Cal in tough spot, chancellor says
Christ details list of difficulties Free Speech Week poses
A four-day event featuring far-right speakers planned for UC Berkeley next week is creating an environment unlike “any university has ever faced,” and the campus is mobilizing hundreds of police officers to head off potential trouble, Chancellor Carol Christ told The Chronicle on Thursday.
Christ cited factors she said make the speaking engagement extremely unusual besides its four-day length: The fact that media personality Milo Yiannopoulos is promoting the event as an “occupation” of the campus, and that some of the listed speakers contacted university officials and said they weren’t aware they were supposed to appear.
In addition, she said, the Berkeley Patriot student group that applied for permission to hold the event is a “very small, recently created student organi-
zation that is the door to a kind of disproportionately large organization” behind the event. That organization is Milo Inc., the Yiannopoulos group that she said was created about the same time as Berkeley Patriot.
“This is unlike any situation the campus has ever faced before and, I dare say, any university has ever faced,” Christ said. “I think we are living in a new world. It’s a dangerous world in many ways.”
Tension over the event flared up Thursday after an organization run by one of the expected speakers, David Horowitz, plastered the campus with dozens of posters that accused several students and faculty of being terrorist supporters. The posters included photos of some of the targeted individuals and names, and Christ said she ordered them removed. The campus also opened an investigation into the incident as a possible hate crime, along with other messages found on campus that targeted gay and immigrant students.
Christ called the posters “horrible” and “chilling.”
Horowitz is a liberal-turned-conservative who espouses anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and antiblack ideology, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate-watch organization.
Free Speech Week is “fundamentally disrupting the academic business of campus” and costing money that could be spent on academics, Christ said. She also questioned whether free speech is the motivation behind the event.
“If you think about free speech and why free speech was important to the students — they wanted to be able to stand someplace in a public plaza and argue their point of view and have people hear them,” she said. “I’m not sure that’s the goal here.”
Berkeley, where the Free Speech Movement began half a century ago, cannot deny people the right to speak, no matter how odious the message, she said. But at the same time, the consequences of allowing that speech could be dire, as several right-wing events this summer demonstrated when violent protests broke out.
It is a troubling situation, she said, because the law is not clear about what would constitute a legitimate public safety concern that would justify canceling an event. It is also unclear what constitutes an unreasonable expense, she said.
As it is, the university expects to spend more than $600,000 on security for the four-day event, which will require the assistance of law enforcement agencies from different campuses and from police all over the Bay Area.
One of the problems campus officials are having is that the list of speakers keeps changing, as do the times and locations where they are supposed to talk, Christ said.
Among the speakers expected next week are Steve Bannon, President Trump’s ex-adviser, and author Ann Coulter.
“The only thing that isn’t a victory (for the right wing) is if people shrug their shoulders and walk away,” she said, pointing out that the Constitution protects abhorrent or odious speech. “I believe passionately in free speech. I believe it is our obligation under the Constitution ... but many of our students are questioning free speech and its limitations.”
She said many young people nowadays — who were raised not to bully others — feel that words cause emotional injury.
Dan Mogulof, the UC spokesman, said police perimeters will be set up around some of the speaking events and attendees to those will have to show identification.
Christ said the university will reassess the situation after Free Speech Week, including what constitutes a campus organization, whether a yearly budget should be set for speaking engagements and how many successive events like this one should be allowed.
“Our obligation is to allow these events to go on,” especially when they are sponsored by student organizations, she said. But “it’s a topic that’s ripe for a probing discussion.”