Reed Reaches Agreement on Discrimination
On July 22, 2026, Chair of the Board of Trustees Deborah Kamali ‘85 and President Audrey Bilger sent an email to the Reed community titled “An Important Message Regarding Resolution of Office of Civil Rights Complaints.” The email stated that the college had reached a voluntary agreement with two complainants who filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights in 2024. Both complaints were filed on behalf of Jewish students who felt they had been discriminated against on the basis of their Jewish heritage and religion. On September 23, 2024, the Anti Defamation League (ADL) and Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed a complaint about Reed on behalf of one of the students, while the other student filed a report independently in May 2024.
In the agreement, Reed College did not admit to any liability or wrongdoing in the instances of antisemitism on campus. The resulting resolution contained 42 terms and did not contain any monetary exchange. The student activist group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) including one protest on November 10, 2023.
In the 2023-2024 academic year, several incidents of violence occurred towards Jewish students on campus, including one of the complainants, who was physically assaulted with a rock thrown through her window and had her mezuzah ripped off the wall outside her dorm. The perpetrators of these incidents were not identified.
“I think this incident in particular raised a lot of disappointment around students and the student body,” said Student Body President Andrew Happy ‘27 to Oregon Public Broadcasting when asked about this incident. Happy contextualized the incident by stating it had “emerged in the light of a previous semester of heightened student protest.”
In fall 2023, many Reed students responded to the ongoing Israel–Palestine conflict. On November 10, 2023, student activist group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) led a protest in which students marched from campus to the Portland World Trade Center. Audrey Bilger made a statement in response to the protests on November 13, 2023, titled “Our Shared Community Values.” This statement suggested that some elements of the protest were “hate speech” and “advocating violence.” In a public statement the same day, SJP responded, that “Western ignorance to the Arabic language and politics… has long been weaponized to distract from the very real suffering of peoples throughout the region.” Several faculty members also wrote an open letter expressing concern about the divisive nature of Bilger’s comments.The complainants alleged that the college should have prevented these incidents of discrimination by responding to the protests more thoroughly, and these are the complaints which were resolved in the recent agreement.The final resolution to the complaints contains multiple provisions. The agreement requires that the college staff a Title VI coordinator and hire an independent consultant. Title VI is a clause of the Civil Rights Act which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs involving federal financial assistance. Title IX coordinator Christy Martin is also serving as Title VI coordinator, and she will be responsible for ensuring the school complies with federal standards of anti-discrimination. The independent consultant will be sourced from outside Reed and hired with guidance from the Brandeis Center and ADL. The consultant will work to assess the college’s response to complaints using anonymized data and will serve for a period of three years.
The resolution agreement also requires that faculty not excuse attendance or cancel class when students attend protests. Faculty and certain student leaders will now be subject to compulsory antisemitism training starting in the 2026-2027 academic year. The Office of Institutional Diversity (OID) will maintain and add programming “about Jewish identity, including the Zionist component of Jewish ancestral and religious identity.”
In accordance with the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, Reed agreed to consider the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s Working Definition of Antisemitism (the Working Definition), and its examples when evaluating antisemitism on campus.
The 2016 definition reads: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” The definition provides several contemporary examples including “[d]enying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “[d]rawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
These examples are by no means universally accepted. An independent UN commission declared that acts committed in Gaza meet the UN definition of Genocide and that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, and Present Isaac Herzog have incited the commission of genocide in the Gaza strip. Genocide is defined in Article II of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide as “[certain enumerated] acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
Speaking both for himself and in his role as Jewish Student Union president, Ezra Rosenfield ‘27 stated, “I expressed to OID that they should additionally consider the [Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism] which is in part created as an addendum to or a response to the IHRA definition and I believe is significantly stronger.” He additionally expressed his support for the additional Title VI protections of the resolution agreement in general.
The ADL’s 2023 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents characterized organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine as major organizers of antisemitic protests alongside groups such as Patriot Front and the Goyim Defense League. The ADL has leveled antisemitism allegations against the Center for Constitutional Rights, founded by famed Jewish civil rights litigator and former ACLU director William Kunstler. The ADL has made similar allegations against Black Lives Matter, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, World Workers Party, and the Democratic Socialists of America. Despite the resolution agreement being with the ADL, Executive Director of Strategic Communications Sheena McFarland stressed that the agreement was to consider IHRA definitions, not necessarily the interpretation the ADL applies to those definitions.
The ADL argues that “an overwhelming majority of American Jews identify in some way with Zionism or identify with Israel.” Pew Research Center polling from 2021 and cites that number as approximately 80%. More recent polling by the Associated Press NORC shows that only 23% of American Jews identify as Zionist while 50% support Israel as a Jewish state, and 36% consider that support an important part of their Jewish identity. When asked about this, Rosenfield stated “it is antisemitic to conflate Judaism and Zionism,” although he expressed he did not feel he could comfortably state that another Jewish organization was antisemitic. When asked for comment, the ADL asked for clarification in regards to some of the questions but then did not further reply.
Speaking for the college, McFarland expressed that the resolution agreement does not constitute any changes to college policy. In contrast, a press release from the ADL and the Brandeis Center portrays the resolution as a “landmark agreement” with “real reforms” and stating that Reed’s policies “acknowledge that anti-Zionist harassment is a violation of civil rights.” McFarland specified that language stating the school will “consider” the IHRA definition does not bind the school to handle all cases of anti-Zionism on campus as Title VI violations. It remains to be seen whether this agreement will substantially affect the college’s policy toward discrimination complaints in the future.