Neutral

From the San Francisco Chronicle: ...Amid persistent campus conflicts between the groups following the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas and Israel’s huge military retaliation against Palestinians in Gaza, [UC President] Drake announced a series of measures on Nov. 15 intended to tamp down anger and improve relations between the groups. Included in the measures, UC expects to spend $2 million to develop education programs at each campus that include a “viewpoint-neutral history of the Middle East.” The idea, Drake told the UC regents, was to “improve the public discourse” and create a “better understanding of antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Now 150 professors from UC’s nine undergraduate campuses — including historians, Middle East scholars and department heads — say that Drake’s plan is improperly prescriptive and amounts to a form of censorship. “We are all committed to inclusivity and academic excellence, but to suggest that the UC administration should determine how and what we teach will set a chilling precedent for our field,” the letter said...

Comment: Yours truly suspects that what Drake has in mind is something like the Dartmouth approach which we have highlighted in two prior posts on this blog.* No one at Dartmouth is forced to participate in teaching in that program. It is likely that the $2 million figure Drake proposed was pulled out a hat and was really an effort to show the administration was doing something to address campus tensions. It might be best to look at the Dartmouth model and, if someone or some group wants to apply that model to UC, the $2 million might be useful. (I doubt the Dartmouth program cost anywhere near that amount.) Note also that opposing "viewpoint-neutral" teaching, or Drake's incentive for it, might seem to the general public as saying that teaching must be "biased," a Bad Look for UC if it is perceived that way. The headline of the SF Chronicle article is "UC professors decry plan to teach ‘viewpoint-neutral’ Mideast history." Most readers will not get into the nuance of a lengthy, erudite letter.

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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/11/dartmouths-example-in-dealing-with_01421823328.html; https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/11/dartmouths-example-in-dealing-with.html. The original Drake statement is at https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/11/uc-regents-chair-leib-uc-president.html [Click on video]. The letter referred to in the SF Chronicle article above is at https://docs.google.com/document/d/17Q4kUQkMUHyLZGoGiYh6pBmr92vke3G2P8pmXGZsZ5I/edit.