A graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley is being criticized for offering extra credit to students for attending a demonstration to support Gaza, according to an email sent Tuesday.
Following pushback regarding the options, university leaders responded to make some changes, Fox News reported Wednesday.
The initial email from graduate assistant Victoria Huynh read:
We’re offering a field trip and/or extra credit opportunity: (1) Students can attend the national student walkout tomorrow against the settler-colonial occupation of Gaza (info attached below) OR (2) Students can watch a short documentary on Palestine and call/email your local California representative using this linktree.
…
For sections 101/102, we’ll spend some time today talking about Palestinian history in relation to class concepts like colonialism, imperialism, and Third World solidarity.
This is a real e-mail distributed at an Asian studies class @UCBerkeley.
— Ale Resnik (@AleResnik) October 25, 2023
This is the same institution that welcomed in disgraced SF DA, Chesa Budin. pic.twitter.com/pAUmGvQslJ
Social media users were quick to share their thoughts on the email, one person writing, “UC Berkeley is well known for their radicalism. This doesn’t surprise me.”
“They should start calling our universities ‘anti-American reeducation factories,'” someone else commented, while another person replied, “This is truly poison. Our kids are being poisoned.”
In the wake of the backlash, UC Berkeley’s Assistant Vice Chancellor at the Office of Communications and Public Affairs Dan Mogulof said when leaders learned of the issue they took action.
“The situation has been remedied, the assignment has been changed and there are now a number of options for extra credit, not just one,” he told Fox, adding students may participate in any local event that is relevant to the subject they are studying.
A UC Berkeley law professor recently urged law firms not to hire his “antisemitic” students after Hamas terrorists attacked Israel, leaving over 1,000 people dead, Breitbart News reported October 17.
“Would your clients want an attorney who condones hatred and monstrous crimes?” corporate law professor Steven Davidoff Solomon wrote in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal.
Breitbart News’s Joel Pollak reported Thursday that Brandeis University, which is “a disproportionately Jewish institution in Massachusetts founded after the Holocaust,” saw its student council choose not to condemn Hamas’ atrocities.
Breitbart News also said Thursday the USC [University of Southern California] Shoah Foundation will gather testimonies from the survivors and witnesses of the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7.
“The move confirms the attack that saw the mass rape, torture, and slaughter of Israeli civilians is being considered part of Holocaust lineage of events,” the article said.
