Julio Frenk was sitting at a Miami Hurricanes football game on Oct. 7, 2023, when he learned the details of the terror attacks in Israel that killed 1,200 people and saw over 250 taken hostage. Frenk, a public health scholar and sociologist who was then the president of the University of Miami, knew immediately that he had to weigh in with an unequivocal condemnation of the violence. 

“I had no question that I had to respond and say something. It’s very personal for me,” Frenk, whose family settled in Mexico City after fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s, told Jewish Insider in an interview this week. His wife’s father survived Nazi concentration camps but lost nearly his entire family in the Holocaust. “I think it was one of the first messages by a university president, and it was unambiguous.” 

In an email sent to university affiliates two days after Oct. 7, he touted UM’s “deep ties” to Israel. “We stand in solidarity with the people of Israel, with all those impacted by the violence and with all who seek peace,” wrote Frenk. 

It was an unusually bold statement from a university president at a time when many other leaders of elite universities seemed afraid of issuing similar clear-eyed denunciations. He followed the email with straightforward guidance about the university’s rules around protesting, harassment and violence, and continued disavowals of antisemitism. There was no anti-Israel encampment at UM in the spring of 2024. 

But that was in Florida, a conservative-minded state where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and other political officials have made clear that violent anti-Israel protest activity would be punished — bolstered by the leadership of Frenk at the University of Miami, Ben Sasse at the University of Florida and other academic leaders. 

Now, Frenk, who is 71, is attempting to bring some Florida to deep-blue California as he wraps up his first semester as chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles, a position he started in January. Both schools have among the largest Jewish student populations in the country.

Westwood, where UCLA is located, is a dramatically different environment for Frenk, who was the dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health before taking over in Coral Gables. UCLA, the top-rated public university in the country, has a budget double the size of Miami’s. It’s also a public university, which means greater free speech protections than at UM. But for Frenk, the core issue has nothing to do with infringing on students’ freedom of expression. It’s about teaching them what’s right and what’s wrong. 

“When we engage with each other, we do that respectfully and without — obviously no hatred, no harassment, no incitement to violence, but also no expressions that are deeply offensive to the other side,” Frenk said to JI. He specified that he was referring specifically to the anti-Israel slogan “From the river to the sea” as one such expression. “That’s the same message here. It’s not a legalistic issue. It’s part of educating young people.” 

During UCLA’s large anti-Israel encampment last spring, Jewish students were barred from accessing parts of campus by the protest organizers. The tents popped up just days after Frenk had accepted the offer from Michael Drake, president of the University of California system.

“I had already said yes, and he said, ‘Are you going to change your mind?’ And I said, ‘No, I’m not going to change my mind. I think this is a very important challenge to face and fix if I can, and I’m going to give it my all,’” Frenk recalled. “What drew me here is just the reputation, the standing, and I know that that spring, the images of UCLA going to the world were not very enticing. But to be honest, facing that challenge was something that attracted me.”

“My position has been that, with all transparency and humility, we need to acknowledge that we have an antisemitism problem in universities. Denying it would be dishonest,” Frenk added. “What we are telling the Department of Justice and others is yes, we acknowledge, and we are fixing the problem.”

Frenk took over the chancellorship of UCLA at a precarious time for the entire institution of higher education, which is facing “the greatest challenge in living memory,” he said in a speech to a Jewish communal advocacy day in Sacramento this month. 

He committed early on to fighting antisemitism, even seeking to work proactively with the Trump administration on protecting Jewish students. 

“We’re trying to respond to the federal government, first of all by saying that I applaud the decision to combat antisemitism, and secondly, that we acknowledge that there had been a problem with, there is a problem with, growing antisemitism. But we are determined to deal with that and eradicate antisemitism.”

But Frenk walks a fine line as he declares President Donald Trump’s goal of combating antisemitism to be laudable while also criticizing some of the administration’s strategies, such as cutting federal funds to Harvard and other institutions — all while the UC schools face the prospect of being sued by the Trump administration. 

“That occupies me at night,” he said of the prospect of losing federal funds. UCLA receives hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government each year. 

“My position has been that, with all transparency and humility, we need to acknowledge that we have an antisemitism problem in universities. Denying it would be dishonest,” Frenk added. “What we are telling the Department of Justice and others is yes, we acknowledge, and we are fixing the problem.”

He cited a statement that UCLA signed onto, as a member of the American Association of Universities, which “clearly states that we applaud the decision to combat antisemitism, but that certainly withholding research money is not the way to do it,” Frenk explained. “We’re hoping that the administration will reconsider those kinds of measures.”

“My North Star is always to be explicit about the principles,” Frenk said. “[One] thing we said [at Miami], and I’m following the same idea at UCLA, is here are the rules: You cannot occupy space, you can have no encampments, etc., and here are the consequences of violating the rules.” 

Early in his tenure at UCLA, Frenk suspended the undergraduate and graduate chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine after their members vandalized the home of UC Regent Jay Sures. In March, he announced an initiative to combat antisemitism that would implement the recommendations of a task force that studied antisemitism and anti-Israel bias on campus. 

“It has a budget. It’s not just volunteer time. It has a full-time executive director,” said Frenk. “It has administrative support. It is real. It reports to me directly.” Its goals include hiring a Title VI officer to enforce federal civil rights statutes and implementing trainings for students and staff when they return in the fall. That’s in addition, he noted, to a UC-wide revision of rules about campus protests and gatherings that took place last year. 

“My North Star is always to be explicit about the principles,” Frenk said. “[One] thing we said [at Miami], and I’m following the same idea at UCLA, is here are the rules: You cannot occupy space, you can have no encampments, etc., and here are the consequences of violating the rules.” 

It was, he explained, a page out of his pandemic playbook, when Miami reopened in the fall of 2020 with strict precautions in place. He suspended a student soon after for hosting a party in her dorm room. 

“The parents were pleading with me, and I said, ‘Look, I am responsible for protecting this campus. And furthermore, you’re paying us to educate your daughter, and part of their education is to learn that there is something called the rule of law, and that if you don’t follow the law, there are consequences,’” Frenk recalled. “She’s going to graduate into the real world, and is going to find that that’s not the way the rest of the world behaves. I see this as part of my educational duty, and it’s exactly the same principles we’re using in UCLA.” 

So far, Frenk insists he “very much” has buy-in from the relevant stakeholders at UCLA in his quest to ensure that, contrary to last year, the school actually enforces its policies. 

“We do it for our Jewish students, faculty and staff, for the rest of the members of our community and for the university itself,” said Frenk. 

Fighting antisemitism and the impact it has on the entire campus environment will “save the university,” according to Frenk. That’s a lesson he learned from his grandparents, after they fled Germany. 

“It was through antisemitism that German universities, which were the premier universities in the world in the 1920s and early 1930s, declined,” said Frenk. “It destroyed the soul of the university.”