MAILBAG:

My own experience with UCI’s pervasive racism and left-wing politics goes back many years.

I called UCI requesting a copy of statistics on students by race. UCI ignored me. I then wrote a letter, requesting those stats. I was told they had no such thing. Only when I demanded the information, and threatened to go to the trustees of the University of California did UCI give me the race report it previously denied having.

UCI’s race report documents its acceptance of black and Hispanic students with vastly inferior grades and SAT scores. These result in lower graduation rates, which do a gross injustice to the students accepted.

Had they attended community colleges or state universities, many thousands more of them would at least have graduated. Even those minorities who do graduate from the University of California take far longer to do so, on average. UCI tried to conceal these facts and documents, in violation of state and federal public disclosure laws.

When I have communicated with faculty and administration via e-mails, my comments were never called “free speech,” but rather “inappropriate.”

Perhaps if I had been spouting the hate speech so favored by UCI’s Muslim Student Union, it might not have been called “inappropriate” by these “intellectual” faculty members of UCI.

I recently signed up for and attended another “Climate Change” conference at UCI, where I again passed out fliers that no other attendee seemed to appreciate (I rode my bike there. Most of them drove).

Both times they tried to kick me out, because they didn’t like what I had to say. UCI does not tolerate free speech. It only mouths that it does.

JOHN JAEGER

Irvine

UCI’s Arab students show tolerance of Jews

Muslim and Arab students have staged protests at UCI aimed at Israel’s brutal aggression against Palestinian Arabs.

Many of these students come from Palestinian families that have had members slain by the Israelis, had their homes demolished by the Israelis, had their land confiscated by the Israelis.

The Jewish presence at these protests has been blatantly pro-Israel. Despite the booths’ being set up and literature distributed to praise Israel, not one word was uttered against Jews at the protests I have attended.

The Muslim and Arab students are to be admired for their restraint in the face of great provocation.

As to the report “by an independent community task force,” one wonders who the members were. Since the task force was originated by Hillel, a notoriously pro-Israel group, could the members be neutral observers? Or are they biased against Muslims and Arabs, and is the report simply another Zionist propaganda broadside?

RICHARD HERMAN

 Costa Mesa

Pilot report on racism at UCI poorly researched

I was alarmed by the headline in Wednesday’s A1 story “Report: Racism ignored at UCI.”

I was more alarmed to read in the first paragraph that these were findings of “an independent community task force.”

The word “independent” in such a context suggests an objective and nonpartisan group. Only well into the story did we learn that the task force was appointed by the Hillel Foundation (hardly a disinterested body) and that Hillel had subsequently “dropped the investigation but the group decided to push on independently.”

So what “independent” means here is more like “maverick” and refers to a group that had been in effect disbanded, but refused to go away.

Unfortunately, a lot of readers won’t have gotten beyond that misleading, even deceptive, first paragraph. Shame on Joseph Serna and the Daily Pilot. This is bad journalism, and UCI and the Pilot’s readers deserve better.

ROBERT NEWSOM

Newport Beach