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| Venice, Italy on May 8, 2026 |
In September 2025, I wrote a guest post for this blog entitled “Why Should We Stand Up for the UC?” that placed much of the blame for the current federal assault against the University of California on the complicity and weakness of UC leadership, including the Regents, UCOP, and the Academic Senate. In bowing to the false claims of antisemitism that have served as the Trump administration’s pretext for attacking American universities and unleashing police and administrative terror on anti-genocide protesters, the UC invited federal intervention while crushing the grassroots movements of students, faculty, and staff that not only stood up for the best values of humanity, but also represented the best defense against rising fascism and authoritarianism.
Since asking Californians to “stand up for the UC” in September, the university’s leadership has somehow managed to deepen its complicity with the very oppressive forces that it claims to be resisting while simultaneously attracting additional federal attention that threatens our students, faculty, and staff. Though new actions over the last eight months have not garnered the same media attention as the brutal police crackdown on the Gaza solidarity encampments in spring 2024, the UC has targeted individual faculty, students, and staff for discipline while colluding with pro-Israel organizations--organizations that support Zionism's systematic effects of "Palestinian occupation and dispossession" while also equating opposition to Zionism with antisemitism--to implement structural changes that will curtail campus speech, preempt protest activity, restrict teaching of disfavored topics, and undermine faculty governance long after Trump has left the scene.
While these measures are the only problem facing the system, any hope for the future of the UC must involve actively confronting its complicity with Zionism and its corrosive effects not only in historic Palestine, but also here in California.
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The most visible symbol of UC’s collaboration with Zionism is the Regents’ recent settlement with the Louis D. Brandeis Center, a Zionist lawfare organization founded by former George W. Bush and Donald Trump appointee Kenneth Marcus. Like the ADL, AIPAC, and similar groups, the Brandeis Center is not in any meaningful sense a Jewish organization. Rather, its central goal is the defense of Zionism – an ethnonationalist and nakedly colonialist political project created in the late nineteenth century that a great many Jewish people do not embrace and whose largest numerical support base is among Christian Zionists. In practice, this translates into attempts to suppress criticism of the state of Israel by falsely equating anti-Zionism (including that voiced by Jewish people) with antisemitism.
In November 2023, the Brandeis Center filed a Title VI lawsuit against UC Berkeley, alleging that the University failed to address severe, persistent, or pervasive antisemitic harassment and discrimination after several student groups at the law school made the principled decision not to platform Zionist speakers. This was one of at least 22 separate Title VI lawsuits or complaints filed by the Brandeis Center after 10/7, all of which focused primarily on Zionism and the state of Israel.
Rather than standing up for their own students and their right to choose speakers who represented their values, the UC Regents held a closed door meeting on March 7th and preemptively settled with the Brandeis Center with no formal consultation with faculty either at UC Berkeley or systemwide.
Source: AAUP/MESA, “Discriminating Against Dissent: The Weaponization of Civil Rights Law to Repress Campus Speech on Palestine” (November 2025).
Even more so than the Frankel settlement – in which the Regents capitulated to a similar Zionist lawfare attack against UCLA in July 2025 – the Brandeis agreement represents nothing less than the institutional imposition of compulsory Zionism at the expense of academic freedom, shared governance, and the educational mission of the university. Among the terms of the settlement, the Regents agreed that UC Berkeley would “consider” the deeply-flawed IHRA definition of antisemitism for use in internal investigations of potential policy violations by students, faculty, and staff and also incorporate it into mandatory trainings for all university members, some of which (for Title VI officers), must be produced in cooperation with the Brandeis University President’s Initiative on Antisemitism.
The IHRA definition has been widely criticized by legal experts and scholars, including one of its own co-authors, as inappropriate for an academic environment. It was specifically rejected by the UC Berkeley academic Senate in an April 2025 resolution to then UC President Michael V. Drake, which insisted that, “the University must reject demands by the federal government. . . that require an abandonment of its academic freedom and violation of its members' legal rights,” including “[a]dopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which can be used in ways inconsistent with both academic freedom and freedom of speech and assembly.”
Of the 11 examples of antisemitism provided in the IHRA definition, seven relate to Israel, including “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” As the Berkeley Faculty Association (BFA) noted in its blistering critique of the settlement, “The irony of using the IHRA definition is that faculty and students at UC Berkeley may freely criticize the United States, or any other nation-state in the world–including their foundational ideologies, and their implications today–but not Israel. Criticism of any other state will not be subjected to this level of surveillance.”
Implementation of the IHRA definition in order to suppress criticism of Israel has been a major goal of pro-Israel lobbying and lawfare groups, including not only the Brandeis Center, but also the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Congress (AJC), the AMCHA Initiative, StandWithUs, the Deborah Project, JIMENA, and the Academic Engagement Network (AEN). Nor is this threat simply hypothetical. As JVP Action and Palestine Legal have documented, “The IHRA definition of antisemitism has been the one of the primary tools the Trump Administration is using to suppress criticism of Israel.”
In addition to endorsing a speech code that is specifically aimed at suppressing criticism of one particular nation state, the Brandeis settlement also creates a form of shadow governance in which the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Jewish Life and Campus Climate (CAC) – a group appointed solely by the Chancellor with no external review and (as of the time of this writing) no public list of membership – is granted sweeping powers to review curriculum, complaints, and discipline across the campus.
Under the terms of the settlement, “UC Berkeley will consult regularly with said Committee regarding the implementation of the commitments set forth in this agreement.” The only publicly identified member of this group is its current chair, Ethan Katz, a self-declared “liberal Zionist” who has stated that, “I find accusations of genocide against Israel inflammatory and lacking in intellectual rigor,” has co-authored a public letter raising racialized concerns about sexual violence by Palestinians (“We shudder to think of what is happening now to the women hostages”), and has warned that “I think there’s a lot of things that have gone wrong in the in the Palestinian solidarity movement.” His position of chair of the group charged with helping to oversee implementation is another example of the way in which the Brandeis settlement privileges Zionism and Zionists in defining not only Jewish identity, but also campus life more broadly.
Among the new responsibilities granted to the CAC will be to “review the impact of UC Berkeley’s educational offerings relating to Jewish history on its Jewish and Israeli students” and produce “a public written report with any recommendations to changes in leadership and curriculum. . . . ” To do so, the CAC must be provided “such resources as necessary,” a poorly defined requirement that opens up the possibility that this group will be granted access to instructor materials such as syllabi, assignments, and student evaluations.
The intentionally punitive and chilling effects of this review process are explicitly spelled out elsewhere in the agreement, where it notes that the CAC will be provided all complaints about discrimination based on “Jewish and Israeli Protected Categories” that are “relating solely to an academic course” as well as information about “how the campus responded to the complaint.” To facilitate this hostile review of UCB's curriculum, the CAC’s webpage (as required by the settlement) advertises that “Students are encouraged to contact [the CAC] with questions, concerns, or feedback. . . . regarding the impacts of UC Berkeley’s course offerings relating to Jews, Jewish history, antisemitism, and related topics,” essentially encouraging pro-Israel students to complain to this body about courses or materials they mayfind objectionable. Such complaints are routed directly to Katz as chair. Finally, in addition to serving as a curricular watchdog, the CAC will also receive detailed reports from the Office of Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination’s (OPHD) regarding investigations and outcomes of discrimination complaints relating to “Jewish and/or Israeli students.”
No other group on campus has received such a sweeping mandate to review curriculum and discipline. As the BFA noted, “this settlement appears to place the committee as such in a fundamental structural conflict with the Academic Senate–the governing body responsible for reviewing, evaluating, and approving educational offerings.” The UCB Senate agreed, issuing a statement decrying the failure of consultation prior to the settlement and warning that “it undermines the Academic Senate’s delegated authority to oversee the curriculum” and “seriously weakens the ability of the Academic Senate to protect academic freedom and to ensure faculty due process during investigations of violations of the faculty code of conduct.”
In addition to empowering a group with no accountability to the Academic Senate to report on curriculum and leadership of academic programs, the Brandeis settlement specifically names programs linked to Israel at UCB that are to be preserved and funded for a minimum of five years (the duration of the agreement). These include “the Tel Aviv–Berkeley Executive LLM Program, in partnership with Tel Aviv University. . . . the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies Winter Trip to Israel: Historical Battlefields of the Holy Land fall seminar led by Professor Ron Hassner” and “the Berkeley Global Internship Program in Haifa, including the associated coursework for credit.” These commitments were made without any consultation with the Academic Senate (which is supposed to have control over academic programs). No other set of programs, institutes, or courses at UC Berkeley have received a comparable written guarantee of support.
The stipulations outlined above (which is not even a complete accounting of the terms of the settlement), far transcend the narrow issue of student club bylaws on invited speakers that purportedly sparked the lawsuit. It’s worth reiterating that none of these terms were forced on the UC by a hostile federal government or by a court order. Rather, all of them were voluntarily agreed to by the Regents in a settlement with a private Zionist organization. When student intervenors from UC Berkeley tried to challenge the settlement in court, UC lawyers stood literally shoulder-to-shoulder with Brandeis lawyers to defend it in a federal courtroom in San Francisco. This was a graphic illustration of the university’s decision to choose solidarity with Zionism over the rights of its own students.
Defending the decision to settle, UC Berkeley Provost Ben Hermalin explained that the goal was, “[t]o get rid of a lawsuit that was draining in finances. We spent millions of dollars defending it before we settled. We would have spent millions more to take it to court.” For context, the annual budget of UC Berkeley in 2025 was $4 billion. The campus spent $8 million in policing its own students during the period of the encampments and, for what it’s worth, $4.7 million on the coach of a football team that finished with a 7-6 record (good for a seventh place finish in the ACC). Yet when it came time to defend the fundamental rights of students and faculty as well as the principles of shared governance and academic freedom, the Regents, who oversee a system with a total budget of $53.6 billion, apparently decided that a few million dollars was too steep a price to pay.
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In seeking to deflect the criticism that they faced from faculty and other groups in the aftermath of the Brandeis settlement, the UCB administration insisted that much of what was conceded had already been addressed voluntarily by the campus and the UC system during the previous years. As Hermalin summarized it, “The Brandeis settlement is really just a reaffirmation of the things that the campus was already doing.” To the extent that this is true, however, it is not a defense of the settlement but rather an indictment of the way in which the UC system has imposed a sweeping set of repressive structural changes, while simultaneously imposing individual discipline to curtail criticism of Israel.
Among the structural changes to the governance of the UC system made in direct response to Zionist pressure since 10/7 are:
- A Regental directive limiting the ability of academic departments to post political statements. This came in response to several UC ethnic studies departments posting in support of Palestine.
- Draconian changes to so-called “time, place, and manner” (TPM) policies in direct response to the encampments and aimed at preventing similar demonstrations of solidarity with Palestine by restricting the ability of students, faculty, and staff to protest.
- An overhaul of the Faculty Code of Conduct (APM 015) and the administration of discipline (APM 016) in response to an outcry from Zionist Regents about the failure to sufficiently punish faculty.
- A UC presidential directive that forbids student organizations from engaging in “boycotts of companies based on their association with a particular country.. . .” This directive came after the Law Student Association (LSA) at UC Davis voted to divest from Israel. UC Davis then proceeded to dissolve the LSA and the subsequent systemwide directive prohibited such actions by any student group at any campus in the future.
In addition to the repressive policy changes at the systemwide level, UC campuses continue to persecute individual students, faculty, and staff in response to Zionist pressure to crack down on pro-Palestine activism. As we approach the two-year anniversary of the violent police crackdown on encampments, two faculty members at UC San Diego are still facing discipline for trying to protect students from police violence during the raids, with one facing up to two years of suspension without pay. At UC San Francisco, a doctor and two staff members have been fired for Palestinian advocacy during the last year, including a nurse midwife who was terminated for wearing a watermelon badge after returning from a volunteer effort in Gaza. Lecturer Peyrin Kao at UC Berkeley was recently suspended and accused of violating a Vietnam-war era UC policy against “indoctrination” for speaking with students about Palestine after class.
Kao’s suspension for supposedly interjecting politics into the classroom is particularly egregious given that at the same campus, vocal pro-Israel Professor Ron Hassner staged a publicity stunt in which he spent two weeks living in his office and teaching his classes over Zoom in order to dramatize supposed antisemitism on the Berkeley campus. Rather than discipline Hassner for disrupting his teaching and “politicizing the classroom,” UC Berkeley leaders granted him numerous concessions and publicly praised him, declaring, “The administration is committed to confronting antisemitism and holds Professor Hassner in great esteem and it is in conversation with him about his concerns.” Indeed, as part of the Brandeis settlement, the UC carved out Hassner’s Israel-focused offerings for special treatment and protections while Kao faces suspension and loss of income for actions that were far less disruptive and far more principled.
The cases outlined above are all public, but I am personally aware of faculty and staff at at least four other UC campuses who have faced discipline or termination for their pro-Palestinian advocacy and the real number is likely much higher. Meanwhile students continue to face fallout from the encampments. At UCLA, over 175 students have endured conduct hearings stemming from pro-Palestine demonstrations in a lengthy, traumatic, and potentially life-altering process that dragged on into April 2026, two years after the encampment was brutally attacked by Zionist vigilantes and local police. As UCLA student Dylan Kupsh lamented, “I’ve become accustomed to being harassed once by Zionists, then again by UCLA.” Chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) have been suspended or placed on probation at UCLA, UCSC, USCD, UCD, and UCI.
Meanwhile, UC Regent and mid-tier Hollywood talent agent Jay Sures (whose agency, UTA, represents the ADL) has recently attacked UCLA student government on Regental letterhead and UC Berkeley law students during an appearance on Fox News. Reflecting this pattern of repression, half of the UCs have now been designated “hostile campuses” by CAIR, a designation earned “due to reported incidents, policies, and discriminatory practices targeting Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, Jewish, and other individuals opposing occupation, apartheid, and genocide.”
As with the Brandeis settlement, none of the repressive actions outlined here were imposed on the UC by the Trump administration. Nor can any of them be plausibly claimed to protect Jewish students, many of whom participated in pro-Palestine demonstrations and were subsequently subjected to police and administrative violence. Rather, the pattern that emerges is of affirmative action taken by UC leadership to privilege one particular ideology – Zionism – and one foreign nation – Israel – at the expense of the avowed principles of the university, including academic freedom, shared governance, and due process.
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When pressed on their complicity with pro-Israel repression, UC leaders sometimes assert that such concessions are necessary to protect the larger educational mission of the university at a time when it is under assault from the Trump administration and can ill afford additional negative attention. Rejecting even the mild resistance offered by Harvard, UC President James B. Milliken recently declared that “Given our responsibility to the university and to the state of California, the better course for us was to engage.” He invoked UC’s “oft-cited willingness to work with the government in good faith.”
And yet as with then-President Michael V. Drake’s strategy of showing “signs it was listening to the Trump administration” and not being “the tallest nail,” UC’s eager complicity with Zionism under Milliken has not shielded it from either government attacks or continued lawfare from Zionist groups. In the last eight months, the Trump administration has filed a Title VII lawsuit against UCLA (which was subsequently joined by a number of pro-Israel faculty members), initiated investigations into medical schools at UCLA and UCSD, and continued threats to defund the UC system. UC Berkeley, meanwhile, remains subject to no less than six federal investigations. All the available evidence indicates that rather than deterring further federal action, the UC’s attempts to placate the Trump administration merely provides more ammunition (in the form of voluntary admissions) that can then be leveraged into additional investigations.
Zionist organizations, meanwhile, have taken the UC’s collaboration as an invitation to demand further concessions. Only days after settling with the UC, the Brandeis Center blasted UC Berkeley law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky (an avowed Zionist who had signed a public letter that characterized the club bylaws that sparked the lawsuit as “antithetical to free speech and our community values” and linked anti-Zionism to antisemitism) for having the temerity to suggest that despite the settlement, clubs were still entitled to exercise their own discretion in whom they asked to speak on campus. A representative from the Brandeis center called Cherminsky’s statement “just plainly wrong and inconsistent with the agreement” and threatened that “we will be addressing the issue with the university." In February, meanwhile, The AMCHA Initiative, a UC-focused pro-Israel group that has repeatedly targeted students and professors for racist abuse, released a lengthy report accompanied by a petition to the Regents that asserted that faculty who called attention to the genocide in Gaza were part of “a coordinated anti-Israel agenda that has fueled harassment, exclusion and intimidation of Jewish and pro-Israel students." It insisted that the laundry list of repressive measures already adopted by the UC were insufficient and there there needed to be additional “Regents-level oversight with consequences” including a complete ban on academic units expressing “political positions," as well as prohibitions on boycotts, “anti-normalization” efforts and “faculty use of instructional authority for political and anti-Israel mobilization.”
In short, if the UC’s leadership has sought to “protect” the university and its students, faculty, and staff from the Trump administration and Zionist lawfare by making concessions – a claim that seems farcical given the evidence of the past two years – it is a strategy that is not only morally bankrupt, but has also repeatedly, disastrously, and predictably failed.
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In my previous guest entry to this blog, I noted that while faculty governance is marginally less disastrous than the UC’s administrative leadership, it has failed to address the underlying threats the university faces, in addition to shirking the moral duty of speaking out in opposition to a live-streamed genocide in Palestine in which the university is deeply complicit. In the subsequent eight months, there has been no sign that the systemwide Academic Council has awakened from its slumber. Council has failed to make even a cursory statement about the Brandeis settlement or the ongoing repression of students, faculty, and staff, much less confronted the role of Zionism in driving attacks on the UC. And while the UC Berkeley Senate has issued a statement condemning aspects of the settlement, their objections are confined to narrow issues of shared governance and fail to address the underlying reasons why the Regents so eagerly collaborated with Zionist groups to undermine the university’s foundations.
A similar inability to identify and confront the origins of the current attacks on the university has afflicted the Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA) and its local chapters on the campuses. To its credit, CUCFA, in partnership with UC unions and the AAUP, has stepped into the void left by UC leadership and the Academic Senate by aggressively pushing back against the Trump administration, including winning release of the federal demands against UCLA (which the Regents attempted to keep secret) and a preliminary injunction against funding cuts and any potential deal with the federal government. CUCFA and seven campus chapters also filed an Unfair Labor Practices (ULP) charge specifically addressing “UC’s actions to suppress speech about Palestine on our campuses, which represents an illegal content-based restriction of faculty rights [and] sets an alarming precedent.”
Yet for all its admirable work in defending the UC and the underlying principles of academic freedom and faculty rights, neither CUCFA nor the individual FA chapters have been willing to address either the ongoing genocide in Palestine that prompted student and faculty protest in the first place, or the role of Zionism as the driving force in producing both the external pressure and internal repression that they have been so active in defending against. In my view, no organization that owes its existence to compromise with genocide is one with the moral credibility to lead the University of California or any other institution. And yet even those who wish to close their eyes to events that they perceive as taking place “over there” or believe addressing the genocide would hinder their efforts to build power internally cannot ignore the ongoing repressive effects of Zionism here at the UC if they care at all about the future of the institution and its members.
While not the only factor in the current assault on the UC’s students, faculty, and staff, specifically naming Zionism as one of the primary causes is important not only as a point of historical accuracy, but also as a prelude to addressing the problem at its root rather than simply treating the symptoms on an ongoing basis. Responding to the current crisis at the UC by solely focusing on a procedural defense of academic freedom, shared governance, and faculty rights without mentioning Zionism is akin to responding to climate change by purchasing an air conditioning unit and a bunch of room fans. While these palliative measures are helpful and perhaps even necessary in the short term, failing to name and address the root cause of the problem ensures an ongoing state of crisis which will continue to get worse over time if not directly confronted. How many examples of Zionist pressure and UC collaboration resulting in structural and individual repression do we need before faculty bodies are willing to name and confront it?
Even for those who have given up on the university as beyond the possibility of salvation or see it as an avowed “enemy institution,” confronting Zionism within the University of California is crucial to the “belly of the beast” anti-imperialist work of demobilizing and dismantling the U.S. war machine. Whatever one thinks of the past, present, or future of the UC as an educational institution, it is undeniably a crucial node in the military-industrial-academic complex that fuels genocide in Palestine and imperialist violence around the world. UC leadership perhaps accidentally acknowledged this truth in responding to the Trump attacks by emphasizing its contributions to “national security” through its nuclear labs and other military research. How can we in the UC system hope to stop genocide, war, and militarism in Palestine and around the world if we cannot effectively confront and curtail our own institution’s role in fueling this violence?
For the people of Gaza, for the people of California, for the sake of democracy, justice, and humanity, we must not simply divest from Israeli genocide, but also actively confront the role of Zionism within our own institutions. In my next guest post for this blog, I will consider the difficult but necessary task of dezionizing the University of California and what that might look like in practice.
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