I saw the following two headlines right next to each other in a list of news stories, and they are both correct:

Antisemitism report lets CUNY off the hook, offers no help against hate: professor

Report on antisemitism at CUNY college system calls for ‘complete overhaul’ to approach

The fact that these headlines are not in conflict with each other points to something important about the anti-Semitism investigations at U.S. colleges more broadly. This particular investigation was commissioned by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and led by Jonathan Lippman, the former chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals.

The first headline quoted above is from a New York Post op-ed by Jeffrey Lax, a Jewish CUNY professor who has been calling attention to the public university system’s problem with Jew-hate since well before the advent of the tentifada.

Lax praises some of the report as “a welcome dose of reality” for its forthright declaration that anti-Semitism is a genuine problem at CUNY and that the school is failing in its duty to address it. But he faults the report for avoiding discussion of Sally Abd Alla, the school’s top diversity apparatchik who would play a key role in enacting any of the report’s recommendations. Abd Alla is a former official with the Council on American-Islamic Relations which has supported the anti-Semitic BDS movement; Abd Alla has thus far stymied more limited attempts to change the culture at CUNY.

Lax also faults the report for stopping short of recommending that the school adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that would indicate what lines students and teachers can’t cross. He sees both the range of incidents the report takes into account and its lack of certain concrete recommendations as copouts.

The second headline quoted above is the title put on a JTA writeup by the Times of Israel. The article is correct in that the report calls for a complete overhaul of CUNY’s policy menu regarding anti-Semitism specifically and discrimination generally. The article, by Luke Tress, does not mince words when it comes to CUNY’s ineptitude and its organizational confusion.

Which is to say, if you’re looking for a single takeaway from the report, either of those headlines works. But the real problem is not the investigations themselves but their inherent limits. This can be seen clearly in a very good section of the Lippman report on the application of Title XI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids discrimination “on the ground of race, color, or national origin.”

Because the Act doesn’t mention religion, colleges have long been able to skate by on the idea that discrimination against Jews qua Jews is bad but not a violation of those students’ civil rights, which would jeopardize the institution’s federal funding.

There is no question Jews are being openly and intentionally discriminated against on campus, especially since the post-Oct. 7 surge in anti-Semitism led to encampments student activists that physically block Jews from accessing public portions of campus. But is it a violation of the Civil Rights Act? Should schools lose their funding?

That’s not a question a third-party review commissioned by the governor can answer definitively. Or, rather, a commission’s answer to that question isn’t enforceable. For the record, the answer is yes: The Israel-specific nature of the anti-Semitism obviously accords it with the “national origin” part of the law, and “Jews aren’t a race” is a copout that is irrelevant to the question of whether much anti-Semitism is racial in nature, which it is and has been since the beginning of time.

If you want to rule that these actions do not violate Title XI, you must get creative. And that means you are putting effort into getting around the application of civil-rights law specifically for Jews—which is kind of the whole problem in the first place, isn’t it?

But Judge Lippman can’t take away CUNY’s federal funds. The Office for Civil Rights within the Department of Education, however, can make that happen. And it can also get the Justice Department involved. But, as David Bernstein has noted, the Department of Education “does not appear to have opened a single investigation of its own, nor has it referred even the most egregious cases to the Justice Department for potential civil litigation. Every lawsuit that has been filed has been the product of private rather than government efforts.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland has neglected his duties regarding Jewish Americans, and Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and his boss, President Biden, appear in no rush to help, either. Until the federal government decides that Jews, too, deserve the protection of the law, not much is going to change.