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University plans to reinvite CBS News leader after lecture was cancelled in February, Professor Judea Pearl says
Two UCLA professors who called for the cancelation of CBS News journalist Bari Weiss spoke with contempt against a Jewish colleague who was involved in inviting her to the lecture series named after his late son, according to emails obtained by The College Fix.
The Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture was canceled in February after political science Professor Margaret Peters and others complained about Weiss being the featured speaker.
In a series of emails obtained this week through an open records request, Peters and sociology Professor Randall Kuhn described Weiss as a “Zionist fanatic, anti-trans hate monger” and criticized Professor Emeritus Judea Pearl, Daniel’s father, for supporting “a parade of horrible right-wing ‘anti-woke’ grifters” as guest lecturers.
The annual lecture series features leaders in journalism and international relations. It’s named after the late Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and murdered by Islamic terrorists in Pakistan in early 2002.
Past speakers include Jake Tapper, Bob Woodward, Larry King, Ted Koppel, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Harvard Professor Steven Pinker.
Professor Judea Pearl, a renowned computer scientist, declined to comment about the emails when contacted by The College Fix. However, he did say UCLA plans to reinvite Weiss to speak.
“It is my understanding that it was Bari Weiss’s security team that requested a postponement due to safety measures they deemed insufficient,” he said Tuesday in an emailed statement. This echoes a statement that UCLA released in February after the lecture was canceled.
“Moreover, it is my understanding that UCLA remains committed to inviting Bari to deliver the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture in person at a later date,” Pearl said.
He also emphasized that “at no point did UCLA capitulate to anti-academic, politically motivated pressure to silence her.”
“This lecture series prides itself on featuring thought leaders from a broad spectrum of ideas and backgrounds. Naturally, in keeping with the legacy of Daniel Pearl, we prioritize speakers who can directly confront the rising danger of antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and other forms of racism, be it on the left or on the right,” Pearl told The Fix.
Earlier this year, Weiss, who also is Jewish, was scheduled to give the annual lecture on “The Future of Journalism” at UCLA.
But a week before the Feb. 27 event, the public university announced its cancelation. Soon afterward, the university stated Weiss had withdrawn due to security concerns.
But new emails obtained by The Fix through an open records request indicate that Weiss and the Pearl family faced internal animus from one of the UCLA leaders directly involved with the lecture.
Peters was, at the time, the associate director of the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations, which hosts the lecture series. She still teaches political science at the university, but she no longer serves with the center.
The recently obtained back and forth email exchange between her and Professor Kuhn in mid-February reveals more about their opposition to the event, including a faculty petition that Peters created and circulated.
Kuhn’s initial email to Peters asked for her thoughts on “this Bari Weiss situation.”
“I know there are worse things happening on campuses across the country like department closures and Charlie Kirk statues, but it’s still quite intolerable,” the sociology professor wrote.
Peters responded that Weiss’s planned talk was “just awful,” and she planned to resign if it went forward.
“… there is some chance she will back out. ‘Her security is worried’ which I think is code for she’s scared that there will be protests about how much of a fascist she is,” Peters wrote.
Kuhn agreed with Peters’ outrage, replying that “the idea of her giving an academic lecture is insane.”
“As for talking points, where do I start with a person who is a self-described Zionist fanatic, anti-trans hate monger?” he wrote.
In another email, dated Feb. 17, Peters wrote with disdain about Judea Pearl’s influence over the lecture series bearing his late son’s name.
“Judea basically has a say over who gets to speak, and for the last few years, it has been a parade of horrible right-wing ‘anti-woke’ grifters,” Peters wrote.
Responding that same day, Kuhn told Peters, “Judea’s survivor’s guilt will be the ruin of us all if we allow him to continue to run this university.”
He also linked the Jewish professor to a faculty group that, according to Kuhn’s email, allegedly made “spurious antisemitism allegations against dozens of faculty, including Jewish faculty such as myself.”
“They have undoubtedly turned over ‘evidence’ to DoJ and Congress,” Kuhn wrote, referencing a federal investigation of antisemitism at UCLA.
Another email from Peters also blamed Pearl for “leading a cyberbullying attack” against her after she spoke up publicly about Weiss’s speech.
Peters alleged Pearl’s social media posts resulted in “several pieces of hate email.” She did not identify the specific posts, but Pearl appears to have written a single X post that named her.
Neither the university media relations office nor Kuhn responded to two requests for comment Tuesday from The College Fix asking about the emails. An email to Peters resulted in an “out-of-the-office” reply stating that she is traveling and has limited access to email.
In another February email to the center’s director, Peters shared an article about Weiss’s connections to the University of Austin and British conservative Niall Ferguson as “another reason why having Weiss is a very bad look for us.”
Peters explained more to a journalist at the Jewish News Syndicate, writing that her opposition to Weiss’s talk “has little to do with her views on the situation in Israel-Palestine or her religion.”
“My views on her are based on her decades of bad-faith attacks on academic freedom, her attacks on editorial independence at CBS, and ideological policing at both the Free Press and the University of Austin,” Peters wrote in a Feb. 19 email.
The University of Austin is a private, liberal arts institution dedicated to free thought and classical liberal ideals. Weiss is on the board of trustees. She also founded The Free Press, an online news outlet that rapidly gained a large audience, after she left The New York Times.
Back in February, Peters publicly threatened to resign if Weiss spoke. The emails indicate that Peters also opposed Weiss speaking via Zoom after her in-person talk was cancelled.
The center’s leaders debated changing the format to an online lecture but ultimately decided against it.
Burkle Center Director Kal Raustiala informed Peters of the decision in a Feb. 18 email.
“… despite a lot of pressure from CBS and from the Pearls, I decided not to do the event that way. I don’t think Zoom allows for real engagement,” he wrote, adding that the center similarly decided against an online format when former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lecture was canceled several years earlier.
Raustiala also made it clear to Peters that he opposed canceling the lecture based on Weiss’s personal views.
“Speech and debate on matters of controversy are part of a serious university, in my view, and that general approach guided me here,” he wrote.
The university media relations office repeatedly has emphasized that Weiss and her team decided to cancel the lecture, not UCLA.
It previously referred The Fix to its February statement: “The university was ready to implement a comprehensive security plan for this event, developed in coordination with campus safety and external law enforcement partners. UCLA remains committed to supporting public programming which represents a wide range of viewpoints, with safety planning tailored to each event.”
Weiss’s notoriety grew in 2020 when she quit The New York Times after raising concerns about its radical left-wing bias. She later founded The Free Press, an independent online news outlet, and later became editor-in-chief of CBS News.
MORE: Free speech group slams UCLA for ‘double standards’ after hecklers disrupt event
