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The University of California at Davis is one of the most anti-Semitic schools in the country, the California Globe reports, beating out Columbia, “the lodestar of pro-Hamas protests” and UCLA, where earlier this year “Hamasniks blocked Jewish student access to parts of campus.” According the group Stop Anti-Semitism, UC Davis is the only California school on the list, which rates universities nationwide on the way they treat Jewish students.

The report card probes the way schools report anti-Semitic incidents and their willingness to work with Jewish advocacy groups.  Administrators are rated on how they respond to incidents, and whether they speak out about them at all. The report also seeks to know if Jewish students are included in DEI policies, and if they feel safe at the school. At UC Davis, Jewish students have to wonder.

As the Globe reported last year, assistant professor Jemma DeCristo tweeted threats to “Zionist journalists,” accompanies by photos of a cleaver, and axe, and blood. As it turns out, the assistant professor of American Studies was formerly known as Jeramy Decristo, and the man who thinks he’s a woman is still at UC Davis.

“For Dr. Jemma DeCristo, who is a scholar-artist-activist and writes about Black art and community, America is a ‘problem space,’” the department explains. “Dr. DeCristo insists that when students in American Studies learn to treat the world around them as ‘problem spaces,’ when they research, question, write, and study that space, they can start to mold their reality and build the world they want.” In the same department, consider professor Jose Blanco a “Queer Xicanx Feminist activist, scholar and storyteller.”

Drawing on the work of  “Black, Latinx and Indigenous decolonial thinkers,” professor Blanco “explores the ways Black, Immigrant and Indigenous women-led community struggles across the United States have been foundational to our understanding of racialized social life, ecological violence and resistance across entangled geographies.” As Stop Anti-Semitism noted, professor Blanco also “celebrated the 10/7 massacre,” the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.

During an “emergency teach-in” UC Davis faculty labeled Israel as “racist,” “genocidal,” “oppressive” and so forth. Present at the teach-in was UC Davis professor Joshua Clover, who “teaches critical and political theory in the departments of English and Comparative Literature.”

At the teach-in, Clover said “I will condemn Hamas when Zionists condemn the entire Israeli state.” As it turns out, this was not the professor’s only cause.

In 2019 in Davis, convicted criminal Kevin Limbaugh gunned down Natalie Corona, 22, a rising star in the city’s police department. The community hailed Corona as a hero who had paid the ultimate price. After a photo of Corona holding the “thin blue line” flag, went viral on social media, the campus Ethnic and Cultural Affairs Commission proclaimed, “this flag represents an attempt by law enforcement to undermine the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Professor Clover tweeted:  “I am thankful that every living cop will one day be dead, some by their own hand, some by others, too many of old age.” In addition, “people think that cops need to be reformed. They need to be killed.”

UC Davis bosses issued statements disassociating themselves from his views, calling for tolerance, and so forth. As donors and police officers surely noted, Clover remains on the faculty. After the Stop Anti-Semitism report, UC Davis spokesman James Nash proclaimed that “UC Davis is committed to fostering a climate of equity and justice where all can feel welcome and thrive, free of harassment or discrimination.” Avoiding direct mention of anti-Semitism seems to be the pattern.

A month after the 10/7 attack, a collection of UC officials, including UC president Michael V. Drake, issued a statement “to condemn the alarming, profoundly disappointing acts of bigotry, intolerance, and intimidation we have seen on our campuses over these past several weeks.” The statement concludes:

“Members of the UC community may have differing opinions on the Middle East conflict, but our stand on intolerance and intimidation in our own community is unequivocal: We will not stand for it, and we will do everything in our power to ensure that the University of California is a safe community for all.”

It isn’t, and there’s another issue to remember.

Back in the 1970s, the UC Davis medical school denied admission to fully qualified student Allan Bakke, a Vietnam veteran and person of pallor. Bakke sued and won, but the UC system continued to discriminate on the basis of race and ethnicity. Californians responded with the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), Proposition 209 on the 1996 ballot. The measure barred racial preferences in state education, employment and contracting.

As Thomas Sowell noted in Intellectuals and Race, the predicted disaster never occurred, but UC bosses claimed the measure harmed “diversity.” The UC established a vast DEI bureaucracy that boosted costs, doubtless contributing to the system’s $500 million budget deficit. As donors, parents and students might note, the DEI squads add no educational value. They have also failed to prevent anti-Semitism on campuses like UC Davis, now among the 25 worst schools in the nation.