Hundreds of people gathered on the University of California, Berkeley campus Wednesday to protest the Trump administration’s latest attack on academic freedom. They stood before the famed steps named after Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio to celebrate the pursuit of knowledge, defend freedom of expression and protect access to higher education for all.
“Today, this university, like many across the country, faces an unprecedented and dire threat to its very existence,” Poulomi Saha, associate professor of English and co-director of the Program in Critical Theory, told the crowd. “We reject efforts by government officials to harass, deport and silence members of our community, and we will not let them dictate our curriculum and our policies.”
The values that Berkeley upholds and represents are values worth fighting for, said Saha, who helped organize the rally. “We believe in active participation and leadership in addressing the most pressing issues facing our local and global communities that are central to our educational mission. Among those pressing issues are protecting people’s rights, building a society that is fair, just and inclusive, tackling existential challenges such as climate change, working to alleviate suffering, promoting peace, ensuring the responsible use of new technology. In short, making the world better.”
The faculty coalition organized the event in just 48 hours. “It represents the widest range of faculty to have ever gathered on this campus,” Saha, whose preferred pronoun is they, told Inside Climate News. “We’re gathering with a wide range of diverging viewpoints on many things,” they said, “but we see the threat to this university to be so dire that we have no choice but to stand together.”
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Faculty who teach subjects as diverse as English, gender studies, African studies, law, natural resources and environmental studies took to the podium to defend their freedom to teach and students’ right to learn and protest without government interference.
“The very existence of our university feels under threat at this time,” Amanda Goldstein, an associate professor of English who specializes in Enlightenment literature and pre-Darwinian biology, told Inside Climate News.
“We’re on the Department of Justice target list,” she said before the rally started, referring to the Trump administration’s task force to combat anti-Semitism at 10 universities where students have organized pro-Palestinian protests. “So we’re here to defend our basic freedoms to speak and teach and learn and fruitfully disagree with one another without threats or loyalty tests or harassment of our students.”
More than 100 Jewish faculty and staff at UC Berkeley issued a statement last month denouncing threatened deportations of foreign-born student protesters as terrorists. Speakers at the rally repeatedly called for the release of Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University grad student who was arrested and detained earlier this month by immigration authorities even though he’s a legal permanent resident.
Goldstein and her colleagues rapidly mobilized after seeing the Trump administration’s actions against Columbia, which included a threat to end federal funding unless the campus administrators complied with a list of demands. That demonstrated “just how far they intend to reach into determining the governance and curriculum of universities,” Goldstein said. “That encroachment on the autonomy of universities to govern themselves and to simply operate as engines of research and thought and debate feels endangered for us.”
The rally occurred just 12 days after more than a thousand people crowded around the same steps to protest the Trump administration’s drastic cuts to federal scientific research and mass layoffs of scientists at agencies across the federal government.
Stephen Rosenbaum, a lecturer at the law school, said he came to the rally because he’s concerned about the weaponization of the Departments of Education and Justice against higher education universities in the United States. “Columbia University had $400 million in grants cut. Brown has had funding cuts and also Johns Hopkins,” Rosenbaum said. “Berkeley is on a list for investigations, and a lot of that is a pretext to stop free speech.
“This is the greatest public university in the world, but it needs money from the feds, and this president thinks he can impound money that’s already been allocated by Congress,” Rosenbaum said. “We need to show that the public is very much opposed to this,” he said, adding that faculty depend on federal funding to teach about important subjects like climate change.
The University of California Regents met in Los Angeles Wednesday and Saha urged the crowd to make their voices heard all the way down in L.A. in a call and response cheer.
“Who are we?” they said. “Berkeley!” came the response. “What do we stand for? The freedom to…” “Speak!”
“The freedom to…” Teach!” “The freedom to…” “Learn!”
Claudia Polsky, a clinical law professor and director of the Environmental Law Clinic, said lawyers are seen as the last line of defense against the Trump administration “as it daily flouts the Constitution, ignores our statutes and defies court orders.”
Normally, she said, it takes imagination to see how the past holds lessons for the present. “Now, the moves from the fascist playbook are so obvious that if deeds were words, we would call it plagiarism.
“We come together as a faculty to uphold the values for which this institution stands,” Polsky said. “The freedom to speak without censorship of words like ‘climate change,’ ‘inclusion’ and maybe even ‘empathy.’”
Students and faculty cheered her comments, while holding signs reading “Education not censorship,” “Hands off our students” and “Cal stands against fascism.”
Trump’s attacks on Columbia University are just the beginning, Polsky said, and Berkeley is among nine other universities in the DOJ’s crosshairs. “Sixty American universities have already been named as essentially enemies of the state, threatened with loss of funding and speech restraints and other conditions that are pretextual and unlawful,” she said. “We cannot let this happen here…now or ever.”
Speaker after speaker warned that the attack on higher education is threatening the critical role a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds plays in fostering innovation, discoveries and solutions to the planet’s most pressing challenges.
On these steps, now named for Mario Savio, students have stood for generations demanding a more equitable world, Saha told the crowd. “But naming these steps for Mario Savio came decades after he stood here.
“As we wait for history to catch up, we work towards a better future,” they said, urging the protesters to stand united. “When they come for us, they will try to divide us. We will not be divided. We stand together. We will not leave anyone behind.”
Juana María Rodríguez, a professor of comparative ethnic studies, urged her colleagues and community to protect the rights of the most vulnerable. “We are witnessing law-abiding undocumented people ripped from their homes and their families,” she said. “We are seeing legitimate green-card holders sent to detention centers for exercising their constitutional rights.”
As a nod to the history of the steps she stood on and the spirit of protest they embodied, Rodríguez read from the legendary speech Savio gave in front of them 60 years ago.
“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you cannot take part, that you cannot even passively take part, where you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all of the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop,” Rodríguez shouted.
“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,” Rodríguez said, as the crowd cheered.
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Liza Gross is a reporter for Inside Climate News based in Northern California. She is the author of The Science Writers’ Investigative Reporting Handbook and a contributor to The Science Writers’ Handbook, both funded by National Association of Science Writers’ Peggy Girshman Idea Grants. She has long covered science, conservation, agriculture, public and environmental health and justice with a focus on the misuse of science for private gain. Prior to joining ICN, she worked as a part-time magazine editor for the open-access journal PLOS Biology, a reporter for the Food & Environment Reporting Network and produced freelance stories for numerous national outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Discover and Mother Jones. Her work has won awards from the Association of Health Care Journalists, American Society of Journalists and Authors, Society of Professional Journalists NorCal and Association of Food Journalists.
