Academic Freedom at the University of California in the Wake of Chemerinsky and Summers

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Scheer
Executive Director
California First Amendment Coalition

The best that can be said about the University of California’s leaders is that they are neutral in their spinelessness: in the face of political pressure, they are quick to surrender the university’s academic freedom--its lifeblood—whether that pressure comes from the ideological right or the left.

From the right, UC-Irvine was criticized for its hiring of law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, a liberal, as the dean of its new law school. Chancellor Michael Drake, rather than resisting pressure from conservative quarters to politicize a key academic appointment, fired Chemerinsky last week. (Later, apparently realizing that his action would do grave harm to the fledgling law school, Drake went hat-in-hand to Chemerinsky and publicly re-hired him.)

From the left, the UC Regents found themselves under assault for their invitation to Lawrence Summers, prominent economist, former president of Harvard University and US Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, to speak at a regents’ function in Sacramento this week. Some 290 UC faculty members, clearly in need of remedial training in First Amendment principles, signed a petition condemning Summers as a “symbol” of “gender and racial prejudice” and insisting that his speaking engagement be cancelled. The regents, to their great discredit, gave in, withdrawing Summer’s invitation.

These incidents reveal a UC leadership that has clearly lost sight of its mission. Building new campuses, enhancing the diversity of faculty and students, strengthening university finances, and the like: these are all means to an end. That end is not conflict-avoidance or consensus. It is academic excellence in service of —excuse the corniness—the pursuit of truth.

Fundamental to the pursuit of truth is academic freedom—the freedom to consider, and give voice to, all manner of ideas, especially those that are unpopular or outside the mainstream or even subversive. This freedom is fundamental not because all ideas are equally valid---they’re not---but because the validity of an idea can only be determined through free and open debate.