The Unfree Speech Movement
Sol Stern, was among the student radicals at Berkeley in 1964, back when colleges had intellectual freedom, as the subhead of his WSJ op-ed puts it. Stern writes about why the move for unfree speech is so successful on campuses today:
The Berkeley "machine" now promotes Free Speech Movement kitsch. The steps in front of Sproul Hall, the central administration building where more than 700 students were arrested on Dec. 2, 1964, have been renamed the Mario Savio Steps. One of the campus dining halls is called the Free Speech Movement Café, its walls covered with photographs and mementos of the glorious semester of struggle. The university requires freshmen to read an admiring biography of Savio, who died in 1996, written by New York University professor and Berkeley graduate Robert Cohen.Yet intellectual diversity is hardly embraced. Every undergraduate undergoes a form of indoctrination with a required course on the "theoretical or analytical issues relevant to understanding race, culture, and ethnicity in American society," administered by the university's Division of Equity and Inclusion.
How did this Orwellian inversion occur? It happened in part because the Free Speech Movement's fight for free speech was always a charade. The struggle was really about using the campus as a base for radical politics.
...On Oct. 1 at Berkeley ... one of the honored speakers at the Free Speech Movement anniversary rally on Sproul Plaza will be Bettina Aptheker, who is now a feminist-studies professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Writing in the Berkeley alumni magazine about the anniversary, Ms. Aptheker noted that the First Amendment was "written by white, propertied men in the 18th century, who never likely imagined that it might apply to women, and/or people of color, and/or all those who were not propertied, and even, perhaps, not citizens, and/or undocumented immigrants. . . . In other words, freedom of speech is a Constitutional guarantee, but who gets to exercise it without the chilling restraints of censure depends very much on one's location in the political and social cartography. We [Free Speech Movement] veterans were too young and inexperienced in 1964 to know this, but we do now, and we speak with a new awareness, a new consciousness, and a new urgency that the wisdom of a true freedom is inexorably tied to who exercises power and for what ends."
Read it and weep--for the Free Speech Movement anniversary, for the ideal of an intellectually open university, and for America.
A really important, terrific, and very short (50-page) book to read is Freedom from Speech, by Foundation for Individual Rights in Education president Greg Lukianoff.
An essential quote from it (one of many):
"It is crucial ... to note how the definition of safety has been watered down on campus. The term is no longer limited to physical security -- far from it. In my career, I have repeatedly seen safety conflated with comfort or even reassurance. It is hard for me to overemphasize how dangerous this shift is."
"We asked for freedom of the press, thought, and civil liberties in the past because we were in the opposition and needed these liberties to conquer. Now that we have conquered, there is no longer any need for such civil liberties."
Marxist theorist Nikolai Bukharin in 1917
Ken R at September 25, 2014 4:27 AM
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
It held for a long time, before someone realized that they could demonize the people who wrote it, with ulterior motives. Once they could do that, they could blame those people for how it is applied in a modern era hundred years later...
as if the original meaning was no longer clear.
SwissArmyD at September 25, 2014 10:13 AM
Ken, David Horowitz said those same words to me some years ago. Once he told me that, and I understood it, then I understood the Left.
Cousin Dave at September 25, 2014 10:28 AM
My youngest daughter is a high school junior. Last night, she told me they had started studying the Constitution. I suggested to her that the Bill of Rights should not be thought of as a means to a thing; rather, it should be regarded as the thing itself. I think she got it.
Last summer, my middle daughter was off on an exchange trip with high-schoolers about her age. During one of the bull sessions, one of them posited, if you could eliminate one right from the Bill of Rights, which one would it be? These were supposedly intelligent kids.
Old RPM Daddy (OldRPMDaddy at GMail dot com) at September 25, 2014 2:28 PM
The only one I could think to give up out of the bill of rights is the grand jury process. But that is only part of number 5. And only because the grand jury process has gotten rather silly now. At one time you knew the accused and could decide if the evidence made any sense. Now it is more of a rubber stamp.
A better question is not if you could, but if you had to which one would you give up.
Ben at September 25, 2014 5:52 PM
Well, there's the Third Amendment, which has almost never come up in American jurisprudence. But that should be regarded as a historical accident -- in the Middle Ages, forcing residents to quarter and feed soliders was a common practice.
Cousin Dave at September 26, 2014 8:06 AM
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