UC Regent Jay Sures Must Resign or Be Removed!

In the midst of Trump’s all-out war against education, University of California leadership must safeguard public higher education. Yet UC Regent Jonathan (“Jay”) Sures, a top United Talent Agency executive and chair of the board of directors at Los Alamos National Laboratory, has used his power to curb the freedom of speech, academic freedom, and shared governance that are the cornerstones of a democratic education. 

As a headliner at the recent Jewish American Summit in Los Angeles, Sures, speaking as a UC regent, praised the brutalization of students protesting Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. Claiming to have “moral clarity,” he stated of these anti-genocide protests: “The more Republican-leaning states tend not to have this problem, primarily because they empower their police to do their jobs.” Despite the mass arrests, police failures to protect, police violence, and the UC spending $29 million policing students protesting the genocide, Sures maintained “the police across the University of California were really held back from doing their jobs.” He endorsed Trump’s attacks on higher education, saying, “If the intent is to cut funding because schools are not enforcing their time, place, and manner rules and allowing rampant antisemitism, I understand it.” 

Sures shared the stage at the Jewish American Summit with other vitriolic speakers, including known transphobes, Islamophobes, and misogynists. Mosab Hassan Yousef, a former Israeli spy, was greeted with rapturous applause when he called for Muslims to be ethnically cleansed from the United States: “I don’t want Muslims in America. Get the fuck out of the United States! Go back to the shitholes where you came from! This country is perfect, and it’s much better without your Islamic belief system!” He compared Muslims to donkeys who are “all the same,” and referred to Islam’s founder as “a pedophile.” In a time of the U.S.-Israeli war in the Middle East and Israel’s U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza, these are not mere words. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) designated the Jewish American Summit an “anti-Muslim extremist organization.” LA Mayor Karen Bass denounced Yousef’s language as “appalling.” 

Sures has repeatedly abused his authority by directly attacking UC students and faculty on regental letterhead. He even went so far as to target an individual UCLA student only to lose in court where he was ordered to pay the student’s attorneys’ fees. At a January 2025 regents’ meeting, he attacked faculty governance while appearing with a large bullet prominently featured on his desk and ominously stated, “Anything and everything should be on the table.” He doubled down at the recent Jewish American Summit, saying, “You hit me with a fly swatter, I’m going to hit you with a baseball bat.” 

Biased, hateful, and intolerant, Sures’s rhetoric and actions put him in direct violation of UC Regents Policy 4400, which asserts that “the State of California has a compelling interest in making sure that people from all backgrounds perceive that access to the University is possible for talented students, staff, and faculty from all groups” and hails UC’s “historic promise to recognize and nurture merit, talent, and achievement by supporting diversity, accessibility, and equal opportunity in its education, services, and administration, as well as research and creative activity.”  

Sures has condoned violence against students, denigrated UC faculty, and participated in conferences rife with hate speech. He is unfit to serve as a UC regent. He has proved that he is a danger to the UC community and a threat to the university’s core values as a public educational institution. It is past time that he be removed from the UC Regents. We demand that Sures immediately resign and if he fails to do so we demand that the Regents act promptly to censure and remove him from his position.