The University of California’s Board of Regents plans to discuss on Thursday the limits of free speech, and chances are that its members will be getting an earful.
Based on early reviews, the regents can expect to hear the university system’s proposed “statement of principles against intolerance” panned by student leaders who say they were excluded from its drafting, by First Amendment advocates who see it as threatening the exchange of ideas, and by a long list of Jewish organizations that had urged the system to take up the issue in the first place.
One common reaction to the statement is confusion, because so many elements of it contradict each other, tipping from one side to its opposite like a tightrope walker’s balancing pole. It declares that intolerance “has no place at the University of California” and that the university “will respond promptly and effectively to reports of intolerant behavior,” but adds that the statement “shall not be used as the basis to discipline students, faculty, or staff.” It says it “applies to attacks on individuals or groups and does not apply to the free exchange of ideas,” as if the former were not an inescapable element of the latter.
The proposed statement declares: “Everyone in the university community has the right to study, teach, conduct research, and work free from acts and expression of intolerance.”
“No, they don’t,” countered John K. Wilson, co-editor of Academe, the American Association of University Professors’ blog, in a post denouncing the proposed statement. He argued that every thinking person is intolerant of someone — such as unthinking, intolerant people — and that the only sure way to silence expressions of intolerance is repression.
Henry F. Reichman, a professor emeritus of history at California State University-East Bay and chairman of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, on Tuesday described the statement as “self-contradictory” in its professed stands for free speech and against intolerant speech. “You can’t do both,” he said.
Given how the First Amendment protects free speech at public universities, Mr. Reichman said, “intolerance is going to be at the University of California whether they like it or not.”
Beyond Repair?
Dianne Klein, a university-system spokeswoman, on Tuesday argued that much of the criticism of the document is premature. The board’s education-policy committee, which will be discussing it after the regents hear public comment, will focus almost solely on coming up with a plan to refine whatever statement eventually goes before the full board for a vote.
“I cannot emphasize enough,” Ms. Klein said, “that what is under discussion at the board meeting Thursday is a draft. We had to have something on paper.” She also stressed that the statement “is not a prescriptive document,” and that the leaders of the university system’s nine campuses will be left with the task of determining how such a statement of principles would be upheld. She acknowledged that she does not believe “that any statement that we come up with will be pleasing to everybody.”
Based on the university system’s recent history, however, even such a can’t-please-everybody standard of success might be too optimistic. This year, for example, its Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses came under intense criticism for defining as “microaggressions” against minority-group members statements such as “America is a melting pot” or “America is a land of opportunity.” Nicholas B. Dirks, the Berkeley campus’s chancellor, similarly was accused of trying to stifle speech last year in pleading for civility on the campus.
Mr. Wilson has declared the California board’s statement “unfixable,” partly because, for example, it leaves university employees and students subject to negative repercussions for speech beyond those covered by formal disciplinary proceedings. Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, noted in a recent column that some of the examples of intolerant speech cited in the California statement, such as statements describing members of certain racial or ethnic groups as less ambitious, are covered by the First Amendment. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech advocacy group, has similarly denounced the California policy as misguided.
Twisting Path
The university system’s administration initially waded into this latest discussion of intolerance at the behest of a coalition of Jewish organizations, which argued that students were being exposed to anti-Semitic harassment and bias in the context of campus debates over Israel. They had urged the system to take a stand against speech that meets the U.S. State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism, such as statements that demonize Israel, compare Israel’s policies to the policies of Nazi Germany, or hold Israel to standards not applied to other democratic nations.
The statement being considered by the regents has been cheered by some groups critical of Israel’s policies, such as Jewish Voice for Peace, as protecting free speech by omitting the State Department’s anti-Semitism definition. Meanwhile, several Jewish groups that were urging the university to adopt the State Department language have cried foul. In a letter sent to the regents this month, they accused the university system of hypocrisy for failing to acknowledge “flagrant forms of anti-Semitic expression” while engaging in activities such as “providing extensive sensitivity training regarding the subtlest forms of racist, sexist, and homophobic ‘microaggression.’”
Student representatives on the Board of Regents are also bothered by the statement, and played a key role in persuading the board to postpone any vote on it this month. Kevin Sabo, president of the University of California Student Association, which represents students on all of the system’s campuses, said on Tuesday that the document had emerged from an “administrative bubble” and that students had “never been consulted” about it.
Ms. Klein, the university-system spokeswoman, said that she expected a lively discussion of the statement, and that that’s a good thing. Coming up with such a statement of principles “is always a very messy process,” she said, “but, frankly, it is fantastic process.”
How messy or fantastic that process ends up being is likely to be the subject of debate.
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
