The UC Regents will deliberate on Jan. 25 over whether the University of California can restrict the public expression of personal or collective opinions of any departments, centers, units, or schools on official university websites. This includes websites and other official channels of communication maintained by the UCs.
The basis of their concern is that these statements may be seen as reflective of official institutional views and beliefs.
So, let’s talk about official institutional beliefs.
The UC states that its fundamental mission is to “discover knowledge and to disseminate it to its students and to society at large.”
If this policy passes, entities would only be allowed to post “official business,” such as course descriptions, personnel changes, and dates of upcoming events. By impeding departments’ abilities to communicate with the public, the UC Regents would be snuffing out a direct line of communication between students and their academic communities.
As associate professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and Performance Play & Design micha cardénas puts it, this communication is an essential part of being an academic.
“The faculty needs to have the freedom to research […] and come to conclusions about what is the truth of those issues, and then be able to talk about those things on a website or in their articles or on video or in public statements,” professor cardénas said.
As the UC’s policy on academic freedom states, “The faculty has the major responsibility to establish conditions that protect and encourage all students in their learning, teaching, and research activities. Such conditions include, for example: free inquiry and exchange of ideas: the right to critically examine, present, and discuss controversial material relevant to a course of instruction; enjoyment of constitutionally protected freedom of expression…”
While the proposed UC Regents policy assures us that it will “be construed in a manner consistent with the First Amendment,” it sorely misses the point.
It suggests that there is a better time and place to express personal and collective beliefs than on university property. When will it ever be “appropriate” for students and faculty alike to collectively hold institutions accountable when they fail to support us?
The timing of the proposal cannot be separated from the current political context we are living in. With the ongoing genocide in Gaza, college campuses, including UC Santa Cruz, have become a place of political activism for students and faculty communities.
On Nov 13., four days after the Shut it Down for Palestine walkout and rally at UCSC, Executive Vice Chancellor Lori Kletzer emailed faculty citing University policies that impose “limits on using the classroom and courses of instruction for political advocacy.”
In the email, she cited the Regents Policy 2301, which prohibits the misuse of the classroom for the purpose of “political indoctrination” or other purposes including the cancellation of class to “encourag[e] students to participate in a protest or rally.”
This climate of labeling discussion of current events as political indoctrination makes some instructors and departments hesitant to even mention the Israel-Gaza conflict in the classroom for fear of retaliation by the University.
“The effect of repression is often called a chilling of speech, an environment of fear around speaking certain opinions. That is happening in classrooms [and] across campus in public events,” professor cardénas said. “I see people both feeling fear to speak out about Palestine and also expressing that they are afraid to say anything in support of Palestine.”
The policy also comes in the wake of UCSC’s public—and unprecedented—condemnation on Sep. 5 of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism’s (ICSZ) upcoming meeting on campus grounds. The purpose of the convention centered around studying, discussing, and critiquing “a distorted definition of antisemitism—which dangerously conflates criticism of the state of Israel with antisemitism.” It also sought to provide historical context to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, as well as the contentious climate surrounding Palestinian advocacy. The statement declared the conference as “antithetical to UC Santa Cruz values.”
UCSC’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) department also issued a response on Oct. 11 calling out the administration for the undermining and censoring of faculty, students, and Palestinian scholars for advocating on behalf of Palestine.
“Faculty and students who challenge systemic forms of injustice and domination must be assured that their intellectual work is supported and that they can proceed without fear of retribution, censorship, slander, or policing,” the CRES statement read.
If this policy is implemented, the ability for discourse on administrative websites will be revoked. For departments like CRES, critical engagement with society and ideas is integral to their praxis as an academic discipline. Just as students rely on these sites for information about class content and academic information, they must also be able to see and hear the voices of other students and faculty advocating for their rights, needs, and demands.
“Upholding the values of freedom of speech and inquiry are core to the University of California’s mission,” reads the introduction of the proposed resolution. However, this policy would ensure that students and faculty are stripped of yet another platform to express their most urgent concerns. There is no place “more appropriate” for intellectual or political discourse.
A university is a place for debate, critical inquiry, and civic discourse. The University of California claims to ‘foster in its students a mature independence of mind, and this purpose cannot be achieved unless students and faculty are free within the classroom to express the widest range of viewpoints in accord with the standards of scholarly inquiry and professional ethics.”
Independent thought must be encouraged not just within the four walls of college classrooms, but must continue on the official websites of the UC.
If the University of California is the progressive system it claims to be, it must take a step back and consider the dangerous line this resolution is toeing. Is the University of California stable enough to honor its commitment to public discourse among faculty and the campus community, or is it buckling under the pressure of our political moment?
Editor’s Note: Following the Jan. 25 UC Regents Meeting, the regents postponed the vote until their next meeting on March 19-21.