Bettina Aptheker was a 20-year-old sophomore at UC Berkeley when she climbed into a police car and barefoot so she wouldn’t damage it and helped start the free speech movement.
“There is no demand, Ball has no demand,” she told a group of people gathered in Sproul Plaza in Sproul Plaza, citing abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
She told me she blinded her eyes at the lights of the TV cameras, but the students roared, “Their energy is just passing through my entire body,” she told me.
As Aptheker describes, Berkeley is still trapped in the end of McCarthyism in the 1950s, when the First Amendment was almost cut down for fear of government retaliation. A few days ago, administrators passed rules to combat political speeches on campus.
Aptheker and other students planned a peaceful protest just to have the police roll up and arrest a graduate student named Jack Weinberg, a clumsy guy with soft hair and working for the Civil Rights movement throughout the summer.
In those nonviolent methods that ultimately won some equality for Black Americans, hundreds of students sat down around cruisers and stayed for more than 30 hours, while Hecklers threw eggs, cigarette butts, policemen were in the crowd around the surroundings – before protesters and universities successfully resumed free speeches on campus, they were in the crowds on the periphery.
History has created that the movement for free speech was born through the most American characteristics – courage, passion and youth invincibility.
“You can’t imagine what happened today,” Aptheker said of their success. “It was a different period, but it felt very similar to the kind of suppression that is happening now.”
By standards, President Trump is pushing for USC and eight other institutions, so Aptheker may be arrested using “legal force” when necessary because his 10-page “compact academic excellence” requires. The protests of students will be suppressed by policies that require “civilization” toward freedom.
If you somehow missed his latest attack on higher education, the Trump administration sent that deed to the University of Southern California and eight other institutions on Thursday, asking them to default to the list of requirements in exchange for carrots on the frontline visit to federal grants and benefits.
While voluntarily, the agreement threatens strongman style, and higher education institutions are “If the institution chooses to abandon federal benefits, it is free to develop models and values. ”
That’s the stick, losing federal funds. UCLA, Berkeley and other public universities in California can tell you how it feels to hit it.
“It’s about backing down any gains we’ve made,” Aptheker said of Trump’s policy. “No university should have any deals with him.”
The biggest problem with this evil treaty is that it sounds reasonable on the surface, even if not needed. My favorite part is: The requirement to freeze the high altitude tuition at the signature university for five years.
Tuition at USC is currently nearly $70,000 a year without housing. What do parents think this sounds feasible?
Even the parts about the protests are nothing big on the surface.
“Seeking the truth is a core function of higher education institutions. Performing this task requires maintaining a vibrant market of ideas in which different perspectives can be explored, debated and challenged,” the document reads. “The signatories acknowledge that freedom of debate requires civilized conditions.”
Poetic, like taking off your shoes before getting on a police car, right?
But, like everything about Trump, the devil is not even a detail. Just in black and white. The deal requires civility, Trump style. This includes abolishing anything that could “delay or disrupt class instructions”, which is almost every protest, with or without footwear.
Any university signed up also agrees to “change or abolish intentional punishment, derogate or even cause violence against conservative thought.”
So, no longer talk about the far-right ideas, guys. This frustrated our racists, misogynistic female bishops, Christian nationalists and all the persuasive conservative snowflakes. Taking the increasingly popular concept of conservatism as an example, slavery is actually good for blacks, or at least not that bad.
Florida adopted educational standards in 2023, believing that slavery helped blacks learn useful skills. In another particularly incredible example, the conservative education nonprofit Prageru, a video about Christopher Columbus’s children, had the explorer say: “It’s better to be considered a slave than to be killed, no, I don’t think the problem.”
Of course, Trump is busy clearing out any hints from the Smithsonians that slavery is a stain on our history.
Will this violate the civilized standards of Trump’s black history professors to devalue ideas like unconfidence and fools? Discussing Charlie Kirk’s comment in a Feminism class is, is the good reason for women to go to college to find a topic for husbands?
Or, an environmental science course that accurately teaches climate change denials is unscientific, and when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently mentioned to save the Earth as “nonsense”, is anti-intelligent at best? Will this be uncivilized and belittle the conservatives?
Bleittle is a small word that can touch the big one. I worry that the entire academic department might be bothered by it and some persuasive professors.
Aptheker, 81, continues to be the kind of doctrine that professors might hate, free and inclusive at UC Santa Cruz for decades. There, I heard her speech for the first time. I was a kid of a mixed race who used to be the target of more than one racial slander, but I had never heard of my personal experience as a larger background for people of color or women.
Listening to Aptheker and professors like her, I learned not only how to see my life in the wider structure of society, but also how collective action improves the most vulnerable conditions among us in the decade later.
Ultimately, Trump wants to suppress this knowledge – while there is no need for power, collective needs do nothing because they are their own power.
Trump’s contract is not just about silencing students or smashing protests, but also about trying to clear this truth, and those who hold it. Signing this so-called deal is not only a betrayal of students, it is a betrayal of the tasks of every university, but also a betrayal of the values that uphold our democracy.
Gov. Gavin Newsom rightly threatened to deny state funding from any signed University of California, writing on social media that the Golden State “will not provide funding for students, professors, researchers and schools that have abandoned their academic freedom.”
Of course, some universities will be willing to sign it. The University of Texas called it the “honor” asked. There will always be those who cooperate in their own demise.
But authoritarians continue to fear, and people like Aptheker will teach a new generation of hard-working corrections courses, will open their minds to bold ideas and will question old realities that are not as unbreakable as they seem. Far from the ongoing fear, colleges should strive to make it a reality.
It is unlikely to belittle the focus of college education.
