Volume 33 Number
How Free is the Free Speech Area?
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Student Excerpts from Free Speech ResearchHow the Free Speech Area is used is intimately tied up in the discourse of the times, the culture, and the historical setting because the audience receiving the communication is a product of the times, the culture, and the historical setting. The Free Speech Area becomes a public sphere for the exchange of ideas by the presence and existence of the audience -- students, faculty, administration, and even the media. - Rachel Betke What were the limitations of our research? After all, how much of the information that is left in the University Archives from 1968 paints an accurate picture of the time? How much was lost over the years that might have shed light on that picture? In regard to the formation of the FSA, did the administration of the CSU and the Chico State campus act out of a concern for the students' rights, or was it an act of containment? These questions would prove hard to answer. The administration's documents on the development of the Free Speech Area and free speech activity included memos, press releases, cabinet minutes, and reports that were all distinctly administrative; each text had a similar administrative bias that again revealed as many questions as it answered. The texts felt carefully written and refined but often strangely void of any significant meaning. Every sentiment of commitment to any cause had been wrung out except for protecting the status quo and quietly pleading with students to refrain from protests. The memos released to faculty and students plainly argued that students should quell their unrest and allow time and the establishment to work out the very things they were protesting. The well-designed and, likely, well-timed press releases from President Hill's office give us no indication of the range of the administration's discourses, emotions, and logics about a campus, that simply put, would not calm down. - David Van Natten One of the main differences that can be pointed out between our Free Speech Area and the panopticon is that we are not inmates. We are people who choose to be here and benefit from a higher education. We were not sent here as a form of punishment; in fact, we should consider it a privilege. It should not be too much to ask if there are rules that apply to this privilege. It would be similar to driving with no regard to the law. How safe is that for you and for others? Throughout the research of this project, the student attitude towards the administration was that it is an entity that exists merely to force power upon us. I am not denying the power of protest; I am simply suggesting alternate ways of being effective. Some members of our class staged a protest during our researching of the project. It was held in the Free Speech Area and was aimed at the administration and their reported neglect to announce all rapes and sexual crimes committed on campus. A worthy cause and test of the Free Speech Area. But there was a much easier way to get a response than staging protest. I e-mailed President Esteban in regards to this very issue. He responded in less than 20 minutes with an e-mail saying that he appreciated my interest in the issue. He also sent my e-mail along to a police chief who was more than willing to discuss the details with me. This doesn't sound very inaccessible to me. - Katie Beebe
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Rhetoric students research the history of the FSA
In the fall 2000, I taught English 175, the rhetoric course required for English majors. Talking with students on the first day, I was struck by their skepticism over the impending presidential elections and their sense that studying "language use in action" offered paltry strategies for critical engagement in public culture. In response to distrust about the relation between the classroom and the larger world, I decided to experiment with pedagogy that countered this notion. I asked students to engage in a collaborative, semester-long research project on a space that came into being because of an ongoing conflict among the classroom, knowledge production, and larger society -- the Free Speech Area (FSA). The result is an archival history the students completed, donated this summer to Meriam Library's Special Collections.
The FSA is a wide, grassy expanse beside Kendall Hall. This space was apportioned in the late 1960s, when California state universities -- and campuses across the country -- responded to student teach-ins and demonstrations on antiwar and civil rights issues with space that purported to enable students' First Amendment rights while maintaining uninterrupted settings for learning.
As a new faculty member, I was fascinated by the FSA. I imagined it, in its heyday, a site for frothy declaimers railing against the status quo, or reasoned facilitators engaging in debate on matters of civic urgency. As it functions now, the FSA is a vexed site for passionate reactions to the events of Sept. 11, pamphleteering street-corner evangelists, informational tables of student organizations, and art sales.
Created by the state to centralize and manage speech, the FSA is that strange mixture of civil society that merges intimately with the locus of state power. Why it exists, how it functions, and for whose benefit were the questions I posed to my students. They did not have advanced research skills or familiarity with a library special collections room. While librarians such as Mary Ellen Bailey and Jim Dwyer were generous with their knowledge, we also learned by simply diving in and putting our heads together.
Students chose research groups and were responsible for providing the class with documents that give a history of the area since 1968.
One student group archived the CSU administrative rhetoric on the FSA, including a letter they received from former president Stanford Cazier; another group archived student rhetoric, documenting the conflicts over the closing of First Street and the Vietnam War; a third group traced local media coverage; a fourth group collected oral histories of long-time Chicoans who were involved in the FSA, such as Abe Bailey, Jane Dolan, and Tom Reed; and a fifth group observed how the area is used today. These documents became our class text for the remainder of the semester.
In writing about their experiences as researchers, students came to little consensus on the "why" and "how" questions. David Van Natten felt the FSA exists as a tenuous compromise between student need for free expression and university mandates to enable yet control student speech. Kendall Leon claimed it exists as an expression of historical tensions over knowledge production on campus. Buffy Lauer saw it as a panopticon, a way to contain and observe aberrant student speech. Katie Beebe saw the FSA as a democratic space that shows that the university values student speech.
My goal as a rhetoric professor was to invite students to generate interesting claims supported by primary documents, personal experience, and dialogue with each other. Along with the primary source material, these student essays are part of the library's collection. They represent everything from revelation to tedium, as well as the knowledge that critical participation in public culture can happen in the classroom. Keep an eye out for a Web page, linked to Special Collections, that houses these materials online.
Jill Swiencicki, Department of English
University Publications
California State University, Chico
400 West First Street
Chico, CA 95929-0040
530-898-4263
publications@csuchico.edu