UCLA Chides Student Leader Who Barred Funding for BDS Event
Image by YouTube
— UCLA has reprimanded the former president of its Graduate Student Association for threatening to withhold funding for an event were it to promote divestment from Israel.
Jewish organizations complained this week about the investigation by the university’s Discrimination Prevention Office that concluded last month. Complaints from Students for Justice in Palestine and the campus Diversity Caucus that law student Milan Chatterjee had violated students’ freedom of speech by putting stipulations on association funding had spurred the probe.
Chatterjee, who is Hindu, threatened to rescind funding for a student town hall last November if pro-Palestinian groups used the occasion to promote divestment from Israel. He said his intention was to maintain the Graduate Student Association’s neutrality in political affairs.
The Discrimination Prevention Office found that Chatterjee acted “outside the authority of the presidency and cabinet to create policy and make funding decisions, among other findings,” the Daily Bruin reported.
UCLA policy requires that funding to student events be made without regard to the viewpoint of any registered organization.
Jewish groups accused the Discrimination Prevention Office of “targeting” Chatterjee.
The American Jewish Committee in Los Angeles said it was “deeply concerned” by the university’s ruling.
“The fact that a student official would be sanctioned for seeking to avoid embroiling the UCLA GSA in the fraught politics of the Middle East tells you all you need to know about the political agenda of his detractors and the cowardice of those that enable them,” the AJC wrote in a statement this week.
The Israeli-American Nexus, a Southern California organization affiliated with the the Israeli-American Council, said it was outraged by UCLA’s treatment of Chatterjee, charging that the university acted out of bias.
“It is very troubling when a public university sanctions a fair and balanced student leader for simply seeking to keep the UCLA GSA from being entangled in the complex issues of Middle East politics,” the IAX said in a news release. “When the policy was enacted by Milan in November 2015, the GSA Cabinet had voted unanimously in favor of it.”
Chatterjee is not expected to face any other consequences from the university.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
