We write as the executive council of the Berkeley Initiative for Freedom of Inquiry (BIFI), a group of Berkeley faculty representing diverse viewpoints and disciplines who share a common commitment to free inquiry, academic freedom, shared governance, and the integrity of scholarly judgment. We have brief comment on the draft Strategic Plan.
We recommend that the Strategic Plan be tethered to the university’s mission: excellence in research and teaching, along with the discovery and stewardship of knowledge.
The distinctive mission of the University is to serve society as a center of higher learning, providing long-term societal benefits through transmitting advanced knowledge, discovering new knowledge, and functioning as an active working repository of organized knowledge. That obligation, more specifically, includes undergraduate education, graduate and professional education, research, and other kinds of public service, which are shaped and bounded by the central pervasive mission of discovering and advancing knowledge.
Academic freedom is deeply connected to our teaching mission. As APM-010 states, we have a core commitment to “foster[ing] in its students a mature independence of mind.” APM-010 connects this to the freedom to “express the widest range of viewpoints in accord with the standards of scholarly inquiry and professional ethics.”
Accordingly, we recommend that the Strategic Plan adopt a new pillar on free inquiry, connected to excellence. We suggest:
Reinvigorating a Culture of Free Inquiry
As the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, Berkeley has an unmatched opportunity to model a marketplace of ideas
- Affirm that Berkeley’s priorities in student success are served by a commitment to open inquiry and high standards
- Inform the other strategic priorities with inquiry free of ideological constraint
- Reinvigorate the Free Speech Movement’s legacy as a living institutional value
- Foster a culture that actively encourages unconventional thinking in research, teaching, and campus discourse
- Establish Berkeley as a national convening space for difficult conversations that other institutions are unwilling to host
Respectfully Submitted, Executive Committee, Berkeley Initiative for Freedom of Inquiry