UC Regents Approve Policy Regulating Political Speech on Department Websites
Credit: Image Courtesy of Margaret Attridge- The UC Board of Regents approved a policy regulating what type of statements academic departments can publicly post.
- The policy will prohibit departments from publishing political opinions on their homepages and require them to publish a disclaimer alongside the post on other pages.
- The Academic Senate endorsed the most recent version of the policy. Members raised concerns about previous drafts regarding free speech and academic freedom.
The University of California (UC) Board of Regents approved a policy limiting what types of public statements academic departments and faculty can post on university websites.
The policy prohibits academic departments and other campus units from posting “discretionary statements” or communications about events or issues beyond their usual operations on the group’s main homepage. It also requires the statements on other pages to come with a disclaimer that they do not represent the university or campus as a whole.
The UC Board of Regents approved the policy Thursday in a 13-1 vote. Josiah Beharry, the student regent, was the only dissenting vote.
“This new document, I truly believe, is a better policy,” Regent Jay Sures, the main proponent of the policy, said during Wednesday’s committee hearing. “It reflects that we value academic freedom, and it provides a very inclusive environment for the individual departments to put out statements and reflect minority opinions within those individual departments.”
The most recent version of the policy includes several edits that the Academic Senate advocated for, such as clarification that “individual or collective scholarly endeavors” will not be banned from website homepages. It also now allows links to discretionary statements on homepages.
“The draft policy … safeguards the ability of units such as departments to make statements. It also imposes certain requirements and guardrails,” James Steintrager, the 2023-24 Academic Senate chair, said before the committee’s vote.
“… The Senate considers the current draft a marked improvement over previous drafts and generally consonant with free expression and academic freedom.”
Steintrager also expressed the Senate’s ongoing concern about the implementation and enforcement of the new policy, urging the board to endorse the Senate’s recommendations which would “presumably encourage compliance.”
Why UC’s Limiting Departments’ Political Speech
The issue of political statements by departments first arose on Oct. 9 when Regents Chair Richard Leib and UC President Michael Drake issued a statement condemning Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel as “terrorism” and “sickening.”
A week later, on Oct. 16, the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council released a statement countering the university’s stance, accusing the university of distorting the “unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza,” expressing a lack of confidence in the administration’s ability to make public statements that “demonstrate a full understanding of this historical moment.”
Sures responded in an Oct. 31 letter, calling the letter from the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council “appalling and repugnant,” and saying that the letter contained falsehoods about Israel and attempts to justify the violence by Hamas on Oct. 7.
At the Jan. 24 regents meeting, Regent Hadi Makarechian mentioned that the board was considering the policy because departments posted political statements “related to the war between Hamas and Israel” on official webpages.
The regents decided to table voting on the policy in January and delayed a final decision on the proposal twice more: once in March after protesters interrupted the board shortly after they began to consider the policy, and again in May.