{"id":25213,"date":"2017-09-05T06:28:21","date_gmt":"2017-09-05T11:28:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25213"},"modified":"2017-09-05T06:28:21","modified_gmt":"2017-09-05T11:28:21","slug":"the-strange-and-tortured-legacy-of-free-speech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25213","title":{"rendered":"The Strange (and Tortured) Legacy of \u201cFree Speech\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Strange (and Tortured) Legacy of \u201cFree Speech\u201d<\/a>\"\"<\/h3>\n
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Photo by Charlie Nguyen | CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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 \u201cFree Speech Year\u201d \u2014 a magnanimous gesture toward the Free Speech Movement (FSM) of 1964-65, an iconic moment in sixties radicalism.\u00a0 Christ\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Those plans also come at a time of recurrent left-right street combat in Berkeley.<\/p>\n

Christ announced that the university would sponsor \u201cpoint-counterpoint\u201d panels to demonstrate how strongly opposed political views can be exchanged in a peaceful, respectful setting.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0There is a special \u201cFree Speech Week\u201d set for September 24-27th<\/sup>.\u00a0 \u00a0A group called \u201cDiscover Berkeley\u201d, headed by Boalt Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, will be touring California in October with its \u201cFree Speech Now: the Berkeley Experience\u201d program.\u00a0 Its focus:\u00a0 \u201chow to ensure that disparate voices are heard.\u201d<\/p>\n

In something of an understatement, Christ lamented: \u201cNow 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.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0She neglected to mention those incidents where speech has been shut down entirely.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Strange (and Tortured) Legacy of \u201cFree Speech\u201d 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 \u201cFree Speech Year\u201d \u2014 a magnanimous gesture toward the Free Speech Movement […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[15868,15866,15867,5493,2703,13258],"class_list":["post-25213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-berkeley","tag-carl-boggs","tag-carol-christ","tag-counterpunch","tag-free-speech","tag-university-of-california"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25213"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25214,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25213\/revisions\/25214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}