This is taken from Kerr, Clark. The Gold and the Blue, Volume Two: A Personal Memoir of the University of California, 1949–1967, Political Turmoil. 1st ed. vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. https://search.library.berkeley.edu/permalink/01UCS_BER/ppt38b/cdi_walterdegruyter_marc_9780520929531
THE OPEN FORUM: The Open Forum policy allowed any affiliate of the Associated Students or otherwise “recognized” student group to invite any speakers they wished (except Communists). This became a pressing public issue in spring 1961, two years before the ban on Communists was lifted. Frank Wilkinson, who was an alleged, but not an admitted or proven, Communist spoke on campus at a meeting organized by SLATE, a student political party that had become a “recognized” student organization in May 1958. There was a vehement protest, particularly by Assemblyman Donald Mulford, a very conservative Republican who represented the Berkeley and Piedmont areas, but also by many others. Mulford’s attack got a good play in major newspapers around the state. I replied,
“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. Only in this way can it best serve American democracy.[14]
My statement, in turn, was also widely quoted, and Regent Thomas Storke had it engraved on a bell in the Storke Tower at Santa Barbara. Chancellor Strong of Berkeley pointed out that “about 600 speakers a year appear on the Berkeley campus … on a wide diversity of subjects.”[15] Wilkinson’s speech was only one of them.
Wilkinson spoke on March 22, 1961. A year earlier, student participation in the disturbances that accompanied the San Francisco hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee had given rise to cries of outrage by many alumni and others. Consequently, in my presidential Charter Day address in Berkeley’s Greek Theatre on March 20, 1961, before many loyal but disagreeing alumni, I commented on several issues of current concern, including (by implied reference) the university’s refusal to punish students involved in the May 1960 HUAC disturbances, the denial of SLATE’s demand to use the ASUC as a political action entity, the still existing ban on proven Communist speakers (lifted in 1963), and permission for Wilkinson to speak. I said:
“Members of the University community, faculty members and students alike, deserve the same right to freedom of thought and expression which every citizen enjoys outside the campus boundaries. They are not, however, entitled to trade on the University’s good name, or to use the University community or a part of it as a captive audience, or to violate the law. The University, in turn, is not entitled to place limitations upon the off-campus actions of students or faculty members in their roles as private citizens. Participation in the University community does not sever either the rights or the obligations of citizenship in the broader community.[16]
Alexander Meiklejohn, who then lived in Berkeley and was in the Charter Day audience and after whom the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) award noted below was named, wrote me a longhand note of support: “You seem to me to have made a great contribution to the educational purpose of the university when there must have been many obstacles to the contrary.”
[…]
Notes
14. University of California Ofice of Public Information, press release, March 22, 1961.
15. “Echoes of Last May,” California Monthly, April 1961, 40 (quoted in Stadtman, University of California, 437).
16. Remarks by President Clark Kerr, ninety-third Charter Day ceremonies, University of California, Berkeley, March 20, 1961. For text of the entire speech, see IGS Documentary Supplement 3.1.