Last year, a controversy arose at UC Berkeley when some student groups within its law school took the position that they would invite no pro-Israel speakers to campus, a rather curious attitude for future lawyers to take given our First Amendment. The controversy inspired me to write a letter to UCB Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinky.
The Louis D Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, an organization that advocates for Jewish students when it comes to issues of anti-Semitism, has been active in this story and has now filed a lawsuit against UCB for its alleged lack of cooperation in complying with a California Public Records request.
The below article is running today in the campus paper, The Daily Californian. I am cross-posting it here.
As I stated in my own reader comment to the DC, this is hardly surprising. As a former part-time teacher at UC Irvine, I recall the experience of a friend who filed similar requests to the university and the Olive Tree Initiative seeking records as to how the OTI was expending its funds in the Holy Land, specifically to some very suspicious Palestinian activist groups there. She never got the information.
Having worked for the US Government for 25 years, I am familiar with Freedom of Information requests. They can be very cumbersome to comply with, and granted, some requests are trivial (this one is not, in my view), but the alternative is no transparency within our government. Government agencies and institutions have set up departments and sections to deal with these requirements, and UCB should supply the requested information.
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