JVP Academic Council Statement on UC Berkeley’s Settlement with the Brandeis Center

Dear President Milliken, Chancellor Lyons, and members of the Board of Regents: 

The Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace* strongly objects to the settlement agreement signed by the University of California at Berkeley on March 19, 2026 with the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (no affiliation with Brandeis University) and Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education.  The settlement agreement poses a broad infringement of academic freedom and a heightening of censorship and political persecution. It will impose through administrative fiat the flawed IHRA definition of antisemitism throughout the university, an overbroad definition whose aims include the censoring of speech supportive of Palestinian freedoms on campus. Furthermore, the settlement imposes a new form of surveillance and oversight that evades all accountability to the campus community, undermining the independent and rightful powers of the Academic Senate over curricula, and producing chilling effects on teaching, speech, student groups, and rights of assembly on campus.  

Whereas several sound legal arguments have been documented by the AAUP for resisting the allegations made by the Brandeis Center, UC Berkeley has once again capitulated to demands that violate its own principles and protocols.  Most concerning to us is the misuse of Title VI to persecute viewpoints critical of Zionism or supportive of Palestinian rights and freedoms as signs of antisemitism. The settlement also commits UC Berkeley to the mandatory use of the overbroad and flawed IHRA definition of antisemitism, whose main purposes are to suppress speech in support of Palestine on campus and to hijack anti-discrimination regulations to entrench this definition at the expense of the broad range of anti-discrimination concerns, including anti-Black, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian racist conduct on campus.  

We are particularly alarmed that the settlement vests an administrative advisory committee serving at the discretion of the chancellor with broad powers of curricular review, classroom surveillance, and disciplinary consultation with no accountability to the community. Doing so augments increasingly autocratic and secretive powers at the university at the expense of transparency and accountability.  The composition of a politically biased committee that will review all complaints bypasses established university procedures, privileging a committee whose membership is shielded in opacity and given broad powers to interpret allegations of antisemitism without disclosing their criteria. The placement of surveillance cameras on campus for detecting “antisemitic” acts will surely have a chilling effect on free speech, producing a persecutory environment that strikes fear of retaliation in those whose academic freedom should be protected, that is, faculty engaged in research and debate on topics such as the history of the Middle East, including Palestine, and the history of Zionist settlement and anti-Zionist Jewish organizations and thought, legal definitions of genocide, and differing historical understandings of antisemitism itself.   

Requiring mandatory training in the flawed IHRA definition of antisemitism for many staff, incoming students, all instructors, including  faculty, lecturers, and graduate students effectively demands support of Israel, including its racist, colonial, and genocidal powers, as a precondition of employment. This requirement constitutes a harrowing form of indoctrination, legislating a political viewpoint as a precondition of community membership.  

UC Berkeley’s willingness to sacrifice its most cherished principles of free speech and accountability is once again on display, as it was in August of 2025 when it capitulated to a Department of Education inquiry, sending files to the Trump administration without disclosing those contents to members of its own community, and as it was in the unjust termination of lecturer Peyrin Kao for exercising his rights to extra-mural speech. 

 The current settlement destroys not only academic freedom and shared governance, but the basic rights of students, staff, and faculty to espouse critical viewpoints in the face of an ongoing genocide and relentless repression of the Palestinian people, including the new death penalty law that applies only to Palestinians.  We abhor the further concentration of autocratic control without accountability at a campus whose legacies are being shredded through its repeated capitulations to authoritarian powers that mandate support for Zionism and its violent legacies and establishing new forms of political persecution for those who speak their conscience and avow their solidarity with Palestinians as the genocide against them continues.

Sincerely, 

Dr. Jonah Rubin on behalf of the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace

The Jewish Voice for Peace Academic Council is a network of scholars dedicated to furthering JVP’s vision and values. Drawing upon our shared commitment to both progressive Jewish values and Palestinian liberation, we organize in solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle in educational and academic settings. We draw upon our skills as scholars, educators, and writers to develop critical analysis of contemporary censorship on Palestine. We oppose the deployment of the charge of antisemitism to censor or criminalize speech critical of the State of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.  We defend employment rights, academic freedom, and rights of association within higher education and confirm the core values of Jewish Voice for Peace.