Remembering when the Bay Area opposed censorship

Depicted: Mario Savio, leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, speaks to assembled students on the campus at the University of California in Berkeley, California, on December 7, 1964. Image by Robert W. Klein

It's been a rough year for open dialogue and tolerant debate around the bay. University students shout down and threaten speakers whose scholarship they don't like. City councils shut down Zoom meetings. And (predictably) Labor bigwigs blow bogus racist dog whistles at candidates that challenge their Woke orthodoxy. In this Election Week, we choose to recall the words of Berkeley Free Speech leader Mario Savio in 1964, reminding us that it hasn't ways been thus, and needn't be.

In our free speech fight at the University of California, we have come up against what may emerge as the greatest problem of our nation—depersonalized, unresponsive bureaucracy. We have encountered the organized status quo in Mississippi, but it is the same in Berkeley. We find functionaries who cannot make policy but can only hide behind the rules. We have discovered a total lack of response on the part of the policy makers. To grasp a situation which is truly Kafkaesque, it is necessary to understand the bureaucratic mentality. 

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Bureaucracies begin as tools, means to certain legitimate goals, and they end up feeding their own existence. The conception that bureaucrats have is that history has in fact come to an end. No events can occur now that the Second World War is over which can change American society substantially. We proceed by standard procedures as we are.

Here is the real contradiction: The bureaucrats hold history [h]as ended. As a result significant parts of the population both on campus and off are dispossessed, and these dispossessed are not about to accept this ahistorical point of view. It is out of this that the conflict has occurred with the university bureaucracy and will continue to occur until that bureaucracy becomes responsive or until it is clear the university cannot function.

Read the whole thing here.

Related:

• Stanford researcher faced gov't censorship during Covid—and just won his legal challenge

• This is how censorship begins

• SJSU prof: New university prez pushing anti-intellectual “social justice re-education” agenda

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