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:
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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