Unfounded Censoring of Letters Threatens a Bastion of Dissent

You would have thought, “Anywhere but UC Berkeley.”

Sure, times are such in America that your patriotism can be called into question for raising your hand to contest war policy or the erosion of constitutional rights. But for the last half century, Berkeley has existed entirely outside the norm, priding itself on challenging everything from haircuts to capitalism.

The times, they are a changin’. Now, in the home of the antiwar and free-speech movements, we have a scrum over war and free speech.

It all began when a university-affiliated enterprise called the Emma Goldman Papers Project tried to mail out fund-raising letters including quotes from the turn-of-the-century anarchist, who was deported in 1917 for speaking out against the draft.

Nervous UC Berkeley officials broke out in hives and ordered the quotations removed, fearing they might be construed as university-sanctioned dissent against a war with Iraq. They might as well have called Goldman project director Candace S. Falk and said: “This is America, Candace. Love it or leave it.”

“I was appalled and I didn’t know what to do,” says Falk, who caved in reluctantly and sent the censored letters.

You could perhaps understand the university’s concern if Goldman’s quotes promised death to all corporate-imperialist war-mongering pigs. But that was not the case.

In one, she encouraged Americans “not yet overcome by war madness to raise their voice of protest, to call the attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated on them.” In the other, she warned that dissenters “shall soon be obliged to meet in cellars ... and speak in whispers lest our next-door neighbors should hear that free-born citizens dare not speak in the open.”

God bless Emma. We could use a rabble-rouser like her today.

But Robert Price, an associate vice chancellor at UC Berkeley, broke out in a sweat when he saw the quotes.

“It wasn’t from nowhere that these quotes randomly happen to fall on the page,” he told the New York Times. He accused Falk of using Goldman to make a “political point, and that is inappropriate in an official university solicitation.”

God forbid. A political point.

The Emma Goldman Papers Project exists, of course, to make a political point. If Emma was too fringe even for Berkeley, the university ought to say so. But if it’s going to co-sponsor the preservation of her work, it ought to have the courage of its convictions, if not hers.

“It is shocking,” said Robert H. Hirst, editor of a Mark Twain project similar to the Goldman program. Forty years ago, the free-speech movement was ignited when the university argued that political solicitations on campus made the university complicit in the antiwar movement.

“They were wrong then and they’re wrong now,” said Hirst. “No one who sees a solicitation from the Emma Goldman foundation is going to think for one minute that she somehow speaks for the university.... I don’t think it’s possible for someone editing Emma Goldman’s papers not to be political.”

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl said in a statement Tuesday that the issue wasn’t free speech, but the appropriateness of the fund-raising letter. Whatever that means.

“I can understand how others might view it differently,” Berdahl said, “and in retrospect, had we to do it over, we would have done it differently.”

Had they to do it differently, they should have put the quotes in boldface and put them on all the other fund-raising letters, too. What’s a public university for, if not to challenge convention, give voice to minority views, and stir debate on national policy and everything else in the world?

Chancellor Berdahl said the right thing in the end, and Falk said she wished she had taken the dispute to him earlier. But she said Tuesday night that she still isn’t sure whether Berdahl is going to let her send out the original letters.

Because the censorship happened at UC Berkeley, of all places, it has struck fear that American universities will continue a trend toward shrinking from controversy for fear of drying up funding sources.

“I think it has a good deal to do with the fact that we’re living in the Bush-Ashcroft era, and universities are increasingly under a lot of pressure” not to offend those who control the purse strings, said Berkeley history professor Leon F. Litwack.

Hirst said the threat is real enough that he thought long and hard about speaking up in defense of the Goldman program for fear of reprisal against his Twain project.

Falk told me that when Emma Goldman argued against war, the government feared her in part because of her powers of persuasion. “She was so incredibly artful, the attorney general at the time said her eloquence made her an extremely dangerous person,” Falk said.

UC Berkeley has now managed, unwittingly, to accomplish two things:

It has given Goldman a forum she hasn’t had in 85 years, and it has proven that her work is more important than ever. Falk said more than 200 calls of support and donation pledges came in from across the country Tuesday.

Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at [email protected].