Statement by the Executive Committee of the Berkeley Initiative for Free Inquiry, a faculty group dedicated to improving the climate for free speech at Berkeley:
We join our colleagues in the Berkeley Faculty for the Freedom to Learn and the Berkeley Faculty Association in deploring the current presidential administration’s capricious attacks on universities around the country and its crackdown on free speech. In particular, we condemn this administration’s wielding of deportation procedures to silence social and political dissent by noncitizens on American campuses and across the US. Threats to deport members of our academic communities for disfavored but constitutionally protected speech unacceptably chill the free expression of those directly targeted, both on campus and off, and deprive our entire academic community of the benefit of hearing the full range of all of its members’ perspectives.
We also applaud university leaders at Harvard and elsewhere who have resisted unreasonable demands to compromise the integrity of their institutions under the pressure of arbitrary cancellations of federal funding, and we celebrate our colleagues at Berkeley and across the country who have raised their voices in defense of the core academic values of free speech and academic freedom.
Finally, we encourage all of our Berkeley colleagues to vote for the “Berkeley Resolution to Protect Academic and Political Freedom” on April 23, 2025 at 3pm in a special meeting of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate.