Profiles in Hatred: Dr. Andrea Guzman
UCF’s Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion bears more responsibility than any other administrator for turning UCF Jews into second-class citizens.
Dr. Andrea Guzman Oliver began her career in professional administration in 2006 at a local community college. Subsequent promotions led to her elevation through various educational bureaucracies, eventually landing at UCF as the Vice President of Diversity in July 2021.
Dr. Guzman’s resumé — chock full of references to diversity councils, research papers on first generation students and minority groups, and presentations on women’s issues — portrays a career bureaucrat who leveraged disadvantaged people and groups for her own benefit while failing to actually help them, as evidenced by her own creation of a second-class justice system for Jewish students at UCF.
It’s inconceivable that throughout Dr. Guzman’s long career, during which she ostensibly worked with and assisted minority students facing both immediate and longer-term (i.e., systemic) discrimination, she would not have learned about the oldest hatred in the world. Educational institutions have an incredibly long history of antisemitic behavior, being historically responsible for distributing incredibly violent forms of Jew-hatred, including its most famous incarnation: Nazism. Many American universities continued the trend of antisemitism in education by importing German academics who had assisted the Nazi regime; imposing quotas on Jewish enrollment; and requiring exams which tested “character” instead of academic aptitude, specifically designed to disqualify Jews from admittance.
Rather than fight discrimination and bigotry at America’s largest public university, Dr. Guzman was disturbingly eager to perpetuate it herself in the aftermath of the October 7th pogrom, which precipitated the largest spike in American antisemitism in recent history.
Soon after the attack, an impromptu coalition of white supremacist, socialist, and pro-Palestinian student groups at UCF began posting racist and anti-Indigenous content against Jewish people on social media. Some examples include posts which:
Called Jews “settler colonists,” a statement designed to stigmatize and justify the removal of Jews from their indigenous homeland and birthplace, as shown by over 4,000 years of archaeological and genetic evidence of Jewish peoplehood.
Claimed that Israel had bombed a hospital in the early days of the war, even though the claim had been conclusively debunked, constituting a blood libel, one of the most vicious forms of antisemitism in existence.
Describing the Islamist and white supremacist terrorists who murdered between 1,200 and 1,400 people on October 7th as “martyrs,” those who die in the service of God.
Claiming that Jews steal the dead bodies of Palestinians to stage as victims of anti-Jewish massacres.
Claiming that Jews generate images of murdered Jewish babies using Artificial Intelligence.
Openly calling for the destruction of Israel, the only Jewish state in the only Jewish homeland.
The vast majority of the above examples were reported either directly to Dr. Guzman or to an office which she oversees. In every single reported case, Dr. Guzman openly declined to intervene.
In her role as a senior administrator at UCF, Dr. Guzman was responsible for upholding federal and state law, as well as UCF’s own published Student Code of Conduct. Yet despite every single reported incident violating at least one clause of the Code of Conduct unambiguously, and the accumulation of these incidents constituting a hostile environment towards Jewish people (illegal under both federal and state law), Dr. Guzman openly refused to take action. Her deliberate and decisive inaction created a simple yet chilling precedent at UCF: Jewish students do not have the same rights as non-Jewish students. Jews are second class students at UCF predominantly because of Dr. Guzman’s (in)actions.
While Dr. Guzman obliquely cited the 1st Amendment to the United States Constitution as one of many reasons for failing to enforce federal law, state law, and the school’s own internal regulations, the conduct of antisemitic students at UCF — particularly the sheer volume of death threats towards Jewish students and Jewish people overall — created a chilling effect on Jewish speech, with multiple known incidents of Jewish students withdrawing from Jewish life on campus because of racist death threats from other students. The harassing and intimidating environment which pervades campus for Jewish students, created by Dr. Guzman’s failure to act on multiple reported incidents of antisemitic activity, is illegal under Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act. Specific instances of harassment used language which the State of Florida classifies as racist discrimination. Taking action to protect Jewish students does not violate the 1st Amendment. To the contrary: by failing to protect Jewish people from threats of physical harm, Dr. Guzman denied Jews their rights under the law.
Dr. Guzman’s failure to actually encourage diversity by protecting Jewish students on her campus, despite being legally and institutionally empowered to do so, demonstrates her moral failing as a professional committed to supporting minority groups (including historically underrepresented minorities in higher education), as a senior official at a public university, and as a person. Her legacy is to remind us of the “banality of evil”: simply by advancing herself up the corporate ladder, without any regard to the people upon whose backs her career is built, she managed to crush UCF’s Jewish community by leaving them to fend for themselves against a coalition of racist and anti-Indigenous student groups. She will be remembered for her deep cowardice in the face of pure evil, and for her own evil through complicity and cooperation with antisemites at UCF.