After months of delaying a planned vote on the issue, the University of California’s Board of Regents voted 13 to 1 Thursday to prohibit academic departments and other academic units from posting political statements on their website homepages.
The ban comes after some UC departments posted statements supporting Palestinians. Josiah Beharry, the student member on the board, was the only no vote.
The final version of the restriction is largely identical to the proposed version that the board postponed voting on in March. Academic units can still release “discretionary statements,” but the policy says they “should be posted on a separate page identified for such statements.” Homepages can still link to these statements.
“Discretionary statements” are defined as those a unit makes online or otherwise shares “via mass distribution” that “are not part of the day-to-day, term-to-term operations of the unit, and that comment on institutional, local, regional, global or national events, activities or issues.”
The policy also says these statements should be “accompanied by some explanation of whose views it represents,” such as the actual vote results among the unit’s faculty members or a note that the statement does or doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of all.
Sean Malloy, a UC Merced professor, told the Los Angeles Times that “it is only when faculty speech threatened to upset support for Israel and Zionism that the regents saw fit to enact such a policy.”
