From Fox News: The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has agreed to pay $6 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Jewish students and faculty members over the school’s handling of anti-Israel protests, including allowing protesters to ban Jews from a part of the campus known as a “Jew Exclusion Zone.”
The lawsuit was brought last year by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which accused UCLA of “aiding and abetting” an antisemitic culture, including “segregating Jewish students and preventing them from accessing the heart of campus.”
In a statement to Fox News Digital, Mary Osako, the UCLA vice chancellor for strategic communications, said the university has taken “concrete action to enhance campus safety by creating a new Office of Campus and Community Safety, instituting new policies to manage protests on campus and taking decisive action for conduct that violates our longstanding policies.”
In August 2024, school officials admitted that students had been deterred from entering parts of the campus .
UCLA was called out and a federal judge ordered team to halt anti-Israel protests and to end bans of Jews from portions of the school’s campus.
“In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith,” a federal court said at the time. “This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.”
Osako acknowledged the antisemitism and vowed to change course.
“Antisemitism has no place at UCLA, and we remain steadfast in our commitment to eradicating it from our community,” she said. “We have reflected candidly on our progress and are working to expunge antisemitism from our community in its entirety.
“These efforts have been supplemented by our continuing work to eliminate antisemitism completely and definitively through our Initiative to Combat Antisemitism,” Osaka added. “This work, and today’s settlement, represent an important next step as we build upon our past efforts and stride toward fulfilling our promise of being an exemplary university.”
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