded by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and by championing men’s inclusion in women’s sports, in violation of Title IX.
Former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill testified before Congress claiming to “fiercely support the free exchange of ideas as central to our educational mission.” Despite these assertions, Penn persecuted one of its own, conservative law professor Amy Wax, for declaring that sex is binary and airing the inconvenient truth that black law students “rarely” finish in the top half of their class.
Professor Wax was severely punished by the university and was suspended for one year at half pay, despite her status as a tenured professor. Meanwhile, Magill was presiding over a campus where professors openly celebrated Hamas’s October 7th massacre of innocent Israeli Jews and gleefully called for a global intifada.
Penn’s Jew hatred problem goes back considerably further than October 7. In September of 2023, the campus played host to the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, an event sponsored by numerous university departments and centers including the Middle East Center, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, and the Wolf Humanities Center.
Featured speakers included Roger Waters, of the band Pink Floyd, a notorious anti-Semite who enjoys dressing in Nazi garb. Another highlighted speaker was former CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill, who was fired by CNN after he endorsed the genocidal statement “Free Palestine, from the River to the Sea” in a speech at the United Nations.
The festival’s co-chair, Susan Abulhawa, is a blatant Hamas sympathizer who attempted to justify a terrorist shooting outside a synagogue in Jerusalem, claiming that, “Every Israeli, whether in a synagogue, a checkpoint, a settlement, or shopping mall is a colonizer who came from foreign lands and kicked out the native inhabitants.” She added, “They all serve in the racist colonial military. The whole country is one big militarized tumor.”
Given the line-up of pro-Hamas speakers and organizers, the festival unsurprisingly devolved into an open forum for Jew hatred. As the American Jewish Committee reported, “The festival’s inaugural event includes a screening of the film Farha, which includes a number of toxic antisemitic tropes, including a modern retelling of the blood libel trope that casts Jews as vicious, bloodthirsty, and cruel. The film is a distortive piece of fiction, yet it is often treated as evidence of extreme, unprovoked Israeli cruelty towards innocent Palestinians during Israel’s War of Independence.”
Hoda Fakhreddine, one of the organizers of the festival who serves as a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Penn, invoked the genocidal phrase “From the river, to the sea,” and invoked anti-Semitic tropes, claiming that Jews control the media, and denied the fact of the Jewish people’s historic connection to the land of Israel.
Fakhreddine laughed off concerns that the presence of so many anti-Semites on campus might cause Jewish students at Penn to fear for their safety, dismissing them as “hysterical and racist accusations that our presence here poses a threat to Jewish students on campus, making them feel unsafe and fearful of wearing their kippas.”
Fakhreddine also stunningly blamed the Jews for wanting “an extra country” claiming that “So many of us in this room have had to watch our elders die in refugee camps that aren’t fit for rodents, all so they [Jews] can have an extra country if they want, the violence of which is on full display on this campus every year when Zionists set up their so-called Birthright Trips propaganda tours to recruit young American Jews to become our colonizers, tormentors and Lords.”
Following Hamas’s October 7 massacre of innocent Israelis, the climate of Jew hatred on campus only grew worse—and yet the Penn administration stood idly by and watched their own faculty side with Hamas while Jewish students suffered the consequences.
On October 16, 2023, a pro-Hamas front group, Penn Against the Occupation, held a “Collective Walk Out for Palestine.” During that event, a Jewish student was assaulted while putting on tefillin (boxes containing Torah verses used in prayer).
The Amcha Initiative, a watchdog group that tracks anti-Semitism on campus, describes some of the other events that took place:
“A speaker claimed there were no ‘innocent civilians,’ since ‘all settlers and all settlements are legitimate military targets and they will be targeted until the time in which one-state, a plura-national, secular and socialist state is formed on Palestine and you can either live there in peace or you can go back to Moscow, and Brooklyn and and f**king Berlin where you came from,’ and added, ‘I can never condemn the violence [against Jews].’”
“Comments by professors further condoned terrorism directed at Jews.”
“Chants that included ‘Intifada, Intifada,’ ‘Resistance is Justified, When People are Occupied,’ and ‘Free Palestine.’”
“Another speaker stated, ‘Zionism is racism’ and ‘the only solution is a one state solution from the River to the Sea.’”
“According to reports mentioned in a lawsuit against the University, Professor Biareishyk ended his Russian history class early so that students could attend the walkout. Also according to the lawsuit, a student with a yarmulke was harassed by protestors, who called out ‘how does it feel to be a part of a mass genocide?’ Similar profanities were directed at another Jewish student who was wearing a Star of David necklace. Several students yelled to Jewish students to ‘get out of here k*kes!’ Three men, whose faces were covered by keffiyehs and who were standing at the outskirts of the rally, harassed a female Jewish student with statements of, ‘you’re a dirty little Jew, you deserve to die’; ‘you don’t deserve to be on the same earth that we stand on’; and ‘the Jews deserve everything that is happening to them.’”
Highlighting these various instances of Jew hatred and Penn’s failure to enforce existing campus rules against vile Hamas supporting students and faculty, several Jewish students sued the university in federal court alleging its violation of Title VI.
One of those students filing the lawsuit was Eyal Yakoby, who has testified to witnessing illegal Jew hatred that was tolerated by the campus administration.
“I have seen and heard first-hand reports of individuals in the encampment, including students, committing acts of violence, intimidating and harassing Jewish students and faculty members, and inciting others to do the same,” Yakoby stated in his legal declaration.
“Those at the encampment have denied a campus rabbi and numerous others entry to the quad. I have also seen a video of a Jewish student, surrounded by campus protesters, who threatened him with ‘I hope you have good health insurance’ and ‘how’s your dental’?” Yakoby alleged. “I personally witnessed a police officer, after being assaulted by a protester, asking his sergeant whether he could arrest the individual, only to be told that the police do not have the authority to make arrests at the encampment.”
Yakoby and other students reported “these and other incidents” to members of the Penn administration but says they refused to act.
“Since the filing of the original complaint, students and professors at Penn have only become emboldened by Penn’s response (or lack thereof) to combat antisemitism,” Yakoby said. “Penn has proven that it is incapable of effectively addressing antisemitism or is unwilling to do so.”
A district court judge stunningly dismissed the initial lawsuit in June but allowed the plaintiffs the opportunity to refile an amended suit.
Penn’s record on illegally allowing men to participate in women’s college sports is as marred as its tolerance of anti-Semitism.
During the 2021-2022 athletic season, the University of Pennsylvania notified its women’s swim team that 6’4” male swimmer “Lia” (aka William) Thomas was transitioning to female and would thus join them in their locker room and pool.
Abiding by the Biden administration’s deeply flawed interpretation of Title IX which allowed an individual’s self-asserted “gender identity” to take precedence over their biological sex, Penn insisted that “Lia” be treated as a member of the women’s team in good standing and allowed to use the same locker rooms and training facilities and enter the same competitions. When female swimmers on the team expressed reservations, they were treated to lectures on kindness and inclusion and told that they were the problem.
A lawsuit filed by three former Penn female swimmers alleges that the university heavily promoted trans ideology and claimed that their concerns about sharing a locker room with Thomas were evidence of a “psychological problem.”
“The UPenn administrators told the women that if anyone was struggling with accepting Thomas’s participation on the UPenn Women’s team, they should seek counseling and support from CAPS and the LBGTQ center,” the women’s lawsuit states.
“The administrators also invited the women to a talk titled, ‘Trans 101.’ Thus, the women were led to understand that UPenn’s position was that if a woman on the team had any problem with a trans-identifying male being on her team that woman had a psychological problem and needed counseling,” the suit describes.
Not only were Penn’s female students told they were mentally disturbed for objecting to Thomas, a fully intact male, from changing in their locker room, they were threatened with reputational harm if they dared to publicize their objections.
“The UPenn administrators went on to tell the women that if the women spoke publicly about their concerns about Thomas’ participation on the Women’s Team, the reputation of those complaining about Thomas being on the team would be tainted with transphobia for the rest of their lives and they would probably never be able to get a job,’” the lawsuit claims.
Thomas’s male stature and strength also gave him an undeniable advantage over his female opponents. While he had been merely a passable swimmer on the men’s team, Thomas quickly shot to the top of the women’s leaderboard. “At the 2022 Ivy League Swimming Championships, Thomas came in first in the 500-, 200- and 100-yard freestyle races, setting pool and Ivy League records, and was ultimately the highest-scoring swimmer at the entire meet,” Fox News recounts.
From there, Thomas went on the NCAA Women’s Swimming Championships where he won the 500 yard freestyle individual title and tied for fifth place with the University of Kentucky’s Riley Gaines in the 200 yard freestyle event. Since there was only one fifth place trophy, the NCAA decided to award it to Thomas, giving Riley the sixth place award to hold for photo ops.
It was only during the summer of 2025 that the University of Pennsylvania, facing legal challenges from the new Trump administration over their handling of Title IX and other issues, finally apologized to the female swimmers that it had coerced into accepting a male as their teammate and updated their records to reflect the women who had lost to Thomas as the true victors, though Thomas’s name remains with an asterisk.
“While Penn’s policies during the 2021-2022 swim season were in accordance with NCAA eligibility rules at the time, we acknowledge that some student-athletes were disadvantaged by these rules,” Penn President J. Larry Jameson said. “We recognize this and will apologize to those who experienced a competitive disadvantage or experienced anxiety because of the policies in effect at the time.”
Jameson attempted to excuse Penn’s conduct in the case as consistent with the Biden administration’s interpretation of Title IX, but for the female swimmers whose rights to privacy and fair competition were violated, this excuse holds little substance. The actual law forbidding sex discrimination in education has not changed—only the administration’s interpretation of it as applying to so-called “gender identity,” a deeply flawed and disingenuous reading. Penn should have known and done better.
For its failure to protect its Jewish students from a hostile campus environment and its refusal to uphold the Title IX rights of its female students, the University of Pennsylvania belongs on the list of Academic Felons.
#5: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology might not at first glance seem a likely candidate for the list of Academic Felons. The hard sciences are supposed to be immune from woke doctrines. But in recent years, the science and math-geared behemoth has been corrupted by Jew hatred and leftist radicalism that has infiltrated the university’s classes and governance.
In a lawsuit filed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law against the university last June, two Jewish students accused MIT of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by failing to act when abhorrent acts of Jew hatred were committed against them, including by one of MIT’s own faculty members.
One of the plaintiffs, postdoctoral student Lior Alon, is a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces. In the months following Hamas’s barbaric October 7th attack on innocent Israeli Jews, Alon found himself increasingly subject to persecution on campus due to his Jewish background and his past service with the IDF.
“During anti-Israel encampment protests in spring term 2024, Alon was prohibited from entering the Kresge Lawn section of campus, through which he needed to pass to access his office,” describes The Algemeiner. “The edict allegedly came down from pro-Hamas activists and was enforced by an MIT police officer, who became an accessory to the group’s usurpation of school property.”
But the worst abuse came at the hands of one of MIT’s own esteemed professors.
Michel DeGraff serves as a Professor of Linguistics at MIT. The Haitian-born DeGraff makes no secret of his far-left political leanings or his extreme anti-Semitism. His official faculty webpage lists his research interests as “Language, linguistics, education & knowledge production for decolonization & radical liberation.” Just two weeks after October 7, DeGraff shared a video on Instagram which celebrated Hamas’s acts of terror as a solution to Israel’s “decades of land thefts, massacres, [and] second-class citizenship.” DeGraff commented that this analysis “might give us a few more reasons why we should be Gaza — if we celebrate Indigenous People’s Day, if we admire the Haitian Revolution and other acts of resistance against colonialism and slavery, etc.”
DeGraff has also invoked the terrorist slogan that Israel must be “liberated” from Jewish control “from the river to the sea” and praised a New Yorker article that drew parallels between “the ongoing genocide in Gaza” and the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews.
Aware of Alon’s status as both a Jew and an IDF veteran, in the months after October 7th DeGraff made it his personal mission to make the graduate student’s life hell. He publicly doxxed Alon by sharing his name and photo on social media and then tagging the Islamist news outlet Al Jazeera. The professor also wrote an article for Le Monde, a French publication, in which he called out Alon by name, writing “like many other Zionist counter-protesters, [Alon] participates in well-rehearsed propaganda that erases anti-Zionist Jewish students.” Alon’s lawsuit describes how he faced public harassment following these doxxing incidents and was even accosted at his child’s daycare.
Fearing for his own and his family’s safety, Alon sent an official notice to MIT President Sally Kornbluth asking that DeGraff be made to take down the social media postings doxxing him.
“I have been subjected to antisemitic harassment and defamation by a professor, including online doxxing, which has made me and my family fear for our safety,” Alon explained. Kornbluth did not reply, nor did the administration take any action whatsoever to rein in DeGraff’s horrific mistreatment of Alon whose only ‘crime’ was to be Jewish and a former member of the IDF.
Nor did DeGraff’s harassment of Jewish students stop with Alon. Another Jewish student, PhD candidate William Sussman, was also targeted.
The lawsuit describes how “Professor DeGraff posted a message targeting Sussman by name on his X platform of over 10,000 followers” adding that “Not a single administrator … intervened to stop the harassment or condemn the targeting of both a Jewish student and an Israeli professor in such a vicious and public way.”
DeGraff also sent mass emails to his entire academic department labeling Sussman as an example of a Jewish “mind infection”—a term the professor had adopted and frequently used in a seminar he was teaching titled “Language and Linguistics, from the River to the Sea in Palestine.” Astoundingly, DeGraff even cc’d MIT President Kornbluth on these department-wide emails, showing how assured he was of a sympathetic audience for his depraved rantings among the campus administration.
Again, Kornbluth and the rest of the MIT leadership took no action to halt the abuse. The lawsuit states that “while a long list of senior administrators witnessed the continuing antisemitic harassment of Sussman by a professor, the only person who spoke out in an attempt to protect Sussman was an Israeli professor who himself was targeted and harassed by Prof. DeGraff based on his Israeli identity.”
Leaflets that specifically called out Sussman by name were also placed under students’ dorm room doors. The flyers featured “white lettering on a green band (like those worn by Hamas)” describes the Jerusalem Post.
Sussman filed a formal complaint with MIT but was told by a university official that his complaint would not result in an investigation because DeGraff’s messages labeling Sussman a “mind infection” “do not suggest that Prof. DeGraff is treating you differently because you are Jewish.”
“It appears that Prof. DeGraff’s use of the ‘mind infection’ term relates to his views of the Israeli government, its education system, and how its ‘propaganda’ about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has impacted the discourse and events on US college campuses,” the MIT official wrote, justifying the use of the term.
Unable to continue his studies under DeGraff’s abuse, Sussman withdrew from the university and ended his pursuit of a PhD.
“Jews and Israelis on campus were prevented from fully engaging in their studies, their research, and the full spectrum of campus life,” states the lawsuit filed by Alon and Sussman. “They have been forced out of their programs, out of campus spaces, off campus, and even out of the university entirely.”
“This is a textbook example of neglect and indifference. Not only were several antisemitic incidents conducted at the hands of a professor, but MIT’s administration refused to take action on every single occasion,” Brandeis Center chairman Kenneth Marcus described. “The very people who are tasked with protecting students are not only failing them, but are the ones attacking them. In order to eradicate hate from campuses, we must hold faculty and the university administration responsible for their participation in — and in this case, their proliferation of — antisemitism and abuse.”
For its reprehensible failure to uphold Title VI and protect Jewish students from harassment and doxxing at the hands of a deranged professor, MIT deserves a place on the list of Academic Felons.
#6: The University of Louisville
Despite its location within the red state of Kentucky, The University of Louisville has demonstrated its abject contempt for the rule of law when it conflicts with the woke principles of the radical left.
In July, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) opened an investigation into the University of Louisville (along with four other universities) charging that they are in violation of the ‘national origins’ clause of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
That clause plainly states that: “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
Yet if the Trump Administration’s charges are true, Louisville is violating this law by sponsoring financial scholarships for tuition that can only go to illegal immigrants or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) students. Louisville is discriminating against students who are American citizens since they are unable to apply for these scholarships that are reserved for illegals. Other financial awards at Louisville are reserved for ethnic minorities—another violation of Title VI.
”Non-citizens should not be given special preference over American citizens for scholarships at American universities,” Trump-appointed Education Secretary Linda McMahon posted on X.
This isn’t a matter of complicated legal semantics. Title VI is crystal clear and has been on the books for over six decades. But this didn’t stop Louisville from using federal tax dollars to sponsor tuition for illegal aliens—no Americans need apply.
Among the awards being investigated are the Sagar Patagundi Scholarship as well as the Dawn Wilson Scholarship and Louisville Tango Festival Scholarship.
The Sagar Patagundi award is eponymously named. Patagundi is himself a DACA recipient who immigrated to America illegally from Mumbai at age 11, initially arriving on a visitor’s visa. The language describing the scholarship makes it clear that American citizens are not eligible, stating that it will “subsidize the cost of higher education…for undergraduate DACA and undocumented students;”
In an interview with Voyage LA, Patagundi shared his impetus for sponsoring a scholarship for illegals:
In Louisville, I found my voice. I became deeply involved in immigrant rights, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+, and women’s rights movements. Driven by my own experiences, I founded F.I.R.E. (Fighting for Immigrant Rights & Equality), a nonprofit dedicated to creating safe spaces for undocumented youth pursuing higher education…
Despite my contributions, I didn’t qualify for financial aid. Desperate to continue my education, I created a GoFundMe campaign, and with the support of my community, I graduated debt-free. In response to my work, the University of Louisville established the Sagar Patagundi Alumni Scholarship to help undocumented and underprivileged students attend college tuition-free—a testament to the impact of my journey.
Since the investigation was announced, all information about these awards appears to have been stripped from the university’s website.
“Protecting equal access to education includes protecting the rights of American-born students. At the Equal Protection Project, we are gratified that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is acting on our complaints regarding scholarships that excluded American-born students,” explained William A. Jacobson, founder of the Equal Protection Project. “Discrimination against American-born students must not be tolerated.”
The University of Louisville’s lawlessness extends beyond its funding of illegal scholarships. The public academic institution has also violated the First Amendment rights of its faculty by firing a prestigious psychology professor for making off-campus remarks criticizing radical gender ideology.
Professor Allan Josephson was hired by the University of Louisville in 2003 to lead its department of psychiatric and child psychology—a program that at the time was “struggling.” Following fifteen years under Josephson’s leadership, the department “now has a national reputation,” according to a lawsuit filed by on the professor’s behalf by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).
“He provided such superlative leadership that his supervisor … awarded him perfect marks in his 2014, 2015, and 2016 annual reviews,” the lawsuit describes.
This all changed after Josephson spoke out about his views on childhood gender transition—a topic that was practically unheard of when he was hired back in 2003, but that has rapidly become a huge topic of controversy in American society.
At a 2017 event held by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Josephson condemned the new practice of transitioning children who are confused about their gender and subjecting them to experimental treatments that can cause permanent life-altering changes such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. This path of medical intervention neglects “the developmental needs of children and relies on ideas that are just not true,” stated the professor—a view that has since been upheld by recent medical analyses such as Britain’s Cass Report.
At the Heritage Foundation forum, Josephson went on to explain that “the notion that gender identity should trump chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, and secondary sex characteristics when classifying individuals is counter to medical science.”
“Children persistently, insistently, and consistently demand many things that are not good for them,” he continued. “A parent’s role is to resist these demands when parental wisdom trumps children’s limited life experience.”
Astoundingly, Josephson’s remarks at this off-campus forum—which according to every principle of academic freedom as well as the professor’s personal constitutional right to free speech are legally protected—led to his firing by the University of Louisville in February of 2019.
“Universities are supposed to be a marketplace of ideas, but the University of Louisville is turning itself into an assembly line of one thought,” declared Travis Barham, an attorney for the Alliance Defending Freedom which took up the professor’s case.
After filing a lawsuit jointly with the Alliance Defending Freedom, the University of Louisville ultimately settled the suit last April to the tune of almost $1.6 million in damages and lawyer’s fees.
“Hopefully, other public universities will learn from this that if they violate the First Amendment, they can be held accountable, and it can be very expensive,” Barham, the ADF lawyer, commented.
The University of Louisville’s endorsement of scholarships reserved for illegal immigrants and its indefensible violation of the First Amendment rights of a prestigious professor earn it a place on the list of Academic Felons.
#7: Cornell University
For decades, many premier universities have illegally prioritized race and other diversity criteria in deciding who to hire or promote for academic and administrative positions. In the 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court confirmed that such conduct stands in direct violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and struck down the use of racial preferences or “affirmative action” in admissions and hiring decisions. But Cornell University, it seems, did not get the memo.
The Ivy League institution is now embroiled in an Equal Opportunity Commission Investigation after evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, a white male, found out through whistleblower emails that when he applied for a position at Cornell in 2020, the university systematically excluded all white applicants as part of their “diversity hire” process.
Wright partnered with the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) to lodge a complaint against Cornell in June. The complaint led to the EEOC investigation which could ultimately result in a lawsuit against the Ivy League behemoth.
“The evidence includes a December 23, 2020, email message from a department chair confirming that the tenure track faculty position in question would be filled through a ‘diversity hire’ process that excluded the great majority of qualified candidates because these persons lacked the targeted identity traits,” AFPI stated in its legal complaint. “Candidates were prescreened and selected, then invited one at a time, in a secret process with no advertised position opening to avoid any sense of competition on the part of the prospective candidates. Only individuals with certain favored identity characteristics (race, ethnicity, and/or sex) were considered for employment.”
AFPI goes on to describe how “a list of 20–30 preselected candidates, compiled purely based on identity screening, was used to guide the [hiring] process,” adding that “It is estimated that more than 98% of otherwise qualified applicants were excluded from employment consideration based on their disfavored identity characteristics, without these persons ever knowing an open Cornell faculty position existed.”
“When concerns were raised about the credentials of proposed hires, the Cornell faculty members who questioned the ‘diversity hire’ process were dismissed as ‘racist,’ and no further objections were tolerated,” the complaint notes.
“These practices violate not only the law but also the most basic principles of academic integrity and fairness,” AFPI concluded. “They also directly contradict [Cornell] President [Michael] Kotlikoff’s claims that merit governs Cornell’s hiring decisions.”
“One committee member described the process bluntly: ‘What we should be doing is inviting one person whom we have identified as being somebody that we would like to join our department and not have that person in competition with others,’” Wright described in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal
“That ‘somebody,’ who is black, was selected not because of research excellence, but because of race,” Wright added. “I was denied the chance to compete—so were other academics who might have been qualified.”
Wright had ample credentials for the open position at Cornell. “Over a 12-year career, he earned a doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and completed a postdoctoral position at Pennsylvania State University. He was also awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and published almost 30 peer-reviewed papers in academic journals,” The College Fix reports. In his Wall Street Journal piece Wright describes himself as an “evolutionary biologist, a liberal and a first-generation college graduate.” But none of this mattered when it came to the job opportunity at Cornell because he was excluded purely as a result of his race and gender.
Leigh Ann O’Neill, chief of staff at AFPI’s Center for Litigation which filed the initial complaint, described how the Cornell biology department “conspired with the Office of the Provost … to orchestrate a hiring scheme where the pool of candidates for an open position was predetermined.”
By “using a chosen preferred race as a defining factor,” she explained, Cornell was “thereby excluding all other potential candidates based on their race.” She labeled Cornell’s behavior as “by far the most blatantly unlawful hiring scheme” she’s seen.
Wright’s complaint is not the only pending suit that accuses Cornell of illegal discrimination. The university was recently forced to suspend one of its own professors for refusing to accept an Israeli student into his course on Gaza.
That professor, Eric Cheyfitz, serves as a professor of American studies and humane letters at the school. He is a well-known anti-Isreal activist who has partnered in the past with the campus chapter of the Hamas-funded Students for Justice in Palestine and has also served as the faculty advisor for Cornell’s Jewish Voice for Peace, another anti-Israel group.
The course in question is titled “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance.”
Students in Chaifitz’s class will learn to “analyze Indigenous perspectives on political, social, and environmental systems,” in the context of a “global war against an ongoing colonialism,” states the course description.
When an Israeli student attempted to sign up for the class, Chaifitz, in direct violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, told the student that he was not welcome due to his national background.
Cheyfitz “admitted to actions that violated federal civil rights laws and fell short of the university’s expectations for student interactions,” a spokesman for Cornell told the New York Post. Under pressure after this blatantly illegal faculty conduct, Cornell suspended Professor Cheyfitz pending a disciplinary investigation. The aging professor elected to retire rather than see the disciplinary procedures to their conclusion.
For its blatant discrimination against both students and faculty in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, Cornell deserves its place on the list of Academic Felons.
#8: San Jose State University
While a number of prominent colleges and universities have violated Title IX by allowing biological men to play on women’s collegiate sports teams, perhaps nowhere was the favoritism and bias more evident than at San Jose State University where trans-identified male athlete Blaire Fleming was given a coveted spot on the women’s volleyball team roster.
Fleming’s mere participation is a violation of the law, but the trans athlete was also treated with extraordinary favoritism and allowed to flout team rules. He also allegedly plotted to injure a teammate critical of his place on the women’s team—a potential crime that received only a cursory investigation by a firm already invested in Fleming’s success.
Instead of defending its female players, San Jose State chose to stand by Fleming and attempted to silence female athletes and an assistant coach who disagreed with the decision to allow a male on their team.
Fleming’s participation in female sports did not receive much attention until his senior year when an article from Reduxx, an online magazine that is critical of transgender ideology, helped to expose his role on SJSU’s women’s volleyball team. The news that one of their female players was actually male was already well known to the coaches and administrators at SJSU, as well as to many of the student athletes on the volleyball squad.
One of Fleming’s teammates was Brooke Slusser who was initially Fleming’s friend and roommate after transferring to San Jose for her junior season in 2023. Slusser has stated publicly that she initially had no idea that Fleming was actually a male.
When Slusser transferred to SJSU in her junior year in the fall of 2023, she had no knowledge that Fleming, one of her volleyball teammates and roommates, was transgender.
“They didn’t tell anyone. The school, the staff, they didn’t talk about it whatsoever,” Slusser said.
“At no point during Slusser’s recruitment or the 2023 volleyball season did her coach, Todd Kress, or SJSU inform Slusser that Fleming was male, even when her coach and the athletic department frequently assigned her to room with Fleming on road trips,” describes the California Insider.
“Slusser would not have roomed with Fleming or changed clothes in front of Fleming if Slusser had known Fleming was male,” a lawsuit filed by Slusser states.
Slusser eventually discovered the truth about Fleming’s sex but was cautioned by team coach Todd Kress and other SJSU officials not to comment on his participation on the women’s team. As the controversy ramped up, other universities in the Mountain West conference began to willingly forfeit games against San Jose State rather than participate in an unfair contest and face a male athlete on the court. Unable to keep quiet any longer, Slusser joined a number of other female athletes in a lawsuit against SJSU and the Mountain West conference for violating Title IX.
The volleyball team’s assistant coach, Melissa Batie-Smoose, soon filed her own Title IX complaint to defend the women’s team and was immediately suspended indefinitely for daring to speak out on their behalf.
“My assistant coach spoke truth to protect my team. Then… they (suspend) her. They took away the only safe space we had in the program. Because she knew that it was right to stand up for the 18 women on the team. Not one man,” Slusser commented on X.
The complaints from Slusser and Batie-Smoose made the public aware of even more disturbing allegations regarding Fleming: that the trans athlete had potentially conspired with a competitor to attempt to injure Slusser on the court.
According to the lawsuit filed by Slusser, the night before a team match against Colorado State, Fleming along with several of his teammates snuck out of their hotel room (which is a violation of team rules) in order to visit Colorado State volleyball opponent Malaya Jones. One of those teammates who was present at the meeting later told the SJSU coaches that trans player Fleming had plotted with Jones to deliberately spike Slusser in the face during the teams’ October 3 face-off.
“[The teammate Chandler] Manuskey said that at Jones’ residence Fleming had shared with Jones the scouting for the CSU-FC game and they had discussed Fleming ‘throw[ing] the game’ and how they would set up Jones to ‘blow up’ Slusser and ‘blast’ her in the face during the game,” the court documents state.
“Manuskey also said that Fleming stated, ‘I’m going to leave center court open,’ which would allow Malaya Jones to have a wide-open shot to try to ‘blow up Slusser,’ i.e., to try to hit Brooke Slusser in the face with the ball.”
Slusser’s teammate Chandler Manuskey described Fleming’s plot to injure Slusser to her coaches before the next day’s match, but according to legal documents, head coach Todd Kress refused to believe her. Kress was forced to investigate the allegations, but instead of hiring a neutral party, he selected the same law firm that was helping to protect Fleming’s eligibility to play in women’s volleyball.
Fox News describes how “attorney Tim Heaphy of the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher led a third-party investigation into allegations against San Jose State’s transgender volleyball player Blaire Fleming of conspiring with an opponent to harm a teammate. Heaphy carried this out in the same month that other partners in his firm worked to protect Fleming’s eligibility to compete in women’s college volleyball. Heaphy later offered the school legal counsel to help it navigate a federal Title IX investigation over the same situation.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fleming was cleared of any wrongdoing by this supposedly impartial investigation in just three days.
If Fleming and Jones had followed through on this plot, it could have caused severe injury to Slusser who was still feeling effects from a concussion the previous year.
“It’s obvious once this was put out into the public that there’s so much bias in this situation, and they’re trying to just sweep these things under the rug and not have to deal with it when there’s obvious problems going on all over the place,” Slusser said in an interview on Fox News.
“They need to be held accountable for using the same law firm and not doing a thorough investigation because Title IX was built to protect women, and they’re obviously deciding to protect the man in this situation when they were blatantly trying to harm a female athlete at their school, and they’re still backing this male athlete and that’s just wrong all over the place. And there’s schools all over the nation doing this, they’re just not getting the spotlight it deserves.”
San Jose State University’s deliberate violation of Title IX by allowing a man to play women’s volleyball and its subsequent censoring and persecution of the female players and assistant coach who dared to speak out, earn the university its place on the list of Academic Felons.
#9: The University of Arizona
As a public educational institute, the University of Arizona is bound by the precepts of the United States Constitution, among them the First Amendment which allows faculty and students to speak and write freely in their private lives without it affecting their status with the university. But a lawsuit from a recently-fired adjunct professor at the university reveals that UA has likely violated this obligation by dismissing a professor for his off-campus comments and activism critical of transgender ideology.
The faculty member in question, Daniel Grossenbach, had served as an adjunct professor of ethics at the university for three years when he was unexpectedly terminated from his position. At the time, Grossenbach was told that his termination was necessary in order to hire more full-time professors with doctorate degrees, a reasonable explanation that resonated with him. “If you have an expert, that’s even better for the students. That sounds understandable,” Grossenbach told The College Fix.
The professor soon found reason to question this rationale when he found that the university was advertising for an adjunct professor in his former department—the same exact position from which he had just been terminated.
“These advertised positions were a fit for Professor Grossenbach’s background, skills, and experience and were virtually identical to what he was already doing before Defendants terminated his employment on the pretextual basis that it was seeking a full-time instructor to cover his courses,” describes the lawsuit filed by Grossenbach with assistance from the Christian legal group Liberty Council. “In other words, Defendants were not even seeking to hire a fulltime professor for Professor Grossenbach’s courses as they had told him. Rather, Defendants were seeking an adjunct professor—who was not the target of an anonymous censorship campaign—to fill Professor Grossenbach’s prior role.”
After filing a public records request with the university—and waiting over nine months for it to be granted—Grossenbach’s suspicions were verified.
The university’s own heavily redacted records revealed that administration officials had discussed his work with a parental rights group, Save Catalina Foothills School District (SaveCFSD) which opposes the school district’s policy of allowing minor children to “transition” genders without the knowledge and consent of their parents.
Grossenbach, who has multiple children attending schools in the Catalina Foothills district, had founded SaveCFSD “to petition the district over ‘policies and practices of hiding minors’ mental health information as a violation of fundamental parental rights,’” describes The College Fix. “SaveCFSD claims the district has hidden minors’ mental health information, distributed gender identity surveys, and maintained secret lists of students requesting alternative names and pronouns, all without notifying parents.”
The organization’s website describes how the once well-respected school district had recently gone “woke,” resulting in 40% of families in the area opting out of public education. An ominous-sounding “Did you know?” section on the website describes how students in the district received a survey asking for their preferred pronouns and then asking for permission to use these same pronouns when speaking with a parent.
“Some [surveys] went further to ask other private facts like the minor child’s sexual desires,” the website adds. “As of today, no CFSD official or staff member has responded to these parents with a copy of the survey as the law requires.”
“CFSD Allows 18 Year-Old BOYS to Undress and Shower with 14 Year-Old GIRLS,” states another article on the website which highlights the school district’s contradictory attempts to explain its own policy on restroom and changing room use.
Incensed by Grossenbach’s activism with SaveCFSD on behalf of parents’ and students’ rights, anonymous activists apparently contacted his employer, the University of Arizona, complaining that he ran an “anti-gay hate group,” and spread “misinformation.” Shortly thereafter, he was suspiciously terminated from his employment with the university.
“This discrepancy fueled his legal action,” The College Fix explains, “as Grossenbach is now suing the University of Arizona, seeking reinstatement, back pay, damages for reputational harm, and an injunction against speech-restricting policies. He alleges violations of his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.”
The professor is also accusing the university of violating the public records law in Arizona by initially rejecting his request for documents related to his termination and then delaying fulfilling that request for 239 days.
The lawsuit filed by the Liberty Council details a much more convincing reason why Grossenbach was fired from his position at the University of Arizona than that initially offered by the university:
Professor Grossenbach was compelled by his sincerely held religious beliefs to form SaveCFSD, and he felt led by his religious convictions to urge parents to attend CFSD school board meetings for the purpose of petitioning the board to address this gross intrusion into parental rights. Anti-religious zealots turned digital critics connected over the issue in Facebook comments and bandied about to discuss a way to silence Professor Grossenbach and SaveCFSD. As is oft true of those determined to silence speech they do not like, the self-appointed digital censors settled on what they deemed the most effective method of silencing Professor Grossenbach—get him fired from his job. And that is what they went about doing, and in November 2023, the University obliged their demands.
The self-appointed digital censors and anti-religious zealots took their complaints about Professor Grossenbach’s speech and advocacy to his employer and lodged numerous anonymous complaints against Professor Grossenbach. After those anonymous complaints were filed, Professor Grossenbach was fired. Of course, knowing that basing its termination upon complaints targeting Professor Grossenbach for the exercise of his First Amendment rights is grossly unconstitutional and unlawful, Defendants provided a pretextual explanation for their actions. Defendants concocted the explanation that they had received funding for a full-time faculty member to take Professor Grossenbach’s place as an adjunct professor and to teach his course in the Spring semester.
In this manner, Grossman and the Liberty Council allege, these radical trans activists convinced the University of Arizona to illegally fire a professor for his off-campus activism as a concerned father.
“Indeed, responses and public records confirmed that Defendants terminated Professor Grossenbach shortly after receiving anonymous complaints about his religious speech, expression, and advocacy work with SaveCFSD and had internally placed a hold on his courses almost immediately after receiving those complaint,” describes the lawsuit.
“[The University of Arizona’s] actions have inflicted irreparable damage to Professor Grossenbach’s professional career and reputation, ended his academic pursuit of a doctorate degree, decreased his earning potential, and reduced his income,” stated the Liberty Counsel in a press release. “Further, when Professor Grossenbach was terminated, he lost a potential textbook publishing deal, furthering his financial loss and reputational damage.”
“Professors at public universities and colleges do not shed their constitutional rights to free speech and religious exercise when they work for a university,” commented Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver. “Professor Daniel Grossenbach engaged in constitutionally protected speech, religious expression, and religious exercise and was speaking on matters of public concern regarding his faith, morality, and the community. The University of Arizona cannot fire a professor for his protected speech. Viewpoint discrimination is unlawful and violates the First Amendment and religious discrimination violates Title VII.”
For its alleged illegal firing of Professor Daniel Grossenbach and its abhorrent attempts to interfere with a father’s right to oversee his children’s education, the University of Arizona belongs on the list of Academic Felons.
#10: Golden West College
Golden West College located in Huntington Beach, California, is a public educational institution that claims to pride itself on its intellectual openness and diversity of thought. But hidden in the mission and values statements of the university are a torrent of left-wing buzzwords that point towards the institution’s failure to protect free speech and the expression of diverse political and ideological perspectives as is required by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
“Golden West College provides culturally affirming educational opportunities for our students and community to achieve upward mobility,” states the College’s mission statement. “Our academic excellence, exceptional student services, and community partnerships empower students to achieve personal and academic goals and contribute toward an inclusive and equitable society.”
The College’s official statement of “values” includes “Equity Through Servingness” which is defined as being committed to “culturally affirming classroom approaches, fostering community engagement, and identity development.” The description continues: “As a minority-serving institution, we are equity-centered in curriculum, programs, and hiring practices to advance social mobility and civic engagement.”
When the Golden West College chapter of Young America’s Foundation dared to question the Left’s sacred cows including illegal immigration and the dictum that trans women are women, they found their legal constitutional rights sacrificed on this altar of left-wing wokeness.
In February of last year, student activists Annaliese Hutchings and Matin Samimiat, who ironically was born in the fascist nation of Iran, manned a booth for Young America’s Foundation at Golden West’s Club Expo, a forum to advertise student activities to interested students.
Their YAF booth contained a large sign encouraging debate. It read: “CHANGE MY MIND!!! • It is a privilege to be an American and we should all be thankful for it. • Illegal immigration is a cancer upon any society in the world. • Men do not belong in women’s sports and spaces.”
While potentially controversial, the sign was clearly protected by the students’ First Amendment right to free expression on a public college campus. But Golden West college administrators didn’t see it that way.
Following the Expo, Samimiat was contacted by College Disciplinary Officer Stephanie Smallshaw (never a good sign) who told him that her office had received “several reports” relating to “some messaging on a white board at your booth” and insisted on a meeting to discuss the matter.
Before the meeting could take place, the YAF students displayed another white board at a different college club preview day which contained similar perspectives to the previous one, including the statement that “Hamas is a terrorist organization, and they must be wiped from the face of the earth.”
When the meeting finally took place on March 20, the YAF students were told that their statements were offensive and were threatened with disciplinary action if they continued to express them.
The Institute for Free Speech, a legal organization which took up the case on behalf of the students and YAF, describes what happened next:
Smallshaw [the College Disciplinary Officer] warned Samimiat, joined by YAF Vice President Hutchings, that they would face discipline for continuing to express these views. When Samimiat pushed back, citing his firsthand perspective of growing up in Iran—a country he described as “the biggest supporter of Hamas”—Smallshaw dismissed his personal experience and told him it was “not his responsibility” to create environments for students to engage with difficult topics.
When Samimiat then reported that other students had directed vulgar personal attacks at him—including telling the Iranian-born American citizen to “Go back to your f*cking country”—Smallshaw suggested that the students’ own “provocative language” expressing conservative viewpoints triggered these personal attacks.
Samimiat responded by stating his willingness to alter the tone of YAF’s signage without changing the message, but the administrator refused to outline what language might be considered acceptable without violating the College’s disciplinary code.
“I left Iran to enjoy the amazing freedom that the United States offers. Now I find myself threatened with punishment for expressing political opinions—because they happen to be opinions that administrators don’t like,” Samimiat said in a statement provided to The College Fix, which reported on the case.
Unwilling to accept this violation of their legal rights, the YAF students got in touch with the Institute for Free Speech which filed a case against Golden West College in federal district court in California.
In July 2025, following months of being involuntarily muzzled by their own educational institution, the students and their attorneys achieved a striking victory for free expression. Finding itself up against a legal wall, Golden West agreed to settle the lawsuit by repealing its unconstitutional disciplinary code which had formerly prohibited “hateful behavior” and “infliction of mental harm” and pay over $25,000 in attorney fees as well as nominal damages to the students.
“Students shouldn’t have to try to guess what speech is allowed by college administrators or fear punishment for taking a political stance,” said Institute for Free Speech Vice President for Litigation Alan Gura. “Public college officials can’t silence students simply because the students’ constitutionally protected opinions might offend others—that’s exactly the kind of viewpoint discrimination the Constitution forbids. This settlement ensures that students can now engage in robust political debate without administrative censorship or threats.”
“This settlement reminds us that the First Amendment still means something in America,” commented student Matin Samimiat. “When I came to this country from Iran, I never imagined I’d have to fight for the same free speech rights here that were denied to me there. But thanks to this victory, future students won’t have to choose between expressing their deeply held beliefs and facing discipline under an unconstitutional speech policy.”
For its illegal persecution of conservative students who were expressing their constitutionally protected beliefs, Golden West College belongs on the list of Academic Felons.