I recently retired after decades on the faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz, including 10 years as chairman of my chemistry department. Like many scientists, I’ve spent my career on problems that don’t yield to slogans: building evidence, testing claims, revising conclusions. Universities work when that ethic governs campus life.
But across the University of California system, a growing number of faculty and academic units, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, have been doing something different: using the UC academic infrastructure to advance organized political advocacy as institutional practice. A recent report, When Faculty Take Side: How Academic Infrastructure Drives Antisemitism at the University of California, shows how this pattern has produced hostile and exclusionary conditions, especially for Jewish students and others targeted as “Zionist” or “pro-Israel.”
