Monday, March 21, 2011

Education Dept. Investigates Complaint of Anti-Semitism at UC-Santa Cruz

The Chronicle of Higher Education
March 15, 2011

By Peter Schmidt
The U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights has announced plans to investigate the University of California at Santa Cruz for anti-Semitism, based on a lecturer's complaint that administrators there had turned a deaf ear to her concerns that critics of Israel were creating a hostile climate for Jewish people on the campus.
The case marks the first major investigation of anti-Semitism on a college campus by the civil-rights office, known as OCR, since its decision last fall to step up its efforts against such discrimination in a manner that some civil-rights experts saw as likely to pull the agency into debates over campus speech critical of Israel or Zionism. The University of California system is now defending itself against allegations of anti-Semitism on several fronts, as its Irvine campus remains the subject of a separate OCR investigation, undertaken in 2008, and its Berkeley campus and system administration were named in a discrimination lawsuit filed by a Jewish student this month.


Full Story: http://chronicle.com/article/Education-Dept-Investigates/126742/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

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