UCLA chancellor rebukes law school over hosting attorney of 9/11 mastermind

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Chancellor Julio Frenk publicly rebuked a School of Law symposium on the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks because it featured an attorney who has represented Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whom the 9/11 Commission identified as the “principal architect” of the attacks. 

The two-day symposium, titled “25 Years After 9/11: Reimagining Freedom, Justice, and Security,” ran Sept. 10-11 and was sponsored by five centers within the UCLA School of Law. According to the Los Angeles Times, the event examined legal issues arising from the U.S. response to the attacks, including torture, rendition, detention, immigration enforcement, and surveillance. 

Frenk, who became chancellor in 2025, released a statement Sept. 11 distancing UCLA’s administration from the symposium and stressing that “nothing about” the event “changes or qualifies” UCLA’s rejection of “antisemitism and terrorism in all their forms.” 

“Academic freedom does not require us to be neutral about antisemitism or terrorism,” Frenk said. “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.”

Melanie Partow, who worked on Mohammed’s defense at Guantanamo Bay through the War Department’s Military Commissions Defense Organization, was scheduled to appear on a Sept. 11 panel titled “Torture, Rendition, and Detention: The Erosion of the Rights Regime Post-9/11.” The Times reported that it was “unclear whether Partow spoke,” and the symposium’s program said the in-person event would not be livestreamed. 

Frenk issued his statement after criticism from Judea Pearl, a longtime UCLA professor whose son, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped and beheaded in Pakistan in 2002. Mohammed has claimed responsibility for the killing, according to the Times. 

Pearl said he was “ashamed of my university” and accused the law school of “weaponizing the painful days of 9/11” to “promote hateful ideologies,” the New York Post reported. The professor argued that a Sept. 11 event should “be used to commemorate the victims of that attack: innocent Americans.” 

Symposium organizers and other UCLA law professors subsequently pushed back against Frenk’s statement, arguing that critics had mischaracterized the event and the role of a defense attorney in the legal system. 

In a Sept. 12 joint statement reported by the Times, professors Ahilan Arulanantham and LaToya Baldwin Clark said more than 20 experts participated in a “nuanced and sophisticated” discussion about both the successes and failures of the U.S. government after 9/11 and that the program included remembrances of the attacks’ victims. 

“We are enormously proud of the symposium we organized, and UCLA should be too,” they said, later adding, “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.”

UCLA law professor Aaron Littman also criticized Frenk’s response, arguing that providing an accused terrorist with a legal defense does not amount to endorsing his actions. According to the Times, Littman said suggesting otherwise posed “a threat to democracy.”

Frenk, however, emphasized that the event caused pain to Pearl and others who objected to its speakers. He called Pearl a “deeply valued member of the UCLA community” and expressed “profound respect for him, for the memory of his son Daniel, and for his decades-long commitment to combating antisemitism, terrorism, and hatred.” 

“In this case, I understand why Professor Pearl and others are deeply hurt,” Frenk concluded. “Judea’s voice, and the history behind it, deserve to be heard with the seriousness and humanity they demand.”