Universities should be a place to challenge the status quo, says Katie Rodger, UC-AFT president.

Rodger, who teaches writing at the University of California, Davis, says she and her colleagues are concerned that the UC system has changed its “campus climate” policies without meaningful feedback from campus unions, the Academic Senate, and student governments.

For faculty members without tenure at UC campuses, they have long felt their right to free speech is precarious, Rodger said.

A full-time position, like she has, is relatively rare. The majority of the members, which number between 5,000 and 6,000, are part-time.

“The realities of a job that is unstable and uncertain really equates to a limitation and a suppression of our ability to exercise the intention of what academic freedom is,” Rodger said, “which is not only the right to speak freely in terms of the content of our courses, but often to speak up against what one’s own institution might be doing.”

Rodger thinks that hesitation to speak up has gotten more widespread.

“What we’ve seen unfold in the last academic year has challenged what academic freedom might look like,” she noted. “Even for people with tenure.”

Rodger and Mia McIver, the president of the CFT Universities Council, went to Washington, D.C earlier this year to see Congressional hearings about universities’ handling of pro-Palestinian protests.

“Chancellor Block at UCLA was testifying about the student encampment protests,” Rodger said. “We watched as Republican lawmakers, in my mind, gaslit and scapegoated campus community members.”

This summer the California State Legislature made $25 million in funding for the UCs contingent on developing a “systemwide framework for its campus climate policy.”

UC-AFT, Local 1474, responded to these changes with a statement, listing four main concerns: that the process of establishing the policies was undemocratic; that they violate the collective bargaining agreements; that employees’ and students’ rights to rally or protest may be restricted; and that enforcing a ban on masks would undermine both public health and free speech.

Kendra Levine, a transportation librarian at the University of California, Berkeley and chief negotiator for UC-AFT, says she and her colleagues have been fighting for academic freedom to be included in their contract. The existing UC policy only covered students and instructors in classroom settings, she says, and since librarians and researchers aren’t usually in the classroom, they were left out.

During recent contract negotiations, they got a letter from the university saying academic freedom will be a policy.

“It now covers academic freedom issues outside the classroom, so we brought it back into the contract,” she said. “So, there’s no question if a librarian has any concerns about academic freedom–whether or not we have it.”

The atmosphere at libraries has gotten tense, Levine says, and an incident about six years ago started a conversation about academic freedom when a supervisor questioned a librarian’s choice of words in a title for a presentation on cataloging.

“The title was a little jokey and self-effacing,” Levine said. “The supervisor told them they had to change it, and that seemed like overstepping because this person was just making a presentation for other librarians.”

Levine notes that university librarians do many different things, from working in metadata services and cataloging to offering reference support to instructing undergraduates, and they need to be able to approach their work without fearing repercussions.

“There’s going to be limits to that due to the political climate and budgets and external pressures,” she said. “It’s disheartening, but I think we have to acknowledge that academic freedom doesn’t totally exist. There are definitely limits to it.”

Those limits were underscored by the concerns of members of the Claremont College Librarians, Dominican College faculty, and the University of San Francisco Part-Time Faculty Association.

Are you a CFT member that has a story or thoughts to share about academic freedom? Reach out to the editor, Nason McCarthy nmccarthy@cft.org