What’s New
The University of California at Los Angeles was condemned nearly simultaneously this week by a campus antisemitism task force and by pro-Palestinian students and faculty.
The task force’s new report, first noted on Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal, found that UCLA had responded inconsistently and inadequately to incidents of campus antisemitism, including some rhetoric from pro-Palestinian activists.
Also on Tuesday, pro-Palestinian students and faculty sued the university over its summoning police to shut down an encampment there last spring, as well as ongoing disciplinary proceedings against student protesters.
The Details
The 93-page report on antisemitism at the university paints a particularly thorough picture of how one campus has fared since the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas. The document alleges a pervasive environment of discrimination that was often untempered by effective action by university administrators.
“Throughout most of 2023-24, campus leadership repeatedly decided not to enforce federal law, state law, and university and campus rules,” the report states.
The task force said the university took a permissive approach to student protesters even when they violated policies. According to the report, UCLA’s police chief said in early May that he had advised UCLA leadership from the start not to let protesters’ encampment continue, but administrators decided to allow it “as an expression of students’ First Amendment rights.”
After initially planning to hold in-person focus groups, the task force nixed the idea over “privacy concerns, perceived hostilities on campus, feasibility, and timing.” Instead, the report is largely based on a survey of 428 Jewish and Israeli members of the university community.
The survey found that nearly 40 percent of respondents had experienced some form of antisemitic discrimination, while one-third had made either a formal or informal complaint to the university regarding such conduct. “Most respondents,” the report notes, “did not have confidence that reporting discrimination to UCLA administrators would lead to any effective action by the campus.” Half of faculty respondents said they had considered leaving the university due to antisemitism; 42 percent of staff and 37 percent of undergraduate students said the same.
The report also highlights the wide range of opinions on the war among Jewish students and employees. While over 80 percent of both faculty and staff believed that antisemitism at UCLA was taken less seriously than other forms of discrimination, 37 percent of graduate students believed the opposite — that antisemitism was taken more seriously than other concerns.
Meanwhile, UCLA’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, Faculty for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace sued the university over its response to the spring encampment. The lawsuit alleges that administrators’ decision to declare the protest an “unlawful assembly,” and their subsequent call to police to forcibly disperse pro-Palestinian activists, violated students’ constitutional speech rights.
The lawsuit — brought by the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and the law firm Walkup, Melodia, Kelly & Schoenberger — also demands that the university expunge disciplinary cases against protesters. “UCLA added insult to injury by filing campus conduct charges against arrestees,” states a news release from the organizations, “delaying graduations and job searches and casting a cloud of cruel uncertainty.”
The Backdrop
UCLA has been a focal point of campus unrest in 2024. Last spring, counterprotesters attacked pro-Palestinian activists at their encampment. University police officers did not immediately intervene to stop the confrontations, sparking criticism from the Los Angeles mayor and others.
A federal judge recently castigated UCLA for its response to the encampment, arguing that the multi-day protest’s location on a main campus quad effectively blocked Jewish students from getting to classes. The judge asserted that students at the encampment prevented “people who supported the existence of the State of Israel” from accessing the area.
The University of California system directed UCLA and other institutions to shore up protest policies in advance of the fall term. A letter from the system’s president, Michael V. Drake, said that institutions should explicitly ban encampments and protests that block pathways, and that students and employees who don’t comply could face consequences as severe as expulsion and termination.
Many colleges have set up internal task forces to make recommendations on responding to rising antisemitism and Islamophobia stemming from the Israel-Hamas war. One of the thorniest issues the task forces have grappled with is what kinds of speech and conduct should qualify as antisemitism. The groups have typically avoided drawing an explicit line between antisemitism and anti-Israel speech but have suggested ways to help colleges make such judgments.
What to Watch For
Darnell Hunt, UCLA’s interim chancellor, said in a statement to The Wall Street Journal that he appreciated the antisemitism task force’s report and would review the recommendations. He did not provide a specific timeline for enacting policy changes.
Pro-Palestinian advocates hope that their lawsuit against UCLA will encourage the institution and the University of California system to “take a different approach to both Palestine solidarity protests and speech on campus in general,” said Graeme Blair, an associate professor of political science and a spokesperson for UCLA’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapter. In particular, the suit aims to stop the university from using “the safety of students as a pretext for shutting down speech,” Blair said.
