Photo by Charlie Nguyen | CC BY 2.0
It has recently come to my attention that new Chancellor Carol Christ at the University of California, Berkeley, my alma mater, has unveiled ambitious plans for a “Free Speech Year” — a magnanimous gesture toward the Free Speech Movement (FSM) of 1964-65, an iconic moment in sixties radicalism. Christ’s plans (essentially hopes) come at a time when a new cycle of right-wing speakers is slated for the fall, raising prospects of campus violence surpassing the chaos of February and May when Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter were scheduled to appear, then cancelled. Those plans also come at a time of recurrent left-right street combat in Berkeley.
Christ announced that the university would sponsor “point-counterpoint” panels to demonstrate how strongly opposed political views can be exchanged in a peaceful, respectful setting. Other events include workshops on constitutional issues, a revisiting of FSM history and its aftermath, discussions about how the FSM influenced the larger trajectory of American higher education, and so forth. There is a special “Free Speech Week” set for September 24-27th. A group called “Discover Berkeley”, headed by Boalt Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, will be touring California in October with its “Free Speech Now: the Berkeley Experience” program. Its focus: “how to ensure that disparate voices are heard.”
In something of an understatement, Christ lamented: “Now what public speech is about is shouting, screaming your point of view in a public space rather than really thoughtfully engaging someone with a different point of view.” She neglected to mention those incidents where speech has been shut down entirely. Whether a low-temperature intellectual milieu can be imagined, much less realized, in the age of Donald Trump, a resurgent conservatism, and escalating campus polarization is yet another matter.
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