University of California grapples anew with free speech limits amid Israel-Hamas war turmoil

Sixty years after its flagship Berkeley campus became the epicenter of a student free-speech movement, the University of California is once more at the center of debate over cherished freedom of expression amid disputes at colleges around the country over the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

On Wednesday, the UC Regents took up a proposed policy that would limit how campus departments could express opinions about contentious or complex issues on their publicly funded university websites. But demonstrators disrupted the meeting shortly after the policy was introduced for discussion, forcing the board to recess.

“What we are facing today is uncharted territory in many respects,” UC President Dr. Michael V. Drake said Wednesday as the meeting convened. “We are navigating it actively. We are not always perfect but we are learning and adjusting as we go.”

Regent Jay Sures, a Los Angeles talent agent leading the discussion on the policy, was repeatedly interrupted by protesters as he said “we have made it crystal clear that preserving academic freedom and freedom of speech are absolutely imperative as we put a policy in place, if we put a policy in place.”

“In fact,” Sures added, “it is core to the mission of the University of California.”

Though the proposed policy isn’t specific to a particular subject matter, it arose in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack on Israeli civilians by Gaza-based Hamas terrorists, in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and 250 taken hostage. The subsequent airstrikes by Israeli forces in Gaza has killed at least 30,000 people and destroyed much of Gaza’s buildings and infrastructure, displacing more than a million people and causing a widespread humanitarian crisis.

Following the Oct. 7 attack, the UC Office of the President issued a statement condemning the “sickening and incomprehensible” violence and that “our expressions of grief extend to all innocent people affected by this ongoing conflict.”

But the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council responded in a letter that month that such administration statements “distort and misrepresent the unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and thereby contribute to the racist and dehumanizing erasure of Palestinian daily reality.”

The proposed policy originally was to be taken up in January, but the Board of Regents put off a vote until March to allow for modifications. The recommended proposal Wednesday would prohibit staff from posting discretionary statements about political or controversial matters on department home pages. But a link to a separate opinion statement could be provided although it must be clear the statement doesn’t reflect a position of the university as a whole.

Faculty who are supporting the Palestinian cause and are critical of Israel oppose the policy. UCLA Faculty for Justice in Palestine wrote in a Tuesday article for UCLA’s Daily Bruin that it “directly threatens academic freedom and makes faculty vulnerable to political retaliation at the University of California.”

It’s unclear how much the policy would affect department communications. At least one, UC-Santa Cruz’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department, advertised a “Faculty for Justice in Palestine” group at the campus on its home page. But it was unclear whether that would run afoul of the policy.

UC is hardly the only college system facing such issues. In November, Barnard College, a private New York City women’s liberal arts college, issued a policy that political statements can’t be posted on official college websites without administrative approval.

But it’s a particularly sensitive topic at the University of California, where students at Berkeley in 1964 led a free-speech movement protesting campus restrictions of on-campus political demonstrations supporting civil rights and opposing the Vietnam War.

Both sides in the policy debate have claimed the safety of the university’s students and faculty have been jeopardized by the dispute over the Israel-Gaza conflict. UCLA Faculty for Justice in Palestine argued in its article that critics of Israel face a “heightened wave of repression” and that the proposed policy “will soon cascade into many other topics and areas, from sexual and reproductive rights to critical race theory.”

But policy supporters point to acts of violence by anti-Israel demonstrators against Jewish students. On Tuesday, the House of Representatives Education Committee formally requested a wide range of documents from UC-Berkeley on Tuesday as part of an investigation of campus antisemitism.

In late February, anti-Israel protesters disrupted a Students Supporting Israel event at UC Berkeley featuring an Israeli speaker, surrounded the venue and broke down its doors, forcing attendees to be escorted to safety.

Check back for updates.