Dean's Address

THE WINDS OF FREEDOM

By Harold J. Hunter, Jr.

April 13, 2002 at the Annual Meeting of the International Academy of Trial Lawyers

Thank you Mr. President, First Lady Sherry, Fellows and spouses of the Academy, honored guests, and my beloved family.

In 1988, under the guidance and leadership of AI and Jeanne Abramson, the Academy visited what was then the City of Leningrad in the Soviet Union. We filled the bus at the airport, and while awaiting transit to our hotel, our beloved Dick Baxter spotted what was obviously a vent in the ceiling of the bus the approximate size of a small dessert dish. Facetiously pretending that this vent contained a secret microphone, Baxter, a tall man, rose to the aisle, stood on his tiptoes, and put his face against the vent, declaring, “You have a lovely country here; my name is Richard Baxter — B-a-x-t-e-r — from Grand Rapids, Michigan.” Everyone on the bus laughed except for the rather dour bus driver and the government employed tour guide. As we approached our hotel, Sally asked me how one could automatically discern that we were in a totalitarian country. I told her, firstly, that she would see very few people smiling, and secondly, that there would not be a news stand or a bookstore anywhere to be found. In the hotels were high quality merchandise stores known as Berioska’s. These stores were not available to the Russian people. Clientele was restricted to tourists bearing American dollars, and official members of the Communist party. The stores were opened earlier in the morning for the exclusive patronage of members of the party. Only after that time could the public enter. This was a vivid reminder to me of George Orwell’s parody on Communism entitled “The Animal Farm,” wherein it is broadly written that “all of the animals are equal, except that some are more equal than others.”

The Twentieth Century has laid a heavy and blood-stained hand on human dignity, liberty, and rights. Two weeks after he was in power, Lenin eliminated no less than 20 newspapers. He openly deplored “the luxury of discussions and disputes.” Said he: “It is a great deal better to discuss with rifles than with the theses of the opposition. It is true that liberty is precious — so precious that it must be rationed.”

History speaks volumes about Stalin’s mass murders and mock trials.

When Dictator Juan Peron seized power in Argentina, he shut down the Supreme Court, and took over all radio and news media.

After he was firmly entrenched in power, Fidel Castro announced to his newly enslaved people that because he and they were now joint owners of the state and all that belonged to it, elections would be redundant and were thereby eliminated. You all remember the compassionate Doctor of Medicine from Buenos Aires by the name of Che Guevara. He was in charge of executing dissidents by firing squad in the old Spanish fortress which lay directly across the bay from Havana.

The Dictator, Pol Pot systematically murdered 1,200,000 people — 20% of the population of Cambodia.

When the colony governing European powers abandoned Africa, it left a vacuum of tyranny and oppression. You well remember names like Idi Amin, Patrice Lumumba, and Mwabe Nkrumah, the self-proclaimed dictator of Ghana, who modestly dubbed himself “The Great Redeemer.” In this own words, Nkrumah announced: “All Africans know that I represent Africa and that I speak in her name. Therefore, no African can have an opinion that differs from mine.”

I need not inventory the unspeakable crimes of Adolph Hitler, not to mention his hideous Nuremburg Laws, which, with the stroke of a pen, disenfranchised every Jew in Germany.

In 1933, shortly after Hitler took power, a massive group of college students assembled on the streets of Berlin, carrying lighted torches. They marched directly to the University of Berlin where, with the torches, they burned thousands upon thousands of books. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, stood gleefully by and praised the students for destroying the past, and lighting the way for the future of the new order.In the 1960’s we had the vicious Red Guard, made up primarily of undereducated, mean spirited teenagers who looted, pillaged, and did all they could to destroy artifacts and other material evidences of the past. Said one Red Guard to the other: “I know she was a capitalist; she owned one couch and two chairs.”

The multiple terrors of the twentieth century leave behind them three common and tragic hallmarks. They are the squelching of free expression, the destruction and obliteration of the past, and the absolute sacking of the rule of law.

In the mid 1960’s, there was enrolled at the University of California/Berkeley, an avid young student by the name of Mario Savio. Mr. Savio, the leader and founder of the so-called “Free Speech Movement” was bound and determined to force the repeal and extinction of a long held university rule prohibiting political expression and/or displays or gatherings on campus property. Savio gathered thousands of students en masse, and neither the National Guard, the Berkeley police, nor the university police were able to shut down this massive show of force and resolve.

The University finally capitulated and rescinded its policy against political expression on campus. When I, and a number of you, emerged from college in the frivolous 50’s. There was only one conclusion we could reach about masses of students gathering together in protest, and in preference over beer parties and football games. That conclusion was simply that this unrest had to be rooted in Communism.

Such, of course, was not the case — the Free Speech Movement had been a success on this huge campus. Over twenty years ago, when my son and daughter proceeded to Berkeley in the footsteps of their mother, I enjoined each of them to keep their eyes and ears opened, reminding them of the privilege of going to school in a virtual marketplace of different ideas — some of which they may agree with, and some of which they may not.

The University of California is a fine world class university, at the forefront of scholarship and research, and bearing no less than 20 Nobel prize winning faculty. The University is also a cauldron for student agitation. In modern education, at virtually all levels, we are seeing, I fear, an erosion of the venerable and cherished rights born at our birth, and repeatedly bought and paid for at distant places like Verdun, Iwo Jima, the Chosin Reservoir, Khe San, and Kandahar.

Let us look around. Let’s examine what has now happened at the Berkeley campus where the proud words “Let There Be Light” are graven in stone. Within the past 12 months, the daily student newspaper has been burned, stolen from its racks, and its editorial office sacked by angry students. It seems that the “Daily Californian” published an unpopular editorial which aroused certain segments of the student population. For this, the paper was forced to and did apologize. Later on, following 9/11/01, a political cartoon was presented in the paper, depicting Osama Bin Laden headed for the fires of Hell, and clothed in typical mid-Eastern garb. The paper was bitterly and vocally attacked and charged with racism. This time, however, there was no apology. Some years ago, after the Savio movement had won its victory, former UN Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick spoke on the Berkeley campus and was shouted down so vocally that her address was terminated. Indeed, “Let There Be Light”!!

As recently as February of this year, the publisher of the Sacramento newspaper spoke at a Sacramento State University commencement. While trying to draw a balance between security measures and cherished rights, the speaker was shouted down and the address terminated.

I applaud with sincerity current academic efforts to teach students to think critically. This, however, does not license thinking belligerently, rudely, or in confrontation. The protection of free speech is not conditioned upon the approval or acceptance of the listener, nor upon whose ox has been gored.

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