At Berkeley in the Sixties: The Making of an Activist

11 The Speaker Ban

In January, four of us drove to Sacramento for Governor Pat Brown’s inaugural ball. We got back very late. Once again I woke the housemother to get in, and once again I was brought before the dean. This time she wanted to punish me; it was my second offense. I don’t remember what the punishment was, but I do remember that no one else among the students thought that there was something wrong with these rules. The fact that they applied only to girls because the doors to the boys’ dorms were not locked mattered to no one but me. The only solution seemed to be an individual one. Helen wrote a letter asking that I be let out of my dorm contract, even though it cost her the room deposit. Fortunately I had met someone commuting from the suburb of Walnut Creek who wanted to live closer to campus, so we found an apartment to share on the second ®oor of 2509 Stuart. Marida was not very political, but she was a good roommate. Our ¤rst apartment had one bedroom, a kitchen, and furniture; her parents supplied most of what we needed to set up housekeeping. Unfortunately, there were no hallways and thus no purely private rooms. This became a problem when she acquired a boyfriend who hung around all the time and preferred that I be elsewhere. We survived until the end of the semester and then went our separate ways. The next time I saw her she was standing behind a counter in Sproul Hall, working as a clerk. Visibly pregnant, she had dropped out of school. 11 The Speaker Ban In the spring of 1963 I paid my $1 dues to join SLATE, encouraged by Allan Solomonow and Ken Cloke. Ken had joined SLATE upon entering Cal in 1959, as did several of his friends from Reseda High School. Allan had pretty much moved on. At the time I joined, SLATE was going The Speaker Ban l 53 through one of its periodic identity crises over whether it should continue and what it should be. The Regents had made ROTC voluntary the previous June, and SLATE’s seldom-successful efforts to elect representatives to the ASUC did not bring activists into the organization. SLATE needed a more compelling program. It started a major campaign to eliminate the speaker ban. By this time I was well on my way to becoming a radical civil libertarian , a process that was completed in the spring semester by taking Speech 123, a course on freedom of speech taught by Jacobus ten Broek. Thanks to intensive reading and debate about the ideas of three apostles of free speech—Milton, Mill, and Meiklejohn—and many Supreme Court cases, I ¤nished the year convinced that nothing was so dangerous to a democratic society as the suppression of iniquitous beliefs— especially by the state. Thus, the idea that a great university, where academic freedom was supposed to reign, should be closed to any speaker seemed preposterous. The speaker ban had crept into existence over many years but became formalized in the 1930s and ®ourished in the Cold War paranoia of the 1950s. As a formal policy it can be traced to two rules written by the Sproul administration and endorsed by the Regents in 1934–1936 when student protests were prompting legislative inquiries. Regulation 5 on academic freedom, which was written in response to publicity that Communists were in¤ltrating the university, included the statement that “the University assumed the right to prevent exploitation of its prestige by unquali¤ed persons or by those who would use it as a platform for propaganda.” Regulation 17 said in part that “in no circumstance shall any speaker . . . be invited to address any meeting . . . except upon invitation of the president or his direct representative.” From the administration ’s perspective, the purpose of the rules wasn’t so much to guide the students as to guard the university; administrators bent them when they wished.1 The application of the university’s speaker policy was erratic. In 1947, former vice president Henry Wallace was deemed too controversial to speak at UCLA because he opposed Cold War policies. But in early 1949, UCLA students heard a debate between two professors, one of whom had just been ¤red from the University of Washington after he admitted membership in the CP. Shortly thereafter, UCLA withdrew an invitation to socialist Harold Laski, a professor at the University of London and Labour...