[BIFI] Berkeley Initiative for Free Inquiry – The Berkeley Initiative for Free Inquiry (BIFI) is a faculty group devoted to improving the climate for free speech

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.

Free Speech Movement sign under Sather Gate.University Archives photo, courtesy of Bancroft Library. 1964.

Latest Updates

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.
more
“Faculty for Yale” Formed

The group’s founding commitments are:
more

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.

Join

BIFI Membership

First	Last	Title and Unit	Role
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

Free Speech FAQs

Where are the rules about “political litmus” tests?

Senate Bylaw 40 explains the powers of the Senate, the protections for tenure at UC, and critically, contains this text:

40.3 Special Provisions Concerning Faculty
(a) No Political Test
No political test shall ever be considered in the appointment and promotion of any faculty member or employee.

What is the Kalven Report

The Kalven Report is a 1967 statement of a University of Chicago committee chaired by Harry Kalven, Jr. The Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action [local copy] concluded that institutional neutrality on political issues was necessary for intellectual freedom.

What policies govern political activity in the classroom?

Regents Policy 2301 recognizes a right of students to proper instruction, including the “right of students to have their classes held on the regularly scheduled basis and to be taught by the instructor whose responsibility it is to teach the course in question…” This provision has been interpreted to prohibit cancellation of classes for rallies and protests, see email from Benjamin Hermalin (Oct 25, 2023).

The same policy prohibits, “Misuse of the classroom by, for example, allowing it to be used for political indoctrination, for purposes other than those for which the course was constituted, or for providing grades without commensurate and appropriate student achievement, constitutes misuse of the University as an institution.”

In addition, the Faculty Code of Conduct, APM-015, imposes standards for professionalism. It defines “significant intrusion of material unrelated to the course” as a form of “unacceptable conduct.” It also prohibits the “use of the position or powers of a faculty member to coerce the judgment or conscience of a student…”

May departments and schools issue political statements at Berkeley?

This issue is still being debated as of this writing (Feb. 2024).

In 2022, Joint Senate-Administration Workgroup on the Role of The University and its Units in Political and Social Action was charged by Chancellor Christ to recommend, “1) a draft set of principles and issues to consider when the university and its units are commenting on matters about which people have deeply held views; and, 2) resources for operational unit and academic department officials to help them consider when and how to issue statements about current events and subjects about which people are known to disagree on behalf of their units.”

That Workgroup recommended in a draft 2022 report [local copy] that departments could make political statements, but also qualified the recommendation with guidance for a consultative process before issuing a statement. The draft report went out for comment, but no final report was issued.

In January 2024, the UC Regents considered a measure that bans departmental statements while greenlighting political statements by the Chair of the Board of Regents, the President, the Chancellors, and the leadership of the Academic Senate. This measure was tabled for the March 2024 meeting.

What are the rules on use of University resources for political purposes?

Because the University of California is a non-profit entity, faculty must exercise their political advocacy carefully. One may not use University property (including electronic resources like email and websites) for electoral or ballot political advocacy.

The precise rules are in PACAOS-40 (Policies Applying to Campus Activities, Organizations, and Students. PACAOS-40 must be read in context. It is about electioneering rather than politics in a general sense. For instance, faculty members are free to evaluate candidates and ballot measures in their expert roles. At all times, one must carefully use their title—the title should only be employed for identification, and never for endorsement of a candidate or ballot proposition.

Interestingly, PACAOS-41.10 contains a provision on institutional neutrality: “As a State instrumentality, the University must remain neutral on religious and political matters. The University cannot sponsor or fund religious or political activities except when authorized for University purposes by The Regents or the President or their designees.” Again, in context, political matters here are electioneering ones, and so this provision does not impose broad institutional neutrality (e.g. banning departmental political tracts).