The Next Berkeley Drama

It looks so calm.

Now that one speaker has come and gone without major incident, there is "free speech week" coming up at UC-Berkeley. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

The University of California will uphold its free-speech tradition by hosting provocateurs such as Milo Yiannopoulos regardless of their message, unless they resort to personal threats or attacks on audience members, UC President Janet Napolitano says.

“If we at UC unreasonably limit the ability of speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter to safely express themselves on our campuses, we are telling the world that we would accept suppression of our own speech,” Napolitano told a legal conference Friday in Sacramento.

She spoke a day after conservative commentator Ben Shapiro spoke at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall under heavy security, while several hundred protesters held a rally nearby but were kept from entering the campus. Yiannopoulos, Coulter and another right-wing commentator, Steve Bannon, former chief strategist for President Trump, are scheduled to appear at UC Berkeley during a four-day event, starting Sept. 24, that sponsors are calling “Free Speech Week.”

A speech by Yiannopoulos at the campus in February was called off after violent clashes, and Coulter canceled a Berkeley appearance in April, saying she had been warned of possible violence.

Source: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Napolitano-vows-to-uphold-UC-s-free-speech-12202087.php

Some faculty and others want to close down the campus (boycott) during this period. (Editorial note from yours truly: Is it a good idea to give Milo & Co. the ability to shut down the campus by simply announcing an event?) From the Daily Cal:

UC Berkeley faculty members circulated a letter Wednesday morning calling for campus and the Berkeley community to boycott the “alt-right presence” by canceling all classes and campus activities for the duration of “Free Speech Week.”

The letter, signed by about 130 campus staff members, was written by seven professors from the African American studies, ethnic studies, gender and women’s studies and film departments. These departments house populations of students targeted by the “alt-right,” according to Leigh Raiford, campus African American studies professor and co-author of the letter...

Full article with link to letter at http://www.dailycal.org/2017/09/14/uc-berkeley-staff-members-express-safety-concerns-free-speech-week/

And it turns out that the group sponsoring this event is announcing speakers who aren't confirmed; at least one has never heard of the event:

Although Milo Yiannopoulos released a full list of speakers Thursday that are scheduled to attend “Free Speech Week” at UC Berkeley in the coming weeks, both the campus and the Berkeley Patriot have revealed that not all the speakers have been confirmed.

Yiannopoulos issued a press release naming the speakers who he said were confirmed to speak at the UC Berkeley campus from Sept. 24-27. Prominent speakers on the list include former White House chief strategist and Breitbart editor Steve Bannon and Ann Coulter, whose previous campus event was postponed. Not all the speakers on the list, however, have been confirmed.

Charles Murray, a libertarian conservative political scientist, posted a tweet Friday saying that he has “never heard of this event.”

“I was never contacted by the organizers of this event,” Murray said in an email. “The inclusion of my name in the list of speakers was done without my knowledge or permission. I will add that I would never under any circumstances appear at an event that included Milo Yiannopoulos.” ...

Full article with the supposed list of speakers is at: http://www.dailycal.org/2017/09/15/speakers-invited-free-speech-week-uc-berkeley-unconfirmed/

PS: The group that seems to be somehow involved in "Free Speech Week" is something - apparently a newspaper - called the Berkeley Patriot. When yours truly searched for it on the web, there was a link to:

http://www.californiapatriot.org/magazine/. If you click on that link, you get a page of headlines with broken links to the actual text. So maybe it's not surprising that in the article above you find:

“The Berkeley Patriot was under the impression that those speakers were confirmed and it’s seeming like some speakers didn’t know that they were invited,” (a spokesperson for the Berkeley Patriot) said. “That’s a big issue and we’re going to try to figure this out with Milo and his team.”...

If you look at the Wikipedia page for the Berkeley Patriot, everything it references in the history of the newspaper went on in the early 2000s. So no one is bothering to update its page. In short, the powers-that-be at Berkeley are dealing with an event that seems to be under the jurisdiction of an entity that at best has a shaky existence. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Patriot. It's not clear even whether its name is Berkeley Patriot or California Patriot.