U California Tables Anti-Israel Proposed Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement After Pushback
Coalition Letter to which Legal Insurrection Foundation was a signatory: How could a group of UC faculty who refuse to acknowledge that the Hamas massacre was terrorism be trusted to establish state-wide ethnic studies standards for all California students?
On November 3, 2023, it has recently come to light, a little-known academic committee at the University of California (UC) quietly tabled a proposal that threatened to wreak havoc in the Jewish community—by forcing the state’s high schools to teach anti-Israel ethnic studies courses.
The proposal to establish an ethnic studies requirement for admission to UC schools was spearheaded by the antisemitic UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council. They promote the “liberated” [read: anti-Israel] version of ethnic studies: Anti-Zionism, they argue, should be one of the “animating commitments” of California state-mandated high school ethnic studies courses.
Legal Insurrection has covered the ethnic studies movement in California here:
- Gavin Newsom Signs Bill Requiring Critical Race-Related ‘Ethnic Studies’ for All High School Graduates
- University of California Committee Wants to Impose Compelled Speech in High School Ethnic Studies Course
- University of California Wants Ethnic Studies Mandate That Gov. Newsom Called Offensive to Jews
- Lawsuit Challenges Attempts to Inject “Liberated Ethnic Studies” Curriculum Into California Schools
- Hayward CA School District Approves Noxious “Liberated Ethnic Studies” CRT Curriculum
- Radical “Liberated Ethnic Studies” Team Leader/Teachers Union Member Wins CA School Board Seat
- Study: U Cal Education Schools Indoctrinate Future Teachers in Critical Race Theory Exploiting ‘Ethnic Studies’
- California Should Prioritize Math and Reading Over Ethnic Studies
- California’s Budget Shortfall Could Derail Its ‘Ethnic Studies Train’
Had the proposal passed, the Faculty Council’s radical antisemitic agenda would have set the de facto curriculum standard for California’s high schools to meet to guarantee their students’ eligibility for admission into UC schools.
Public pressure, including an eleventh-hour petition launched in solidarity with a coalition letter signed by Legal Insurrection Foundation, reportedly influenced the committee’s decision to put the proposal aside in a 6 to 5 vote with one abstention.
The Jewish community had watched with growing alarm this fall as the Faculty Council became increasingly brazen in its hostility toward Israel, even before October 7th Hamas massacre. After that day’s horror, UC leaders, to their credit, quickly condemned the violence as “sickening and incomprehensible,” and in no uncertain term as “an act of terrorism” by Israel’s enemies.
But the Faculty Council didn’t. They were outraged—at the UC administration. They demanded that the UC president and leaders take back their sympathy and support for the Jewish state. The slaughter, rape, and kidnapping of innocent civilians that day, they say in their October 16th letter, was justified in the name of the “Palestinian freedom struggle.”
That letter, it turns out, might have been the Faculty Council’s own undoing, by provoking the response that stopped the dreaded ethnic studies proposal in its tracks.
Led by the AMCHA Initiative, a nonprofit organization that fights antisemitism at the nations’ colleges and universities, a coalition of 115 groups sent a letter to the UC Regents urging them to reject the Faculty Council-backed ethnic studies admissions requirement:
UC faculty who cannot acknowledge that the Hamas massacre is terrorism and a crime against humanity, and who state that anti-Zionism and the elimination of the Jewish state is a core value of their discipline, must not be trusted to establish state-wide ethnic studies standards for California students.
Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, director of AMCHA, uncovered the minutes from the November UC academic committee meeting rejecting the Faculty Council proposal. “Buried deep” within them, she writes in the Jewish Journal, the committee chairman reveals what gave six of its members pause: Word from the higher-ups that the proposal “has raised concerns among the Regents due to its association with the recent letter about the war in the Middle East from the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council.” That was enough to put it on hold, at least for the time being.
But the battle is not likely over. As Rossman-Benjamin points out, there is nothing to stop the Faculty Council from coming up with a new proposal forcing California’s high schools to adopt its antisemitic agenda—an agenda that nearly half the committee voted to support.
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Comments
The loathsome antisemitism is so systemic that these individuals actually believe they are in the right..
There is no reason to excuse genocide. Not one. That these supposed intellectuals have let their personal indoctrination is disgusting. They should be shunned.
Let the pendulum swing; make these Hamas licker scurry away like the vermin they are.
I guess everyone was on-board with Critical Social Justice Anti-White Theory, but Anti-J00 theory is a bridge too far.
We need to have a national conversation in the U.S. about how vile Muslim supremacists and terrorists, enabled, kowtowed to and emboldened by their vile Dhimmi-crat allies, have spent the last forty-something years engaging in the most patently dishonest, slanderous and simply evil revisionist history and propaganda vilification and demonization of Israel and Israeli Jews.
It galls me to concede it, but, these reprobates have been wildly and undeniably successful in spreading this manifestly contrived and fallacious propaganda narrative that perversely and offensively turns belligerent, totalitarian and fascistic Muslim supremacists and terrorists into alleged victims, while casting the actual indigenous people of the middle east, long-suffering and long-persecuted Jews, as alleged oppressors and settlers engaged in a host of supposed transgressions.
A website which documents country how awful Muslins in general and Pales in particular, are. It is not a pretty picture, and while I personally have a lot of information about this, it would be really useful if it was all organized and available for all to see.
This is the same state that passed a state Constitutional amendment to limit Asian access to colleges.
Yes! There’s nothing those evil racist Republicans won’t do!
Oh. Wait…
Your tax dollars at work!
“Anti-Zionism, they argue, should be one of the “animating commitments” of California state-mandated high school ethnic studies courses.”
Here I thought the “animating commitments” of education were equipping people with what we know, and tools we’ve found, that they might not otherwise acquire for themselves so easily.
I think there’s a different word for installing agenda.
I think everyone, especially if you are Jewish, can see the train coming down the tracks aimed at the Jews. History tells us to fight like hell but make travelling plans.