Laffy
"Tuesday is 60th anniversary of an event that shaped our world: The Berkeley Free Speech movement, which set the stage for modern liberalism - and the right's backlash
How bittersweet that a wave of campus repression is drowning their victories."
If @willbunch wrote it, you should read it.© And I🧵 thread it. 1/...
Laffy
5/ "Easy to blame current mess on unique situation that triggered it: Israel’s war in Gaza in response to Hamas’ bloody attack on Oct 7, & web of polit landmines around issues like religion, race,, colonialism that it touched off. Some have spoken of Palestinian Exception to campus free speech bc of sensitive accusations that incl both antisemit & Islamophobia. But experts who focus on academ freedom say probs brewing well before last Oct7, speaking to 60 yrs of radical change in US higher educ"
Laffy
6/ "The 1964 Berkeley Free Speech movement didn’t happen in a vacuum. At the start of the 1960s, Black college students, later joined by a number of their white peers, protested off campus for civil rights. But back on campus, these young people remained under the thumb of their paternalistic institutions as the “Red Scare” of McCarthyism made university leaders wary of overt politics. Student activists began to recoil against rules that treated them as children.."
Laffy
7/ "Reagan’s 1966 campaign for governor — in which he famously said a Berkeley “hippie” is someone “who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane and smells like Cheetah” — launched him on a path toward the presidency. There, he signed off on a 1980s’ era of college privatization as tuition rose, government support shrank, students became more reliant on loans, and universities became more reliant on billionaire donors and trustees, as well as corporate support for research."
Laffy
2/ "Barely a month old, the new college semester has brought a bevy of new rules that limit the time or place or manner of protests — not much different from what University of California leaders were doing in 1964 — or add potentially chilling requirements for would-be demonstrators to register. Some have banned outdoor encampments all together. Some prominent schools have threatened protesters, or even would-be protesters, with harsh punishment."
Laffy
3/ "Risa Lieberwitz, a Cornell labor law professor who’s also general counsel for the American Assoc of University Professors union, told me that U.S. campuses are seeing a wave of repression unlike anything since the pitched battles of the 1960s. “University administrators seem to be responsive to external pressures to crack down on actions by student and faculty,” she said, “as opposed to university administrators considering the fundamental principles of academic freedom and free speech.”
Laffy
4/ "On the afternoon we spoke, the University of California board of regents, overseeing the sprawling system that includes Berkeley, approved a request from its Los Angeles campus, UCLA, to gear up for the new semester by purchasing three drones, 3,000 rounds of pepper bullets, and eight munitions launchers for its campus police."
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8/ "Backlash agnst student protest ran from blood-red TX, where GOP Gov. Abbott called out state troopers in riot gear to quash pre-Palestin protest before it cd start, to deep-blue NYC, where doomed Columbia pres brought in NYPD to bust up a student encampment, leading to 100s of arrests...largely peaceful Gaza protesters of 2024 getting arrested at higher rates than Vietnam protesters at end of 1960s—even as those protests had turned violent, incl burning down dozens of milit ROTC offices"
Laffy
9/ "Lieberwitz noted that repression has a history of backfiring when it goes too far. It happened in 1964, and she thinks it could happen now. She sees the rapid rise of unions supporting adjuncts, grad students, and even undergrad student workers as signs that students were rising up against corporatized college even before the Gaza uproar. “You saw free speech coming out of the 1950s because people finally pushed back,” she noted."
Laffy
10/ "But will today’s youth generation — coming of age in a more repressive time, saddled with problems like debt and rampant careerism not faced by their predecessors — be able to accept that torch? Huge issues, including the constitutional right of dissent and the future of colleges as bastions of open discourse and critical thought, hang in the balance. Sixty years later, America is desperately waiting for a second Free Speech Movement."
Please read the whole column
HistoPol (#HP) 🏴 🇺🇸 🏴
#USpol #FreeSpeech #Republicanism
(1/n)
I guess it makes a lot of sense to remind people of 👉why this rightwing backlash happened, strategically speaking.👈
I'm therefore linking to an insightful article by #JonSchwarz from @theintercept, which I threaded:
*The clandestine logic behind "#Reaganomics"
"The Origin of #StudentDebt:*
https://mastodon.social/@HistoPol/109730219700294592
...as well as a more current look at the issue by @ThomHartmann on #HOA and "...#Reaganomics #grift #Republicans have...
HistoPol (#HP) 🏴 🇺🇸 🏴
@GottaLaff @theintercept @ThomHartmann
#USpol #FreeSpeech #Republicanism #Reagonomics #MAGA
(2/2)
...inflicted on this country for the past 43 years:"
https://mastodon.social/@HistoPol/112875414830140318.
For those asking how long this #Republican strategy that led up to #Reaganomics and the #MAGA movement had been going on, I would like to point out this important thread:
https://mastodon.social/@HistoPol/112598555451884508
//
HistoPol (#HP) 🏴 🇺🇸 🏴
You are very welcome!
Siobhan
This is a great thread. Thank you for posting!
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