UC Irvine and Free Speech

 

The University of California at Irvine puts out a quarterly magazine (UC Irvine Magazine), and a friend gave me a copy of the Spring 2024 edition.  Most of the articles concern the work and research being done at UC Irvine. In fact, UCI is one of the nation's leading universities in terms of the hard sciences, and at last count, they boasted 7 Nobel Prize winners (not peace). The university has fewer humanities and social sciences departments than most universities, and thus, most of the students there are serious students engaged in the study of fields like biology, pre-med, and engineering. In comparison to schools like UC Berkeley, UCLA, and places back east (like Columbia), there is usually less student unrest.

Yet, over the years, the school has suffered a number of black eyes that have brought unwanted national attention. These have almost uniformly been in the form of anti-Israel activism, featuring vitriolic speakers invited to campus by the Muslim Student Union and Students for Justice in Palestine. I would say it goes back at least two decades and has reached a crescendo since last October 7 when Hamas committed one of the most horrific attacks imaginable against Israeli civilians. Inexplicably, some in academia have actually celebrated this attack and condemned Israel for striking back at Hamas. At UCI, students and activists set up an encampment for almost three weeks while the school negotiated endlessly before sending in police when the little rascals tried to take over an adjacent science building. 

As a part-time teacher at UCI from 1998-2016, I witnessed many of these incidents, which was a major reason I began my blog in 2007. In my overall view, the leadership at UCI, like so many other campuses, has failed to deal effectively with protests that exceed the boundaries of free speech and have made campus life for Jewish students at times unbearable.

Now comes the above-mentioned UCI publication, whose timing could not have been more ironic, and which opens with a "Letter from the Chancellor", Howard Gillman. In this "letter" (above) Gillman talks about his views of free speech and academic freedom as they pertain to UCI.

The following page features a paragraph describing UCI's history of activism (the university opened in 1965). The timing is ironic given the recent pro-Palestinian occupation set up at UCI, which lasted nearly three weeks and only ended when students and outside protesters tried to take over an adjacent science building. It was not pretty. There is one memorable quote in the latter article: "You would never see someone setting a dumpster fire at Irvine." Literally or figuratively? Maybe there haven't been any real dumpster fires, but the above-mentioned encampment and its clearing out, which drew national attention was, to borrow the old phrase, "a real dumpster fire". I am not criticizing the hundreds of police who were finally allowed to do their job, but for the image of the university, the whole thing was a "dumpster fire".

I also take issue with the second article that portrays UCI as a place where activism takes place that is focused on issues and solutions. Bringing in speakers like Amir Abdel Malik Ali, Abdul Alim Musa, Mohamed al-Asi, George Galloway, Norman Finkelstein, Hatem Bazian, Rabab Abdulhadi, Hussam Ayloush- I could go on and on- doesn't strike me as being focused on solutions. Putting up this caricature of Ariel Sharon in May 2008 on the so-called "apartheid wall", with all the stereotypical Jewish features that go back to Julius Streicher's Der Stuermer, is not focusing on issues and solutions. 

Disrupting the speech of Michael Oren, the then-Israeli ambassador to the US in 2010 was not focused on solutions. Similarly disrupting pro-Israel events featuring Israeli Defense Force reservists in 2016 and 2017 was not focused on solutions. Similarly disrupting celebrations of Israel's founding by Jewish students year after year is not an exercise in finding solutions.

And most recently, chanting with bullhorns and banging drums outside classroom and science research buildings is not what I call finding solutions. On the day the encampment was finally cleared, I seriously doubt those students/activists were searching for solutions when they tried to take over a building next to the encampment. True, worse things have happened at Berkeley, UCLA, Columbia, and many other so-called institutions of higher learning, but UCI does not stand as some sort of shining beacon of light when it comes to campus protest.

This leads me to my final point: Perhaps, it is time for universities to reexamine just what their role is. Is it to educate or serve as a training ground for activists-left-wing activists in particular? UCI's law school should be subject to the same question, but that is a topic for another day. Are our universities really intended to be places where all the ills of the country and/or the world are to be fought out? Under the present situation, free speech and protest exist only for one side of the philosophical divide. Speakers and events that are pro-America, pro-Israel, conservative, or pro-Republican can expect to be disrupted. Does UCI remember the night Milo Yiannopoulos came to campus in 2016?

Is this really what our universities are supposed to be about? If so, the public's patience is wearing thin. The overwhelming majority of Americans are tired of seeing our campuses taken over by pro-Hamas anti-Semites and anarchists at the expense of the majority of students who want to study. I know from personal experience that 99%+ of UCI's students are not involved in this activity, but what say do they have when the university administration allows this loud disruption of university life to go on for weeks?

I don't know exactly when the above two pieces in UCI Magazine were actually penned. The magazine has just come out, but given recent events at UCI, the celebratory tone is ironic and frankly, laughable.

I have sent a link to this post to the magazine.

*Update: June 19: Last night, I received a prompt response from the editor of the magazine informing me that it takes a long time to print, bind, and deliver the magazine (about a month). On this occasion, there was also an unforeseen delay in distribution. Thus, the magazine went to press in mid-April.  The encampment went up at the end of April and was cleared in the middle of May. In other words, the letter from Gillman and the article in question were written prior to the encampment issue occurring.