Disrupted Lectures and Stolen Newspapers: Campus Hostility to the Free Expression of Ideas

NAS have done nothing when visiting speakers were being shouted down; they have done nothing while teachers were abusing their classrooms by using class time to promote their own political views; they have done nothing while university funds were being used to support campus events that were un- educational political rallies. But to say only this would understate the problem of administrative inaction and complicity. Even when concerned faculty members have specifically brought these problems to the attention of administrators or of academic senate watchdog committees, they have seen them routinely shrink from their responsibility. The website www.noindoctrination.org did some of the work that department chairs might have been expected to do – it investigated student complaints about politicized classrooms. But even when their job had been at least half done for them in this way, department chairs seemed to have no interest in what had been made available to them. When documented cases of abuse were brought to their attention, they turned a blind eye. When Luann Wright began to investigate the extraordinary abuse of the classroom in UC San Diego’s Warren College writing courses documented above, what astonished her most was that “To my dismay, I discovered that parents, students, and UCSD’s own faculty review committee had been complaining about the excessive bias and lack of actual writing instruction for years Ideological zealots had hijacked this writing program, yet no one at any level of academic responsibility was willing to rein them in.” Her conclusion was that “Only when confronted with public outrage and outside pressure does academia seem motivated enough to address the issues of classroom indoctrination and intolerance.” Complaints made by individual faculty members to campus administrators have often concerned politicized teach-ins and conferences. These complaints usually made two basic points: first, these events violated state law and campus rules by using state funds for a political purpose, and second, that lacking any analysis of the case pro and con, they were of very low quality from an educational standpoint. But the administrative response has been routinely evasive. Obvious abuses were protected and enabled by the very people whose institutional role was to enforce regulations and maintain quality. Typical of this evasiveness was the response of the UC Santa Cruz administration to a complaint lodged by two faculty members 54 about the March 15, 2007 panel at UCSC, described above. The complaint drew the attention of the campus chancellor to the fact that this was a political, not an educational event, and thus a a misuse of public money intended for educational purposes, b use of the university for a political purpose, and c an event that lacked any university-level analysis of issues. The campus chancellor simply referred the matter to a university lawyer – as if the only issues that had been raised were legal ones. With that he abdicated his responsibility to look at the educational issue. When the university’s lawyer wrote a response to the complaint, 55 she took the narrowest view of the law and of university regulations. Despite clear instruction to the contrary in the directive by President Hitch, she largely reduced the idea of a “political purpose” to advocacy of voting for candidates or ballot 54 Letter dated March 9, 2007 by Ilan Benjamin and Tammi Benjamin to Chancellor George Blumenthal. 55 Carole R. Rossi response to the Benjamins, April 30, 2007. NAS measures. And she similarly narrowed the notion of “taking a political position” to the campus’s taking a position qua campus, managing thereby to make even improper departmental expenditures to support political rallies irrelevant. This willful misreading of university regulations and state law was a desperate attempt to avoid confronting a serious problem, one that if met head-on would certainly have provoked the anger of faculty activists at an administration that had dared to question what they were doing. Another important issue arises from these complaints. A well-documented complaint of politicization presents not only a particular case to adjudicate: it also confronts the administration with the possibility that one of its academic units has been corrupted and may need to be taken in hand. A major responsibility of campus administrations is to ensure that all departments are functioning at an appropriate level of integrity and excellence. In this case the UCSC chancellor was faced with evidence that something might be badly wrong with one or more of them, and the unambiguously political UC Berkeley event that promoted the boycott of Israeli academics and academic institutions presented the same issue to that campus’s chancellor. Yet both administrators dodged the important question of departmental integrity that these events had presented to them. 56 All of this leads to the sad conclusion that UC administrators, far from performing their role as the university’s quality control mechanism, now routinely function as the enablers, protectors, and even apologists for the politicized university and its degraded scholarly and educational standards. If administrators wanted to stop the shouting down of visiting speakers, they could, but choose not to. If they wanted to stop abuse of the classroom, they could, but choose not to. There appears to be only one way to interpret this inactivity: administrators do this because they know that an influential segment of the faculty expects it of them and will make their lives a misery if they ever attempt to do their duty. State law is explicit about one of the most important duties of UC’s administration: “The university shall be entirely independent of all political or sectarian influence and kept free therefrom.” There can be no doubt that the administration has failed in that duty, and that the failure has been comprehensive and catastrophic. 56 Letter from Chancellor Birgeneau dated October 26, 2010 to three faculty members from different UC campuses who complained about the event: Leila Beckwith UCLA, Tammi Benjamin UCSC, and Roberta Seid UCI. “UC administrators, far from performing their role as the university’s quality control mechanism, now routinely function as the enablers, protectors, and even apologists for the politicized university and its degraded scholarly and educational standards.”