A UCLA Professor’s Case Against the Antisemitism Lawsuit Proves Its Point

When the Justice Department sued UCLA  for a second time this year —the  first targeted its Jewish faculty and staff —UCLA historian David Myers  answered in the  Forward  with the typical, now common characteristic reflex of the university under scrutiny: concede a little, contextualize a great deal, and recommend further study.  The  Forward  piece warrants attention not because Myers is unusual, but because he is representative. He grants that a “small number” of the antisemitism allegations are true, then dismisses the federal complaint as “partisan and partial” and “comical.” He faults UCLA’s own antisemitism task force for ignoring the “relational nature” of the conflict and the “wider ecosystem of hate.” And he proposes, as the cure, a “major new educational effort.”  One fact organizes everything the essay leaves out. A federal judge has ruled on what happened, and not ambiguously. In August 2024, Judge Mark Scarsi  found  that “Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith”—language he called “abhorrent” to religious liberty. UCLA did not dispute the facts. It argued only that third-party protesters engineered it, and the court rejected that defense.  What followed is also on the record. UCLA appealed and then  withdrew the appeal within two weeks . Last summer it consented to a permanent injunction and  paid $6.13 million  to settle the students’ claims. None of this appears in the  Forward . A writer who dismisses the government’s case as “self-reporting and hearsay” has omitted the one part of the record that is neither self-reported nor hearsay—the findings, the injunction, the payout, the abandoned appeal—which is the central omission in his argument.  The insistence that antisemitism never be allowed to stand on its own term—that it first be situated within a “relational” conflict and a broader “ecosystem of hate”—operates less as analysis than as deferral. Every prejudice sits within a broader ecosystem. But civil-rights law proceeds by identifying specific injuries to specific people; a university does not answer a complaint of racial exclusion by gesturing at the wider ecosystem of hate. It remedies the exclusion. An encampment that excluded Jewish students from portions of campus was not harsh political speech. It was the segregation of students by creed, which is why a court, and not a task force, brought it to an end. Whether Myers is right about the worst violence on April 30 is beside the point. The question before the court was not who suffered the greatest injury, but whether Jewish students were denied equal access to their university.  The free-speech framing inverts too. Myers warns that “time, place, and manner” rules and the IHRA definition of antisemitism will chill pro-Palestinian expression. But the adjudicated First Amendment violation at UCLA ran the other way. The university’s own de-escalation strategy facilitated the exclusion zone, and the injunction  specifically barred  UCLA from facilitating it again. The students whose access to campus was curtailed by state inaction were Jewish.  That leaves the proposed remedy. After a federal finding, an abandoned appeal, a permanent injunction, and a multimillion-dollar settlement, the prescription is more seminars and more study: the reflex Tocqueville would have recognized, the performance of concern standing in for the discharge of an obligation.  Chancellor Julio Frenk calls the new suit’s premise  “simply wrong”  and points to his administration’s programs. The programs are real. So were the exclusion zone, the injunction, and the check the university wrote.  Most strikingly, Myers’s preferred remedy is not disciplinary reform, enforcement, or accountability. It is an expansion of research and educational programming through an initiative he directs. The oddity is hard to miss: a federal lawsuit is met with a proposal to enlarge the apparatus charged with studying the problem, turning institutional breakdown into justification for institutional growth.  The instinct runs deeper than one conflict. The modern university treats almost every failure as a research question. If students are lonely, it builds a center; if trust erodes, it appoints a commission; if antisemitism spreads, it launches an initiative. But some problems persist not because they are understudied but because leaders decline to exercise judgment. A university does not need another commission to know that students should not be barred from campus for being Jewish.  The Justice Department’s complaint may overreach, and one can object to the leverage of  frozen grants and billion-dollar demands  without pretending the injury never occurred. But UCLA does not lack studies, initiatives, task forces, centers, or reports; it has produced all of them. What it lacked in 2024 was the willingness to ensure that Jewish students could move freely through their own campus. Until universities learn the difference between studying a problem and solving it, they will keep mistaking institutional activity for institutional responsibility.  The post A UCLA Professor’s Case Against the Antisemitism Lawsuit Proves Its Point appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .