The Berkeley Free Speech Circle

In my last post, I pointed out the contradictory nature of the demands being made by one of the members of the Occupy Wall Street movement. One of the demands was that the government spend $2 trillion on new infrastructure and environmental remediation projects. I pointed out that the government would obviously have to incur additional debt in order to spend this amount. Another demand was that all debt all over the world be forgiven. I observed: “How exactly an additional $2 trillion of debt is to be incurred at the same time that all debt is being stricken from the "Books" is something our author does not feel requires an explanation.”

As I pondered the sheer ignorance evinced by these contradictory demands, I recalled a similarly self-contradictory revolutionary declaration made by various parties at the University of California at Berkeley some years ago. Unlike the Occupy Wall Street demands, however, this declaration is not contained merely in an ephemeral post on an internet blog, but rather is memorialized in stone in the most public place on the Berkeley campus. I am speaking, of course, of the so-called “Berkeley Free Speech Circle,” a circular granite slab embedded in the surface of Sproul Plaza with the following inscription: "This soil and the air space extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity's jurisdiction."

Such idealism! Such spontaneity, as Nancy Pelosi might say! But, if you actually think about what the words mean, they are completely self-nullifying. Obviously, the words are meant to be a statement by an authority with jurisdiction over the disk. For, if the words were uttered by someone without jurisdiction over the disk, they would have no force. And yet, the statement made by that authority with jurisdiction over the disk is that the disk “shall not be subject to any entity’s jurisdiction.”

As with their noble comrades in the Occupy Wall Street movement, how exactly the Berkeley revolutionaries thought they could exercise their jurisdiction over a plot of land by making a statement that no authority (including, presumably, themselves) had jurisdiction over that plot of land is something that the authors of the inscription did not feel required an explanation.

These are the kinds of pronouncements that pass for intelligent political discourse on our campuses today.