UCSC History of Consciousness Department
History of Consciousness Statement on Academic Freedom
We write in response to UC officials’ series of public messages concerning campus activities related to Israel’s assault on Gaza. These include the Nov. 10 letter signed by UC President Drake and all UC Chancellors, the Nov. 13 letter from Executive Vice Chancellor Kletzer, and Drake’s Nov. 15 remarks to the UC Regents. These statements threaten to undermine political organizing, critical thinking, and academic freedom, which ought to be protected and supported on campuses everywhere.
Drake’s letter warns UC educators against “using classroom time for improper political indoctrination.” Kletzer’s letter echoes the same warning and lists policies under which alleged transgressors may be punished. These accusations are troubling incursions on our freedom to engage in critically-oriented pedagogy pertinent to current events. As university educators, we have a responsibility to present critical interpretations of historically-significant subject matter without fear of intimidation, censorship or reprisal. We strongly object to UC officials’ transparent attempts to stifle classroom discussions of an issue as significant to our collective political moment as the Israeli state’s repression, ethnic cleansing, and potential genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza.
We are similarly concerned with President Drake’s announcement of new programs focused on “how to recognize and combat extremism,” which he says will also promote “a viewpoint-neutral history of the Middle East.” We note that the language of “combating extremism” has frequently been used to target political dissent from Arab, Muslim, and South Asian communities around US foreign policy. Moreover, we join our history and social sciences colleagues in rejecting the premise of a “viewpoint-neutral history” as a basis for pedagogy. We are deeply concerned that this program will operate under the guise of neutrality to stifle the presentation of perspectives that are critical of the dominant US institutional policy consensus on Israel and the Middle East.
These statements and programmatic decisions carry worrying echoes of a broader national campaign to characterize scholarly analysis of the Israeli settler-colonial project in Palestine as antisemitic, and indeed to equate critical pedagogy of all kinds with “political indoctrination.” In the weeks since the UC and UCSC administrator pronouncements, attacks of this nature have significantly escalated through mechanisms such as the House Education and Workforce Committee’s investigations of university administrators at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
At a time when critical thinking, civic engagement, and workplace organizing are urgently needed in our world, we assert our rights as educators and academic workers. California’s Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act (HEERA) enshrines our right to “encourage the pursuit of excellence in teaching, research, and learning through the free exchange of ideas” in the interest of “providing an academic community with full freedom of inquiry.” These foundational values of higher education are all the more important when critical thinking and academic freedom run contrary to unjust ideas that our society’s most powerful political and cultural institutions endorse and disseminate.
Even as we condemn this repression of academic freedom, we are reminded by History of Consciousness Emeritus Professor Angela Davis that when we can no longer accept the things we cannot change, we must change the things we cannot accept. We therefore commit ourselves to defending academic freedom whenever it comes under assault in our department. We will oppose any administrative censorship of History of Consciousness classroom content. We will resist any attempt to single out individual instructors for reprisal, retaliation or punishment, including through the use of adverse student evaluations. These commitments represent our fundamental responsibilities and moral obligations to each other as members of the academic community.
Finally, we will continue to work in solidarity with colleagues across the world who face persecution for expressing their views on this issue that directly impacts us all.
Sincerely,
UCSC History of Consciousness Department
