Controversy in California over ‘neutral’ Middle East history

American colleges and universities are grappling with how to address wildly varying viewpoints of the Israel-Hamas war, amid mounting tensions and incidents of violence in educational communities. 

As part of a slate of initiatives, one major university system said it will develop programming with a “viewpoint-neutral history of the Middle East.” But the recent move by the University of California stirred more controversy than it relieved – with strong pushback from professors concerned about sacrificing academic freedom.

More than 150 UC professors signed a letter to the UC president taking issue with the idea of viewpoint-neutral programs as a way to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia. The president’s office responded by clarifying the program would be voluntary and extracurricular. But the question of neutrality lingers, especially among experts who point out that the very act of academic exploration leads to the inevitable formation of a viewpoint. 

The attempt at ensuring safe and equitable policies for expression on college campuses and the swift response from professors underscore the tricky nature of balancing intellectual exploration with pressure on school administrators to answer for extreme views expressed on campus. Also at play is the role of universities in fostering dialogue and understanding during moments of crisis.

The controversy comes at a moment of scrutiny for many university leaders. On Tuesday, the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania faced sharp questions from Republican lawmakers as they testified before a congressional committee about antisemitism on their campuses. The U.S. Department of Education has launched investigations into allegations of antisemitism or Islamophobia at 13 colleges and universities since Nov. 16. 

The UC initiative and subsequent concerns present a “disconnect between our aspirations for a place where everyone can be equally welcome, which is the kind of thing administrations think about, and the applicability of the term ‘viewpoint neutrality’ to the endeavors of teaching,” says Lara Schwartz, director of the Project on Civic Discourse at American University.

Viewpoint neutrality, as a legal term, means that university policies cannot vary according to viewpoint, says Professor Schwartz, who is also a constitutional law expert. The Supreme Court has ruled that student fees at public universities, for example, cannot be withheld from campus organizations based on a group’s beliefs.

But academic content requires a wide range of viewpoints, argue professors from history, humanities, and social sciences departments across UC campuses. “There is a clear, structural difference between government agencies avoiding the endorsement of a particular political position and university-based professionals presenting conflicting viewpoints as a normal part of our curriculum,” the professors wrote in their letter to the president. The signers represent a small but vocal portion of the 25,000 professors in the system.

Ken Cedeno/Reuters

Harvard University President Claudine Gay testifies before a House Committee on Education and The Workforce hearing titled "Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism" on Capitol Hill in Washington, Dec. 5, 2023.

Who decides what is neutral? 

The University of California – a 10-campus public school system serving nearly 300,000 students – announced the $7 million plan on Nov. 15. Initiatives include: 

• $3 million for emergency mental health resources for students, faculty, and staff.
• $2 million for leadership training for educators, focused on freedom of expression; academic freedom; and diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.
• $2 million for the development of educational programs “focused on better understanding anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, how to recognize and combat extremism, and a viewpoint-neutral history of the Middle East.”

The announcement rang alarm bells for some faculty who saw it as a first step toward curbing what content they could teach in their classes. 

There is no contradiction between having a viewpoint and producing history with integrity, says Jennifer Derr, founding director of the Center for Middle East and North Africa at UC Santa Cruz, who signed the letter. When students come to her class thinking of history as a collection of objective names and dates, she says, part of her role is to show all the decisions that go into presenting a narrative. 

“That is never a neutral act,” she adds. “It’s based on an assessment of what is historically significant, what we have evidence for, what plays into the larger notions of a just society that we are oftentimes wrestling with.”

Addressing professors’ concerns, UC President Michael Drake’s office wrote, “The University of California remains deeply committed to shared governance and the academic freedom of our faculty. The president’s remarks were referencing voluntary educational programming on our campuses, not classroom content or curriculum.”

Who decides what’s neutral? asks Sherene Seikaly, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at UC Santa Barbara and one of the professors who signed the letter. The university’s job, she says, isn’t to neutralize viewpoints – it’s to foster discussion, debate, and disagreement to bridge different viewpoints. 

“You don’t resolve tensions by parroting only one side of the tension and not engaging the other side. ... So how do you resolve conflict? You talk to people. You talk to your scholars; you talk to your students. And that is actually, on my campus, precisely what is happening. We’re talking to each other,” she says.  

Professors at campuses around the United States are bringing together faculty experts – who often have different ideological viewpoints on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – to lead campus discussions about the conflict. For example, at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, Centre College in Kentucky, and Elon University in North Carolina, faculty are reportedly guiding students through earnest, respectful conversations about the war in Gaza and the region’s history. That is what universities do best, says Professor Schwartz: research, learning, teaching, and dialogue.  

Differing applications

In their letter to President Drake, professors wrote that his use of the term “viewpoint-neutral” calls into question their academic integrity and is “an unneeded rebuke of the rigorous work done by our colleagues who spend significant time developing and delivering world-class curriculum and pedagogy.”

Viewpoint neutrality in university regulations is essential, especially for public schools, points out Professor Schwartz. “This idea that you would have to be viewpoint neutral in your regulations, in the way you treat different people and different actions and different expressions and scholarship, that’s not just important because you’re a university. That’s required because you’re the government; it’s the First Amendment,” she explains. 

Schools that violate this neutrality can lose their federal funding. 

But applied to curricula, viewpoint neutrality undermines what’s powerful about the practice of history in a democratic society, says Dr. Derr at UC Santa Cruz.

“This idea of presenting conflicting ideas in the classroom and thinking about those conflicting ideas through historical evidence critically, this to me is the work of [historians],” she says. “And I think it’s the kind of work that should be celebrated in moments of political difficulty.”