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 f you want to understand
what's gone wrong with higher education in America, UC Berkeley
is the place to begin.
Berkeley is where the great student protests of the Sixties started;
Berkeley is where our current culture war broke out; and Berkeley
is the center of today's movement to abolish the SAT's. Last week,
Berkeley did it again. By publicly apologizing for publishing a
book ad critical of proposed reparations for slavery, Berkeley's
student newspaper, the Daily Californian, quickly gained
national honors in the field of intellectual censorship.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. In 1964, the Berkeley campus
was swept by a student rebellion against restrictions on political
activity. The revolt was called the "Free Speech Movement," and
it would be easy to say that today's student censors are betraying
the spirit of that movement. But matters are not so clear cut.
It's true that the original Free Speech Movement billed itself as
a defender of rights for all. But while the mantle of our constitutional
liberties succeeded in building a broad-based student coalition
— one that included even the Young Republicans — the leaders
of the original Free Speech Movement were never interested in balanced
debate. The text of the movement was individual rights, but the
sub-text was the need to find some new form of solidarity —
some substitute for religious communion in a lonely secular world.
The student leaders, many of whom had returned to campus from a
dangerous but ennobling summer of work for the civil-rights movement
in Mississippi, discovered that they could keep alive that almost
religious sense of danger, purpose, and solidarity, by looking at
the entire world through the prism of the civil-rights struggle.
A widely distributed pamphlet called, "The Student as Nigger," said
it all. Once these middle-class kids had re-imagined themselves
as persecuted victims of their parents, the government, and university
authorities, their lives were turned into an almost magical crusade
against injustice. The rallies purported to be about individual
rights, but they were really about heroic solidarity, us against
them, good versus evil.
When the quasi-religious underpinnings of the Sixties ethos came
up against the free-speech rights of all those evil oppressors out
there, free-speech went into the can. It happened first at Berkeley,
when in the early eighties, before "political correctness" even
had a name, Ronald Reagan's U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick was
shouted down during a lecture on the UC Berkeley campus. That a
few censorious radicals might have shouted Kirkpatrick down was
unsurprising. But campus reaction to the incident was shocking.
In the pages of the Daily Cal, respected faculty members
split over whether our nation's U.N. ambassador
| “When
the quasi-religious underpinnings of the Sixties ethos
came up against the free-speech rights of all those evil
oppressors out there, free-speech went into the can.” |
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had a legitimate right to speak on campus. Many argued, in the
Marxist fashion, that oppressors have no rights, and that classic
liberal notions of fairness are themselves a cover for the despotism
of the powerful. The Kirkpatrick incident was a portent of things
to come — arguably, the kick-off of the culture war that began
in earnest in the late eighties.
Now, in the pages of the same Daily Cal, we see the conclusion
of the original struggle for "free speech." David
Horowitz, that courageous and canny conservative trickster,
decided to force the issue of liberal intolerance by running an
ad for a pamphlet on "The Death of the Civil Rights Movement."
The ad contained "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad
Idea for Blacks — and Racist Too." On the whole Horowitz's
arguments against the reparations idea are powerful and well-reasoned.
He shows that slavery is not comparable to the Holocaust or Japanese
internment — cases where reparations have been paid. And he
correctly points out that only a tiny minority of today's whites
actually descend from slave owners, many in fact being descendants
of immigrants, or of union soldiers who gave their lives to defeat
the confederacy. Horowitz astutely criticizes the reparations idea
for feeding into an ethos of grievance and victimization that only
inhibits racial progress. Surely most Americans today oppose the
idea of slave reparations. Can it be wrong to allow the key arguments
in support of such a position to appear in print?
If there's one place where Horowitz's argument is questionable (actually,
there are a couple), it is his notion that black Americans themselves
benefit from the national wealth created by slavery. It seems cruel
and beside the point to say that someone should be thankful for
wealth created by their ancestors' enforced labor. Isn't the point
of America that we place liberty above wealth or convenience? Although
the majority of Horowitz's points are well-taken, I can understand
someone being offended by that one. But that doesn't justify censorship,
and it's a tragedy that a generation of students have forgotten,
or failed to learn, the principle at stake.
If offensive arguments were outlawed, there would quickly be nothing
left to say. The level of hypocrisy here on the part of the academic
Left is truly breathtaking. I myself have been forced to teach
the offensive works of Catherine MacKinnon in a course required
of all student majors in my department, and MacKinnon is a required
text on many elite campuses around the country. My male students
had to endure reading the claim that they are all incipient rapists.
And by the way, despite protests, no texts balancing MacKinnon's
views were allowed to be assigned. Leo Bersani, a radical gay theorist
at UC Berkeley, has described with bemused pleasure the way in which
Berkeley's humanities departments have virtually merged into a single
gay and lesbian studies program, with
| “Are
you afraid that affirming the principle of universal free
speech might disenchant your magical world of oppressors
and oppressed?” |
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liberal
straights attending lecture after lecture in which their own sexual
preference is stigmatized as outdated and oppressive. How comes
it then, that David Horowitz cannot present his on the whole quite
solid argument against slave reparations, even if a part of that
argument might be considered as mistaken or offensive by some?
In fact, why did he have to buy an ad at all? Why aren't his books
already assigned at the university?
It only takes two words to answer that question: affirmative action.
The slave-reparations idea is an extension of the basic rationale
for affirmative action, and in attacking the reparations idea, Horowitz
rightly takes on the larger problem of affirmative action. After
the Horowitz ad appeared, black students on campus stormed the Daily
Cal's offices, destroyed papers, and intimidated staff. There
followed the public apology, which essentially said, "We are terribly
sorry for not censoring that ad. We promise to censor more efficiently
in the future."
The comments by the aggrieved black students all struck the same
note. How are we supposed to feel welcome here if such an ad can
be printed? What that means is that affirmative action has created
a group of students on campus on a hair trigger for feeling offended.
Despite California's formal ban on affirmative action, the university
continues to do its best to de-emphasize test scores and, in roundabout
ways, take race into account. That keeps whites resentful and blacks
insecure about their standing. So any idea that makes blacks feel
"unwelcome" is attacked as racist, so as to divert from the sneaking
suspicion, which preferences cannot help but create, that they don't
really belong on campus to begin with.
Ah, but what about all those liberal whites? They've simply forgotten
what free speech is. Is David Horowitz wrong or offensive? Then
use the publication of his ideas to expose their flaws. Let Horowitz
speak. Then answer him openly, forcefully, and persuasively. Or
are you afraid that something Horowitz says might not be answerable?
Are you afraid that affirming the principle of universal free speech
might disenchant your magical world of oppressors and oppressed?
Is not the very idea of reparations itself an attempt to turn a
complex present into a magical world of oppressors and oppressed,
gods and devils?
And to the editors of the Daily Cal, I put the following
additional questions: Do you believe that your actions have facilitated
or inhibited frank debate over racial issues at your university?
In the wake of your actions, what Berkeley student would dare to
raise his voice against affirmative action or the reparations idea
in any class discussion? Do you not see that preventing such expressions
of opinion was the very purpose of those who stormed the Daily
Cal? Does it bother you to think that racial issues can now
be more easily and honestly debated on Crossfire, The
Capital Gang, The McLaughlin Group, The Spin Room,
or Hardball than on the flagship campus of the University
of California? Would you want to attend a university that refused
to make available to you the best arguments on all sides of controversial
questions? Would you stand up to unjust demands for censorship
by African American or Hispanic students every bit as firmly as
you would oppose unjust demands for censorship from your own university's
administration? Would anything less be racist?
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