U.C. Berkeley Professors and Students Stand Up Against Trump’s Assault on Universities

University of California Berkeley professors rallied last week on March 15 in response to the assault on the universities from the Trump regime. T-shirts and prepared signs said, “Freedom to speak, freedom to teach, freedom to learn, for everyone!” Significantly, over 1,000 people came. That included professors, retired professors, some administrators, and many students. Many professors, a number of heads of departments, and several deans spoke at the rally. The speakers called on everyone to stand up for what UC Berkeley has been renowned for—free speech, critical thought, opposition to racial and gender oppression—and some called on the university administration and the UC Board of Regents to do this as well (which they, so far, have not been doing). Some denounced fascism. The head of Gender Studies read the Martin Niemöller poem about the lessons of Nazi Germany (“First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist…”), and called on people to stand up and do better than the German people. One speaker from Berkeley Law made the important point that yes, we will fight this in the courts but that the courts are not enough, people have to protest. Another speaker read the famous Mario Savio statement from the Free Speech Movement, and called on people to act in that spirit:

"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!"

A crew from Revolution Books reached out to the people at the rally and distributed hundreds of the flyers with Bob Avakian’s statement “Trump’s fascist rule, like Hitler’s before him, is a regime of horrors—and is completely illegitimate,” and flyers from THE REVCOM CORPS For The Emancipation Of Humanity on the March 27 protests supporting Mahmoud Khalil. They brought to people word about the national @BobAvakianOfficial Everywhere Campaign—to spread word about how through his social media messages, Bob Avakian is leading people to see how capitalism-imperialism is destroying the future, how Trump/MAGA fascism arose out of this very system, how there is a whole better way the world can be, and how to work now for the revolution that humanity urgently needs. Many of the professors were eager to talk about fascism and what we should do to defeat it.

(reposted from revcom.us)