Free Speech? Really?

"We can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility.  Simply put, courteousness and respect in words and deeds are basic preconditions to any meaningful exchange of ideas."

From a September 8 email 

commemorating the 50th anniversary 

of the Free Speech Movement

 by Nicholas Dirks, Chancellor,

University of California, Berkeley

This is so silly that I hardly know where to begin.

It suggests that Nicholas Dirks thinks Berkeley is an 18th century debating society.  It implies that, at Berkeley, you may say anything you like except something that hurts someone else's feelings or clashes with one of his strongly held views.

Chancellor Dirks was born in 1950 and so was 14 years old when the Free Speech Movement was born on the Berkeley campus.   Unless he was totally checked  out -- and my guess is he was a bright and sentient teenager -- he could not have missed what was going on in this country at the time.

I just googled around and learned about a couple of interesting things that were happening in 1964.

Lenny Bruce

In 1964, this famously foul-mouthed comedian was arrested twice in one week for obscenity at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village -- not for anything he did but for his language, which was generously laced with four-letter words and scatological topics.

Another scheduled Bruce performance was banned by the Detroit Board of Censors.  (Yes, there was such a thing.)

Also that year, the Illinois Supreme Court unanimously upheld his conviction on obscenity charges, only backing down when it became clear that the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn it.

Here's a Lenny Bruce riff:  "If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses."  This was gravely offensive at the time, but jokes about Catholics are broadly acceptable these days.

Under the chancellor's rules, would there be room for a Lenny Bruce who made Palestinian jokes at UC Berkeley today?

Voting Rights Act

In 1964 the state of Louisiana was still denying voting rights to African Americans with trumped-up "literacy tests."  The opposition to these tests was not limited to courteous and civil discussions.  Police attacked and beat a number of demonstrators, and at least three voter registration volunteers were killed. After years of voting rights drives in southern states, most black people in the American South still were effectively unable to participate in elections.

Later that year, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to guarantee voting rights to all citizens.

The protests and activity that raised the issue and led to the passage of the act no doubt offended many white Americans in the South.  Leaders of the protests, and the people who disagreed with them, did not always conduct themselves with the "courteousness and respect" the chancellor so admires.  But pushing the discussion also led to its solution.

People with passionate convictions are not always measured in their expressions.  This is part of life, particularly at places like Berkeley.  If you disagree strongly with a point of view, why should you not counter it strongly?  If you do so with contempt and name-calling, you will not advance your ideas with thinking people.  You will make a fool of yourself.  This is a useful lesson to learn in college.

Who Decides?

The Free Speech Movement broke out because there were certain things you could not say on the Berkeley campus.

Chancellor Dirks may think he is arguing for polite speech, but the subtext is that he believes that he and the university faculty should dictate the terms, as well as the volume level, of the discussions.

Simply put, there are now many things that you are not allowed to say on the Berkeley campus, just as in 1964.  

The only cure for speech you don't like is more speech.    Shushing people -- and universities seem to be quite vigilant about doing this lately -- only works for so long.

That's when free speech movements are born.