During their Nov. 14 meeting, the UC Board of Regents discussed the report published in October by the Task Force to Combat Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias at UCLA, calling the findings “deeply troubling.”
As previously reported by the Journal, the report found that 75% of Jewish students, faculty, administrators and staff believe that the “antisemitism is taken less seriously than other forms of hate and discrimination at UCLA”; the Task Force also took the university to task for allowing the anti-Israel encampment, which the report described as “a source of antisemitism,” to fester for as long as it did.
Regent Chair Janet Reilly said she was “deeply dismayed at the findings” of the report. “It describes a situation that should be horrifying to every fair-minded person,” she said. “There is no circumstance under which our students, faculty and staff should suffer the effects of such toxic bias and discrimination. While we applaud the efforts at the campus to address this insidious problem, there should be no mistake about our primary reaction to this report before us. The circumstances described are intolerable and we’ll do everything we can to address the underlying issues.”
UC President Michael Drake called the report “deeply troubling” and that he has been working with Interim Chancellor Darnell Hunt on improving the campus climate. He highlighted how his office implemented a series of directives implementing stricter measures on campus protests, establishing the Systemwide Office of Civil Rights, and allocating $7 million toward combating antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of prejudice.
Regent Richard Leib, who said that countless members of his family were killed during the Holocaust, asked, “how it can be that 70 years after World War II, so many Jewish students, faculty members and staff do not feel safe or feel welcomed” at UCLA and why “their voices expressing fear, anxiety and anger have fallen all on deaf ears.” He continued, “my impression of this report is, I feel like we’ve lost our way. We are failing in our mission and responsibility as a university and as a society … this is not a simple problem of enforcing our rules, we need to take stock and do everything in our power to restore our campuses to safe places where students can learn and thrive.”
Leib commended the Task Force on the thoroughness of the report and noted that the fact that 70% of the respondents in the report cited the encampment as a source of antisemitism “demonstrates why no encampments should have been allowed to persist at any of our campuses.” He recounted walking through the remnants of the encampment after it had been cleared and seeing the “alarming” antisemitic graffiti throughout the area. “I can understand why some Jewish students felt UCLA treated antisemitism secondary to other forms of discrimination because of the slow response in removing some of these hateful comments,” although he acknowledged that “after the encampment was removed, they went full speed ahead and did remove them, so that was good.”
He expressed support for the report’s recommendations and that the university has already begun implementing the recommendations and expressed astonishment that the
Academic Senate did not recommend any faculty members for discipline who “joined the encampment” or lectured on topics outside of the focus of the class and made political statements that offended students.
Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis (D) said that “there is something very deep and worrisome about the antisemitism that has sort of broken to the surface within our system and the conclusions that it is going to take a lot of work to deal with this issue in an ongoing way.” Jewish students’ concerns their safety “has been rooted in differences in differences in student positions on a foreign war” and that “in many ways, students by virtue of their ethnicity or their faith are being held responsible for things they shouldn’t be held responsible for.” She added that they “have quite a bit of work to do going forward” to address the “underlying problem here.”
“There is something very deep and worrisome about the antisemitism that has sort of broken to the surface within our system and the conclusions that it is going to take a lot of work to deal with this issue in an ongoing way.” – Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis
Regent Jonathan “Jay” Sures asked Chancellor Hunt how many complaints UCLA received on antisemitism compared to anti-Islam and anti-Arab Hate since the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre; Hunt replied that he didn’t have the exact figures with him but that the university did receive “hundreds” of complaints “on both sides.” The university’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is investigating the cases, but the “due process” involved has caused the investigations to take some time. Sures then asked Hunt if there has been “formal punishment” against students, faculty or staff as a result of the complaints, to which Hunt said that he wasn’t aware of any so far. Hunt added that the university “submitted data to Congress” about a few weeks ago about the statuses of the cases and that “some of these cases can take up to a year to resolve.”
Regent John Perez said that he was “frustrated with how it got to this point” as well as the “both sides-ism that doesn’t pay adequate attention to any of the issues at hand.” He recalled that when he chaired the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission after 9/11, they took efforts to protect vulnerable Muslim communities. “Nobody asked me then to speak out against antisemitism because I was speaking out against Islamophobia and targeting of Muslims in a way that was unfair and unjust and based on something they had nothing to do with,” Perez said. “But yet too often when we talk about the perniciousness of antisemitism in our community and in our campuses, we’re compelled then to talk about something.” The day after the Oct 7, 2023 massacre, calls to condemn the terror attack were “met with a both-sides approach. Yes we should concern ourselves with all expressions of hate and of violence and of death but to do it in a reflexive way that denies the crisis of the moment is problematic. I don’t want us to conflate these two issues, I’d like us to deal with both of them, appropriately, seriously and with appropriate focus.”
Judea Pearl, Chancellor’s professor of computer science at UCLA, National Academy of Sciences member and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, told The Journal that “disappointingly, none of the discussants mentioned ‘Anti-Zionism’ (or ‘Zionophobia’) — the primary cause of campus hostilities and that “Drake and Hunt continue to tout the ‘Dialogue Across Differences’ initiative as the ultimate fix for campus problems, ignoring repeated warning that the leadership of this initiative is dismissive, if not antagonistic to fundamental beliefs and sensitivities shared by the majority of the Jewish faculty on UC campuses.”
