[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
In the spring of 2022, Israeli sociologist Yael Nativ served as a professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies (TDPS). As Evan Gahr of the California Globe reports, that all changed after the massive Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, followed by a surge of anti-Semitic hatred on college campuses across the country.
Berkeley’s Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, whose slogan is “complexity welcome,” arranges for Israeli professors to teach in different departments at Berkeley. Nativ’s course was well received and the Institute invited the Israeli to return for the 2024-2025 school year. So did TDPS department chair SanSan Kwan.
In August 2023, Nativ submitted her application to teach the same dance course she taught in 2022. But after the October 7, 2023 attack, Kwan told the Institute’s Rebecca Golbert that the TDPS department would “not host Dr. Nativ again.” As Kwan explained, “things are very hot here right now and many of our grad students are angry. I would be putting the dept [department] and you in a terrible position if you taught here.”
The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, and Olivier & Schreiber PC, has filed a lawsuit against the University of California Board of Regents charging that Nativ was “the victim of national origin discrimination in violation of Berkeley’s nondiscrimination policy. Berkeley found that the rationales offered after the fact for denying Dr. Nativ’s application were pretextual, and that the real reason for Dr. Nativ’s rejection is that she is Israeli.” The anger of “graduate students,” code for Hamas, was the determining factor.
Nativ wrote an article Haaretz headlined, “Berkeley Gave in to Fear and Division When It Canceled My Invitation After October 7.” That prompted an investigation by UC Berkeley’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination (OPHD) which after nine months found that the discrimination claim was “substantiated by a preponderance of the evidence and constituted a violation of Berkeley’s Nondiscrimination Policy.” Even so, as Gahr noted, UC Berkeley “continued to stonewall.”
UC Berkeley faces other lawsuits and in July chancellor Rich Lyons told Congress the campus is committed to fighting anti-Semitism. The people have room for reasonable doubt, and as the lawsuit proceeds there’s a few things they should know.
Back in 1996, Californians passed the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), Proposition 209 on the November ballot, which banned racial and ethnic preferences in state education, employment and contracting. No longer could a student be admitted or a professor hired – or rejected – on a racial or ethnic basis. Supporters included UC Berkeley grads David Horowitz and Peter Collier, and the students welcomed the measure.
On the other hand, state democrats and the education bureaucracy fought the measure from the beginning and have since established a vast DEI bureaucracy that burns up tax dollars but adds no educational value. This is no surprise in a university system that has become a political stronghold for Democrats.
In official pronouncements, Democrats statewide hailed California Assembly Speaker John Perez as a graduate of UC Berkeley. As it turned out, Perez dropped out of Berkeley and never returned to finish his degree. His major had been “Chicano studies,” a non-discipline. In 2014, Gov. Jerry Brown, who also opposed CCRI, appointed Perez to the University of California Board of Regents.
Gov. Jerry Brown retained Democrat Ana Matosantos, from a wealthy family in Puerto Rico, as state director of finance, and refused to accept her resignation after she was arrested for drunk driving in Sacramento. Gov. Newsom made Matosantos his cabinet secretary and “energy czar” before appointing her to the UC Board of Regents in 2022.
For president of the University of California, the state in 2013 hired Janet Napolitano, the Obama Department of Homeland Security boss and former Arizona governor whose career went back to the smear campaign against Clarence Thomas. Napolitano was a politician, not an educator, and it showed. In 2017, California State Auditor Elaine Howle discovered that Napolitano, while raising tuition and fees, was hiding a slush fund of $175 million.
Napolitano’s office interfered with investigators but the UC president faced no criminal charges and stayed in office until 2020. Last year, Joe Biden appointed Napolitano to a panel tasked to investigate the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. He survived a second assassination attempt and went on to win the election.
Michael V. Drake served as University of California president from 2020-2025. James Milliken now takes over as the 22nd president of “UC’s world-renowned system of 10 campuses, six academic health centers, and three affiliated National Laboratories.” The famed UC system has now become a laboratory for discriminatory DEI polices and partisan politics, but there’s more to it. At UC Berkeley, Hamas has become, in effect, the faculty search committee and department of admissions. It will be interesting to see if president Milliken can bring about meaningful change.
