Statement on Behalf of the Undersigned UCLA Law Faculty Regarding Chancellor Frenk’s September 11, 2026 Statement 

We write to express our grave disappointment at Chancellor Frenk’s September 11, 2026 statement, which he has reaffirmed, that appears to condemn a symposium hosted by several law school centers on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The statement closely followed and seemed to echo criticism, including in the tabloid press and on social media, that the Symposium supported terrorism and antisemitism. This criticism arose because the Symposium hosted critics of the government’s response to 9/11, and because it included, as a panelist, a government-appointed attorney who represented Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a man accused of being the “mastermind” behind the 9/11 attacks. 

This media disinformation campaign had been launched against UCLA Law academic programs (and by implication UCLA) before the Symposium occurred and without regard to what was actually said. (See NYPost, “UCLA marks 9/11 by hosting attack mastermind’s activist lawyer and lefties who claim counterterrorism is ‘racist,’” Sept. 9.) The Chancellor’s rebuke of the Symposium violated the very terms of academic freedom that he invoked. It also exposed the faculty and staff affiliated with planning the Symposium, as well as the invited speakers, to harassment and threats. The statement reads as an assault on the law school, and what we as faculty, staff, and programs do to advance the academic mission of the University.

Universities are places of open inquiry. As faculty, administrators, and staff, we succeed in our work only when we exhibit robust openness to hearing from, and really listening to, people with a variety of different forms of expertise and experience. The Symposium hosted at the law school was exactly that—an academically serious exchange of ideas between over 20 panelists with legal, professional, and military expertise, as organized by expert law school colleagues.  

A central value of the university is that we listen carefully—and when we speak, we try to speak in an informed way. In our view, the Chancellor did the opposite. To our knowledge, the Chancellor did not bother to ask Symposium organizers–his own faculty with the most expertise on the event and its subject matter–about his concerns prior to releasing his statement. Nor did he attend the Symposium, or (so far as we can tell) talk to anyone who did. 

The statement strongly suggested the Symposium was somehow supportive of terrorism and antisemitism. But there was absolutely no basis to malign the Symposium as antisemitic or pro-terrorism. No speaker made any statement remotely suggesting support for any such positions. Some speakers did criticize some government counterterrorism efforts, such as the so-called Muslim Travel Ban, as racist practices that assigned guilt based on group membership, with no law enforcement value. These views are widely held among lawyers. While one may disagree, the notion that such arguments are antisemitic or support terrorism–without even hearing any speaker who made them–is absurd. 

The Chancellor’s statement also implicitly accepted the critique that the Symposium supported terrorism because it included as a panelist a government lawyer employed by the Trump Administration’s Department of Defense who was assigned to defend Mohammed. Again, the Chancellor had no knowledge of what she actually contributed to the discussion. In point of fact, her comments made no reference to any particular client. They focused entirely on the unique processes and ever-evolving adjudicatory structure that the military has set for trying these cases. 

Beyond the specifics of the content of the lawyer’s remarks, however, the criticism leveled at the Symposium for including the lawyer reflected a profound misunderstanding of the lawyer’s role. We teach our students that our constitution guarantees to every criminal defendant charged with serious offenses the assistance of counsel. (In addition, in this specific instance, the Department of Defense states that “defense counsel are responsible for providing a zealous defense for each accused tried by a military commission.”) To impute the crimes of the client to the lawyer is to undermine this constitutional imperative and the rule of law principle it embodies. Unfortunately, we live in a time when officials at the highest levels of government have targeted members of the legal profession for representing clients or causes with whom these government officials disagree. Judges face violent threats for rulings seen as adverse to the current federal administration. Lawyers have to consider and implement security measures for taking on certain cases. It is crucial that, at this moment, UCLA’s leaders avoid statements that fuel the current assault on the rule of law and aid those who aim to undermine the university.  

For the Chancellor to affiliate himself with these disparaging attacks against the Symposium instead of verifying what it was actually about is not befitting of a leader. The Chancellor is charged to defend the school against external forces aiming to chill inquiry, dictate favored points of view, and hobble the university. The course of action taken by the Chancellor arguably places the school in greater jeopardy of adverse legal action by giving credence to the false claim that the Symposium supported antisemitism and terrorism. This is particularly vexing and self-sabotaging as the Department of Justice’s own civil rights investigations of leading colleges and universities, including UCLA, have been exposed as part of a political project to undermine these institutions rather than a legitimate examination of antisemitism.    

Rather than defending the faculty from these grossly inaccurate and threatening attacks and standing up for the legitimacy of academic inquiry, the Chancellor’s statement undermines free expression. It will have a chilling effect that makes faculty, staff, and programs unclear as to what symposia are appropriate, which speakers are legitimate, and what we can do within our spheres of expertise to advance the academic mission of the University without eliciting public disapproval from the Chancellor.  

We call on the Chancellor to retract his statement publicly, or, at a minimum, state simply and unequivocally that he never had any basis for believing that this symposium promoted terrorism or antisemitism and never intended to imply that it did. We also request a meeting with the Chancellor open to all concerned law faculty and the wider law school community. The retraction is imperative to repair the relationship between those who work at the law school and the University administration, a relationship that is in danger of deterioration. The meeting would also give the Chancellor an opportunity to hear our concerns, clarify his intentions, and better align his statements with institutional commitments to academic freedom and the work of the University.