‘This is the hill to die on for universities’: free speech can survive Trump, but not without a fight

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s good to have you all with us. My cohost today is my colleague Mike Fox, who hosts Stories of Resistance for the Real News and covers Latin America and world issues. Today we’re talking with David Hollinger about free Speech, the movement that happened to Berkeley and the fight we have now for Free Speech in America. David Hollinger has written many books, including Protestants Abroad, how Missionaries Tried to Change the World, but Changed America after Cloven Tongues of Fire, Protestant Liberalism, and Modern History and Science, Jews and Secular Culture. Among many of the books, he’s the former president of the Organization of American Historians and the Preston Hotchkis, professor of History Emeritus at the University of California Berkeley, and joins us now to talk about free speech in the World today and what it was like then in 1964 when he was an active participant in the free speech movement that took over Berkeley and Shook the nation. So Michael’s good being together again, and welcome to the program, David Hollinger. Thank you. Lemme ask you to describe the free speech movement in Berkeley at that moment and what was happening. Let’s start there.

David Hollinger:

The issue that brought it up was the remarkably myopic perspective of the regents of the University of California and the administration, which was to prevent speech on campus that advocated political action. And so as a result, all these rallies would occur right at the edge of the campus. So you’d stand up on the street and then you’d have a couple thousand people on the campus listening. And so the idea was, this is absurd. We ought to be able to speak on the campus about political advocacy. So this is what triggered it, and more and more people got involved, and it’s true that the civil rights movement experience of the South was very important. There were lots of people, not only Mario Savio, but others who had been involved in Mississippi Summer. So the connection was there because what kind of political adequacy did you want?

Well, we were advocating against racism. The other thing, and this is I think less widely understood today, mark, is that it was a struggle over the character of the university. And the idea was that the university ought to be a place where people can have all of these political arguments out in the open that’s not talking about what goes on in the classroom, which is a somewhat different set of issues, but we ought to be able to have free inquiry out there arguing as we want all over the campus. And as the movement went on, it was very exciting because this sort of civic stuff about civil rights and anti-racism merged with the academic stuff. And so there was a sense of community in that a lot of US students graduate and undergraduate and especially junior faculty for a while, shared these values. And so the sense of community that had emerged even at the end of October, fairly early in the process was very strong.

And I think the thing that began particularly to affect me was that I realized that we, in the free speech movement, we had a deeper and more accurate understanding of what universities were than the Regents did, and then the administration did. Now, Clark Kerr was actually a damn good university president. He did a lot of very good things, but he wasn’t very good on this. And our local Chancellor Strong wasn’t very good either, and the regions were terrible. But the feeling that we had by will into November was that there were so many things that came together. So there was a sense of almost peace emotionally speaking that even though we were loud mouths and saying a lot of stuff, the community that we had based on our academic commitments on our civic commitments pulled together very nicely. And the culmination of it, and this is a part of the free speech movement that I don’t think is widely enough recognized today.

The culmination of it was when the faculty Senate and Berkeley has the strongest faculty senate of any university in the United States. So when these guys speak, it means something. And on December 8th, they voted eight to one to support our demands. So here you have a case of the students saying, this is what the university ought to be. And rather than our feeling in a state of tension with the faculty, it turned out they agreed. So the sense of harmony that was possible, which you couldn’t do very much. Well in a lot of the later movement stuff when we were involved in the anti-war movement, I mean the issues were different, didn’t have so much to do with the character of the university, but the free speech movement was very much about universities and about civil rights and about free speech.

Marc Steiner:

One of the things I thought as you were saying this, is that this is direct line, which is really important from the Civil Rights movement to the free speech movement and the actors who came and did that. That’s right. And from there to the anti-war movement that exploded not long after.

David Hollinger:

Oh, absolutely.

Marc Steiner:

There’s a direct connection between all those things.

David Hollinger:

No question about it. And when the anti-war movement comes along, a lot of us that had learned our politics in the free speech movement were right there in the anti-war movement from the beginning. And the Berkeley anti-war movement was very vocal early on. I mean, the same was true at Michigan and a couple other places, but we were out there partly because of the political experience that we’d already had. And the anti-war, of course, broadened the constituency. I mean, you had the civil rights thing, but not everybody who was interested in the Vietnam War had also been that committed to civil rights. I mean, nobody was against it, but it’s a different set constituency. And you began to get draft age geist. So the draft comes up. And so that we had all these big rallies against the war where we drew on the free speech tradition, and we were very glad to be part of a tradition of political dissent in the country.

But again, there was a kind of harmony about it because most people that we knew were against the war. Now, in the case of the anti-war movement, though, you do have factions that develop as you get along. And so you get the weather underground and you get people that are, well, from a more mainstream point of view, very far out. And these were honest debates. They were debates though within a movement that was very clear that the United States proved itself to be an imperialist operation, and we wanted to restore the best things about the United States and its role in the world that were being betrayed by Vietnam. But you know all this, you were in the war, anti-war movement.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, I was deep into it. Deep it. There you go. And on the fringes of the weatherman though, I didn’t go underground. Oh, really? Oh, okay. Yes, but Oh, Mike, I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Michael Fox:

No, it’s fine. David, if you will, could you just take us back? Imagine that we’re in the heyday of this free speech movement. We’re there on campus, what do we see? Take us to a protest. Take us just to a moment, describe the scene.

David Hollinger:

Well, okay, the Spro Hall Plaza where Savio and various other Worthies would be speaking, you’d have several thousand. Of course, crowd assessments are often contested, but I can remember times when it was shoulder to shoulder all the way from Bancroft, which is the closest street to the South, all the way up to Sayer Gate, which is the part of the campus that enters the other buildings back to where the stairwell goes down to the lower level. So I don’t know, were there five or 6,000 people at those rallies? I think there might have been, but it was this feeling that we really did have this act together, and there were a number of rallies like that. I would say the anti-war rallies were bigger than the free speech rallies, but they were part of the same thing. The free speech rallies began small and gradually increased over time.

And among the things that helped them, actually helped them grow were these faculty members that used to show up and speak. So Savio and Suzanne Goldberg, these others would make their thing Betina Aptekar, and there would be several thousand there. And then John Sill, he died a couple of weeks ago in these nineties. Now John Searl was later expelled from Berkeley because of sexual harassment. Alright, so he’s famous now for that. But in 64, he was one of the faculty members that was the most vocal in defending the free speech movement. So you’d be standing out there and then suddenly after one of the free speech committee members spoke, suddenly you’d have John Sill up there, or you’d have Robert Bou poet from the speech department, or you might have, I think Henry Smith finally spoke at some of these. You’d have a number of the leading faculty members.

So the atmosphere as I’m describing it, is this gradual mix of civil rights driven activities displayed by speakers who were in Mississippi Summer to a more comprehensive, multidimensional constituency signaled by the changes in the speakers that you would get from time to time. Now, that applies to the main theater of the action. But to speak a little bit more to your question, Michael, the free speech movement also exists in little pockets of discussion all over the campus. You’d have a lot of people eating lunch at the dining commons, and the discussion was, of course, about these issues in free speech. And there would be somebody would come along who was, there was a guy named Rusty who would come along where I often ate lunch, and he would say what was going on in the free speech committee?

And then we would ask him questions, gee, don’t you think the leadership should do this or that? Well, I don’t know. We discussed that and so-and-so was against it, and you never know what Betina is going to say. Okay, so there’ll be these kinds of casual interactions. The reason I stress that is that if you only focus on the main theater of action, you miss out on how deeply this whole movement affected random conversations among people all across the campus under almost any circumstances. Now with regard to classrooms, I remember we were all very strict about this, and I remember my Bob Deloff great Colonial American professor. I was in his seminar that semester, and when we went to Havelin Hall for his class, this was Puritanism all the way. We did not use class time to talk about the free speech movement. However, we all knew that Bob Little was a strong supporter of the movement. We would talk to him before class, then after class, professor Litoff, is the Senate going to act on this? We heard that the Senate was having an emergency meeting on Tuesday. What’s going to happen? Well, it looks pretty good because several of the leaders of the Senate have come around and are much more positive toward the FSM than they were two weeks ago. Oh, I use that as an example of how on the edge of the academic experience this would come up. Anyway, I hope that answers your question.

Michael Fox:

Absolutely. I think it’s just incredible how important this was happening at Berkeley, but how important, what an impact this had over the entire country. David, how old were you at the time?

David Hollinger:

Let’s see, I was 23. That was my second year. Second year of graduate student. I was born in 1940, born in 1941.

Michael Fox:

Amazing. Did you understand the significance of what was happening, what you were participating in?

David Hollinger:

I understood that it had some significance because there were just so many people with so many different backgrounds that were involved in it. And also we were getting national press, not always friendly. So I guess I would say that I was as aware of as the next guy that this was an interesting thing to be part of. So yeah. Yeah. I guess the reason I’m hesitating is that I don’t want to claim to have today’s assessment of what its significance is necessarily, but at the time we thought that we were, as they say, making history

Marc Steiner:

And you were making, I think you did. That’s right. Fast forward for a second and thinking about the free speech movement, the name of it, what it stood for, what it stood for on campus, the ability to speak out and how that relates to what we face today and what has happened in this battle for free speech, which we don’t talk about much in terms of free speech, but clearly there is a suppression going on and there’s this rightwing takeover much of our country, and how that moment talks what we’re facing now in terms of this whole battle around free speech, what does it mean to people now?

David Hollinger:

Yeah, I think that a challenge there is to recognize that the free speech movement was able to engage this at a high level of generality. That the free speech conversations that we have in our own time involve refined arguments about whether or not to say from the river to the sea is hate speech, refined arguments as to whether somebody’s failure to speak out with sufficient vehement after October 7th constitutes a deep moral failure. So there’s a back and forth a lot about Israel and Palestine that adds a different dimension. Is antisemitism free speech? Well, some kind of speech is protected and some not. So you have all these arguments about what the First Amendment actually protects. Now, all of that gives today’s conversation about free speech, a different aspect. And although guys like me would like to say, oh yes, we figured this out for all time.

We didn’t face this. And as a consequence of that today, a lot of the discussion about the First Amendment is quite refined. And I think of the writings of Robert Post, the former dean of the Yale Law School, who writes eloquently about free speech doctrine, our own law dean here at Berkeley, Irwin Chesky, who’s done a couple of columns in the Times that you might’ve seen. He’s also very good on this. So these people engage harder issues. I would say it was easy for us. The other thing is that nowadays wise heads are quick to point out that academic freedom and free speech are quite separate things. We didn’t make that much in the earlier days. Now it’s recognized that academic freedom protects professionalism. It protects an ability of instructors to maintain the truths that they want to tell, even if there’s somebody coming in from the outside that doesn’t like those truths, so that the academic professionalism is quite different than just free speech on the streets.

So that’s a distinction that’s been made post is particularly good at talking about the difference between academic freedom and free speech, even though they are definitely allied and they have part of the same large ideological tradition going back to Milton and all that. But you refer to the stuff about what’s happening today and the struggle of universities to protect themselves. Now, just this very, this morning, I saw that Arizona had joined many of the other universities in refusing the so-called compact by which the federal government promises to fund the research on your campus if you sort of clean up your act on Middle Eastern studies and other things like that. So I’m glad that we’re fighting that. I don’t know what will happen at Vanderbilt and Texas, but most of the universities have stood up against that right now, given what the Trump administration is trying to do to universities to reduce them to vocational and technical institutions, to deprive them of the critical role that universities have traditionally played in fomenting democracy, they really are trying to do that.

So that means that this is the hill to die on. The universities are right, this is the hill to die on. This is the worst crisis that we’ve had since 19 16, 17, 18 in terms of the political opposition to universities. When Charles Beard resigned at Columbia and there were a whole series of quarrels over World War I, this is by far the worst thing that’s happened since then. And universities are much more central to American life than they were at that time. They have a lot more authority. They affect many more things. So it’s important that we take a stand, and I’m very glad to see that many of them are, but not all. And we’ll see how some of these other people come in the next little while. So if that’s what you’re asking about, yes, I think that’s a really huge issue of our time.

Marc Steiner:

So one of the things Mike and I talked about before this conversation started was the work you’ve been doing on the evangelical and the communicable movements. Oh yeah.

David Hollinger:

Right.

Marc Steiner:

And how that struggle now with the rise of kind of right wing religious movements in our country affect the notion of free speech. How do they affect it and how does all that tie together? What does that mean for where we are?

David Hollinger:

Well, a lot of the influence of evangelicalism on American politics has been this mannequin approach of absolute good and absolute evil, and that’s part of the biblical tradition that they rely on. I mean, even Jesus of Nazareth used to say, if you are not for me, you’re against me. That’s from a point of view of biblical scholarship, a little bit of an outlier among Jesus’s comments, but it’s a part of the tradition. And the more ecumenical Protestants, the Congregationalists and the Methodists and so forth, they never actually did that. And in modern times, the ecumenical Protestants have been quite okay with plurals democracy. We might say that they should have done this or that thing differently. But you can’t say that the National Council of Churches, the Christian, the Methodist Church, are enemies of plurals democracy. You really can’t say that. Whereas a lot of these evangelical spokesmen are very absolute and they don’t want to compromise. Josh Hawley, the Senator from Missouri, is a bonafide Christian supremacist.

So when he says that the government of the United States has got to be subject to Christianity, that Jesus is the Lord of all, and we need to make sure that this is the case in every government in the world, including ours, well, that’s not a circumstance where you have a lot of back and forth. So I’d say that the Evangelicalism has made it harder for plurals democracy to function because it promotes this mannequin stuff. Now, it’s important to note that Republicans didn’t need evangelicals to begin to think this way. Back in the nineties, Grich and Pat Buchanan circulated a series of instructions for the Republican Party. We’ve got to stop treating the Democrats as colleagues. We’ve got to demonize them that way. We’ll get more votes. Now, that was not grounded in evangelicalism, but one of the reasons that evangelical voters have been such an easy mark for right wing Republicans is that they bring this mannequin to public affairs.

So when the Republican leaders then cultivate all these evangelical voters, that kind of absolutism, that plays very well. And I think one of the striking things of really the last half century since Reagan really is how the Republican party, which doesn’t begin with that particular interest in religion at all, it finds that the evangelical voters are its most reliable constituency. So if you’re able to get all these evangelical voters every time, it’s kind of silly from a political point of view, speaking instrumentally not to use them. So I think that’s been a major disincentive for a lot of Republican leaders to go against some of Trump’s stuff, because Trump’s style, his own Manican style, plays very well with a lot of these evangelicals who, and you go back, if you look at the history of what evangelical leaders were saying in the 1940s, fifties, sixties and seventies, even though they didn’t have the political clout that they have now, they said that we evangelicals have either got to go off by ourselves and not be part of this, or we have to take it over.

What does it mean to take it over? Well, we’ve got to get rid of all this new deal regulation. So you have a lot of evangelical leaders like Harold Chenal, the first president of the National Association of Evangelicals during the 1940s and fifties. He’s saying this stuff all the time. So it’s a little bit frustrating. Now, when you read a lot of the journalists who think of this as a fairly recent phenomenon, you need to understand that evangelical protestantisms leaders since World War II have voiced anti-regulation, anti pluralistic arguments all the way through. So the Republicans sort of back their way into this. I mean, this is the party of Earl Warren got saved the mark, but yet what has is that they gradually get sucked in. So really you can say that for the first time in American history, we have a major political party with a vested interest in keeping the educational level of voters low. And the evangelicals play into that because the educational level of the evangelical voters is low, low, you can count on them. And a lot of demographic demagogic arguments that might not work as well elsewhere work very well with that constituency. So I think that the influence of evangelicals in American life is a very big thing, and it extends well beyond free speech, but that’s one of the things that it does. You don’t want free speech if you figured everything out.

Michael Fox:

That’s right. That’s right. You have to stick in line, David. So you just segued into exactly where I want to go. I’m really interested in this cross section between say, fake news and disinformation. And this question of how the Republican party now wants to keep people uneducated. How do these things go hand in hand? What does it mean for free speech in and accurate and truthful speech? Because the other thing that’s been under attack in a lot of ways,

David Hollinger:

I think that the ability of the Republicans to control the flow of information for a lot of Americans has profound consequences. Classic free speech theory as developed by Mill. And as all of us in the free speech movement did this, and Mario Savio always wanting to have everybody argue back and forth and come to an agreement was based on a vision of a community of inquirers and speakers that would argue back and forth, and somebody would point out this or that fact this or that fact. And the idea was that you could persuade somebody that you disagreed with. You might say, oh, come on, don’t you understand the following? And then you’d quote various things that actually happened. And then somebody might say, well, yeah, we’ve got to deal with that. Whereas now the Republicans can count on a lot of the voters that they count on.

Those people are not going to learn a lot of the truth telling things. So it’s fine for Stephanie rule and her friends on M-S-N-B-C to go over what the facts are and how the Trump administration during a given day has told 20 lies. Okay, well, the people that watch M-S-N-B-C that take Politico, that read the New York Times or the Post or the Globe, they get that. But a lot of these voters don’t see that. And as long as the Republicans can control the information flow, not only Fox News, but Sinclair, I know there are a lot of rural areas in the country, rural and small town areas where the media is now controlled altogether by these national conglomerates. I mean, the local newspapers, local TV stations are either gone or bought up. So that’s something that has happened in the larger political economy of the United States.

And it frees the Republicans to lie and lie and lie, and they know that there is no accountability with regard to the particular segments of the population that matter. So we might say, oh, but these are obviously lies. And look at all this, it’s been refuted. I mean, the New York Times has a list of 27 lies that the administration has told today. Okay, well somehow that doesn’t get through. Or if it does, there’s so much identity politics and tribalism on the part of the Trumpites that they will not believe it even when it comes up. I remember I was reading one of these reporters was going around interviewing Trump voters, and he says this Trump voter. Now with regard to January 6th, there are a whole lot of police officers who are actually hurt that day and injured by the demonstrators. Oh, that’s not true. That’s false news. Close the door.

Speaker 4:

Right.

David Hollinger:

Okay. So even when there’s an effort to do it. So I’d say that the tribalism and the identity politics is part of this. The control of the media is also part of it. And I think it helps in terms of understanding how we get here to realize that when the Republicans choose the Southern strategy back in the days of Nixon and Reagan, when they choose the Southern strategy, they end up deciding that they don’t have to appeal to highly educated voters in the States with the highest educational level. So by 2016, which is before Trump, before Trump, the Republican party had so abandoned the states with higher education that of the 32 senators that represented the Northeast and the Pacific Coast, only two were Republicans. And these our states like New York and California that used to produce Republican governors and senators of genuine stature. But once the Republicans found that they could win with the southern states and with the Midwest and the mountains, then they did that.

And there were also these educational and religious coordinates because even though the Southern strategy was based ultimately on race, that you wanted to appeal to voters who were uncomfortable with the Civil Rights Act and with integration, that’s the way it started. It turns out that many of the voters in those same states are also evangelicals. By far the highest percentage of evangelicals are in those states, the old Confederacy plus Oklahoma and Kentucky. And they’re also the lowest educational level. So it’s not only that less than 20% of the population of those states are college graduates, much less down to 14 and 15% in some states. But also the quality of the secondary education is not as great. So the Republicans backed into this trap, I would say, by which their electoral fortunes depend increasingly on voters that are not well-educated and that are as evangelicals not terribly committed to modern standards of epistemic plausibility.

So the educational and the religious components fit together. But the reason I stress that is that I think that our press accounts generally, there’s a lot of stuff on evangelicals and their threat to democracy, but that all this goes back to the southern strategy and a decision that the Republicans made. So evangelicalism has actually not changed that much in the last 70 or 80 years. What’s changed is the Republican Party, the changes that have occurred in evangelicalism are mostly those that come with getting greater power. They have more power. Now, evangelicalism has changed in that. Yes. But the line that you have coming out of evangelicals is not that different than you would get from Harold AK in 1942.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah, I mean, it seems this is great. And I think that it’s as if everything has been turned on his head from the moment, the free speech movement and the fuel, the civil rights movement that fueled the free speech movement came out of the church. It did. And the ecumenical church and the church that fought That’s right. And that everything is get twisted and turned around, and with Trump attacking free speech at universities, attacking universities and all of that, and the evangelicals taking precedence inside the Christian world, at least publicly.

David Hollinger:

Well, that’s right. And Martin Luther King, Jr. Whatever else he may have been, was a standard issue ecumenical Protestant. He was trained at Boston University by some of the greatest liberal theologians of the time.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, he was. Yes.

David Hollinger:

And and the other people that he worked with were supported by these liberal Protestants. The letter from the Birmingham Jail is published in the Christian century, and this was at a time when the evangelicals were still holding their meetings in places where there was segregation and where quite hostile things about the civil rights were being published in their magazine. Now, one of the things that happens to give more authority to the evangelicals is the gradual secularization process. So as the liberal Protestants, the ecumenical Protestants, the Methodists, the Episcopalians, and the Congregationalists and so forth, as they lose members from the 1960s on down through the end of the century, the country loses what has been the most important countervailing force against evangelicalism. And so you no longer have people like Reinold, Nebo, Harry Emerson, Fosdick, a lot of the great Protestant thinkers who were okay with plurals democracy, and they’re gone. They don’t have that much authority. So Christianity is increasingly recognized as what the evangelicals do and the decline of the liberal Protestants. And it’s not absolute. I mean, we have bishop buddy trying to defy the sovereign. So there are flashes of this. I’m not saying that that movement is dead, but the diminution of liberal Protestantism and the enlargement of the authority that goes with ecu, with evangelicals, that has a lot to do with where we are today.

Michael Fox:

David, mark was just mentioning how everything is kind of turned on its head at this moment. And I think it’s interesting how Trump will use the discourse of free speech to attack free speech. That’s right. One of the first things he did on January 20th was to sign his new free for free speech that now I’m finally going to bring free speech for you. How intertwined is Trump’s discourse around free speech or controlling the message and teachings at universities kind of tied into this large authoritarian like Trump’s attempts to take back or take over universities and gear them in one direction at the same time, use this discourse around free speech, but his definition of free speech, how intertwined are those two things?

David Hollinger:

Well, what happens is that Trump uses a lot of generic ideals like merit and free speech and diversity, and he claims that he represents them and that the academic establishment has betrayed those ideals. And so free speech is somehow that’s not allowed unless it’s enunciating the stuff that he wants to advance. So I think a lot of the commentators have observed that a strategy of the current Republican party, especially Trump, is to take some generally accepted ideal claim it for their side and accuse the other side of not doing it.

So you claim that the other people are weaponizing the Department of Justice. So you Trump weaponized the Department of Justice and you say, it’s actually the Democrats that did this. We’re just fighting back. The conversation is about free speech. Follow that same pattern. Oh, they did it first. And it’s consistent with Steve Bannon’s program is that you have to confuse people, do everything you can to confuse people so that somebody who’s not following this that much, and a lot of the Trump voters, all the social scientists tell us, a lot of ’em don’t follow politics that closely. They hear, oh, well, so-and-so’s for this. But then the other side is too, well, who knows what’s going on here. So it’s calculated to confuse and free speech is a cardinal example of how that happens. I would say also, Michael, that that’s part of this conversation about what it means to be conservative.

And when they say that they want universities to be more responsive to conservative ideas, well what do they mean by that? And sometimes they will seem to say, oh, well, we want things to be done on the basis of merit. Well, most universities are saying, we’re doing that. We don’t always get it right. There are disagreements about what counts as merit, but we’ve got an apparatus for that so we can figure this out. Whereas the Trump people are saying that we’ll decide what counts as merit and they will disregard the quite fine grain stuff that’s been going on in universities. They’ll also say something like, well, we have to make sure that economic ideas and basic political ideas of a conservative nature are present in universities. Well, Milton Friedman’s type of economics is actually quite well represented, but the constant claim that universities are in the pocket of left wingers is just such a crock.

It’s really so frustrating. We had an interesting experience here on the Berkeley campus that I think is relevant to this. There was a wealthy Republican donor, wonderfully loyal to us, and we speaking corporately, we at Berkeley appreciated his support. And he said that he thought that there ought to be an endowment for a lecture fund for people who would come here and articulate conservative ideas. Well, we tried to explain to him that we already do quite a lot of that, but he was very determined to do it. And if I may put it this way, we were glad to take his money. So what we did, we established this lecture series and we brought in these various people that were associated with conservatism in some way or another. But here’s the thing, I think every single person that we brought in during my five years on that committee had already spoken at Berkeley, had been invited here by the econ department, by the law school,

By the sociology department. So the lecture fund showcased this and showed in a very visible way our openness to this. But in terms of the intellectual culture of the campus, it really didn’t change that much. Now, that’s not to say that universities have handled questions of merit and free inquiry perfectly. I mean, I think this whole thing about requiring DEI statements for faculty, which they did for a while, I think that was a violation. I mean, that’s basically a political test. So the sort of left wing parts of academia succeeded in getting some of the administrations to actually impose a political test for a while. We had a little bit of that at Berkeley. I fought it, a lot of other people did, and it’s now dead in the water here. What it amounts to is we speaking corporately, gave all these hostages to universities critics, and we sort of turned academic freedom and free speech over to them as issues.

And we who were the custodians of these things weren’t true enough to them. So all this to say that the right-wing critique of universities is not like 100% wrong, but university capacity for responding to it, making these changes ourselves is greater that I think than is acknowledged. What I wish would happen a little bit more often is that there would be publicity given to a remarkable document of the year 2020 at Princeton University where 300 faculty and students and some staff I guess signed a petition saying that Princeton should basically be reconstituted as an engine for social justice. And that departments that had hired X percentage of blacks and Hispanics would be rewarded with more hiring lines and departments that hadn’t would be penalized until they came around. But it wasn’t only just hiring, there were a whole series of specific steps that the petitioners in 2020 demanded.

Now, the president of Princeton did not adopt this. He fussed with it a little bit. He sort of temporized, but he did not adopt it. But now the significance of that document of 2020 is that this is exactly what the right wing critics complaint about. It’s there. However, it did not tramp. It did not take over Princeton. Princeton was able to stand it down similarly with things that have happened elsewhere. Now, what I would like to see is that universities would defend themselves today by giving publicity to that the right wing claims that their people in academia that want to do away with academic freedom and free speech and just turn it into engines of the left wing, the way Brett Stevens and the New York Times colonists are always saying, are there people that want to do that? Yes, we should say yes, there are these people, but we are defeating them. We speaking corporately, the academic establishments of university is not going that way. Now you can find cases like this DEI statement where we went too far in that direction, but they’re not, that doesn’t happen at Berkeley now. Doesn’t happen a lot of other places.

Marc Steiner:

And I really want to appreciate the time of goodness today and being with us here at The Real News, David Hollinger, it’s really a pleasure to talk with you and to do this co-hosting, my colleague here, Michael Fox. Very good.

Michael Fox:

It’s been such a pleasure. So thank you so much, David. I really, really appreciate it. David, can I ask you to, now that we’ve spoken for an hour, can I ask you to introduce yourself?

David Hollinger:

Well, I’m David Hollinger and I’m now emeritus professor at the University of California Berkeley, which is how this event starts because my experience in the free speech movement, and I guess I’m one of the last survivors being aged 84 of people that are still around that was involved in it in any way. I’ve had much of my career as a historian at Berkeley, although I taught for a number of years elsewhere. I was at the University of Michigan for a while. I taught at Oxford. I was at the State University of New York, and most of my writings have been in the field of American intellectual history, broadly conceived. So I’ve written about the history of religion, about the history of philosophy, about the history of academic institutions, and it’s a pleasure to be here.

Michael Fox:

I have one more question and is, you mentioned something which was an interesting parallel for me, and how in 1964, part of the impetus for the creation of the free speech movement was because you all were protesting and protesting racism and standing up for the Civil Rights movement and whatnot, and they wouldn’t let you do that on campus.

David Hollinger:

That’s

Michael Fox:

Right. And we go fast forward here 80 years, and we see Palestine encampments that are on campus being demolished. We see people like il, the Trump administration is trying to support him. Do you make these parallels? Is this clear for

David Hollinger:

You? I think that there is that tradition. Of course, not so much complicates it or clouds it, but something we have to take into account is that some of the folks that are allied with these Palestinian voices that are being inappropriately purged and silenced, some of these voices have said inappropriate things about Jews. In other words, just because they don’t like something that Israel has done, they’ve racialized it. And I think that universities and our society generally is right to say, you can’t do that. You can’t go around grabbing the MEA off of somebody’s door just because you don’t like what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza. So that makes it a little bit different. But I don’t want to overplay that point. And I think your sense is exactly right that a lot of the Palestinian voices that are being silenced today are being silenced inappropriately.

Michael Fox:

David, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate it. I’m glad this worked out. Finally. I know we’ve been talking for weeks. Thanks guys.

David Hollinger:

Alright,

Marc Steiner:

Pleasure to

Michael Fox:

Take care, David. Take care. Bye.

Marc Steiner:

Thanks to Cameron Granadino who are running the program today, audio editor Stephen Frank for working his magic producer Rosette Sewali for all her working research that makes her program sound good, and the Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. So please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.