City Attorney Carmen A. Trutanich
800 City Hall East
200 N. Main Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Dear Mr. Trutanich,
We, the California Scholars for Academic Freedom,** write to state our
opposition to the request you received from the Global Frontier Justice
Center to prosecute Professor David Klein for his website-based speech
about issues pertaining to the Palestine-Israel conflict. The
Global Frontier Justice Center is asking you to abrogate the right to
freedom of speech and the rights of professors to academic freedom in
the name of their partisan political stance that attempts to repress
any speech in the United States that criticizes Israeli policies.
Their two previous attempts to silence Professor Klein have been
categorically rejected, both by California State University,
Northbridge’s then interim President Harry Hellenbrand, and by
California Attorney General Kamala Harris. In his public letter
of April 2012, President Hellenbrand noted that “invoking the apparatus
of the state to proscribe broad categories of speech in hubs of
innovation and disruption like public universities will have the
paradoxical effect of chilling public exchange while heating up
zealotry.” Attorney General Kamala Harris similarly concluded
that the evidence does not support a finding of misuse of state
resources.
In January, a federal judge in San Francisco threw out a similar
lawsuit by members of a Zionist student organization alleging that
administrators at the University of California, Berkeley had allowed an
“anti-Semitic climate” to develop due to the activities of Students for
Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Student Organization.
The Global Frontier Justice Center is part of a larger campaign to
repress free speech about the Palestine-Israel conflict. This
campaign conflates criticisms of Israel with anti-Semitism.
Public universities have a special responsibility to protect academic
freedom and freedom of speech. Academic freedom includes the
freedom of professors to conduct and disseminate scholarly research, to
design courses and teach students in the areas of their expertise, and
to enjoy First Amendment protections for extramural speech. (The latter
is a right enjoyed by everyone within the jurisdiction of the U.S.
constitution, but is the third leg of the principles of academic
freedom because professors should not be professionally penalized for
non-academic speech that they engage in beyond the academy.)
Academic freedom is not absolute or unrestrained; its “enjoyment” is
determined based on standards of scholarly excellence and achievement
(e.g., acquiring a PhD or other type of graduate degree, getting a job
as an academic at a university, publishing academic works in reputable
scholarly venues, being promoted on the basis of periodic review
processes in which the merits of an individual’s publications and
teaching are judged by peers, and so on). Institutions of higher
learning are the sites where academic freedom is enjoyed and thus they
bear a responsibility for its protection.
The Global Frontier Justice Center is the U.S. representative of the
Israel Law Center, which recently successfully lobbied for a law in
Israel that criminalizes any speech discussing boycott, divestment or
sanctions against Israel or settlements in the occupied
territories. Any public discussion of these activities will
result in punishment. The U.S.-based Jewish Daily Forward, the
Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee have all
criticized this law for its abrogation of democratic rights to freedom
of speech.
It is imperative that you not allow the Israel Law Center to extend its
suppression of free speech to the state of California and, by
extension, to the United States.
The Global Frontier Justice Center uses harassment to attempt to
silence debate in the United States. This harassment of Professor David
Klein is one of many such harassment activities by individuals in the
U.S. who claim to represent the state of Israel.
We urge you to affirm that the City of Los Angeles stands by the
California Constitution and the U.S. Constitution, and categorically
reject the request you received from the Global Justice Frontier Center.
Yours,
California Scholars for Academic Freedom
Contact Persons:
Lisa Rofel
Department of Anthropology
Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz
831-459-3615
LROFEL@ucsc.edu
Manzar Foroohar
History Department
California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), San Luis Obispo
mforooha@calpoly.edu
(805)756-2068
David Delgado Shorter
Associate Professor and Vice Chair
University of California, Los Angeles
(310) 206-6699
shorter@ucla.edu
Gary Fields
Associate Professor
Department of Communication
University of California, San Diego
gfields@ucsd.edu
JESS GHANNAM
Clinical Professor
Department of Psychiatry, and
Global Health Sciences
University of California, San Francisco
School of Medicine
415 921 8096 (T)
jess.ghannam@ucsf.edu
Howard Winant
Professor
Department of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara
805-893-3118
hwinant@soc.ucsb.edu
Professor Mahmood Ibrahim
History Graduate Coordinator and Adviser
Cal Poly Pomona
http://www.csupomona.edu/~mibrahim/
**CALIFORNIA SCHOLARS FOR ACADEMIC FREEDOM is a four-year-old group of
more than 134 academics who teach in over 20 California institutions of
higher education. The group formed as a response to a rash of
violations of academic freedom that were arising from both the
post-9/11/2001 climate of civil rights violations and to the increasing
attacks on progressive educators by neo-conservatives. Many attacks
were aimed at scholars of Arab, Muslim or Middle Eastern descent or at
scholars researching and teaching about the Middle East, Arab and
Muslim communities. Our goal of protecting California Scholars and
students based mainly in institutions of higher education has grown
broader in scope. We recognize that violations of academic freedom
anywhere are threats to academic freedom everywhere.
Cc: Dianne Harrison , President, California State University, Northridge
Harold Hellenbrand, Provost, California
State University, Northridge