It was a sad day in Berkeley, with spring apparently waiting. On the California campus in mid -April, the Magnolias curled up and the Japanese cherry trees were dotted with drops. Deborah Blocker had agreed to meet at the Free Speech Movement Café, but was closed by renovations, replaced by a tent established in front of the library.
Freedom of expression was also in a gloomy state. Sixty years after the protests that turned Berkeley into the lighthouse of students’ dissent, the campus is paralyzed, grabbed by the “Arctic” cold, as described by law professor Christopher Kutz. “People are afraid to speak or sign a letter about something as not controversial as the importance of the rule of law,” he explained. “He [Trump] The administration said they wanted to defend freedom of expression. They crushed him. “
Blocker is a French professor and an expert in Italian studies who specializes in Medici -ira aesthetics in Florence. On March 27, he received an email from the Vice President of Legal Affairs at UC Berkeley. The message informed him that the institution, under the pressure of the federal fiscal force that investigated anti -Semitism, had been equipped to unleash the name, position, hiring date, telephone number and the personal email address of the teachers who had signed the congratulations in Gaza.
Prosecutor’s Office
The professor “did not understand” what was happening. He thought she was being accused of anti -Semitism: Louis Casimir Blanc’s grandfather, a Jewish Polytechnic student and resistance fighter, and William Blocker, a Brooklyn’s pharmacist from Brooklyn. A colleague had to explain the situation: the federal task force was really trying to call her as a witness of the Prosecutor’s Office in the open anti -Semitism case against UC Berkeley and another 10 universities.
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