From Dr. Ron Stockton’s Facebook post:
Approved by 71% of faculty.
About time, In My Not-Very-Humble Opinion.
(sorry I don’t have the actual wording)
Faculty pushes to censure University of Michigan regents over speech, protest policies
Updated: Nov. 08, 2024 By Samuel Dodge | sdodge@mlive.com
Update: All motions passed by at least 71% on Thursday, Nov. 7.
ANN ARBOR, MI – Faculty representatives at the University of Michigan could formally censure the Board of Regents for the first time ever over changes to freedom of speech and protest rule changes.
The Faculty Senate, the governing body that represents the university’s faculty, approved during its Nov. 4 meeting three motions for all faculty to consider over the next three days.
The motions include a review of university bylaws, pausing rule changes addressing discipline of students and admonishing the regents for not involving faculty in changes to speech and protest rules.
Faculty members have until 5 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 7 to approve the three motions via electronic voting. A separate motion criticizing the university’s handling of gender-based violence and sex discrimination was also approved for a faculty-wide vote.
The censure motion, which faculty called the first of its kind against the regents in university history, was brought forward by School of Information professor Kentaro Toyama. He accused the regents of taking a “dramatic authoritarian turn” in the past year and not seeking community input on campus-wide rule changes.
“This past year, the regents pretended to care about the opinion of those they oversee,” Toyama said. “Not students, not frontline staff and not faculty…they have repeatedly rebuffed faculty requests to meet with them, and they have undertaken a series of changes to university policy that are autocratic in nature.”
The university respects the faculty’s voting process and will wait to see how the censure motion plays out, university spokesperson Kay Jarvis said. Any motion that passes would be advisory in nature, she said.
Multiple regents declined comment at this time until a result on the motion is official.
The embattled rule changes include university bylaws on protests that can disrupt lawful speech on campus, discipline against students that can be enacted by the university without someone’s complaint and a commitment to individuals adhering to “institutional neutrality” by not making political statements on behalf of the university.
The university is committed to free expression, just not speech or conduct that violates the law or university policy, according to the university’s Public Affairs website.
“This includes targeted speech that involves bullying, defamation, destruction of property, harassment or threats,” according to the website’s section on “Free Speech on Campus.”
“Because the university is a public institution, we are prohibited from interfering with lawful speech and are also required to intervene when anyone attempts to substantially disrupt or interfere with the lawful speech of others,” officials say on the website.
Part of the Faculty Senate’s criticism was about how they lacked input on these changes. History professor Derek Peterson motioned for a pause in the implementation of rules where the university can make its own complaints against students rather than investigate ones made by community members.
“The revised policy makes the University less democratic and less responsive to the will of ourselves the faculty, and because it allows unaccountable university administrators to impose disproportionate sanctions on our students,” Peterson said Monday. “It has the effect also of chilling students’ speech and activism.”
Additionally, the rule changes have “fostered a climate of repression at the university” through police action against primarily pro-Palestinian protesters, security guards on the Diag, disciplinary actions such as campus bans and pushes for criminal charges, according to the censure motion.
There have been numerous pro-Palestinian protests on the Ann Arbor campus in the last year. The protesters have demanded the university divest its $18-billion endowment from any Israeli companies or weapons manufacturers that arm the Israeli military. University officials have repeatedly said divestment is off the table.
Protests have escalated to sit-ins inside university President Santa Ono’s office, vandalizing Ono and regents’ private homes and placing fake corpses at every regent’s home. An encampment of dozens of protesters on the Diag was cleared by law enforcement in May, including the use of chemical spray.
Protests have led to multiple criminal charges for protesters, including felony ones for resisting police officers.
“We must ensure that all of us here and those who follow us will have the space to act and speak freely in all places and spaces, from the Diag to the classroom,” said Stephen Ward, professor of Afro-American and African Studies. “We can and should act to reverse the course on which the regents are traveling.”
The former Faculty Senate chair Tom Braun pushed back against all the motions while also saying the actions of student protesters has been extreme at times.
“I’ve seen damage to UM buildings, vandalism to the private homes and workplaces of UM regents and our university’s president and even threatening language in emails sent to me by students,” he said.
Braun also criticized the push to pause rule implementation since a previous attempt already failed, and said the current faculty’s criticism of the regents is only distancing themselves from future negotiations.
“Regents are not refusing to speak to all faculty,” he said. “This motion will do one thing: further distance faculty from the regents, but that is what the authors of this motion want. They want us to be angry and frustrated, and they want us to act foolishly, and they want us to be isolated from negotiation.”
Craig Smith, a university librarian, disagreed with Braun by calling the regents’ actions “unacceptable.”
“I don’t feel like I’ve been told to be angry. I feel like I am angry,” he said.
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