A growing controversy over a UCLA law school symposium is rapidly becoming a larger confrontation over the meaning of academic freedom, opening a broader fight over whether university administrators can publicly distance themselves from controversial academic events without chilling the freedom to teach, research and debate.
A controversy at UCLA is rapidly becoming a larger confrontation over the meaning of academic freedom.
Integrity Media helps fund our academic freedom project, which ties this case to the effects the United States is now having on academic freedom. This story combines the current story about UCLA, in which we see once again that school administrators are slaves to both political parties and their impulses to curb our freedom. I was inspired to write this piece because, as the symposium speaks of—and as this current event that I’m at shows us—9/11 and the loss of liberties tie directly into our current state of academic freedom. You can read many of our stories on this subject here.
The dispute began after UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk issued a public statement distancing the university from a law school symposium held September 10–11 examining the legal consequences of the U.S. response to the September 11 attacks. The conference addressed issues including torture, detention, government surveillance and the rights of defendants.
Among the speakers was Melanie T. Partow, an attorney who had worked through the Defense Department’s Military Commissions Defense Organization on the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man accused of masterminding the 9/11 attacks. A representative from the Council on American-Islamic Relations also participated.
The presence of those speakers prompted criticism from right-wing media and some members of UCLA’s Jewish community, particularly over the conference’s description of Israel’s war in Gaza as “genocide”—a characterization used by international human rights organizations but rejected by Israel and disputed by major American Jewish organizations.
But the backlash has increasingly shifted toward Frenk himself.
Dozens of UCLA law professors demanded that the chancellor retract his September 11 statement, arguing that it wrongly cast suspicion on a symposium that fell squarely within the law school’s academic mission. A separate national open letter attracted more than 200 academic signatories, including professors from Harvard and Stanford.
At the heart of the dispute is a deceptively simple question: Can a university defend academic freedom while simultaneously publicly distancing itself from the very academic work it claims to protect?
Frenk has insisted that the answer is yes.
In his original statement, he said UCLA rejected antisemitism and terrorism while emphasizing that the university had not endorsed the law school event. He later told the Academic Senate that the symposium nevertheless proceeded without alteration and that its speakers, program and academic content remained intact.
Frenk argued that his statement was intended in part to support UCLA computer science professor Judea Pearl, whose son, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was murdered in Pakistan in 2002. Pearl had objected to the participation of CAIR and to the symposium more broadly.
“The key point of my statement,” Frenk wrote, was that UCLA could protect academic freedom while also supporting members of its community who were experiencing pain.
Faculty critics see the matter differently.
A letter signed by 52 UCLA law faculty members—roughly one-fifth of the school’s faculty—described the chancellor’s statement as an attack on the law school’s academic mission. They argued that the statement could lend credibility to accusations that the symposium itself promoted terrorism or antisemitism, while potentially increasing the legal and political pressures already facing universities.
The UCLA Academic Senate leadership took a more measured position. Rather than demanding a retraction, Senate leaders warned that Frenk’s comments had been interpreted as criticism of the event and emphasized that university policy protects freedom of inquiry, research, teaching, expression and publication.
Tim Groeling, chair of the UCLA Academic Senate, said the issue warranted further examination. Senate leadership has asked the university’s Committee on Academic Freedom to consider the implications of administrators selectively commenting on faculty activities.
The controversy also exposes the difficult terrain surrounding lawyers who represent unpopular or accused individuals.
Faculty organizers said Partow’s presentation concerned military adjudication procedures rather than any particular client. Their argument is rooted in the basic function of a law school: examining how legal institutions operate, including when the people involved are accused of horrific crimes.
That distinction has become central to the faculty’s defense of the event.
LaToya Baldwin Clark, a UCLA law professor and director of the Critical Race Studies Program, argued that preventing a law school from hosting attorneys because they have represented unpopular defendants would undermine the very purpose of legal education.
The national faculty letter similarly urged Frenk to affirm that UCLA’s law school and its centers remain free to bring speakers representing a broad range of perspectives.
The larger concern is not simply what happened at one symposium.
Universities are increasingly operating under intense political pressure, including federal investigations, funding battles and demands from outside groups that administrators intervene in controversial campus debates. UCLA faculty members are now asking where the line should be drawn between an administration expressing institutional values and an administration effectively policing the boundaries of academic inquiry.
Frenk maintains that the symposium itself remained protected and unchanged.
His critics respond that academic freedom is not merely the absence of a cancellation. It also depends on whether scholars and faculty can pursue controversial questions without university leaders publicly suggesting that the work itself requires institutional distancing.
That tension now sits at the center of UCLA’s dispute—and the outcome could have implications well beyond one September symposium.
As I write and read this story, I’m sitting here in Chicago, watching the Integrity Media Awards unfold and seeing firsthand how urgently these questions of power, freedom, and accountability matter. Awards are being handed out to figures including Judge Andrew Napolitano, Max Blumenthal, and others. With any luck, we’ll have video soon that we can post.
This case is a vivid example of why academic freedom and critical thought remain essential. The UCLA symposium on 9/11 and the rights now under pressure speaks directly to what has been documented—and what we’ve all witnessed—in the post‑9/11 world: a society increasingly shaped by those in power and by institutions built in the name of security.
They also honored whistleblowers, and I had a chance to speak with Thomas Drake. We reminded each other of Benjamin Franklin’s famous warning: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
We have been suffering under the current regimes of the United States, and again, we will be posting video of the judge’s powerful speech, in which he discusses acts such as the Patriot Act—legislation that Congress was given only 15 minutes to read and understand, despite the enormous criminal and legal consequences it would carry.
Again, we honored the few brave people who have exposed what our country has become since 9/11, including Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, a great American journalist who risked everything to expose what the NSA was doing in the post-9/11 era. Snowden’s case also demonstrates the power of the Espionage Act, which does not provide the kind of affirmative defense that would allow someone accused under it to argue that their actions were undertaken in the interest of the American people. But, of course, that is the point of whistleblowing: exposing wrongdoing when the institutions responsible for that wrongdoing would prefer that it remain hidden.
I want to end with another speaker and friend who is now, in a sense, Internet famous: the then young CIA officer John Kiriakou the agency’s counter terrorism chief in Pakistan, the only person to go to prison for his role in exposing the torture program and other human rights abuses carried out by the United States.
I thank Integrity Media for the work they do and for helping bring together and honor those who speak truth to power and work to expand our rights. I will be posting those videos as soon as I get them. But our job now is to share these stories and expand this network to the largest audience possible.
As we at ScheerPost have written about academic freedom, this is a glaring example of why it matters—not simply for universities, but for curiosity, dissent and critical thought itself.
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