UC moves to limit where academic departments post opinions against backdrop of Gaza War

Update: On July 18 the full board approved the webpage policy with one no vote.

After seven months and three voting delays, the University of California Board of Regents is on the verge of approving a pared-down policy outlining how academic departments should publish political and social opinions on university websites — largely embracing a set of standards that faculty themselves adopted in 2022. The journey to a consensus re-energized longstanding debates about academic freedom.

While entirely a faculty matter, some pro-Palestinian students condemned previous versions of the regents’ proposed policy, which they interpreted as part of a crackdown on free speech that punished protests against Israel. Student anguish over the war in Gaza — and their anger with UC leadership for so far not calling for a ceasefire or divesting from weapons manufacturers and companies tied to Israel — helped to amplify the faculty’s alarm over the regents’ initial proposals. 

The university will need to further clarify its rules on speech and expression by this fall. The latest state budget is withholding $25 million from the UC until system leadership sends a report to the governor’s office explaining its policies for public demonstrations and other free speech matters. While the two concepts — what faculty can do under academic freedom and how students can express themselves under free speech rules — are distinct issues, they’re often enmeshed publicly, especially over themes as contentious as Islamophobia, antisemitism and its connection to Israel.

Most regents were vague about the impetus for the plan, but one regent, Hadi Makarechian, said in January that the proposal emerged “because some people were making some political statements related to Hamas and Palestinians.” That meeting was occasionally testy, with another regent urging his peers to practice “decorum.”

What the new policy would do

The new rules, passed today by a joint committee that will be voted on by the full board tomorrow, require that writings which depart from research, course information and other administrative announcements not be posted on the homepages of academic departments and other divisions. Instead, they can appear on other departmental web pages designated for opinions. Full-board approval is likely; the rules would take hold immediately. 

Only one regent, student member Josiah Beharry, voted no on the measure today.

These so-called “discretionary expressions,” which are writings “that comment on institutional, local, regional, global or national events, activities or issues,” also need to be clearly labeled as opinions that don’t necessarily reflect the position of the university or campus.

The policy specifically avoids restricting academic research, course content or other “scholarly endeavors” — an undefined term — that may touch on political or social matters from appearing on the homepage. This was new wording that emerged since the last draft in March. Nor does the policy proscribe speech on non-campus websites.

“We were satisfied that the current policy does not violate principles of academic freedom or free speech,” said James Steintrager, chair of the Academic Senate, in an interview with CalMatters in May, when the proposal was on the agenda but ultimately never heard. “We’re still concerned about the drive for and necessity of a policy in this area, but we think that with the input of the senate, the Board of Regents has ended up in a much better place.”

That sentiment is a departure from how faculty initially received the policy proposal in January, which was saddled with confusion over the scope of the measure and what it sought. One possible takeaway was that the January plan intended to bar any expression of faculty opinion on administrative websites, “a draconian policy,” Steintrager said.

“We’re still concerned about the drive for and necessity of a policy in this area, but we think that with the input of the senate, the Board of Regents has ended up in a much better place.”

James Steintrager, chair of the Academic Senate, university of california

The regents also postponed votes in January and March after discussing the matter publicly each time.

During today’s regents meeting, Steintrager reaffirmed his praise and critique of the rules, adding that “public comment assertions to the contrary, this is not a ban on discretionary or political statements.”

Richard Leib, a regent member and former chair of the board who has viewed some of the chants at student protests against the war in Gaza as antisemitic, said that “this whole topic about free speech is all BS, because what we’re trying to do is show transparency.”

Does it go too far or not far enough?

But if it were up to senate members, which include most full-time professors across the system, the regents would just adopt the policy the senate itself approved in 2022. Unlike the regents’ approach, the 2022 policy provided guidance — using words like “should” rather than “must” to encourage academic departments to distinguish their opinions from the positions of the university. The Academic Senate policy also recommended that departments “solicit minority or opposition statements” as well.

The Academic Senate believes that “the UC community at the level of departments and other units of the sort largely governs itself appropriately, and we favor policies that enable successful self-regulation over more restrictive measures,” Steintrager wrote to the regents May 1.

“A claim that a department of a public university takes as a political position will be taken as the official stance of the university, no matter how it is delivered.”

Jeffrey Young, a clinical psychologist, UCLA

The regents’ proposal stopped short of that, preferring a mandatory set of publishing guidelines in part because few academic units or campuses “have followed the June 2022 Academic Senate advisory guidance,” a board document representing the regents said. 

Some Jewish faculty wanted the regents to ban all department statements and said the proposed rules don’t go far enough. “A claim that a department of a public university takes as a political position will be taken as the official stance of the university, no matter how it is delivered and no matter what qualifications are added,” said Jeffrey Young, a clinical psychologist at UCLA, during public comment yesterday. Several other professors voiced similar sentiments.

Focus on ethnic studies departments

Regent Jay Sures pushed for the policy, arguing in January that opinions on homepages “will be mistaken as the position of the institution itself.”

In late October, he excoriated an Oct. 16 letter by UC ethnic studies faculty that faulted the UC for calling Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel an act of terrorism. The ethnic studies letter, which didn’t name Hamas, said that “to hold the oppressed accountable for ‘terrorism’ reinscribes a colonial narrative that seeks to have the world believe that history began on October 7, 2023.”

Sures wrote that the council’s members should “commit to learning more about antisemitism and all forms of hate and how it lives on our campuses where you are tasked and trusted with educating our next generation of students.”

The homepage for UC Santa Cruz’s critical race and ethnic studies department as of today still contains language calling on scholars and organizers to “act now to end Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza,” a statement that’s been appearing since at least Oct. 25 of last year, according to the web archiving tool Wayback Machine.

The department was following Academic Senate guidance, department chairperson Felicity Amaya Schaeffer said in an interview, as the guidance wasn’t mandatory and deferred to campus departments.

With the regents committees’ backing of a mandatory rule, Schaeffer said key questions remain unanswered, mainly, whether the department’s call to action counts as discretionary speech that needs to be moved to a different webpage.

She said the regents policy is an attack on academic freedom. She also believes the regents are overreaching rather than deferring to faculty expertise on their own subjects.

“We do have three faculty who work specifically on Palestine, who were hired by the university to do this kind of research,” she said. “So for us, this is not at all opinion, this is about the expertise of the department in which many of us write critically about state power, war, genocide.”

A rule like the one the regents is proposing is a poor fit for an ethnic studies department, Schaefer said, because “the lines between what gets called political or discretionary and research are completely entangled and inseparable.”  

UC San Diego’s ethnic studies department, however, appears to have relocated its statements of support for Palestinians to a secondary page reserved for “statements and commentaries.”

A Dec. 4, 2023 snapshot of its homepage shows a statement calling “for an immediate end to the war crimes and genocide taking place against the Palestinian people (50% of whom are children).” But by Dec 14, the homepage underwent an overhaul, with political statements moved from the homepage to the new “statements and commentaries” section beneath the “About Us” tab.

Academic department leaders will be responsible for implementing the rules. “The expectation then is that the unit leadership enforce the policy,” said Charlie Robinson, general counsel for the UC, at today’s regents meeting, “and if there are any concerns about it, then you go up the hierarchy to make sure that it’s being enforced properly.”