UC Berkeley Opens Civil Rights Investigation Into Confrontation at Dean’s Home

UC Berkeley has opened a civil rights investigation into a professor who was seen in a viral video trying to wrench a microphone away from a Muslim student giving a pro-Palestinian protest speech at the professor’s home last month.

The Title IX investigation follows a complaint filed by the student, Malak Afaneh, who is Palestinian American and wears a hijab, with the university’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination. Afaneh hopes the investigation leads to the professor’s dismissal.

“I frankly don’t believe that a professor that is able to put her hands on a student should be allowed in the classroom, especially near other visibly Muslim, pro-Palestinian students,” Afaneh, 24, told KQED. She first learned of the investigation on April 26.

The confrontation took place at an April 9 dinner hosted by Berkeley Law professor Catherine Fisk and her husband, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school, in the backyard of their Oakland home to celebrate graduating students. As shown in the video, Afaneh, a third-year UC Berkeley law student, stands on the home’s garden steps wearing a red hijab and black and white keffiyeh and begins speaking into a microphone.

Reading from her phone, she begins a traditional Muslim greeting of peace to mark the final night of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Fisk approaches Afaneh from behind, wraps one arm around her shoulders, and, with her other hand, attempts to wrestle Afaneh’s phone and microphone from her hands mid-speech.

“This is not your house. It is my house. And I want you to leave,” shouts Fisk, who threatens to call the police.

In a statement, Chemerinsky called the university’s investigation a routine response to a complaint.

“It is no more than that,” Chemerinsky said. “It is disturbing that the student who deliberately disrupted a dinner party at my home and refused to cease the disruption or leave when asked repeatedly to do so then had the audacity to file a complaint with the campus that she was mistreated.”

Afaneh is co-president of the group Law Students for Justice in Palestine, which has long demanded that UC Berkeley divest from manufacturing companies that supply weapons to Israel and called for a boycott of the dinner at Fisk and Chemerinsky’s house. After the altercation, it released a statement demanding the couple’s resignations.

Chemerinsky, who is Jewish, has said a poster that Afaneh’s group distributed, which included a caricature of him holding a bloody knife and fork and the words “No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza starves,” was blatantly antisemitic.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ said in a statement last month that she was “appalled and deeply disturbed” by what happened and offered her support to Chemerinsky. “While our support for free speech is unwavering, we cannot condone using a social occasion at a person’s private residence as a platform for protest,” Christ said.

The San Francisco Bay Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, praised the university’s Title IX investigation.

“It is crucial that all students, regardless of their religious or political beliefs, are safe and respected at university-sanctioned events,” Zahra Billoo, the group’s executive director, said in a statement on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian student protests continue at UC Berkeley, with 170 tents at the steps of Sproul Hall as of last Friday, according to local news site Berkeleyside. There were at least 14 pro-Palestinian encampments on college campuses in California as of last week.

Israeli troops seized control of Gaza’s Rafah border crossing this week, according to the Associated Press, raising concerns of a full-scale invasion and the collapse of aid as Cindy McCain, the American director of the U.N. World Food Program, said northern Gaza is experiencing “full-blown famine.” The war in Gaza has killed more than 34,700 Palestinians, the AP reported.

The devastation is personal for Afaneh, whose parents immigrated to the United States in 2001 from Abu Ghosh, an Arab town in Israel, and Al-Khalil, in the West Bank. Afaneh grew up in Chicago and “all over,” she said and came to Berkeley in 2021 to attend law school.

Since the incident in Fisk and Chemerinsky’s backyard, Afaneh has continued to protest with the UC Berkeley encampment. She played an early role in negotiations with school administrators but has since pulled back as she prepares for her next steps: graduation, the bar exam and a job at a New York City civil rights law firm.

The faculty member who will hand Afaneh her diploma when she walks the stage on Friday is Chemerinsky, the Berkeley Law dean who threw her out of his home.

Afaneh unsuccessfully asked the school to allow her to accept her diploma from another faculty member. At her graduation, Afaneh intends to wear a keffiyeh, a black-and-white checkered scarf that demonstrates support for Palestinian nationalism.

She will also refuse to shake Chemerinsky’s hand.

“I’m going to handle it as I’ve always handled it,” Afaneh said. ”I’m going to hold my head up high with grace and dignity, as I have been doing.”