The Trump administration is launching an investigation into alleged antisemitism on all 22 California State University (CSU) campuses, issuing subpoenas for the personal phone numbers and email addresses of all faculty members.
On Friday, CSU Chancellor Mildred Garcia released a statement to the CSU community, alerting all campuses of the investigation and confirming that the system would comply.
“The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has initiated a systemwide antisemitism complaint against the CSU,” Garcia wrote. “To this end, the EEOC has begun direct outreach to faculty and staff members across the system to review allegations of antisemitism and to speak with them about their experiences on campus.”
“The CSU is – and always has been – committed to maintaining a welcoming and non-discriminatory living, learning, and working environment for all students, faculty, and staff, as well as our campus guests,” Garcia continued.
Before the Chancellor’s systemwide message, Cal State L.A.’s Office of Administration and Finance sent a statement to faculty only on Thursday.
“The EEOC is now requiring, through a federal subpoena, that the university produce personal phone numbers and email addresses for all employees,” said Claudio Lindow, Cal State L.A. ‘s vice president and chief financial officer.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Jeffery Santner, a Jewish faculty member at Cal State L.A., said he is not currently worried about antisemitism on campuses and did not feel that it was a problem during the 2024 protests.
With the Trump administration’s increased antisemitism investigations, not everyone is convinced that they will have their intended result.
“There is certainly the importance of bringing to light prejudicial behaviours, whether antisemitism or racism,” said Steven Windmueller, an emeritus professor at Hebrew Union College. “What I worry about is the particulars in these situations of simply identifying antisemitism as a sort of standard measure…will have a profound backlash.”
“There’s a huge debate more broadly about what constitutes antisemitism, and is it inclusive of the idea that you can be critical of Israel without calling for the destruction of Israel,” said Windmueller. “It’s one thing to be critical of a foreign nation; it is quite different to call for its sort of destruction or end. I think that hasn’t been clarified by either the federal government…or universities in terms of how they evaluate or measure what is happening.”
On June 17, 2025, police took down a pro-Palestinian encampment at Cal State LA after protesters took over the Student Services building and caused significant damage, according to AP News. According to The Eastsider, the students broke windows, destroyed furniture and spray-painted walls with “Free Gaza” and “Palestine” messages.
In April 2025, Cal Poly Humboldt’s pro-Palestinian protesters occupied and barricaded campus buildings for a week, according to the L.A. Times. The L.A Times then reported that students made demands for the university to divest itself from companies that profited from the conflict in Gaza.
During these protests, Jewish students said that they experienced hostile behavior.
“So one has to identify when such demonstrations, whether they’re against Israel or against Jews, whatever one might describe them, the incidents themselves…go well beyond simply racial or religious hatred or activity, but then border on civil disobedience and criminal actions,” said Windmeuller.
The Trump administration’s probe comes after other universities such as Harvard, UCLA and UC Berkeley, were also investigated by the Trump administration for allegedly not protecting Jewish students.
As a result of their investigations, UCLA’s federal research funding lost $584 million in suspended grants after the U.S. Department of Justice found that the university failed to respond to antisemitic demonstrations on campus.
“I think it’s unlawful with a lot of things that [Trump’s] doing right now,” said Jacob Quinn, a junior at Cal State L.A. “I think now, now that he’s in office, he’s starting to overstep boundaries where he’s trying to delegate how school systems should be run under his perspective, or whatever the case may be.”
Last Monday, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco granted UCLA a preliminary injunction, saying that the government likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act, according to a court document. In Lin’s order, she said that the government is required to justify and detail specific procedures and explanations for federal funding cuts. When informing UCLA, the government had used generalized terms that offered no specific details on the suspension. According to PBS News, UCLA was able to restore $500 million to its federal research grants.
USC was also subject to investigations by the federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism last February after pro-Palestinian protests were organized on and around campus. Protests included encampments in Alumni Park and “die-ins” on the campus lawns.
“We’re going to these schools and we’re going to tell the board of trustees that they have a fiduciary duty to protect Jewish American students like everyone else,” said counsel to U.S. Attorney General and task force leader Leo Terrell on Monday in a Fox News interview. “If they fail to do so…we’re going to take all the federal funding away from them, we’re going to make sure every Jewish-American student on campus is protected.”
Annenberg Media reached out to USC’s administration about whether the task force visited USC, but has not received a response.
Anthony Bottino contributed to this story.