The University of California, Los Angeles has used millions of tax dollars to fund its diversity, equity and inclusion programs and to support faculty members who have made “radical” anti-Israel comments, according to an Aug. 13 report from the nonprofit Open the Books.
The group’s report, first reported by the New York Post, documents statements from professors at the public school, including that the Germans had “indistinguishable” rhetoric from that which “Israel uses about Palestinians” and that Germans said that “what they did in the countries they occupied wasn’t their fault.”
UCLA faculty also said Zionism in Israel has “basically taken up on the mantle of white supremacy,” per the report.
Among the faculty, whose anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric the report documents, are those with endowed positions and chairs of departments. Several appear to have tenure.
Daniel Mariaschin, CEO of B’nai B’rith International, told JNS that U.S. universities appear to have learned nothing from the past two years.
“In hiring professors like this, they are giving approbation to ideological indoctrination, not promoting intellectual curiosity,” he told JNS. “The University of California system should get an ‘F’ for such mindless, reckless hiring.”
The report states that the university received millions of dollars in federal grants, including from the National Science Foundation, in recent years that went to diversity programs.
“We, of course, support free speech rights on all sides of a debate, but taxpayers shouldn’t have to fund radicalism through the Department of Education or federal research grants,” Christopher Neefus, vice president of communication at Open the Books, told JNS.
Rabbi Dovid Gurevich, director of the Chabad House at UCLA, told JNS that diversity initiatives have “been detrimental and harmful to the campus climate and meritocracy, in general, and to the Jewish students, staff and faculty, in particular.”
“It is unfortunate that some professors continue to peddle hateful, nonfactual, inflammatory rhetoric, which not only immorally inverts the Holocaust but also further fuels marginalization, ostracism, harassment of and violence against the Jewish communities,” he said.
“Such rhetoric coming out of academia is yet to be adequately addressed by most universities, with UCLA being no exception,” the rabbi told JNS.
Mary Osako, vice chancellor for strategic communications at UCLA, told JNS that “UCLA’s partnership with the federal government advances life-saving care, research and economic innovation in California and across the nation.”
She added that the public school has been “abundantly clear” that the campus is no place for Jew-hatred and that the school took “concrete steps to extinguish hate” and created an initiative to combat Jew-hatred earlier in the year.
