Reality Principles: An Interview with John R. Searle

Eminent philosopher John R. Searle defends free speech, free inquiry, and the Enlightenment.

Steven R. Postrel & Edward Feser from the February 2000 issue

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Searle: I was very active.

Reason: I wonder if you could say a little bit about your role in it, and any reflections you might have.

Searle: In 1959, when I came back to the United States from Oxford, where I had been teaching, I wanted to be more active in the life of the community than I could be as an expatriate. I've always been active in civil liberties issues--I believe in human rights and especially the right to free speech and free expression. I was active in opposing what was then called the House Un-American Activities Committee. [HUAC] put out a movie called Operation Abolition, and this movie was going to be shown in the law school [at Berkeley]. I was asked to comment on the movie, and just a couple of hours before I was to address these law school students, they got a call from the chancellor's office saying my speech was canceled. I, an assistant professor in this university, was not to be allowed to address the students on this sensitive issue unless they got someone to rebut me.

This was in December of 1961, and at that point I decided this university was not deeply committed to free speech. So a couple of years later, when some students came to me and said, "We are campaigning on behalf of free speech," they found a sympathetic listener. I became extremely active on behalf of the FSM. In fact, I guess I was the first regular faculty member to come out for the FSM.

My disenchantment with student radicalism came not because of the FSM but because of the events that occurred afterwards. After the FSM abolished itself, there was this sense of expectation of the '60s [activists] that somehow they were going to revolutionize society and overthrow capitalism and do all kinds of things that I did not want. I wanted free speech. But I discovered that there were a lot of people who, when they got free speech, wanted a whole lot of other things that had nothing to do with free speech. Truth to tell, some of them didn't much care about free speech. They only wanted free speech for views that they agreed with.

So I was then placed in an awkward position: I thought that the forces that had become unleashed by the '60s were really threatening to the university. We wiped out the old chancellor and the old system of authority--totally destroyed it. So the new chancellor asked me if I would come in and work in his administration as his adviser on student affairs, and I did for two years. And that was much harder than the FSM, because that's when we had to put the revolution back in the bottle. You cannot run a major university on the principle of permanent revolution.

The result of that was that I lost a lot of my old friends. They wanted to keep the revolution going. I did not. I thought, one revolution is enough. But not everybody agreed with me, and there were a lot of tense times as a result of that. We did, however, succeed.

In '69 there was an off-campus event--the People's Park debacle--that really was not an on-campus student event. That was a battle primarily between the nonstudent element living on the south side and the university, and especially those state authorities when Reagan came in with the National Guard. But the battle for academic control of Berkeley had been won by '67. So what happened in Paris and Columbia and Harvard and Stanford and a whole lot of other places occurred after what had happened there.

Reason: What do you think of the prospects for the future?

Searle: I left my crystal ball in my other pajamas. (Laughter) I don't know which way it's going to go. I have a sense that the present generation of undergraduates just thinks all those old '60s ideas are ridiculous.

I think that the movement of the '60s has done a lot of long-term, permanent damage, in certain departments, because they gave up on their educational mission. Certain departments, especially in literature and cultural studies, are, as far as I can tell, permanently demoralized. But in the departments that I deal with most directly there has been almost no effect. The philosophy department today is pretty much the same kind of philosophy department we had here 30 years ago.

Reason: Your direct experience is positive?

Searle: My students are as good as ever, and maybe better than ever. My perspective is skewed by the fact that I happen to get really superior students. I teach very difficult upper division courses, and I get the most self-selected bunch of students in the university, because nobody takes the courses who isn't highly motivated. You come to my lectures, and you'd be amazed at the quality of the questions asked.

But I don't teach many large freshman courses. When I did a few years ago I found I couldn't teach at the level that I could when I started teaching here in 1959. And the reason was that I could not take for granted the cultural references. I couldn't assume that everybody knew who Plato was. In 1959 the freshmen hadn't read Plato, but they had heard of him. But by, say, 1975, you couldn't assume that.

Also, affirmative action had a disastrous effect. We created two universities during affirmative action. We had a super-elite university of people who were admitted on the most competitive criteria in the history of the university, but then we had this other university of people who could not have been admitted on those criteria, and who had to have special courses and special departments set up for them.

Now affirmative action meant two completely different things. When it first started out the definition was that we were going to take affirmative actions to see that people who would never have tried to get into the university before would be encouraged and trained so that they could get admission. I was all for that--that we were going to get people into the competition who would otherwise not have been in the competition. What happened though, and this was the catastrophic effect, is that race and ethnicity became criteria not for encouraging people to enter the competition, but for judging the competition.

But now a lot of that is changing. The idea that we're going to admit people just on racial and ethnic criteria, we've given up on that. Now we're trying to get people prepared to compete in the university, and that's a good thing if we can do it.