That is just one of the incidents addressed in a new report that the AMCHA Initiative shared with JNS exclusively.

The episode is part of a broader trend in the ways professors have fueled rising Jew-hatred at the public university system, even after UC reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Education in December 2024 to resolve probes of alleged discrimination against Jews, Israelis, Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians.

The issue in the public system is a “failure of governance,” according to Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, co-founder and director of the AMCHA Initiative.

“It’s the failure of universities, of administrators and also faculty senates to actually impose the rules, policies, state laws and federal laws that are already on the books and to hold faculty and departments accountable,” she told JNS. “Faculty are a very powerful bloc within the university.”

The faculty senate and the system’s model of shared governance mean that professors are the “first line of defense” when it comes to academic programming, according to Rossman-Benjamin.

“The problem there is that the faculty are not policing themselves,” she told JNS. “The faculty are not holding themselves accountable.”

“Much of the public conversation has framed the antisemitism crisis as student-driven and episodic, focused on protests and encampments,” the AMCHA Initiative told JNS. “This report reaches a different and more troubling conclusion. While students are the most visible actors, faculty and academic departments are key institutional drivers of the hostile environment.”

The report calls on University of California regents to take action to ensure that the system’s “resources and authority are not used to advance activist agendas inside the university’s core educational functions.”

The initiative’s report “concludes that UC’s antisemitism crisis cannot be solved through student discipline or protest management alone,” it told JNS. “Instead, it urges the UC Regents to rein in faculty misuse of academic authority by enforcing existing rules and closing policy gaps.”

The system’s 2024 resolution agreement with the Biden administration “has been useless in a sense, since the problem is continuing,” Rossman-Benjamin told JNS.

UC professors have used official university platforms to call for boycotting Israeli institutions and to issue anti-Israel statements and anti-Israel programming. Faculty for Justice in Palestine and Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine chapters have been the main vehicle behind these anti-Israel campaigns, per the report.

The report examined UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley and UCLA, and found that incidents targeting Jews on campus increased by 1,150% at Santa Cruz from July 1, 2023—about three months before Oct. 7—until June 30, 2025, when compared to July 1, 2021, until June 30, 2023.

At UCLA, anti-Jewish incidents increased 3,150% and at Berkeley by 531% in the same timeframe.

Incidents involving calls for Israel to be destroyed and glorifying violence against Jews or Israel increased 7,000% at Santa Cruz, 1,175% at UCLA and 2,125% at Berkeley, according to the report. In each of the incidents that occurred in the 2023-25 timeframe, nearly half or more involved faculty members.

The report defined faculty involvement in the incidents as being “perpetrators, public defenders or institutional enablers of the harassment, intimidation and exclusion of Jewish and Zionist students.”

AMCHA based its analysis on public records and the ways that faculty actions correlated with antisemitic incidents on campus and how they impacted students.

Rossman-Benjamin told JNS that the statistics are “pretty astounding.”

“The faculty was intimately involved in some way,” she said. “They weren’t necessarily the perpetrators, the assaulters, but in many cases, they defended the assaulters. They defended the behavior that resulted in students being harmed.”

Faculty for Justice in Palestine’s reason for existence is to “protect and defend and amplify the students,” according to Rossman-Benjamin.

“If students were just doing this alone without any support from faculty, who essentially give the seal of approval and academic legitimacy and institutional legitimacy to the students, without that, I think the picture would be radically different on the campuses,” she told JNS.

As of last spring, 55 Santa Cruz faculty members have endorsed boycotting Israel, including provosts and chairs or directors of departments, programs, centers and institutes, and 19 academic units sponsored or co-sponsored at least 27 events featuring speakers calling for boycotts of Israel, per the report. Nine of the latter occurred after the December 2024 resolution agreement, it added.

University departments have also used “official websites and social media accounts to repost and amplify messaging from anti-Zionist student and faculty groups,” according to the report.

Those have “promoted boycott and anti-normalization campaigns, amplified claims portraying Israel as genocidal or apartheid, endorsed suspended or unregistered groups that targeted Jewish campus institutions and circulated attacks on mainstream Jewish organizations and Jewish campus institutions,” it said.

One instance highlighted in the report came in February 2025, when a critical race and ethnic studies department reposted a call to disrupt a Jewish studies event and called on the Jewish studies department to cut ties with the Helen Diller Family Foundation, alleging that the foundation funds “Zionist genocide” and “white supremacist violence.”

Between 2023 and 2025, 75 incidents—seven after the agreement with the federal government—targeted Jews on University of California campuses, 46 of which involved professors. Another 71 incidents in that timeframe included rhetoric calling for the destruction of the State of Israel or glorifying violence against Jews or Israel, according to the report. Of the 71, 38 involved professors and 12 came after the settlement with the federal government, it said.

At least 115 UCLA professors—including department, program and center heads—have called for boycotting Israel between 2023 and 2025, and high-level administrators have done the same, according to the report.

At least 18 university departments, centers and programs sponsored 23 events related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in that timeframe, and all featured at least one speaker who supported academic boycotts of Israel, per the report. Of the 23, more than half (12) events occurred after the December 2024 resolution agreement.

“In recorded events, speakers urged disruptive protest actions, dismissed reports of extensive sexual violence on Oct. 7 as propaganda and framed antisemitism allegations as baseless, while repeatedly casting Israel’s actions as genocidal,” the report states.

The report also found that after police cleared the anti-Israel encampment on campus in spring 2024, at least 36 academic units issued statements in support of the encampment. Thirty-three of those statements called for the protesters to receive amnesty, and 25 endorsed the encampment’s demands, including boycotts of Israel.

There were 130 incidents targeting Jews at UCLA in 2023-25, 59 of which involved faculty and 21 that followed the resolution agreement with the government, the report states. Another 51 incidents during that timeframe involved rhetoric calling for the destruction of Israel or glorifying violence against Jews or Israel, 26 of which involved faculty and 12 after the resolution agreement.

At Berkeley, 171 professors endorsed boycotting Israel between 2023 and 2025, including chairs, directors or heads of centers and institutes, according to the report. At least 34 academic units sponsored or co-sponsored events with speakers supporting boycotts of Israel, and speakers called Zionism “racism” and said that Israel is committing “genocide” and that political violence is “resistance,” the report said.

In September 2024, the Berkeley chapters of Faculty for Justice in Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine and Bears for Palestine released a toolkit advising professors on how to advance anti-Zionism in their course materials and getting around university policy against political advocacy in the classroom, according to the report.

The university had 101 incidents targeting Jews on campus from 2023-25, 44 of which involved faculty members and eight after the resolution agreement, and during that timeframe, 89 incidents—38 with faculty and five post-resolution agreement—included calls for Israel’s destruction and glorifying violence against Jews or Israel, the report states.

Rossman-Benjamin told JNS that the report findings are “absolutely applicable to schools across the country.” The organization’s “barometer” on anti-Zionist faculty has found that the three University of California schools are at “the highest level of anti-Zionist faculty behavior,” as are “lots of other schools.”

“At least half of the schools that are most popular with Jewish students have a serious problem of faculty anti-Zionism that’s been institutionalized,” she said.

The UC regents and academic senates must hold professors who engage in the sort of misconduct detailed in the report accountable, according to the report. Taxpayer funds shouldn’t go to public institutions that allow such behavior, it adds.

Rossman-Benjamin told JNS that “this is a new way to look at the problem,” which amounts to a “breakdown of governance.”

“If we look at that and how to fix that, which is such a big problem on campuses, it will actually not only manage to help solve the problem of antisemitism,” she said. “I think it really creates a much better campus for everyone.”