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A controversy over a fall 2002 UC Berkeley course description that warned “conservative thinkers ... to seek other sections” has sparked a systemwide debate at the nine-campus University of California over one of academia’s most treasured concepts: academic freedom. 

Academic freedom, broadly defined, is the right to pursue research, teaching and publication without interference or intimidation by administrators who may not agree with a scholar’s work.  

At issue is a 69-year-old policy, crafted by former UC President Robert G. Sproul, which reserves academic freedom for scholars who engage in the “dispassionate” pursuit of “truth” and keep politics out of the classroom. 

The old policy has remained in place, largely unnoticed, since 1934, despite a politicization of the college campus that dates back to the 1960s and a growing consensus that there is no objective truth about anything.  

A new proposed policy, written by UC Berkeley law professor Robert Post at the behest of UC President Richard Atkinson, seeks to adapt to modern thinking. The statement, in line with those of most major American universities, asserts that professors should be free to pursue scholarship, regardless of its political bent, as long as it is quality work. 

“Most would now agree that scholarship can be both politically engaged and also professionally competent,” wrote Post in a March 12 letter to Atkinson accompanying the new policy. “In fact political passion is the engine that drives some of the best scholarship and teaching at the University of California.” 

But critics say the new statement, however modern, removes important safeguards against university professors who intimidate students who do not agree with their politics. 

“This is happening everywhere,” said Luann Wright, president of NoIndoctrination.org, a small, San Diego-based group that opposes bias in the classroom. “Why not leave the protections in place?” 

Proponents of the new policy say there are adequate safeguards in place elsewhere in the university’s policies. 

The UC Academic Senate, which represents faculty at all nine campuses, is reviewing the new policy and tinkering with small stylistic changes. An advisory vote is expected this summer or fall, but the ultimate decision likely will rest with Atkinson. 

UC spokesman Brad Hayward said it is unclear if Atkinson will have to seek a final stamp of approval from the UC Board of Regents, given that former President Sproul did not seek a vote from the board when he issued the initial policy in 1934 and made it official in 1944. 

UC dusted off the old policy last year when a national controversy erupted over a course description, written by graduate student instructor Snehal Shingavi, for his fall 2002 UC Berkeley writing class “The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance.” 

The description discouraged “conservative thinkers” from taking the course and argued that the state of Israel “has displaced, maimed and killed many Palestinian people.” 

Critics blasted the description as biased, and the story made it all the way to the Wall Street Journal, where an editorial decried the “Intifada curriculum” as evidence that American universities are “beholden to leftist ideologies.” 

The university removed the “conservative thinkers” language, but left the bulk of the description intact. The English department also assigned a professor to monitor the class. 

Hayward said the university, in the midst of the controversy, reviewed the old academic freedom policy, located in the university’s Academic Personnel Manual, and found it out of date and not very useful.  

But critics say the old policy provided just the sort of safeguards against bias that the university should have embraced in the midst of the crisis. A new policy, without those safeguards, marks a step backward, they say.  

“It is a funny kind of response to [the controversy]—to say, okay, in the future, we’ll just let it happen,” said UC Berkeley history professor Richard M. Abrams. 

But Hayward said the university’s move to revamp the academic freedom policy was not a direct response to the Palestinian course controversy. He said UC simply stumbled across the old statement in the course of the crisis and realized it was time for reform. 

Furthermore, he said, there are several protections against faculty abuse of power in another section of the Academic Personnel Manual. 

The rules guard against “significant intrusion of material unrelated to the course,” preventing a chemistry professor, for instance, from lecturing on the evils of war. The section also prevents “use of the position or powers of a faculty member to coerce the judgment or conscience of a student” and forbids an instructor from evaluating a student “by criteria not directly reflexive of course performance,” such as political views. 

Wright acknowledged that these additional rules are significant, but argues there is symbolic importance in keeping protections in place in the university’s marquee statement on academic freedom. 

“Why remove these safeguards?” she asked. Students “should feel that [the classroom is] a safe place to say, ‘I’m looking at it from a different perspective.’” 

Wright cites dozens of postings on her Web site, from anonymous, conservative students, who complain about political intimidation at the hands of their liberal professors. 

One recent posting by a UC Santa Barbara student read: “I always felt that in [my instructor’s] eyes I was an enemy, not a young student who had come there to learn and discuss and debate. She did not want to hear what I had to say if I did not agree with her. She was not open, she only wanted to silence the other side to the story. It seemed ridiculous because here she was teaching freedom and equality, yet she was discriminating against me based on my political views.” 

But supporters of the new policy say intimidation is rare and argue that the new statement is simply a common sense reform that conservatives are turning into a political football. 

“I feel like this is a big argument over not a lot,” said UC San Diego political science professor Ellen Comisso. “These guys are going to make it political story — ‘these left-wing professors, in order to indoctrinate their students, are attacking the no indoctrination policy.’” 

Wright, who describes herself as middle-of-the-road, argues that indoctrination is a real problem and that she would also be opposed to a right-wing professor imposing views on students. 

When Sproul wrote the original academic freedom policy in 1934, he was intent on maintaining UC’s image as a neutral institution and concerned that radicals were soiling the university’s name, according to C. Michael Otten’s 1970 book “University authority and the student: The Berkeley Experience.” 

Sproul’s concern is clear in a passage of his academic freedom policy which reads: “In order to protect [academic] freedom, the University assumes the right to prevent exploitation of is prestige by unqualified persons or by those who would use it as a platform for propaganda.” 

UC Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement of the 1960s sharply challenged the notion of an apolitical campus. And many intellectuals, dating back at least as far World War II, disputed the notion that there is an objective “truth,” arguing instead that everyone brings their own biases and perspectives to the study of any given issue. 

Post, author of the new policy, said his new policy simply reflects these modern currents in American intellectual life and encourages a healthy debate among passionate people who are nonetheless open to new ideas.  

“All of academic freedom rests on this notion: that you can’t know something in advance,” he said. “So, to attack that is very bizarre.”