Free inquiry and open debate is vital for research and education.
The Berkeley Initiative for Free Inquiry (BIFI) is a faculty group devoted to improving the climate for free speech
Our mission
We are a group of Berkeley faculty representing diverse viewpoints and disciplines who share a common commitment to free inquiry and open debate. We believe these are vital ingredients to maintaining the University’s position as a leading institution for research and higher education.
Free inquiry is a central requirement for the University’s excellence in all of its core missions: A proper university education must invite students to grapple earnestly with difficult and uncomfortable questions, credible scientific research must approach politically loaded empirical questions with unflinching willingness to report inconvenient findings, and vigorous scholarship in the arts and humanities must be free to boldly question consensus beliefs and values. While we prize civility and kindness, these values must never be grounds for suppressing debate: at Berkeley, no ideas are off-limits, and no assumptions beyond questioning.
Group members affirm that a special responsibility for the stewardship of academic freedom falls on the faculty, who lead in the classroom, set disciplinary standards, and evaluate the scholarship of students and colleagues. Tenured faculty, who enjoy the strongest protections for their professional and extramural speech, must correspondingly shoulder the primary burden of defending others’ right to freely explore controversial ideas.
We also recognize that Berkeley can truly flourish only if non-tenured members of our scholarly community, including students, can think and speak freely. As such, formal procedural protections alone are no substitute for a community-wide commitment to approaching hotly contested issues with an open-minded spirit of curiosity and charity toward opposing viewpoints.
We will strive to protect the freedoms so hard won here.
Latest Updates
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Harvard May Consider Institutional Neutrality
The Harvard Crimson reports: Interim Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 is expected to announce a working group that will consider a policy of institutional neutrality, a move that comes just months after the University became embroiled in controversy over its response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
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Is Institutional Neutrality Catching On?
The CHE reports: Amid a polarized political climate and debates about the war in Gaza and hot-button social issues like abortion rights, university leaders’ statements about current events have attracted attention and scrutiny. A small but growing number of institutions are responding to the pressure by swearing off such statements altogether.
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“Faculty for Yale” Formed
The group’s founding commitments are:
Our goals
We intend to pursue the following goals to improve the climate for free inquiry at Berkeley:
- Review new and existing university policies to ensure that they are compatible with academic freedom and freedom of speech, and advocate for revisions where necessary.
- Work to ensure the full spectrum of rights under Academic Senate Bylaw 40.3: “No political test shall ever be considered in the appointment and promotion of any faculty member or employee.”
- Advocate for colleagues and students when they come under attack for the ideas they express.
- Advocate for the embrace of the Kalven Report and for institutional neutrality on contested social and political questions that do not directly concern the University’s operation.
- Ensure that university time, place and manner restrictions, as well as policies on bullying, harassment, and discrimination, are implemented consistently and even-handedly.
- Provide scholarly programming including conferences and seminar series to promote thoughtful and constructive discussion both of academic freedom per se, and of controversial but important issues.
- Educate faculty about their rights and responsibilities relating to academic freedom, and advise them about how to successfully manage courses that engage with difficult issues.
- Develop new courses that explore free speech and open inquiry and the pressures that confront these values.
- Encourage students to speak their minds freely, to engage in passionate but civil discussions when they disagree, and to recognize the foundational importance of the free exchange of ideas both in a university and in a democratic society.
Join BIFI
Members are expected to list their names publicly on the organization’s website and to uphold the above principles in the course of their teaching and scholarship. Members will be invited, but not required, to participate in the group’s activities as described below. Membership confers the right to vote for the group’s leadership council, which will set the group’s agenda, write open letters on the group’s behalf, and otherwise act as its executive arm, in consultation with the membership when possible. Open letters will be circulated to the group before release.
BIFI Membership
First | Last | Title and Unit | Role |
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Vinod K. | Aggarwal | Distingushed Professor, Political Science | Executive Committee |
Sarah | Anzia | Professor, Public Policy & Political Science | Member |
Eric | Biber | Professor of Law | Member |
Déborah | Blocker | Professor of French, affiliated faculty in Italian Studies | Executive Committee |
Jack | Citrin | Professor of Political Science | Executive Committee |
Frederick | Crews | Professor of English Emeritus | Member |
Shamik | Dasgupta | Associate Professor, Philosophy | Member |
Markita | del Carpio Landry | Associate Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering | Member |
Frederick M. | Dolan | Professor of Rhetoric, Emeritus | Member |
Steve | Fish | Professor of Political Science | Member |
Will | Fithian | Associate Professor of Statistics | Executive Committee |
Michael | Frenklach | Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering | Member |
Sean | Gailmard | Professor, Charles & Louise Travers Department of Political Science | Member |
Eileen | Gambrill | social welfare:Emerita Professor | Member |
Neil | Gilbert | Distinguished Professor of Social Welfare Milton and Gertrude Chernin Professor of Social Welfare and the Social Services | Member |
Alexander | Givental | professor of mathematics | Member |
Chris | Hoofnagle | Teaching Professor, School of Law | Executive Committee |
Nicholas P. | Jewell | Professor of the Graduate School | Member |
Svetlana | Jitomirskaya | Professor, Mathematics | Member |
Orin | Kerr | William G. Simon Professor, UC Berkeley Law School | Member |
Rob | Kirby | Math Dept. Emeritus | Member |
Gregory | LaBlanc | Distinguished Teaching Fellow, Haas School of Business | Member |
Joseph | Lewnard | Associate Professor of Epidemiology, School of Public Health | Member |
Ethan | Ligon | Professor, Dept of Agricultural & Resource Economics | Executive Committee |
Dmitry | Livdan | Associate Professor, Haas | Member |
Smriti | Mehta | Postdoctoral Scholar, Berkeley School of Education & Department of Physics | Executive Committee |
Sabeeha | Merchant | Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology, Plant and Microbial Biology | Member |
Leonard | Miller | Professor of Social Welfare, emeritus | Member |
Jelani | Nelson | Professor, Department of EECS | Member |
Panos | Papadopoulos | Professor, Mechanical Engineering | Executive Committee |
Robert | Price | Professor of Political Science, emeritus | Member |
Satish | Rao | EECS | Executive Committee |
David M. | Romps | Professor, Department of Earth and Planetary Science | Executive Committee |
Daniel J. | Sargent | Associate Professor, History Department and Goldman School of Public Policy | Executive Committee |
Julia | Schaletzky | Executive Director, Center for Emerging and Neglected Diseases; professional faculty, UCB | Executive Committee |
Randy | Schekman | Professor, Molecular and Cell Biology | Member |
Alejandro | Schuler | Assistant Professor, Biostatistics | Member |
David | Sraer | Associate Professor, Haas School of Business and Economics Department | Member |
David | Steigmann | Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering | Member |
Steve | Tadelis | Professor of Economics, Business and Public Policy, Sarin Chair in Leadership and Strategy, Haas School of Business | Member |
Nathan Matthieu | Tang | PhD Student, Chemistry | Member |
Steven | Weber | Professor of the Graduate School | Member |
Everett | Wetchler | PhD Candidate | Member |
Jason | Wittenberg | Professor of Political Science | Member |
Jonathan | Wurtele | Professor of Physics | Member |