Over the summer of 2026, Reed College came to a settlement over a Title VI complaint filed by the ADL on behalf of two students who had experienced antisemitism. Many similar settlements have occurred in recent years under similar circumstances. To find out more about why and how agreements with ADL and schools have been occurring all across the country, the Quest spoke with Nora Lester Murad from the campaign, Drop the ADL From Schools. Murad was a founding member of the group which built on #DroptheADL, which began in 2020. She described how their goal “was aimed at getting progressive organizations and even liberal organizations to understand that the ADL is not an ally—as it misrepresents itself to be—and that the ADL has and continues… to partner with progressives or organizations of communities of color in ways that hide their actual impact and intent.” The move towards working within the realm of K-12 and higher education was a reframing of some of their strategies and language to work more specifically for schools. The goal of Drop the ADL From Schools became “to get the schools to understand that the ADL is not an educational organization, it is a political advocacy organization… It's not a partner, it's a predator.”
These organizations formed in response to a dramatic increase in the weaponization of civil rights law (particularly Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act) which has occurred since the mid-2010s and particularly after October 2023. This “lawfare” has become more prevalent as a tactic among right-wing organizations, and it seems that Reed has become a recent target. Murad finds the process deeply troubling, as “the ADL, the Louis D. Brandeis Center, Stand With Us, [and] Deborah Project… want schools to have this certain set of policies. [To accomplish this they] make bad faith accusations, and get the school to [adopt] their policies just like a protection racket. Now the school is enforcing the policies of this external political actor.” The argument is that the process of using federal lawsuits to pressure schools to adopt ADL policy is an infringement on an institution’s self-determination—and its ethical obligations.
Murad noted that, in dealings between complainants (like the ADL), the accused (like Reed), and the government, there’s pressure for a quick settlement to be made before the government begins a full investigation. As Murad put it, before a full investigation, “[the Office for Civil Rights] would always try to mediate a solution if possible.” That is, the government was happy if the two settled voluntarily, because that ostensibly meant the plaintiff got the change they wanted to see and the defendant was amenable to it. For schools, it was easier to just accept the terms of the ADL, which seemed harmless enough on paper, rather than risk a full federal investigation and the potential repercussions if it was found that a Title VI violation had actually occurred. Murad described how, “It never was in anyone's interest to finish the investigation, because they might find something, right? So you might as well settle it.”
Essentially, when the ADL files a complaint against a school, the school may go straight to communications with the ADL to preemptively avoid a government investigation, which results in “a private settlement that's taking place outside of the context of federal policy, of federal law, federal oversight. It's just a private agreement, and that's happening more and more.” In particular, Murad pointed out that “I think Reed is an egregious example of [preemptive agreement], and that's why a lot of people are looking at Reed and saying, ‘This is a bad milestone for us. This is… another precedent that's taking us further and further in the wrong direction.’”
Keeping in mind that antisemitic violations do occur, and did occur at Reed in 2023 and 2024, Murad noted that private settlements with the ADL sidestep the process of determining whether a bias incident actually occurred. Even more importantly, these settlements do not question whether the ADL’s recommended policy is the appropriate solution to the problem. Murad described how “we never find out… if the allegation was true. We never have the discussion about if something happened, why did it happen? [Instead], we run to a settlement.” The result is that “the ADL says, ‘we want you to do these five things’, and [the school replies] ‘sure, I'll do those five things.’ Then the ADL, or the Brandeis Center, puts out a press release saying, ‘we had a success, we achieved a settlement,’ [which] really implies that somebody determined that these allegations were true, and that [somebody] determined that these five steps are going to address that thing.”
Murad also stressed the gap between the goal of ‘fixing antisemitism’ and the solutions proposed in agreements with the ADL and organizations like it. Although the ADL offers a convenient set of policies, trainings, procedures, etc., Murad asks institutions who accept them, “Why are you doing that? You're a school. Don't outsource discipline to a political organization. Don't outsource your training methodology. Don't outsource your curriculum choices. Don't outsource your bias reporting to these external political actors.” This is key to Drop the ADL From Schools' mission of informing schools that the ADL is not a social justice partner, but rather an ideological organization with their own agenda which may be misaligned from the values of the school.
The difficulty in responding to the ADL settlement and the incidents which generate it is that “what they're asking for on paper looks reasonable. They're saying, ‘do antisemitism training’; that's not a bad thing, you know? They're saying ‘monitor antisemitic incidents’; that's not a bad thing, so just give in to it. But the devil's in the details. Yes, [the school should] do antisemitism training, but using what definition of antisemitism? The ADL’s definition includes criticism of Israel, a state that should not be exempt from or above critique.” Murad emphasized this as a core part of the fight against antisemitism: an institution should generate solutions only responsive to the conditions of its own community. She said, “I think the school really needs to think. [You should ask,] what is causing the problems that we're having? And then tailor a solution to the cause of the problem.”
Of course, Murad recognized that there are more progressive organizations out there who might offer more palatable solutions than the ADL, but schools should consider that “you don't just want to swap out one for the other.” Instead, she argued that the school and its community need to do the hard work of defining and responding to all discrimination, including antisemitism, on its own, and that a solution is going to be more involved than simply implementing yearly mandatory training. She also stated how, “when we ask the question about ‘if the ADL doesn't do the antisemitism training, who should do it?’ I think we're jumping over a conversation as [to whether] if we go through a training, [be it] two hours, five hours, eight hours, [once] we go through the training, [will we be] fixed?”
Although Reed’s intentions may be good, coming to a settlement with the ADL seems to reflect a broader national trend of coercive outsourcing of policies, training, and disciplinary procedures to politically-motivated organizations. Murad described this moment as a “historic opportunity” to reevaluate how we combat discrimination and move toward policy that is more grounded in solidarity. She concluded by saying, “what's happening here is a real historic opportunity… [civil rights] is being weaponized [through antisemitism accusations] primarily against people of color, not only Palestinians. It’s a historic opportunity for everybody to realize that the right wing is going to divide and conquer with whatever tools they have, and that we have a shared interest in not allowing that to happen.”