On January 11, 1968, John Gerassi, well-known as a militant opponent of the war in Vietnam, was dismissed from the faculty of San Francisco State College where he held the post of Visiting Lecturer in International Relations. As Acting Chairman of the Department of International Relations, I had joined with the other tenured members of the department in recommending his dismissal.
The firing of a professor is a serious matter which always sends shock-waves through the academic community. This case was especially upsetting, not only because it raised important questions about academic freedom, but because it was falsely linked with the issue of racism and with campus protest against the war in Vietnam. The events which led to the dismissal caused the college to be temporarily closed down, seriously damaged faculty and student morale, and increased right-wing political pressures on the college administration.
Interest in the Gerassi case is found not only among those who want to know why he was fired, but from many who wonder why he was hired in the first place. He was hired because the Department of International Relations wanted a Latin American specialist who would contribute to its efforts to build courses that are relevant to current international events, and who would not shrink from confronting the difficult intellectual and moral problems raised by American policy in Latin America.
Gerassi had wide experience in Latin America, had been an editor of Newsweek magazine, and had written a book called The Great Fear in Latin America which had been used in the department and found valuable. Gerassi has an M.A. in philosophy from Columbia, speaks fluent French and Spanish, taught at the New School, at Windham College, and was an Assistant Professor of Journalism at NYU when we invited him to come to San Francisco. He had published articles in The New York Review, Book Week, Commonweal, and Esquire, and he was Latin American Editor of Ramparts magazine. We checked with academic colleagues who knew him and they responded favorably, so we offered him a one-year appointment, which he accepted.
The members of the department were in general aware of Gerassi’s political views as they had been expressed in his articles and in The Great Fear. The latter was a critique of American policy in Latin America and a plea for “a policy of reconquest” of the area “with the arms of a new and lasting friendship.” It was critical of American economic exploitation and military intervention. It advised the United States to support Latin American nationalism or face the growth of Communism. We knew that Gerassi opposed the war in Vietnam, was sympathetic to the Cuban revolution, and believed that armed struggle was the only way that Latin America could free itself from United States domination. While these views were not shared by all of us, and were vigorously opposed by at least one, we thought they would enliven the dialogue among faculty and students and precipitate controversy of educational value. We had had similar aims when we sought and hired an extremely conservative colleague the previous year. In making our decision, we looked upon Gerassi as a “high-risk, high-gain” person, a term used by the Peace Corps to describe the livelier volunteers. Six members of the department, including myself, voted for the appointment; only one thought it was a bad risk.
By the time Gerassi arrived in San Francisco, his views had moved considerably beyond those expressed in The Great Fear. Between May, when we hired him, and September, when he began work, he had visited Cuba and had attended the OLAS conference. That meeting was also attended by Stokely Carmichael, who was lionized by the Cubans as an authentic American revolutionary. Gerassi returned fired up with revolutionary fervor and entranced by the romanticism surrounding Fidel, Che Guevara, and Régis Debray. In a formal lecture, sponsored by the International Relations Department, he told an enthusiastic student audience:
What it means…for the individual that goes to Cuba—what it means for an individual American that goes to Cuba—and sees the committedness, and sees the strength, and sees, therefore, because of that committedness, the incredible freedom, as I said, the complete and total relaxation of any kind of repressive measures, the lack of police, the lack of check-ups, the lack of all these things, because the youth is committed, and when you have the youth committed you don’t need it anyway; even from a practical point of view, there’s no need for any of it. When you see all that, and you consider yourself radical, or you consider yourself revolutionary, and you realize that it’s true that the example sets the tone; the example is what influences people—not the talk; not the theory; not even the writing of the books—ultimately it’s the example. You go to Cuba. Cuba, without trying to be nasty to you, puts you right on the spot. It makes you at all times while you are visiting there say “and what are you? Because if you’re a revolutionary, then put up or shut up!”
Gerassi’s revolutionary romanticism came to the campus at a time when it could have maximum impact. The Students for a Democratic Society were circulating nationwide an article by its Inter-Organizational Secretary, Carl Davidson, entitled “Toward Institutional Resistance.” Davidson described the American university as a “‘knowledge factory’ adjunct to the multinational corporations of American capitalism.” He said that “the social order we are rebelling against is totalitarian, manipulative, repressive, and anti-democratic. Furthermore, within this order of domination, to respect and operate within the realm of bourgeois civil liberties is to remain enslaved, since the legal apparatus is designed to sustain the dominant order, containing potential forces for change within its pre-established and ultimately castrating confines. As a result, it is the duty of a revolutionary not only to be intolerant of, but to actually suppress the anti-democratic activities of the dominant order.”
John Gerassi had returned from Cuba with its “incredible freedom” and “complete and total relaxation of any kind of repressive measures,” ready to do battle with the American Establishment. He gave an interview to the campus newspaper, Open Process, which was published on October 27: “The whole educational system in this country,” he said, “is really part of the Establishment, and it has to be challenged and confronted just as much as the military…. Of course, the risk involved is great. If you really accept this—if you’re going to have that kind of confrontation on campus—it means you’re risking bringing the whole thing to a standstill. But is that so bad?”
IN THE SAME INTERVIEW, Gerassi discussed the free speech issue that had arisen in connection with war recruiters. “You don’t have freedom of speech in this country with regard to whether you go fight or whether you don’t want to go fight…. You don’t have freedom of speech about the system under which you live. It can’t even be considered whether General Motors should be nationalized…. There is no free speech objectively. They have the loudspeakers. Let’s face it—we don’t.”
If Gerassi meant by this that minority opinion in the United States has less access to the mass media than majority opinion, then it would be hard to disagree with him. But the language he used is difficult to square with a statement he made elsewhere in the interview. “Any individual,” he said, “can get up and say what he wants to in this country and openly advocate sedition and have nothing happen to him, or at worse have to settle for a $50 honorarium instead of a $500 one.” He implied that a little repression would be a good thing because it would unite the Left. Unfortunately, as his post-suspension interview with Elsa Thompson of Pacifica Radio revealed, San Francisco State College had not produced that oppression:
THOMPSON: When you were invited to come to San Francisco State, both Marshall Windmiller and the other people involved in okaying your appointment were in fact thoroughly familiar with your background?
GERASSI: Oh, yes, they used my book, The Great Fear in Latin America, and have used it for a couple years right in the Center.
THOMPSON: And since you have been at San Francisco State, until this difficulty which has arisen within the last few days, has there in fact been any interference in anything you wanted to do with your students or with what you had to say in the classroom?
GERASSI: Well, I’ve been suspended.
THOMPSON: Yes, I understand that now…
GERASSI: Oh, prior…
THOMPSON: Yes…prior to…
GERASSI: No, none at all…
THOMPSON:…you were allowed—you were in fact doing what you wanted to do at San Francisco…
GERASSI: Exactly.
THOMPSON: Then really, insofar as one can tell, this suspension is in fact hinged around the events of the past few days.
GERASSI: That’s right, and in a way, if I may say so, I consider it really very unfair, not to me, but to my students.
The reason given by Gerassi for the suspension was correct. It, and the dismissal which it preceded, were both based on his actions on December 6, not on his teaching or other activities.
December 6 was the day when long-simmering campus tensions exploded. The tensions had many causes, but they were focused on the action of College President John Summerskill in suspending two groups of students. The first were nine black students who had allegedly beaten up the editor of the student newspaper, The Gater. (The paper had a history of insensitivity to the concerns of black students, and had published a column on world heavyweight champion Mohammed Ali which had racist overtones.) A subsequent hearing resulted in the lifting of five suspensions, but four remained in effect.
The other suspensions were directed against the white editor and a columnist for another campus paper, Open Process, for publishing a poem which described a bizarre act of masturbation in four-letter words and which the poet dedicated to a member of the faculty. When the ACLU threatened Summerskill with a lawsuit over the Open Process suspensions, he consulted attorneys, discovered he was on weak ground, and lifted the suspensions. The black students, who claimed that their due process and been impaired by the prehearing suspensions, then demanded that the four suspended black students also be reinstated. The two cases were not parallel, however, for violence had occurred in the black student affair and the student editor had been hospitalized. According to the ACLU News, the AGLU Staff Counsel told Summerskill that “considerations of immediate personal violence to members of the academic community might allow suspensions and expulsions before a hearing, but that the Open Process matter was not such an emergency.”
Summerskill refused to lift the suspension of the black students. Whether his decision was wise or not is debatable, but it was certainly legal and within the requirements of due process. The black students, however, attributed it to racism, and began to organize a confrontation. They were supported by the Progressive Labor Party, Students for a Democratic Society, and members of the Open Process staff. The white radicals organized the Movement Against Political Suspensions (MAPS) to join the Black Students Union in confronting Summerskill. Leaflets were issued that called him a “liberal racist” and compared San Francisco State with Mississippi.
