Poppy Press

On Thursday, the UCLA Office of Student Conduct gave assurances that the only way to get information about the student group case was through a public records request – as per their own privacy regulations.

These types of requests take weeks, if not months to complete. Instead, the next day, UCLA administration emailed a statement to media outlets, notably the LA Times and the Daily Bruin, to disseminate information about the incomplete cases.

Within hours, the Los Angeles Times reported that “UCLA indefinitely banned Students for Justice in Palestine as a campus organization and suspended a similar graduate student group for four years.”

This is false information.

The LA Times’ reporting implied that a sanction had been given, or that fact-finding had been complete – this is not the case. The article features lackluster reasearch, misinformation, and mischaracterizations.

A member of undergraduate Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) told Poppy Press: “The announcement of the ban on SJP is completely false, and the entirety of the process is meant to be confidential. The hypocrisy of the LA Times is not lost on us – choosing to report on a university student conduct charge, than the entire neighborhoods being detonated in Palestine.”

UCLA’s Office of Student Conduct recommended indefinite revocation of university recognition for undergraduate SJP and a four-year suspension for graduate SJP following the protest outside Regent Jay Sures’ house. The organizations can choose to accept their recommendation or move forward with a conduct hearing in front of a jury of their peers.

Throughout this process, the university has been trying to compel students to meet without lawyers and within arbitrary time limits that it has admitted is not allowed in the student conduct protocols. This will affect students’ chances to a fair hearing, presenting the decision to press as if it has already been made despite the process to which students are entitled.

“While the university is more worried about going through a long bureaucratic process of student code of conduct charges, bombs that were designed in our classrooms are dropping on the families of its students and professors in Palestine, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon,” said a representative from SJP.

Earlier this month, Columbia openly surrendered their stated principles, including students’ rights, with their Judicial Board overriding student conduct decisions regardless of the original outcome.

On the other side of the coast, UCLA is adopting a different, more subtle method: project an image of submission to the Trump administration.

This time they did so by providing false and misleading information to media outlets in an attempt to manipulate the conduct process, one of many other initiatives taken this month to manufacture consent for the repression of speech against genocide.

Regardless, the organizations plan to move forward with their conduct hearings, in front of a jury of their peers.

A member from graduate SJP asserted, “We know that the UCLA community does not want their endowment and pension funds invested in the U.S. and Israeli war machines. We know that the UCLA community does not approve of our lab technologies being sold to the DoD and ICE, and this scares the UCLA administration, because they know we have the people and the truth on our side. No ban on any student group will stop the tide of dissent against the UC’s unethical investment practices and political repression against pro-Palestinian activism on our campus.”