The stoles, like other outrages at UC Irvine, will pass

JOSEPH N. BELL

I tend to come in on the back end of issues that light up the

Newport-Mesa community. This is due partly to laziness and partly

because I like to soak up the comments on the Forum page to see if

there is anything I can add to the discourse. In the area of living

history, at least, my qualifications can hardly be challenged. And I

think some of that history is relevant to the current debate over the

stoles worn by Muslim students at the recent UC Irvine graduation

ceremonies.

The anger that this issue has raised reminded me instantly of a

similar acrimonious dispute on the watch of UCI Chancellor Dan

Aldrich 40 years ago. That’s when the Board of Governors of the

United Republicans of California passed a resolution that Aldrich was

not fit to be UCI’s chancellor because he “repeatedly demonstrated

his flagrant and complete disregard for decency, morality and

responsibility in the educational community ... and supported,

permitted and protected activities of left-wing organizations on the

UCI campus such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the

Communist Party USA.”

Dozens of letters to the editor in the Pilot in those feverish

days of anti-communism reflected the group’s position. Some of them

-- they were allowed to be unsigned in those days -- attacked Aldrich

personally. He was even booed when he was introduced as a speaker at

a Newport Beach meeting of a philanthropic organization he had long

supported. And the Orange County American Legion sent out a mailing

piece saying that it had “previously recognized un-American

activities on the Irvine campus similar to that which occurred at the

Berkeley campus and, by his own admission, Chancellor Aldrich can

stop this sort of sick propaganda without abridging free speech.”

Aldrich’s sins in the eyes of his critics mostly involved his

application of the 1st Amendment. Three examples will illustrate.

When the San Francisco Mime Troop was booked to appear on campus with

a show entitled “Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel,” enormous local

pressure was put on Aldrich to cancel their appearance on the grounds

that the California Assembly’s Committee on Un-American Activities

had labeled the group “subversive.” Aldrich found the booking had

been scheduled according to regular campus procedures and refused to

cancel it.

Then there was the matter of a radical speaker named Eldridge

Cleaver who was denied an on-campus podium at Berkeley but was

allowed to speak at UCI. And the case of a graduate student named

Mike Krisman who had been a paratrooper for three years before

returning to school to become UCI student body president and

spokesman for the Students for a Democratic Society.

When Aldrich supported Krisman’s appointment as coordinator of

academic advising, the Orange County Young Republicans were as

outraged as they were a month later when Krisman took a summer job as

one of four young men in Marine uniforms in a living re-creation of

the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima for the Pageant of the Masters in

Laguna Beach.

There were other similar incidents, but these three illustrate the

nature of the heat directed at Dan Aldrich. I was teaching at UCI at

the time and hearing these charges with the same incredulity as the

rest of the faculty. (I’ll leave the mindless inclusion of the ACLU

in the same context with the Communist Party to another column.) To

all of us -- at least in my experience -- who served under him, Dan

Aldrich personified practically all of the virtues allegedly most

dear to his critics. He was an imposing man physically who excelled

at athletics, was a registered Republican, wore his patriotism

proudly and had a prestigious background in agriculture. He also had

a vigorous, outgoing family and was straightforward enough to connect

with Orange Countians who regarded incipient intellectualism with

dark suspicion and erudite enough to mingle with equal facility with

scholars.

I observed those qualities on campus and in the community

throughout the troubled Vietnam years, and I believe that Dan Aldrich

was quite possibly the only educator of stature in the state of

California who could have run UCI even-handedly and kept the peace

with Orange County as long as he did.

Because the county has diversified considerably since the Mime

Troop flap, dealing with such intense heat is no longer a condition

of employment for the UCI chancellor. But the principles that guided

Dan Aldrich have also guided succeeding chancellors, as they did in

the matter of the Muslim stoles.

Two quotes I ran across in digging through my files on this period

seem to me especially enlightening in weighing the propriety of this

decision.

The first came from then-UCI Social Science Dean James March --

long since awarded a chair at Stanford. He wrote: “By ancient and

mostly honorable traditions, members of the university community are

officially and deliberately protected from major economic or social

retaliation for unpopular views. This frequently places parts of the

university community at odds with the main body of feelings in the

larger community, state and nation. These traditions are some of the

major attributes of a serious university. The occasional deviant

faculty member or student or other members of the community tests a

university’s willingness to conserve its traditions. It hardly

requires much foresight to predict future opportunities at UCI for

meeting new challenges of a similar sort.”

The second is extracted from an opinion of U.S. Supreme Court

Justice Louis Brandeis in a 1st Amendment case. He wrote: “To justify

suppression of free speech there must be reasonable ground to fear

that serious evil will result if free speech is practiced.... If

there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and

fallacies to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy

to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

These are complex issues in which sound principles sometimes

contest for priority. But Muslim stoles -- like the Mime Troop --

will also pass.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.