UC Berkeley History Professor Emeritus David Hollinger is one of a small handful of people on the UC Berkeley campus today who participated in the Free Speech Movement (FSM) of 1964. In a recent conversation, Hollinger reflected on his experience in the FSM and its connection to his career as a scholar and teacher.
These reflections draw on his autobiographical essay, “A View from the Margins,” in Robert Cohen and Reginald Zelnik, THE FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT (University of California Press, 2002).
After earning his Ph.D. in history from UC Berkeley, Hollinger taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the University of Michigan before returning to Berkeley to join the history faculty in 1992. His scholarship in the field of American intellectual history led to his election as President of the Organization of American Historians, and his election to both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
“Over the decades, David Hollinger has been an astute observer of American society — its norms, its conflict and its fundamental promise,” History Department Chair Cathryn Carson said.
Hollinger spoke to Berkeley Social Sciences about the Free Speech Movement’s impact on academia. This interview is edited for clarity.
What sticks in your mind now as the most important aspect of your experience in the Free Speech Movement?
I enjoyed being part of an intense community of students and faculty committed to the classical liberal values of free speech, academic freedom, human rights, and the unique social importance of truth-finding and truth-telling. In 1964, I took an unashamedly idealistic perspective on these commitments, and still do. These commitments are much more severely threatened today than in the 1960s.
To me, the FSM represents the 1960s at its best. What most matters for me about those years is not the spirit of Woodstock, not the slogans and the chants, not the gratuitous personal cruelties inflicted in the name of honest relationships – all of which were abundantly part of the scene – but the sincere if inadequate effort to unite reason and affection, to render intimate the flame of learning and the flower of love, to enact in secular time T. S. Eliot’s Christian prophecy of a moment when the “tongues of flame are enfolded into the crowned knot of fire, and the fire and rose are one.”
Looking back, are there aspects of the movement that you think were overemphasized or misunderstood, either by supporters or critics?
Lots of people could not believe that the FSM was really about what it said it was about. Surely, it was alleged with an air of deep savvy; those kids are really interested in something else. But the letters the arrested students wrote to the sentencing judge outlined in impressive detail the FSM’s commitments to free speech and to a campus open to candid and far-reaching debate.
New York University History and Social Studies Professor Robert Cohen has analyzed those letters in the book he co-edited with my late colleague, Berkeley History Professor Reginald Zelnik. Were some people also protesting bureaucratization’s costs to human dignity (as in the famous signs saying “I am a UC student—do not fold, spindle, or mutilate”)? Yes, that was real. Were some folks just having a joy ride, as is confessed in author David Goines’ indefatigably light-hearted book, The Free Speech Movement? Yes, that attitude was visible, too. But after all the hangers-on are given their due, the FSM’s self-representation was not false, and it is the part of the FSM least often taken seriously.
The relationship between academic values and social justice is a central theme in your reflection. Do you believe modern movements on university campuses are similarly shaped by this dual commitment, or has the balance between these values shifted over time?
The willingness to expect job applicants to declare their political views by means of a statement on diversity, equity and inclusion has persuaded me that within the ranks of today’s progressives, there are quite a few people who no longer believe in classical academic values. They appear to have decided that universities in our time need a political test, so long as its character can be concealed by calling it an affirmation of “shared values.”
I see welcome signs that the basically wholesome DEI movement is being restored to its proper size and scope. But I do lament that an effort has been made to keep out professors who might have a variety of views about what role universities should play in correcting social injustices. Ideas once counted as responsible contributions to a debate about that issue were suddenly reclassified as violations of our campus’s values. As a result of this slight of discursive hand, universities delivered academic freedom to the right wing as an issue that obvious enemies of academic freedom are now exploiting. This was a dreadful error by some otherwise sensible academic leaders.
You mentioned that you, along with other graduate students, were inspired by the Free Speech Movement to reflect on the relationship between academic professionalism and political activism. How did this introspection affect your own career trajectory as a historian?
Those of us who stayed in academia after the 1960s had witnessed friends depart in order to go fully into political organizing. This was an ideal context in which to decide just what you believed. Folks with whom you agreed about most things were telling you that universities were hopelessly embedded in reactionary structures and were best abandoned by anyone deeply committed to the creation of a more just society.
Most of us who stayed after hearing a lot of that talk from trusted acquaintances had come to conclusion –at least I did, and I know I am not alone –- that truth-finding and truth-telling were important not only for their own sakes, but were foundational to achieving a more just society. In today’s world, when truth’s hold on public attention is precarious and when powerful interests participate in its systematic suppression, this old feeling strikes me as sounder than ever.
In my case, one of my scholarly engagements from the beginning was the truth about diversity —how it came about in various settings, what tensions it caused, what it contributed to society, and what counted as diversity and why? I began writing about this in 1975 (when my first publication with the word “diversity” in the title was published), and have continued to do so in many settings over the decades. I have also been involved in university governance, concerned always that academia’s contributions to social justice are best maintained by close cooperation between faculty and administrators committed to the independence of universities.
When the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate voted by a margin of 8 to 1 to support the FSM, saving the honor of UC Berkeley, I resolved always to be involved in shared governance through faculty senates. I did this even in my first job at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and then was an officer of the senate at the University of Michigan. I have been active here, too, ever since I returned here as a professor in 1992, serving on a number of senate committees, including a year as chair of the Budget Committee.
If you could offer today’s students one piece of advice based on your experience in the movement, what would it be?
Never place the word truth in quotation marks; yet always remember how hard it can be to find truth, and to proclaim it.