At UC Santa Cruz, the Indoctrination Goes On

UC Santa Cruz- America's Wackiest University

Once again, I am proud to post a letter from my friend and colleague, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a teacher at UC Santa Cruz (America's Wackiest University). I use the term university lightly here because this institution is nothing more than a center for left-wing indoctrination. From Angela Davis' History of Consciousness department to the Community Studies department to ethnically-segregated dorms, to anti-Israel indoctrination, this so-called university and its so-called colleges have turned the very concept of education into a joke. The result is an environment where a particular group of students (Jewish) has been made to feel uncomfortable-all because radical left-wing professors, administrators, students, and other know-nothings have bought into this propaganda against Israel as some sort of Nazi state. They don't know what true Nazis were because nobody bothers to teach them about true history anymore. It's all anti-Western civilization in fashion these days. Compounding this travesty of education is a feckless president named Mark Yudof, who sits in his office and wrings his hands about anti-Semitic hate speech, swastikas on bathroom stalls, and professors giving the finger to and heckling Jewish students (at UC Berkeley) who protest the swastikas.



The UC Santa Cruz Story



By Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, Lecturer in Hebrew and Jewish Studies at UC Santa Cruz



"What I thought would be an interesting and informative course exploring the two sides of a very complex conflict, turned out to be so outrageously one-sided and anti-Israel as to make a mockery of the educational system. The professor used her lectures, classroom discussions and course readings as a vehicle for her own personal vendetta against the state of Israel, against Zionism, against Israelis and against Jews....Many times when I would confront the professor in class or on the class website, she would argue with me so harshly that I felt personally assaulted by her."

A Jewish student at UC Santa Cruz wrote these words after taking a class on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This student was not alone in her feelings. Since 2001, numerous Jewish students on my campus have told me that they felt emotionally and intellectually intimidated and harassed by professors who use their classroom as a bully pulpit for bashing the Jewish State and its supporters.

Some Jewish students have complained to me about feeling traumatized by departmentally-sponsored events, such as an academic conference on Zionism held at UCSC in 2007. Sponsored and funded by 8 departments, each of the conference's speakers concluded that Zionism was an illegitimate ideology and Israel a racist state, each professed to being an anti-Israel activist, and one speaker even urged members of the audience to join in the movement demanding that businesses and universities divest from Israel.

Still other Jewish students have reported feeling emotional distress when one or more of the residential colleges, with which each UCSC student affiliates, helped organize virulently anti-Israel events. Students view their College as the core of their university experience and see its participation in the demonization of the Jewish State as a betrayal of a fundamental trust. One Jewish student described her College’s sponsorship of a virulently anti-Israel event as “more than hurtful, it’s absolutely unsettling.”

Finally, almost all of these students have complained that there is a double standard at UCSC -- that no other ethnic group has been subjected by faculty or administrators to such hostile and demonizing criticism. And to make matters worse, when Jewish students sought help from campus administrators about these matters, the administrators refused to acknowledge there was a problem and were insensitive to the students' concerns. For example in January 2009, 90 Jewish students signed a petition to the administrators of Cowell College urging them to remove the College's name from an event the College was sponsoring, which the students felt certain would demonize the Jewish State and its supporters and be discriminatory against them as Jews. The Cowell administrators flatly refused and even asserted that the College "had every right" to put on such an event. Students reported to me that they believed the administration would have responded to them quite differently if they had been African American or Latino.

As part of a small faculty group on campus, I have participated in efforts to bring these problems to the attention of numerous UCSC administrators and faculty members since 2001. In every instance, the administration and faculty either ignored the problem or denied its existence. So in June 2009, I decided it was time to turn to the federal government. I filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR), alleging that anti-Israel discourse and behavior in classrooms and at university-sponsored events was tantamount to institutional discrimination against Jewish students, and had resulted in their intellectual and emotional harassment and intimidation. Besides providing extensive documentation of the longstanding and pervasive nature of the problem, I also chronicled the failure of numerous efforts that I and others had made to encourage UCSC faculty and administrators to acknowledge and address the problem. (To download a copy of the complaint: www.zoa.org/media/user/images/Benjamin-Complaint-6-25-09.pdf).

In March 2011, the OCR determined that my complaint had merit and opened a federal investigation.

Nevertheless, the problem persists. Just last month Jewish students reported being upset by a "Teach-in on Islamophobia," which UCSC faculty members and research groups had helped to organize, co-sponsor, and promote. The speakers at the event, who were well-known for their anti-Israel animus and activism, blamed Israel and the Jews for Islamophobia and used language that demonized the Jewish state and its supporters. A large table set up at the event contained materials advertising and promoting the U.S. Boat to Gaza, one of the boats participating in the "Freedom Flotilla II," whose organizers have ties to terrorist organizations including Hamas. Sitting at the table and handing out a personal letter encouraging students to endorse the U.S. Boat to Gaza was a UCSC administrator responsible for the educational programming at Cowell College, who acknowledged that she was to be a passenger on the boat. This event, which bore official university sponsorship as well as the significant participation of at least one faculty member and one administrator, can not help but contribute to the hostile environment for Jewish students at UCSC.

Although the problem is severe at UCSC, it is not unique to that campus. Jewish students on several UC campuses have reported feeling intimidated and harassed by faculty who use the classroom and conference hall to promote anti-Israel agendas, and by administrators who dismiss their concerns and hold these students to a discriminatory double standard. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible for students to challenge professors or administrators without risking harm to their academic careers and future.

The Jewish students at the University of California need our help!

Please help us show these students that the Jewish Community cares about them.

Please help us show UC President Mark Yudof that the Jewish Community stands strongly united on this issue and will not back down until the necessary steps are taken to protect Jewish students on UC campuses.

Please encourage your family, friends, and colleagues to sign the Amcha Initiative's letter to President Yudof:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LettertoUCPresidentYudof


You can also join our Facebook Cause ("Stop the Harassment and Intimidation of Jewish Students at the University of California") for updates about the letter and to read or report experiences of anti-Semitism on UC campuses or attempts to combat it, and invite others to do the same:

http://www.causes.com/causes/615378-stop-the-harassment-and-intimidation-of-jewish-students-at-the-university-of-california?m=892208b3



Thank you!



Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, Lecturer, University of California at Santa Cruz

tbenjami@ucsc.edu


Leila Beckwith, Professor Emeritus, University of California at Los Angeles

lbeckwit@ucla.edu
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Please support Professors Rossman-Benjamin and Beckwith. Help bring an end to this disgraceful re-born form of hate that has found acceptance on our university campuses.