The investigation probed all 148 public campuses in the California Community Colleges, University of California and California State University systems to check for their adherence to a 2021 law that requires the institutions to “make all their equipment dealings exceedingly clear to the public,” CalMatters states. “However,” the nonprofit news organization found, “not every college follows every part of the law.”
The collective failure to follow the law appears to be based at least in part on lack of awareness. For instance, Keith Curry, president at Compton Community College, told CalMatters that he hadn’t been aware of the law until the news organization asked him about it. Curry has since implemented a corrective action plan to make sure the college annually releases the reports and holds the public meetings required by the military equipment transparency law.
The findings by CallMatters represent much more than the discovery of a serial institutional failure to fulfil a legal obligation. Rather, the findings also expose the fault lines that exist between efforts to keep colleges and universities safe and what some students see as the militarized suppression of activism and free speech. These concerns are particularly heightened in the wake of the police clashes that ensued in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests that rocked campuses in 2020 and the Gaza war protests that upended campuses in 2023 and 2024.
The nation’s collective memory is also stained by cases of deadly military force being deployed in the tumultuous 1960s and 70s during campus protests against racial segregation and the Vietnam War, such as the Orangeburg Massacre of 1968 at South Carolina State College and the Kent State shooting of 1970.
The Golden State’s military equipment transparency law, then, is much more than a matter of box-checking legal compliance. The public meetings that it mandates can foster meaningful and much-needed dialogue about how to strike the right balance between campus safety and free speech.
