When a Faculty Union Turns Against Its Students

California’s latest fight over campus antisemitism was framed as a battle over free speech. But beneath that familiar slogan was something far more disturbing: an effort by the faculty union for California State University’s 22 campuses to weaken vital protections for Jewish students while claiming to defend student rights.

That effort took the form of AB 2551, which began as a health-care measure before being gutted and amended into a higher-education bill late in the legislative process. In its original rewritten form, it would have repealed the campus-safety protections added to California’s Education Code after the post-Oct. 7 explosion of antisemitism in public higher education.

After a swift statewide outcry, the repeal language was removed. But the bill still advanced — and its sponsor, the California Faculty Association, made clear that its larger goal had not changed.

At the Senate Education Committee hearing, CFA legislative action chair Melina Abdullah called the bill “a first step towards ending time, place and manner restrictions” that she described as “repressive and harmful to our students.”

Time, place and manner rules are not censorship. Properly enforced, they allow protest to coexist with everyone else’s rights. They distinguish advocacy from intimidation, rallying from blocking access, and protest from disrupting classrooms, libraries, residence halls and campus events. These are precisely the protections Jewish students have needed since Oct. 7, as anti-Israel activism too often moved from political expression into harassment, exclusion, intimidation and denial of access.

Before accepting CFA’s free-speech claim, Californians should ask what kind of freedom CFA is prepared to defend — and for whom.

In April 2025, CFA adopted a resolution demanding that CSU “immediately and permanently terminate” study-abroad programs in Israel and end academic and cultural partnerships with Israeli universities.

This was not a political statement. It was an academic boycott: a demand that the nation’s largest public university system use its academic infrastructure — study abroad, exchange, research partnerships and scholarly collaboration — to limit what and where students may study, which scholars they may learn from, which partnerships may exist and whether Israel may be encountered as a legitimate subject of university life. For Jewish, Zionist and pro-Israel students, cutting off those opportunities is a direct attack on their academic freedom.

But academic boycott and its harms reach beyond formal university ties. Its anti-normalization logic treats ordinary engagement with Israel — and Zionism itself — as illegitimate. On campus, that means pressure to stigmatize speakers, marginalize Israel-related scholarship and treat students who refuse to disavow Zionism as suspect members of the academic community, creating conditions in which abuse and harassment can be excused as activism.

That is the staggering hypocrisy at the center of CFA’s position. The union invokes free speech when anti-Israel activists want fewer rules, but shows no comparable concern when its own boycott campaign would trample the academic freedom and free expression of Jewish, Zionist and pro-Israel students, and help create the hostile conditions those rules are meant to prevent.

The hypocrisy would be disturbing from any faculty group. From CFA, it is far more dangerous. As the exclusive bargaining representative for CSU faculty, CFA has systemwide infrastructure, access to university leadership, organizing capacity, and legislative clout.

CFA’s boycott resolution was not simply a local union position. It carried out a campaign that PACBI — the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, the academic-boycott arm of the BDS movement — had asked faculty networks to pursue: dismantling study-abroad programs in Israel and other academic collaborations with Israeli institutions and scholars. PACBI’s U.S. affiliate, USACBI, promoted the campaign on American campuses. CFA’s Palestine, Arab and Muslim Caucus, co-chaired by USACBI founder Rabab Abdulhadi, then drafted a resolution matching that demand. In effect, CFA used public faculty-union power to press CSU into a foreign-led academic-boycott campaign against the Jewish state, at the expense of CSU’s own students and faculty.

AB 2551 is not separate from that campaign. It gives legislative form to a defensive strategy the BDS movement developed. Through its “Right to Boycott” campaign, the movement portrays anti-BDS laws, antisemitism definitions and protest restrictions as attacks on political expression.

In academia, USACBI goes further. Its “Academic Defense” apparatus urges faculty, students and campus groups engaged in BDS advocacy to reframe antisemitism charges, sanctions and litigation as attacks on academic freedom, antiracist activism, faculty governance and university autonomy. AB 2551 follows that script: rules adopted to protect students from harassment and hostile environments are recast as repression, while activists constrained by those rules are recast as the injured party.

California lawmakers must not pass AB 2551 in any form. At this point, no legislator can honestly treat it as neutral free-speech legislation. It is the defensive side of the academic-boycott campaign CFA has already pressed CSU to adopt. That campaign narrows Jewish students’ academic freedom and then seeks to weaken the rules they need when exclusion turns into harassment, intimidation or denial of access.

And because academic boycott directly undermines public universities’ educational mission, lawmakers should not stop with defeating this bill. They should consider legislation, modeled on existing state precedent, that keeps taxpayer-supported colleges and universities in California from using academic programs, partnerships and exchanges to enforce political boycotts.

California’s public universities exist to expand knowledge, inquiry and academic opportunity. A faculty union must never be allowed to turn them into instruments of political coercion and exclusion.

Rossman-Benjamin is the director of AMCHA Initiative, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to combating antisemitism at colleges and universities in the United States. She was a faculty member at the University of California for 20 years.