UCLA chancellor rebukes law school event with 9/11 ‘mastermind’ attorney; organizers push back
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- UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk took the unusual step of publicly rebuking a law school 9/11 symposium that promoted a panel with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s defense attorney.
- Frenk stressed that UCLA “does not endorse” the event while saying academic freedom “does not require us to be neutral about antisemitism or terrorism.”
In a rare rebuke of a campus event, UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk on Friday distanced the university from a law school symposium about the 9/11 terrorist attacks that faced criticism for including a lawyer for alleged 9/11 “mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, prompting push-back from faculty who said a just legal system requires that even the most vile defendants receive legal defense.
The symposium, “25 Years After 9/11,” was sponsored by five law school centers and ran Thursday and Friday, highlighting legal issues raised by the U.S. response to the attacks. Topics included torture, rendition, detention, immigration enforcement and government surveillance. The program said America’s response ushered in “sweeping expansions of state power.” Some critics also believed the symposium line-up and program descriptions appeared to sympathize with extremism and antisemitism.
In his Friday afternoon statement, Frenk said: “UCLA’s values are clear. We reject antisemitism and terrorism in all their forms, and we believe our campus must be a place where the dignity of every member of our community is respected. Nothing about this event at the UCLA School of Law, which we do not endorse, changes or qualifies those commitments.”
Melanie T. Partow, an attorney who has represented Mohammed at Guantanamo Bay, was listed as a speaker on a Friday morning panel titled, “Torture, Rendition, and Detention: The Erosion of the Rights Regime Post-9/11.” The 9/11 Commission report described Mohammed as the “principal architect” of the attacks. The Washington Free Beacon first reported on the event.
Partow worked on Mohammed’s case as part of the Military Commissions Defense Organization, an entity of the Department of Defense. The department tasks the organization with “providing a zealous defense for each accused” during military tribunals. She did not respond to a request for comment.
Twenty five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, most students and some teachers have no living memory of the day. From UCLA lecture halls to LAUSD schools, educators and families rethink how to teach 9/11 history to a new generation.
Some members of the Jewish campus community also objected to the program’s description of Israel’s war in Gaza, launched after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, as “genocide.” A United Nations commission said in September 2025 that Israeli authorities had genocidal intent in Gaza. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reached similar conclusions. Israel has rejected the finding, and major American Jewish leaders have called the allegation antisemitic.
This month, more than 5,000 Jewish public figures and allies — including several UC professors — signed an open letter opposing the accusation. The letter said “the massacre of October 7 has been systematically downplayed, while Israeli actions have been distorted and amplified.”
Frenk also said that “academic freedom does not require us to be neutral about antisemitism or terrorism. Speaking at UCLA should never be mistaken for the university’s approval, endorsement, or acceptance of an individual’s viewpoints, or our institution’s indifference to the pain their presence may cause members of our community.”
The symposium was organized by the law school‘s Critical Race Studies Program; the International and Comparative Law Program; the Institute for Technology, Law and Policy; the Miñana Family Center for Immigration Law and Policy; and the Promise Institute for Human Rights.
“We are enormously proud of the symposium we organized, and UCLA should be too,” law school professors Ahilan Arulanantham and LaToya Baldwin Clark said in a statement Saturday afternoon. Arulanantham is faculty co-director of the Miñana Family Center for Immigration Law and Policy and Clark is faculty director of the Critical Race Studies program.
“We showcased a nuanced and sophisticated set of conversations among more than twenty leading experts who discussed both the successes and the failures of our government and our nation in the years since 9/11,” the statement said. “Had any of the critics actually attended, they would have heard moving memorials to the victims of the 9/11 attacks and its aftermath — including opening remarks from Professor Ahilan Arulanantham, who was present in Manhattan on 9/11, and from Jasleen Kohli, Executive Director of the Critical Race Studies program, whose mother nearly boarded one of the flights that was hijacked,” the statement said.
On Saturday, several UCLA law professors and alumni also took to social media to voice disagreement with Frenk. One was Aaron Littman, who said on BlueSky that he was “profoundly disappointed in our chancellor, as a member of the UCLA law faculty and a Jew... The rule of law demands that everyone be provided a robust defense.”
“The suggestion that representing someone who did horrendous things — and that inviting such a lawyer to speak on a panel at a conference — in any way reflects an endorsement of those terrible deeds is a threat to democracy, at a time when democracy is already teetering,” said Littman, who told The Times in an email that he did not attend the symposium.
In an interview, law school professor Seana Shiffrin, who attended parts of the event on Thursday and Friday and lived in New York in 2001, said she experienced an “academically serious” symposium where “I heard no one who sympathized with extremism or terrorism or who issued antisemitic remarks.”
“There were incredibly moving reminiscences and remembrances of that day, of the victims in the two towers, the victims’ families, and their panic, and the first responders,” Shriffrin said. Participants discussed the health effects on the first responders and “the experience of those of us who lived there — what it was like, the smell in the air, and the particles in the dust, and the fear and sadness we all experienced.”
Shiffrin said she not attend the event featuring Partow. “The academic quality of a panel on torture and rendition is only enhanced by including people who are experts because they have provided representation on these very issues,” Shiffrin said. “I don’t know why we would think that wasn’t part of the academic mission. Understanding the operation of the legal system is in the academic mission of a law school.”
In addition U.S. charges against him for 9/11, Mohammed confessed to killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded in Pakistan in 2002. Mohammed identified Pearl by his Jewish religion when he said he was behind the killing during a 2007 Guantanamo Bay military hearing, according to a Defense Department transcript.
Pearl’s father, Judea Pearl, is a longtime UCLA computer science professor who criticized the event.
The milestone anniversary brought memorial rituals — wreath-laying, flag-flying, moments of silence, vigils and readings of victims’ names — and volunteer projects in tribute to a day that about half of U.S. adults remember as the most historic event of their lifetime, according to a new poll.
Pearl said he was “ashamed of my university and, especially, the five centers within the UCLA School of Law sponsoring this disturbing symposium.” While calling it “distasteful,” Pearl said that he was less concerned that Partow was a speaker, but said it was “despicable” and “hurtful” that the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which he accused of being “sympathetic” to 9/11 and Oct. 7 attackers, was on the symposium program. CAIR, a Muslim civil rights group, disputes those characterizations.
“To my esteemed colleagues at these five centers: Please find different dates to engage us with your political sophistry,” Pearl said. “Let us spend these two days in serene prayers with our dear ones — find yourselves different dates.”
Pearl, 90, co-founded the Daniel Pearl Foundation with his late wife, Ruth, who died in 2021. The foundation co-sponsors the annual Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture at UCLA, which “celebrates the memory of Daniel Pearl as a prominent journalist who dedicated his life to bringing joy and understanding to the world.” Next month, the lecture will host Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was imprisoned in Russia for 16 months before his release in a prisoner exchange in August 2024.
In his statement, Frenk commended Judea Pearl, calling him a “deeply valued member of the UCLA community.”
“I have profound respect for him, for the memory of his son Daniel, and for his decades-long commitment to combating antisemitism, terrorism and hatred,” Frenk said. “The brutal murder of Daniel Pearl was an act of unspeakable evil, and I support Judea and his family.”
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