|
« AAUP Homepage
|
Free Speech Controversy Erupts at UC Berkeley
A controversy over free speech flared up late last fall at the University of California, Berkeley, but ended when the institution's chancellor affirmed the right of the Emma Goldman Papers Project, housed at Berkeley, to use quotations from Goldman's work as it sees fit in future fund-raising appeals. The project's staff collects, edits, and publishes documents by and about the famous radical.
The controversy arose when a university official struck two Goldman quotations from a letter soliciting funds for the project, saying that they were inappropriately political. In one of the deleted comments, from 1902, Goldman warned that free speech advocates "shall soon be obliged to meet in cellars, or in darkened rooms with closed doors, and speak in whispers lest our next-door neighbors should hear that free-born citizens dare not speak in the open." In the other quotation, from 1915, Goldman called upon people to protest impending war.
Scholars and editors at Berkeley and elsewhere protested the administrator's action, and after the story was reported in the New York Times in January, Berkeley chancellor Robert Berdahl sent an e-mail message to the campus community in which he called the deletions an error in judgment and affirmed the right of the project staff to distribute the fund-raising letter as originally written. The chancellor's prompt action was laudable, says AAUP associate secretary Jonathan Knight, who adds that "institutions committed to freedom of expression must resist pressure to refrain from disseminating controversial ideas."
|