The University of California at Los Angeles got caught threatening to punish conservative students after its event was disrupted by liberal agitators. UCLA has since walked that threat back, but it is proof that universities will not let their woke politics die easily.
The UCLA Federalist Society chapter held an event with Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival, which was disrupted by liberal agitators. Those agitators swarmed the event, screamed and hurled profanities, and prevented others who wanted to participate from enjoying the event. The dean of UCLA’s School of Law issued a generic statement about the importance of debate and said the university would be “reviewing all policies” regarding public events.
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Where the university’s bias lay was clear in a follow-up email to the Federalist Society chapter. Assistant Dean of Student Affairs Bayrex Marti said that if the chapter publicly named any students who participated in the protests, the university could discipline the chapter for naming them. UCLA very clearly threatened the chapter and its members after they were the victims of anti-First Amendment protests that the university allowed to happen.
After the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression got involved, UCLA then backpedaled, insisting that “UCLA does not discipline students for speech that is protected under the First Amendment” and that “The initial communication was not intended to suggest otherwise, and we have apologized for any lack of clarity.”
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As we can clearly see, though, this was a threat by UCLA to “discipline students for speech that is protected under the First Amendment.” We can all read the email from Marti and understand the implications. Had FIRE not weighed in on this, the implicit threat in the email would have been the last word. UCLA, which has proven it is captured by woke ideology that favors left-wing agitators over law-abiding students, made it very clear where it stood on this situation before public backlash (and a looming legal threat from FIRE) led it to chalk this all up to a “lack of clarity.”
Wokeness was not killed in 2024, and UCLA is showing that it will live on at universities, testing the limits of its power with threats against conservative student organizations while biding its time for Democrats to return to power. So long as university bureaucrats continue to threaten conservative students as a first reaction to liberal agitators shutting down their events, woke politics will live on. Universities like UCLA won’t give up on these double standards that easily.