College students monitored by the FBI. Government agents leafing
through library records. University professors and officials being
questioned ““ and fired ““ for their political
leanings.
Such activities were commonplace when Clark Kerr was fired from
his post as president of the University of California for not
cracking down on student activists during the peak of the Cold
War.
Today, three days after Kerr passed away, some fear that history
is repeating itself.
Although the enemy has changed from the Soviet Union to
terrorism, and although the battle fields have shifted from Vietnam
to Iraq, the federal government may be scrutinizing higher
education in a fashion similar to how it did during the Cold War,
say professors, activists and government watchdog agencies.
Legislation passed by the House of Representatives and the
Senate in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and
a recent FBI memo regarding anti-war demonstrators have been the
main catalysts of fears that the government is reverting to Cold
War-like policies.
“That the government has been able to expand its intrusion
into people’s private lives and threaten academic freedom and
the academy in the name of fighting terrorism, there’s a
strong parallel between the use of the Cold War and the Soviet
threat in taking away some civil liberties,” said Robert
Rhoads, a UCLA professor of higher education who studies student
activist movements.
The list of what activist groups claim to be civil rights
violations is long ““ and growing.
For example, last year the American Librarians Association
passed a resolution condemning the USA PATRIOT Act because of a
provision allowing the FBI to sift through patrons’ library
records. The FBI has denied that it would overstep legal bounds to
act on the provision.
Nevertheless, such tactics harken back to the Cold War when the
FBI, under Director J. Edgar Hoover, tried to look through library
records to determine which patrons had Communist sympathies.
A recent FBI memo circulating among police departments
describing the tactics of anti-war demonstrators created an uproar
among activists, who claimed the FBI was tracking them. This tactic
was also common during the Cold War, when government agents
routinely snapped photos and jotted down names of student
protesters at political hotbeds such as UC Berkeley.
One student protester who said he was kicked out of Berkeley for
his activism during the Cold War is Peter Camejo, a businessman and
former Green Party candidate for California governor.
Camejo was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley in 1967 and a leading
member of the anti-war slate in Berkeley’s student
government. Within a year, he was thrown out of school because of a
speech he made on campus condemning the Vietnam War, Camejo
said.
Camejo said he believes there are clear similarities between
government policy during the Cold War and the war on terrorism
““ only now he says things are much worse.
“While in the ’60s there were (civil rights)
violations, those were done in secrecy. (The government) tried to
act as though they were still in a war,” he said. “Now,
they have simply passed the PATRIOT Act and declared the Bill of
Rights invalid.”
Although Rhoads said he did not know of any current civil
liberty violations committed by the FBI in higher education, he
also said people didn’t know about violations committed
during the 1960s until 20 or 30 years later.
Kerr experienced the conflict between the government and
academia firsthand when he became the chancellor of Berkeley in
1952.
Beginning in 1949, UC professors were required to sign a loyalty
oath that affirmed they did not belong to a group advocating
violent revolution. Although Kerr signed the oath, he defended
professors who refused to sign it in the name of academic
freedom.
During Kerr’s tenure as chancellor, many professors would
approach him to ask if they could give a speech on a controversial
subject, Kerr said in a May 2002 interview.
“I’d say to them, “˜That’s a decision for
you to make, not for me to make, but you’re an American
citizen and you ought to do whatever you think an American citizen
has a right to do, and if I were you, I’d give the
speech,'” he said.
Kerr’s stance drew the attention of the FBI. When Kerr
became UC president in 1958, Richard Auerbach, who was in charge of
FBI field offices in San Francisco, sent a memo to Hoover, calling
Kerr “a controversial figure in California
education.”
The FBI soon became embroiled in a behind-the-scenes war with
student activists at Berkeley, spreading disinformation about
activists and monitoring student protesters.
The FBI and then-gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan leaned on
Kerr to crack down on the students. Kerr refused, and when Reagan
won the governorship in 1967, he asked the UC Board of Regents to
fire Kerr. They did by a vote of 16 to eight.
Although the government may not be exercising as much force now
as it did when Kerr was fired, intervention in areas such as higher
education is nothing new, said David Burnham, a professor at
Syracuse University and co-founder of Transactional Records Access
Clearinghouse, a government watchdog group.
“Every time the United States has gotten into a war
situation, the government has become more invasive and slightly
more coercive and more secret,” he said.
The suspension of civil liberties dates back to 1798, when
Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Act. The act prohibited
people from expressing ideas the federal government deemed
treasonable and was aimed toward preventing the spread of the ideas
about the French Revolution in the United States.
During the Cold War, the FBI was known to have arrested
suspected communists on the slightest pretext and planted evidence
to implicate students and activists.
Rhoads said he would not be surprised at all to learn that the
federal government was taking similar covert actions.
“I suspect the government has increased its monitoring of
student activists under the guise of homeland security,” he
said.
However, many American citizens probably believe the government
is justified to a certain extent in its skeptical approach to civil
liberties, especially during the war on terrorism, Burnham
said.
Burnham, who followed the anti-communist branch of the New York
Police Department when he worked as a New York Times reporter in
the 1950s, said federal scrutiny of higher education during the
Cold War was much more intense than it is now.
However, that is not necessarily a reason to be at ease.
“It seems to me those earlier periods were much worse, but
that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be concerned,” he
said.