OPINION:
Is it too much to ask that Jewish students attending a public university have the same rights as all other students? Shockingly, University of California, Los Angeles won’t commit to ensuring Jewish students’ equal rights without a fight (“Federal judge orders UCLA to end ‘abhorrent’ discrimination against Jewish students,” Web, Aug. 13).
Last week in a ruling granting a preliminary injunction sought by three Jewish students who were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus by anti-Israel protesters, U.S. District Judge Mark C. Scarsi excoriated UCLA administrators for refusing to protect the Jewish students’ constitutional rights.
Judge Scarsi wrote: “In the year 2024, in the United States of America … Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.” Calling this “unimaginable” and “abhorrent,” he repeated it for emphasis before observing, “UCLA does not dispute this.” He rejected UCLA’s excuse that it had no obligation to protect the Jewish students’ rights because third-party protesters engineered the exclusion.
Judge Scarsi’s preliminary injunction prohibits UCLA administrators from “knowingly allowing or facilitating the exclusion of Jewish students from ordinarily available portions of UCLA’s programs, activities and campus area.” UCLA should embrace the ruling and apologize for having failed its Jewish students during the 2023-2024 academic year. Instead, UCLA is appealing.
Could anyone imagine a public school system asking an appellate court to hold that the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board did not apply to it if a denial of minority students’ rights was engineered by outside agitators and public school administrators merely accommodated and facilitated that denial of rights? Surely not. Yet this is what a reversal of Scarsi’s decision in Frankel v. Regents would effectively mean.
Clearly, UCLA does not take antisemitic intimidation or discrimination seriously.
STEPHEN A. SILVER
San Francisco, California
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