After
a long, tedious struggle with anti-Israel harassment from
administrators and student members of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions
(BDS) movement at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), a
former graduate student body president has decided to leave his UCLA
education behind, in his quest for a less hostile learning environment.
Former
UCLA law student and Graduate Student Association (GSA) president Milan
Chatterjee has been the object of bullying and framing ever since he
refused to allocate campus funding to an event that either promoted or
rejected support for the State of Israel. Chatterjee’s “viewpoint
neutrality” policy stated that topics surrounding Israel were irrelevant
to the nature of campus politics and thus, campus funding should not be
directed to taking sides on such measures.
The
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), an anti-Israel hate group
responsible for leading the smear campaign against Chatterjee, responded
with a plethora of threatening legal documents, administrative pushes,
and media allegations painting Chatterjee as a biased student body
president and calling for his apology and resignation. SJP leaders Rahim Kurwah and Yacoub Kureh, two UCLA grad students, enlisted
the help of Palestine Legal (PL) and the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU) to send lawyers after Chatterjee to intimidate him, as well as
push UCLA’s figurehead administration to launch a detailed investigation
into his actions.
These allegations were easily debunked time after time, but that did not stop hateful anti-Israel activists from attempting to publish
falsehoods and make them a supposed reality. Worse, the UCLA
administration did nothing to stand by the GSA neutral policy and defend
Chatterjee for doing his job. Instead, Vice Chancellor for Equity,
Diversity and Inclusion Jerry Kang aided the SJP by taking part in the
investigations and harassment directed at the student president.
Finally,
Chatterjee has had enough. Not only was his reputation being constantly
tarnished with cruddy lies and hateful spews; he was fighting to not
fall behind in his schoolwork, his health, and his sanity. In a letter
to UCLA Chancellor Gene Block, Chatterjee revealed his decision to
complete his final year of law school at New York University (NYU) in
Manhattan. He wrote:
Dear Chancellor Block,
I
write to inform you that I have decided to complete the final year of
my UCLA School of Law program at a different institution. The hostile
and unsafe campus environment I am facing at UCLA has left me with no
choice but to move away from this university at great additional expense
to me and my family.
Since
November 2015, I have been relentlessly attacked, bullied and harassed
by BDS-affiliated organizations and students. The smear and harassment
campaign started with the false accusation that I (an Indian-American
Hindu) was not “viewpoint neutral” when allocating funds, in my capacity
as Graduate Student Body President, to a diversity event. What really
occurred is that my administration and I abstained from supporting
either a pro- or anti- BDS agenda. This condition was explicitly
approved by a UCLA administrator. The event took place on November 5,
2015 and a variety of campus viewpoints were actively represented,
including both sides of the issues raised by the BDS movement. Dean
Erwin Chemerinsky-- one of America’s leading constitutional law
scholars-- and four legal organizations concluded that my administration
and I acted in a viewpoint neutral manner.
Subsequently,
BDS activists wrote defamatory articles about me and led a grassroots
campaign against me on the UCLA campus. They even tried, on multiple
occasions, to remove me as Graduate Student Body President. I reached
out to senior members of your administration-- many times-- for guidance
and support to defuse this situation. Furthermore, I believed that
these administrators would be especially sensitive given the public
outcry caused by similar BDS-led efforts against UCLA students Rachel
Beyda, Avi Oved, Lauren Rogers, and Sunny Singh. I could not have been
more mistaken. Your administrators were non-responsive and unhelpful.
In
fact, when Palestine Legal and the ACLU circulated a legal letter
defaming me on the Internet, had their attorneys write a libelous
article about me in the Daily Bruin, and sent lawyers to Graduate
Student Association meetings to attack me personally, I contacted the
Interim Vice Chancellor of Legal Affairs many times for help. Not only
did she decline to provide me with the necessary legal support, but she
told me that I needed to get my own attorney. Finally, I was connected
to the American Jewish Committee, who found the situation serious enough
to refer me to a pro-bono counsel.
In
late February 2016, my new attorney, Peter M. Weil, of Glaser Weil LLP,
sent you and several senior members of your administration, a lengthy
letter detailing the constant bullying harassment and attacks to which I
was being subjected. Your administrators chose to not take any action
or even investigate this matter.
To
make matters worse, at the behest of pro-BDS organizations, the Vice
Chancellor of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) launched a
three-month-long investigation of me. His office wrote a defamatory,
27-page report which has been heavily condemned by seven major
organizations.
In
reality, this report was an attempt by your administration to publicly
scapegoat me for their systematic failure to adopt and implement
University of California policies, and provide the necessary guidance to
me and other student organizations when we approached them for help.
Your administrators fell asleep on the job and decided to blame me-- a
student-- for it.
But
the desire to vilify me did not stop there. Although the Report was
designated as “Confidential,” no reasonable safeguards were adopted to
preserve the report’s confidentiality. It was readily forseeable that
pro-BDS organizations-- whom your administration freely made this
“Confidential Report” available to-- could and would leak it. No efforts
were made to prevent this and, of course, this is precisely what
occurred.
In
violation of confidentiality and retaliation policies, Students for
Justice in Palestine openly and unlawfully leaked the EDI report onto
the Internet. When I filed a complaint about this violation, your
administration declined to investigate it. Worse yet, the Vice
Chancellor of EDI, on his blog, urged the public to read this leaked
confidential report, and gave them access to it. As recent as August 22,
2016, there was a scurrilous op-ed piece in the Daily Bruin attacking
me and relying extensively on the so-called Confidential Report.
UCLA
is one of the finest universities in the world. It is unfortunate,
indeed that your administration has not only allowed BDS organizations
and student activists to freely engage in discriminatory practices of
its own against those same students. Whether you choose to acknowledge
it or not, the fact is that the UCLA campus has become a hostile and
unsafe environment for students, Jewish and non-Jewish, who choose not
to support the BDS movement, let alone support the State of Israel.
I
implore you to acknowledge the reality of this regrettable situation
and take corrective action that not only remedies my grievances but
addresses the current hostile and unsafe campus climate generally so
that other students are not forced to leave UCLA. It is too late for me,
but I sincerely hope that it will not be too late for those students
who follow me.
I
will be returning to Los Angeles as often as necessary in order to
pursue the discrimination grievance that I filed pursuant to UCLA
Procedure 230.1
Sincerely,
Milan Chatterjee
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