Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”

Sign up to attend Michael’s talk in Los Angeles on Thursday, November 20: HERE.

Editor’s note: A culture of rampant lawlessness has been steadily growing in American academia. Our nation’s universities have shamelessly put their pursuit of woke leftist ideology ahead of their loyalty and obedience to the laws of the United States of America and the principles of freedom and equality of opportunity that inform them. The Freedom Center is exposing the worst perpetrators of this illegal conduct as the Top Ten Academic Felons, and we will be highlighting one school a day as we count down from #10 to #1. The University of California-Los Angeles is #3 on our list.

#3: University of California-Los Angeles

The acts of anti-Semitic exclusion recently perpetrated by UCLA were so blatant a violation of federal civil rights law, that the university felt compelled to grant a $6 million settlement to Jewish students and faculty who sued the university over its felonious conduct which violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

The lawsuit which was filed by three Jewish students and one professor argued that UCLA allowed and facilitated the creation of a “Jew Exclusion Zone” on campus during pro-Hamas demonstrations in the spring of 2024.

The merit of their claim is undeniable. During the mass protests that roiled the UCLA campus, radical student activists aided by outside agitators took over an enormous swath of campus, labeling it the “Palestine Solidarity Encampment.” Students policed entry to this encampment, denying entry to “Zionists” (an estimated 80-90% of American Jews are Zionists) or anyone who refused to condemn Israel’s defensive response to Hamas’s brutal October 7^th massacre of over 1200 innocent Israelis. Those pro-Israel students who attempted to breach the wooden and metal barricades surrounding the encampment were turned away with either words or brute force.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which took up the legal complaint on behalf of the plaintiffs, described the specifics of the case in clear and concrete terms:

In spring 2024, extremist students and outside agitators at UCLA set up barricades in the most popular area of campus and established an encampment in violation of the school’s policies.

Those agitators refused to let students through unless they disavowed Israel’s right to exist. The effect of this encampment was to segregate Jewish students and faculty with religious and ethnic obligations not to condemn Israel, preventing them from accessing the encampment and other parts of campus, including the campus’s most popular undergraduate library and classroom buildings. The activists used checkpoints, built barriers, and often locked arms to prevent Jews from walking through the encampment.  They also created an identification system, giving wristbands to those who had passed their anti-Israel ideological test and preventing those without one from entering.

For a full week, UCLA’s administration failed to clear the Jew Exclusion Zone and instead ordered campus police to stand down and allow the illegal encampment to stay. The administration even stationed security staff around the encampment to keep students unapproved by the protesters out of the area. Even after the first encampment was cleared, activists have continued to stage encampments and occupations of public spaces at UCLA.

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice led by Pam Bondi reached the same conclusion in July 2025. A letter from the DOJ directed to University of California President Michael V. Drake, concluded that “Jewish and Israeli students at UCLA were subjected to severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive harassment that created a hostile environment by members of the encampment.”

“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,” Bondi commented.

The federal laws at stake in the matter are crystal clear. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal aid. In an executive order issued in 2019, then-president Donald Trump directed federal agencies to enforce this law against institutions that discriminated against Jews, since Judaism is both a religion and a nationality/race.

UCLA has a clear and undeniable obligation under federal law to ensure that all tuition-paying students—Jewish or not, Zionist or not—are granted equal access to the university campus and facilities.

Instead of protecting the rights of its Jewish students, UCLA instructed its security guards to do exactly the opposite. They stood by and allowed the pro-Hamas insurgents to deny Jewish students free access to their own campus.

The Amcha Initiative, a watchdog group dedicated to tracking and combatting anti-Semitism on campus, documented some of these horrific confrontations on the public university campus and the resultant violations of Title VI.

As Amcha reports:

• A Jewish counter demonstrator at the anti-Zionist encampment on campus was beaten. After her 13-year-old sister dropped her Israeli flag, the counter demonstrator bent down to pick it up and at least five kefiyah-clad protestors accosted her, first by stomping on the flag and then by knocking her to the ground, repeatedly kicking her in her head and causing her to lose consciousness and apparently suffer a concussion. When she awoke she was bleeding from her head, disoriented, and unable to recognize her family.
• A pro-Israel counter-protester was attacked by an anti-Zionist encampment protestor who attempted to rip the sign from his hand, grabbed his hat and flashed a taser.
• Also, the same day, a moving barrier of protesters was formed to block a Jewish student, who wears a Star of David necklace, from entering campus while as a security officer stood nearby. The Jewish student told protesters, “I’m a UCLA student, I deserve to go here, we pay tuition, this is our school, and they’re not letting me in. My class is over there, I want to use that entrance … will you let me go in?” The protesters simply told him that they’re “not engaging” and blocked the Jewish student every time he attempted to go through the entrance.
• Additional incidents occurred with anti-Zionist protesters affiliated with the SJP and JVP encampment blocking Zionist students from walkways and accessing the library, using wristbands to identity anti-Zionists, with many of these incidents documented on video. In one video, protestors have taken over access to an area near the school library, demanding wrist bands and approval to each student passing, with one Jewish student attempting to enter and upon being denied asking, “So you won’t let me in because I’m Jewish?” The anti-Zionist protester responses, “Ummm no… we have a couple Jewish students here… are you a Zionist?” The Jewish student responds, “Yes of course I am” to which the protester retorts, “Well yeah, we’re not gonna let Zionists in.”

Even professors were not guaranteed unfettered access to the campus. UCLA Professor Nir Hoftman reported to Fox News that he was assaulted by the pro-Hamas demonstrators merely for attempting to walk across campus.  “They literally assaulted me on the way over here. I was walking to give the interview to a news station and two or three thugs tried to block my approach to the open area. I ignored them and one of them stood in front of me and said, ‘you can’t walk this way.’” One of the demonstrators then tackled him from the side and pulled his earbud from his ear before fleeing.

Hoftman related that campus security officers were present but did not take any action to protect him. “The security people who were there, were watching, not doing anything,” he reported, describing the state of the campus as “anarchy, it’s like the wild, wild west.”

The settlement UCLA will pay to settle the lawsuit amounts to an acknowledgment of their horrifying failure to protect the civil rights of their Jewish students. That settlement includes:

• A $6.45 million payment, including $50,000 to each plaintiff and $3.6 million for legal fees.
• $2.33 million in charitable donations to organizations like Hillel at UCLA, the Anti-Defamation League, and Chabad of UCLA.
• $320,000 for a UCLA initiative to combat antisemitism.

The settlement also mandates that in the future, UCLA will ensure that Jewish students, faculty, and staff are not excluded from any areas of campus.

UCLA’s failure to protect the civil rights of a vulnerable minority earn it one of the top spots on the list of Academic Felons.

Previous articles in the series:

#10: Academic Felon: Golden West College.
#9: Academic Felon: University of Arizona
#8: Academic Felon: San Jose State University
#7: Cornell University
#6: University of Louisville
#5: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
#4: University of Pennsylvania