Aaron Sibarium writes for the Washington Free Beacon about bad publicity for a major West Coast university.
The University of California, Los Angeles, was slapped with a lawsuit on Tuesday for stonewalling a public records request related to an “activist-in-residence,” Lisa Gray-Garcia, who demanded that students pray to “Mama Earth” during a mandatory lecture for UCLA medical students.
The Goldwater Institute, a conservative nonprofit, filed the request on October 31, 2025. Nearly five months later, UCLA has not produced any of the records sought by the institute, including Gray-Garcia’s contract with the university and any course syllabi she has prepared.
As a guest speaker at UCLA medical school, Gray-Garcia led students who attended her mandatory lecture in chants of “Free, Free Palestine,” an incident cited by the Justice Department in a lawsuit accusing the university of anti-Semitism. The self-described “poverty scholar” has also referred to the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks as “justice” and called the University of California, San Francisco, a “Zionist funded akkkademik institution.”
The record request targets documents that could be fodder for the Justice Department’s complaint. It covers any emails to or from Gray-Garcia that use the terms “Israel,” “Palestine,” “genocide,” or “Zionist,” as well as all orientation materials for the Activist-in-Residence program, which includes a $10,000 stipend for “movement leaders to undertake power-shifting scholarship.”
“Under California law, taxpayer-funded institutions like UCLA cannot withhold public records like the ones Goldwater has requested, even if those records include embarrassing or controversial information that the institutions would prefer to keep hidden,” said Goldwater Institute attorney Brad Benbrook. “UCLA proudly advertises on its website that it pays ‘Activists-in-Residence’ like Ms. Gray-Garcia to engage in the type of ‘poverty scholarship’ and ‘revolutionary journalism’ she pursues, yet it has refused to produce the basic documents Goldwater has requested about her work for UCLA and the financial support UCLA provides.”
