Alternate headline: Harvard Runs Thin on Allies.
The paroxysm of anti-Semitism on American campuses did not limit itself to the Ivy League. A continent away, pro-Hamas agitators and students staged violent intimidation campaigns at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), making national headlines as Jewish students and faculty got targeted. The faculty and administration went all-in almost immediately after the October 7 massacres too, offering extra credit for pro-Hamas lectures the same week. That prompted demonstrations promoting an "intifada" against the Jews within hours:
🚨As a @UCLA alum, part time lecturer and Jew, I find the chanting of "intifada, intifada!" disgusting in the wake of the barbaric terror attacks in #israel and Hamas call for violence against Jews globally.
— Ariel Jalali ⚙️💬 (@arieljalali) October 12, 2023
This is happening now at UCLA pic.twitter.com/ua7tLk2dwX
The school then allowed students and agitators to set up "Zionist checkpoints" that excluded Jews from the campus. It took a federal judge to force the school to take action to end it, which UCLA initially had refused to do, claiming it was a student activity for which they had no responsibility. Apparently, no one at UCLA's law school had read the Civil Rights Act, Title VI, the Constitution, or anything that teaches basic moral fiber.
The slow learners at UCLA are about to get schooled, big-time. The school settled private lawsuits prompted by these and other incidents late yesterday, paying out millions of dollars and getting forced into a consent decree that will last for 15 years, reports the Free Beacon:
In June 2024, Yitzchok Frankel, then a second-year UCLA law student, filed a lawsuit alleging he was "harassed and blocked from approaching the encampment by antisemitic activists, all with the assistance of UCLA security." He was later joined by two additional Jewish students and a medical school professor, and the Justice Department's notice of violation on Tuesday also pointed to findings in the Frankel suit.
Under the settlement, UCLA will contribute over $2.3 million to eight Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League and Hillel at UCLA, while another $320,000 will go toward UCLA’s Initiative to Combat Antisemitism. It will also dole out $50,000 to each of the plaintiffs and pay $3.6 million of their legal fees.
In addition to the payments, UCLA will also enter a consent judgment that prohibits it from "knowingly allowing or facilitating the exclusion of Jewish students, faculty, and/or staff"—including discrimination based on one’s "religious beliefs concerning the Jewish state of Israel"—from university programs or spaces. The agreement will be in effect for 15 years.
Fifteen years. And UCLA negotiated that. Imagine what a court might have imposed after a trial.
Actually, we may not need to imagine it. As the Free Beacon also noted, the Department of Justice dropped another legal fight on UCLA just as they extricated themselves from the private action:
Today, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division announced that the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by acting with deliberate indifference in creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students.
The Civil Rights Division’s Notice of Violation finds that UCLA failed to adequately respond to complaints of severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive harassment and abuse that Jewish and Israeli students faced on its campus from October 7, 2023, to the present.
“Our investigation into the University of California system has found concerning evidence of systemic anti-Semitism at UCLA that demands severe accountability from the institution,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “This disgusting breach of civil rights against students will not stand: DOJ will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system.”
The LA Times reports that the clock has now started on another capitulation from UCLA. Harmeet Dhillon set a deadline for UCLA to reach an agreement on a settlement, or the DoJ may file a lawsuit -- and worse:
The DOJ letter, signed by U.S. Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet K. Dhillon and Deputy Assistant Atty. Gen. Gregory W. Brown, gave UCLA a deadline of Aug. 5 to enter into a voluntary settlement to “ensure that the hostile environment is eliminated and reasonable steps are taken to prevent its recurrence.”
If UCLA refuses, the officials said, the Trump administration would file a federal lawsuit by Sept. 2.
University of California and UCLA representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The notice is the first major conclusion among an array of Trump administration investigations probing UC campuses over alleged antisemitism, the use of race in admissions and hiring and promotion practices involving faculty diversity.
This is just the first warning shot across the bow. The DoJ has active investigations into several of the UC schools for their treatment of Jewish students and faculty; the UCLA letter is likely the first of a number of such actions. Second and more pressing for UCLA, this finding allows the Department of Education to cut off all federal funds to UCLA, whether that be in the form of research grants, subsidies, and even student loans. The State Department could also investigate and suspend UCLA from access to foreign students, as could the Department of Homeland Security.
In other words, UCLA could find itself facing The Full Harvard, and you never want to go The Full Harvard.
It sounds as though UCLA is in the mood to bargain these days, which means it's not ready to go The Full Harvard quite yet. They'd better get used to the idea of a consent decree too, or at the least a federal monitor a la Columbia University. UCLA needs to prepare its administrators and faculty for an end to DEI programs, perhaps even in its most pernicious form at UCLA Medical School -- and its curricula.
Harvard's getting lonelier all the time. Maybe they'll learn something at UCLA, because no one's learning anything worthwhile at their own campus.
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