The governing body of the University of California approved a new policy Thursday banning academic departments within the 10-university system from publishing political statements on their UC homepages.
The policy establishes new rules surrounding “discretionary statements” that are “not part of the day-to-day, term-to-term operations” of the department “and that comment on institutional, local, regional, global or national events.”
The rule applies only to homepages; academic departments can continue publishing political statements off of the homepage, along with a disclaimer stating the view expressed is not that of the university as a whole.
In January, 400 UC faculty members signed an open letter addressed to the Board of Regents sounding the alarm after a host of university departments, mostly in the humanities, issued statements about the war in Gaza. The letter was spearheaded in part by Judea Pearl, a UCLA computer science professor and the father of Daniel Pearl, a Jewish American journalist captured and killed by Islamist militants in 2002.
The letter pointed to department statements that expressed full-throated support for Palestinians but spent little time acknowledging Israelis or the Oct. 7 massacre of civilians led by Hamas, the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history. While academic departments have for years published statements that could be construed as political, such as supporting Black Lives Matter, the statements on Gaza have fomented a “hostile, antisemitic climate” on many campuses and threaten “to do great harm not just to Jews, but to the entire University,” the letter said.
“We, the undersigned, are faculty members from a number of UC campuses, who are deeply concerned about the growing hostility and harassment targeting Jewish members of the campus community,” the letter said. “Of particular concern is the role played by individual faculty members and whole departments … through their use of the University’s name, facilities and resources to engage in anti-Zionist political expression, whose goal is to demonize, delegitimize, and ultimately dismantle the Jewish state.”
A statement published by UC Riverside’s Gender and Sexuality Studies department, for example, still up on its homepage, expresses “solidarity with the Palestinian people,” describes the war in Gaza as a genocide and calls for divestment from companies that do business in Israel. It says the department would like to reach out to students traumatized by the war, including Palestinian and Arab students, without mentioning Israeli or Jewish students, nor referencing the Oct. 7 attack.
A statement on the homepage of UC Santa Cruz’s department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies criticizes “efforts across campuses to silence speech about Palestine” and shares a link to join Faculty for Justice in Palestine, an activist group. The statement also calls the war in Gaza a genocide, a deeply contested claim that Israel rejects and some supporters of Israel consider to be a form of antisemitic blood libel.
Meanwhile, some activists opposed the new policy, calling it an incursion into academic freedom or an effort to squelch valid criticism of the Israeli government.
Ronald Cruz, a member of a group called BAMN or “By Any Means Necessary,” told UCLA’s Daily Bruin newspaper that the measure was a “censorship proposal” and said it was meant to silence faculty on the Palestinian issue.
“It is an attack on academic freedom and freedom of speech,” he said, according to the Bruin. “If adopted, it will not silence the mass anti-war movement that defied [UCLA] Chancellor Block.”
The text of the measure says the regents sought to balance academic freedom with the need to protect the university’s reputation.
“The University affirms the right of academic freedom while also fostering an inclusive environment,” the measure says. “However, individual or group statements on political or controversial issues that are posted on Units’ websites and are unrelated to the Unit’s day-to-day operations are likely to be interpreted by the public and the community as the University’s institutional views, as opposed to individual or group speech.”
Regent Richard Leib said he found it “embarrassing” for UCs when such political statements are misconstrued as the university’s point of view, according to the Bruin. He defended the new policy as “content-neutral” because it applies not only to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but also to other political issues.
“If the economics department put MAGA stuff on its website, it’s the same deal,” he said.
The new policy striking political statements from homepages applies to academic departments as well as schools, centers, labs, institutes and other officially recognized campus entities. Political statements published off the homepage must include a disclaimer “expressly stating that the statement should not be taken as a position of the University, or the campus, as a whole.” Individual faculty members will still be allowed to post political statements through their own channels, like social media, on their personal blogs, or wherever they choose.