The University of California’s Board of Regents has overwhelmingly voted to ban academic departments from posting political statements on their website homepages.
The policy takes effect immediately following its approval by the governing board on July 18 in a 13–1 vote.
Under the new rule, the main homepage of a campus department, division, or other academic unit of the University of California (UC) system will be reserved for information about course offerings, campus activities, traditional mission statements, or other news and events related to faculty research and teaching.
Academic units can still release “discretionary statements,” which are defined as those 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 new policy states.
“Discretionary Statements should not appear on the main homepage of a website of an academic Unit, and instead should be posted on a separate page identified for such statements,” it states.
In addition, a discretionary statement must be “accompanied by some explanation of whose views it represents,” such as the results of a vote on whether to issue the statement or a note saying that the statement does or does not necessarily reflect the views of all members, the policy states.
The restrictions were first proposed in January after some academic units, including at least three ethnic studies departments, prominently displayed statements on their websites last fall condemning Israel’s military campaign in Gaza in response to Hamas’s surprise invasion and mass killing of Israeli civilians.
At UC Merced, for instance, the department of history and critical race and ethnic studies put out a statement on its homepage expressing solidarity with what it called a Palestinian resistance against “decades of systematic oppression.” It further called on the UC community to not describe the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel using terms such as “unprovoked” or “terrorism,” which it claimed are “dehumanizing language” and served to discredit the Palestinian cause.
Along similar lines, the ethnic studies department at UC San Diego noted on the “statements and commentaries” page of its website that the department supports Palestinians who fight for “self-determination” and “freedom from an apartheid system that seeks to dehumanize them.”
The website for UC Santa Cruz’s critical race and ethnic studies department also featured a statement endorsing a pro-Palestinian faculty group.
The effort to keep such statements from department websites was led by UC Regent Jay Sures, who worried that anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian views by individuals or groups could be mistaken as the position of UC as a whole.
Other university employees shared the same concern. In January, more than 400 UC faculty members signed an open letter objecting to using official UC websites to promote “anti-Zionist activism.”
The UC system has stood by its original Oct. 9, 2023, communication denouncing Hamas for its atrocities. On Oct. 16, 2023, Mr. Sures openly criticized a letter by the UC ethnic studies council in which a group of ethnic studies professors from across the system demanded that UC drop its characterization of the Hamas attack as terrorist aggression.
“Our statement of condemnation of the October 7th massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas was absolutely justified and necessary because terrorism has no place in our world,” he told the council. “As human beings we need to condemn it immediately and forcefully without fear of retribution or that some may be offended.”
