At San Diego State and UCLA, the responses to an aggressive gambit by conservative activist David Horowitz were noticeably different. Horowitz distributed a poster that can be filled out to identify supporters of the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement, which targets Israel, as “pro-Palestinian terrorists.” Horowitz rejects the idea that this is an extreme tactic, saying campus groups which back BDS also support Hamas, which is officially recognized by the State Department as a terrorist group.

When seven San Diego State students were so identified with the inflammatory posters in April, San Diego State University President Elliot Hirshman and his administration met with upset students. The subsequent statement issued by the university said a committee would review university policies with the goal of “balancing freedom of expression and protection from harassment.” But the statement alluded to the posters, however hateful they may be, as falling under the First Amendment — political speech with “protected status.”

This led to a protest in which dozens of students surrounded a car that Hirschman was in and wouldn’t let it leave. After an hour, Hirschman got out and spoke with the students. But they remain unsatisfied and have called for the SDSU president to resign. He also faces faculty criticism.

UCLA warned of legal action against Horowitz

At UCLA, the fliers — which named faculty members as well as students — triggered a much stronger response. In an email to campus students, faculty and employees, Jerry Kang, vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion, said the tactics “amounts to a focused, personalized intimidation that threatens specific members of our Bruin community,” Kang said in the email.

The Daily Bruin reported that Kang said “UCLA will enforce university policies on harassment and intimidation by pursuing legal action against Horowitz.”

Horowitz responded by threatening to sue Kang for defamation. He also accused UCLA of double standards and hypocrisy — a view also voiced by high-profile UCLA Professor Judea Pearl, who said even the word Israel “has been shunned by the UC administration like leprosy.”

Now it’s UC Irvine’s turn for unrest.

On May 18, about 50 protesters disrupted the screening of “Beneath the Helmet,” a documentary about Israel soldiers, an event that was to include a discussion between students and former Israel soldiers. After protesters blocked exits, UCI police intervened and led those in the screening room to safety amid what witnesses described as a hail of profanity and anti-Israel chants.

UC Irvine Chancellor Howard Gillman emailed students, faculty and employees the next day, saying the protesters “crossed the line of civility.”

UC Irvine was the scene of perhaps the best-known U.S. campus protest against Israel. In February 2010, 11 UC Irvine and UC Riverside students repeatedly disrupted a speech by Michael Oren, then Israel’s ambassador to the U.S.  In 2011, 10 of the students were found guilty of misdemeanor counts of organized disruption of the event. They were ordered to do 56 hours of community service and serve three years of “informal probation.”

Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas’ decision to pursue criminal charges over and above the mild discipline the students faced on campus was sharply criticized by Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Irvine’s law school. He said it was “unnecessarily divisive.”

But the University of California may slow that momentum. At a Board of Regents meeting Tuesday in San Francisco, a proposal meant to curb harassment of Jewish students at UC’s 10 campuses was unveiled. It declares “anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and other forms of discrimination have no place at the University of California” and that university officials must “challenge speech and action reflecting bias, stereotypes, and/or intolerance.”

This is significantly stronger language than a previous proposal unveiled last year — and quickly rejected — that was more generally worded without a specific reference to anti-Zionism. UC regents are expected to vote on the language at their meeting next Wednesday in San Francisco.

But that vote will only come after they hear sharp protests from students and faculty who see this policy as damaging their speech rights and exonerating Israeli for its treatment of Palestinians.

Professor: Criticizing Israel not equal to bigotry

UC Berkeley literature professor Judith Butler told the Los Angeles Times that the language of the policy allowed for arbitrary definitions of what is unacceptable speech:

[She] questioned who would define that term or decide what crossed the line into discriminatory speech.

 

And although the statement provides no sanctions, calling on university leaders to “challenge” bias, Butler wondered whether those singled out as criticizing Zionism would be denied faculty research funds, promotions or other benefits.

 

“To include anti-Zionism as an instance of intolerance and bigotry is actually to suppress a set of political beliefs that we actually need to hear,” she said. “It saddens me and strikes at the heart of the task of the university.”

UCLA student Eitan Peled, a member of the liberal Jewish Voice for Peace group, blasted the proposal in an interview with the Associated Press. “As a student who considers my work advocating for Palestinian human rights as an expression of my Jewish values, I am surprised to see that criticism of a modern nation-state that regularly violates international law is so centered in a report against intolerance,” he told AP. “Debate over Zionism and the abusive policies of the state of Israel absolutely should be debated vigorously, not silenced by accusations of discrimination.”

Ex-UC president: ‘Microaggression’ against Jews common

Meanwhile, former University of California President Mark Yudof is also speaking out about the BDS movement and the treatment of Jewish students at some universities. He’s joined the advisory board of the Academic Engagement Network, which seeks to “bring together faculty members and administrators to address issues related to Israel.” Its members include Lawrence Summers, the former treasury secretary and Harvard president.

In a December essay published by Inside Higher Education, Yudof depicted the BDS movement as trying to shut down discussion of issues involving Israel while linking Zionism to other issues, including police violence toward African Americans. “In age of exquisite sensitivity on some campuses to microaggression, or language that subtly offends underrepresented groups, the ironic toleration of microaggression against Jews often goes unnoted,” he wrote.

It was while Yudof was UC president that the UC system suffered perhaps its most notorious display of anti-Israeli sentiment. Eleven UC Irvine and UC Riverside students were arrested in February 2010 after they interrupted a speech at UC Irvine by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren and refused to let him complete his remarks. The incident triggered vast reaction.

The Los Angeles Times broke the story this week of how UC pension officials had sold $30 million in holdings in companies that run private prisons. Such companies are criticized by activists who believe they are unaccountable and that the U.S. criminal-justice system is much too quick to consign young offenders to prisons for long periods, making it highly unlikely they will lead productive lives. The UC decision was both applauded and criticized, per the Times:

“By selling their shares they’re sending a message … that the UC system is against human rights abuses,” said Kamilah Moore, who graduated from UCLA in 2014 and is a field organizer for the Afrikan Black Coalition, a student advocacy group. …

 

Xavier Harris, who graduated this month from UC Merced, where he was a member of the black student union, said he was encouraged by the move. “It shows [administrators] are listening when we said this is an issue that affects our friends and families,” he said. “They should be in the business of education, not profiting from incarceration.” …

 

Ivo Welch, a finance professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, said that UC administrators may be too sensitive to outside pressure.

 

“If you start going down the list of Fortune 500 companies, I’m sure we can come up with reasons we should divest from each one,” he said. “I’m almost left speechless by how we pamper student whims.”

Previous divestment decision also based on risk

In September, UC sold its $200 million worth of shares in companies in the coal and oil sands extraction business. UC officials had a slightly different tone in describing this divestment, acknowledging student protests but also saying there were legitimate questions about risks. This is from a Reuters report:

Chief Investment Officer Jagdeep Bachher said slowing global demand, an increasingly unfavorable regulatory environment pose insurmountable challenges for coal mining companies.

 

The profitability of companies focused on developing crude from Canadian oil sands has also fallen amid low global oil prices, Bachher said, making those companies increasingly risky investments.

But the next divestment target of student activists — Israeli-owned businesses or corporations that do considerable business with Israel — seems likely to be vastly more difficult to achieve. Such a politically fraught decision would be made by UC regents, not by staff. And the man generally considered the most influential regent — billionaire financier Richard Blum, husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein — is an intense critic of the BDS (Boycott Divestment Sanction) movement that seeks to punish Israel for its treatment of Palestinians.

In 2013, he abstained from joining an otherwise-unanimous vote to approve the selection of Sadia Saifuddin as a student representative on the regents board in 2014-15. Saifuddin was a leader of the BDS movement at UC Berkeley and belonged to campus groups that the Simon Wiesenthal Center said were explicitly anti-Semitic.

More recently, Blum has fought for a tough UC speech code protecting Jewish students from what he depicts as steadily escalating intimidation and bullying from UC students associated with the BDS movement and other anti-Israeli groups. This led Los Angeles journalist Conor Friedersdorf to write a piece for The Atlantic about free speech on campus that compared Blum with students at UCLA who seek to regulate and punish other students for being insensitive to or insufficiently concerned about minorities.