WASHINGTON – Against a backdrop of alleged anti-Semitism at some of the nation’s top universities, including Harvard and Columbia, the federal Department of Education is said to be backing away from a 2004 policy of protecting Jewish students against discrimination and harassment on campus.

According to staff of the United States Civil Rights Commission and members of Jewish organizations, correspondence from the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, Stephanie Monroe, has failed to embrace policies protecting Jews that were enacted by her predecessor, Kenneth Marcus, in the fall of 2004.

At issue is whether the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, which Ms. Monroe oversees, is authorized to investigate anti-Semitic incidents at schools and universities that receive federal funding, as virtually all colleges and universities in America do.

Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act gives the OCR jurisdiction to investigate discrimination “on the ground of race, color, or national origin,” but not religion.

In policy pronouncements in September and October 2004, however, Mr. Marcus said the Office of Civil Rights, in keeping with Supreme Court rulings, “recognizes that Title VI covers harassment of students of Jewish heritage regardless of whether the students may be Caucasian and American born. OCR cannot turn its back on victims of anti-Semitism on the grounds that Jewish heritage may include both religious and ethnic characteristics.”

Embroiled in its own heated debate over policies governing anti-Semitic harassment, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in February asked Ms. Monroe to explain the OCR’s policy for addressing anti-Semitic harassment, according to correspondence obtained by The New York Sun.

In response, Ms. Monroe wrote: “OCR does have jurisdiction to investigate complaints raising allegations of religious discrimination or anti-Semitic harassment if the allegations also include discrimination over which OCR has subject matter jurisdiction, such as, race or national origin (including discrimination based on a person’s ancestry or ethnic characteristics).”

Ms. Monroe’s omission of any reference to the 2004 Marcus policies, and the lack of an explicit statement that the OCR will comprehensively investigate cases of anti-Semitism even for students who are white and American born, has led some Civil Rights Commission staff to worry that the OCR is “backing away from” policies implemented by Mr. Marcus, they said. “Stephanie Monroe could have responded ‘no change,’ but she didn’t respond ‘no change,'” one said.

Ms. Monroe told the Sun she does not “view this letter as in any way changing policy,” but added that “the word anti-Semitism doesn’t appear in any of our statutory requirements over things we have jurisdiction over.”

Whether the OCR investigates alleged anti-Semitic incidents, Ms. Monroe said, is determined case by case. The decision to investigate would depend on whether the harassment was driven by a student’s perceived Jewish ethnic origin, which would likely be subject to an OCR investigation, or his expressions of Jewish religious beliefs, such as the wearing of a kippa, which probably would not.

“That’s of concern,” the director of the Center for Law and Justice at the Zionist Organization of America, Susan Tuchman, said. Because the barriers separating discrimination based on the Jewish religion and Jewish ethnicity are almost invisible, Ms. Tuchman said, a student who is harassed for wearing a kippa “would be something OCR would clearly have jurisdiction over.”

“It’s a watering down of the policy,” Ms. Tuchman, who testified at a November 2005 Civil Rights Commission hearing on anti-Semitic discrimination, said.

Concerns that the Education Department was shying away from investigating campus harassment of Jews were fueled, Ms. Tuchman said, by the fact that an OCR investigation into alleged anti-Semitic harassment at the University of California, Irvine, has recently come “to a standstill.” The initial complaint was filed by the ZOA on behalf of Irvine students in October 2004, immediately after the announcement of the Marcus policy on anti-Semitic discrimination.

In a letter from the Office for Civil Rights to Ms. Tuchman acknowledging the complaint, an OCR official writes: “Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin in programs and activities operated by recipients of Federal financial assistance, including cases of anti-semitic harassment.” The letter does not differentiate between anti-Semitic harassment based on religion and harassment based on perceived ethnic affiliations.

Meanwhile, frustration is growing in the Civil Rights Commission over the delay in adopting its own policy recommendations for preventing anti-Semitic harassment, staff said.

After the November hearing, commission members had sought to adopt at their December meeting recommendations that would condemn the swelling tide of anti-Semitic “propaganda” disguised as “anti-Israeli” or “anti-Zionist”; request that federal grant making institutions exercise oversight of Middle Eastern studies departments; urge the OCR to embark on a public-education campaign to inform Jewish students of their right “to be free from anti-Semitic harassment”; and calls for action by Congress and the Education Department to collect and report data on instances of anti-Semitic harassment at post-secondary institutions.

The measure has been tabled at all monthly meetings since, in part because of the alleged ambiguity of the OCR’s policy, and the language of the findings and recommendations has been moderated, according to commission staff.

The Commission is scheduled to take up the issue at its April 3 meeting, to be conducted by conference call and open to the public.