The Crisis at Berkeley

For most of the last few years, it has been possible to regard the antics of the campus left with a mixture of benign neglect and schadenfreude at the supine reaction of college administrators, who seem not to have read the chapter on appeasement in their history books. The obsession with “microaggressions,” the insistence on “trigger warnings,” and the demand for “safe spaces” amply supplied with plush toys and grief counselors are pathetic compared with the campus left of the 1960s. In those days the campus left meant business—the black activists who occupied the student union building at Cornell had loaded weapons; the bombs were real at the University of Wisconsin and Claremont Men’s College. When protesters lacked bombs, they resorted to arson and mass vandalism (Columbia, Oregon, UC Santa Barbara, etc.). Until recent weeks, the closest thing we’ve seen to overt 1960s-style violence is the University of Missouri’s assistant professor of communications Melissa Click calling for “some muscle” to rough up a journalist during a campus protest two years ago, a plea whose meager result would have embarrassed a rookie Teamster. And Black Lives Matter, for all of its rage and impulse to disrupt public events and block highways at rush hour, is a far cry from the Black Panthers. This has made all the more disgraceful the capitulations of so many administrators. It’s one thing if, like Cornell University’s president James Perkins in 1969, you have a loaded gun pointed at you. But caving to hysterical and whining students?

The campus scene has taken an ominous turn for the worse in recent months, however, with a riot and arson at Berkeley that prevented Milo Yiannopoulos from giving a scheduled speech on February 1, followed by the attack on Charles Murray at Middlebury and near-violent incidents at his appearances at Notre Dame and Indiana University, and culminating in the menacing mob that prevented Heather Mac Donald from speaking in public at Claremont McKenna College. Like Murray at Middlebury, Mac Donald attempted to give her talk by streaming video from an empty hall but was ultimately cut short when police and campus security weren’t confident they could assure her safety. I recently hosted both Mac Donald and Murray at UC Berkeley but did so very quietly at unpublicized, invitation-only events. I brought Murray to my large lecture class with no prior announcement, but it has come to this: Well-known conservatives have to be sneaked on to campus.

Last month matters came to a head with Ann Coulter’s proposed appearance here. The Berkeley College Republicans, who are routinely shouted at, spat upon, and mocked at their student group table on Sproul Plaza, invited Coulter to speak on April 27 (she was scheduled to be in California as a part of a larger speaking itinerary). From the first moment, university administrators, ostensibly committed to a policy of equal accommodation for all student groups, signaled to the Berkeley College Republicans that they’d rather the group didn’t go forward with Coulter’s appearance. Although the initial notice of Coulter’s invitation for April 27 was transmitted to the university on March 17, allowing plenty of time to make arrangements, there followed a slow-walk process in which the administration put forward a number of new restrictive policies and conditions, not written down or previously enforced on any other student group. Most noteworthy was the demand that Coulter’s appearance be concluded by 3 p.m. because she is a “high profile” speaker—a condition that was not applied to recent evening appearances by former Mexican president Vicente Fox or former Clinton aide Maria Echaveste. Several larger venues on the campus, available on the 27th according to official calendars, were deemed unsuitable for Coulter, and the university finally said Coulter could appear only at an off-campus location. Then, after anti-Coulter flyers began appearing on campus bulletin boards along with threats from the same “antifa” thugs who rioted over Milo Yiannopoulos’s proposed appearance on February 1, the university on April 19 unilaterally canceled Coulter’s appearance, citing security concerns.

The university quickly backtracked from this decision, probably less out of self-awareness of its cowardice than because of the threat of a lawsuit from the College Republicans charging viewpoint discrimination (which is specifically forbidden in a California statute). They offered to accommodate Coulter the following week or at some date in the fall. Either alternative was tantamount to killing the whole thing. May 1 is “dead week” before final exams, and few students are on campus, aside from which Coulter was already scheduled elsewhere. Coulter initially said she would show up at Berkeley the afternoon of the 27th as planned, perhaps speaking with a bullhorn from the steps of Sproul Hall, as Mario Savio did in 1964. She reversed course after her lecture tour sponsor, the Young America’s Foundation, backed out in the face of ballooning security costs and fears of being held responsible for a riot.

Taking no chances amidst a swirl of rumors that Coulter was going to turn up anyway, protesters from the left and right announced their intention to turn up on the 27th to reprise their recent rumble. A pro-Trump rally in a Berkeley park on April 15 had erupted into a violent clash when a masked “antifa” mob turned up, and a sequel seemed likely. A heavy police presence on campus the last week of April prevented protesters from reaching critical mass, and police kept a lid on a protest in the same city park where the April 15 violence occurred. A fragile peace has settled in on the campus ahead of final exams, but no one thinks the university has things in hand. A future Coulter appearance is in limbo.

This is not the first time Berkeley administrators have lost control of the campus. The supposed irony that the home of the legendary 1960s Free Speech Movement has become inhospitable to the speech of anyone who departs from campus orthodoxy has become a commonplace observation in recent weeks. But this perception has the matter backwards. The seeds of today’s stifling campus conformism trace back directly to that misunderstood episode. Far from being an example of true campus openness, the Free Speech Movement was a key inflection point on the way to the ruin of our universities. The one common denominator then and now is the ineptitude and pusillanimity of college administrators and the capitulation of faculties to the demands of radicalized students.

If you enter the Berkeley campus from Bancroft Way and traverse the commons in front of Sproul Hall, Berkeley’s main administration building, you will run the gantlet of tables that student groups set up every day on a first-come, first-served basis. They run the full spectrum of interests, from fraternities and sororities to song-and-dance troupes to pre-professional societies. There is a high quotient of ethnic and identity-politics groups, but also a large number of Asian Christian fellowships, sliced by denomination (Baptist, Lutheran, Catholic) and nationality (Korean, Japanese, Thai, Chinese, Taiwanese).

These student tables are the most tangible legacy of the original free speech movement, as Berkeley’s rigid rules against such activity were the proximate cause that ignited the fuse in the fall of 1964. In that long ago time when faculty and some students actually dressed in jackets and ties for class, the university prohibited most organized political activities (especially fundraising) in its public spaces. But the rule was lightly enforced. Nathan Glazer, then on the faculty here, wrote that “Berkeley was one of the few places in the country where in 1964 .  .  . one could hear a public debate between the supporters of Khrushchev and Mao on the Sino-Soviet dispute—there were organized student groups behind both positions.”

Student activism was picking up in the fall of 1964. Berkeley students had protested at the Republican National Convention that nominated Barry Goldwater in San Francisco, and a number of students had spent the summer in the South working for civil rights organizations. There were Berkeley chapters of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Friends of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). Alarmed at the escalation of political activity on campus, the administration announced that it intended to enforce the ban on politically oriented student tables, citing concerns about how the sidewalk tables were “impeding traffic.”

Students reacted to the new rules in predictable fashion: More groups (including the College Republicans and Cal Students for Goldwater) set up sidewalk tables in defiance. At the end of September the dean’s office summoned five students identified with some of the political tables to warn they faced suspension. The dean’s office underestimated the response. Four hundred students appeared on the afternoon of September 30, declaring that they had been equally responsible for operating sidewalk tables and demanding that they receive the same punishment as the five students originally cited. The administration ignored the assembled students and announced at 11:45 p.m. that the five students, along with three others thought to be organizers of sidewalk tables, were to be placed on “indefinite suspension.” There would be no negotiation about the university’s rules. “As soon as I heard the news,” David Lance Goines, one of the suspended students, wrote, “I realized with a thrill that I was having the best time I’d ever had in my life. I was up to my ears in excitement.”

The next day, October 1, defiant students set up more tables outside Sproul Hall. A crowd of 2,000 soon assembled to take part in an impromptu rally. The police decided to arrest Jack Weinberg, an honors graduate in mathematics. The administration apparently singled out Weinberg because, as a nonstudent, he could be charged with trespassing. (Weinberg, the head of the Berkeley chapter of CORE, is sometimes credited with having promulgated the popular slogan “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Weinberg is now 77.) The police carried Weinberg to a nearby police car, whereupon the theater began in earnest. Hundreds of students sat down around the car, making it impossible for the police to remove Weinberg from the scene. Soon students began clambering atop the police car to make speeches. It was then that Mario Savio emerged as the iconic and ironic leader of the Free Speech Movement—ironic because he had theretofore been known for his considerable stutter. When Savio was extremely angry, however, his stutter disappeared.

This tableau carried on through the night and into the next day, with a parade of speakers holding forth from the roof of the police car, reciting Thoreau’s meditations on civil disobedience as a refrain. The incident was front-page news in California, usually sensationalized with banner headlines such as the San Francisco Examiner‘s “Reds on Campus.” As a large contingent of police moved in, and fears of a riot grew, the president of the University of California system, Clark Kerr, made his entrance, opening up negotiations with student leaders to end the situation. A compromise was struck: The university would not press the trespassing charge against Weinberg and would appoint a special committee to work out a new policy on political activity. The students and the police dispersed (the students later took up a collection to pay for damage to the police car), and Weinberg was released after a pro forma booking at the police station. By the time it was over, Weinberg had sat in the back seat of the police car for 32 hours, with one carefully negotiated trip to the student union building to use the bathroom.

Kerr and the administration thought the commotion was over. During the next six weeks, an uneasy truce prevailed as a special committee of administrators and students deliberated about new rules. The administration agreed to relax rules on political activity on campus subject to one caveat—no advocacy of “illegal” activity. Protesters aligned with the civil rights movement thought this proviso was directed against them, since they often rallied to recruit participants for sit-ins and other acts of civil disobedience. But many student activists were inclined to accept the terms of the compromise. The Free Speech Movement, by now a carefully organized body, called for a new protest sit-in outside Sproul Hall that attracted only about 300 people. The administration this time wisely did nothing, and the sit-in was called off after a few hours of boredom. The Free Speech Movement seemed to be fizzling out. Only a colossal blunder by the administration could revive its fortunes. And blunder is exactly what the administration proceeded to do.

During the negotiations after the police car incident, it was thought that some kind of amnesty would be given to the students involved in that incident, as well as perhaps the lifting of the suspensions of the original eight students disciplined on September 30. But over the Thanksgiving weekend, the administration announced that it was going to revisit disciplinary measures against some of the students initially threatened with suspension, casting doubt on its good faith in the negotiations. The Free Speech Movement exploded back to life. On the following Wednesday a large crowd gathered outside Sproul Hall, where Savio called for a student strike to bring the campus to a “grinding halt.” Joan Baez appeared and sang “We Shall Overcome.” Then 1,500 students marched into the building, with the American flag at the head of the procession, and proceeded to sit down in the hallways. The sit-in was peaceful; the students took care not to block doorways or otherwise seriously impede the operations of the university. As day gave way to night, no arrests had been made. About half the students had left while the remainder bedded down for the night. “It appeared to me that at last the administration was getting clever,” Berkeley’s eminent philosopher John Searle wrote. “I thought they would sit there harmlessly while the faculty came up with a solution.” Instead the administration made its second blunder of the week.

Publicity over the events at Berkeley was bringing pressure on Governor Pat Brown and the university regents, all of whom pressed Kerr to take a stronger stand. (Among local law enforcement officials who were concerned by reports, which proved to be erroneous, that students were vandalizing offices in Sproul Hall was Alameda County deputy district attorney Edwin Meese. Two years later Ronald Reagan would relentlessly attack Brown for not having insisted that “those damn kids ought to shut up and go back to class or get tossed out.”) At 3 a.m., 600 police and state highway patrolmen entered Sproul Hall and began making arrests. In good civil rights fashion, the protesting students went limp and had to be carried out one at a time, a process that took over 12 hours. More than 800 students had been arrested by the time the building was finally cleared.

By now the situation was spinning out of control. The student strike took hold as graduate teaching assistants and a large number of faculty canceled classes. Rumors of a National Guard occupation, mass expulsions of students, and, most improbable of all, mass firings of faculty swept the campus. The faculty, hitherto annoyed by the student protest, was beginning to swing over to the students’ side. In the meantime Kerr was working behind the scenes with senior faculty members on a new settlement. The compromise would include a promise to desist from disciplinary proceedings against students involved in protests prior to December 3 (the students who had just been arrested in Sproul Hall would still have to face the music), but did not resolve the issue of what restrictions the university would enforce on campus advocacy. “Any attempt to solve the crisis without meeting those issues was bound to fail,” Prof. Searle wrote. “Having ignited the fuel, one can’t stop the fire by blowing out the match.”

Kerr attempted to present the compromise as a fait accompli at an extraordinary campus meeting in the outdoor Greek theater on Monday, December 7—Pearl Harbor Day. Fifteen thousand students and faculty showed up. The meeting was a fiasco, culminating in yet another administration blunder. As the meeting adjourned, Mario Savio approached the microphone hoping to make brief comments. Police intercepted him and carried him off the stage, one officer pulling him by his necktie. Faculty members were appalled. The students in the audience began to chant, “We want Mario! We want Mario!” Indignant faculty members besieged Kerr, and amidst the confusion Savio was released and allowed to give brief remarks. He announced simply that there would be a noon rally at Sproul Hall.

Over 10,000 students showed up for the Sproul Hall rally, where the crowd roared their disapproval of the new compromise. A telegram from Bertrand Russell arrived: “You have my full and earnest support. Warm greetings.” (Russell had also wired Gov. Brown demanding that he stop the “oppression” of Berkeley students.) The leaders of the Free Speech Movement, sensing events were moving in their favor, called off the strike. The next day the faculty senate delivered the coup de grace to the administration, voting by a lopsided 824-115 in favor of two resolutions that effectively called for the administration to capitulate to the students. This bold stroke made clear that the inmates were in charge of the asylum. The Free Speech Movement had won.

Exactly what this victory entailed was not immediately clear. Even critics of the Free Speech Movement admitted that many of the original grievances against arbitrary university restrictions of political activism were just, and faulted the administration for their ineptitude. Three months after the climax at Sproul Hall, Nathan Glazer, who had attempted to mediate between the students and the administration at various times during the crisis, wrote in Commentary that “one fears that the future of American higher education may be foreshadowed here. .  .  . A great wave of energy has been released.”

Indeed, it didn’t take long for the willfulness and dogmatism of the student left to take a harder shape in the form of the New Left, a “movement” whose opposition to the Vietnam war was generalized into a radical critique of “the System.” Whereas the free speech protesters at Berkeley in 1964 often marched with the American flag, before long the flag was brought forth only for burning. The New Left soon repudiated the idea of free speech itself, embracing with enthusiasm Herbert Marcuse’s theories of “repressive tolerance.” Marcuse argued that “the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions.” That “great wave of energy” released by the Free Speech Movement shortly led to a diminution of speech and diversity of thought in universities, and to a conformity vastly more stifling than anything clueless administrators of the 1960s could have imposed.

Today a plurality of students thinks freedom of speech is no longer a paramount principle. NYU’s vice provost Ulrich Baer went full postmodernist (he approvingly cited the subjectivist supremo Jean-François Lyotard) in the New York Times on April 24, arguing that it is perfectly appropriate to censor the expression of any ideas that offend any self-aggrieved or previously marginalized group. He is not an outlier. The reflexive appeasement of radicalized students is the heart of the problem, and it is sadly entrenched at most American universities.

The campus double standard about whose ideology and speech is favored is readily apparent in the treatment accorded to the Berkeley College Republicans. In early March a passerby grabbed one of the BCR’s wooden signs from in front of its table on Sproul Plaza and smashed it into several pieces. Although this act was caught on video and the offender has been identified (he is a student at a nearby art school and not a Berkeley student), no action has been taken. Graffiti reading “Behead the BCR,” and printed flyers with names and photos of individual BCR members calling them “baby fascists” or calling for their lynching, have appeared on campus bulletin boards.

When the BCRs set up their table on Sproul Plaza, a group of lefty hecklers will frequently set up right across from them as the “Berkeley Collage Republicans” and mock the CRs in ways that would delight a second-rate Dadaist. But the incoherence of this street-theater misses the point. Imagine what would happen if a group of students set up a table for “Liquor, Guns, Bacon, and Trump” across from one of the regular LGBT tables in Sproul Plaza. The campus would probably shut for a week for sensitivity rallies and investigations into “hate crimes.” But if it’s only the College Republicans, then, well, no harm, no foul.

The BCRs, to their great credit, take it all in stride, but they drew the line when the university threw up one disingenuous roadblock after another to the Coulter event and filed their lawsuit. They are being represented by San Francisco attorney Harmeet Dhillon, a fast-rising star in Republican political circles who is rumored to be on the radar screen for a possible Trump administration appointment. The response from Berkeley’s general counsel Christopher Patti to her first letter teed up a delicious rejoinder from Dhillon: “First, I want to express how disappointed I am that counsel for UC Berkeley, of all institutions, would misgender me by addressing your letter to ‘Mr.’ Dhillon, an error repeated by your colleague who sent me a similarly addressed email. Please be more sensitive (or at least accurate) in the future.”

This probably won’t be the last “hoist by their own petard” moment for Berkeley’s administration. While the university has been operating for the last several years with a $150 million deficit, requiring large tuition increases, the UC system last week was revealed in a state audit of the president’s office to have had $175 million in undisclosed reserve funds all along. The state legislature is furious, and some prospective Democratic candidates for governor next year such as Gavin Newsom are calling the situation “outrageous.” UC president Janet Napolitano, a former Democratic governor of Arizona and Obama cabinet member, is under fire.

There are now almost as many administrators at Berkeley as faculty (the ratio was more than two-to-one faculty-to-administrators as recently as 2000), and the state auditor reports that many of the university’s administrators enjoy salary and benefits well above those of administrators at any other public university in the state. Among the costly nonacademic programs that Napolitano has started are counseling services for “undocumented” students ($21.6 million), a “carbon neutrality” initiative ($2.5 million), a wetlands project ($4.6 million), and a “Global Food Initiative” ($5.2 million). There was no word in the audit about whether the hidden reserve funds were tapped to build outgoing chancellor Nicholas Dirks’s escape door from his California Hall office. After Dirks’s office was briefly occupied by students a couple years ago, he did his best imitation of Monty Python’s Brave Sir Robin and spent $9,000 to build an emergency exit so he could flee the next time students swarmed his suite. A real profile in courage.

In other words, the crisis at Berkeley is not limited to its ideological conformity—administrative bloat and intellectual rot are surely connected at some level. Napolitano will probably survive chiefly because the California Board of Regents, all political appointees of recent governors, is as weak-minded as Berkeley’s administration. Berkeley is of course just a microcosm of an American higher education archipelago of ideological intolerance and detachment from reality. Higher education can’t control its spending and won’t control its kooks. It is very hard not to sit back and cheer.

Steven F. Hayward, a senior resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, is the author of The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980,

from which the account of the Free Speech Movement here is drawn. His latest book is Patriotism Is Not Enough.