I recently retired after decades on the faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz, including 10 years as chairman of my chemistry department. Like many scientists, I’ve spent my career on problems that don’t yield to slogans: building evidence, testing claims, revising conclusions. Universities work when that ethic governs campus life.
But across the University of California system, a growing number of faculty and academic units, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, have been doing something different: using the UC academic infrastructure to advance organized political advocacy as institutional practice. A recent report, When Faculty Take Side: How Academic Infrastructure Drives Antisemitism at the University of California, shows how this pattern has produced hostile and exclusionary conditions, especially for Jewish students and others targeted as “Zionist” or “pro-Israel.”
As the report details, this “politicization” isn’t private faculty speech. It’s academic units using UC-branded platforms and academic authority to take sides, mobilize support for demands, and marginalize disfavored people or programs. Drawing on hundreds of documented incidents, the report reveals how faculty and academic departments embedded anti-Israel activism into curricula, classrooms, departmental statements, and official programming.
The report’s argument is that these are not isolated expressions but institutional practices, with predictable consequences for campus climate. But for STEM and medicine, the consequences don’t stop there: This politicization creates serious risks for departments that depend on external funding, research collaboration, and public trust.
Start with the money. Biomedical and scientific research at the UC is overwhelmingly financed by the federal government. When a public university appears unwilling to enforce basic nondiscrimination obligations and institutional boundaries, the financial risk is real.
And that risk is not distributed evenly. A humanities department that uses its website or curriculum as a political megaphone may never feel the downstream effects. A medical school or engineering division will. When federal oversight agencies see inconsistent enforcement of rules governing instruction, neutrality, and use of institutional resources, the potential costs land hardest where federal dollars and research infrastructure are concentrated.
This isn’t theoretical. The UC is already under intensifying legal pressure and federal civil-rights scrutiny over hostile-environment concerns affecting Jewish students, faculty, and staff. In a system heavily reliant on federal research funding, that scrutiny can carry funding disruptions and compliance costs — felt most acutely in STEM and medicine.
Then there is the professional harm: the direct attack on research collaboration. While UC leadership laments grant cancellations that threaten life-saving research, UC faculty networks and departments are pressing for academic boycotts that would sever ties with Israeli scholars and institutions.
In STEM, modern research runs on collaboration. That makes academic boycott demands uniquely damaging. The UC has institutional and campus-based scientific partnerships and funding streams connected to Israel-focused research and innovation, including agriculture and water-scarcity collaborations, bioinformatics work in personalized medicine for diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s, and programs that pair students and researchers across institutions — exactly the kind of cross-border exchange universities are supposed to protect.
The costs of academic boycotts won’t be paid by the activists making the demands. They will be paid by the scientists and clinicians whose grants, labs, trainees, and global partnerships are disrupted — and by the patients and communities who depend on the discoveries those collaborations make possible.
Finally, there’s reputational harm. When certain departments devote their mission to political activism, the whole university begins to look like a political actor. STEM and medical units may not be driving this, but they’ll still be judged as part of it. And that perception shapes decisions: where students enroll, where faculty build careers, where partners commit support, and whether the public still trusts the university.
A common response is to dismiss politicized department statements, programming, and campaigns as “protected speech.” But that misses the point. The question is not whether individual faculty may speak — it’s whether the UC’s institutional authority, resources, and branding can be used for organized political advocacy. As a recent public letter to the Board of Regents signed by 368 current and emeritus UC faculty explains, the failure is one of governance: The UC has not enforced a clear boundary between individual expression and institutional action.
If STEM and medical faculty don’t want the scientific and medical core of the university to become collateral damage of this politicization, we have to treat this as our problem, too.
First, the Academic Senate must stop treating “shared governance” as a narrow set of procedural duties. It is also about safeguarding the conditions for scholarship, including enforceable boundaries that prevent departments from turning UC infrastructure into political machinery.
Second, campus administrations should treat periodic review and oversight of academic units as a serious responsibility, not a formality, especially when a unit’s public-facing activity repeatedly substitutes activism for scholarship.
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Third, the regents should enforce existing rules and strengthen them where needed, with clear operational standards and consequences when academic units misuse instructional authority, unit platforms, or UC resources for political programs.
The UC became great because it earned public trust — through intellectual rigor, institutional integrity, and a commitment to inquiry over ideology. If we allow politicization to metastasize into institutional practice, the university won’t only harm targeted students. It will deeply undermine the research enterprise that sustains the UC’s global standing and, in medicine and STEM, saves lives.
Ilan Benjamin is a distinguished professor and chairman emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz.