Violence at Berkeley and Freedom of Speech

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/opinion/violence-at-berkeley-and-freedom-of-speech.html

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To the Editor:

It is regrettable that The New York Times’s reporting on the cancellation of the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos’s appearance on the University of California, Berkeley, campus did not make clear that my administration reluctantly took that step only after determining that both the speaker’s and the public’s safety was highly endangered.

Berkeley continues its iconic commitment to free speech, and we went to extraordinary lengths to facilitate planning and preparation for this event, working in close concert with the Berkeley College Republicans. Dozens of police officers were brought in from U.C. campuses across the state.

Numerous crowd-control measures were put in place. But we could not plan for the unexpected. On Wednesday night, the Berkeley campus was invaded by more than 100 armed people in masks and dark uniforms who used paramilitary tactics to engage in violent destructive behavior intended to shut the event down.

At that point the University of California Police Department concluded that the speaker had to be evacuated from campus for his own safety, bringing the event to an end.

We deeply regret that the violence unleashed by this group undermined the First Amendment rights of the speaker as well as those who came to lawfully assemble and protest his presence.

The violence was an attack on the fundamental values of the university, which stands for and helps maintain and nurture open inquiry and an inclusive civil society, the bedrock of a genuinely democratic nation.

NICHOLAS DIRKS

Chancellor, U.C. Berkeley

Berkeley, Calif.

To the Editor:

Re “A Free Speech Battle at the Birthplace of a Movement” (news article, Feb. 3):

As a college student in the early 1960s, I watched in 1964 with great admiration Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. How tragic it was to read that half a century later at that same university, Milo Yiannopoulos, a controversial Breitbart News editor whose views are on the far right of the political spectrum, was denied the right to speak.

The Berkeley students, faculty, administration and protesters need to understand that denying Mr. Yiannopoulos the right to speak is antithetical to free speech. Free speech is about allowing all to say what they want regardless of their views. We can question, challenge and even disagree with the speaker. But we should not silence the speaker. In light of the violence, a less drastic alternative would have been to reschedule the speech.

Free speech is one of America’s lasting treasures. Any deviation from that practice, especially at our colleges and universities, should be rejected as fundamentally inconsistent with one of America’s basic freedoms.

NORMAN SIEGEL

New York

The writer is a civil rights lawyer and a former executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

To the Editor:

Re “Berkeley Cancels Milo Yiannopoulos Speech, and Donald Trump Tweets Outrage” (nytimes.com, Feb. 1):

As a faculty member at University of California, Berkeley, I have been aghast to read the sloppy coverage in much of the media of the recent protests before a scheduled talk by a Breitbart agitator, Milo Yiannopoulos

I was present Wednesday night on Sproul Plaza for the student-organized L.G.B.T. dance party and peaceful protest that began several hours before his scheduled appearance.

At 6 p.m. a group of black-clad, masked anarchists, unaffiliated with the university, arrived and began setting fires and shooting fireworks at the building where the talk was supposed to take place. They carried a banner that read “This Is War.” These and other outsiders who came to our campus started fights, broke windows and damaged businesses. Although you quote a university spokesman saying that these were not U.C.-affiliated groups, interviews with people who were there would have given a fuller picture. In fact, I witnessed many students running away from Sproul Plaza in fear after this group arrived.

In our polarized climate, events are hastily patched into prefabricated story lines. Berkeley students are now being blamed for “riots” and “violence.” President Trump himself tweeted a threat to cut federal funding to our campus. Twitter and Facebook are ablaze with their own threats (yes, death threats, too) against our “fascist” students and faculty.

And yet at the end of the evening, Berkeley students were photographed cleaning up trash left behind by a mess they had not made. Are Berkeley students the problem, or the society around them?

ELENA SCHNEIDER

Berkeley, Calif.