Legal Docket: Religious liberty on a college campus

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Monday the 12th of August.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Time now for Legal Docket.

Well, Mary Reichard is out this week healing at home, but she did do some initial reporting for today’s story about anti-semitism on campus. WORLD’s Steve West filled it out and brings it to us now.

SOUND: [Protestors at UCLA]

STEVE WEST: Since the spring of this year, campuses across the country have been rocked by pro-Palestinian protesters—many, but not all, are students. The protests followed Israeli military moves to counter Hamas militants who killed 1,200 people in southern Israel and took about 250 as hostages.

Administrators at some schools have been criticized for a slow response to removing illegal encampments by protesters. In some cases, critics say they have actually facilitated protests which not only contain anti-Semitic chants but have blocked the movement of Jewish students on campus.

In June, three Jewish students at the University of California Los Angeles, sued the school and its administrators for violating their First Amendment rights to free speech and religious liberty.

The students were helped by a public interest law firm, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. Mark Rienzi, the president and CEO of Becket, recently spoke with WORLD’s Mary Reichard about the lawsuit.

MARK RIENZI: So our students are two law students, Yitzchok Frankel and Eden Shemuelian, and one undergraduate student, Joshua Ghayoum. All three of the students are students at UCLA. They pay tuition. They are entitled to fair and equal treatment on UCLA's campus.

At the heart of the students’ complaint was not what protesters were doing but what administrators failed to do.

RIENZI: When the anti- Israel encampments broke out, UCLA assisted those encampments with excluding certain people, namely religious Jews who have beliefs about Israel, excluding those people from entry to portions of campus. And UCLA was not a mere bystander to this discrimination, but it was a perpetrator.

According to the complaint, protesters set up a “Jew Exclusion Zone” at Royce Quad, one of the busiest areas on campus. Students said that for about a week the encampment blocked Jewish students and faculty from going to classes, offices, and the library.

Protesters used barriers to physically block people from passing through. To enter the area, a person had to pledge their commitment to the activists’ views and have someone within the encampment “vouch” for their loyalty. Once a person was inside the barriers, the demonstrators then gave them wristbands or some other form of identification.

Protesters also locked arms to prevent people who refused to disavow Israel from entering the zone. The Jewish students who sued say that school leadership aided the protestors, rather than the students.

RIENZI: UCLA admits it set up the metal barricades that were used to keep the Jews out of the heart of campus. It assigned security guards who, instead of helping the Jewish students access parts of campus that they had every right to go through, those security guards were instead instructed to tell the Jewish students to go around or go someplace else and don't go through the campus.

So how did UCLA end up in this situation? In testimony before a congressional subcommittee in June, Rienzi laid out a series of events leading up to the encampments.

RIENZI TESTIMONY: Imagine if you will the following scenes: A group of individuals holds a demonstration at a main thoroughfare in a public university. They carry anti-semitic signs and they chant “slaughter the Jews.” Police officers are present but they stand idly by as demonstrators intimidate Jewish faculty and Jewish students.

A few weeks later a professor finds a pile of trash at her front door with a piece of paper that says “loudmouth Jew” and a book cover that prominently features a swastika. Then imagine hundreds of agitators swarming a law school holding signs and chanting slogans like “There's only one solution” and “Death to Jews.” A short time later unknown individuals put up a statue on campus that traffics in anti-Semitic tropes with a large pig holding a bag of money alongside a bucket painted with the Star of David.

Finally, students and outside activists erect an unauthorized encampment at the heart of campus outside of important academic buildings and the main undergraduate campus library. Those inside the encampment shout anti-Semitic slurs like “This is the final solution” and “Death to Jews,” they draw a Star of David, then they cross it out and then they draw the Nazi hate symbol, the swastika. They set up checkpoints to block access. They interrogate students attempting to pass. They issue wristbands to people with approved ideas and they deny entry to visibly Jewish students such as those wearing a Star of David or wearing a kippah.

Rienzi says there are multiple grounds for holding UCLA liable for its inaction or complicity in protesters’ illegal activity.

RIENZI: UCLA has an obligation to allow and respect the religious exercise of these students. It's also a case under Title VI of the civil rights law, which says that recipients of federal funding cannot allow this type of discrimination on their campus. Schools are not allowed to allow segregation, and they certainly can't allow religious segregation, which is what it was here. So there are, you know, there are long precedents saying segregation is impermissible. UCLA ought to have known that.

Things came to head for the students and the school a couple of weeks ago as a federal judge heard arguments over whether students were entitled to relief. According to an account of the proceeding from Courthouse News Service, U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi didn’t have much regard for arguments by UCLA attorneys. They said Jewish students didn’t have standing to complain since the university had taken steps to remove the encampments and address security issues.

What Judge Scarsi did do is order the parties to come back in a week with an agreed-on order that he could enter before the start of fall classes that would ensure fair treatment and equal access to university buildings by Jewish students.

They did that last Monday—only they weren’t able to agree.

The University doesn’t want an order in the first place, but the one they proposed does not address charges of anti-Semitism but only building access and campus traffic flow. And it gives broad discretion to university officials in how to address future encampments.

On the other hand, the students’ proposed order is more direct in addressing denial of access by Jewish students to buildings, programs, and facilities. It would also change how school leaders respond to future protests and encampments by directing campus security to not deny Jews access to buildings or programs, even as a part of so-called de-escalation efforts.

It’s up to the court now to decide how strong of an order to issue against the university. The school plans to appeal, and will ask the court to stay the order while it appeals.

So far, other schools have had to come to terms with their failure to protect the rights of Jewish students and faculty. Columbia University recently settled a similar lawsuit. And last Tuesday, a federal judge in Massachusetts allowed a lawsuit against Harvard University to proceed.

But after all this, you might be wondering—how could this happen at an American university? Is it a consequence of an identity politics and woke ideology that analyzes everything through a “who is more powerful” lens? Rienzi seemed to suggest as much.

RIENZI: I think the people who hate the Jews and hate Israel often quite frequently hate America and hate our freedoms and our constitutions too. So I think it's all kind of bound up together. I don't know for any individual person whether that's true, but on the whole I think those are all pretty related hatreds and pathologies, and they're bad. And I don't think it's good for our universities to tolerate them and placate them the way they did at the expense of their Jewish students this spring.

And even for Americans who aren’t Jewish, attacks on the religious liberty of some should be a concern for all.

RIENZI: We should not want to be part of a society that would treat Jews or anybody else this way. But it's also important for the rest of us, because what's happening to the Jews today could happen to the Catholics or somebody else tomorrow. Religious liberty really is about all of us, and we simply can't sit idly by while some group gets abused or beaten up this way…. [8:17] The idea that this happened in 2024 in the United States at UCLA is disgusting, and it needs to not happen again. But the only way you get to “It’s not gonna happen again” is if you get clear court orders, you get clear rules laid down, and the rest of the colleges look and say, “Oh, I better follow that rule in the future.”

The court is expected to rule before students return to classes.

That’s it for this week’s Legal Docket.

I’m Steve West.

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