UC-Berkeley relents on mailing quoting Emma Goldman
By The Associated Press
01.17.03
BERKELEY, Calif. — University of California officials have given the university's Emma Goldman Papers Project permission to send a fund-raising letter that includes quotations from Goldman about war and the suppression of free speech, The New York Times reported yesterday.
The decision reversed the university’s earlier blocking of the mailing, which ignited a debate over free expression. UC-Berkeley initially refused to allow the solicitation letter to be mailed because officials said the quotations from Goldman, a Russian-born anarchist, amounted to a political statement opposing the Bush administration's preparations for possible war against Iraq.
Goldman (1869-1940) was an iconoclastic, anti-war muckraker whose anarchist views got her deported to Russia. Her provocative turn-of-the-century writings are housed at UC-Berkeley.
Candace Falk, the director of the Emma Goldman Papers Project, used three quotations from Goldman's work as part of a fund-raising appeal. In halting the mailing, university officials said she had deliberately chosen the quotes to make a political statement against war with Iraq. Repeated telephone messages left for Falk by the Associated Press were not returned on Jan. 14.
Falk told The New York Times that she did in fact select the quotes because of their relevance to possible military action by the United States, and felt so strongly about the principles at stake that she sent out an uncensored letter at her own expense.
"You can't work on the Emma Goldman Papers Project and fold on something like this," she said. "We just had to find a way to get this out."
Falk chose one quotation from a 1915 Goldman paper that called on people "not yet overcome by war madness to raise their voice of protest, to call attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated on them."
Around the time of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Goldman was one among a passionately vocal anti-war group who also advocated for socialist reforms, organized labor, sexual freedoms, atheism and anarchism.
For her outspoken political activities, Goldman was deported to Russia along with several other opponents to military conscription and U.S. involvement in World War I.
After a flurry of news media interest in the controversy over the fund-raising appeal, UC-Berkeley at first defended its support of the Goldman Papers Project and appeared to be backing away from its original stance.
"The work on the Emma Goldman Papers is a valued part of the research that we do at UC-Berkeley," Chancellor Robert Berdahl said in a Jan. 14 statement. "We have spent more than a $1 million so far supporting the ongoing project."
Berdahl said he understood how the university's effort to delete the quotes could be misconstrued as censorship.
"The question that has arisen was originally seen not as a free speech issue, but as a question by the associate vice chancellor over what was appropriate in a fund-raising letter," Berdahl said. "I can understand how others might view it differently and in retrospect, had we to do it over, we would have done it differently."