00:00Hello, I'm Joel Pollack, opinion editor at the California Post. UCLA can't seem to stay out of
00:04trouble, and the latest example is a controversy involving UCLA Chancellor Julio Frank, who spoke
00:09out against anti-Semitism and terrorism. That doesn't sound like it should be controversial,
00:14but to UCLA's radical faculty, it is. The story started back on September 11th, when the UCLA
00:20Law School held a symposium to mark the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 terror attacks. It
00:25invited several radical participants, including a lawyer for alleged terrorist mastermind Khalid
00:30Sheikh Mohammed, who is said to have been the brains behind the 9-11 attacks. Mohammed is also
00:35allegedly the man who decapitated Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002,
00:40and he was murdered partly because he was Jewish. His dad happens to be Judea Pearl, a professor of
00:48engineering at UCLA. He spoke out saying that this event was very hurtful, and then Chancellor Frank
00:54issued a statement saying that while UCLA respected academic freedom, it also opposed anti-Semitism
01:00and terrorism. That was too much for many of the professors who are active in the UCLA Faculty
01:07Senate, and the Senate sent a letter to Chancellor Frank saying it was very concerned about what he
01:12had done and implying that he had violated academic freedom. He wrote back and said that he had not done
01:17so, that he had been very careful with his words, and saying that he was trying to empathize with
01:22Professor Judea Pearl, the father of Daniel Pearl, as well as those in the UCLA community who might
01:27have experienced 9-11 in a hurtful way. Well, I think it goes too far to express 9-11 as
01:32some kind
01:33of partial or emotional experience for some people. A university should feel perfectly free to take a
01:40position that is entirely uncontroversial, that 9-11 was a bad thing, and if anybody else has a problem
01:46with it, maybe they shouldn't be teaching at the university. But the fact that the faculty members felt
01:50that that was somehow an infringement on their academic freedom tells you just how far down
01:55the rabbit hole some of the left-wing faculties at California's public universities have gone.
02:00For the California Post, I'm Joel Pollack.
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