From: Nicholas Dirks Chancellor
Date: Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 12:08 PM
Subject: Civility and Free Speech
To: "Faculty; Staff; Students"
If you are a manager who supervises Cal employees without email access, please circulate this information to all.
Please do not reply to this message
Date: Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 12:08 PM
Subject: Civility and Free Speech
To: "Faculty; Staff; Students"
Every fall for the last many years, we have issued statements
concerning the virtue of civility on campus. This principle is one of
several that Berkeley staff, students, faculty, and alumni themselves
developed and today regard as “fundamental to our mission of teaching,
research and public service.” To quote further from our “principles of
community”: “We are committed to ensuring freedom of expression and
dialogue that elicits the full spectrum of views held by our varied
communities. We respect the differences as well as the commonalities
that bring us together and call for civility and respect in our personal
interactions.” For a full list of these stated principles, please see http://berkeley.edu/about/ principles.shtml.
In this year’s email, I extended this notion of civility to another
crucial element of Berkeley’s identity, namely our unflinching
commitment to free speech — a principle this campus will spend much of
this fall celebrating in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the
Free Speech Movement.
My message was intended to re-affirm values that have for years
been understood as foundational to this campus community. As I also
noted in my message, these values can exist in tension with each other,
and there are continuing and serious debates about fundamental issues
related to them. In invoking my hope that commitments to civility and to
freedom of speech can complement each other, I did not mean to suggest
any constraint on freedom of speech, nor did I mean to compromise in any
way our commitment to academic freedom, as defined both by this campus
and the American Association of University Professors. (For the AAUP’s
Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, please see http://www.aaup.org/ issues/academic-freedom.)
I did, however, express my conviction that in the ongoing debates
on campus about these and other issues we might collectively see the
value of real engagement on divisive issues across different
perspectives and opinions. By “real engagement” I mean openness to, and
respect for, the different viewpoints that make up our campus community.
I remain hopeful that our debates will be both productive and robust
not only to further mutual understanding but also for the sake of our
overriding intellectual mission.
Sincerely,
Nicholas B. Dirks
Chancellor
Please do not reply to this message
"Please do not reply to this message" -- Wow, so that's actually what he means by "real engagement."
ReplyDeleteHere's an open letter to Dirks written by members of the Board of Directors of the Free Speech Movement Archives:
http://www.fsm-a.org/2014%20Sept%20FSM-A%20Board%20Letter.html