By Ethnic Studies Council at the University of California

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For most people outside and even a majority of people within the University of California (UC) system, the term, “Area A-G/H,” reads as meaningless institutional shorthand. Yet the pitched battle around Area A-G/H, a proposed new UC ethnic studies admissions requirement, was a consequential moment in the ongoing fight for ethnic studies in California. In this deep blue state, which has been majority-minority since 2000, eighty percent of the K-12 population are students of color. As one of the birthplaces of ethnic studies in the late 1960s and early 1970s, UC Berkeley, along with San Francisco State University, was a testing ground for the field’s institutionalization. Because of this history, California has also served as a laboratory for both cooptive and repressive measures to curb the field’s transformative potential. In the case of Area A-G/H, the playbook launched against ethnic studies anticipated the Heritage Foundation’s notorious 2024 Project Esther by several years. If few outside the internal development and review process understood the stakes of the proposed new UC requirement during the 2020-25 window when it stood a chance of becoming policy, the highly organized opposition was swift to grasp its import, albeit not in the terms in which they cynically publicly denounced it.

To no small degree, the ferocious backlash to the inclusion of Palestine in the 2019 draft version of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC), which the California Department of Education (CDE) had commissioned, primed the opposition for the war it would wage against Area A-G/H ethnic studies. In fact, many of the same players who banded together against ethnic studies at the state level shifted their focus to A-G/H at the University of California. By the time Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 101 on October 8, 2021, establishing ethnic studies as a high school graduation requirement throughout the state, political will around ethnic studies was waning in Sacramento. With every member of the CDE advisory committee tasked with drafting the ESMC requesting that their names be stripped from the state-approved final draft in which all reference to Palestine had been violently erased, there was a centralized vacuum of content expertise as the field was being implemented–unevenly–throughout California. This is necessary context for understanding why the UC A-G/H ethnic studies review process was instantaneously embattled and why our course criteria were so urgent.

In the absence of state standards around ethnic studies, those of us who crafted these criteria did so with an eye to establishing ethnic studies methods anchored in a commitment to justice. Specifically, we were tasked with developing ethnic studies course criteria across existing A-G fields (A=history, B=English, C=math, D=science, E=language other than English, F=visual and performing arts, G=college-preparatory elective). What this, in theory, meant is that high school students could fulfill the proposed Area A-G/H ethnic studies requirement not just by completing a dedicated ethnic studies elective or an ethnic studies social sciences course but also by taking a STEM class grounded in ethnic studies methods. We accordingly emphasized in our framing introduction to the criteria that “ethnic studies content cannot merely be tacked onto preexisting subject areas but stands in potentially transformative relationship to established disciplines, bodies of knowledge, research methods, and academic norms.” In our guidelines to teachers, we noted that “in cases where ethnic studies is articulated within a traditional discipline,” they should “consider how the structural violence of racism and colonialism informs the methods, concepts, and content area of the course,” encouraging them to “[r]eflect that reckoning with racial injustice in the course design, critical questions, and assignments.” More than a typical biology class, for example, with a stray unit focused on eugenicism, scientific racism, or human experimentation, a course that simultaneously fulfilled Area D science while satisfying Area H ethnic studies would have to demonstrate a transformative commitment to justice and praxis. Our establishing UC course criteria according to the core principles of our field was in keeping with the university’s historic reliance on content experts in setting admissions standards for a range of subjects taught at the K-12 level throughout California.

For those of us appointed by the University of California to create ethnic studies course criteria and oversee their implementation, however, the sheer irregularity of the process–upended by ideological antagonism to the anti-imperialism of the field and its Third Worldist origins–meant that we were forced to revise the A-G/H draft criteria an unusual number of times in response to non-specialist feedback, that we were often sidelined in discussions where content expertise should have been centered, and that hard-won affirmative decisions to move the criteria forward were arbitrarily stalled or reversed. All of this impeded our ability to advance the criteria to next levels of review, as we had been appointed to do. We never wavered, however, understanding that the haphazardness of the review process–and the ceaseless interference by anti-ethnic studies interests–were testament to the field’s urgency in our current historical juncture.

Left to our own devices, those of us who had been charged by the University of California, our employer, with institutionalizing ethnic studies thus found ourselves without institutional support in the trenches of a protracted struggle. The attacks by an emerging unity of reactionary forces obligated us to fight and organize on multiple fronts. The most virulent and sustained assaults came from Zionist groups and individuals who sent us vile racist death threats, spearheaded doxing and firing campaigns against us, called for some among us to be deported, attempted to subject us to state surveillance and investigation as “terrorists,” placed us on public blacklists, and defamed us in ad hominem media attacks. What the university had initially framed as an ordinary yearlong service assignment was transformed into a struggle that extended over a half decade, resulting in job loss for some of us.

In the course of parrying serial blows to the review process from hostile faculty inside the UC system who were, in some instances, collaborating with external provocateurs, including out-of-state, right-wing, front organizations, we who were charged with realizing the proposed UC A-G/H ethnic studies requirement were compelled to examine our opposition. In effect, we turned our attackers into objects of study and scrutiny. Who were they? What interests did they represent and serve? A veritable rogue’s gallery came into view. Disgruntled agitators who had filed failed Title VI complaints with the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education alleging rampant antisemitism in the UC system, anti-affirmative action “mismatch theory” proponents who maintained that Proposition 209 fortified democracy, STEM researchers who campaigned against diversity requirements in campus curricula, “great replacement” theorists, and corrupt journalists: these unsavory actors forged common cause against the proposed UC ethnic studies requirement, working in league with each other. Referring to each other as a “team,” as now-public emails disclose, some of these anti-ethnic studies opponents distributed confidential committee emails leaked to them by a member of a key Academic Senate review committee, a flagrant breach of university policy, in their combined efforts to ensure the defeat of the A-G/H ethnic studies requirement.

Ironically, opponents of the proposed requirement characterized those of us who developed the course criteria and members of the Ethnic Studies Council at the University of California, which mobilized cross-campus and community support for ethnic studies, as a sinister and shadowy cabal. Starkly absent from their demonizing screeds was actual sustained engagement with the substance of the criteria. Instead, they scoured the internet for evidence of our political positions specifically with regard to Zionism, with little regard for fact or accuracy. Signatures on BDS petitions, criticism of Zionism as a form of settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide; supposed fidelity to the first draft of the California Department of Education’s ESMC; actual or imagined ties to the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium; and involvement in the founding of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism: these were adduced as proof of the purported antisemitism of our draft criteria. Received neither as expressions of academic freedom nor as free speech, our activities, academic alliances, and political positions were instead framed as reasons to limit or dismantle both. With the defeat of the UC ethnic studies requirement in April 2025, the reactionary forces that had united against ethnic studies crowed about their victory.

After October 7, 2023 and the onset of the genocide in Gaza, history’s pendulum appeared to have swung decisively against ethnic studies. The brief interlude of institutional reckoning with racism that followed the 2020 police murder of George Floyd was over. It was in the openness of that fleeting earlier moment that the California-based, student-led, educational organization GENup and the UC Students Association (UCSA) had successfully advocated for a new ethnic studies admissions requirement. These students secured rare unanimous initial support from the Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, the systemwide UC Academic Senate committee that catalyzed the development of Area A-G/H. That same committee, under new leadership, thereafter worked in unprincipled ways to overturn the proposed requirement. Similarly, Governor Gavin Newsom, who had signed AB 101, turned his back on the rollout of the field, repeatedly failing to fund the mandate beyond an initial one-year budget allocation.

In a key regard, however, the gutting of the UC Area A-G/H ethnic studies requirement stands out as a brutal artefact of the genocidal complicity of these times–more an indictment of moral failure and cowardice on the part of the requirement’s detractors than a crowning triumph that will stand the test of time. Their insistence that the anti-Zionism that characterizes ethnic studies is one and the same as antisemitism is an ideological relic even now. Such a conflation can only be maintained through repressive force. It does not withstand critical scrutiny.

In the spirit of political education, which is the driving purpose of our field, the Ethnic Studies Council at the University of California offers documents from the battle for Area A-G/H ethnic studies. These documents are meant to serve as tools for ethnic studies practitioners, including K-12 teachers. At the same time, they function damningly as receipts. Accompanying each document are questions meant to elicit critical engagement. The first document is the formal proposal for the UC A-G/H ethnic studies. Opponents charged the criteria with containing alleged “antisemitic elements” even as they studiously avoided discussing the actual course criteria. By offering the latter here as tools for K-12 ethnic studies teachers, we wish to breathe new life into them and to allow readers to judge for themselves. The second is a September 18, 2023 press release to the UC Regents by Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a former Hebrew-language lecturer at UC Santa Cruz who directs AMCHA, a Zionist, self-styled campus antisemitism watchdog organization. The third is a June 2012 video featuring Rossman-Benjamin that was the subject of a student-authored petition calling on then-UC President Mark Yudof to condemn her terror-tagging, anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic remarks. Collectively, these documents illustrate the liberatory promise of critical ethnic studies while casting light on the way in which Zionism and white supremacy operate through institutional channels to halt or warp its implementation.

Proposal for A-G Ethnic Studies

September 18, 2023 Press Release to the UC Regents

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin Video

• June 2012 video of Tammi Rossman-Benjamin: On February 9, 2013, the UC Santa Cruz Committee for Justice in Palestine (CJP), later renamed “Students for Justice in Palestine,” published an online Change.org petition calling on then-UC President Mark Yudof to condemn then-UC Santa Cruz Hebrew lecturer and AMCHA Initiative director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin’s terror-tagging of students in the Muslim Students Association (MSA) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The petition referenced a June 2012 video posted online by Rossman-Benjamin’s supporters in which she characterizes MSA and SJP members as “foreign students who come from cultures and countries where antisemitism is how they think about the world.” A lightly edited transcript–with filler and repetition removed–follows below.
  • What is Rossman-Benjamin’s principal concern? What is motivating her critique of MSA and SJP?
  • In her book Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (2012), Lisa Marie Cacho, reflecting on the so-called war on terror, argues that “terrorist suspects” constitute a socially dead class of “permanently criminalized people” who are “subjected to laws but refused the legal means to contest those laws as well as denied both the political legitimacy and moral credibility necessary to question them.” She states that “targeted populations do not need to break laws to be criminalized.” Please place Rossman-Benjamin’s terror-tagging of MSP and SJP students in historical context. Against the backdrop of the “war on terror,” what were some potential consequences of her terror-tagging of these students?
  • Discuss Rossman-Benjamin’s lexical choices: “foreign,” “virulent,” “Arab world,” “serious agenda.”
  • In their petition, CJP pointed out that the year prior, Rossman-Benjamin had sent an open letter to Yudof riddled “with racist rhetoric tying student groups to terror.” CJP further remarked Yudof’s alacrity in sending out “a systemwide email that adopted the Amcha Initiative’s false narrative, without any condemnation of [its] inflammatory language or baseless claims.” Consider and discuss (1) the fact that Yudof never publicly condemned Rossman-Benjamin’s terror-tagging of MSA and SJP students against (2) the fact that following his retirement from his position as UC president, Yudof went on to serve as the advisory board chair of the Academic Engagement Network, an organization dedicated to “oppos[ing] the denigration of Jewish and Zionist identities” and “advanc[ing] education about Israel.” Rossman-Benjamin is an AEN member.

Tammi Rossman Benjamin video transcript (click to view)

“ Students have become poisoned by the rhetoric that they hear on campus. And who are the primary sources of this, or what are the two primary sources of this? The MSA and SJP students. And who are they? Who are these students? They are generally motivated by very strong religious and political convictions. They have a fire in their belly. They come to the university. Many of them are foreign students who come from cultures and countries where antisemitism is how they think about the world, right? There’s virulent antisemitism in the Arab world, and many of these students come from countries where antisemitism is perfectly acceptable. In fact, they’re fed on a diet of antisemitism, and they come to American universities, to California, and they have not been educated about what antisemitism is. So these student groups often have strong ties to international campaigns to demonize and delegitimize Israel, as well as to organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, the Muslim Brotherhood founded the Muslim Student Association, the MSA, forty years ago. And other terrorist organizations–Al Awda is one of the main sponsors of the Students for Justice in Palestine. Al Awda is an organization that has ties to both Hamas and Hezbollah. So these are not your ordinary student groups, like the Young College Republicans or the Young Democrats, right? These are students who come with a serious agenda, who have ties to terrorist organizations. The MSA and SJP students have forcefully promoted their message on campus, and in most cases, they have met little resistance. And as a result of the sheer quantity of MSA and SJP materials and events, anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian discourse has really dominated the campus square for over a decade, negatively affecting perceptions and attitudes of literally hundreds of thousands of California university students towards the Jewish state. And also, the near success of the boycott campaigns, as insignificant as the effect on any one campus could possibly be to the state of Israel. So what? So what? So the student government’s not gonna give money to companies that do business with Israel? That’s not the problem. The problem is the near success of these campaigns have really fueled and encouraged and strengthened the international boycott movement’s efforts to delegitimize Israel, and that is a serious problem, and we’re seeing it getting stronger and stronger every day.”

Representing nearly 700 ethnic studies scholars and practitioners across the UC system, the Ethnic Studies Council at the University of California first formed in response to highly coordinated, politicized attacks against our field and its world-transforming potential. In keeping with the grassroots movement tradition of the struggle that birthed the field, the council includes not just faculty, but also, students and staff in its organizing core. During a time of unabating state violence, imperialist aggression, and naked fascism, the Council has led campaigns for K-12 ethnic studies, promoted the UC systemwide ethnic studies admissions requirement, and taken robust part in the defense of students, staff, faculty, and community members targeted for protesting the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people. Our organizing includes initiatives that have exposed UC complicity in genocide. The Council issues a weekly newsletter with updates on relevant news, events, and campaigns. We produce our own podcast, The Lower Frequencies, and each quarter we convene ethnic studies practitioners from across the ten UC campuses and beyond in general assemblies organized around pressing issues related to our field.