College Encampment Update: Judge Issues Preliminary Injunction Against UCLA

Via Eugene Volokh, a federal judge has just issued a temporary restraining order preliminary injunction against UCLA, forbidding that state university from operating or allowing Jew-free exclusion zones on its campus. You can read that order here. The big finish is on pages 15 and 16:

Reminder: I went to grad school at UCLA, and taught there as both a TA and a lecturer, and I know the campus well. In April, while an anti-Israel encampment had taken over a central portion of the UCLA campus, I went back to walk around the camp and see how it was being run — and was denied entrance to the encampment by university-hired private security guards, who told me that the people running the encampment had been granted full authority by university administrators to decide who they would allow through their gates. Masked protesters were also guarding the entrance gates and controlling admission to a public outdoor area of a state university campus, behind barricades provided by the school:

In his order today, District Court Judge Mark Scarsi notes that UCLA acknowledges its decision to allow the encampment to police its gates and establish tests of identity and ideology to control the space, framing it as an effort to de-escalate conflict in the face of a private protest that seized control of a part of the campus:

In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. UCLA does not dispute this. Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters. But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion.

Beyond the immediate application, the topic isn’t Zionism or Judaism; the topic at hand is the identity-focused closure of public space on a public campus. If a private group can take over part of a state university campus and close it to Jews, or to Zionists, or to people who seem suspiciously Zionist-ish to the idiots manning the gates, then the principle is established for everyone: public campuses can host religious and political exclusion zones.

Today’s ruling is an important first step.

A final by-the-way note: In May, I filed a public records request with UCLA, asking for the university’s instructions to the security contractor that denied me admission to the encampment on the grounds that the people inside it hadn’t cleared me. In mid-August, the university is still processing my request for records.