Hundreds of Jewish faculty members, staff, and students who work for Columbia University will be eligible to claim a slice of the $21 million it is paying to settle accusations that they suffered unlawful discrimination because Columbia failed to confront antisemitism on campus.
Columbia’s agreement with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is “the largest religious discrimination harassment settlement that we’ve ever achieved in our 60-year history” and the agency’s largest settlement of any kind in about 20 years, Andrea Lucas, acting chair of the EEOC, told The Free Press.
The deal includes every Jewish employee at Columbia—and is in addition to the $200 million fine that Columbia agreed to pay over three years to resolve civil rights investigations of the Ivy League institution. The $21 million EEOC settlement is equal to about 0.3 percent of Columbia’s operating revenue of $6.6 billion in fiscal 2024. Columbia students who are Jewish but don’t work for the university are ineligible for the payouts.
The Trump administration’s truce with Columbia goes much further than payouts or fines. It serves as a watershed moment in our nation’s reckoning over the antisemitism that erupted, and then flourished, at colleges and universities across the United States since October 7, 2023.
Lucas told The Free Press that the EEOC’s investigations have found “things out of Nazi Germany.” Students were turned away from educational and work spaces, Jewish faculty were too scared to go to work, students were terrified of getting assaulted or harassed while walking across campus, and much more. “This was a really grave civil-rights violation at a really large scale,” she said.
Inside the government and at Columbia, though, there is tension over whether the Columbia deal will actually inspire fundamental change at the Ivy League institution.
