Bettina Aptheker was a second year student in UC Berkeley when she got on a police car, barefoot so that she does not damage her and helped start the movement of freedom of expression.
“Power does not concede anything without a request,” she told a crowd gathered at Sproul Plaza this Thursday, October 1964, citing the abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
She was blinded by the lights of television cameras, but the students burst out approval, and “their energy has somehow crossed my whole body,” she told me.
Berkeley, as the Aptheker describes, was still taken at the end of the 1950s McCarthyism, when the 1st amendment was almost shot by the fear of reprisals from the government. A few days earlier, the administrators had adopted rules that repressed the political discourse on the campus.
Aptheker and other students had planned a peaceful demonstration, only for the police to meet and stop a student graduated by the name of Jack Weinberg, a guy tasty with flexible hair and a mustache who had spent the summer to work for the civil rights movement.
Well informed of these non -violent methods which finally gained a little equality for black Americans, hundreds of students sat around the cruiser, remaining there more than 30 hours – while the heckled threw eggs and cigarette butts and the police massaged on the outskirts – before the demonstrators successfully negotiate with the university to restore the freedom of expression on the campus.
History has been made and the movement of freedom of expression born by the most American features – courage, passion and the invincibility of young people.
“You cannot imagine that something like that happens today,” said Aptheker about their success. “It was a different period, but it looks very much like the type of repression that happens now.”
According to standards, President Trump is pushing at the University of South California and eight other institutions, the Aptheker would probably be arrested, using “legal force if necessary”, as required by his “compact for academic excellence” of 10 pages. And the protest of students would be crushed by policies that would require “civility” on freedom.
If you have somehow missed its latest attack on higher education, the Trump administration sent this Pact to the USC and eight other institutions on Thursday, asking them to acquiesce a list of requests in exchange for the carrot of access to the line to federal subsidies and advantages.
Although voluntary, the agreement threatens the Strongman style, that higher education institutions are “”Free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution chooses to give up federal advantages. »»
It is the stick, the loss of federal funding. The UCLA, Berkeley and the other public universities of California can tell you what it is to make you knock.
“It is intended to make one of the earnings that we have made,” said Aptheker about Trump policies. “No university should make any agreement with him.”
The biggest problem with this harmful pact is that it seems on the surface to be reasonable, if not desirable. My favorite part: a request that the tuition fees of signatory universities be frozen for five years.
USC tuition fees are currently at nearly $ 70,000 per year without housing. What the normal parent thinks that seems doable?
Even the pieces on Sound protests, on the surface, no matter.
“The search for truth is a central function of higher education establishments. The realization of this mission requires maintaining a dynamic market of ideas where different points of view can be explored, debated and disputed, ”says the document. “Signatories recognize that freedom of debate requires conditions of civility.”
Civility as removing your shoes before climbing on a police car, right?
As with everything that is Trump, however, the devil is not even in detail. He is there in black and white. The agreement requires civility, the Trump style. This includes the abolition of anything that could “delay or disturb class instructions”, which is almost all manifestations, with or without shoes.
Any university that disconnects would also be accepted to “transform or abolish the institutional units which will deliberately punish, go beyond and even arouse violence against conservative ideas”.
So, no more badly talking about extreme right ideas, friends. This brings out our racists, misogynists, Christian nationalists and conservative snowflakes of all persuasions. Take, for example, the most popular conservative idea that slavery was actually good for blacks, or at least not so bad.
Florida adopted educational standards in 2023 which argue that slavery helped blacks acquire useful skills. In another particularly blatant example of the non -profit conservative educational prager, a video for children on Christoper Columbus asserts the explorer, “being taken as a bitterness is better than being killed, right? I do not see the problem.”
And of course, Trump is busy serving the smithsonian of all the clues that slavery was a stain on our history.
Would it violate Trump’s civility that a black history teacher depreciates ideas such as not unbalanced and crazy? What about debates in a course of feminism that discuss Charlie Kirk’s comment that a good reason for women to go to university is to find a husband?
Or what about a class of environmental sciences which teaches with precision that the denial of climate change is non-scientific, and that it was at best anti-intellectual when the defense secretary Pete Hegseth recently referred to the efforts to save the planet as “shit”? Would that be impregnated and demeaning the conservatives?
Brettle is a word with a large range. I am concerned that whole university departments can be slaughtered, and certainly teachers of certain persuasions.
Aptheker, now 81, has become the kind of Professor Trump would probably hate, teaching freedom and inclusiveness to UC Santa Cruz for decades. This is where I heard his conference for the first time. I was a mixed child who had been the target of more than a racial insult while growing up, but I had never heard my personal experiences in the broader context of being a person of color or a woman.
By listening to Aptheker and teachers like her, I learned not only how to see my life in the broader fabric of society, but I learned how collective action improved the conditions for the most vulnerable of us, decades after decade.
It is ultimately this knowledge that Trump wants to crush – that although power concedes nothing without demand, collective requests work because they are their own power.
Even more than silencing students or breaking the manifestations, Trump’s compact seeks to purge this truth and those who hold it, the system. The signing of this so-called agreement is not only a betrayal of the students, it is a betrayal of the mission of each university which is worth its tuition fees and a betrayal of the values that support our democracy.
Governor Gavin Newsom has rightly threatened to retain the funding of the state of any University of California who signs, writing on social networks that the Golden State “will not finance his students, his teachers, their researchers and will not give up academic freedom”.
Of course, some universities will gladly sign it. The University of Texas called him an “honor” to ask. There will always be those who collaborate in their own disappearance.
But the authorities live with the constant fear that people like aptheker will teach a new generation their hard -won lessons, will open their minds to daring ideas and question the old realities that are not as unbreakable as they might seem. Universities, far from supposing this constant fear, should fight to make it a reality.
Nothing less rage the very point of university education.
