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Political science professor linked CBS News chief to ‘fascism,’ emails obtained by The College Fix show
Barely a month before CBS News leader Bari Weiss was slated to speak at UCLA, two professors internally discussed canceling her guest lecture due to the Jewish journalist’s alleged support of “fascism” and the Trump administration, according to documents obtained by The College Fix this week.
“I think it is disappointing that we are platforming a woman who has helped drive the narrative that universities are not places of academic freedom and, thus, has helped drive the attacks on the very university we work at,” political science Professor Margaret Peters wrote in a Jan. 24 email to law Professor Kal Raustiala regarding Weiss.
Raustiala is the director of the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations, which had invited Weiss to speak. Peters is the associate director.
Weiss, the editor-in-chief of CBS News, was scheduled to give the center’s annual Daniel Pearl Memorial lecture on Feb. 27 about “The Future of Journalism.”
But a week before the lecture, UCLA announced that the event was canceled. Soon afterward, the university stated Weiss had withdrawn due to security concerns.
The university media relations office reiterated that Weiss and her team decided to cancel the lecture, not UCLA, when contacted via email Tuesday about the documents.
It also referred The Fix to its February statement, which says, “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.”
However, the emails obtained by The Fix through an open records request indicate that the center’s leaders were discussing canceling the talk.
In a Jan. 24 email, Professor Peters asked Raustiala about Weiss’s talk, writing, “Are you worried at all about the reputational costs to the Center of hosting Bari Weiss?”
Peters referenced a series of emails that she had just received from people with the progressive Action Network urging UCLA to cancel Weiss’s lecture. Those emails, which The Fix also obtained, criticized Weiss’s pro-Israel views and accused her of defending “genocide” against Palestinians.
But Peters wrote that she had planned to email Raustiala about the matter anyway. Then, she criticized Weiss’s decisions about covering the Trump administration.
She is “clearly … in bed with” the Trump administration, Peters wrote, adding, “While I know canceling her lecture would just feed her ‘I got canceled’ narrative, can we at least take the Burkle name off the lecture?”
In a follow-up email to Raustiala on Jan. 27, Peters claimed Weiss supports fascism (Weiss is Jewish and a lesbian).
“I feel very strongly that we should not have Bari Weiss here,” Peters wrote. “I do not want to be associated with any organization that implicitly or explicitly condones her opinions. This talk condones her work, which was bad enough when it was just a right-wing grift, but is unconscionable when it supports fascism.”
Raustiala responded by agreeing to talk with Peters about the event on Feb. 2.
Neither Peters nor Raustiala immediately responded to two requests for comment from The College Fix on Tuesday, asking about their emails and their involvement in the cancelation of Weiss’s lecture. The Fix also asked for their thoughts about a public university shutting out differing political opinions.
Weiss also did not respond to emails requesting comment Tuesday through The Free Press and her personal website.
Notably, Manhattan Institute investigative analyst Stu Smith also received the professors’ emails via public records request this week. On X, Smith pointed out that Peters previously had denied being involved in discussions to cancel Weiss’s lecture in a statement to the Jewish News Syndicate.
It was public knowledge that Peters had threatened to resign if the CBS News leader’s talk went on as scheduled. Nearly 11,000 people also had signed a petition demanding the university cancel her talk, according to a February report by The Daily Bruin.
Commenting on the overall situation, Graham Piro with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression told The Fix that public universities have an obligation to protect speech — “even and especially if a speaker’s appearance will draw protest or controversy.”
“Members of a university community are free to protest or voice their disagreement with a speaker’s views. But public universities must not respond to calls for cancellation by capitulating and censoring speech on campus,” Piro, FIRE Faculty Legal Defense Fund Fellow, said Tuesday.
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, more recently, became editor-in-chief of CBS News.
MORE: Bari Weiss lecture canceled at UCLA amid protest concerns
