State Sens. Matthew Lesser (D-9) and Aundre Bumgardner (D-41) have introduced a bill to the state legislature that claims to improve campus safety at Connecticut’s colleges and universities. While SB 980 appears as a commonsense approach to addressing incidents of hate and harassment, I fear it replicates existing policies in ways that would unwittingly undermine the campus professionals already tasked with addressing these issues.
But more significantly, it would also open the door for the Trump administration to deploy its weaponized enforcement of antisemitism against Connecticut’s academic institutions.
By now I’ve taught political science at Trinity College for more than a decade, officially becoming a full professor in July. In this job I’ve worked closely with students who have been on the receiving end of incidents of hate and harassment. I have also been in conversations with colleagues across the state, and across the country, who have witnessed incidents of hate and harassment on their campuses.
The first thing I can tell you is that most academic institutions already have in place the kind of mechanisms that SB 980 mandates, namely training about how to respond and methods for reporting and investigating incidents. Furthermore, Connecticut’s colleges and universities all have decades of experience building the kind of institutional responses, guided by federal regulations concerning nondiscrimination, equal access, and speech protections.
Academic institutions also have trained professionals who have expertise handling these issues. That doesn’t mean everyone always gets it right, but that’s because issues of campus speech are always difficult, especially pertaining to incidents of hate on campus. Take, for example, the 2020 incident in which two University of Connecticut students were recorded making racial slurs as they walked across campus. This was something I would consider an expression of hate, and which was interpreted by an observer as harassing, but was ruled protected First Amendment speech in court. These are the delicate balancing acts that campuses have to navigate every day.
But SB 980 does nothing to add to the toolbox of resources that administrators, diversity officers, student service professionals, and deans might draw upon to address these complicated issues. Rather, the bill only adds a layer of punitive bureaucracy, envisioning simplified solutions to problems that are already extremely hard to address, and which professionals grapple with on a daily basis.
However, in addition to being redundant to processes that already exist, SB 980 also opens the state’s academic institutions to considerable risk.
The bill would mandate that academic institutions create task forces designed to “combat hatred, harassment, bullying and violence based on actual or perceived religious identity, including, but not limited to, combating antisemitism and Islamaphobia [sic].”
In addition to spelling Islamophobia incorrectly, this bill would place Connecticut colleges and universities squarely within the highly politicized debate over campus antisemitism that has raged at the local and national level since the 2024 protests over Israel’s disproportionate use of violence in Gaza. Campus professionals are already doing the hard, and often delicate and behind-the-scenes, work of balancing speech-–including protest–-and campus safety. This work is often best done by avoiding the polarizing national spotlight and avoiding the crosshairs of crusading partisans. SB980, however, would trust Connecticut colleges and universities into this public melee.
But even more dangerously, SB 980 requires that academic institutions submit a “report to the joint standing committee of the General Assembly” that documents the “the number and manner of complaints received and investigations conducted and concluded.”
Right now, as we speak, the federal government is being weaponized against higher education in the name of combating antisemitism. For example, Trump’s executive order on antisemitism empowers the U.S. Attorney General and Secretary of Education to monitor campus for incidents that violate its highly politicized definition of what constitutes antisemitism.
The executive order authorizes the use of civil rights enforcement measures to discipline faculty and institutions, including deporting non-citizen students and faculty.
The Department of Justice has initiated investigations against five schools based on claims that protests constituted antisemitic acts. The Trump administration, as can be expected, has not expressed such zeal for stamping out Islamophobia on campus but rather finds political opportunity in using accusations of antisemitism as a political cudgel to wield at institutions of higher education.
If Connecticut institutions are required to report on their own handling of campus incidents of antisemitism, one can easily predict that an opportunistic federal administration-–one that has not hidden its contempt for higher education–- will use these reports as an excuse to target Connecticut schools.
Well meaning on face, SB 980 will become a welcome mat, laid out for a Trump administration to trample on our state’s colleges and universities.
Isaac Kamola is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Trinity College.