CFSA’s Goals

Develop a comprehensive program to teach all students about Columbia’s policies. These actions should include:

• Program: A required freshman orientation program that explains Columbia’s commitment to freedom of expression and its policies around respectful disagreement. It should include a letter to all incoming students devoted to describing the intellectual community they will be joining — one that embraces freedom of thought, enquiry and expression, and one that protects the right of protest while making clear that right of protest does not include the right to harass, bully, threaten or prevent anyone from participating fully in campus life. Additionally, all contracts for admissions should note that by signing the admissions contract, the individual hereby is agreeing to abide by these rules.
• Audience: Such a program should not be limited to new students, but include current students.
• Delivery: The program should include regular instruction throughout the year on free speech, viewpoint diversity and civil discourse for students at all levels with each student required to attend at least one course per year to remain in good standing for matriculation.

Create a program to educate all administrators on the core principles guiding the university’s commitment to free expression and viewpoint diversity:

• Program: Educate all administrators on the university’s Statement on Freedom of Expression, and provide guidance and policies related to Protests and Free Expression. Such a program would center the university’s core principles in any administrator’s responsibility to foster a healthy campus culture. It would also provide training to Columbia’s Department of Public Safety concerning the impartial and consistent enforcement of “time, place and manner” restrictions on campus protest.
• Audience: All faculty and staff.
• Delivery: A refresher of the program should be provided annually for all employees at all levels, where completion of the training is required each academic year to maintain employment.

Create neutrality policy applicable to all employees and students: Protect the reputation of Columbia and its commitment to diversity of viewpoint by adopting as a core principle an institutional neutrality policy such as the Kalven Report on Institutional Neutrality.

Eliminate the use of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) statements for faculty hiring, promotion, and funding through the university. As compelled speech, such statements are ideological litmus tests that incentivize insincerity as they undermine freedom of expression.

Support faculty initiatives that foster and safeguard the university’s core principles of academic freedom and inquiry. Work with faculty to encourage academic and administrative departments to post statements in support of freedom of expression and academic freedom that resemble the departmental statements of commitment to diversity and anti-racism.

Establish a free-standing Ombuds Office, dedicated to examining claims of breaches of free speech protections. The office would have expertise in First Amendment law and in the university’s academic freedom and free speech principles. It would thus be able to dismiss cases of attempted suppression of protected speech or retaliation for protected speech to help ensure that students and faculty are not punished for protected speech. It would also act as a resource for students, faculty and administrators who seek to understand free speech protections and their limits.

Adopt criteria to govern the appointment, retention and promotion of faculty and academic staff similar to those embodied in the University of Chicago’s Shils Report, which prioritizes academic excellence in research and teaching. These guiding principles should, using the language of the Shils Report, “be criteria which give preference above all to actual and prospective scholarly and scientific accomplishment of the highest order, actual and prospective teaching accomplishment of the highest order, and actual and prospective contribution to the intellectual quality of the University through critical stimulation of others within the University to produce work of the highest quality.”

Faculty play a crucial role in upholding the university’s commitment to these principles. The Columbia Academic Freedom Council (CAFC) provides a model that the administration should embrace. CAFC is committed to defending the academic freedom of individual faculty members whose freedoms comes under threat from any quarter, and to making academic freedom itself the subject of ongoing inquiry and conversation on campus.

Reform Columbia’s anonymous reporting systems to ensure transparency, prompt notification, a right of rebuttal, and swift rejection of all complaints against First Amendment protected speech. This reform would limit review of complaints to those that are actionable discrimination and harassment. It would also prevent any accusation against students from becoming part of their permanent record.

Measure progress of nurturing a campus culture of academic freedom and respect for viewpoint diversity using outside resources such as FIRE’s (Freedom for Individual Rights and Expression) annual survey of freedom of expression ranking of colleges and universities. Every effort should be made to improve Columbia’s current “abysmal” campus free speech rating. https://www.thefire.org/college-free-speech-rankings