The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) settled a discrimination lawsuit Tuesday brought by Jewish plaintiffs — but was hit the same day with a Department of Justice (DOJ) finding of civil rights violations.
In April 2024, UCLA allowed anti-Israel students to set up an “encampment” in the center of campus. The university surrounded it with metal barricades and allowed activists to patrol the encampment boundary.
The activists barred Jewish students who would not renounce support for Israel from crossing through the space. They also assaulted members of the public, including journalists exercising First Amendment rights.
A federal judge had already slammed the university in 2014, saying he found it intolerable that “Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.”
The Daily Bruin, the student newspaper at UCLA, reported the terms of the settlement:
The UC announced Tuesday it will pay $6.45 million to settle a lawsuit brought by three Jewish UCLA students and a professor who alleged they faced antisemitism during the Palestine solidarity encampment in the spring of last year.
The terms of the settlement require the UC to pay the plaintiffs a total of $200,000 and provide organizations that “combat antisemitism” with $2.33 million. The organizations include Hillel at UCLA, the Academic Engagement Network, the Jewish Federation Los Angeles’ Campus Impact Network and the Anti-Defamation League – an organization that lobbies for Israel and seeks to combat antisemitism.
UCLA’s Initiative to Combat Antisemitism – an initiative launched by Chancellor Julio Frenk in March – will also receive $320,000.
However, UCLA is not out of legal trouble. Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, sent a lengthy letter to UCLA outlining the findings of a federal investigation of antisemitism at the university.
“The Department has concluded that UCLA’s response to the protest encampment on its campus in the spring of 2024 was deliberately indifferent to a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students in violation of the Equal Protection Clause [of the Fourteenth Amendment] and Title VI [of the Civil Rights Act of 1964],” she wrote. She invited UCLA to begin a voluntary resolution before further legal proceedings.
The Trump administration has, unlike the Biden administration (which boasted of its antisemitism “strategy“), taken an aggressive posture toward universities on the subject of antisemitism, launching investigations and using the threat of funding cuts to enforce compliance with federal civil rights law.
UCLA is one of ten campuses nationwide that has been accused of being among the worst offenders.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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