Dear Colleagues,

Given the particular importance of the traditions of free speech and academic freedom on this campus the Berkeley Faculty Association urges you to read and consider the draft report of the The Joint Senate-Administration Workgroup on the Role of the University and its Units in Political Action.  Our response to this report, which significantly departs from the recommendations of the system-wide Academic Council and the Committee on Academic Freedom, is pasted below. Links to all the various documents are contained in our response as well as in the email from Chancellor Christ and EVCP Hermalin below.

You can provide your own responses to the report until 7 November on this google form

James Vernon
Chair of Berkeley Faculty Association on behalf of its Board.

 


 

Berkeley Faculty Association response to The Joint Senate-Administration Workgroup on the Role of the University and its Units in Political Action.

The Berkeley Faculty Association is alarmed by the draft report of the Joint Senate-Administration Workgroup on the Role of the University and its Units in Political Action. The report is procedurally disturbing, conceptually confused, and chilling of free speech on campus.

  1. Governance and procedure

The system wide Senate charged the University Committee on Academic Freedom (UCAF) to consider the issue of political statements made by departments, following expressions of support for the Palestinian people by many departments across the University of California system in May 2021. The UCAF published their recommendations, which were approved by Academic Council, on 2 June 2022. The UC Berkeley Joint Senate-Administration Workgroup draft report, circulated by Chancellor Christ on 8 September, is dated May 2022, that is before UCAF had made its final recommendations. The report only cites the draft recommendations of UCAF from October 2021. It does not engage with UCAF’s final recommendations which it significantly departs from by providing a more restricted understanding of free speech and academic freedom, as well as by insisting that statements should include a list of signatories. It is one thing for the Berkeley campus to develop its own by-laws and protocols in response to the UCAF recommendations; it is quite another for it not to properly consider them.

Established by the Senate to protect its independence in 1972, the Berkeley Faculty Association has been troubled by the proliferation of joint administrative-Senate faculty committees in the past decade. These joint committees effectively remove the independence of the Senate, which is a central principle of faculty governance. It is especially concerning that the Senate has been co-opted in this way to consider questions of free speech and academic freedom on campus.

Quite apart from this centralization of power, the report pedals a corporate view of the university in which all ‘stakeholders’ are held responsible for not causing ‘reputational damage’ that tarnishes the UC Berkeley brand. While this perspective is most powerfully expressed in the statement of dissent by Assistant Chancellor Dan Mogulof, it also informs the main report’s insistence that the campus be seen as ‘neutral’. It is hard not to read the report as a timid response to the alt-right targeting of universities in the culture wars and an effort not to alienate potential donors.

  1. Free speech and academic freedom

The attempt to qualify the rights to free speech on campus by invoking the discourse of civility is not new. Chancellor Dirks was the first to do so at UC Berkeley on the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement in September 2014. We wrote then that while “civility is an ideal—and a good one, free speech is a right. The right to free speech does not dissipate because it is exercised in un-ideal (un-civil) ways.” This report compounds the error of Chancellor Dirks by stating that “Free speech is not an absolute value or an absolute good, and individuals and groups should always consider the harm that their speech may cause and keep Principles of Community (civility and respect) front and center.” Quite apart from the difficulty in assessing what constitutes ‘harm’, ‘civility’ or ‘respect’, this position has no legal basis. The right to free speech is a “negative right” constituted through prohibitions on the infringement of speech by the state and other public institutions and officials. Free speech might not be absolute, but it is absolutely not contingent on being expressed with civility and respect or in ways that may cause “harm and hurt to members of the university community and reputational damage to the university.”

Likewise, the report suggests that the academic freedom of faculty is tied only to individuals and the subjects of their research and teaching. Again, this is not a novel move to constrain and delimit academic freedom, but it is a confused one given that the report then acknowledges that faculty’s speech as a private citizen is also protected from university discipline by the principle of academic freedom. We suggest the committee revisit the AAUP’s 1940 ‘Statement on the Principles of Tenure and Academic Freedom’ which clearly states professors cannot be penalized for extra-mural speech.

Here we echo the University of California’s Academic Council’s statement that “Freedom of expression and academic freedom are core tenets of the UC educational mission, and individual faculty members and groups of faculty have a right to speak publicly about political or controversial issues.”

  1. What is a Political Statement

No less alarming is the draft report’s failure to define what constitutes a ‘political’ or ‘controversial’ statement, claiming “it is not possible to distinguish between ‘political’ statements and other statements”. It is unclear why the report here departs from current understandings of the law and UC policy as summarized by UCAF in its recommendation: “Because relevant U.C. policy restricting use of UC resources for “political” purposes has long been interpreted and applied within the University as addressing electoral politics (candidates and ballot initiatives), and because there is no law prohibiting the University from issuing more general statements related to “political” issues, PACAOS-40 simply does not apply to statements about other matters that could be considered “political,” such as Israel/Palestine, Black Lives Matter, hybrid instruction during COVID, strikes by grad students or lecturers, mask mandates, etc.”

Indeed, the report’s desire to uphold the apparent political neutrality of the campus is itself perplexing. We are at a loss to know what might be the basis of the “university’s legal, ethical, and educational responsibilities to maintain political and viewpoint neutrality.” The campus makes its own political statements in a myriad of ways, from renaming buildings, accepting donations to build research institutes with specific positions on global poverty or fossil fuels, or rejecting calls for a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel.

It is disappointing that the report takes as its single hypothetical example a Department of Gender and Women’s Studies issuing a statement in support of Palestine. It is the case that our Department of Gender and Women’s studies, like the campus’ Center for Race and Gender, signed on to a statement in support for a Palestinian Feminist Collective in May 2021 alongside similar departments and centers across the country. However, it is a telling example to pick given that many departments across the campus – including in STEM fields – made strong statements in support of Black Lives in the Spring of 2020.

Worse still the report uses the word “controversial” to refer to advocacy for basic justice and the only two examples it gives are “Palestine” and “Middle East”. They are examples that have a thoroughly chilling effect for those faculty on campus whose research and teaching addresses the Middle East. Furthermore, singling out Palestine stigmatizes those who are Palestinian, or who support the Palestinian cause, as somehow intrinsically ‘uncivil’ and ‘controversial’. It is hard to see how this adheres to the campus’s frequently evoked goals of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging and Justice.

  1. Deliberation and transparency

We agree with the report’s emphasis on promoting a more deliberative and transparent approach to statements by departments. Departments should be encouraged to discuss what public statements are made, to reveal the procedures they used to produce those statements, and to be open to also publishing dissenting statements by colleagues.

We note that the Berkeley report again departs from the UCAF recommendation by suggesting that such statements should include a list of signatories and dissenters. We agree with Academic Council’s endorsement of UCAF’s recommendation that including a list of the individual faculty who support a statement “may chill speech, strain the academic freedom of those who hold minority views, and create a limited public forum that legally requires the publication of minority viewpoints.” We would add that in the social media age such lists ignore the real threat of ‘doxxing’ when individual faculty are targeted for malicious online attacks by those who do not share their views. Listing faculty signatories also ignores the very real asymmetries of power within departments, leaving untenured junior faculty especially exposed to the resentment of senior colleagues with whom they may disagree.

In conclusion the Berkeley Faculty Association has major concerns about this draft report. We urge all Senate faculty and department chairs to consider it closely. We urge the Joint Administration-Senate Workgroup to revise its report and robustly defend the right to free speech and the principle of academic freedom on campus in line with Academic Council and UCAF’s recommendations. We ask Senate leadership to use its own committees to consider these issues independently of an administration that appears more concerned with protecting the ‘reputational damage’ of the campus brand than the rights to free speech and academic freedom.