University of California, Los Angeles, is facing legal heat for withholding information about one of its resident political activists, who was brought on campus in 2024.
A Phoenix-based public policy think tank, the Goldwater Institute, requested documents on Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia through California’s Public Records Act last October, but the university has consistently pushed back their release.
“The public has a right to know how taxpayer dollars are being spent at universities like UCLA. And likewise, they have a right to know what students are being taught in these schools,” Brad Benbrook, an attorney working on the case pro bono with the American Freedom Network, told the Deseret News.
He continued, “The highly unconventional things that Miss Gray-Garcia espouses make it all the more important to understand what UCLA is teaching its students, so the people of California can decide if they want to keep using taxpayer money for that.”
The institute wants to know Gray-Garcia’s compensation, course syllabi, any emails discussing topics like Israel and Gaza and all materials provided to “activists-in-residence” during their 2024 orientation.
The university allegedly promised the documents by January but has consistently pushed back their release, so the think tank is suing.
UCLA launched this political activism program in 2016; its goal is to “turn the university inside out.” Specifically, UCLA brought on and paid political activists to focus on racial, economic and social justice.
Who is Lisa ‘Tiny’ Gray-Garcia?
UCLA’s website describes Gray-Garcia as a “formerly unhoused, incarcerated poverty scholar, revolutionary journalist [and] lecturer.”
For part of her childhood, Gray-Garcia was homeless. She described the experience in a picture book titled “When Mama and Me Lived Outside."
Much of Gray-Garcia’s activism revolves around “stolen land” and poverty. In a lecture at UCLA in 2024, she described modern medicine as “white science” and asked students to bow to “mama Earth.”
Audio from the lecture, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, depicts Gray-Garcia offering a benediction for “black,” “brown” and “houseless people” whose cause of death is the “crapatalist (sic) lie” of “private property.”
As set out in the complaint, “there’s also a troubling racial aspect to the things she espouses, including the statement in her YouTube video that ‘homelessness is a white man’s scam,’” Benbrook told the Deseret News. “Normally the UC system has great intolerance for communications like that. So it’s important to understand why they tolerate it in this case.”
Outside the classroom, Gray-Garcia has espoused support for the terrorist organization, Hamas, including for their attack on Israel.
The day after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, which resulted in the deaths of 1,200 people, Gray-Garcia called the country a “settler colonial terror” in an X post. The next month, she wrote, “When u resist after decades of relentless poLicing, killing& terrorizing that’s not ‘terrorism’ that’s justice.”
What are Gray-Garcia’s lectures about?
Cecilia Cissell Lucas, a professor at UC Berkeley, provided some insight into Gray-Garcia’s guest lectures in a public letter of recommendation. Around 2017, the pair co-taught a course titled “Community Reparations and Decolonization.”
The course examined “systems of domination,” which included capitalism, white supremacy, “heteropatriarchy” and settler colonialism. It also examined “resistance/liberation movements,” and “interrogat(ed) the politics of knowledge production.”
Reparations and decolonization is “intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually demanding and, at times, even painful,” Lucas wrote. “I was consistently impressed with Ms. Gray-Garcia’s capacity to create space for that pain while also helping students to move through it and become inspired to join in the legacies of social change agents.”
The Berkeley professor included reviews from students who took the course.
“The fact that I was reminded that Euro-centric education is not the only type of education was humbling. I was reminded of how individually and communally we can draw knowledge from each other, how each of us is a scholar, even if in different paths of life,” one student wrote.
Another student added, “This course changed my life. I would definitely recommend all Berkeley students to take this class. It could perhaps change all of the Berkeley community.”
Each UCLA activist resident earned $10,000 between January-May, UCLA’s website said in the positions’ advertisements. They may also receive up to $2,000 in research support from the university.