Opinion | U Regents must decide: Will they uphold or undermine academic freedom?

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The shameful decision on Friday by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to halt its decadeslong recommendation that newborns be immunized for hepatitis B at birth made me grateful for a recent initiative at the University of Minnesota.

Seven months ago, in late April, the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) launched its Vaccine Integrity Project (VIP). The timing was no accident. A notorious peddler of vaccine misinformation had recently been installed atop the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services, and vaccines — one of the great public-health triumphs of the modern world — had depressingly become an even more contentious political issue.

The Vaccine Integrity Project was thus formed, in its own words, to safeguard “vaccine use in the U.S. so that it remains grounded in the best available science, free from external influence, and focused on optimizing protection of individuals, families, and communities against vaccine-preventable diseases.” To meet its mission, the project has since created a helpful website, submitted official comments on proposed CDC guidance, responded to the Trump administration’s purging of experts and countered federal health authorities’ dissemination of anti-vaccine propaganda.

Combining scholarly expertise with a commitment to public service, the project embodies precisely the sort of inspired work that Minnesotans expect of their land-grant university.

What a shame, then, that it will have to be shut down.

The impetus for all this was, not surprisingly, the Israeli destruction of Gaza. In a campaign of political repression that enjoyed bipartisan support, numerous colleges and universities targeted students who had dared to show moral clarity in opposing what the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, legal scholars, Holocaust historians and B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization, all concluded was genocide.

The U’s administration contributed to the repression. It infamously unhired Raz Segal to be the director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, it reissued a set of absurd restrictions on protest activities and it removed a number of collective faculty statements from departmental websites responding to the Israeli campaign (as well as that of Russia in Ukraine). The U.S. has fallen into the middling ranks of the Academic Freedom Index, with 84 countries now performing better than us, and the U’s leadership has done its best to weaken academic freedom specifically in Minnesota, too.

For the Board of Regents, its great contribution was its execrable resolution. While the board may have been focused on suppressing support for Palestinian rights, the resolution in fact covers all matters of public interest or concern. Indeed, it must — a failure to create a viewpoint-neutral policy would be to engage in viewpoint discrimination, opening the university up to potential legal jeopardy.

This is unfortunate for the invaluable service that CIDRAP and the Vaccine Integrity Project are now providing to the state and nation.

The university’s administration and board have three choices.

Two, the regents and the administration can try to parse the ways that corporately authored public-health statements somehow differ from, say, those of the Human Rights Program or the department of American Indian studies. But such attempts at hairsplitting would only degrade the already declining confidence of faculty and staff in the university’s current leadership, and they would likely prove unpersuasive to those inclined to sue the institution. Put simply, the regents’ and administration’s earlier shortsightedness has now created a dilemma. They can treat CIDRAP and the Vaccine Integrity Project differently from those units whose academic freedom has already been denied, betraying an obvious double standard or they can memory-hole much of the Vaccine Integrity Project’s public work, inviting global derision and making the university a higher-education laughingstock.

Which brings me to the third — and, as I see it, really the only — choice. The Board of Regents can finally listen to the AAUP, PEN America and countless faculty, staff and students and rescind its March resolution, replacing it instead with something like the careful, thoughtful recommendations (tinyurl.com/InstitutionalSpeech) developed by a shared-governance task force that most of the regents, none of whom were trained as academics, previously had the gall to reject.

It’s time to choose.