Submission: Proposed anti-BDS legislation threatens free speech

Imagine if you were told that funding for your university organization would be withheld based on your political beliefs. That would sound a lot like 1950s McCarthyism. But sadly, this was the reality of being a student at UCLA last year, and may soon become the reality for many more if California passes a widely criticized bill under consideration. The bill aims to penalize support for boycotts related to Israeli human rights abuses, prohibiting the state from contracting with businesses that abide by such boycotts.

Such penalization by a public figure took place on our campus last year. The UCLA Graduate Students Association president told an organization I worked with, the Diversity Caucus, an organization that intends to encourage partnerships between student organizations with goals of promoting better campus climate, that we could only receive financial support if we had “zero connection with ‘Divest from Israel’ or any equivalent movement/organization.” If we engaged with supporters of divestment directly or indirectly, our funding would be revoked. Essentially, organizations were blacklisted based on viewpoint and we were threatened with the loss of funding, which impacted any further efforts we could make toward improving campus climate and promoting collaboration at UCLA.

In a report released this summer on the controversy, the UCLA Office of Discrimination Prevention confirmed that the university’s GSA president violated campus policy and our rights by attempting to defund student groups using biased and discriminatory criteria. Civil rights attorneys affirmed that these funding restrictions violated constitutional free speech rights and urged that “student governments distribute funding in a viewpoint neutral manner.” The UCLA report also finds that GSA implemented these discriminatory practices through selective, nondemocratic means and harmed the campus climate.

I can speak to this firsthand as an educator and member of the Diversity Caucus, an organization that seeks to work with the Department of Social Welfare to address and overcome barriers to diversity. Free, open debate for students of all backgrounds must be protected. Discrimination of this sort should never be tolerated at a public university in the United States. If diversity on a public campus means anything, we should engage directly with each other when our worldviews clash, not suppress the perspectives we do not like.

This incident of suppression is sadly part of a larger pattern of punishment against advocates for Palestinian rights. Palestine Legal has identified attempts from California to New York to blacklist companies that support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions or BDS movement for Palestinian freedom and equality through measures that would deny them access to state contracts.

In a particularly egregious example of this suppression, the efforts of the California public officials are to no longer penalize individual boycotts directly but instead single out companies at a larger scale and perpetuate an anti-BDS culture. The Los Angeles Times and others have condemned these efforts as McCarthyist threats to free speech.

At UCLA, we don’t need to wonder about what the chilling effects will be. We are already all too familiar with blacklists, attempts to censor free speech and threats to deny funding. If California adopts the anti-BDS legislation currently being debated by the state government, we know what the impact will be. We know what protections the U.S. Constitution guarantees: We cannot blacklist boycotts or suppress free speech just because we don’t agree with what is being said. A student body president cannot get away with blacklisting pro-divestment groups, nor should the state legislature.

Too many public officials have little interest in protecting our campus climate, civil rights or free speech; they show more interest in scaring people, especially young people, from exercising their constitutional rights to demand their tax and tuition dollars be spent in socially responsible ways.

Whether on campus or at the state level, our rights should be protected. Californians must be able to freely engage in discussion about one of the most important foreign policy debates of our time.

Brar is a graduate student in human development and psychology.