A look at the previous decade’s worth of suicide statistics at each of the 10 UC campuses

This article is the second in a multi-part investigation by The California Aggie looking at suicide statistics in the UC system. As these statistics are not maintained by the UC Office of the President, The Aggie has compiled the previous decade’s worth of suicide statistics at each of the 10 UC campuses through public information requests.

Leading mental health experts say that collecting suicide data can be a critical tool in prevention efforts — UC Davis’ Executive Director of Student Health and Counseling Services (SHCS) Margaret Walter agrees.

“Any sized college or institution of higher education would want to look at public health issues such as suicide with an eye for prevention opportunities or improving response,” Walter said when asked why a public university such as UC Davis would collect suicide data.

Yet the UC does not require its campuses to collect suicide-related data, nor does there exist a “systemwide UC policy or standard on collecting suicide data,” according to Andrew Gordon, a spokesperson for the UC Office of the President (UCOP).

“There is no systemwide definiton of suicide nor policy thresholds at which suicides must be reported by a campus,” Gordon said via email. “Though campus counseling centers typically do collect this data and share with campus leadership locally.”

In order to gain insight into student suicides on UC campuses that UCOP was not able to provide, The California Aggie submitted 20 California Public Records Act requests for the previous decade’s worth of student suicide statistics at each of the 10 UC campuses.

As there is no systemwide standard for collecting suicide data, the data reported by each campus cannot directly be compared. Given the responsive records submitted to The Aggie by each of the campuses, however, UC Davis was reporting the highest number of student suicides over the past 11 years — a total of 20, just one death higher than deaths reported by UC Santa Barbara and two deaths higher than deaths reported by UC San Diego. 

Some of the data provided by a few of the campuses were incomplete or insufficient, such as the data provided by UCLA that was inexplicably missing more than half of the 11 years of requested data. 

The following data is an estimate provided by officials and may not represent the actual number of suicides at a given campus.

Student suicide data from each UC campus from 2008-2018: 

• UC Davis: 20 deaths by suicide
• UC Santa Barbara: 19 deaths by suicide
• UC San Diego: 18 deaths by suicide
• UC Berkeley: 12 deaths by suicide
• UC Riverside: 11 deaths by suicide
• UC Irvine: Eight deaths by suicide
• UC Merced: Four deaths by suicide
• UC Santa Cruz: Three suicides between 2004-14. The Aggie requested data from 2008-18 and instead, a day after the print deadline for this article, UCSC officials provided data for the time period 2004-14. This was not the specific range of dates requested, and the responsive records were submitted by the university over a year after the CPRA request was officially submitted.
• UC San Francisco: Zero deaths by suicide — a UCSF spokesperson said this estimate is correct, adding via email that “unless a suicide happens on campus, it is not included in these statistics.”
• UC Los Angeles: University officials provided an incomplete data set, with the years 2008 through 2014 missing. There were 10 confirmed suicides from 2014 to 2018, with an additional six “possible suicides” reported during this same time period. Although numerous officials at the university were repeatedly asked to explain why the university did not provide six years of requested data, The Aggie did not receive a response by the deadline for this article.

Where is this data coming from?

As there is no systemwide standard for collecting suicide data, the data reported by each campus cannot be directly compared.

In view of the fact that the UC has no systemwide definition of “suicide,” The Aggie reached out to the Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) directors at each campus to request their university’s operational definition. 

Dr. Myrla Seibold, the associate CAPS director at UC Merced, sent the following response via email: “As Chair of the UC CAPS Directors I met with all the UC CAPS Directors this afternoon and everyone said that suicide is determined by a coroner.”

Once a death is classified as a suicide by a coroner, each campus has a different response protocol. At UC Davis, Student Affairs is the first campus body to receive notice from the coroner’s office and, from there, a group of campus officials is notified. 

When asked whether Student Affairs keeps a record of previous student suicides in order to document and track this information, Student Affairs Vice Chancellor Emily Galindo said via email that it only keeps a copy of the letters sent out to the families of those students listing available resources. Student Affairs does not notify families in the case of a suicide, a coroner does.

Galindo was also asked whether information collected by Student Affairs related to student suicides is used in any decision-making processes, such as in the allocation of funds for mental health services. She did not directly answer the question.

In an interview, when discussing the estimated 20 student suicides that have occurred over the previous decade at UC Davis, Walter said she does not know whether that number “really reflects the experience of our campus” because it is “simply the number that Student Affairs knows about.”

At SHCS, once officials are notified of a student suicide, they look at whether the student received services there.

“If they were served by a counselor, we would reach out to that counselor to talk to them,” Walter said. “We also do a chart review if the student was served here to look and see [if] they followed up. We just want to know if there’s any opportunity to work on prevention.”

What does this data mean?

There are a number of reasons why the data reported by the campuses varies so widely.

“If one college was more diligent than another in tracking numbers, it could appear to have a crisis on its hands when, in reality, another institution could have equal or higher numbers,” said Chris Brownson, the associate vice president for student affairs and director of the counseling and mental health center at the University of Texas at Austin, in a 2018 article from Inside Higher Ed. 

Additionally, there is no standard detailing when a university should — or should not — count a student suicide as such. This means that there may be certain circumstances, such as a school break or a leave of absence, which might disqualify such a death from being recognized by a university. 

“Not all suicides happen on site, so should they be counting that or not?” said Dr. Jane Pearson, the National Institute of Mental Health’s (NIMH) special advisor to the director on suicide research. “Do you want to count over the summer? How many months after somebody graduates? I don’t know if anybody has come to some consensus on how those should be counted.”

Officials from campuses including UC Davis and UC San Diego said that any death of a student by suicide, classified as such by a coroner, would be recognized, regardless of the circumstances. This was not the case, however, at UCSF which recognizes only deaths that have occurred on campus. In 2018, approximately 15% of UCSF’s total student population lived on campus, according to a university spokesperson.

Because there exists virtually no standards at any level regarding the collection and reporting of this data, it becomes challenging to accurately assess the importance of such information. Proponents of collecting this data, however, affirm and emphasize its importance.

“Something as simple as reporting [is] fundamental to […] understanding what happened at the end and being able to look back and figure out what happened over the rest of that time,” said Paul Gionfriddo, the president and CEO of Mental Health America, a long-standing mental health advocacy organization. “That’s how people need to look at this.”

Currently, though, if UC Davis wanted to assess the numbers it had on file, it would not be as easy as pulling up a spreadsheet. 

If pressed, Walter said Student Affairs “could probably go back and look at all of the emails they’ve sent” to assess student suicide in recent years. Adding the SHCS could, if asked, look at their files as well, but “it’s something we’d do detective work to go back and find.”

The number for the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is (800) 273-8255.

Written by: Hannah Holzer — campus@theaggie.org 

Suicide data can be essential information, but public universities aren’t required to collect by any state, federal bodies

This article is the first in a multi-part investigation by The California Aggie looking at suicide statistics in the UC system. As these statistics are not maintained by the UC Office of the President, The Aggie has compiled the previous decade’s worth of suicide statistics at each of the 10 UC campuses through public information requests. 

Patti Pape lost her son Eric Pape in May 2017 when Eric, a student at UC Davis, died by suicide. Since then, Patti Pape has become an advocate for increased access to mental health resources, talking at churches and schools, attempting to influence public policy and speaking with local representatives.

Patti Pape was “horrified” to learn that the UC system has no official policy nor standard on collecting suicide data. There is also no systemwide policy on the collecting and reporting of this data nor is there a systemwide definition of suicide — information that was discovered through an independent investigation conducted by The California Aggie and disclosed by Andrew Gordon, a spokesperson for the UC Office of the President (UCOP).

At UC Davis, 15.5% of undergraduate students had seriously considered suicide at any time over the last 12 months, according to a report from 2017. This rate is higher than the national average of 11.5% of undergraduates over the same period, according to a copy of a survey administered to UC Davis students last year as part of the American College Health Association’s National College Health Assessment. In 2019, that number rose on campus to 15.8%, compared to 14.4% of undergraduates nationally.

UC Davis has had 20 suicides in the past decade — a number obtained by The Aggie through public records requests. This number was gathered by university officials using information from the UC Davis Police Department and the Office of the Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs, according to Julia Ann Easley, a spokesperson for UC Davis.

The number may not represent the actual number of student suicides at UC Davis over the previous decade. It is based upon deaths classified as a suicide by the county coroner who then notified UC Davis Student Affairs. 

As Student Affairs does not keep a database of this information on hand, the number 20 was determined by university officials in order to complete The Aggie’s record request. When asked, officials from the university’s Student Health and Counseling Services said they had not previously heard this number, as it seems the data had not been put together in such a manner before now.

Additionally, UCOP does not have access to this information as it “does not maintain” suicide data, according to an official with UCOP’s public records office. 

For Patti Pape, the lack of a systemwide standard for collecting this data “is not acceptable.”

“It doesn’t make sense that we have this national problem with suicides and the UC doesn’t feel they should be keeping statistics,” she said. “Not knowing where we’re going, where we came from and our history is just going to cause us to make the same mistakes over and over. Reform is necessary in order to keep our children healthy and alive. If you don’t know [your history,] you’re bound to stumble and have a crisis at some point.”

Why is it important to collect suicide data?

Experts say suicide data can be invaluable information for administrators. Dr. Jane Pearson, the National Institute of Mental Health’s (NIMH) special advisor to the director on suicide research, said in order “to change anything, you have to measure it.”

“For a lot of advocates who are very passionate about wanting to prevent suicide, if they’re not measuring it, you don’t know if all that energy and passion is going in the right place and it becomes a huge opportunity loss,” Pearson said. “It might make them feel better and it might create some awareness, but if it’s not really changing somebody’s trajectory, it’s hard to say whether that’s the best investment because we have limited resources and limited time to track that investment.”

When asked if she thought schools and universities should publicly publish suicide data, Pearson said ultimately, it’s up to the insitutions.

“You can’t force them,” she said. “If you’re looking for a school that uses data to do better, that’s a good thing.”

Mental Health America (MHA), the nation’s longest-standing mental health advocacy organization, strongly supports the collection of suicide data in a standardized way.

“If we collect good data about the ultimate stage four event — which is losing one’s life to a mental health condition, usually that’s gone untreated — we can do a much better job in the future of changing trajectories of lives before people get to these crises stages,” said Paul Gionfriddo, the president and CEO of MHA. “It starts from understanding what’s happening […] in order to be able to quantify the benefits we can get from intervening earlier.”

Universities aren’t required to keep suicide data. But should they? 

There is no mandate, at either the federal or local level, requiring that public universities collect or report suicide data. 

An official with the California Department of Public Health confirmed to The Aggie that the department does not require universities to report student suicides nor does the department collect this data from universities.

Given that there is no requirement for schools to report this data, there exists, then, a discussion over whether there is any incentive for universities and schools to collect the data in the first place — as well as whether there is an incentive for them to do the exact opposite and not collect the data at all.

“Many schools are tracking this data, they just have no intention of sharing them outside of the school,” said Dr. Victor Schwartz, the chief medical officer of The Jed Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on suicide prevention for the nation’s teenage and young adult population.

Schwartz, who formerly served as the medical director for New York University’s counseling services, continued to say that this data does, for the most part, exist, but it’s just not released to the public “because there’s no incentive.”

Most of the country’s large universities don’t track this data or, if they do, they do so in an inconsistent manner, according to a 2018 investigation done by the Associated Press.

The AP “asked the 100 largest U.S. public universities for annual suicide statistics and found that 46 currently track suicides, including 27 that have consistently done so since 2007. Of the 54 remaining schools, 43 said they don’t track suicides, nine could provide only limited data and didn’t answer questions about how consistently they tracked suicides, and two didn’t provide statistics.”

Based on the findings, the 100 universities examined by the AP were split into four categories: schools that don’t have statistics or don’t consistently collect them, schools that did not provide statistics, schools that provided limited data but did not answer questions about the consistency of their tracking and schools that currently keep statistics on student suicides.

Of the six UC campuses examined for the study, all six — UC Davis, Berkeley, Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego and Santa Barbara — were placed in the fourth category: schools that do keep statistics. 

Collin Binkley, a reporter from the AP who worked on the report, responded to a request sent by The Aggie asking how the publication decided to categorize UC Davis, among the other UCs listed, in this way. Binkley forwarded a completed CPRA request from the UC Davis public records office listing student suicides from 2006-2017 (there were a total of 25 deaths during this time period).

The responsive records Binkley received were formatted in a manner identical to the format of the responsive records received by The Aggie. In both instances, the responsive data was gathered from the UC Davis Police Department and the Office of the Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs.

“It is important to note that the Police Department only holds information on those cases to which they respond, and Student Affairs data is only noted once a death has been confirmed by a coroner,” the email sent to Binkley from the public records office stated.

By comparison, the eight California State University campuses examined for the study — Sacramento, San Luis Obispo, Pomona, Fullerton, Fresno, Los Angeles, Long Beach and Northridge — were placed in the first category: schools that don’t have statistics or don’t consistently collect them.

“We do not collect this type of data. No policy mandates it,” said Hazel Kelly, a representative from the CSU Chancellor’s Office, via email.

While there are no policies or requirements to report this data currently, Schwartz said there have been efforts on a state level to collect and publicly report this data, but there are also fears that there may be “perverse outcomes” from enforcing a mandate of this kind.

  “If schools know that they’re going to have to report the number of suicides on campus, it may change the threshold for trying to force students who have suicidal ideations out of school with the thought that, “‘Well, if a death occurs off campus it’s a tragedy, but it’s not going to be on our statistics,’” Schwartz said. “Schools might wind up spending some time trying to game the system […] by making their statistics look as good as possible rather than doing what’s in the best interest of the student.”

Indeed, a class-action lawsuit filed in 2018 accused Stanford of discriminating against students struggling with their mental health by attempting to convince them to take a leave-of-absence and return home, rather than providing treatment through the university’s on-campus resources.

Schools and universities might fear they will be blamed for a suicide, Gionfriddo said, but this fear should not be a reason for inaction. When it comes to the collection of suicide data by institutions in a standardized format, Gionfriddo believes this is an obvious and necessary action. 

“We need to press upon anybody who interacts with younger people [that] this data should be collected, it should be reported, [it] should be standardized and we shouldn’t be afraid to do that,” Gionfriddo said. 

When asked whether she believes UCOP should implement a policy requiring that UC campuses collect and report this data, Margaret Walter, the executive director of UC Davis’ Student Health and Counseling Services, said she thinks about suicide data as parallel to the collection of data responsive to the Clery Act and the subsequent confusion this information sometimes causes when it is publicly released. The Clery Act is a federal statute requiring that colleges and public universities disclose certain campus crime statistics.

“The Clery data […] would never encompass all the issues of interpersonal violence that happen to our students in a given year [and] it only reports the numbers that were disclosed,” Walter said. “Having that number highlights the need to work on prevention and response to that issue, but it also creates a lot of confusion as parents look that number up when their children are applying for school and think that it means, ‘Oh, UC Davis and UCLA are different because these numbers are different.’ When really, you can’t assume that.” 

Commenting on the university’s most recent release of Clery Act data, Sarah Meredith, director of the Center for Resources, Advocacy and Education, said in a previous article in The Aggie that statistics released through the act do not necessarily reflect the actual number of instances of a certain reportable event. For example, sexual assault numbers are not “necessarily reflective of the entire number of sexual assaults that occurred in a given year,” instead representing those campus community members who “felt they could disclose their experience to someone who happened to be a [mandated reporter].”

Walter said she believes tracking suicide data might “encourage more dialogue which could benefit prevention and response” which she sees as a positive, but because the data might always be “inadequate, it might also create confusion.” 

Suicide rates in the U.S. are rising. What role can statistics play in prevention?

Suicide rates have gone up 30% in half of the states in the U.S. since 1999, but the changes in rates of suicide and suicidal ideation are perhaps the most pronounced among college-aged individuals.

Suicides among individuals aged 18 to 25 increased as much as 56% from 2008 to 2017, according to a study published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology which looked at nearly 8 million survey responses.

Between 2008 and 2017, suicidal ideation rose by 68% among the same 18 to 25-year-old age group. Suicide attempts increased by 87% among the 20 to 21-year-old group and, among the 22 to 23-year old group, attempts rose by 108%, according to the study. Walter said the rising suicide rates align with higher incidents of anxiety and depression among the young-adult age group.

“Within the space of mental health, we are seeing students who are experiencing loneliness [and] anger at higher rates than ever before,” Walter said.

  On a national scale, suicide rates have increased in nearly every state from 1999 to 2016 — California’s statistics, specifically, have seen an increase of 6-18% during this period, according to the Center for Disease Control. And the rates are steadily increasing: “The U.S. suicide rate increased on average by about 1% a year from 2000 through 2006 and by 2% a year from 2006 through 2016,” according to an article in Bloomberg.

Pearson said when she first started at NIMH, “we felt hopeful, and then slowly the rates have been going up.”

Internationally, other countries, including Japan, have seen suicide rates fall. In the late 1990s, Japan had some of the highest rates of suicide among industrialized countries, but around the 21st century, “Japanese citizens began to view suicide as a public health problem rather than as a personal problem to deal with in private,” according to an article from the American Psychological Association (APA).

As part of a plan to deal with rising rates of suicide, Japan mandated that detailed suicide statistics be released each month — “that step allowed suicide prevention resources to be matched to communities with the greatest needs,” the APA article states.

From the viewpoint of Schwartz, collecting suicide statistics is not the “end all be all,” as researchers have a general sense of the rate of suicide attempts and suicidal ideations on college campuses in the nation. In efforts to collect information, questions from universities should be framed from the viewpoint of: “What is it that would be helpful for the system to actually know that it doesn’t know now? And how might that better be gotten,” Schwartz said.

Generally speaking, there must be more done to help college-aged and high school-aged individuals, Gionfriddo said.

Gionfriddo was a former state legislator in Connecticut in the 1980s. He said that at that time, policymakers — himself included — were not doing enough to understand best practices for creating access to services and support systems. We’re still not doing enough, he said, but change can start with taking up the issue of reporting suicide statistics.

“If you don’t report adequately, if you don’t report properly, if you don’t report at all, it doesn’t change the fact of the death or the cause of the death, all it does is put our heads in the sand and minimize the value of that life and minimize the impact of that particular death on family, on friends, on peers, on the university community, on a broader community and on a state,” he said. “It should be a fairly easy thing to say, ‘Let’s just do this consistently, and let’s do it right.’”

The number for the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is (800) 273-8255.

Written by: Hannah Holzer — campus@theaggie.org 

When white nationalist, anti-Semitic incidents happen at UC Davis, they do not occur in a vacuum

UC Davis has been repeatedly targeted by white supremacist groups during the last year. White supremacist and anti-Semitic fliers were posted on campus in October 2018 and October 2019.

These actions reflect a concerted effort on the part of such organizations to disseminate their views following the fatal Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. An Anti-Defamation League (ADL) report cited “a 9 percent increase” in on-campus anti-Semitic incidents between 2017 and 2018, according to Inside Higher Ed. In the U.S. overall, there was a 182% increase in the distribution of white supremacist propaganda between 2017 and 2018. 

While UC Davis in particular ranks as a university with higher instances of anti-Semitism, these incidents also reflect a growing national trend of white supremacists targeting college campuses. The propaganda generally include “fliers, stickers, banners, and posters” expressing “racist, anti-Semitic, and Islamaphobic views,” said an ADL report. Due to “public backlash” and “negative media coverage,” the report suggests white supremacists have sought to “maximize media and online attention, while limiting the risk of individual exposure.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) currently deems the “alt-right” as “white nationalism’s most recent formation,” in part instigated during the controversial election of Donald Trump as president. The alt-right is thought to be increasingly “porous,” which “allows for the inclusion of more radical elements, including a suite of Neo-Nazi organizations.” The failure of a second Unite the Right Rally and the angry reaction to Richard Spencer’s speeches on college campuses in 2017 and 2018 demonstrate the movement’s increasing desperation and inability to recoup lost ground after the events in Charlottesville.

Today’s alt-right and white nationalist movement has the same roots as previous anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic and racist movements. As noted by extremism expert Heidi Beirich, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, in a phone interview, “the American hate movement is rooted in hatred of Jewish people and people of color.” 

Still, UC Davis’s history of anti-Semitism emerged well before the events in Charlottesville. In 2015, swastikas were painted on the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi’s house. In 2016, university printers received anti-Semitic fliers from The Daily Stormer and in 2017, a sermon given at the Islamic Center of Davis allegedly called for the annihiliation of the Jews. 

“Identity Evropa [also known as the American Identity Movement] distributed flyers and stickers at the University of California at Davis,” according to an April 2018 ADL report mapping anti-Semitic incidents nationwide. “One flyer read ‘Action. Leadership. Identity,’ and another advertised a book called ‘White Identity’ with the message, ‘Your professor is scared of this book.’”

Locally, in May 2018, the Road to Power organization “issued anti-Semitic robocalls on behalf of neo-Nazi Patrick Little that claimed Senator Dianne Feinstein was a dual-citizen of Israel and accused Feinstein of killing American children by sending billions of dollars to Israel. The call also said that Little was ‘going to get rid of all the nation-wrecking Jews from our country.’” 

In October 2018, the Daily Stormer distributed fliers throughout campus blaming prominent Jewish public figures, including Senators Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer, for the controversy surrounding the nomination of now Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Additionally, in October 2019, the American Identity Movement again posted fliers on campus.

UC Davis is not the only campus that has been targeted: incidents of bigotry have occurred at UC Berkeley and UCLA in previous years as well. At UC Berkeley, anti-Semitic graffiti was discovered on a bathroom wall, and in some instances, members of the student body, rather than outside organizations, have been the perpetrators of anti-Semitic rhetoric. For example, political assumptions have been made about students simply because they are Jewish. 

At UCLA, when then-undergraduate Rachel Beyda was confirmed into the student council’s judicial board, she was asked whether she would be able to maintain an “unbiased view” of campus matters due to her activities in Jewish organizations, according to The New York Times. When she left the room, the council debated whether her membership in a Jewish sorority and her participation in Hillel would interfere with her ability to handle governance questions impartially.

The controversial session was posted on YouTube and later removed. The council initially rejected her nomination in a 4-4 vote, and then accepted her and apologized following faculty intervention with a 9-0 vote. Jewish community leaders condemned the council’s initial behavior. Roughly a year later, perhaps in response to these concerns, the UC Board of Regents authored a resolution stating that, “Anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism and other forms of discrimination have no place at the University of California.” 

Sascha Recht, a third-year neurobiology, physiology and behavior major who is involved with several Jewish organizations on campus, described her reaction to the fliers found at UC Davis over the past couple years. 

“I have to say, it’s very disheartening,” Recht said. “I’m proud that [the Jewish community on campus] is very proactive, we see this and we immediately think about what we can do to get it removed — our response is very quick and very precise — but those are not the kind of images you want to see, you don’t want to condone hate in any way.” 

Asa Jungreis, president of UC Davis’ Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity and a third-year community and regional development and sustainable agriculture and food systems double major, spoke on behalf of his fraternity. 

“I am disheartened by the continued presence of vitriolic fliers on campus,” Jungreis wrote in an email. “Although the school has improved in their response to the anti-semitic alt-right propaganda anonymously littered on campus the lack of repercussions faced by the responsible parties that makes them comfortable enough to continue spreading hate is frustrating and worrying […] Organizations that I’ve been affiliated with […] have faced direct anti-Semitic actions. Any and all anti-Semitic behavior, or acts of hate targeted at any race, religion, or minority group will not be tolerated.”

Recht expressed concern about the university’s response to such acts. 

“There are ways to address the student body when something like this happens and I feel like the administration hasn’t utilized those tools effectively,” Recht said. “I’ve met with members of the administration personally and it goes in a file somewhere until something else happens and so it’s unfortunate.” 

Jungreis described the nature of the university’s response to anti-Semitic actions on campus as “formulaic,” noting that he is “hard-pressed to think of anything notable beyond vague condemnations via newsletters.” 

The SPLC notes that there was significant effort on the part of white nationalists to “rebrand” following the Unite the Right rally. The fallout from the rally led to “infighting” and, as social media platforms sought to limit online hate speech, various groups began to splinter.

“Very early in [the American Identity Movement’s] evolution they started doing this campus flyering,” Beirich said. “They claim to get out their message, and they probably try to recruit smart college students. I don’t know if this works at all in terms of recruitment but it certainly gets them publicity, so that’s part of the reasoning for this, for engaging in this tactic. After Charlottesville, after Heather Heyer was murdered […] [white supremacists] were saying it was a bad idea to engage in these street protests, because it made [them] look bad.”

Subsequently, Integrity First for America (IFA), a non-profit, filed a lawsuit against 26 individuals who participated in the Charlottesville rally. Roberta Kaplan, a New York City based lawyer best known for her landmark work on the 2013 Supreme Court case United States v. Windsor which addressed same-sex spousal rights, worked on the case. 

“A lot of people named in [the IFA lawsuit] had to hire lawyers, and they were pissy,” Beirich said. “And the other thing that happened after Charlottesville is that Paypal started pulling their accounts so [these groups] couldn’t raise money and they couldn’t move money and they started getting banned from Facebook and Twitter, they were deplatformed in a big way,” she added, noting that the SPLC had been lobbying Facebook to more vigilantly monitor hate groups even before the events in Charlottesville.

Barry Klein, the co-president of Congregation Bet Haverim and a retired Vice Chancellor of Research at UC Davis, also believes that recent events in Davis mimic a national trend of intolerance happening both on and off college campuses. 

“The general issue […] is that there’s been a resurgence of intolerance in the world right now,” Klein said. “It happens from all directions. Certainly it’s very clear, and there’s the so-called right wing groups that are fostering anti-Semitism and [there’s] left-wing intolerance too. We’re at a place in the world right now where the center seems to have vanished, where the dialogue in the world has really degraded.”

Klein added that Davis “isn’t necessarily an outlier in the rise of anti-Semitism and hate things in general. The most uninteresting voice [for me to listen to] is my own. I want to listen to [other] people. We can argue in a respectful way […] to get to the place we want to be.”  

Recht has experienced assumptions similar to those made of Beyda during classes at UC Davis.

“People will assume you’re not loyal to the U.S. if you’re Jewish, that you’re loyal to the Jewish state [Israel] first,” Recht said. “It’s a very strange and unfortunate question — it will be assumed that you believe certain things because you’re Jewish.” 

Recht also mentioned protests on campus where people were chanting that “[Jews] should have learned from Germany. There’s no gray area there, that’s a blatant insult.” 

Recht made a distinction between individuals who take issue with the policies of the Jewish state and those who have problems with its existence in general. Similarly, Klein expressed concern about the conflation of Israeli policies with Jewish identity. 

“The people who have criticisms of Israel, those criticisms [sometimes] spill over into criticism of the Jews,” Klein said. “Jewish people don’t speak with one voice, on-campus or off. Being Jewish and being pro-Israel are not the same thing. The pro-Israel thing has a lot more complications.” 

Klein views the Jewish community as being in solidarity with other minority groups.

 “We’ve always been champions of the underdogs, of people who are oppressed, separate from Israeli politics,” Klein said, recalling the cooperation of Jewish community leaders and African Americans during the Civil Rights movement and Jewish involvement in labor and women’s rights movements. “You can get involved with the contemporary politics in the Middle East and you can get lost in all these political things and lose sight of the camaraderie.” 

Klein hopes to increase communication between Congregation Bet Haverim and students on campus, describing plans to create a community outreach group that will work with Hillel and other campus organizations in order to “put a face on [the Jewish community]” and “invite other groups to our synagogue.” 

Similarly, Jungreis wrote that he hoped “UC Davis [would] grant Jewish organizations greater autonomy in raising awareness regarding and responding to anti-Semitism by promoting Jewish organizations and outreach on campus. While the majority of UC Davis faculty and staff are in no way friendly towards anti-Semitic behavior, I feel that more has to be done to make explicitly clear to all students and faculty that harassment of Jews on campus can come in various forms, and is not limited to such blatant acts as the recent flyers.”

Recht also discussed the importance of interfaith unity in combating hate in all its forms.

“We stand in solidarity [with minority groups] in the sense that we understand what it’s like to be persecuted for superficial reasons,” Recht said. “We have been supported and we’re very fortunate because we have certain relationships with the Muslim and Christian communities. If something happens in one of our communities we support each other. It’s a reciprocal thing and I would like to see that be stronger. Discrimination affects all of our communities.”

Written by: Rebecca Bihn-Wallace — campus@theaggie.org