How a proposal to keep opinions off UC websites could dangerously restrict speech

Something dangerous is happening at the University of California. Echoing similar moves at many private colleges, the powerful regents of our public university system are moving to suppress political speech they dislike. 

The impetus was an open letter the Ethnic Studies Faculty Council wrote last fall, criticizing the UC administration’s response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel.

Regent Jay Sures responded by expressing his view that the letter “perpetuates hate and discrimination.” He pledged to “do everything in my power” to protect “everyone in our extended community from your inflammatory and out of touch rhetoric.”

Sures is now making good on that promise by pushing a policy that would ban political statements by faculty members on university websites. 

My colleague at UC Davis, Brian Soucek, and I spent two years wrestling with this issue as chairs of the state’s Academic Freedom Committee. After months of consultation across the entire UC system, including with university lawyers, the governing body of the UC faculty endorsed our committee’s carefully crafted recommendations for making statements on political issues.

In contrast, the policy Sures proposed was rushed and breathtakingly broad. It would prohibit any “official channels of communication” from being used “for purposes of publicly expressing the personal or collective opinions” of faculty members. As written, it would prohibit any faculty member’s opinion on any subject from appearing on any university-run website, course page or social media account. 

It would prohibit me from posting a link to this op-ed anywhere on the Berkeley Law website.

At a recent regents meeting, the university’s general counsel explained that “the original motivation for this discussion was concerns that people had about some speech that they thought was hate speech and whether the university wanted to be associated with it.”

Regent Hadi Makarechian noted that the policy was brought “because some people were making political statements about Hamas and the Palestinians.” Sures responded by acknowledging “there was an abuse of the websites and not a designed policy in place.”

Sures told his fellow regents that the “policy as written is very clear.” But it wasn’t. Soucek and I pointed out the deep ambiguity of the proposal. At the meeting, the regents considered limiting the proposal to the “landing pages” of university websites, but the decision was ultimately postponed until March.

Speech restrictions that are politically motivated and target particular viewpoints are often disguised as neutral. For example, the true impetus for Sures’ policy was to restrict what he and others considered to be an “abuse” of university websites and the promotion of “hate speech.” But throughout the January meeting, UC officials claimed that the purpose of the policy was to avoid confusion that faculty members might be speaking on behalf of the university when they opined on political issues. 

This concern is a pretext for suppression of controversial faculty speech. After all, there is an easy fix to avoid confusion, which our 2022 recommendations addressed: simply require that political statements are accompanied by clear disclaimers, like the one atop the UC San Diego Ethnic Studies website. 

Many faculty of all political stripes, myself included, often bristle when departments issue statements on controversial topics. They are often performative. They can chill minority views and serve as political litmus tests, which is particularly dangerous in a university setting. Our 2022 recommendations included a number of steps departments should take to guard against these concerns, including being more judicious about issuing statements in the first place.

But here’s the thing: it’s much more dangerous to prohibit speech altogether. What is happening at the University of California is what often happens when those with governmental power reactively move to suppress views they dislike. They create hastily-drafted restrictions that are overbroad, vague, rife for abuse and chilling.

And, like this policy, they are usually disguised in “viewpoint-neutral” language. We should not be fooled.