#DropTheAEN

Higher education workers reject the racist policies and programming of the Academic Engagement Network

Mark G. Yudof

AEN Co-Founder & Advisory Board Chair

“The BDS strategy is a blatant attempt to co-opt the language of human rights: Israel is a settler nation, a bastion of white privilege, a racist and apartheid state, and a perpetrator of alleged genocide… My principle fear is not that the BDS movement on campuses will injure the Israeli economy or isolate Israeli universities. My greatest fear is that the future leaders of America will be viscerally anti-Israel because of the distorted discourse on today’s campuses. What happens on campus never stays on campus.”

Mark G. Yudof, “We must defeat BDS macro-aggression,” The Times of Israel, Dec 9, 2015

Mark G. Yudof is Emeritus Professor of Law at UC Berkeley with expertise in constitutional law and, ironically, freedom of expression. He served as president of the University of California system (2008-2013), chancellor of the University of Texas system (2002-2008), and president of the University of Minnesota (1997-2002), before “retiring” to become a full-time Israel lobbyist. In addition to his AEN work, Yudof is on the Board of Governors of the University of Haifa and joined Brandeis University President’s Initiative on Antisemitism in 2023.

Yudof has long been an “unabashed Israel supporter” and served on the board of the B’nai B’rith Advisory Council during his UT tenure.1 In 1993, he has his wife Judy Yudof were co-recipients of a Jewish National Fund (JNF) Tree of Life Award.2 Judy Yudof is a former international president for the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (USCJ) and a Bush-appointed council member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. She has been a long-serving board member of Hillel International, has previously worked with the American Jewish Committee (AJC), currently sits on boards of the American Israel Friendship League (AIFL) and Mercaz: The Movement to Reaffirm Conservative Zionism, and is co-chair of the advisory board for the Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies at UC Berkeley.

As UC President, Yudof repeatedly suppressed speech related to Palestine and exacerbated anti-Palestinian racism on UC campuses. He dismissed numerous assaults and threats targeting pro-Palestinian UC students while speaking loudly in defense of pro-Israel students and staff; he ignored warnings from the Center for Constitution Rights and other rights groups that his administration was making Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian students unsafe; he changed UC policies to make academic boycott and divestment from Israel more difficult; helped draft a 2012 resolution for the California State Assembly that conflated criticism of Israel with anti-semitism; participated in a 2013 conference hosted by Israeli military, political, and business elites; and actively worked with Israel lobby organizations.3 He led two trips to Israel sponsored by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) through a program known as Project Interchange, which recruits US politicians, opinion leaders, and university presidents and chancellors.4 He also reinstated the study abroad programs for UC students at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Ben-Gurion University.5 In 2012, Yudof also became a co-founding board member of The Israel Institute, another lobbying organization that works with US post-secondary institutions to strengthen US-Israeli academic ties, including by funding positions at U.S. institutions for Israeli academics.6

Yudof’s $660,000 UC salary was widely criticized, in part, because his administration oversaw a major tuition hike, faculty salary cuts, and firing of non-tenured teaching staff.7 Despite only working at UC for seven years, including one year of paid sabbatical, he retired with a hefty $357,000 pension. When asked about his unprecedented retirement negotiation, he retorted: “That’s the way it works in the real world.” 8 Yudof also began making additional income in 2015 as a “grantee consultant” for the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation—earning over $2.2 million in this role to date.9 Non-coincidentally, the foundation’s co-President Lisa Eisen is also a founding board member of the Israel Institute alongside Yudof, and serves on the board of AEN’s fiscal sponsor the Israel on Campus Coalition. The foundation provided the lead funding for the AEN’s 2015 launch,10 and remains one of the largest donors to AEN, ICC, and Israel Institute.

Yudof co-founded the AEN in 2015 with the explicit purpose of supporting faculty to oppose BDS and strengthening U.S. ties with Israeli academia. He boasted to Haaretz about the founding advisory board he assembled, “We’re well-connected with the leadership of higher education in America. There are strong relationships.”11 To coincide with the AEN’s launch, he authored op-eds in Inside Higher Ed and Times of Israel, arguing that the campus BDS movement was inherently anti-semitic and must be defeated.12 He told the New York Times, “I don’t want to see BDS become stronger because, 20 years from now, these students will be judges, heads of Congress…we have to respond now to maintain the historical relationship with Israel.”13

Since 2015, Yudof has penned and co-authored numerous op-eds on AEN’s behalf panicking about BDS, Israel delegitimization, and insisting that zionists are the only campus community members who have faced discriminatory academic censorship.14 In actuality, numerous researchers, academic associations, and civil liberties groups have documented the very opposite: that campus Palestine supporters face serious and systemic inequities, including censorship, threats, harassment, assaults, doxxing, lawfare, and retaliation including job loss, suspensions, illegal arrests, and deportation.15

Sources

  1. “New Cal President Keeps Kosher, Loves Israel,” Jewish Telegraph Agency, July 2, 2008. ↩︎
  2. Tom Tugend, “New UC President Yudof is part of a dynamic duo.” Jewish Journal, March 24, 2008. ↩︎
  3. Nora Barrows-Friedman, “Former UC president comes out openly as Israel lobbyist.” Electronic Intifada, December 19, 2015. See also additional reports by the Electronic Intifada, including Dalia Almarina, “How California uni chief conflates real bigotry with criticism of Israel,” April 18, 2012; Barrows-Friedman, “Bogus allegations of “anti-Semitism” create real climate of fear for Arab, Muslim students in US,” August 8, 2012; Ali Abunimah, “Climate of fear silencing Palestinian, Muslim students at University of California, rights groups warn,” December 4, 2012; Abraham Greenhouse, “UC President Yudof to attend Israeli conference boycotted by Stephen Hawking,” May 13, 2013; Barrows-Friedman, “California university chief admits failure to curb divestment campaigns,” June 28, 2013; ↩︎
  4. Greenhouse, May 13, 2013; ↩︎
  5. Tom Tugend, “The off-campus Yudof.” Jewish Journal, April 18, 2013. ↩︎
  6. The Israel Institute Inc., 990 Tax form, 2012. ↩︎
  7. Deborah Solomon, “Big Man on Campus.” New York Times, September 24, 2009; Larry Gordon, “UC chief quits, citing health reasons,” Los Angeles Times, January 18, 2013. ↩︎
  8. Jack Dolan, “UC is handing out generous pensions, and students are paying the price with higher tuition.” Los Angeles Times, September 24, 2017. ↩︎
  9. Calculated from Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation 990 Tax Forms, 2015-2024. ↩︎
  10. Debra Nussbaum Cohen, “New U.S. Group to Enlist pro-Israel Faculty to ‘Catalyze Campuses.’” Haaretz, December 8, 2015 ↩︎
  11. Ibid. ↩︎
  12. Mark G. Yudof, “We must defeat BDS macro-aggression.” The Times of Israel, December 9, 2015; “BDS and Campus Politics: A Bad Romance.” Inside Higher Ed, December 13, 2015. ↩︎
  13. Linda K. Wertheimer, “Students and the Middle East Conflict,” New York Times, August 3, 2016; Philip Weiss, “Israel lobby panics about ‘spoiled’ next generation of American leaders turning against it.” Mondoweiss, August 6, 2016. ↩︎
  14. For example, Mark G. Yudof, “Anti-Semitism and Junk Constitutional Law,” The Times of Israel, April 1, 2016; Sarah Bray, Kenneth Waltzer, and Mark G. Yudof, “Barring Students from Studying in Israel,” Inside Higher Ed, October 14, 2018; Kenneth Waltzer and Mark G. Yudof, “Antisemitisms of the Left and Right,” The Times of Israel, October 21, 2017; Kenneth Waltzer and Mark G. Yudof, “Israel and Academic Freedom: An Exchange,” The New York Review, January 8, 2019; Miriam Elman and Mark G. Yudof, “AAUP Should Rethink Stance on Israel, Antisemitism,” Inside Higher Ed, September 11, 2025. ↩︎
  15. For example, “The Palestine Exception to Free Speech,” Palestine Legal and Center for Constitutional Rights, September 2015; “Presumptively Antisemitic: Islamaphobic Tropes in the Palestine-Israel Discourse,” Rutgers Center for Security, Race, and Rights, November 2023; “Anti-Palestinian Racism on Campus,” Visualizing Palestine and Arab Canadian Lawyers Association, February 2025; “Discriminating Against Dissent: The Weaponization of Civil Rights Law to Repress Campus Speech on Palestine,” American Association of University Proffessors and Middle East Studies Association, November 2025; See also Yasmin Abu-Laban and Abigail K. Bakan, “Anti-Palestinian Racism and Racial Gaslighting,” The Political Quarterly, vol. 93, no. 3, July/September 2022. ↩︎