BY HANK REICHMAN

Yesterday, September 19, the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) filed an unfair labor practice (ULP) complaint charging the university with violations of legally protected faculty employee expression surrounding the war in Gaza.  I posted a summary of the complaint to this blog yesterday.  To access the full 581-page (including exhibits) complaint go here.  For some media coverage of the filing see articles in the San Francisco Chronicle, UCLA Daily Bruin, and San Francisco PBS station KQED.  I was honored to be asked to speak at a press conference announcing the complaint, held at noon Pacific time yesterday on the UCLA campus.  The following is the text of my remarks.

I’m here to place this ULP and UC”s reprehensible treatment of protesting students and faculty members in a broader, national context.  While what happened at UCLA on the night of April 30-May 1 may be the most egregious example of university-sanctioned violence—and make no mistake, that’s what it was—UCLA and the other UC campuses represented here were, sadly, not exceptional.  Last spring university administrators across the country, faced with a protest movement of a scope unseen for decades, and egged on by politicians and improperly entitled donors, turned, with a few notable and admirable exceptions, toward repression and the violence that inevitably accompanies it.

By mid-June more than 3,100 people had been arrested or detained on over seventy campuses nationwide.  On many campuses, Indiana University, NYU, and the University of Michigan are just three examples, faculty members—some supporting the students and their demands (if sometimes critically), others simply advocating free speech rights or seeking to defuse potentially violent tensions—were arrested, often with little or no visible provocation, alongside their students.  Some were thrown to the ground, cuffed, and beaten.

This fall, in a misguided effort to preclude such actions, university officials have enacted—almost always with minimal, if any, faculty and student participation— an alarming series of hastily enacted policies intended to crack down on peaceful protest in ways that inordinately restrict long-accepted rights to free expression, free assembly, and academic freedom.  “These polices,” the AAUP has noted, “often require registration for demonstrations or protests, which, because they take place spontaneously or with little planning time, is tantamount to forbidding them.  Requiring registration also enables surveillance of protest plans, which can discourage protests by groups with minority viewpoints.  Many of the latest expressive activity policies strictly limit the locations where demonstrations may take place, whether amplified sound can be used, and types of postings permitted.  With harsh sanctions for violations, the policies broadly chill students and faculty from engaging in protests and demonstrations.”

Rather than stifling expression, the AAUP continued, “institutions of higher learning should aim to foster an environment in which faculty, graduate employees, students, and other members of the campus community are free to discuss and debate difficult topics, inside and outside the classroom.”  That may at times be challenging, but it is far from impossible.

To be sure, the conflict over Israel and Palestine evokes visceral passions that can be tough to control.  But if any institution should be able to direct those passions toward constructive dialogue, universities should be.  One need not support all the demands of protesters nor approve of their predictably heated rhetoric—I, for one, often do not—to support their rights to free expression.

Which brings me to a second national trend that provides important context for this unfair labor practice charge.  I refer to the rising tide of calls for universities, and even for individual departments, to embrace “institutional neutrality,” a call that has found significant support on the UC Board of Regents.  Because colleges and universities are devoted to the unfettered search for truth, as institutions, there are, to be sure, few controversial topics on which they should take “official” positions.  Indeed, when scholars exercise their academic freedom, it is not the institution’s role to weigh in on their choices but to defend their right to choose.

But it is at minimum the epitome of hypocrisy for universities, including the University of California, to espouse “neutrality” while simultaneously laying their hands on the scale on one side of a public dispute.  For that is what UC has done.  There can be little doubt that a majority of the Board of Regents favors the Israeli government, or at least is willing to accede to the demands of sometimes fanatical and powerful interests that do.  Siding with the status quo against criticism, favoring the powerful over the powerless, however, is not neutrality.

I can recall when the University of California spent a small fortune to defend the rights of the bigoted provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at Berkeley after a violent mob attacked.  Why not extend those protections to UC’s own students and faculty?

One can acknowledge the difficult dilemma faced by many administrators trapped between the mutually exclusive demands of protesting students and those of external donors, politicians, and alums, as well as from students who might feel threatened by some protesters.  It is astonishing, nonetheless, that college and university administrators who have for years touted the importance of “safety” and “care” while also championing “free speech,” have in the name of those values not only sought to silence and punish but have physically endangered the very students they claim to protect.

Punitive responses to protest, even where protest may at times limit the free speech or academic freedom of others, is at minimum inadequate and ultimately will do more to stifle and less to encourage genuine dialogue and debate.

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and chair of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019.  His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021; a second edition will be published in March 2025.