The Free-Speech Battles of Berkeley The mayor pressures the new chancellor to cancel controversial speakers.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-free-speech-battles-of-berkeley-1504556629?mod=nwsrl_commentary_u_s_&cx_refModule=nwsrl#cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=ctrl&cx_artPos=7
Fall semester has begun, and the University of California at Berkeley is back at the epicenter of the free-speech wars. Last weekend saw 13 arrests as Antifa activists bloodied their outnumbered foes in the city streets, and conservative journalist Ben Shapiro, former White House aide Steve Bannon and alt-right parvenu Milo Yiannopoulos are scheduled or have been invited to speak on campus this month. Stage set, Chekhov’s gun on the table.
The university’s new chancellor, Carol T. Christ, has vowed to restore free speech on campus, saying in August that it was “critical for the Berkeley community to protect this right.” Resilience is “the surest form of safe space,” she told students, and “we would be providing you less of an education” if “we tried protect you from ideas that you may find wrong, even noxious.”
Yet Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin has already asked the university to cancel controversial speakers. He said last week the city must be “very careful that while protecting people’s free-speech rights, we are not putting our citizens in a potentially dangerous situation and costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars fixing the windows of businesses.”
Mr. Arreguin also suggested that conservative speakers were “just a target” for radical activists “to come out and commit mayhem on the Berkeley campus and have that potentially spill out on the street.” Yet the risk comes not from the peaceful speakers but from masked and armed censors.
Meanwhile, Ms. Christ is schooling the mayor on the First Amendment. The chancellor believes allowing the speeches to continue as scheduled is the university’s legal obligation and spokesman Dan Mogulof told us she is prepared to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on security to protect speakers and attendees.
Ms. Christ is off to a good start, but the pressure to capitulate will increase as the semester goes on. In the student newspaper recently, Berkeley resident Sarah Cordette accused the chancellor of “giving institutional support to white supremacists” and exposing students to “mental and emotional damage.” You can imagine what the faculty is saying.
Past administrators were so intimidated by student protesters that the university installed a $9,000 emergency exit in the chancellor’s office, which soon became known as an “escape hatch.” And when Mr. Yiannopoulos tried to speak on campus last February, Antifa activists threw Molotov cocktails, used commercial-grade fireworks as grenades, shattered windows and set fires, causing about $100,000 in damage.
A mayor like Mr. Arreguin has a duty to maintain public order, and no doubt his job would be easier if no one controversial ever spoke at Berkeley. But a democracy needs the free exchange of ideas, and universities abandon a social duty if they aren’t venues for that exchange. Mr. Arreguin should be standing in support of Ms. Christ rather than caving in to the violence of the radical left.
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