A Short History of the University of California Speaker Ban
Jo Freeman
Once upon a time the University of California had a policy of
strictly limiting who could speak on campus. This was known as the
Speaker Ban, and it largely applied to known Communists.
The Speaker Ban was based on two rules promulgated under the
paternalistic presidency of Robert Gorden Sproul.
Rule 5 said: "the University assumed the right to prevent
exploitation of its prestige by unqualified persons or by those who
would use it as a platform for propaganda."
Rule 17 put control of all university facilities under the
President. It said in part "In no circumstance shall any speaker
... be invited to address any meeting ... except upon invitation of
the president or his direct representative".
The President and his campus representatives relied on these
rules to decide who could safely address the student body and
faculty colloquia. However, it was flexible.
In 1947 former Vice President Henry Wallace was deemed too
controversial to speak at UCLA because he opposed Cold War
policies. But in early 1949 UCLA students heard a debate between
two professors, one of whom had just been fired from the University
of Washington after he admitted membership in the Communist Party.
Sponsored by the Graduate Student Association, the Provost limited
attendance to faculty and graduate students.
Shortly thereafter UCLA withdrew an invitation to socialist
Harold Laski, a professor at the University of London and Labour
Member of Parliament, after President Sproul said his appearance
"would not be pleasing to the Board of Regents."
In 1951 Max Schachtman, a prominent socialist who was not a
Communist, was not allowed to speak at Berkeley. At UCLA nine out
of ten prospective speakers for an Anthropology Department forum
for "Negro History Week" were denied clearance because they were
members of organizations on the Attorney General's list of
subversive organizations.
In the Spring of 1962, two Soviet nationals, Cosmonaut Gerhman
Titov and Professor Troukhanovskii, spoke on the Berkeley campus.
But a year later Chancellor Strong personally forbid the
participation of Herbert Aptheker, editor of the Communist Party
(USA) journal Political Affairs, in a graduate student colloquium
run by the Berkeley History Department, citing Regulation 5.
Aptheker held a Ph.D. in History from Columbia and had published
extensively on Afro-American history. The History department moved
the meeting to Stiles Hall and passed the hat to pay Aptheker's
expenses.
Communist affiliation was not always the criteria. In May of
1961, Malcolm X was not approved to speak at Berkeley on the
grounds that he was a religious leader. He too spoke at Stiles
Hall. That same year evangelist Billy Graham and Episcopal Bishop
Pike both spoke on campus.
All candidates for public office were kept off campus, though
that did not stop them from speaking to students. When Richard
Nixon ran for the Senate in 1950 and Adlai Stevenson ran for
President in 1956, they stood on city property to address students
amassed on campus. During Pat Brown's 1958 gubernatorial campaign
he spoke at all the state colleges but none of the University
campuses; they had different governing bodies and different rules.
Sproul retired in 1958 as the fierce anti-Communism which he
embraced was also receeding. As a result the Speaker Ban began to
loosen. In March of 1961 SLATE sponsored a talk by Frank Wilkinson
at Berkeley. The House Un-American Activities Committee had called
him a Communist organizer but he had neither denied nor admitted an
affiliation. When he twice refused to testify at HUAC hearings, he
was sentenced to one year in prison for contempt of Congress.
President Sproul would not have allowed him to speak on campus, but
President Kerr refused to cancel his appearance. When three dozen
carloads of Bay Area citizens went to Sacramento to protest,
Governor Brown told them that "This country has become great
because we let everybody speak their piece.... [T]o ban them before
we know what they're going to say,... is a very serious mistake."
However in 1962 Riverside's Chancellor would not let Nobel Laureate
Linus Pauling speak about disarmament on his campus, stating that
this was not Pauling's area of expertise. Pauling had repeatedly
denied ever being a Communist.
The Speaker Ban did not stamp out Communist ideas, or even
opportunities for students to hear Communists speak. Wrote the
California Monthly (published by the alumni association) in October
1963:
Despite this policy, students could and did hear
Communist speakers across the street or, at most, a few
blocks away from university campuses. Moreover, the
ideas of Communists were available to students in the
daily press, over radio and television and in books and
periodicals in the campus libraries. Political activists
in the student body, usually caring less about Communists
than about the right to hear all sides of current
issues, engaged in intricate series of skirmishes with
the administration of the university. Permission to hold
meetings featuring speakers of a wide range of
controversial persuasions was sought. Whether permission
was granted or not, sponsors of such meetings gained
campus and public notoriety far out of proportion to
their real influence among the students on campus.
Brown and Kerr decided it was time for the Speaker Ban to go,
but it was necessary to convince the Regents, some of whom were
rabid anti-Communists. Kerr tested the waters at the March 20,
1961 Charter Day ceremonies when he said that "The University is
not engaged in making ideas safe for students. It is engaged in
making students safe for ideas. Thus it permits the freest
expression of views before students, trusting to their good sense
in passing judgment on these views."
In the fall of 1962 Richard Nixon, running for Governor
against incumbent Pat Brown, made the Speaker Ban a campaign issue.
Nixon said he would expand its scope to include "any individual who
pleads self-incrimination [the Fifth Amendment] before a legally
constituted legislative committee or grand jury investigating
subversive activities" and "any individual who defies the
provisions of the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1951." Kerr
responded by stating that "the University is an open forum. We
have confidence in the judgment, wisdom, and critical faculties of
our students."
Only after Governor Brown was inaugurated for his second term
did the Regents abolish the speaker ban, by 15 to 2 with one
abstention, on June 21, 1963. It did not go down easily. Regent
Jerd F. Sullivan Jr. wrote a long letter in opposition. His
sentiments echoed those of many, some of whom inundated the Regents
with letters after the change was publicized.
... to allow an agent of the Communist Party to peddle
his wares to students of an impressionable age is just as
wrong, in my estimation as it would be to allow Satan
himself to use the pulpit of one of our test cathedrals
for the purpose of trying to proselyte new members.
.....Communism.... is a foreign ideology; a subversive
conspiracy dedicated to the overthrow of our form of
government, by force if necessary. Their sales ability
has been well demonstrated by the strides they have made
in many parts of the world. Therefore, if we as a
country feel that our ideology is superior, why leave our
youth open to the narcotic influence of that
salesmanship.
... The most precious possession of the University is
its good name, and the respect it has generated among the
people who provide its financial support. To tarnish
that good name and dilute that respect would be an
irresponsible act far beneath the character of the Board
of Regents.
Students celebrated the Ban's abolition by inviting a series
of speakers who were too controversial under the previous policy to
open their mouths on the Berkeley campus. In July SLATE sponsored
Mickey Lima, the northern California director of the CPUSA. The
Daily Cal characterized his speech as boring. Herbert Aptheker
returned in late October to discuss U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam.
Neither evoked much of a reaction by the students or anyone else.
In the next academic year SLATE sponsored two truly
controversial speakers: Malcolm X spoke in Dwinelle Plaza on
October 11, 1963, and Capt. Ralph Forbes of the American Nazi Party
spoke in Harmon Gym the following May. Many were in a tizzy about
what students might do when such provocative people came on campus
sprouting ideas that few agreed with. SLATE had to pay for police
protection just in case the students rioted.
This did not happen. Thousands came to hear them speak. They
were greeted politely. Malcolm X was applauded. Capt. Forbes
heard silence relieved by occasional laughter. At the end of their
talks, the audience dispersed. What these people said, not whether
they should have had a University forum in which to say it,
dominated student bull sessions for days.
Despite the fact that there were neither riots nor mass
conversions to politically unacceptable ideas, not everyone was
satisfied that just anyone, even when properly sponsored and
chaperoned, should be able to address students on their home turf.
In June of 1965 the California Senate Factfinding Subcommittee on
Un-American Activities released its Thirteenth Report. Its
chairman was the President Pro Tempore of the Senate. In the
section on "Communists on the Campus" it excoriated President Kerr
and the Regents for removing the Speaker Ban.
[After] Albert J. Lima .... came the deluge. In came
Malcolm X, William Buckley, Jr., Mark Lane, Dr. Fred
Schwartz -- an endless procession of political
candidates, folk-singers, and an incredible procession of
controversial figures ranging from the extreme right to
the extreme left, with heavy emphasis, in our view, on
the left. The students no longer had to walk across the
street to Stiles Hall, the YMCA facility where Communist
speakers had been holding forth for years, because the
university was now bringing the Communists to the campus.
....
It is difficult for us to understand how a disciplined
Communist who addresses a crowd of students for 30
minutes can actually teach them anything worthwhile about
Communism. Certainly not anything they could not learn
much better from the thousands of books on the subject in
the university library. The Communist is obviously there
to indoctrinate and recruit, so he benefits. But the
student, presumably there to learn, gains nothing except
a satisfaction of his morbid curiosity and 30 minutes of
entertainment.
If, as a result of several years of exposing students
to the propaganda emitted by Communist lecturers, one
student is drawn into the Communist conspiracy against
his own country, who is really to blame? We conclude it
must be the persons who are charged with the high
responsibility of caring for and teaching the students
entrusted to them. The Communist speaker is clad with
the reflected prestige of the university where he is a
guest; and we are unable to understand why the people
should contribute to their own destruction by making
their public institutions available to those who are
dedicated to the task of overthrowing our government by
any means available.
.....
....It is our considered view that to throw wide the
portals to any controversial speaker who wishes to
utilize the opportunity to harangue a college audience,
is to put curiosity and entertainment above the
educational process, and to appeal to the morbid and
emotional rather than to the scholarly and the
intellectual.
After satisfying their "morbid curiosity," students applied
the same critical faculties they learned in the classroom to the
speakers they heard in other arenas, showing they truly were "safe
for ideas." And once they were no longer banned, proponents of
politically unacceptable ideas saw the automatic attention they
could command, dwindle. Thus did the students demonstrate more
common sense than those who would decide to whom they could listen
on their own campuses.
The above is based on but not excerpted from my forthcoming history
and memoir of Berkeley in the early 1960s. I condensed the history
and added the long quotes to illuminate the perspective of those
who supported the Speaker Ban.^Z
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