Update, December 7. UC’s Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, Michael Brown, responded.
November 6, 2020
Professor Janet Napolitano
Goldman School of Public Policy, UCB
2607 Hearst Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94720-7320
Dear Professor Napolitano,
We write to you as University of California colleagues and the Council of UC Faculty Associations board of directors to congratulate you on having been invited to join the board of Zoom. We take Zoom’s invitation to you as an implicit recognition that they have an urgent need to address their recent infringement on faculty free speech and academic freedom and, more generally, their relationship with higher ed institutions.
As you may be aware, on September 23, Zoom canceled a regular webinar-lecture also open to the broader public in a course taught at San Francisco State University. The webinar, titled “Whose Narratives: Gender, Justice and Resistance,” was sponsored by SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies Program and the Women and Gender Studies Department. The event was to feature several South African and American activists, as well as 76-year-old Palestinian feminist and member of parliament, Leila Khaled, who is also connected with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)–an organization that is on the US State Department’s list of “terrorist organizations.” Zoom cited anti-terrorism and other laws to justify canceling this reservation. But as numerous letters of protest by academics (including ours to President Drake dated 09/24) have made clear, Zoom’s position was not only on shaky legal grounds but in flagrant violation of the organizers’ academic freedom.
Despite strong letters of protest and condemnation by scholars and professional associations, the company has refused to respond or offer a concrete policy to ensure such censorship and violations of academic freedom do not occur again. We hope that your invitation to join the board represents Zoom’s attempt to place a greater emphasis on academic freedom and censorship issues going forward. Still, we are concerned such a policy change will not happen unless you use your position on the Board to act as a vocal representative of and advocate for the fullest measure of academic freedom and a prohibition of censorship of courses, meetings, and other educational classes, conferences, workshops and events using Zoom.
We call upon you publicly to declare your unequivocal support for these principles as a faculty member of the University of California and its former President. You should make it clear to Zoom that should the company engage in such a violation again, you would no longer be able to legitimate their business with the values of the University of California.
We look forward to your public statement and reply to this letter at the earliest possible time.
On behalf of the CUCFA Board,
Professor Constance Penley,
President, Council of UC Faculty Associations
Professor Wendy Matsumara,
Vice President, Council of UC Faculty Associations