The University of California, Berkeley, announced a settlement on Wednesday, conceding it discriminated against an Israeli visiting professor who was disinvited from her post due to her nationality.
UC Berkeley issued an apology to Yael Nativ, saying it will pay her $60,000 and rehire her. The development comes after Nativ filed a lawsuit against the school earlier this year in the wake of an internal university investigation that found the school discriminated against her.
“I respect and appreciate Dr. Nativ’s decision to settle this case. She is owed the apology I will provide on behalf of our campus. We look forward to welcoming Dr. Nativ back to Berkeley to teach again,” Berkeley’s chancellor, Rich Lyons, said in a statement.
“As part of the settlement, UC Berkeley publicly acknowledges the violation of UC Berkeley’s policy against discrimination with regard to Dr. Nativ and commits to rigorously enforce this policy to prevent recurrence,” reads a joint press release from Berkeley and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which represented Nativ.
The saga started in 2022, when Nativ taught an Israeli contemporary dance class for the university. The experience went so well that she said she was encouraged by Berkeley to come back and teach the course the following year, only to see her application to do so denied in 2023 due to anti-Israel sentiment on campus that rose following Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel, which sparked Israel’s war in Gaza.
“My dept cannot host you for a class next fall. Things are very hot here right now and many of our grad students are angry. I would be putting the dept and you in a terrible position,” Nativ was told in a November 2023 WhatsApp message from Berkeley faculty member SanSan Kwan, according to documents included in the lawsuit she brought against the school in August.
Berkeley’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination opened an investigation into the case. The OPHD concluded Nativ was the victim of discrimination in violation of the University of California’s anti-discrimination policy, which prohibits discrimination, including discrimination based on Israeli national origin or Israeli citizenship.
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Nativ said she was told that she could propose a remedy for the discrimination, but the dance researcher never received a response when she did so, according to her lawsuit.
“Absurdly, instead of the university using the tools of critical theory to create a safe space for students and lecturers to speak boldly, to challenge basic assumptions, paradigms, and ideas, and even criticism itself, it has turned these theories into a doctrine, a tool of disempowering, divisive, and threatening political control. A doctrine that dangerously organizes its world order, learning, teaching, and its organizational conduct, in all its nuances,” Nativ wrote in a 2023 op-ed expressing concern that UC Berkeley’s culture perpetuated the intimidation and silencing of ideas.
