California’s constitution (Article XX, Section 3) requires every state employee — including employees of the University of California and California State University systems — to swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and to “bear true faith and allegiance” to both.
That oath provides interesting context for the events of this recently passed Labor Day weekend. On September 5, UC Santa Barbara history professor Butch Ware appeared at the Marxism Conference in Chicago, where he told an audience, “You cannot call yourself a revolutionary and not be talking about training with weapons.” Revolution, he said, “can and likely will descend into a fight in the streets.” He also warned of “war in the streets” and declared that Democrats “cannot be reasoned with. They must be destroyed.”
The following day, Cal State L.A. Pan-African Studies professor Melina Abdullah spoke at the La Defensa del Pueblo summit in Southern California. Abdullah identified an ICE agent by name, announced the address of the hotel where she believed he might be staying, and told the crowd: “F*** him up.” She later recommended that her audience read George Jackson and “study guerrilla warfare.”
The oath-taking was added to the state constitution in 1952. Fifteen years later, the state supreme court declared invalid a section in which employees were required to disavow any support for the “the overthrow of the Government of the United States or of the State of California by force or violence or other unlawful means.”
But for the professor class, the original constitutional language still bears revisiting. Consider it their homework assignment.