Abhishek Shetty: AB-1887 travel ban should exempt academic pursuits

A UCLA professor is on the brink of finishing a seminal paper, but needs to meet one last time with a professor from the University of Kansas. But California won’t let him go, just so they can send a message to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback.

Last September, the California state legislature passed Assembly Bill 1887, which prohibits state-funded travel to North Carolina, Kansas, Mississippi and Tennessee – all states with anti-LGBTQ laws. The law went into effect at the start of this year and applies to employees of state agencies, boards and departments and even University of California employees like professors.

While the bill aims to prevent travel to states with anti-LGBTQ laws, it is too broad in the type of travel it prevents state employees from embarking on, particularly professors.

The California legislature should amend AB-1887 to allow an exemption for university professors to travel to the blacklisted states for research purposes, depending upon need. Not only is banning such travel unnecessary for California to support LGBTQ rights, allowing travel can have great academic benefits. Moreover, research trips are only a small portion of total Californian travel to the four states.

California’s goal appears to be divesting money from these states, thereby hurting their economies. Their efforts appear to be working so far. Students from California were unable to secure funding to attend the Council on Undergraduate Research conference this year, taking place at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. Consequently, the council’s executive director, Elizabeth Ambos, said that in the future, the council would look into a state’s inclusivity before holding a conference. In the long run, a state like Tennessee would be missing out on the travel – and money – of several students for such a conference.

The state does have a list of exceptions to the travel ban, but it’s narrow. For example, there’s an exception for travel needed to maintain grant funding. However, this does not include other university-related travel. A professor who would want to travel to another university in one of the four states for research or collaboration purposes would be unable to seek university funding to do so.

Jennie Brand, a UCLA sociology professor, said the ban might affect her future plans. Brand said that she was considering visiting a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with whom she is collaborating. However, under AB-1887, the university may not be able to fund such travel through its departmental funds.

“Potentially, I had in mind that I might go to Chapel Hill at some point in the near future to finish up the papers, but now, that’s probably not going to happen,” Brand said.

What’s more, the universities at the blacklisted states hold conferences that can be crucial for the exchange of new ideas. For example, UNC-Chapel Hill holds the Water and Health Conference, which researchers from UCLA’s Luskin Center for Innovation attended last year to present on the link between water quality misperception and adverse health. If researchers wanted to attend the conference again in the future, they might not receive funding from the university to cover the trip.

As a result, the California travel ban is also preventing travel that can be helpful or essential for research purposes. Professors who would want to travel to a university in one of the blacklisted states for research would be denied the funding to cover expenses. This would act as a hindrance to professors who are collaborating with other professors in those universities – an otherwise common occurrence.

The economic effect of the travel of such researchers is too minor to have any significant impact on the economies of the four states, considering the costs of a plane ticket and staying over for a few days. More importantly, the state is preventing the exchange of academic ideas from taking place with this plan. These four states contain several major universities, including UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke University, Vanderbilt University and the University of Kansas. AB-1887 would stifle research between California professors and professors at these universities and discourage future collaborations between them. Moreover, preventing research does not do anything to advance LGBTQ rights, which is the state’s purported aim.

To rectify this, the state legislature should add another exception to AB-1887, allowing the state universities to fund travel for professors who are collaborating with colleagues at universities in the four blacklisted states, or seeking to do research there. Since the California government claims to care about science and research, this would be the fair – and rather simple – step to take.

Some might say that the addition of such an exception would be unnecessary due to its limited scope, or that the fight for LGBTQ rights requires all people, including professors, to make inconvenient concessions. However, the bill already contains a number of exceptions. One more exception, especially one that would help research, would not undermine the state’s goal.

If California wants to make a statement on LGBTQ rights, its message would remain even with the addition of such an exemption. Gov. Brownback’s LGBTQ policies don’t hinge on a professor’s plane ticket.