Negotiations Continue Over CSU Management’s Speech-Restricting ‘Time, Place, and Manner’ Policy

There is no slowdown in the politicized attacks on free speech and academic freedom around the nation and in the CSU system. CFA members continue the fight to protect faculty rights against efforts by Chancellor Mildred García as she seeks to limit academic freedom, the rights to free speech on campus, suppress political action, and chill speech on campuses.

CFA’s member-led negotiation team has engaged with management to discuss the proposed systemwide Interim Time, Place, and Manner (TPM) Policy. At the end of October, CFA members met with management and shared our extensive revisions of the policy that would have ensured the policy conformed to the U.S. Constitution and subsequent case law governing the rights to free speech and public assembly.

Before the Fall break, CFA members again met with management who rebuffed all our substantive changes. Aside from the fact that the policy itself is chilling of free speech, the management document remains problematic on many levels, including an overly vague definition of what it means to be “disruptive,” no recognition of the history and tradition of non-violent civil disobedience, and many other points of confusion and lack of clarity.

“During this moment of political turmoil when many faculty, students, and staff are feeling vulnerable to surveillance, over-policing, and the campaign promises of repression from a new federal administration, this is not the time to double-down on suppressive and unconstitutional policies,” said Kevin Wehr, CFA Bargaining Chair and Sacramento State Professor. “Instead, management should be working with students and union members to support and protect the most precarious among us.”

We are expecting to meet with management several more times, even as we prepare for full contract negotiations in 2025.

Until we complete this process and agree to terms, the interim TPM policy does not apply to CSU faculty. In the meantime, CFA chapter leaders are meeting and conferring at the campus levels over the addenda that define campus-specific spaces and designate various administrative roles intended to enforce the systemwide TPM policy.