“I am a big believer in shared governance,” Regent Jonathan Sures said at the March 20 UC Regents meeting.
“Liar!” a member of the crowd shouted back.
Tensions were high during a discussion of the UC Regents proposed Policy on Public and Discretionary Statements by Academic Units. Sures is Chair of the Compliance and Audit committee, which drafted the original policy referred to as J3.
The policy attempts to prohibit campus entities from publishing political viewpoints on their respective website landing pages. The original policy arose out of the Regents’ concern that statements issued by campus entities may be mistaken as the view of the University, and their desire to protect minority viewpoints within University entities.
However, critics of the proposal question the initial neglect of faculty input, a potentially problematic rollout and the timing of the proposal, as some departments expressed recent criticism of Israel.
The Regents voted to delay action on the item at their two previous meetings on Jan. 23-25 and March 20-21. At their upcoming May 14-16 meeting, the UC Regents will vote for a third time on a revised version.
This revised version follows existing Senate recommendations by defining “key terms” and establishing that each university entity will govern its own process for issuing group statements. Against the Senate’s recommendations, it still prohibits discretionary statements on landing pages.
“We, the CRES faculty, call on everyone — including scholars, researchers, organizers and administrators worldwide — to act now to end Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.” This statement, featured on UC Santa Cruz’s critical race and ethnic studies (CRES) department homepage, would be prohibited by the proposed Regents policy.
The first iteration of the policy was proposed and voted on without soliciting comments from the UC-wide Academic Senate, the faculty body responsible for shared governance. After the January vote and prior to the March vote, the Regents reached out to the Academic Senate for feedback on a compressed review timeline of 30 days as opposed to the standard 90. The Academic Senate voted unanimously against endorsing the second iteration in March.
At the Regents’ January meeting, President of the UC Graduate and Professional Counsel Ryan Manriquez spoke on the history of Academic Units expressing support for movements through their landing pages.
“Issues of the past and present such as support for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), opposition for the Muslim Ban in the U.S., support for LGBTQ+ community, and support for Black Lives Matter have gained recognition and traction through the free speech rightly afforded to administrative units within the UC system,” Manriquez said. “Such speech would have been halted in the face of this policy.”
Academic Units, or official university entities, include academic departments, academic divisions, schools, centers, laboratories, institutes, or campus divisions of the Academic Senate and campus Extension Units.
Faculty and Student Pushback
Chris Connery, a UCSC literature professor who previously served as a chair on both the Santa Cruz Faculty Association and the Committee on Academic Freedom at UCSC, views the amended May iteration as an example of successful faculty resistance.
“The faculty fought back. There was a concerted effort to say to the Regents, ‘you don’t want to get deeply into this,’” Connery said. “Academic freedom is sacrosanct on this campus and in this system.”
Students at the meeting took issue with not being consulted about the proposed policy as well. Celine Aridin, a UC Davis undergraduate and President of the UC Student Association, spoke at the Jan. 25 meeting before the Regents voted on the first version.
“How can you make a policy that will impact a million people who are employed, students in the university, without consulting students?” Aridin said. “Why were we left out of this conversation […]? It’s a start [of] a policy that the whole country is grappling with now — freedom of speech.”
In their comments regarding the latest version of the policy, the UCLA Academic Senate voted unanimously against endorsement, maintaining that the Senate’s 2022 recommendations serve as adequate guidelines. The UC-wide Academic Senate has yet to issue comments on this version.
Christine Hong, a UCSC CRES Professor, questions the implementation of the policy even in its most recent form.
“Ultimately, who will be the arbitrator of whether something counts as opinion or as ‘content-neutral’ material?” Hong said. “Even with regard to climate change, there are people who assert that it is a matter of opinion versus scientific fact.”
Although Connery supports the current version of the policy, he has witnessed a broader erosion of the University’s principle of shared governance in recent years.
“The University of California operates according to the principle of shared governance, and that is that the faculty will participate in the governance of the university and shape it,” Connery said. “There are places where that [principle] continues to operate in a robust way, but it was originally supposed to be everything.”
Aridin, who has more access to administration through her role as President of the UC Student Association, tries to uplift the voices of underrepresented students.
She says campus infrastructure for supporting students is in “dire straits.”
”Why is it so difficult to get chancellors to meet with student leaders [and] groups who are here today, who come to the Regents’ meetings and call for help?” Aridin said. “There is a severe disconnect from the top down.”