January 30, 2024
Dear President Drake, UC Regents, Chancellor Hawgood, Provost Lucey, Dean King, and Chair Wachter,
The Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA) is an umbrella organization for the Faculty Associations at each of the ten UC campuses, which advocates for the economic and employment conditions of UC faculty and faculty rights of academic freedom and political speech. We reiterate our deep alarm at the chilling climate across the United States, and on UC campuses that undermines the academic freedom and the free speech rights of instructional faculty, staff, and students to express support for the Palestinian people and/or criticize the Israeli government in any terms consistent with academic freedom, including settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
We write today to condemn the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)’s misleading and viciously-worded attack on their own faculty member Dr. Rupa Marya, a professor of medicine and internationally renowned expert on antiracism, health equity, and the health impacts of colonialism. Dr. Marya’s supposedly “racist conspiracy theory” was a critique of Israel’s destruction of the healthcare system in Gaza, and was a call to study the impacts of this destruction on the Palestinian people (see Dr. Marya’s personal statement giving context to her Tweet and the response to it). UCSF’s appalling actions, outlined in a petition written by her colleagues, “Protect Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech at UCSF,” have exacerbated the harassment that Dr. Marya had been on the receiving end of since California Senator Scott Wiener reposted a post critical of Dr. Marya and accused her of antisemitism. Hundreds of people reposted Wiener’s post and tagged Canary Mission. As a result, Marya was doxxed and received multiple death threats. It is unconscionable that following these attacks, UCSF did not condemn Wiener and Canary Mission, but rather used its own social media accounts to share its own defamatory statement, which rapidly spread across multiple social media platforms. These attacks by UCSF leadership against a respected member of the community for their antiracist and decolonial post send a chilling message to faculty, students, staff, patients, and community members. It also obstructs faculty members’ right to academic freedom and all community members’ constitutional right to freedom of speech.
We call for an immediate retraction of your defamatory statement and a public reaffirmation of UCSF’s commitment to free speech that safeguards academic freedom. It is fully within Dr. Marya’s rights to express any political position on a post and to share her academic work. CUCFA condemns UCSF’s institutional response that mobilized an antisemitic trope like that of the “conspiracy theory” levied against her. We demand an end to the “Palestine Exception” to academic freedom and free speech. UC System Provost, Katherine S. Newman’s statement, “We count on the disciplinary expertise of our faculty to develop the methods, substantive scholarly work, peer review, and vigorous debate that makes universities such an essential resource for evaluating difficult and contentious issues of contemporary and historical importance” must apply to all.
Finally, in light of the upcoming Board of Regents meeting where the Regents will deliberate their disciplinary powers over faculty (now apparently planned to occur at the March meeting), an issue CUCFA views as an unprecedented and alarming threat to UC’s educational mission. We remind you that shared governance implies that the Academic Senate, notably Privilege and Tenure, have purview over disciplinary processes. Laid out in the Senate bylaws and APM 15, faculty control over faculty disciplinary processes is fundamental to the conditions of our employment and is thus a core CUCFA issue.
Sincerely,
Constance Penley, CUCFA President and Professor of Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Wendy Matsumura, CUCFA Vice President and Associate Professor of History, UC San Diego
On behalf of the Council of UC Faculty Associations