September 24, 2020
President Michael V. Drake
Office of the President
University of California
1111 Franklin St., 12th Floor
Oakland, CA 94607
Delivered via Email to: president@ucop.edu
Dear President Drake,
As members of the Board of the Council of UC Faculty Associations, we write with the utmost urgency regarding the cancellation of an approved remote/streaming panel at San Francisco State University yesterday, September 23, by Zoom, and the subsequent cancellation of the same event by Facebook Live and cut-off in mid-stream by YouTube. The event, titled “Whose Narratives: Gender, Justice and Resistance,” was sponsored by SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies Program and the Women and Gender Studies Department, and was to feature Palestinian feminist and militant Leila Khaled, as well as several South African and American activists.
After protests by several pro-Israel groups, Zoom announced that it was prohibiting the webinar – which was thoroughly vetted and approved by the University – from taking place less than two hours before its commencement. The event was subsequently restricted by Facebook and then, after beginning to be streamed on YouTube, was cut off by the company.
Zoom and the others claimed that Khaled’s membership in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (she is also a member of the Palestine National Council) made her appearance a potential violation of US law. SFSU clearly understood this not to be the case. The relevant Supreme Court decision on this issue, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, which deals with the intersection of the First Amendment and “material support for terrorism” laws, clearly notes that there is no prohibition of being associated with or even a member of an organization, only for providing it with material support of some kind. Moreover, we need not remind you that the First Amendment extends the right not only to speak but also to hear and receive information even when presented by people opposed to the US or its policies.
As SFSU president Lynn Mahoney explained in defending her support of the event, it is imperative that faculty and the university be free from censorship, even from voices that most would find objectionable and even abhorrent: “The university will not enforce silence – even when speech is abhorrent.”
By preemptively canceling this talk, Zoom, Facebook and YouTube – which together represent three of the most important remote platforms used by universities during the Covid-19 pandemic – are engaging in a dangerous precedent of censorship, which will no doubt lead other governments and political groups to demand they cancel other events, classes or content that they oppose. As our colleague Saree Makdisi, professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA, argues, it is a frightening example of “what happens when we subcontract our universities to Zoom.” Simply put, we universities cannot allow Zoom to have a veto power over the content of our lectures and classes.
We thus call upon you to publicly demand that Zoom, Facebook, YouTube (Google/Alphabet) and other increasingly important social media-related educational platforms immediately agree never to cancel or otherwise censor university-related teaching, lectures or other events and, if they refuse, to move immediately towards finding alternative platforms for teaching and lectures that agree to respect our core First Amendment and Academic Freedom rights.
Sincerely,
The Executive Board of the Council of UC Faculty Associations
cc: Chancellor Carol T. Christ
Chancellor Gary Stephen May
Chancellor Howard Gillman
Chancellor Gene D. Block
Chancellor Juan Sánchez Muñoz
Chancellor Kim A Wilcox
Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla
Chancellor Sam Hawgood, MBBS
Chancellor Henry Yang
Chancellor Cynthia Larive