The Trump administration has launched a review into what it describes as “recent incidents of antisemitic violence” at the University of Washington and its affiliates following a pro-Palestinian protest there on Monday that led to about 30 arrests.
On Monday, protesters associated with the student group Super UW – short for Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return – temporarily occupied the Interdisciplinary Engineering Building on the university’s Seattle campus.
The group’s social media posts note that the protest and occupation of the engineering building was aimed at pressuring the university to sever its ties with Boeing, which donated $10m toward the building’s construction in 2022, over the aviation company’s arms sales and defense contracts with Israel.
“UW students want Boeing off our campus,” the group, which the university said was suspended from campus, wrote.
The group also called for the building to be renamed the Shaban al-Dalou Building in honor of a teenage engineering student who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza.
In a statement, the university condemned the building occupation as “dangerous, violent and illegal” and said that the protesters “vandalized the building”, “blocked access to two streets” and “set dumpsters on fire in a nearby street”.
A university spokesperson, Victor Balta, said that about 30 people who occupied the building were arrested and that “charges of trespassing, property destruction and disorderly conduct, and conspiracy to commit all three, will be referred to the King county prosecutor’s office”.
Balta also denounced an unspecified statement issued by the group on Monday as “antisemitic”. Later, the university told the Guardian in a statement that the reference to antisemitism stemmed from a “manifesto” by the group that referred to Hamas’s 7 October attack as a “heroic victory”.
A spokesperson for UW said that the university “considers it antisemitic to refer to the Oct 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel – the largest mass murder targeting Jewish people since the Holocaust – as a ‘heroic victory’, which is what the suspended student group called it in the ‘manifesto’ the group posted Monday.”
The university also said in a statement that in total, 34 people were arrested and are “subject to criminal prosecution and University disciplinary processes”. The school added that 21 students who were arrested have been suspended and banned from all UW campuses, and that non-student participants will be banned from the UW’s Seattle campus.
In posts on social media, the student group said that law enforcement officers were violent with protesters during the arrests on Monday night and that three people required hospitalization.
On Tuesday evening, the federal government’s Departments of Education and Health and Human Services, and the General Services Administration issued a joint press release announcing a review of “recent incidents of antisemitic violence” at UW and its affiliates.
In the statement, the administration praised UW’s “strong response to last night’s violence” and the “swift action by law enforcement”.
However, the administration said that UW “must do more to deter future violence and guarantee that Jewish students have a safe and productive learning environment”.
The federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism “expects the institution to follow up with enforcement actions and policy changes that are clearly necessary to prevent these uprisings moving forward”, the statement added.
The education secretary, Linda McMahon, also warned that the taskforce “will not allow these so-called ‘protesters’ to disrupt campus life and deprive students, especially Jewish students who live in fear on campus, of their equal opportunity protections and civil rights”.
The university responded to the announcement of the review, stating that it complies complies with Title VI and other federal civil rights laws and recognizes the “need to continually improve and have for many months been taking concrete actions to improve the campus climate for Jewish students, faculty, staff and visitors”.
The school said in recent months it had taken several steps such as creating a full-time Title VI coordinator position, providing training on preventing shared ancestry discrimination, reviewing university policies and procedures, strengthening ties with the Jewish community, improving bias incident reporting and response systems, and consolidating anti-discrimination compliance under a new civil rights compliance office.
The university also noted that UW’s board of regents in March “overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to divest from companies with ties to Israel”.
“The University values its long-standing partnership with the federal government. We will cooperate with the Task Force’s review and are confident that an evaluation will find we are in compliance with federal civil rights laws,” the university added.
The University of Washington review is part of a broader crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses under the Trump administration.
In recent months, the education department’s civil rights office has warned 60 colleges and universities that they may face “enforcement actions” over alleged failure to comply with federal civil rights laws related to antisemitism, and the administration has also threatened to cut off federal funding to schools that permit what it deems “illegal protests”.
In March, Columbia University, which has been under scrutiny by the Trump administration over pro-Palestinian protests on its campus last year, agreed to a series of policy changes in order to restore $400m in federal funding that the administration revoked after citing allegations that the school failed to protect students from antisemitic harassment.
The Trump administration has also frozen billions of dollars of federal funding to Harvard University after the university rejected a list of demands from the administration. Harvard has since filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, accusing the government of attempting to “gain control of academic decision-making”.
This week, the Department of Education informed Harvard that it was ending billions of dollars in research grants and other aid unless the school accedes to the list of demands.
