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By David Kirp It’s risky business to teach a class of a hundred or so undergraduates by conducting a structured conversation, as I’ve been doing at Berkeley for the past decade. The risks mount when the subject is as prone to controversy as ethics and public policy. The issues that we examine—assisted suicide, whistle-blowing, vote selling—are difficult; as one student put it, they’re calculated to cause “moral headaches.” The problem that we took up one day several weeks ago was no exception: How should the town of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, respond to the Aryan Nation’s request for a permit to hold a parade on the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth? The discussion started slowly, with students attempting an end run around the core moral issue. Would the projected financial impact of the march—business lost, overtime for the police—justify rejecting the request? one of them asked. If the parade were held, another inquired, would the media regard Coeur d’Alene, situated as it is amid ultra-rightwing enclaves, as a haven for extremists—or a beacon of tolerance? I pushed a bit. “Does it matter that it was the Aryan Nation, rather than the Boy Scouts, that wanted to hold a parade?” The Jewish Defense League had threatened that “blood would flow in the streets” if the neo-Nazis held their march. “Was that good enough reason to prevent the march?” I asked. At precisely that moment, 17 young African-American men and women, masked and garbed head to toe in black, entered the lecture hall from a side door at the front. Marching in single file, with military precision, they headed toward me at the podium, then wheeled and marched up the aisle to take positions along the back wall. There they stood, mute. In more ways than one, we were being held hostage by their presence. Later, some students told me that they initially thought I had staged the event. Later, too, I came to regard the intrusion as pedagogically fortuitous, but certainly did not think so at that moment. I had perhaps half a minute—the time it took for the group to reach its destination—to decide what to do. I didn’t know who our visitors were or why they’d chosen my classroom. I didn’t even know whether they were students. That they wore uniforms and concealed their faces was unnerving and ominous. Rumors had recently circulated about a new round of student protests against the California Board of Regents’ anti-affirmative-action policy, and my best guess was that the group’s actions were part of that cause. One demonstrator had placed a flier on the rostrum, which presumably explained the visitors’ presence. Should I read it aloud? Ignore the demonstrators and carry on teaching? Ask them—tell them—to leave? I tell the students that the course is meant to be a sanctuary where they can be respectfully heard across the ideological fault lines that divide the campus—that the course is an ethical community amid the impersonal multiversity, whose members have a responsibility to one another. It was time, I decided, to put the notion of community to its severest test. How should we as a group—not just I, the instructor—respond to the demonstration? That would become the focus of the classroom discussion. Yet I didn’t know whether it was possible to have such a discussion—or any discussion, for that matter—with the protesters ringing the classroom. I feared that their powerful physical presence might shock some students into silence, or that other students might hijack the conversation by insisting that the visitors be permitted to deliver their message. That didn’t happen. Though I learned later that many of the students were initially fearful, as I had been, they had enough confidence in one another to risk putting their own ideas on the line—even under such fraught circumstances. For the next half hour or so, they talked passionately about the moral course of action. Principles and counterprinciples began to take shape. “These protesters are protected by the First Amendment,” one student asserted, “so we have to hear them out.” “Suppose they came to your home,” a classmate shot back, “or stood up in the middle of a movie theater? Would that be their right, too?” Practical considerations—what lawyers call “time, place, and manner” distinctions—had been introduced into the mix. “What’s the protest about?” several students wanted to know. “Is that relevant?” I responded with my own question. “If we allow this group to deliver its message, are we ethically obliged to hear from those who represent other causes? Suppose that, next time, people demanding an end to experimentation on animals appear at the side door—how should we react to them? Suppose, as in Coeur d’Alene, that the Aryan Nation makes an appearance. What then?” (That hypothetical doesn’t seem far-fetched: What better place than Berkeley for neo-Nazis to get noticed?) Questions piled atop questions. If the protesters had actively disrupted the conversation, rather than remaining silent, one student asked, would their presence be less morally defensible? Should it matter that some members of the class might despise the message—might even react violently—as the Jewish Defense League threatened in Coeur d’Alene? For about 30 minutes, the demonstrators stood impassively, arms folded. Then one of them gave the black-power salute, and, on that signal, the group filed out as noiselessly as they had entered.
Now the class conversation turned self-reflective. “Did I do the right thing by making the demonstration itself an object lesson?” I wondered aloud. In the land of the Free Speech Movement, the historic epicenter of campus activism, had we written another chapter in the book of how a university responds to political action—or did the discussion fetishize procedure, in classic liberal fashion, and in doing so effectively keep substantive justice at bay? “You made the decision not to let them talk, not us,” one student said, with some heat. That was true in the formal sense, because the class isn’t an experiment in democracy—to quote Alexander Haig, “I’m in charge.” But it is a deliberative community and, in talking about the protesters rather than with them, its members had effectively decided the issue. The last minutes of any class are normally a time when the murmurous rustle of papers and the thump of backpacks would be heard, but the students remained still, intellectually charged. The manifesto sat silently on the rostrum; everyone was overwhelmed with curiosity. I decided to read it aloud. The leaflet described the self-styled “Black Out” as a protest against the California regents’ rejection of affirmative action, and also against the “racist” attacks of a conservative student newspaper, the Patriot. But the precipitating cause of the demonstration was a “racist” advertisement that had run a couple of weeks earlier in the Daily Californian. The ad opposed reparations for slavery to African-Americans, listing 10 principles—provocations, really, including the proposition that blacks owe the United States a debt because of the freedom and prosperity they enjoy. The author, conservative activist David Horowitz, was due to speak at the campus later that week. That wasn’t the end of the matter. A conservative student named John had asked to plug the Patriot, for which he writes, and announce the Horowitz event to his classmates. I’d agreed, as I’d earlier permitted a student involved in campus government to make a similar announcement. The reasoning is simple: Participating in the public life of the campus carries the lessons of the class into students’ ordinary lives—it invites them to be more than moral couch potatoes. John’s appearance in front of the class gave a countervoice to the message of the black protesters. “It is conservatives who are really being silenced, not blacks,” he maintained, “since at Berkeley you’re labeled a racist if you dare to challenge affirmative action.” It would be a brave person who tried out that line on Sproul Plaza—the site of countless campus protests since the early 1960s. But these students heard out their classmate, and there wasn’t a hiss in the air. Then they left, still talking. They kept exploring the topic on the e-mail list that functions as a chat room for the class, in sections run by the teaching assistants, and during my office hours. Those undergraduates were getting an education, if not in the tidy form the syllabus had outlined. I soon found out that similar demonstrations had occurred in classes, seemingly picked at random, across the Berkeley campus. A physiology professor told the Daily Cal that he went right on lecturing, ignoring the protesters who ringed his classroom. “I don’t think [the demonstrators] have a right to do that,” he said. That noontime some 75 black-garbed figures linked their arms to close off access to Sather Gate, thus penning students into Sproul Plaza. Ironically, the setting for countless protests, from the Free Speech Movement to the unionization campaign of teaching assistants, had been transformed into the temporary home of campus passivists. The Daily Cal had already apologized for running the antireparations advertisement that had sparked the demonstration. The editor-in-chief, Daniel Hernandez, promised to define “what is tasteful, appropriate, bigoted or detrimental” to his paper’s readership. Only the politics of expediency could explain the editor’s switch, since there was nothing, aside from its content, to distinguish the advertisement from other broadsides that the paper had run in the past. Meanwhile, a quieter, though more venomous, form of racial protest was also taking place: Members of minority student groups that had received financial backing from the administration to encourage minority high-school students to attend Berkeley were instead discouraging them from enrolling in the University. “Racist” is a silencing accusation, a charge that, like “When did you stop beating your spouse?,” brooks no effective denial. That conversation stopper is all too familiarly heard on Berkeley’s balkanized campus, a factory of learning that resembles a community only when power outages are threatened or the basketball team makes it to the NCAA tournament. As Berkeley goes, so goes the rest of higher education: If you’re interested in honest exchanges about controversial issues in general, and about matters of race in particular, talk radio is a better bet than any campus. Still, I hoped to go behind the veil of accusation to find out how the protesters who had entered my class reacted to the ensuing conversation. After all, they were students the day before the Black Out, and they’d be students the day after. Did they learn something, or did they feel they’d been silenced in an ingenious way? To my disappointment, none of them responded to my invitation, issued via an intermediary, to talk. I don’t believe their refusal is just a matter of race, another “black and white at Berkeley” story. In fact, among those in the class who participated in the conversation, there was no monolithic Asian or black, Latino or white, point of view. But the demonstrators, unlike the students in my course, had no particular reason to trust me. More important, they had no reason to see themselves as members of a community of reasoned discussion and mutual commitments. And so they reacted by silencing themselves. David Kirp is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and author most recently of Almost Home: America’s Love-Hate Relationship with Community. This article first appeared, in slightly different form, in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Return to Top |
 David Kirp Photo by Stephanie Rausser
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