UC Berkeleys Love-Hate Relationship with Free Speech This week was the 50th anniversary of the largest campus sit-in and mass arrest in US history on December 2-3, 1964 in Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley. UC Berkeley planned to hold an official event in Sproul Hall to commemorate the sit-in; but at the last moment, administration changed its location and locked down Sproul, apparently for fear that students would try and apply the school-sanctioned history lesson. The point is worth repeating: UC Berkeley admin went so far as to exclude current students from campus space while commemorating past students’ struggle to make that very space their own. In September, UC Berkeley’s own Nicholas Dirks marked the anniversary of the Free Speech movement that came to a head in December 1964. His primary purpose was corral free speech in under the guise of celebrating it, by highlighting the importance of what he called “civility.” Also in September, UCLA launched a rebranding campaign introducing the tagline, “We, the Optimists”; probably needless to say, this campaign views aspects of UCLA’s past and present through impossibly rose-tinted glasses. The politically motivated firing and long-overdue return of Angela Davis to UCLA, for instance, are celebrated under an expanded form of the tagline: “We, the Optimists—We question.” In short, this year more than ever, UC management has aggressively appropriated and expropriated the last few decades’ worth of UC history. Their marking and rose-tinting erase the experiences of those who had to live beneath the shadow of a milestone. They give open lectures but lock down doors, blocking attempts to replicate traditions of resistance. Under such circumstances, the accepted meanings of the words “history” and “tradition” must themselves be undermined, as they typically signify only those forms of continuity that management has an interest in highlighting. (more at link) https://popularresistance.org/free-university-coalition/
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 14:13:19 +0000
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