UCLA Gets New Chancellor: Dr. Julio Frenk to Take Over

The University of California Board of Regents today named Dr. Julio Frenk to be the new UCLA chancellor.

Frenk had been president of the University of Miami since 2015, where he led an ambitious fund raising drive that netted the school about $2.5 billion dollars.

Prior to that, Frenk – a native of Mexico and a fourth generation medical doctor – served as the national Minister of Health from 200 to 2006, overseeing the implementation of a new national health insurance plan there.

“At this crucial moment for higher education, returning to the public sector to lead one of the top research universities in the world — including one of the 10 largest academic health systems — is an exciting opportunity and a great honor for me,” Frenk said. “I look forward to adding my lifelong commitment to public service in education and health care to the vibrant, diverse and cosmopolitan community that is Los Angeles.”

Frenk will be facing a number of challenges at the troubled UCLA campus. In April, pro-Hamas demonstrators took over Royce Quad, building an encampment and, on occasion, targeting Jewish students by keeping them from entering school buildings and such.  After much delay and blather, the encampment was removed by the administration after a group of counter-protestors showed up, leading to a violent confrontation that many say was poorly handled by the school.

The new chancellor, with his medical and public health background (he spent time at Harvard as a teacher as well) may also be well-placed to help turn around the once internationally vaunted medical school. 

The school has come under sharp criticism for allegedly indoctrinating students with woke propaganda to the detriment of their actual medical educations.   

From a “depathologizing” revolutionary suicide seminar to a required class that involved chanting “Free Palestine,” the school has been accused of not only drifting from its core mission but doing so at the expense of its Jewish students:

“During a lecture on the Color Wheel of Power and Privilege, our professor, Dr. Lindsay Wells, unnecessarily singled out American Jews by stating, ‘Jews are white.’ This is untrue and at best reflects a complete lack of understanding of antisemitism. Indeed, the six million Jews murdered in Europe did not benefit from being “white,” and there are many Jews in this country who are not ‘white,’” the 2022 letter (from a student to the administration) read.

The Frenk family history could help repair any such damage: In the 1930s, “Frenk’s father, as a 6-year-old, left Germany for Mexico with his parents and sister to escape the growing climate of antisemitism,” noted a biographical statement from the school. “Frenk has said that, in many ways, his career as a physician and a public health expert has been a way of giving back to the country that saved his family. ‘All of us know that we owe our lives to the generosity of [Mexico], which then became our country.’”

Frenk replaces Chancellor Gene Block who has been roundly criticized for his handling of the student protests of late (he was scheduled to retire at the end of the year either way.)

In his testimony before Congress, Block admitted that even though public masking to hide one’s identity during a crime is actually illegal in California, Block explained that all of the masks being worn by the protestors are fine because – seriously – of covid.

The new guy can’t do any worse than that.