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Thursday, October 12, 2023

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it... Follow Up

Can't hear you!
On Tuesday, we posted about the odd obscurity of the chancellor's message concerning the Israel-Gaza war.* If an outsider wanted to find that message and went to the obvious places - the chancellor's X (Twitter) account, the UCLA X account - it wasn't there. We also looked at the official UCLA website ucla.edu and its sub-pages such as "newsroom" or "news releases." It wasn't there in contrast with President Drake's message which can be found on the UC website:

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/university-california-statement-mideast-violence

We said we would look again Wednesday (yesterday) to see if maybe there was just a delay in posting the message. But as of around 7 pm yesterday, it wasn't to be found. 

As blog readers will know from an earlier posting, you can find the message on our blog:

http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-response.html

which will also lead you to a UCLA link:

https://view.bp.e.ucla.edu/?qs=42d3ba9eefb8d1ce295c37a7ecce8df3ff7487354bb9edf9c4432a9b93218a2bba21e4eeb539b5fc078a45d1f118d6bf7e73300219dbf27687e68103beff08f0557e2a9c9fe93c4c7417962b4774741d007d898bd19b3392

But an outsider is unlikely to stumble on that link by going through the usual sources of official UCLA communications. 

It's almost as if the chancellor didn't want to have his message be readily available.

But we will look from time to time to see if there is eventually a more prominent posting. The problem with keeping the message obscure is that - as other universities have found - it creates a space for others to seem to be the representatives of the university. And then there have to be explanations concerning official positions. See, for example:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/free-speech/2023/10/11/universities-slow-responses-hamas-attacks-draw-scrutiny

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*http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/10/if-tree-falls-in-forest-and-no-one.html.

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