FOIA Files: The University of California

Is the University of California's National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement as committed to First Amendment principles as it claims?

On November 20, 2022, 85% of Stanford University’s Faculty Senate voted to condemn Dr. Scott Atlas, a former chief of radiology at the Stanford University Medical Center who was serving on President Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force. The Stanford faculty pilloried Atlas for questioning the efficacy of state-enforced lockdowns, face masks, and social distancing protocols, even arguing that his claims were “anathema to our community, our values and our belief that we should use knowledge for good.” A few weeks after the Faculty Senate rendered its verdict, the Academic Advisory Board of the University of California’s National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement held a meeting in which its members questioned whether Atlas’ COVID-19 pronouncements were protected by academic freedom.

A series of FOIA productions shed some light on what was discussed during that meeting. Dana Nelkin, a philosophy professor at UC San Diego, seemed to draw a distinction between academic freedom and cases in which faculty members promote ideas with the potential to harm the general public, especially in the context of a pandemic. This line of thinking was seconded by Suneil Koliwad, a medical professor at UC San Francisco, who argued that Atlas had “hit us very hard as scientists in the area of public health, from basic to clinical to epidemiological.”

Nelkin and Koliwad did not respond to Racket’s request for comment.

Why did the Stanford Faculty Senate and the National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement feel the need to castigate Atlas? In the years since the pandemic, experts have acknowledged both the negligible effects of the lockdowns on mortality rates and the deleterious effects of COVID-19 policy on childhood development. Given everything we know now, was Atlas’ perspective really deserving of institutional rebuke?

According to Atlas:

I am proud to be an outlier — happily proven right when the inliers are so wrong. All judgment of the US response lies at the hands of the lockdowners. Unfortunately, my advice — “targeted protection” —was [sic] rejected, with rare exceptions, like Florida.

The National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement was founded to “to explore the intersection of expression, engagement and democratic learning and consider what can be done to restore trust in the value of free speech on college campuses and within society at large.” Sounds innocuous enough, right? But if the Center’s response to the Scott Atlas controversy is any indication, the group has more in common with a political NGO than an academic entity committed to free expression. While it should come as no surprise that American universities are hotbeds of left-liberal groupthink, these latest FOIA disclosures reveal just how ideologically cloistered the chief players at the Center are. There’s little to no evidence of any dissent or deviation from the prevailing orthodoxy on college campuses.

In June 2020, the Center’s executive director, Michelle Deutchman, sent her peers an email from Lauren Robel, an executive vice president and provost at Indiana University Bloomington. In that email, Robel outlined the COVID-19 Healthy Hoosier Commitment, which included a list of actions IU students would be required to take if they chose to stay on campus during the pandemic. The Commitment included a mask mandate, a testing registration requirement, a demand that students who tested positive comply with contact tracing, and a prohibition on large gatherings.

In a message to a few of her peers at other schools, Robel mentioned receiving four responses from mask resistors, who “relented when [she] let them know [she] had asked the registrar to prepare their transcripts for transfer.” Deutchman shared Robel’s response with some of her colleagues and wrote, “I think she exemplifies leadership.”

The COVID-19 pandemic was the ultimate test for free speech advocates. Many of them failed it. Of course, the pandemic is just one issue that calls into question the Center’s commitment to its stated mission. Back in March 2020, intern Jonathan Schwartz provided Deutchman with a list of organizations the Center could feature in its “Speech Spotlight” series. Schwartz wrote:

One of the tragedies of all that’s going on is an increase in hate-speech and hate events. What are schools doing to combat this? How are diversity and inclusion offices working to encourage inclusivity through online learning?

In February 2021, when asked to come up with a theme for the Center’s third annual #SpeechMatters conference, Schwartz proposed the following (emphasis ours):

On the Speech Matters conference, for a theme I would recommend something along the lines of “build back better” (but obviously not that exactly). Maybe “Challenges and Opportunities for the Future of Speech and Engagement.”

Schwartz also recommended writing an op-ed about what how the Biden administration’s Department of Education should promote “both free expression and inclusivity.”

In February 2021, while planning the #SpeechMatters conference, Deutchman suggested bringing in UC President Michael V. Drake to either moderate a panel discussion or participate in a fireside chat with somebody from the Department of Education. Corey Feinstein, then serving as the university’s associate director of presidential engagement and outreach, cited Drake’s forceful condemnation of the Capitol riot and his support for the COVID-19 vaccine as reasons why he might be able to give a good speech on the merits of science.

On February 21, Deutchman invited Renée DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory to speak at that same conference.

A few days later, she invited Vijaya Gadde, then the chief legal officer at Twitter. Gadde, who “helped drive [Twitter] to more heavily regulate what users can say and post,” was also a member of the Center’s National Advisory Board and spoke at its inaugural #SpeechMatters conference. Deutchman hoped that Gadde would be able to discuss the role she played in orchestrating Trump’s Twitter ban.

Gadde declined the invitation, citing the upcoming congressional hearings on that topic.

These FOIA disclosures span three documents and over 1,400 pages. Nevertheless, they reveal a wealth of information about the Center’s ideological makeup and inner workings. As always, you can access all three productions in the Racket FOIA Library.

Below are a few more highlights from these disclosures.

• “THE GOAL IS NOT TO STIFLE SPEECH” On March 1, 2019, while discussing preparations for the conference, Deutchman wrote, “And I talked with UCI Chief of Police — he’s going to reach out to his contacts at Metro DC police. He suggested two plains clothes [sic] officers. All agreed that the goal is not to stifle speech — rather to be prepared just on the off chance that...” (See page 1,190 of the third batch.)

• SCHEDULE AND PROGRAMMING You’ll find the schedule and programming information for the first annual #SpeechMatters conference on pages 1,196 through 1,198 and pages 1,200 through 1,204 of the third batch.

• THE ADL CONNECTION On July 15, 2019, Michael Lieberman of the Anti-Defamation League helped connect Deutchman with Yale University student Jonathan Schwartz, who would later become an intern for the Center. Schwartz spent three years as the director of voter engagement at Every Vote Counts, an organization he co-founded. He also served as a legislative assistant at the ADL. Deutchman, meanwhile, worked for the ADL from 2003 to 2018. (See pages 748 through 754 of the third batch.)

• TRANSITION DOCUMENT On October 2, 2020, Deutchman reached out to Rebecca MacKinnon, the founding director of Ranking Digital Rights, to discuss drafting a transition document on free speech issues for the next presidential administration. MacKinnon is currently the vice president of global advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as a life member of the Council of Foreign Relations. She was previously a fellow at the New America Foundation and the Open Society Institute. (See pages 343 and 344 of the third batch.)

• CAMPUS SPEECH PANEL? On December 1, 2020, Lara Schwartz, the founding director of American University’s Project on Civil Discourse (PCD), reached out to Deutchman in the hopes of organizing a panel discussion on campus speech. Schwartz, who previously worked for Media Matters for America, wanted to be on the panel and suggested that they discuss three topics: how to undo the damage of the Trump administration, how to handle the “threat of misinformation” and the “challenge of growing info literacy,” and how to balance inclusion and freedom. In an email to the Center’s public relations team at Glen Echo, Deutchman raised concerns about promoting Schwartz. (See pages 25 through 28 of the third batch.)

• KEEPING UP WITH REBEKAH JONES On December 17, 2020, Deutchman mentioned scientist Rebekah Jones as a possible speaker. Jones had alleged that she was fired from the Florida Department of Health for refusing to manipulate the state’s COVID-19 dashboard, but her claims would go on to be debunked. (See page 291 of the third batch.)

• “DE-PLATFORM AND POLICE LIES” In January 2021, Deutchman and Simone Chambers, a political science professor at UC Irvine, discussed whether social media companies ought to have banned Trump in the wake of the Capitol riot. Deutchman agreed with Chambers that the question of incitement was a “red herring,” and Chambers argued that, in the short term, platforms should “self-regulate” and “de-platform and police lies.” (See pages 315 through 317 of the third batch.)

• TALKING POINTS You’ll find UC President Michael V. Drake’s talking points for his livestream with Deutchman on pages 242 through 248. Drake’s notes make reference to the statement he made in response to the “insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.” They describe the need to “commit to anti-racism at every level and the ways in which “research has advanced our understanding of implicit bias.” They also claim that “erosion in public trust in institutions damages institutions that exist to serve the public good” and mourn the “danger of undermining trust in science at a time when we are facing a public health crisis.”

• A NEW ALLIANCE On March 16, 2021, Henry Reichman, professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay, sent Deutchman an email complaining about the Center’s decision to put Keith Whittington’s new Academic Freedom Alliance “center stage” at its third annual #SpeechMatters conference. Reichman emphasized that, while he found the “right-leaning tilt of the alliance’s members” and some of their ideas on free speech “deeply problematic,” that was not his primary reason for objecting to the pride of place they were given. (See pages 695 and 696 of the third batch.)

• DIRESTA, RICE, AND MARWICK On April 15, 2021, Deutchman sent Renée DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory, Ebonee Rice of the News Literacy Project, and Alice Marwick of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill a series of questions in preparation for their panel discussion at the #SpeechMatters conference. (See page two of the first batch.)

• “MEDIA MANIPULATION AND DISINFORMATION ONLINE” On April 21, 2021, a day after the conference, Marwick sent the Center a 2017 report she authored called “Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online.” (See page 11 of the second batch.)