More than 350 current and former University of California scholars signed a letter calling on the system’s regents to discuss a recent AMCHA Initiative report about antisemitism at their next meeting.
Judea Pearl, a University of California, Los Angeles computer-science professor and father of Daniel Pearl, the Jewish reporter for The Wall Street Journal, who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in 2002, organized the letter with Ilan Benjamin, a distinguished professor emeritus of chemistry at UC Santa Cruz.
At press time, 279 current and 89 former UC professors had signed the letter. The referenced report suggests that professors are partly responsible for fueling rising Jew-hatred at the public university system.
Benjamin, who retired a few months ago, told JNS that he wasn’t surprised at the number of signatories. Previous letters to the UC regents drew hundreds of faculty signatures expressing concern over anti-Israel professors and departments, he said.
“We know that many people are worried about that,” he told JNS.
The letter states that the AMCHA report “describes a governance-related breakdown,” writing: “UC lacks clear systemwide operational rules and consistent enforcement that distinguish protected individual faculty speech from institutional academic-unit action and that prevent misuse of UC authority and resources inside core academic functions.”
It continued, saying that “when the public sees UC-branded academic units operating as political actors, confidence in UC’s scholarly standards and institutional integrity erodes.”
Benjamin told JNS that “we are really worried about the reputation of the university.”
“We are worried about, personally speaking, also our funding, our ability to recruit students, because when they hear that the university, this department or that department, are acting in this way, they’re concerned,” he said.
“People don’t always distinguish between the different departments, because they see the University of California has this talk or this event, and the event is extremely anti-Zionist, they don’t distinguish between departments,” he told JNS. “They pin the whole university in this kind of discolor, and everybody’s impacted.”
Most of the signatories are in the science, technology, engineering, medicine and math fields, according to Benjamin.
He hasn’t experienced Jew-hatred in the university system, but said that “the indirect impact is huge.”
“It’s hard for you to raise money. You have all this scrutiny from federal authorities,” he told JNS. “At UCLA, they canceled a lot of grants. Here at UCSC, indirectly, I know that some people had their grants stopped.”
“All of this is creating a lot of mayhem for the faculty,” Benjamin said.
The letter states that the AMCHA report “lays out specific regents-level actions to make that boundary real across all campuses” and urges the regents to “take up the report and its recommendations for discussion at the regents’ March meeting.”
‘We expect them to do their job’
Rachel Zaentz, a UC spokeswoman, told JNS that the public system “unequivocally condemns antisemitism and has taken numerous steps to address it, and other expressions of hate and intolerance, on our campuses.”
“The university takes the findings in the AMCHA Initiative report seriously and is reviewing the incidents cited within it,” Zaentz said. “Academic freedom and freedom of expression are core values at UC, and we take action to respond to and counter antisemitism and hate incidents when they occur.”
The system’s board of regents “recently approved amendments to faculty discipline policies and procedures to reduce the time to resolve cases and promote a more consistent application of discipline across our campuses,” she said.
Benjamin told JNS that the faculty behind the letter want the regents to know that it’s not only the AMCHA Initiative that is raising concerns.
“Actual faculty who work and raise money for the university and conduct world-class research” also worry, he said. “We need them to know that we are concerned, and we expect them to do their job.”
“What we’re asking is for the regents to simply enforce regulations they already have on the book. Regulations about course content, regulations about the university not being used for political advocacy,” he said. “They have the rules. They just need to figure out the mechanism to enforce it.”
Benjamin said that “we don’t want the university to lose the public’s trust because few departments are taking advantage of the university name to advance their own very narrow political cause.”
