Fam, is it good when a school turns over a list of suspected dissidents to a repressive regime? Because that’s apparently the stage of fascism we are currently in.
A campus spokesperson for the University of California, Berkeley confirmed that the school gave the administration a list of 160 names of students, faculty, and staff who have a “potential connection to reports of alleged antisemitism.”
A “potential connection” to an “alleged” event. That is vague! And bad! And could scoop up a lot of people!
People on the list learned about it via a generic letter that the school didn’t even bother to personalize, with letters addressed to “Dear member of the Berkeley community.” You couldn’t have at least done a mail merge? The best—aka worst—part? Berkeley didn’t tell the people on the list that they had given their information to the government until two weeks later.
According to the school, they had no choice but to do this as part of the “investigation” into reports of “antisemitic harassment” conducted by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. These probes are shams that look nothing like actual investigations. Indeed, it doesn’t appear to be possible to locate any findings from the so-called investigation, though OCR made sure to publicize which schools were being targeted .
Actual OCR reports—even ones that came out during President Donald Trump’s first term—look like thisan investigation into Berkeley’s failure to appropriately respond to sexual harassment allegations. It details a two-year-long investigation that involved nine campus visits from OCR. The investigators reviewed four years’ worth of student complaints and provided details on each. They conducted student focus groups. They made detailed findings for each complaint and included all the applicable laws and regulations.
By contrast, we have very little information into what, exactly, OCR has found as far as antisemitism at Berkeley. University officials clearly have some information—enough to agree to throw 160 members of the Berkeley community under the bus. But no one else has the vaguest idea what is going on, including people on the list. Nobody knows the criteria for inclusion on the list, and no one was informed of what alleged antisemitic event they participated in. But hey, rest easy: The school says that even more disclosures of names may be required. Terrific.
It’s no mystery what the Trump administration plans to do with a list of people it claims are antisemitic. The State Department has already revoked the international visas of nearly two dozen students at the school, and the school seems fine with throwing more people into the gaping, vicious maw of the administration.
Related | Columbia caves to Trump, setting dangerous precedent for higher ed
Berkeley appears to be heading down the path Columbia University forged. That school’s “settlement” with the administration involved agreeing to a “Resolution Monitor” to assess Columbia’s compliance with the agreement. That Resolution Monitor is allowed access to any nonprivileged documents and data it “reasonably deems necessary” to determine compliance. The agreement also gives the government access to “all Columbia staff, employees, facilities, documents, and data relating to the Agreement, to the extent not unreasonable” unless covered by legal privilege.
So, basically, Columbia agreed to straight-up government surveillance.
Even schools that can’t be characterized as woke bastions, like George Mason University, have ended up in the administration’s crosshairs. In that instance, the administration demanded the Virginia school turn over records about how students have been disciplined, which basically looks like a fishing expedition.
Berkeley is partially justifying its actions by saying the administration is currently withholding $500 million in federal research grants from UCLA, and the UC system is “negotiating” with the administration about it because it now wants $1 billion from the school … to get $500 million back.
The administration is using its power to extort universities and force them to compromise the safety and autonomy of students, faculty, and staff, and it is pretty depressing that Berkeley seems so eager to help with the latter.
