Dear Campus Community,
I want to extend a warm welcome back after what I hope was a restful, refreshing break spent with family and friends. As I reflect on a year that was full of changes, challenges and some great successes, and look ahead to a new year, I’ve been thinking a lot about our university’s core values, enshrined in our Principles of Community, and also academic freedom, which protects faculty from reprisal for teaching and discussing controversial material or for making statements or publishing academic papers and books that some might find outrageous, wrong or objectionable.
Much has been made in recent months over the lines between academic freedom, free speech and hate speech, and where those lines should be drawn.
We are living in a highly politicized, divided and confrontational world. As a university and as individuals, we are obligated to stand up against hate and to resist it in whatever form it presents itself. But as a public university, we must also uphold the First Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits governmental entities — including public universities and colleges — from regulating expression on a vast variety of matters and settings. Free speech can be reasoned and inspiring, but it can also be raucous, outrageous, hateful or silly, and it includes rights to peaceful protest.
Unlike the freedom of speech, academic freedom is not mentioned in the Constitution. The idea took root in the 19th century in response to several high-profile cases in which faculty were penalized — most often fired — for teaching content that certain authorities objected to on political or religious grounds.
Since that time, many universities, including the University of California (UC), have affirmed principles of academic freedom. As stated in the UC’s Academic Policy Manual, “The principles of academic freedom protect freedom of inquiry and research, freedom of teaching, and freedom of expression and publication. These freedoms enable the University to advance knowledge and to transmit it effectively to its students and to the public.”
The protections provided by the First Amendment for the freedom of speech are not unlimited. Courts have found that specific forms of expression — for example: obscenity, child pornography, true threats, perjury and blackmail — do not enjoy First Amendment protection. But there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. We can counter such speech with protests and boycotts and robust denunciations, and we can exercise some content-neutral time, place and manner restrictions. But we cannot legally suppress it solely because it is hateful.
Just as the First Amendment has its limitations, so too have the principles of academic freedom — they are tied to a professional code of conduct for faculty. For example, in the University of California, academic freedom does not include the freedom to discriminate against or harass students on political grounds or for reasons of race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, ancestry, pregnancy, marital status or other such factors.
In December, I was pleased to host Jerry Kang, Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and Professor of Law at UCLA, at UC Merced as part of my Dialogue on Diversity and Interdisciplinarity speaker series. Our next speaker in the series is Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the UC Berkeley Law School, who will join us on campus Feb. 13.
Dean Chemerinsky is a recognized national expert on the First Amendment. His talk will focus on the limitations of free speech and the laws surrounding universities’ restrictions to speech.
I hope you will join in this conversation. Please visit the Office of Campus Climate website for more information about opportunities to participate. I also invite you to visit our free speech website for additional information about the application of the First Amendment in the university context.
In conclusion, it is my first belief that academia plays an important role in these politically charged times. We need to encourage the free exchange of ideas, even as we strive to do so in a way that facilitates learning, inquiry and debate for each and every member of our campus community.
As the discourse in our society at large devolves into factionalism, we in academia need to do better. We can seek common ground, even when we have significant points of disagreement, and use that common ground as a point of connection — what Jerry Kang called in his lecture micro-connections. We can refuse to engage in personalized attacks or denigrate others based on affiliation or presumed group or ideological characteristics.
We can strive to do these things while also recognizing that free speech is sometimes uncivil, and that academic freedom can involve confronting ideas and perspectives that some find offensive and distasteful.
Sincerely,
