By Finck, Ph. D | For Southwest Ledger
An incident happened last month at Stanford University that has unfortunately become all too common across college campuses. This particular incident occurred when Judge Kyle Duncan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit was invited to speak to law students.
Instead of allowing him to give his remarks, other students yelled insults and taunts to the point that he could not carry on. Asking for help from an administrator, Tirien Angela Steinbach, associate dean of the law school for diversity, equity and inclusion, took the mic and berated him herself.
As I said this is not anything new, but historically speaking, what makes this interesting is its location. Stanford’s principal rival, the University of California-Berkeley, just across the bay, is the birthplace of the free speech movement and should be the one thing on which the two schools can agree.
College protests are far from new. In fact, the 1960s practically invented it. The big difference between that decade and now is that the 1960s protests called for open and free dialogue on campus, not stifling it. As the Civil Rights movement and resentment over the Vietnam War began to grow in the early ‘60s, students began to actively participate in both movements.
While students were becoming more interested in participating, administrators wanted to clamp down on student protests. While many administrators agreed with student sentiment, more conservative regents and presidents worried about things like fundraising if their schools earned a reputation as radical hotbeds.
There was also still the issue of in loco parentis, a Latin phrase meaning in place of the parents. At the time, colleges were still operating under the guidance of replacing the parents in moral areas as well as education, meaning they tried to restrict things like drinking, gambling, and, most importantly, sex. This first came to a head at the University of Florida, where the college tried to regulate the student’s experiences while on spring break. Students responded that the college had no authority over adults who were not on campus. Colleges became seen as a microcosm of the large problem of “the man” trying to limit students’ freedoms and turn them all into corporate cogs.
While Florida may have started protests, it was Berkeley that grew them. In the midst of growing social movements, the university began to emphasize its restrictions of any political actions on campus, including speech. Angered by harassment from campus officials and police over political action mostly right off campus, a young graduate student and veteran of the Mississippi Freedom Summer, Mario Savio, led 500 students into the administration building to protest the censorship, and the Free Speech Movement was born.
While the college and Savio were able to work out a truce after the initial encounter, the regents doubled down on political activism, leading to Savio along with students and some faculty to stage massive sit-ins in the administration building.
It was during this event that Savio gave his famous “Bodies Upon the Gears” speech, in which he said, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”
Police would ultimately carry out and arrest around 800 protesters.
In response to the arrests, the FSM called for a general strike. Both liberal and conservative students supported the idea of free speech, making it almost impossible to hold classes as most students and even some professors refused to attend class. After a couple of more days of chaos, the faculty senate met and voted to support the Free Speech Movement and remove all political restrictions on campus.
One often overlooked aspect of the faculty motion was a proposed amendment which would have limited hate or violent speech. The motion was rejected because faculty understood free speech allows for all speech and that people are supposed to use their own minds to decide if they agree or not.
While Berkeley was the incubator of the Free Speech Movement, its ideas and those of groups like the Students for a Democratic Society soon spread to campuses across the nation, even across the bay to Stanford. Campuses soon dropped their political restrictions and many of their in loco parentis responsibilities.
Yet today these same campuses have gone in other directions. It’s not the administration, however, stopping free speech. It’s the students.
Many of these students idolize the ‘60s demonstrators but, at their core, do not understand their fight. Many of the students today ask for permission to protest. They don’t want to lose points if they walk out and miss a quiz. Worst of all, they feel that any ideas they disagree with do not have the right to be heard.
I felt the judge had a good take after his talk when he said something to the point of he was fine, he’s a life-tenured judge, but there were hundreds of fellow students who attended the event who wanted to hear what he had to say. If the protesters did not respect him, they at least should have respected the rights of their fellow students to hear him and make their own decisions.
Dr. James Finck is a professor of history at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. To receive daily historical posts, follow Historically Speaking at Historicallyspeaking.blog or on Facebook.