Berkeley Attack on Free Speech and Emma Goldman

[Nomiprins]

Are they serious? How much Federal funding does Berkeley get from defense, energy and other war-related areas?
Nomi

January 14, 2003
Old Words on War Stirring a New Dispute at Berkeley
By DEAN E. MURPHY
New York Times

BERKELEY, Calif., Jan. 13 — In her own day, the Russian-born anarchist Emma Goldman roused emotions including considerable fear with her advocacy of radical causes like organized labor, atheism, sexual freedom and opposition to military conscription.

"Emma Goldman is a woman of great ability and personal magnetism, and her persuasive powers are such to make her an exceedingly dangerous woman," Francis Caffey, the United States attorney in New York, wrote in 1917.

Goldman died in 1940, more than two decades after being deported to Russia with other anarchists in the United States who opposed World War I. Now her words are the source of deep consternation once again, this time at the University of California, which has housed Goldman's papers for the past 23 years.

In an unusual showdown over freedom of expression, university officials have refused to allow a fund-raising appeal for the Emma Goldman Papers Project to be mailed because it quoted Goldman on the subjects of suppression of free speech and her opposition to war. The university deemed the topics too political as the country prepares for possible military action against Iraq.

In one of the quotations, from 1915, Goldman called on people "not yet overcome by war madness to raise their voice of protest, to call the attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated on them." In the other, from 1902, she warned that free-speech advocates "shall soon be obliged to meet in cellars, or in darkened rooms with closed doors, and speak in whispers lest our next-door neighbors should hear that free-born citizens dare not speak in the open."

Berkeley officials said the quotations could be construed as a political statement by the university in opposition to United States policy toward Iraq.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/14/education/14BERK.html?position=top&pagewanted=print&position=top