[From article]
former Berkeley graduate Robert Cohen. A privately sponsored lecture series in Savio’s honor, dominated entirely by leftist speakers, will be hosted by the College of Letters & Science. In making the announcement, Dean of Social Sciences Carla Hesse
declared: “I think it is fair to say that the attitude of [the administration] toward the Free Speech Movement has evolved over the past 50 years, from fear to pride in what the students at that time stood up for and what they accomplished.”
[. . .]
Official sanctification of the FSM goes hand in hand with an attack on intellectual diversity on campus. Every undergraduate must now take a course on “theoretical or analytical issues relevant to understanding race, culture, and ethnicity in American society,” administered by the university’s
Division of Equity and Inclusion. As Heather Mac Donald has
shown, the point of the requirement is to enforce ideological uniformity on campus regarding race and gender issues.
[. . .]
For all his brilliance, he never acknowledged the damage done to the cause of intellectual freedom by conflating the essentially liberal Berkeley administration with the Bull Connors of the racist South.
[. . .]
this moment may have been the beginning of the sixties radicals’ perversion of ordinary political language, like spelling the name of our country “Amerika” or declaring corporate liberalism “fascism in disguise,” while seeing something hopeful and progressive in Third World dictatorships.
[. . .]
The Free Speech Movement was born on October 1, 1964, when the campus police tried to arrest a recent Berkeley graduate, Jack Weinberg, just back on campus after spending the summer as a civil rights worker in Mississippi. Weinberg set up a table on the Bancroft strip for the Berkeley chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and then refused to identify himself to the police. Rather than submitting to arrest, he went limp and had to be carried to a police car. Dozens of students then spontaneously sat down around the vehicle, preventing it from leaving the campus. A 32-hour standoff ensued, with hundreds of students camped around the car.
[. . .]
The police-car incident came to an end when the Berkeley administration gave in. Weinberg was released, and the charges against him were dropped.
[. . .]
It was during the FSM that the New Left radicals first designated liberalism as the enemy, romanticized Third World revolutions, and broke the long-standing liberal taboo about working with Communists. One of the movement’s most effective leaders was Bettina Aptheker, a 20-year-old sophomore from Brooklyn, New York, who was a proud member of the Communist Party USA. The other FSM leaders rejected the notion that there was anything unusual about a free-speech movement led by a supporter of Soviet totalitarianism.
[. . .]
The radical movement that the FSM spawned soon imploded into violence and mindless anti-Americanism.
[. . .]
Left untold by most of the friendly narratives about the FSM and the New Left is the story of how a once-idealistic student movement crossed the line to antidemocratic ideologies and undermined the possibility of a decent Left in America.
[. . .]
“Tenured radicals,” in
Roger Kimball’s phrase, now dominate most professional academic organizations in the humanities and social studies. They have turned many once-distinguished university departments into bastions of anti-Americanism and apologetics for socialist and Islamist dictatorships. Moreover, the new generation of academics plays rough. Unlike our old liberal professors, who treated my generation of New Left graduate students in a respectful manner, today’s radical professors insist on ideological conformity in their departments and don’t take kindly to dissent by conservative students.
[. . .]
New records have been set for speech suppression on America’s campuses in this 50th anniversary year of the FSM—including a long list of rescinded commencement addresses by “offensive speakers,” such as the anti-Islamist writer Aayan Hirsi Ali (Brandeis University), former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice (Rutgers University), and International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde (Smith College). But the year’s greatest free-speech disgrace will soon occur at Berkeley, where Bettina Aptheker has been designated as keynote speaker for the September 27 campus rally. After the FSM and for the rest of her academic career, this “free-speech” activist remained a cheerleader for the suppression of free speech in the Soviet Union and other socialist regimes. Today, Aptheker is professor of feminist studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she inducts undergraduate students into what she calls “feminist pedagogy.” She’s also a supporter of Hamas, a revolutionary movement that takes a somewhat different view on free speech and the rights of women.
http://www.city-journal.org/2014/eon0925ss.html
SOL STERN
The Free Speech Movement at 50
The movement won; free speech lost.
25 September 2014
