Colleges are telling critics of Israel's war on Gaza to shut up. America needs a new Free Speech Movement.
This year will mark the 60th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley.
I was a high school kid in Los Angeles, several hundred miles to the south. I was just 16 years old. But my world was rocked and my activism was unleashed by the mass arrest of 800 students sitting in at Sproul Hall.
The immediate issue that led to the sit-in was the refusal of UC administration to allow any political literature tables on campus that weren't for Democratic and Republican clubs.
Many of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement had only recently been South as participants in the Southern Freedom Movement.
The bigger issue though was eloquently explained by a student leader, Mario Savio.
And that's what we have here. We have an autocracy which -- which runs this university. It's managed. We were told the following: If President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn't he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received -- from a well-meaning liberal -- was the following: He said, "Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his Board of Directors?" That's the answer.
Well I ask you to consider -- if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something -- the faculty are a bunch of employees and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to be -- have any process upon us. Don't mean to be made into any product! Don't mean -- Don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!
And that -- that brings me to the second mode of civil disobedience. There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus -- and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it -- that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!
For me, a young high school kid in the sixties, Savio’s speech was my political Declaration of Independence.
I think about that now sixty years later as colleges and universities are clamping down again on faculty and students who choose to protest the Israeli occupation and brutal war on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and Joe Biden’s support for it.
For example, pro-Palestinian students and faculty at Barnard College have been put on political lock-down since the start of the Gaza war.
Faculty members who have posted pro-Palestinian signs on their office doors have been asked to remove them or put them inside, she and other faculty said. And about two dozen students who attended a peaceful, but unauthorized, pro-Palestinian campus protest in December have been summoned to appear before a college disciplinary committee.
“The purpose of academic freedom and free expression is precisely to contribute to democratic discussion,” Dr. Jakobsen said. “And so to treat our students as if their participation in participatory democracy is so deeply dangerous, that a demonstration at which there is no disruption should be disciplined, is a very strong statement.”
The impact of the Israeli war on Gaza on democracy and freedom of speech in this country has presented a challenge to us.
Sixty years after Berkeley we may need a new FSM.