YAF Seeks DOJ Investigation After Davidson Allows ‘Intifada’ Lit While Censoring YAF Activists

Young America’s Foundation has formally lodged a civil rights complaint against administrators at North Carolina’s Davidson College for actions taken against YAF student activists Cynthia Huang and Hannah Fay.

Specifically, YAF’s complaint — filed with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Division of Civil Rights and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights — calls out Davidson College for violating Title VI, Title IX, and administrative directives from President Donald Trump.

Despite being a private institution, Davidson College falls under the jurisdiction of federal civil rights watchdogs because the school, as YAF’s complaint notes, receives federal funds. In 2023 and 2024, Davidson College received more than $6.7 million from taxpayers in the form of federal grants and contracts. Federal law directs the government to hold such recipients of taxpayer funds accountable for running afoul of the law and administrative directives.

As the complaint explains, YAF’s students faced discrimination, harassment, and censorship for expressing support for Israel in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack as well as for their stated belief in biological reality regarding men, women, and the inability to change one’s sex.

Among the administrators’ actions outlined in YAF’s complaint, Davidson College officials:

• allowed aggressive anti-Israel demonstrations to permeate campus and allowed the distribution of pamphlets titled “International Intifada: An urgent call to participate in the colonizer’s execution,” but banned YAF students from making available a YAF publication authored by Robert Spencer titled “The Five Myths About Israel Perpetrated by the Pro-Hamas Left”

• harassed, intimidated, and threatened YAF students for making the literature by Robert Spencer available, including threatening disciplinary action for providing a counterpoint to the rabid anti-Israel and pro-Hamas Left’s activism on campus

• used leftist students’ claims of feeling “unsafe” due to expressive activity in support of Israel to intimidate YAF students while willfully ignoring leftist displays, activism, and destruction of property, thereby engaging in clearly disparate treatment based on the viewpoints being expressed

• suppressed expression of the idea that sex is a biological fact and binary while threatening additional disciplinary action over YAF students’ stated belief that people cannot change their sex because, supposedly, such expression made leftist students feel “threatened and unsafe”

The full complaint documenting these and other impermissible actions by Davidson College administrators can be viewed here. The actions by administrators are abhorrent and inexplicable, and they deserve a formal investigation by the relevant civil rights offices within the Departments of Justice and Education to apply appropriate remedial actions.

“As YAF has done throughout its more than six decades advancing conservatism and defending students’ rights, YAF is moving swiftly to remedy administrators’ egregious, viewpoint-discriminatory actions that, at best, turned a blind eye to calls for genocide while harassing and intimidating conservative students for their fact-based positions,” underscored YAF Chief Communications Officer Spencer Brown. “When students are under attack for exercising their God-given rights, YAF has their back.”