BY HANK REICHMAN
Yesterday, September 19, the Council of College of California School Associations (CUCFA) filed an unfair labor observe (ULP) grievance charging the college with violations of legally protected school worker expression surrounding the warfare in Gaza. I posted a abstract of the grievance to this weblog yesterday. To entry the total 581-page (together with reveals) grievance go right here. For some media protection of the submitting see articles within the San Francisco Chronicle, UCLA Every day Bruin, and San Francisco PBS station KQED. I used to be honored to be requested to talk at a press convention saying the grievance, held at midday Pacific time yesterday on the UCLA campus. The next is the textual content of my remarks.
I’m right here to put this ULP and UC”s reprehensible therapy of protesting college students and school members in a broader, nationwide context. Whereas what occurred at UCLA on the evening of April 30-Could 1 would be the most egregious instance of university-sanctioned violence—and make no mistake, that’s what it was—UCLA and the opposite UC campuses represented right here had been, sadly, not distinctive. Final spring college directors throughout the nation, confronted with a protest motion of a scope unseen for many years, and egged on by politicians and improperly entitled donors, turned, with just a few notable and admirable exceptions, towards repression and the violence that inevitably accompanies it.
By mid-June greater than 3,100 individuals had been arrested or detained on over seventy campuses nationwide. On many campuses, Indiana College, NYU, and the College of Michigan are simply three examples, school members—some supporting the scholars and their calls for (if typically critically), others merely advocating free speech rights or searching for to defuse probably violent tensions—had been arrested, usually with little or no seen provocation, alongside their college students. Some had been thrown to the bottom, cuffed, and crushed.
This fall, in a misguided effort to preclude such actions, college officers have enacted—virtually all the time with minimal, if any, school and pupil participation— an alarming sequence of rapidly enacted insurance policies meant to crack down on peaceable protest in ways in which inordinately limit long-accepted rights to free expression, free meeting, and educational freedom. “These polices,” the AAUP has famous, “usually require registration for demonstrations or protests, which, as a result of they happen spontaneously or with little planning time, is tantamount to forbidding them. Requiring registration additionally permits surveillance of protest plans, which may discourage protests by teams with minority viewpoints. Most of the newest expressive exercise insurance policies strictly restrict the areas the place demonstrations might happen, whether or not amplified sound can be utilized, and varieties of postings permitted. With harsh sanctions for violations, the insurance policies broadly chill college students and school from partaking in protests and demonstrations.”
Moderately than stifling expression, the AAUP continued, “establishments of upper studying ought to purpose to foster an surroundings through which school, graduate workers, college students, and different members of the campus neighborhood are free to debate and debate tough subjects, inside and out of doors the classroom.” Which will at instances be difficult, however it’s removed from inconceivable.
To make sure, the battle over Israel and Palestine evokes visceral passions that may be robust to regulate. But when any establishment ought to be capable of direct these passions towards constructive dialogue, universities ought to be. One needn’t assist all of the calls for of protesters nor approve of their predictably heated rhetoric—I, for one, usually don’t—to assist their rights to free expression.
Which brings me to a second nationwide development that gives vital context for this unfair labor observe cost. I discuss with the rising tide of requires universities, and even for particular person departments, to embrace “institutional neutrality,” a name that has discovered vital assist on the UC Board of Regents. As a result of schools and universities are dedicated to the unfettered seek for reality, as establishments, there are, to make sure, few controversial subjects on which they need to take “official” positions. Certainly, when students train their educational freedom, it’s not the establishment’s position to weigh in on their selections however to defend their proper to decide on.
However it’s at minimal the epitome of hypocrisy for universities, together with the College of California, to espouse “neutrality” whereas concurrently laying their arms on the size on one aspect of a public dispute. For that’s what UC has finished. There could be little doubt {that a} majority of the Board of Regents favors the Israeli authorities, or not less than is prepared to accede to the calls for of typically fanatical and highly effective pursuits that do. Siding with the established order in opposition to criticism, favoring the highly effective over the powerless, nevertheless, isn’t neutrality.
I can recall when the College of California spent a small fortune to defend the rights of the bigoted provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos to talk at Berkeley after a violent mob attacked. Why not lengthen these protections to UC’s personal college students and school?
One can acknowledge the tough dilemma confronted by many directors trapped between the mutually unique calls for of protesting college students and people of exterior donors, politicians, and alums, in addition to from college students who may really feel threatened by some protesters. It’s astonishing, nonetheless, that faculty and college directors who’ve for years touted the significance of “security” and “care” whereas additionally championing “free speech,” have within the identify of these values not solely sought to silence and punish however have bodily endangered the very college students they declare to guard.
Punitive responses to protest, even the place protest might at instances restrict the free speech or educational freedom of others, is at minimal insufficient and in the end will do extra to stifle and fewer to encourage real dialogue and debate.
Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of historical past at California State College, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and chair of the AAUP Basis; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Tutorial Freedom and Tenure. His e book, The Way forward for Tutorial Freedom, based mostly partially on posts to this weblog, was printed in 2019. His Understanding Tutorial Freedom was printed in October, 2021; a second version might be printed in March 2025.
