Like some other D.O.J. lawyers who were assigned to the task force, Van Erem began to suspect that the investigations were “outcome-driven”: instead of collecting facts and evaluating whether the alleged discrimination was severe and pervasive enough to create a “hostile environment,” as was normally done in Title VI cases, the object appeared to be to confirm a predetermined conclusion, in order to justify imposing punishments on universities—severe punishments. On April 4th, Van Erem learned through news coverage that the Trump Administration had blocked five hundred million dollars in previously awarded federal funding to Brown, reportedly because of the investigation that the task force had launched—an investigation that had scarcely begun, much less turned up evidence of culpability.
Van Erem and five other D.O.J. attorneys proceeded to send an e-mail to their superiors at the Department of Health and Human Services. “We believe it would be inappropriate at this time to pull funding based on that investigation,” they wrote. In response, Van Erem told me, they were summoned to an in-person meeting at H.H.S. headquarters, where they were assured that the funding freeze was unrelated to Title VI violations. Van Erem said that at the meeting Sean Keveney, the agency’s acting general counsel at the time, instructed her and her peers to reach out to him in person with future concerns. As he spoke, Van Erem started taking notes. Keveney, she said, looked at her disapprovingly and said that her note-taking was making him nervous. To Van Erem, the message was clear. “The subtext was to tell us, Don’t record things, don’t keep things in writing, don’t raise your concerns in this manner,” she said. (Neither H.H.S. nor Keveney responded to a request for comment; Keveney recently left the agency.)
A few weeks later, Van Erem attended another meeting, where investigators who had conducted an on-site visit to Brown presented their findings. Asked about the worst antisemitism they’d uncovered, the investigators described a violent threat in February, 2024, that had been e-mailed to senior staff of the Glenn and Darcy Weiner Center, a campus facility serving Jewish students at Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design. Brown responded by immediately alerting law enforcement and bolstering security. On another occasion, members of the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine staged a protest outside the medical school during a university board meeting and then followed members as they walked out. The group was promptly suspended, the investigators indicated. The standard used to hold schools liable for Title VI violations is “deliberate indifference.” Far from corroborating this standard, rabbis and Jewish student leaders whom the investigators interviewed praised Brown for its swift and effective response to potential threats. One person described the university as a great place to be Jewish.
After this meeting, Van Erem suggested that the task force send Brown a “notice of no violation.” The “higher-ups” would not accept this, she was told by her superiors. Instead, the Trump Administration and Brown reached an agreement to end the investigations and to have the school’s research grants restored, in which Brown agreed to pay fifty million dollars to workforce-development programs in Rhode Island over a ten-year period. The university also agreed to adopt the government’s definition of “male” and “female” in housing and athletic programs, and to remove any consideration of race from its admissions process. In a press release, the White House stated that “Brown’s failure to address anti-Semitism and ensure fair treatment for all students raised urgent concerns about student safety and equal opportunities.” When I asked Van Erem whether she thought that this statement was accurate, she said, “No, our investigation found that we would have a difficult time establishing that Brown had not appropriately responded to allegations of antisemitism.”
Misrepresenting the facts was one of Van Erem’s concerns. Violating the First Amendment was another. At one point, she was asked to review a draft document detailing alleged Title VI violations at Columbia, which, like Brown, had hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding suspended for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students from discrimination. According to Van Erem, much of the alleged discrimination that the draft described was political speech—in particular, speech about Israel and Gaza which she felt should be protected on campuses, not banned.
