The U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division announced this week that the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) violated the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The DOJ asserted that the school acted with “deliberate indifference” in creating a “hostile educational environment” for Jewish and Israeli students.
“Our investigation into the University of California system has found concerning evidence of systemic anti-Semitism at UCLA that demands severe accountability from the institution,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi. “This disgusting breach of civil rights against students will not stand: DOJ will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system.”
The DOJ’s July 29 letter to the university discussed the civil rights violations, explaining that the department “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 and Title VI.”
Similar investigations into other UC System schools are underway.
The Justice Department’s finding comes as UCLA has reached a $6 million settlement with Jewish students over its handling of campus protests.
Earlier this year, UCLA launched an effort to combat antisemitism on its campus, calling the move an “Initiative to Combat Antisemitism.”
“UCLA is at an inflection point,” Chancellor Julio Frenk wrote in a campus statement at the time. “Building on past efforts and lessons, we must now push ourselves to extinguish antisemitism, completely and definitively. The principles on which UCLA was founded — and which we continue to advance — point us toward a clear course of action: We must persevere in our fight to end hate, however it manifests itself. This is an opportunity for UCLA to rise to the challenge of being an exemplary university.”
