Can Such Things Be?

The Daily Bruin carries a very strange article on a student film club that is making a documentary about students protests at UCLA in 1991 against the Gulf War. "Administrators" are said in the article to have allowed the project to go forward only if the documentary makes no mention of UCLA in order to protect the "UCLA brand."

While one can see a rationale for UCLA to control the use of its name if someone wants to put it on a T-shirt, surely there begin to be academic freedom about blocking the use of the name in a student documentary about actual events that occurred on campus. At the time of those events, there were news reports about what happened, including photos reproduced in the Bruin article from the Bruin itself. 

Oddly, the Bruin article simply reports on the decision by "administrators" without raising any questions about it. Excerpt:

UCLA administrators prevented UCLA’s Film and Photography Society from making a historical film about UCLA student activism with any information identifying the UCLA brand. The film, prospectively titled “Good Morning Murphy Hall,” sought to depict the anti-war protest efforts at UCLA following the Persian Gulf War and United States troop mobilization in the Middle East. Samuel Sparks, a fourth-year economics student and executive producer of the Film and Photography Society, said his organization formally requested approval three to four weeks before they planned to start shooting in March, directing the initial inquiry to the UCLA Events Office...

Kyle Walsh, a third-year biology student and director of the film, said the campus facilities in the film had to be portrayed in a way that made the university unidentifiable as UCLA. Walsh added that he believed modifications to the film such as leaving out the name of the building where protests occurred would diminish the effect of the depiction. “Turning it into this faceless, nameless campus, I think, just kind of detracts from the gravity of the situation,” Walsh said. “It doesn’t feel as real.”...

Full story at https://dailybruin.com/2023/04/09/administrators-prohibit-depictions-of-ucla-from-student-film-about-activism.

Note that the Film and Photography Society is an officially-recognized student activity included on the UCLA website: https://community.ucla.edu/studentorg/756. It is not a commercial Hollywood filmmaker looking to use the campus for a backdrop to a story.