BY KENNETH KLEE, DANIEL LOWENSTEIN AND GRANT NELSON

Because the Academic Senate does and should include people with widely divergent opinions on most public issues, it is essential that it confine itself to curriculum, academic standards, admissions, research, academic personnel matters and other issues within the university’s mission.

Recently 200 of our colleagues were not content to organize and speak out against the war in their own names, as they had every right to do. Rather, they adopted a resolution to put the Senate on record as saying “to our fellow citizens, the president of the United States and to our senators and representatives” that “we deplore the administration’s doctrine of preventative war and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.”

As we stated in an op-ed to the Los Angeles Times two weeks ago, “the aca-demic senate includes us. A rump group of our colleagues put these words, words that we find loathsome, into our mouths.” How would those colleagues feel if the tables were turned and a handful of faculty used the senate process to implore the U.S. government to institute a complete ban on travel to Cuba so long as the Castro dictatorship remains in power? Or to condemn abortion?

We emphasize the wisdom of words written by a distinguished University of Chicago faculty committee over 35 years ago:

“To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. ... It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.

“Since the university is a community only for these limited and distinctive purposes, it is a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions of its existence and effectiveness. There is no mechanism by which it can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives. It cannot insist that all of its members favor a given view of social policy; if it takes collective action, therefore, it does so at the price of censuring any minority who do not agree with the view adopted. In brief, it is a community which cannot resort to majority vote to reach positions on public issues.”

When our colleagues manipulated the Senate process to their own ends, they threatened academic freedom and trampled on the crucial norm of collegiality. Equally important, they endangered the highly valued UCLA tradition of shared governance between administration and faculty, which is supposed to be the sole purpose of the Academic Senate.

We repeat the main point of our article: “Unless the academic senate is prohibited from taking political positions unrelated to the university, then mandatory membership in it should be ended. It is unconscionable that we or anyone else should be required, as a condition of teaching at UCLA, to be a member of an organization that speaks in our name and against our views on such controversial issues.”

Klee, Lowenstein and Nelson are professors in the School of Law.