Nitsana Darshan-Leitner

A Medical School Told Jewish Students That Yom Kippur Was Not an Excuse

The DOJ's settlement with a Tennessee medical school is a warning shot every university administrator in America needed to hear.

An empty administrative corridor at a medical school, with an academic calendar and exam notices pinned to a bulletin board and an anonymous figure seated on a bench outside an office, photographed from behind in late-afternoon light.
Illustration

By Nitsana Darshan-Leitner ·

There is a particular species of discrimination that dresses itself up as neutral policy. Lincoln Memorial University's DeBusk College of Osteopathic Medicine in Harrogate, Tennessee, practiced it with textbook precision — and got caught.

The facts, as established by a joint federal investigation, are not complicated. According to the Justice Department, during the 2025–26 academic year the medical school denied Jewish students' requests to reschedule classes, exams and academic assignments for religious holidays while granting identical requests from non-Jewish students. When the Jewish students pushed back, the school's response was audacious: it adopted a January policy that banned excused absences for religious observances altogether — while preserving them for "professional student leadership obligations" and other secular reasons. The message could not have been clearer: your holidays are not our problem.

That is not neutrality. That is a policy written to keep a specific people in their place while offering every other student a calendar exemption. The DOJ investigation, opened in February, invoked Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act — federal laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin. Antisemitism, the department correctly noted, can constitute discrimination on the basis of national origin.

I have spent decades litigating for terror victims in U.S. federal courts and have learned that behind every act of antisemitic discrimination — however bureaucratic it appears — there is a system that tolerates it, and a culture that permits it to grow. The settlement reached this week demands the medical school reverse all penalties against Jewish students, revise its absence policy, and educate every administrator, professor, and staff member about what the law requires. That is a start. It is not enough to stop there.

What happened in Harrogate is not isolated. This administration has reached a parallel agreement with Northwestern University requiring $75 million in payments and mandatory antisemitism training after a hostile educational environment was allowed to fester on campus. The legal tool is the same in both cases: federal funding. Institutions that take federal money are obligated to obey federal civil rights law. When they don't, the money should stop and the lawsuits should start.

To every dean and provost now reviewing their own absence policies: the DOJ is watching, and so are we. Jewish students in America are not asking for special treatment. They are asking for the same treatment — the same treatment that every other student at DeBusk College apparently already had. That is not a demand. That is the law.