The University of California, Los Angeles, will pay over $6 million to settle discrimination complaints brought by Jewish students and faculty against the school in 2024. 

The complaints include allowing antisemitic protesters to build a “Jew Exclusion Zone” to block them from certain areas of the campus. 

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UCLA agreed on Tuesday to enter into a consent judgment and pay more than $6 million to the plaintiffs in the case Frankel v. Regents of the University of California, the largest private settlement of its kind.

“We are pleased with the terms of today’s settlement. The injunction and other terms UCLA has agreed to demonstrate real progress in the fight against antisemitism,” the parties said in a joint statement. 

The agreement builds on “substantive action taken by the University of California and UCLA to promote safety and combat antisemitism on campus,” according to the statement. 

In 2024, the lawsuit against the university was filed after the Board of Regents and Chancellor Gene Block said in congressional testimony that the school has taken no action to demonstrators who blockaded the campus.

The school testified during a House Education and Workforce Committee hearing in May 2024, when they showed the UCLA administration a video of demonstrators stopping Jewish undergraduate students from entering the campus. The chancellor said preventing students’ access based on race, religion, or ethnicity “could be” an expellable offense. 

In the same hearing, Block told Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) that “any part of campus is open to students, so blocking him was really inappropriate.”

“This encampment was against policy, this violated time, place, and manner,” Block said at the hearing.

UCLA is just one of many universities that had protests in spring 2024, which descended into a violent clash between anti-Israel demonstrators and law enforcement. 

In March, the Department of Justice issued a statement of interest in the UCLA case after the university moved to dismiss the complaint. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights also investigated the discrimination complaints against UCLA in 2024.

UCLA plans to support the Jewish community by donating $320,000 to the “Initiative to Combat Antisemitism” and $2.33 million to eight on-campus organizations, including Hillel at UCLA, the Academic Engagement Network, and the Anti-Defamation League. 

On top of donations, the University of California system has “taken several important and proactive steps to combat antisemitism,” which includes communicated campus prohibitions against encampments, training for the UC community, and opposing calls for boycotts against and divestment from Israel. 

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“Antisemitism, harassment and other forms of intimidation are antithetical to our values and have no place at the University of California. We have been clear about where we have fallen short, and we are committed to doing better moving forward. Today’s settlement reflects a critically important goal that we share with the plaintiffs: to foster a safe, secure and inclusive environment for all members of our community and ensures that there is no room for antisemitism anywhere on campus,” Janel Reilly, UC Board of Regents chairwoman, said. “As we build upon our systemwide efforts to further this goal, we remain steadfastly committed to cultivating an environment where all are afforded the opportunity to live, learn and teach safely and peacefully, no matter who they are, where they come from, or how they pray.”

If the settlement receives final approval from a federal judge, it will be effective for the next 15 years.