Pornopolitics and the University
FEUER, LEWIS S.
THE OBSCENITARIAN PHASE AT BERKELEY Pornopolitics and the University By Lewis S. Feuer BERKELEY A young non-student, John Thomson, sits down on the steps of the Student Union of the University...
...There's been a lot of vicarious psychoanalyzing of students, but I think the real cause was the concern of students about the right of advocacy, of free speech...
...A skillful mediator, he has a notable record in dealing with difficult disputes between labor and management...
...The resultant confusion was the kind that could only be produced by the most distinguished collection of intelligence...
...The conflict of generations is alleviated only when both fathers and sons dare see their own flaws clearly...
...A new leaflet, issued March 12, pronounced a new line: "President Kerr has issued a theatrical resignation...
...Crown Zellerbach of San Francisco, he reminded the audience, had a plant in South Africa, and profited from apartheid...
...King...
...Indeed, according to the California Public Opinion Poll, 74 per cent of the people disapprove of the student protest movement in Berkeley...
...I cannot explain how individuals who want (and deserve) freedom and respect for their own views choose not to grant that to others...
...Among the student actrvists at present, there is increasing dissension...
...For this reason, Marx was always doubtful about the role of students in politics...
...This was a masterpiece of talking all things to all men...
...Judge Crittenden, a distinguished jurist, carefully asked each defendant whether with full awareness of his right to trial by jury he was choosing instead to submit himself to the "tender mercies" of the court...
...An utter difference of outlook separates labor movements from student movements...
...The following day, however, Stephan Weissman, the FSM theoretician, tried hard to make the obscene speech demand one of FSM'S own...
...Several students and non-students, including one who had served as the FSM press representative, manned a table where the Obscenist Manifesto was on display...
...The Stalinist-minded W.E.B...
...The judge asked Savio to repeat the statement, wh~ch he did...
...The argument of the obscenitarians, at any rate, was straightforward...
...He went on to discuss the ideological status of the obscene word...
...If not dishonest, the course reports are incompetent...
...During the following days the Free Speech Movement bitterly attacked the Chancellor, not only for violating due process of law, but also (in both the - - and Spider cases) for having presumed to regulate the content of speech...
...At the close of last semester, the Berkeley student activists felt they had gained a huge victory...
...And what did "normally" mean in political cases where violations of the First Amendment might occur...
...a solitary law student had made the legal complaints for the last arrests...
...Indeed, one must remember that the culminating episode of last semester, the occupation of Sproul Hall December 2 by almost 800 persons, took place not because of any civil rights issue but because the University wished Savio and three associates to appear before the Student Conduct Committee to face charges of involvement in violence...
...THE OBSCENITARIAN PHASE AT BERKELEY Pornopolitics and the University By Lewis S. Feuer BERKELEY A young non-student, John Thomson, sits down on the steps of the Student Union of the University of California, and displays a small ink sign with an obscene four-letter word...
...What concrete gain was achieved by all this over and above what the University had previously granted...
...This statement," said the Executive Committee bravely, "removed any ambiguity concerning freedom of advocacy...
...In their view, so long as the obscenitarians and pornopoliticians did not interfere with the functioning of the University, they were free to carryon their activities on the camnus...
...The utterance of this word has a great deal to do with the civil rights issue,' Weissman maintained...
...Savio was beside himself as he went on to denounce President Kerr as a "two-faced hypocrite...
...And when generational struggle becomes a dominant end in itself, it carries with it the same consequences as class struggle did when it was made the ultimate end...
...He explained: "We have a professor here, Lewis Feuer...
...they want less hours, more wages, more security, better working conditions...
...They had secured the ouster of the Chancellor, and they said (in moments of boastfulness) that they had forced the faculty to "capitulate...
...But a trade union is a rational organization compared to a students' group...
...He launched first into a bitter diatribe against Martin Luther King, mocking him for his religious affirmation: "We'll put our bodies on the altar, and God is with us...
...They claimed that obscene speech was inherently part of the civil rights movement...
...The false quotation was itself an inaccurate rendition of a quotation from the New York Times which that newspaper had subsequently corrected...
...Du Bois Club has published an attack on moderate Socialist students...
...The students cannot beg him to return...
...I consider the sending of the letter therefore to be unethical, irresponsible and immature...
...But what if the civil authorities left the cases to the University's discretion...
...The faculty, however, presumably believed that the Regents had simply elaborated on its December 8 resolution...
...International Communism...
...But more important than this personal matter," he continued, "is a question that goes to the very heart of all crises in our times...
...4. A short while afterward, in the courtroom of Berkeley Municipal Court Judge Rupert Crittenden, arrangements were being completed for the trials of 695 demonstrators who had been arrested during the sit-in at the University last December...
...It was the kind of reasoning which Communists indulged in self-destructively against Social Democrats in the early '30s...
...It then went further, and tacked on through its Executive Committee a vague clause which it characterized with a straight face as a stipulation of "clarity and simplicity: that violations of law will be handled by civil authorities...
...Professor Ross, "leery of intellectualizing," was (we hope) no anti-intellectual...
...On its bright pink cover it bore a quotation falsely attributed to Professor Robert Scalapino, chairman of the Department of Political Science: "No one wants this university to become an arena for controversy and debate...
...On a fortunately lesser scale, the student movement in Berkeley has been a continuous case history of the strange workings of youthful fanaticism and its varied impact on their elders...
...3. A few days later, Dr...
...What strange and curious irrationality, what manner of Dybbuk, has come to possess this great university so that all its members and most distinguished personalities find themselves compelled to act out parts in a play which is farce and tragedy, which alternates tawdry buffoonery with political grandiloquence...
...The obscenitarians thought that they could act with impunity because they felt they had already defeated and intimidated both the administration and faculty...
...Because my article ("Rebellion at Berkeley, NL, December 21, 1964) had suggested there was a psychoanalytical overtone in the Free Speech Movement, Savio warned his followers to suppress their obscenitarian motive lest they provide me with overt evidence for what they covertly felt...
...For now, presumably, it was acknowledged that the University rules, which would embody the accepted Regents' policy, would be enforced by the University, but that where the civil authorities took the initiative of enforcement, the University would "normally" accept their judgment...
...tried to strengthen the connection between obscene speech and the civil rights issue...
...Then he added, in his apparent new-found attachment to violence, that he doubted whether he had done the right thing last October 2 when he told thousands of students to go home to avoid an encounter with the police...
...correct speech is the language of middle class pluralists...
...So the committees jostled amongst themselves, and nobody knew whither to turn until the Acting Chancellor created a third new Ad Hoc Committee...
...At the least, therefore, the newly constituted Faculty Committee on Student Political Activity should have passed at once on this claim...
...The next week, on March 8, President Clark Kerr and Acting Chancellor Martin Meyerson announced their pending resignations...
...Meanwhile, the three arrested student obscenitarians have refused to appear before the University committee appointed to deal with their case, pending their appeal to the courts...
...At first, the FsM also supported both Kerr and Meyerson...
...rather he was looking at student movements as if they were labor movements, and missing therefore some of the emotional ingredients specific to the student phenomenon...
...The unanimity behind both President Kerr and Acting Chancellor Meyerson was destroyed when Mario Savio, who was not registered for the Spring semester, returned from Selma, Alabama, where he had gone after his release from jail...
...therefore, to make contact with the masses, one must use obscene speech, and fight for it...
...He challenged the honesty of the "Slate Supplement" ratings as well as their underlying aims: "When in September I asked to see the questionnaires on one of my courses, I found that they had conveniently been lost...
...Then Judge Crittenden said: "I am going to cite you for contempt...
...It was an amazing argument-amazing because it was so frankly self-refuting...
...Almost every day continues to bring this campus its "crisis," so that an ordinary academic day has come to be an extraordinary event...
...The Academic Senate had originally resolved in its celebrated December 8 assemblage "that the content of speech or advocacy should not be restricted by the University...
...For the plain fact was that the successive faculty resolutions had multiplied ambiguities and contradictions which the diplomatic chairman of its Emergency Executive Committee labored to make co-exist less with logic than with the mediator's persuasive art...
...I foresee an efflorescence of the social sciences as PhD candidates flock to Berkeley to study the farfamed student revolt...
...Rock 'n Roll...
...The magazine that the student Left has been waiting for will come (in the non-sexual but hardly non-sensual sense) out (not in, but it is still for the in-crowd) soonsoon...
...The Maoists have published a leaflet which denounces the "political infantilism" of those students who raised "this non-issue of 'dirtyword' advocacy...
...The film will include members of the original cast...
...Prospects for the future, and for the changes the University so desperately needs, have never been brighter...
...We oughtn't to sign petitions asking him to return," he shouted...
...The FSM, though, was engaged in rewriting history...
...Politics...
...If my article on this point required any further confirmation, Savio himself had generously provided it...
...I don't think so,' he answered...
...Similarly on March 3, it was non-student John Thomson who was arrested as he exhibited his obscene placard...
...Therefore, there should have been no free sexual intercourse movement...
...Weissman attacked the professors...
...The next day, Art Goldberg- one of the original FSM leaders who, with Savio, had been charged by the University three months earlier with involvement in violence-posted a sign urging students to contribute to the "- - Defense Fund...
...The Chancellor, they said, was assuming invalidly that the University could distinguish between kinds of speech...
...The leaflet, 'The Last Word on Obsenity" (sic), said nothing about the Acting Chancellor...
...Also, rumor has it that our itinerant colleague, Eugene Burdick of the Department of Political Science, is corning back from Tahiti to write a movie scenario concerning the hero and heroine of the Berkeley student movement...
...Was this an equal exchange which a responsible leader would have made...
...Turning to the obscenitarian demonstration, Savio said: Yes, if he hadn't been in jail, he might have been part of it...
...Spider appeared on Chancellor Meyerson's desk one morning together with another publication, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge...
...Weissman and several other FSM leaders, including Art Goldberg and Laura Mura...
...And it must be believed...
...but worst of all is the anti-intellectual attitude and the slant toward the non-serious student...
...Professor Scalapino himself commented publicly, "Far more serious, however, is the fact that the error was known to the editor and to a large group of Slate workers prior to publication...
...It was certainly true that more than a week after the obscenitarian arrests neither the Faculty Committee on Student Conduct nor the one on Student Political Activity had indicated any readiness to assume jurisdiction, and the Acting Chancellor was obliged to set up still a third Ad Hoc Committee...
...If it decided that obscene speech was not political activity, the Committee on Student Conduct would have had to take reluctant jurisdiction over a case which the students themselves said was political...
...the faculty now urged the Administration to institute disciplinary proceedings of its own against the obscenitarians...
...Theirs, he said, was the "don't rock the boat philosophy...
...The crowd was mostly quiet...
...Kerr is attempting to regain power and prestige...
...Extremism...
...Karl Marx and his friends a century ago observed the duality of motivation in student movements, their altruism and self-destructiveness, their idealism and amorality, their self-sacrifice and obvious desire for power as an intellectual elite...
...Gone, for example, was the concern for "double jeopardy...
...The students as a whole remained indifferent, hostile or amused, and the Free Speech leaders sounded as if they were trying to persuade themselves...
...A remarkable duality haunts all student movements...
...The FSM can be credited with one undoubted achievement: Its tactics have made the soil fertile for a Right-wing movement, and it will require all the tact and argument liberals and conservatives alike can muster to undo their mischief And yet, an unregenerate optimist, I feel this story of obscenity and confusion will have a happy ending...
...Weissman said obscene speech was a political issue, and assailed the Acting Chancellor for permitting the police to make political arrests...
...It would be tedious to rehearse the complicated sequence of events involving Regents, Governor, and Legislature to which this pornopolitical journal has given rise...
...Student movements, on the other hand, are founded primarily on emotions of revolt and altruism which search to attach themselves to important political and social questions...
...Two days later Ross was standing before a crowd of l,OOO students pleading with them not to embarrass his efforts and those of the faculty by turning the Free Speech Movement into one for filthy speech...
...By contrast, the Free Speech Movement insisted with pedestrian consistency that the matter should be allowed to rest in the courts...
...President Kerr had resisted strenuously the pressure of some of the Regents for summary action against the obscenitarians...
...They ridiculed statements that the faculty had acted out of its own deep conscience in voting that there should be no regulation whatsoever by the University of the content of speech on this campus...
...More interesting, however, was Mario Savio's speech that afternoon to about 1,500 persons...
...He has gratuitously heaped insult upon shameless slander in yet another crude attempt to undermine the independence of a fine and spirited faculty and student body...
...Nonetheless, he declared, it was irresponsible to raise this issue for "sound tactical reasons...
...He ridiculed the philosophy of non-violence, and said Selma had been "demoralizing" because Dr...
...Never before had he spoken so frankly and with so little restraint...
...The students sensed that the flaunting of obscene words had more to do with outraging the University'S officers, with shocking the elders the way children do, than with establishing contact with the masses...
...In Berkeley, the tremendous idealism of the student body concerning civil rights is contaminated and misused by a group which has made "the politics of the absurd" and generational struggle into ends in themselves...
...He also delivered an address in the same terms...
...Indeed, the last resolution of the Academic Senate engendered further contradictions with an admirable insouciance...
...Obscene terms used for their own sake are not speech," he said, "and are not protected by the First Amendment...
...2. Meanwhile, attitudes of anti-intellectualism were spreading among the student activists...
...The FSM Steering Committee even went on to repudiate the obscenitarian cause: "Only in the recent controversy over 'obscene' words can students be said not to have acted responsibly...
...Surveying the situation, the editor of the University's newspaper, the Daily Californian, writes: "It is a sad state of affairs when a vast majority of citizens of this state feel a degree from the University of California at Berkeley should be printed on toilet tissue rather than parchment...
...Thus the obscenitarian phase of the student movement in Berkeley, which began on March 3 with the John Thomson incident, was one in a long series of incidents revealing a gradual deterioration in the ethics of the extreme student activists...
...It rejected by a vote of more than 2-1 an exception for speech which was directed to an irnmediate act of force or violence...
...He criticized those who had written about the student condition in a "faceless" university: "I'm a little leery of intellectualizing the problem...
...The FSM did not initiate or support this controversy...
...At the same time he criticized the evasion of responsibility on the part of faculty committees designed to meet these problems: "Faculty committees should not seek to avoid their responsibility for assisting in discipline because of minor questions of internal jurisdiction and doubts about the ultimate state of the civil law...
...Thus was born a new genre of student literature for which we should invent a new name-"pornopolitics...
...which marked a "tragic day in the history of the University...
...It will be financed by the Ford Foundation...
...E. Lawrence-style) who raided the administration lines with his student guerrillas, the character structure of the non-student, the political structure of FSM, the concept of alienation in the speeches of Mario Savio, the influence of Berkeley sociology on student authoritarianism, the influence of analytic philosophy and Paul Goodman's Gestalt analysis on FSM ideology, the influence of Alexandra Kollontai on women activists, the musicology of the FSM...
...The latest incidents deserve a postscript: On February 16, a circular appeared announcing a new magazine-Spider-to be edited by a group of non-students and their student auxiliaries: "A Spider comes out of its Hole...
...But all the ambiguity was still there, for according to the new policy, the University was undertaking a responsibility that the campus should not be a sanctuary for speech which lay outside the bounds of the First Amendment-for instance, speech which incited to immediate force or violence...
...If it decided that obscene speech was a form of political activity, it would have found itself with two equally unpleasant alternatives: either to regulate this type of political activity, or to adhere to the Academic Senate's December 8 resolution and declare that all political speech, including its obscene variant, was not to be regulated...
...It issued a leaflet on March 10, the morning after the proposed resignations were announced, which began: "We are shocked by the resignations of President Kerr and Chancellor Meyerson...
...Such "unethical and deceitful behavior," he said, "adds an unwelcome element of distrust and suspicion to constructive discussions and efforts...
...On their own motion, the student defendants, curiously reluctant to face juries, were electing to consolidate their cases into a representative trial of 150 of them without a jury...
...I had hoped that I could finish my career without ever hearing a contemptuous statement, and hoped that I would never have to rule on one...
...His speech grew less fluent and confident, and he made a desperate effort to veer back to the racial problem...
...They have indicated a postponed readiness to dispense with the too anarchistic Savio, if and when this becomes feasible...
...Ross, a professor of Industrial Relations, had evidently been entirely surprised by the new obscenitarian phase...
...He reminds us how a "proletariat of undergraduates" undertook to incarnate the consequences of their ideology in blood...
...When the Russian student movement emerged in the 1860s, Marx noted that the serious ones devoted themselves to their studies, and gave the government no pretext for suppressing their mutual aid societies, whereas the unstable ones not only adopted tactics which brought Siberian exile but succumbed to the leadership of the classical non-student of the student movement, the infamous Nechayev...
...No such discussion or agreement took place," wrote Dr...
...At this time the FSM was no longer formally in existence...
...King was misleading the civil rights movement, but "the movement isn't Dr...
...An exchange was made: the indictment of 800 persons in exchange for four students who refused to accept their individual responsibility for alleged involvement in violence before a Student Conduct Committee...
...The burden of their argument was: Obscene speech is the language of the masses...
...Within a week the President and Acting Chancellor of one of the largest universities in America announce their proposed resignations...
...Moreover, it was true that the corps of Vice-Chancellors, Deans, Assistant Deans, and Special Assistants on Student Affairs had refrained from taking any responsibility the previ ous week...
...Deceit, contempt and disregard for other people's rights, the emotional patterns of those who hold that all means are sanctified by their sacred goal, all return to possess the student activists...
...Instead, he wrapped himself in the protective mantle of the non-violence movement: Joan Baez sang her religious songs of human freedom and love, and the students, with selfless, non-violent idealism, marched in heroic illusion into Sproul Hall...
...So it happened that Mario Savio was in jail for two days-March 4-5-when the Free Speech Movement entered its obscenitarian phase...
...One arrested non-student turned limpnik, and there were shouts: "Arrest these people, and there'll be 10,000 signs tomorrow" But the sequence of five months ago did not repeat itself...
...Meanwhile,however, the University was pondering and trying to unravel the significance of the resignations of President Kerr and Acting Chancellor Meyerson...
...The obscenitarian rationale seemed to them rationalization, ideology-nothing more...
...As he spoke, he seemed to sense that the crowd was no longer with him...
...The obscenitarian phase began as had the events of last October-with the initiative of a non-student...
...He himself had gone along as on "a Children's Crusade,' but he implied that he favored a more violent approach...
...He asked Savio whether he had read "that throughout history, people had held that trial by jury is the greatest protection against oppression and tyranny...
...If all gods fail, so do the children who follow them...
...With stunning articles about darling books and groovy films, this magazine will become a functional necessity...
...Would it be worse, he asked, to have someone as president "who dislikes us, and says so publicly...
...Drugs...
...but on December 2, he did not tell the students that he had committed an act of individual violence...
...Bruyn...
...The workingmen have specific grievances born of their conditions of life...
...On October 1, a non-student was arrested, went limp, and was held for 31 hours in a police car surrounded by a crowd of students...
...There will be theses on the social composition of FSM, the religious and ethnic distribution of the demonstrators, the influence of the "glass of water" theory on their sexual lives, the relative rates of participation of departments, graduates, and undergraduates, the relationship of Slate to FSM, the relation of the Graduate Coordinating Council to Slate, the role of the Goldwaterites and Maoists, the role of the assistant professors, the role of an Oxonian (T...
...The next day, the two announced that they would remain in office...
...But then a few weeks later (January 5), in a complete about face, the Senate accepted its Executive Committee's expression of pleasure that "the Regents do not contemplate that advocacy or content of speech shall be restricted beyond the purview of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution...
...In the past months, the campus has quieted and students, faculty and local administration have been actively working on educational reform...
...They were arrested finally by the campus police...
...The chairman of the Emergency Executive Committee of the Berkeley Academic Senate, Professor Arthur Ross, was in Sacramento March 3 to help inform the California Legislature of the events at the University...
...Goldberg and another obscenitarian then were arrested on the complaint of a law student...
...The Academic Senate, by an overwhelming vote on March 12, called on Kerr and Meyerson to withdraw their resignations, and urged the Regents to decline them...
...We can understand now more fully why the FSM has always been so preoccupied with defending the status of "indirect violence" which might result from its allegedly non-violent activities...
...The Berkeley Academic Senate will henceforth have a supreme place among the dialectical practitioners of the world...
...They neglected to inform their readers that their ideologue, Stephan Weissman, had initially supported the obscenitarians, and that this support had been rendered after consultation with his fellow leaders...
...When the judge put this question to Mario Savio, the foremost student spokesman, Savio replied in his customary Free-Speechese: "I fully understand the shameless hypocrisy this court has been reduced to...
...This was especially brought to the University's notice by a professor who had been a stanch supporter of the Free Speech Movement, Professor Joseph Fontenrose, chairman of the Department of Classics...
...It was not surprising that when the obscenitarians launched their campaign, nobody in the University was able to define policy with any clarity in terms of the muddled faculty enactments...
...that violations of University rules will be handled by the University," and that where both University rules and civil law applied to the same act, the court's judgment would normally be followed...
...Professors Mark Scharer and Arthur Ross had just told the crowd that flaunting obscene words was unworthy of serious students, and had defended the action of the campus police in arresting the obscenitarians...
...The Chancellor banned the sale of Spider, but his order was evaded until the issue was sold out...
...Actually, the efforts of Acting Chancellor Meyerson to secure judicial action ran into the confusions of faculty policy and resolutions...
...An "irresponsible" issue was defined by him and other leaders as not one which they rejected on principle, but rather as one which would lose them the support of a student body that might finally realize the underlying character of the FSM leadership...
...Albert Camus in The Rebel quotes Pisarev, the theoretician of Russian nihilism, as declaring "that the greatest fanatics are children and adolescents...
...on the one hand, they are filled with the tremendous energies and longings of uncorrupted, altruistic idealism, and on the other, some flaw of generational hatred can transmute most of that idealism into a leverage for destruction...
...Mario Savio, rather more consistent than the Academic Senate, labeled the Regents' decision a "horrendous action...
...They could see clearly this issue had misfired...
...Thus the travails of academe...
...Henry Bruyn, Director of the Student Health Service, accused a Slate representative of having sent out a deceitful letter to 50 colleges and universities, misrepresenting his stand on contraceptive advice for students...
...This is the first time in my career on the bench that anyone has ever made a contemptuous statement before me...
...The chairman of the Republican party State Committee has announced that the University will be a political issue at the next election, and there is a grim possibility that Right-wing extremists will corne forward with a proposition for a state-wide referendum...
...A pamphlet might be written on Left Wing Pornopoiitics: An Adolescent Disorder...
...No group moved to impede the arrests...
...Instead of removing the cover as had been promised, Professor ScaIapino's name was scratched out, though as he noted, his name remained clearly visible beneath the erroneous statement...
...A series of events soon occurred which underscored the decline of student ethics under the influence of their generational ideology: 1. At the beginning of the Spring semester, Slate, the student Leftist political party allied to the socalled Free Speech Movement (FSM), published its semi-annual evaluation of professors and courses entitled "Slate Supplement to the General Catalog," in part compiled with the aid of student questionnaires...
...Then as if trying to regain a constructive note, the student leader called on people to join in a civil rights demonstration at Jack London Square in Oakland...
...Almost everybody was united in backing these men in their determination to defend the University's procedures of due process against outside pressures...
...Lewis Feuer was falling over himself to prove in THE NEW LEADER that the FSM was based on a corporate Oedipal complex, yes, a corporate Oedipal complex...
...but it showed some reluctance to do so...
...Savio has since admitted that he bit a policeman in the leg...
Vol. 48 • April 1965 • No. 8
