[This press release used to reside at the Department of Education’s website but was removed by about January 19, 2025]
PRESS RELEASE
Emory University in Georgia enters into resolution agreement to ensure compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with respect to alleged harassment of students based on national origin – shared Palestinian and/or Muslim ancestry
January 16, 2025
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) today announced that Emory University in Georgia has entered into a resolution agreement to ensure compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with respect to alleged harassment of students based on national origin (shared Palestinian and/or Muslim ancestry).
OCR’s investigation identified Title VI compliance concerns regarding the university’s response to campus protest activity and to notice the university received of discrimination against Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim university students, based on shared ancestry, that could contribute to or create a hostile environment for students. Specifically, OCR is concerned that the gratuitous violence of the law enforcement activity reflected in widely publicized videos from the arrests during the April 2024 protests may have created a hostile environment within the campus community for Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim university members and those perceived to have associated with them. Additionally, OCR identified concerns that the university’s publicly available policies and procedures for receiving and responding to reports of discrimination based on national origin and race lack the clarity necessary to ensure that the university provides a prompt and effective response, consistent with the requirements of Title VI, to reports and complaints of race and national origin discrimination. And at the university’s request, OCR agreed to resolve the allegations regarding different treatment without making a determination as to whether those allegations raise Title VI compliance concerns, given the scope of remedy already confirmed to date in this investigation.
OCR recognizes Emory’s efforts during the pendency of this investigation to address a climate that the university characterized as marked by anxiety, tension, and fear for Palestinian, Arab, and/or Muslim university students. The university acknowledged “shocking” and “deeply distressing” scenes from the law enforcement response to the April 24 protests and expressed willingness to launch a thorough review, including of how Emory engages external law enforcement. In conjunction with the commitments made today in signing this resolution agreement, Emory has committed to ensuring a safe and non-discriminatory educational environment for all students.
OCR determined that monitoring the university’s fulfillment of the following terms of the resolution agreement announced today will effectively ensure the university’s compliance with the requirements of Title VI not to discriminate based on national origin, including shared ancestry:
• Revising its nondiscrimination policies and procedures to ensure all university offices consistently and effectively comply with Title VI, including a definition of harassment that includes harassment based on actual or perceived shared ancestry.
• Revising its policies and procedures pertaining to campus protests, demonstrations, and related forms of expression, to ensure that they provide safeguards for non- discriminatory application and enforcement, including with regard to granting requests for approval of planned protest or demonstration, and its response to these activities including whether to contact outside law enforcement.
• Assessing its response to campus protests, and its decisions regarding student requests for approval to conduct protests, during the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 academic years.
• Providing OCR copies of all complaints and reports concerning alleged national origin discrimination, including shared ancestry, or race, and the university’s response to those reports or complaints during the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 academic years, and taking remedial actions if required; and
• Conducting annual training on nondiscrimination and harassment for all students and employees, Title VI investigators and law enforcement utilized at the university;
• Developing and administering a climate survey to students and employees (survey subjects) at the university to identify whether the survey subjects feel they have been or are currently subjected to or have witnessed discrimination, including harassment, on campus or during university related activities, based on race and national origin, specifically including shared ancestry and ethnic characteristics.
“Emory University’s commitments today promise to bring it into compliance with federal civil rights law, as its full school community deserves,” said Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine E. Lhamon.
The resolution letter to the Emory University and the resolution agreement are available on the Office for Civil Rights’ website.
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Page Last Reviewed:
January 16, 2025
Tag: Emory University
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On April 25, 2024, Emory University President Gregory Fenves violated Emory's open expression policy by abruptly terminating a peaceful protest brutally and violently, enlisting the police to attack demonstrators with pepper spray, rubber bullets, and tasers. Today Fenves violated the policy again, issuing restrictions unilaterally, completely disregarding long-standing principles of shared governance. His move is contrary to the the policy's clear statement that only the University Senate oversees any revisions to the policy. The university senate was told about the new policies but not consulted. The administration decided unilaterally and abruptly, claiming there was no time to consult the senate since students were already on campus -- even though it had the whole summer beforehand to do so.
As Emory University Senate President George Shepherd wrote to Fenves, "Indeed, Emory’s Respect for Open Expression Policy (ROEP) itself mandates a central role for the Senate in changes to the ROEP. Section 8.14.3.2 indicates that changes to the policy come from the Senate after the Committee on Open Expression (the Committee) fulfills its duty to regularly review this Policy and its applicability, and to recommend changes to the University Senate as necessary. For many years, that is how changes to the policy have occurred: the Committee and/or Senate suggests changes, and then the administration decides whether to adopt them, and usually does."
The university announcement of the new regulations excels in double-speak, making it sound as if it is working with the senate. Do not be fooled. This is absolutely not the case.
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In a “revisioning fact sheet” published December 7, 2012, on Emory University’s news page following student protests, the Emory College administration gave a brief account of the rationale and process for its plan to close and reorganize programs “in order to reallocate funds to support others areas of the arts and sciences program.” The first five “facts” offered an account of how the process followed the bylaws and appropriate consultation. I believe these claims warrant another look. The claims listed below are taken verbatim from the administration’s fact sheet. The alternate account below each claim draws on documents from college and university governance, open letters from and to various official bodies, AAUP documents, and news accounts. I had help from a few other faculty members in writing this up. I invite others to use the comments section to make further corrections, both to the university’s account and to the alternative account I am offering. It is indeed a very complicated story.
Claim: The process was guided by the bylaws adopted by Emory College of Arts and Sciences faculty 11 years ago.
Counter-Claim: The ECAS bylaws allow the Governance Committee (GovCom) to appoint a subcommittee. On 2/11/2009 GovCom announced that it had formed a subcommittee named the College Financial Advisory Committee (CFAC), which previously had been an ad hoc committee appointed by the dean after the financial crisis of Fall 2008.[1] Per the minutes of the 2/11/2009 meeting, in its new incarnation the subcommittee CFAC would report to GovCom. But in the intervening years all the duly elected members of GovCom did not receive reports from its subcommittee. According to the minutes of its April 2011 meeting, one member of GovCom, Michael Sullivan, “expressed the concern that although this committee reports to GovCom, much of its discussion is deemed confidential. Thus GovCom is seen to be responsible for a committee while being kept in the dark about its work.” (See these minutes from the April 20, 2011 meeting of GovCom.) While it is true that the bylaws allow the GovCom to appoint a subcommittee and that there are no provisions in the bylaws for how this subcommittee should be constituted or how long its members should serve, that the full GovCom was not apprised of its subcommittee’s work raises questions about how well it could oversee the subcommittee or report to the faculty what was happening.
Without regular and full reports from CFAC to GovCom, GovCom gave only sporadic and brief reports in its minutes to the faculty. (See GovCom minutes on Blackboard.) Moreover, the membership of the CFAC subcommittee of GovCom is not listed on the GovCom’s webpage or in its folder on blackboard, making it difficult for the faculty as a whole to know or inquire about the process. And according to a story in the Emory Wheel, the chair of CFAC had at times purposely deceived faculty members who inquired about the process. This lack of communication departs from the mandate laid out in Article V of the bylaws that GovCom and the other standing committees have (exempting a specified few per Article 5, Sect. 2, H) to communicate with the faculty as a whole.
Emory University bylaws state in Article IV Section 1 that the faculty has “responsibility for… and jurisdiction over” curricula and instructional programming, while Section 2 states that the administration is responsible to “exercise leadership in the development of educational policies and programs.” Together these statements articulate the principle of shared governance, which is at the core of the statement on governance agreed to in 1966 jointly by AAUP, the American Council on Education (ACE) and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB). Emory University is a member of both ACE and AGB.
Claim: The process has taken more than three years and involved appropriate consultation with duly elected faculty committees.
Counter-Claim: Appropriate consultation would have followed the principle laid out in section 2 of the Statement on Joint Government of Colleges and Universities:
The framing and execution of long-range plans, one of the most important aspects of institutional responsibility, should be a central and continuing concern in the academic community. Effective planning demands that the broadest possible exchange of information and opinion should be the rule for communication among the components of a college or university. The channels of communication should be established and maintained by joint endeavor. Distinction should be observed between the institutional system of communication and the system of responsibility for the making of decisions.
The shortcomings in full communication described above seem contrary to the Statement’s call for “the broadest possible exchange of information and opinion” within the Emory College of Arts and Sciences.
The situation is even more problematic with the decisions made by the dean of the Laney Graduate School. LGS’s governance structure calls for consultation with Directors of Graduate Study, an elected Executive Council, and an Appointments Committee. In an open letter to AAUP and the LGS faculty, sent to the LGS Dean on November 15, 2012, members of the LGS Executive Council, which bears responsibility for long term program development and planning, expressed dismay that they had never been consulted.
In addition to open communication with the faculties and representatives of the college and the graduate school, appropriate consultation would have also included many other faculty bodies: the Provost’s commission on the liberal arts, the collective of department and program chairs, and the Humanities, Science, Social Science and Arts Councils, not to mention the full faculty or members of affected departments themselves.
Claim: Consultation appropriately involved faculty rather than students, since faculty have authority over the curriculum.
Counter-Claim: As noted above, consultation did not appropriately involve faculty. If it had been an appropriate process, students should have been welcome to participate. As the Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities states,
When students in American colleges and universities desire to participate responsibly in the government of the institution they attend, their wish should be recognized as a claim to opportunity both for educational experience and for involvement in the affairs of their college or university. Ways should be found to permit significant student participation within the limits of attainable effectiveness.
Claim: The authorized faculty committees have endorsed both the process and the outcome.
Counter-Claim: As noted above, the LGS Executive Council has explicitly stated that it was never consulted. Moreover, College faculty have repeatedly questioned aspects of the process. Even former Provost Earl Lewis noted during his address to College faculty on Oct. 30, 2012, that “the process was flawed” although he deemed the outcomes to be correct.
Claim: These decisions and the process by which they were reached have been endorsed by the Provost, the President, and the Board of Trustees of the University. The Board also recently reaffirmed its support for the decision, the process, and the work of the deans of the College of Arts and Sciences and the Laney Graduate School.
Counter-Claim: While these decisions do have endorsement from the upper administration, on December 12, 2012, the Emory College faculty voted in favor of a motion to appoint an independent, faculty review of the process leading to the decisions.
[1] At the meeting of the GovCom held earlier the same day, according to minutes of the meeting, the committee was considering whether or not to make the CFAC a separate standing committee. In the end it passed a unanimous resolution to make it a subcommittee.
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Emory President James Wagner gave his annual State of the University address last week. For those, like me, who weren’t able to attend, here are some links.
First, click here to read the story in the student newspaper plus comments.
University President James W. Wagner engaged in heated discussions with faculty, staff and students at the ninth annual State of the University Address Tuesday evening.
Second, a link to the youtube video of the address itself (minus the heated question and answer session).
And third a link to an audio file of the Q&A.
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As Emory University’s philosophy department just announced on its website, I’m joining the faculty there this coming fall. As an associate professor of philosophy I will continue my work as a public philosopher and my research in democratic theory, feminist philosophy, ethics, contemporary European philosophy, and pragmatism. It’s an honor and a privilege to be joining this incredibly productive faculty that values pluralism and the history of philosophy. Emory’s philosophy department is a model for what a philosophy department can be.
All this makes the prospect of once again packing up and moving a household and a zillion books okay.
gonepublic by Noëlle McAfee 