UC Berkeley Calls for Self Determination, Resistance to Trump

BERKELEY, CA (04-17) – Speaking from the Mario Savio steps in front of Sproul Hall, Robert Reich, UC Berkeley Public Policy professor and former Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration, addressed several hundred people on this “National Day of Action for Education,” calling on them to resist the assertion of control over higher education by Donald Trump. Reich opened his remarks by saying “Students, faculty and everyone in the Berkeley community, we are in a national emergency.” He then reflected momentarily on the irony that the Free Speech Movement (FSM) began more than 60 years ago on the Mario Savio steps in Sproul Plaza where he was now standing.

That movement began in 1964 when the university imposed restrictions on students by banning political speech and actions on campus. Inspired by the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam war movement, resistance to that edict gave birth to the FSM that was informally led by student Mario Savio and others in open defiance. The action, in turn, shocked the American public as it was the first mass act of civil disobedience on a college campus. After several confrontations with police including sit-ins, the university designated the Sproul Hall steps as an area of free discussion conditioned by certain hours of operation.

In reaction to the students’ gains, Ronald Regan launched his run for California governor by promising to “clean up the mess in Berkeley” for its anti-establishment element of asserting free speech rights along with that of academic freedom. Today, too, marked the 1985 arrest of 158 people on campus who had participated in a sit-in calling on the university to divest money from South Africa’s apartheid system. The arrests, in turn, prompted thousands of students to boycott classes and by July of that year the university had promised to withdraw more than $3 billion it had invested in companies doing business in South Africa. That decision prompted other institutions of higher learning, in solidarity, to do likewise.

On this National Day of Action over 85 campuses across the country held rallies to support the right for self-determination on campuses. Professor Reich, in his comments, reflected that Harvard, a private university, recently had not caved into a “set of demands from the Trump regime. That if they had accepted it would have lost its integrity, it’s own freedom, its own ability to govern itself. It would have succumbed and surrendered to the Trump regime. What it did instead, is it said no!” He went on to say that if Harvard could say no, then the best public university in the world, “must do the same.” Make no mistake, “that letter from the Trump regime is coming…to the Berkeley administration and it will have a list of demands, and Berkeley, if it is going to maintain its integrity and its independence – and it must – it must say no!”

“This is an issue that goes beyond academic freedom. It goes to the core meaning of freedom in this country. It goes to the essence of what we all believe about America. Because if the Trump administration dictates to any university” terms to its faculty administrators or students then there “is no limit to what that regime will do. You cannot appease a tyrant.”

“Columbia University tried to appease a tyrant, guess what? it didn’t work,” he continued. “The only way to deal with a tyrant is to deny the tyrant the ability to be tyrannical. Tyranny cannot exist unless people submit to it. And we are not going to submit! Now, it’s easy to say this, but to actually resist, to renounce, to say no is costly. Columbia University and Harvard and other private universities that are resisting or tried to resist certainly are facing major costs…The costs are worth it. It takes courage to resist tyranny. Courage is contagious. The test of this country is our ability to say no to tyranny and arbitrary authority; to say no to somebody who does not have any sense of limit in terms of power, or need, or subjugation, need for dominance, need to put other people down.”

“This university [UCB] is going to be at the lead of American public universities in saying to that tyrant, No!” He followed with “solidarity breeds courage” in the struggle that lies ahead. And in closing, addressing the Trump administration’s recent abductions and imprisonment of immigrants in an El Salvador prison, he warned everyone that if “anybody can be abducted in the United States and sent to a brutal prison in another land, none of us, none of us, is safe.”

Other speakers noted that the opening salvo of Trump’s dictating terms to higher education has now resulted in over 1,200 student visas having been cancelled across the US and international students, including more that 100 from the UC system, having been deported for exercising their free speech rights. This is in addition to billions of dollars of grants having been frozen as a coercive means to gain compliance. One speaker noted that “The only university that means anything is a university that ensures the freedom to speak, the freedom to learn, the freedom to research and the freedom to teach.”

The operative message reflected on by all of today’s speakers was one of solidarity in rising up for education, by fighting back to defend the institutions from a fascist takeover of academia and by preserving the ability to Speak, Teach, Learn and Research independent of any government intrusion.

Report and photos by Phil Pasquini

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