8 December 1964, Berkeley Campus, University of California, USA
It’s been said that we’ve been revolutionaries and this sort of thing, in a way that’s true, we’ve gone back to a traditional view of the university. A traditional view of the university is a community of scholars, of faculty and students who get together with complete honesty bring the hard light of free inquiry to bear upon important matters in the sciences, but also in the social sciences, the question of what ought to be, not just what is. Now that traditional view of the university, that’s the one that had been attacked, by the revolutionaries, but those who would make it into a kind of adjunct to industry, to the government and so forth. Really, people … us. … who fought this fight, are really the most conservative people on the campus.
We are asking that there be no no restrictions on the content of speech, save those provided by the courts. And that’s an enormous amount of freedom. And people can say things within that area of freedom that are no responsible. And we’ve finally gotten into a position where we have to consider being responsible, because now, we have the freedom within which to be responsible.
And I’d like to say at this time…I’m confident that the students and the faculty of the University of California will exercise their freedom with the same responsibility they’ve shown in winning their freedom