Academic Freedom Under Fire with Scholar Bettina Aptheker

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The Babblery
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Academic Freedom Under Fire with Scholar Bettina Aptheker
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In feminist scholar Dr. Bettina Aptheker’s early years, she found herself front and center in the 1960s controversy over free speech. As a young academic, she found herself mired in a legal dispute over freedom of association. And throughout her career, she has been able to push boundaries due to academic freedom.

Recently Bettina gave a speech about academic freedom and its role in American universities. The Babblery presents this speech interwoven with Bettina’s recollections of her life and career and her unshakable belief in the value of free expression.

Bettina’s experiences are more relevant than ever: Her involvement in the Free Speech Movement of the 60s set the stage for her experiences in the 70s, using freedom of speech and association to defend Angela Davis and then her own husband’s university position. In the 80s, she pushed at the boundaries of academic freedom by building University of California at Santa Cruz’s Women’s Studies into a more politicized Feminist Studies. All of these experiences of the past inform her view of the pushback against students protesting in support of Palestinian rights and the Trump Administration’s pressure against universities. [Click for transcript]

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Academic Freedom Under Fire

Bettina Aptheker on Academic Freedom and the Freedom of Speech

[00:00:27] Bettina Aptheker: In my view, the Trump administration is using antisemitism in a despicable way because there really is antisemitism and he doesn’t really care about it. He’s using it as a whipping post or a scapegoat in order to try to dismantle academic freedom and freedom of speech on the campuses.

Segment 1: The foundations of freedom of speech and academic freedom

[00:00:53] Suki Wessling: This is your host, Suki Wessling. I interviewed feminist scholar Bettina Aptheker in 2024 about her life and the development of feminism. As a student at UC Berkeley in the sixties, she was involved in the free speech movement and we spoke about that time.

[00:01:10] When I saw that she was giving a speech recently, specifically about academic freedom and free speech under the current administration, I asked to record it in the speech that follows. I’ve incorporated some audio from our original interview to create a wider picture of the damage that the administration is doing to our traditions and norms surrounding speech and academia.

[00:01:31] Bruce Thompson: And if the university had a triple crown, our speaker would have been its first recipient because first of all, she’s been a beloved teacher and mentor to generations of UCSC undergraduates. And secondly, she’s one of the distinguished, most distinguished scholars in the field of feminist studies. And thirdly, she’s a cherished colleague and a great university citizen.

[00:02:04] Suki Wessling: Bettina was introduced by fellow UCSC professor Bruce Thompson, and she was happy to swing at the ball he pitched.

[00:02:11] Bettina Aptheker: Bruce’s introduction was perfect because when I was growing up, I wanted to be on the Brooklyn Dodgers. I wanted in order to play on the Brooklyn Dodgers, but they didn’t even let girls into the little league when I was growing up much less. But I used to play ball with the kids and all the boys in the neighborhood, you know.

[00:02:29] So I’m really happy to be with you today and to be talking about academic freedom and I guess it couldn’t be more timely, right? Because this is the Washington Post on July 30th, headline, Harvard Slams Trump Administration Funding Cuts in Pivotal Court Hearing.

[00:02:49] So that’s going on, the whole saga with Harvard is going on as, the Trump administration has tried to, foist its definitions, insofar as it has them, about teaching and learning and, uh, all manner of subjects. And it really tried to gut academic freedom and freedom of speech at Harvard.

[00:03:12] And Harvard has resisted, they’ve resisted, unlike Columbia. They refused to comply with the Trump administration’s, demands and they, and they went to court.

[00:03:25] And the US district judge is a woman named Allison Burrows. And, um, immediately following the hearing last week, Trump attacked her personally on social media, president Donald Trump reacted to the hearing Monday afternoon with a post on social media about the judge, quote. She is a total disaster, which I say even before knowing the ruling. He called Harvard Antisemitic anti-Christian and anti-America.

[00:03:55] The lawsuit that the Harvard has filed has been joined by the American Association of University Professors, and, has also been joined by the American Council on Education. So they’re all in the lawsuit together. They’ve all affirmed that the Trump administration actions are violations of freedom of speech and violations of academic freedom.

[00:04:17] Suki Wessling: Bettina’s entire life has been lived testing the borders of freedom of speech and academic freedom.

[00:04:23] Bettina Aptheker: My father was Herbert Aptheker, and he was a quite prominent member of the Communist Party in the fifties, and a scholar of African American history. So he was blacklisted from university teaching from oh, forever. I mean, he never had a university job until students sit-ins in the sixties got him a job. And it wasn’t a, it wasn’t a tenure track, so my mother supported the family.

[00:04:50] Suki Wessling: Being raised by a non-conformist family in an era when girls’ speech and activities were restricted was a good grounding for what came next, when Bettina arrived at UC Berkeley, because she said,

[00:05:02] Bettina Aptheker: I wanted to get as far away from my parents as I possibly could without falling into the Pacific Ocean.

[00:05:08] Suki Wessling: But she also chose Berkeley because she had been inspired by the news that was then captivating the nation.

[00:05:14] Bettina Aptheker: The year before I was applying for schools was when HUAC House on American Activities Committee came to San Francisco and the students organized this huge protest in front of City Hall in, uh, San Francisco and there’s very iconic images of them being washed down the steps of the city hall by the fire department that turned their hoses on them. William Mandell, who was a, a scholar of a Russian history who had been blacklisted for years, but anyway, they called him before HUAC. And so I, I chose Berkeley because of its politics, because I saw that there was a movement there.

[00:05:57] Suki Wessling: Students at Berkeley were pushing at the boundaries of the First Amendment, daring authorities at the school and in the cities to stop them from speaking their minds. Bettina told me how she got involved.

[00:06:09] Bettina Aptheker: So when the free speech movement happened, I’ll just say, I mean, ’cause that’s 64 and that’s two years after I arrived and I was just 20. My first public speech was from the top of the police car. We, we had seized the police car to prevent the police from arresting one of our fellow students, Jack Weinberg, who had been a civil rights activist and we had surrounded the car.

[00:06:31] To everybody’s astonishment, including ours, and the police couldn’t move it. And so we were using the top of the police car as a podium from which to speak, and we took our shoes off and climbed up onto the roof because we didn’t wanna damage the car. Which is crazy ’cause we, of course we caved the roof in by the time we were done.

[00:06:51] But it wa, it wa our intention was not to do too much damage to the car in any event, it was at night, I remember, and I climbed up on top of the police car. A lot of the guys, including Mario Savio, who later became very much identified as the leader of the movement, another fellow named Art Goldberg, who later became a lawyer, a civil rights lawyer in LA, helped me up onto the car.

[00:07:13] And I gave the speech and, and the only thing I remember about it is I quoted the abolitionist Frederick Douglass that, and he said, power concedes nothing without a demand. And I remember it was at night. I couldn’t see the audience because of the lights that were in my eyes, the television lights. ’cause there was so much media coverage.

[00:07:36] I mean, nothing like this had ever ha had, certainly never happened. Very recently when I said that, I heard the roar of the, of the students and it flows through my whole body and it was electrifying and it was an amazing moment. And I, I still feel it, you know.

[00:07:52] Suki Wessling: At first, Bettina was just a side player, but fate intervened, pitting her background as the daughter of a notorious communist against the fear that the word communist was raising at that time.

[00:08:03] Bettina Aptheker: Clark Kerr, who was the president of the university at the time, issued a statement in which he said that 49% of the demonstrators were communists or communist sympathizers. How he even got to 49%, I have no idea. And we were having a meeting and I was the only one at that particular meeting who actually was a member of a communist party. And Mario Savio slapped his knee. He said, I know what to do. We’re gonna have Bettina speak at the next rally. Because he wanted to throw the one real communist in their faces, you know, that was the, the defiance, you see, the, that was very characteristic, both of him and also of that movement. So the next rally, which was that Monday, I got up and started speaking. That’s how it happened. It, it was totally a total fluke.

[00:08:50]

[00:08:50] Suki Wessling: Although this all happened 60 years ago, for Bettina Aptheker, what has been happening on college campuses for the last two years is very familiar, as is the official response. Bettina is both Jewish and a champion of free speech, so she has particularly insightful analysis of the charges of antisemitism raised by the Trump administration. Let’s return now to her recent speech.

[00:09:13] Bettina Aptheker: Regarding the allegations of antisemitism at Columbia and at Harvard i, I think there were definitely instances of antisemitic statements made by a few students during the protests in the spring of 2024. I don’t think there’s any question about that. And those protests, the, the media called those protests Pro Hamas. They weren’t pro Hamas. They were against the Israeli attacks on Gaza. It’s very different, the, the, the loss of civilian life in Gaza, which was really what was motivating most of the protests.

[00:09:50] And also to say that many Jewish students participated in those protests at all the campuses, including UCLA and also here, but also at Columbia and at Harvard. And at NYU Jewish students who were participating in the encampment, they had there set up a Seder. Because you remember that it, the protest started around the time of Passover in 2024, and the Jewish students set up a Seder and Palestinian and Muslim students joined them, as did Christian students, and they had a dialogue at the Seder on the street, uh, for which they were arrested.

[00:10:29] There were multiple points of view that the Jewish students had and Jewish faculty had on the different campuses. And yes, there were instances of antisemitism, but I think in my view, the Trump administration is using antisemitism in a despicable way because there really is antisemitism and he doesn’t really care about it. He’s using it as a whipping post or a scapegoat in order to, uh, try to dismantle academic freedom and freedom of speech on the campuses. That’s what I think about what they’re doing.

[00:11:09] Suki Wessling: You are listening to the Babblery’s presentation of a speech by feminist scholar Bettina Aptheker.

[00:11:15] Just like in the sixties, student speech now is making people in power uncomfortable. Just like in the sixties, student speech is unruly and unrestrained, but Bettina Aptheker with her long experience, not only as a student activist herself, but in a career as a professor in an embattled field, sees that the students’ speech is not itself the problem.

The double standard in the fight against DEI

[00:11:38] Bettina Aptheker: Students of color, black students, people of Mexican or LA Latino heritage experience harassment all the time on white, predominantly white campuses and sexual harassment is alive and well on the campuses and no one’s suing them about this. Do you understand what I’m, I’m trying to say, there’s a double standard here that’s going on and there’s an agenda here that the Trump administration has, which is to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion at universities and to pick the biggest ones and go after them first and try to dismantle all of the programs and studies the, the area studies like black studies, Jewish studies, women’s studies or feminist studies on all the campuses that have been created since the seventies. And I think that’s a lot of what this is about and what’s really going on.

Academic Freedom vs. Freedom of Speech

[00:12:34] Suki Wessling: Another experience in her past helped Bettina form the perspective that curtailing freedom of speech often goes along with a larger agenda. In 1970, Bettina’s childhood friend Angela Davis was arrested on charges of aggravated kidnapping and first degree murder, even though she had been nowhere near the crime. Bettina worked on the legal team that argued her case, arguing that Davis’s expression of revolutionary ideas about race and sex were at the foundation of the charges. Coming up, Bettina will use her experience working on Angela Davis’s team to illustrate her point.

[00:13:08] Bettina Aptheker: The main thing I wanted to try to get across to you today is that academic freedom is not the same as freedom of speech. These are two different things. They often collide. They often interact or intersect, but they’re not the same.

[00:13:25] The First Amendment, freedom of speech that’s in the Constitution. Academic freedom is not in the Constitution. It has nothing to do with the United States Constitution. It was set up and founded in 1915 by the founding of the American Association of University Professors, which we call A A UP.

[00:13:49] And it was precisely to prevent the arbitrary firing of faculty by members of university boards of trustees, presidents of universities, politicians, and university donors, because they didn’t like the research or public statements or papers, research papers published by faculty.

[00:14:10] Now, it’s significant that it’s 1915 because this is the years leading up to World War I, and there was a lot of dissent in the United States about joining the war. We finally did in April of 1917 is when the United States entered World War I. And the, the, the Woodrow Wilson government was brutal in suppressing any kind of opposition to the war, but there were, there were faculty who opposed it, including economics faculty.

[00:14:41] And when the economics department, when that field was first established, which is early in the century, it was quite radical. It wasn’t the business school, you know, there were a lot of Marxist faculty hanging out in the economics department at the time, and they opposed World War I as an imperialist adventure.

[00:14:59] Now, no matter what you think of it or whatever, that was, that was the, the work that they were doing. So quite a few of them got fired, and so did sociology professors and other people for a variety of reasons.

[00:15:11] And, uh, there was somebody at Stanford that, uh, took exception to the use of Chinese labor in building the railroads. And I think it’s Jane Stanford was the, was still living then and, and wanted to have him fired, because she took such offense at what he said. That’s the origin of academic freedom. You can’t do that. So what we, what we say is that the AAUP’s core principles support excellence in the creation and dissemination of knowledge, thereby strengthening colleges and universities.

[00:15:46] Policies, procedures, and bargaining positions may change from year to year, depending on place time and situation. But these two fundamental principles are unchanging and form the underlying basis of A A UP stances on particular situations.

[00:16:04] Now, let me explain then about academic freedom. It’s tied to the concept of shared governance. Shared governance means the faculty co-governs the university, and this means that when people do their research, it’s peer reviewed. When people come up for promotion or tenure, it’s peer reviewed. When there are issues about curriculum, it’s peer reviewed. So you can’t talk about academic freedom unless you talk about the concept of what they call shared governance.

[00:16:47] Suki Wessling: Bettina’s career in a developing field, women’s studies, also called feminist studies, again gives her an important perspective on what academic freedom is and why it is necessary. Here we return to the 2024 interview.

[00:17:01] Bettina Aptheker: The introductory course, which I think was called Introduction to Women’s Studies, I renamed it Introduction to Feminism to politicize it. And I think the first time I taught the class there were 35 people in it, and then the next year there were a hundred, and then the next year there were 200. I was storytelling using my own life, but also stories from scores of women’s lives. It was always multicultural. It was always anti-racist. I always had an awareness of black women.

[00:17:29] I learned much more about Chicano Latino women. Teaching that class. Asian American women, Native American women. I didn’t have that at the beginning, so, but I was learning and integrating and so that’s how we started building what became feminine. We changed our name in 2004 to feminist studies.

[00:17:49]

[00:17:49] Suki Wessling: I want to point out the word that Bettina used there. They renamed the Women’s Studies program Feminist Studies explicitly to politicize it. That’s academic freedom, the right to push boundaries and explore the edges.

[00:18:03] Bettina Aptheker: My point is it is political. By saying, you know, introduction to Women’s Studies, it sounded so academic. By changing the name, I was identifying it with a movement, which, which was accurate in the sense that women’s studies came out of the Women’s Liberation Movement, just like Black studies or ethnic studies came out of the Black Liberation Movement in the Civil Rights Movement.

[00:18:33] Suki Wessling: You are listening to the Babblery’s interview with feminist scholar Bettina Aptheker. When we return:

[00:18:39] Bettina Aptheker: He was up for tenure and his department voted, it was not a unified vote, but the majority voted against tenure. Well, In the hearing, it turned out that the reason they had denied him tenure was because he was married to me and because I was out as a communist. And they had apparently, unfortunately for them, put it in writing.

[00:19:17] Suki Wessling: Listeners, have you checked out the Babblery Substack at babblery.substack.com? There you can find all sorts of materials related to the full episodes, such as short written pieces by Babblery guests, writing on subjects related – and sometimes wholly unrelated – to the show theme, and also Minibabbles, short companion audio pieces. Subscribe at babblery.substack.com.

Segment 2: The scaffolding holding up Academic Freedom

[00:20:13] Suki Wessling: This is your host, Suki Wessling. Recently I attended a speech by feminist scholar Bettina Aptheker about freedom of speech and academic freedom. We return to her speech as she explains the scaffolding that helps academic freedom thrive.

[00:20:29] Bettina Aptheker: I taught at UC Santa Cruz for 40 years. We have something called an academic Senate, right? All faculty are entitled to be members of the academic Senate if they are tenure track, tenured, and or have security of employment as lecturers, And academic Senate meets at least once a quarter, sometimes I think it meets more, and it’s functions by committee. So for example, there’s Committee on educational policy called CEP. There’s a committee on budget and planning, CPB. There’s a committee on privilege and tenure. Okay. There’s a committee on Academic Freedom, which as Bruce said, I chaired for a while when I was on the faculty.

[00:21:19] . So let’s say I, as a faculty person, want to have, I want to introduce a new course. I want to teach a course. So I have to write up a syllabus and I have to have a reading list on it. And I have to put down week by week what I’m gonna do, or class by class, what I’m gonna do in the course. And I have to indicate what the grading requirements will be and what kind of course requirements I will have and what texts I will use and or film and other, other medium.

[00:21:53] And I submit that to my department and my colleagues review it. Say they approve it, alright. Or they might say, we think you should do this and take this out and have you heard of this book? And so it’s a, it’s a collegial process. It’s not a, you know, And then it goes to the dean, the syllabus goes to the dean of the division.

[00:22:15] So in my case, ’cause I was in feminist studies, it would go to the dean of humanities. And the Dean of Humanities has to sign off on it. And then from the dean it goes to the Committee on Educational Policy. And then that committee on educational policy has representatives from all the different divisions on the campus, the social sciences, the, physical sciences, the engineering school and, and the humanities and so on.

[00:22:41] It’s all represented. And they look at the syllabus and if they approve it, then you can teach the class. That’s shared governance. You don’t just get to make up, you know, stand up there and, and do a class. You have to go through this process and you have to use scholarly articles and you have to, the class has to have some coherence and why it’s, why it’s going in this direction.

[00:23:04] And this was true when I taught Introduction to Feminism. It was true when I taught feminist oral history and memoir. It was true when I taught, um, black feminist Reconstruction, the courses have to be approved by the committee on educational policy.

Politics in higher education

[00:23:17] Suki Wessling: Perhaps what Bettina is describing sounds like a whole lot of inside baseball. Why should non-academics care about this process? For good reason. In this time of political pressure on academic institutions, politicians are directly ignoring Perhaps even discounting the intricate processes of academia. When I spoke to Bettina last year, before all this had happened, she talked about how her subject area, feminist studies, was politicized. I asked her if it’s possible to teach feminist studies without politicizing it.

[00:23:49] Bettina Aptheker: No. Nor is it possible to study anything without politicizing it. It’s just a fiction. You can’t teach history- how are you gonna teach history without understanding the politics of what is- history is itself political.

The rigorous process of tenure

[00:24:02] Suki Wessling: This process of vetting academic work is what ensures that people in fields most likely to be attacked politically have the freedom to do their work. Next in her speech, Bettina talked about the process of advancing in the department.

[00:24:15] Bettina Aptheker: So you come into the university and what’s called a tenure track position. That means you have the possibility of getting tenure, but you don’t have tenure yet. In a lot of the A A UP literature, they talk about it as a probationary period. So you teach your classes, you have to publish and you have to do university service.

[00:24:37] Those are the three criteria. And you come up for review about every two years. And your faculty committee, uh, reviews your file, what they call your file. So where have you published, what have you published? What courses have you taught? How have students evaluated the courses that you’ve taught? and what kind of service have you performed for the university. So when I joined the faculty, it was in a tenure track position. I already had three books published. So I came in as an assistant professor at the highest rank. So you come in as assistant professor one, then there’s assistant professor two, then there’s assistant professor three, then there’s assistant professor four.

[00:25:23] By the time you get to four, you’re usually on the brink of tenure. so when I came up for review, the next time I was awarded tenure. So I had done my teaching, I had published and I had done extensive service. This is self-governance, that’s what it means.

[00:25:40] And that’s the UH, committee on academic personnel. So again, the department makes its recommendation and it goes to the department that votes and it’s a secret vote.

[00:25:52] And then it goes to the dean with the departmental recommendation. And then the dean makes a recommendation and it goes to the committee on academic personnel. And they usually assign it UC Santa Cruz. The way they do it is they set up what they call an ad hoc committee. Which is that they solicit one faculty person from UCSC and two others.

[00:26:16] When you come up for tenure, you have to get six letters of recommendation from faculty, uh, not at UCS In other words, it’s a very vigorous, rigorous process. Now, I imagine that this academic structure that I’m describing to you is the same on most campuses, but it might be called something a little bit different or it might, you know, but this is the basic structure. This is what shared governance means. Okay? And then you’re recommended for tenure or you’re recommended to be promoted to the next step. When you reach associate professor, you’re associate professor one, associate professor two, associate professor three, you got the picture right? So you’re tenured, but then you’re coming up for review every couple of years. And then I think it’s about step four, are you gonna make it to full professor? And I remember when I made it to full professor, my family called me your fullness.

[00:27:17] And I had a lot of books published and right, that’s how I did it. People did it in, do it in different ways. In the social sciences, I think they tend to write journal articles a lot more. The humanities, we tend to write books. I’m sure in the sciences there are papers, papers that people, people publish in their journals.

[00:27:36] Now, the next part of this is to say you can’t just publish anywhere. I mean, you can, but if you’re talking about publication that’s gonna count towards your academic career. It needs to be peer reviewed. So most people will try to publish with a university press because they do peer reviews automatically.

[00:27:58] And the academic journals, for example, in feminist studies, we have a journal called Signs, S-I-G-N-S, signs, if you publish there, it’s gonna be automatically peer reviewed. That means that colleagues, I, and it’s anonymous, I submitted it anonymously and it’s read anonymously. And then they give me feedback about it.

[00:28:20] Suki Wessling: You are listening to the Babblery’s presentation of a speech by feminist scholar Bettina Aptheker.

Freedom of speech for students

[00:28:26] Suki Wessling: Once faculty under self-governance has academic freedom, they pass this freedom on to students.

[00:28:33] Bettina Aptheker: Students also have academic freedom derived from the faculty. And academic freedom for students means the freedom to learn. So another issue with the freedom to learn and this is also part of teaching, is that faculty are expected not to impose their points of view on the students. They can have a point of view, they can make an argument, whatever field you’re in, it’s not necessarily a political point of view ’cause there’s controversy all the time.

[00:29:03] But you, you, you cannot require that students agree with you. What you can do is ask students to engage with you and then if they engage with you, that’s, and that’s what I did for years. I, I told my teaching assistants and so forth. I don’t care whether the students agree. I just want them to think. Learn how to think.

[00:29:26] Suki Wessling: This of course, is where the real controversy comes in. Modern academics largely don’t believe in a purely objective point of view. Their discourse has evolved well beyond the idea that there is one, historically land owning white male, perspective that is correct and objective, and this is where academic freedom comes back around to overlap with freedom of speech.

[00:29:48] Bettina Aptheker: In actual practice, the First Amendment gets involved. So one of the big controversies at the University of California, especially in Berkeley in 1950, was the loyalty oath.

[00:30:01] It was called the Levering Act passed by the California legislature in 1950, and it required state employees to subscribe to a loyalty oath that specifically disavowed radical beliefs. It was aimed in particular at employees of the University of California.

[00:30:21] In January nineteen fifty, seven hundred and fifty faculty members had approved a resolution, this is on the Berkeley campus, to oppose the university’s regents and created a committee to coordinate legal action against the university should an oath be required. Despite that number, the oath was enforced.

[00:30:43] Among those who left the university rather than sign this loyalty oath were Eric Erickson was a leading psychologist, and the classical scholar, Ludwick Adelstein, both of them were Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. In August, 1950, the Regents also fired 31 faculty members who refused to sign the oath. Those who were terminated, sued, and by 1952, they had been rehired.

[00:31:15] Now, when I started teaching, I had to sign a loyalty oath also, I first started teaching at San Jose State, and then I was teaching at, obviously in the UCs, but my loyalty oath said that I, um, we swear or whatever to uphold the constitution of the United States and of the State of California.

[00:31:34] And I thought, yeah, I’ll uphold the Constitution. I believe in the Constitution. But in the earlier version of it, it was that you could not be a member of a subversive organization. And of course, what they were after was that you couldn’t be a member of the Communist Party. I mean, that was the key thing about it.

[00:31:53] And that was part of this, um, I mean, it was a terrible period of repression, but see, so that becomes a First Amendment issue. Because under the First Amendment you have freedom of association, you have the right to join an organization. Do you see what I’m, what I’m getting? So that, that becomes a free speech issue or free association issue.

[00:32:13] So by requiring faculty to sign the loyalty oath, that named specific organizations that challenged their First Amendment rights, but it also, of course, encroached on their academic freedom.

An earlier case of freedom of speech and association

[00:32:28] Suki Wessling: Long before the Trump administration targeted DEI, firing federal employees who had simply been implementing the former administration’s policies, the legal grounds for the freedom of speech and association were set. Bettina was involved in one such case personally.

[00:32:44] Bettina Aptheker: I was married once to a man, uh, for about 13 years. His name is Jack Kurzweil. He’s a lovely man. It’s great that we’re not married anymore, but he’s a lovely human being. He was, uh, a professor of electrical engineering at San Jose State for many years, but when he first got to San Jose State, which was in 1968, he was teaching in the electrical engineering department. he was up for tenure and his department voted. It was a split vote, it was not a unified vote, but the majority voted against tenure and then that was enforced by the dean and, and so on and so forth. So he, appealed it. Well, in the hearing, it turned out that the reason they had denied him tenure was because he was married to me and because I was out as a communist. And they had apparently, unfortunately for them, put it in writing.

[00:33:48] So even with all of that, the university president still denied Jack tenure. But after we had gone through the hearing, we could now go to court. So Judge Zerpoli in this case ordered San Jose State to give Jack tenure, ordered it not to go back to the hearings or anything like that because he affirmed that there was nothing wrong with Jack’s teaching. There was nothing wrong with his publications. There was nothing wrong with his lab work. There was nothing wrong with anything in terms of his academic record, that all of this was about his association through marriage.

[00:34:27] Another case that’s very well known to you was Angela Davis. She was a philosophy graduate student at UC San Diego. Her dissertation advisor was, uh, Herbert Marcusa, who at the time was a very well known Marxist scholar. And, uh, she had passed her qualifying exams and she was writing her dissertation. It’s quite common practice for the university to hire what they call graduate students, ABD, all but dissertation to, to do a lecture course.

[00:35:02] So she was hired, and she was hired at UCLA. And this was, uh, in the spring of 69. And the regents fired her because there was a letter in the Daily Bruin, which is the UCLA student newspaper from someone who announced that Angela Davis was a member of the Communist Party. So they fired her.

[00:35:27] So we did the same thing as happened in Jack’s case, except Jack’s case actually was later. But I told you that story first. So we went through the hearing and I remember that I came down to UCLA to help Angela, whom I’d known since childhood. And the committee found that you could not fire her for her association with the Communist party. That was illegal and that this was established.

[00:35:51] And so she was reinstated. So she didn’t have to go to court. We won it in the hearing, and she was reinstated as a lecturer. 2000 students came to her first class, which was in the fall of 69. first lecture was on the philosophy of Frederick Douglass, he was the great abolitionist.

[00:36:12] So she taught, then she was rehired to teach in the spring of now it would be 1970, right? Fired again. Ronald Reagan was governor. Fired again, what for? Unprofessional conduct. Why? Because she was supporting the Soledad Brothers. So this encroached on her right of free speech, which they constituted as being unprofessional conduct.

[00:36:40] And before we could go through all of the proceedings of the hearings, you know, on campus to contest it and so forth. She was arrested and then, you know, but later on, after her acquittal and so forth, the A A UP found UCLA to be in violation of academic freedom for firing her for unprofessional conduct because her speech was protected by the First Amendment. Closer to home, there’s an example here at UCSC. It was about 1980. There was a professor of sociology. Her name was Nancy Stoller, S-T-O-L-L-E-R. And Nancy was a sociologist. women’s health did a lot of work in women’s health issues, and also women in prison, health related.

[00:37:33] She was also out as a lesbian. Department approved her tenure. The dean approved her tenure. CAP approved her tenure, and the chancellor denied it.

[00:37:45] And it was clear if you looked at this, why would he deny her tenure? Because she was a lesbian, ’cause she was out as a lesbian. So she asked me if I knew a good lawyer and we went through the hearings again on the campus. And again the chancellor refused to grant her her tenure. And so we went to court. And in that case it took years. And that’s the first case of a queer person that I know of at UCSC and the struggle for her to win tenure.

[00:38:20] Suki Wessling: You’re listening to the Babblery’s presentation of a speech by feminist scholar, Bettina Aptheker. When we return:

[00:38:27] Bettina Aptheker: There’s a kind of, of, of chill factor that I think is very much in the process of happening right now. That happened in the fifties also, and I think that’s happening again. On the other hand, I also see, uh, resistance and I see lawsuits and I see faculty uniting.

[00:38:47]

Segment 3: Wins, losses, and the fight ahead

[00:39:45] Suki Wessling: This is your host, Suki Wessling. As a wife, friend, advisor, and professor, feminist scholar Bettina Aptheker has lived to see the struggle for freedom, repeat itself. Academic freedom and freedom of speech and association, one a process of self-governance, the other a right enjoyed by all Americans, have intertwined and been confused. Coming into the modern day, Bettina explains why the difference matters.

[00:40:12] Bettina Aptheker: So when Trump intervenes on the campus, and for example, the demands that, uh, the Middle Eastern studies department at Columbia be dismantled, he is violating academic freedom. It’s not about freedom of speech, it’s academic freedom, because that’s a duly constituted department. And it has scholars and it has literature, and it has a journal and people have published and there are scholars in the field of Middle Eastern studies.

[00:40:43] Starting in the, I would say late sixties and then in the seventies, new departments and new fields of study were established often through great struggle. Uh, San Francisco State, for example, in 1968, the students and some faculty were demanding the creation of a Third World college. And I don’t know how many of you remember, um, the university president, it was a man named S.I. Hayakawa. They called out the police. The, they, they basically shut the campus. I mean the, they attacked the students and, and so on. And then very shortly thereafter, there was a similar struggle to establish Black Studies at Berkeley.

[00:41:28] So these are new fields of study and they didn’t exist before. So These are examples of area studies, but you can see that all of them have to do with, uh, minorities that have historically not been included in curriculum.

[00:41:46] Which is part of the reason that there was agitation for there to be such fields of study. And as students of color entered the university and became trained as scholars, they wanted the fields to be established.

[00:42:00] Suki Wessling: The Trump administration has expressed particular interest in the large demonstrations in support of the Palestinian people at universities across the country. As Bettina pointed out at the beginning of her talk, these protests were often led by Jewish students. Next Bettina explains how what the administration is doing is interfering with academic freedom.

[00:42:21] Bettina Aptheker: There’s a, a journal called the Harvard Review, which is its premier journal, academically reviewed and so forth. And they had an issue on Palestinian studies and they pulled it and refused to allow it to be published. Now, I’m, I’m not talking about the content of whether you agree with it or not, but that was a peer reviewed series of articles and not all of them were by Palestinians, by any means.

[00:42:52] So that’s an encroachment on academic freedom when you have something like that. So the other thing that comes up is suspicion in certain quarters that anything called African American studies is not bonafide scholarship. Right. Or women’s studies. or feminist studies or whatever is not bonafide scholarship. Even though you’re using scholarly methods and you’re doing historical research and you’re published in scholarly journals and so forth. So this becomes also an issue of academic freedom, but on a, on a different scale because it’s where the whole field is being questioned as whether or not it has legitimacy.

[00:43:38] So another personal story I could tell you is that a lot of times when I taught in women’s studies or then became feminist studies, even when I gave historical detail, even when I used sociological statistics, many students, mostly guys, but a lot of students was, was certain that it, that it was sub I was, I was de facto subjective because I was a woman.

[00:44:07] So you understand that, right? So there was no way I could be objective. There was a sort of, um, assumption that, that I was, uh, subjective. And the same thing applies to many of the faculty who are, say Asian American or Black faculty, that there’s an assumption on the part of white people that they are, by definition, subjective.

[00:44:33] So that’s a more subtle, nevertheless important dimension of the issue of academic freedom. ’cause you can have all the trappings you see of academic publishing, of scholarly work, of reference notes, you know, up the wazoo that you’ve written and, and so on and very carefully researched and still have your work questioned, not because of the quality of the work, but because of who you are.

[00:45:00] Now, um, the other thing that the UCs did, and that’s now quite controversial, is, they put in place, uh, programs, that when faculty apply for their tenure or they apply for a position in the first instance, there’s a category called Diversity, uh, equity and Inclusion, which Trump has been talking about all the time. DEI. And faculty were asked to write a statement of their efforts to support DEI, which could be many different things.

[00:45:36] Um, and I want to say that, uh, a lot of this is also about gender. for example, about being more inclusive of women in the sciences, more inclusive of women in, in the, in mathematics you know, and more inclusive of women in a number of fields. So it’s not only racial, the DEI was not only a racial category, but, um, so that has, that has become con increasingly, uh, problematic. And it’s only recently that it was put into place in the first, in the first. I mean, it’s not, it hasn’t, it’s not longstanding policy.

Today’s climate

[00:46:14] Suki Wessling: You are listening to the Babblery’s presentation of a speech by feminist scholar Bettina Aptheker.

[00:46:20] Before we get to the end of Bettina’s speech, I wanted to include a few remarks she made in answer to questions afterward, I felt like she made some important points and clarified current issues. First, she gave an example of the sort of outrageous downstream effects of blanket bans on words, the sort of Orwellian irony that should be funny if it weren’t destroying people’s careers and livelihoods.

[00:46:44] Bettina Aptheker: One of the more insane things that recently, the Dean of Humanities was telling us this, this was early on when the, the, the Trump administration had a list of words, that for which you wouldn’t grant get grants if you had these words in your grant proposal, and one of the words was black, right? So there was a Yes. So there was a, there’s a whole list. They published it online. There’s scores of words, lots of words.

[00:47:10] Anyway, uh, there was somebody at UCSC who was doing a study of, um, black, um, abalone, and the word black was in their proposal and they lost the funding. And the Dean of humanities was telling us about this. It’s like, insane. That’s ridiculous.

[00:47:29] Suki Wessling: Truly ridiculous. She also went further to explain the reasons behind DEI and that although university administrations are being punished for DEI, the push for it came from faculty who understood, in many cases on a very personal level, the lingering effects of racism, sexism, and antisemitism in this country.

[00:47:48] Bettina Aptheker: DEI is something that the faculty voted to do. This isn’t some arbitrary thing. The, the faculty with the consent of the administration voted to, uh, include diversity, equity, and inclusion as part of its academic mission. So in that sense, it’s protected by shared governance and academic freedom.

[00:48:14] So then trying to undo that, you know, or take that away, is violating faculty, academic freedom.

[00:48:20] What I really wanted to get at here is, look, you have centuries of history here in which people of color were systematically excluded from universities, medical schools, and law schools. This is, this is documented. It’s not like I’m making this up. And it wasn’t because they weren’t qualified or all of that. It was because they were people of color, which is why you have Howard University and why you have Meharry University and why those are medical schools and law schools that were set up by black people during reconstruction. That’s why you have those schools, because there was no way for, for black people to get into, uh, in any significant number, sometimes one or two people would get in. So this is a long history of segregation in higher education. It’s been going on for generations. So as the sixties moved on and we got into the seventies and eighties and we got these area studies, there was an effort to try to overcome that discrimination. And that’s what it’s about.

[00:49:26] And the same thing was not only true racially, it was true in terms of gender. Women were systematically excluded from universities for generations, especially for graduate programs. You know, so I’m not even talking about women of color, I just mean white women. So, um, one of the hidden facts about affirmative action, which has sort of been beaten to death, is that the, the population that benefited most from affirmative action were white women. But for all the discussion about it, it was, it’s, it’s about, about people who aren’t qualified and, and, and, and it was all about people of color, you know?

[00:50:06] Now the other thing, there’s another irony here that I didn’t talk about before, in terms of Columbia and Harvard, they both had for many years quotas to keep out Jewish students. That was antisemitism, right? Harvard and Columbia. So when my father went to Columbia University, when he applied for, as an undergraduate, he started as an undergraduate in the thirties, um, at Columbia. Uh, the Italian students and the Jewish students didn’t go to the main campus, at Morning Morningside Heights.

[00:50:44] They were in a separate building in Brooklyn. That’s where they started. So there’s, there’s certain ironies about this, you know, and now Harvard’s getting beaten over the head for antisemitism. We might have gotten beaten over the head for antisemitism, maybe, maybe a, a century ago?

[00:51:12] Suki Wessling: Bettina Aptheker ended her speech with the calm perspective that long experience in the fight for equality and progress has lent her, but also with a warning.

[00:51:27] Bettina Aptheker: I think we’re in a very, very difficult period right now. I think the attacks on the university are part of a very much, um, attack on science, an attack on learning, an attack on, uh, it’s related to climate change. It’s related to many very critical issues that are facing the planet right now and facing humanity.

[00:51:53] And, um, it makes it very chilling effect on faculty to actually, uh, enter certain fields and or write about it and or, um, come out publicly, uh, with statements, so that there’s a, there’s a kind of, of, of chill factor that I think is very much in the process of happening right now. And I think that’s very, very unfortunate and, um, very difficult to overcome.

[00:52:24] That happened in the fifties also and I think that’s happening again. On the other hand, I also see, uh, resistance and I see lawsuits and I see faculty uniting. And I, I see students making statements and working together, and I see people publishing. And so just personally, I’m very excited right now that, uh, I’m gonna participate in a conference in, uh, New York.

[00:52:52] We are doing a conference on, uh, lesbian writers and artists and poets, and I’ve been writing about the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, who has lived for many years here in Santa Cruz and wrote a very important book called Borderlands La Frontera The New Mestiza. This was in 1987, and it opened up a whole new area called Border studies. And I’m very excited about it. And there’s, the conference is sold out already and stuff like that is happening all over the country. So it’s not like, it’s not like we’ve been silenced. It’s just that we are engaged in a very serious struggle to defend academic freedom and the Constitution of the United States. Thank you. Happy to answer any questions. You have

A Plea for Connection

[00:53:42] Suki Wessling: Though the speech has ended, I wanted to include one last thing that Bettina Aptheker said. Her speech was intended to clarify constitutional protections and procedural norms that are being broken by the Trump administration. But the final question that was asked after her speech led to a poignant plea that we all need to keep in mind. When we punish someone for being the other, when we fear their differences, we are denying the incredible wealth of connections between all humans. Thank you, Bettina Aptheker, for your commitment to freedom of speech and academic freedom, from when you were that naive girl climbing onto a police car in 1964 to your role now as a general in the unending fight for freedom.

[00:54:26] Bettina Aptheker: I can have hopes that in 50 years, uh, when I’m long dead, um, that we would have a more equitable, and less conflicted and polarized society and also that the planet might survive that, that it’d still be livable in 50 years. And, um, we have the science to, to actually, overcome a lot of the difficulties with climate change if we would have the will to implement the science that’s needed.

[00:54:58] I would hope that in 50 years we would no longer have such animosity between peoples and races and much, much greater understanding of each other. And the same thing with, um, a gay and lesbian and trans, trans people, that there would be, uh, an understanding that we’re all part of each other. We’re all part of one another, and that whatever differences exist, we’re still all human beings.

END

[00:55:44] Suki Wessling: Thanks to Bettina Aptheker for allowing me to use her August, 2025 speech, as well as for the original interview about her life and work, which you can find on BABBLERY.com.

[00:55:55] Thanks to Temple Beth El in Aptos, California for hosting the speech and sharing the recording. The song, Flowering Vines is by Unwomen. Learn more at unwoman.com. Thanks for listening.