A federal judge has ordered Carnegie Mellon University to turn over discovery materials related to nearly $1 billion in funding from the Qatari government amid an ongoing civil rights lawsuit alleging antisemitic discrimination against a Jewish student.<\/p>\n
The order stems from a lawsuit<\/a> that Yael Canaan, a former student at the private Pittsburgh school, filed against the school, alleging that it violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by failing to address antisemitic harassment and retaliating after she raised complaints.<\/p>\n The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania ruled that Qatar\u2019s financial and contractual ties with the university are relevant to determining whether foreign influence affected how Jewish civil-rights complaints were handled on campus.<\/p>\n The Lawfare Project, which represents Canaan, announced the ruling earlier in the week, calling it a major procedural victory.<\/p>\n \u201cForeign governments with appalling human-rights records are funding the very offices meant to protect students\u2019 civil rights,\u201d stated Ziporah Reich, director of litigation at The Lawfare Project and counsel for Canaan. \u201cThis should alarm every parent, every student, and every policymaker in this country.\u201d<\/p>\n Reich said the court recognized that foreign government funding \u201cis not peripheral, but potentially central, to understanding how civil-rights laws are applied on campus,\u201d a determination she said could open \u201cthe door for courts nationwide to examine whether hostile foreign state interests are shaping institutional behavior in ways that undermine U.S. law.\u201d<\/p>\n Reich told JNS that, as noted in court findings and allegations in the amended complaint<\/a>, a portion of the salary of Carnegie Mellon\u2019s assistant vice provost for diversity, equity and inclusion\u2014who also served as the university\u2019s Title IX coordinator\u2014was funded by Qatar.<\/p>\n That official allegedly discouraged Canaan from filing a formal antisemitism complaint, which would have triggered a university investigation.<\/p>\n The court also permitted additional claims to proceed after evidence emerged that another senior DEI official secretly recorded Canaan without her consent. The official who made the recording later invoked the Fifth Amendment during her deposition.<\/p>\n In its ruling, the court pointed to Carnegie Mellon contracts that require compliance with Qatari \u201ccultural, religious and social customs.\u201d<\/p>\n The judge concluded that \u201cQatar and its affiliates could be a source of antisemitic influence\u201d and that a \u201creasonable jury could find the university\u2019s reliance on Qatari funding affected how it handled Jewish civil-rights complaints.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cUniversities have a legal obligation to ensure that civil rights laws are enforced fairly and without external influence,\u201d said Brooke Goldstein, executive director of the Lawfare Project. \u201cThis ruling is an important procedural development in the case.\u201d<\/p>\n The discovery order targets administrators responsible for the enforcement of Carnegie Mellon\u2019s Title VI and Title IX obligations and moves the case into what the Lawfare Project called \u201ca critical evidentiary phase examining whether foreign state funding influenced how antisemitism complaints were addressed at CMU.\u201d<\/p>\n The post Federal judge orders Carnegie Mellon to disclose Qatari funding in Jew-hatred lawsuit<\/a> appeared first on JNS.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A federal judge has ordered Carnegie Mellon University to turn over discovery materials related to nearly $1 billion…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40223,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[38222,16062,51804,7933,28849,15857,51805,2362,2307,27953,3427,740,742,51807,2676,73,75,74,50,2890,51806,63,25696,44],"class_list":{"0":"post-107747","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-pittsburgh","8":"tag-and-inclusion","9":"tag-antisemitism","10":"tag-campus-antisemitism","11":"tag-carnegie-mellon-university","12":"tag-civil-rights-act-of-1964","13":"tag-complaint","14":"tag-discovery-law","15":"tag-diversity","16":"tag-equity","17":"tag-human-rights","18":"tag-issues-in-ethics","19":"tag-justice","20":"tag-law","21":"tag-lawfare-project","22":"tag-lawsuit","23":"tag-pittsburgh","24":"tag-pittsburgh-headlines","25":"tag-pittsburgh-news","26":"tag-politics","27":"tag-public-law","28":"tag-qatar","29":"tag-social-issues","30":"tag-title-ix","31":"tag-u-s-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107747\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}