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On a recent Saturday at the North Berkeley BART station I thought of these lines from the prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote . .

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages. . .

The good-humored, almost jovial gathering there, which looked to number in the thousands, was pitched as an angry rebuke to the atrocious transgressions of Co-Presidents Trump and Musk. It was all of that, but it was more than that.

Those of us who were there have survived (quoting a later poet) the winter of our discontent and the drought of March, so now that April’s showers have awakened our roots we’re ready to go. Many of the assembled folks were remembering that they’d been there, done that, sometimes with success, sometimes not so much. They seemed indeed to be longing to go on another the pilgrimage to set the world straight, as they had done in the past.  

On my phone I was in touch with three family members at the big gathering in D.C.,and more family and friends in various categories in four or five other places. Several of them had been in parents’ backpacks in earlier crusades, Moderately large crowds in major cities were reported, but even in small towns where this was the first-ever gathering like this crowds were big too.  

For old-timers like me, the fine weather and many clever home-made signs sparked nostalgic memories of our conscientious youth. Living in chilly Ann Arbor as I was then, for me traveling in April on pilgrimage to protest in Washington with its cherry blossoms offered a welcome foretaste of spring.  

Our first pilgrimage in Michigan was a weekly picket line around the block containing the Ann Arbor City Council meeting, towing one or two small daughters in a wagon. For us as young parents it was a pleasant experience, a chance to catch up with friends as we walked that line for a couple of summers of Monday nights. It's hard to believe now, but it took two or three years in the early 1960s, even in a liberal, educated college town like Ann Arbor, to achieve something as modest as a local ordinance barring racial discrimination in rental housing. Yes, I know, racism still exists there, here and everywhere, but at least a few of its most egregious manifestations have been banned sometimes and somewhere during my lifetime. 

Stopping the Vietnam War took a lot longer. The best we could do with grass roots organizing was to raise public consciousness that there was a problem, and that alone took the better part of the mid-sixties. But that work was a necessary and effective precursor to the more dramatic protest activities that others could engage in later on which finally had some effect.. 

Thinking about those past pilgrimages is what reminded me of those lines from the prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tale, which in turn caused me to recall the best teacher I had in my years at what we then called “Cal” at the end of the 1950s. That would be Mr. Muscatine (at Cal we didn’t call English professors “Doctor” in those days) who taught the Chaucer course. He modestly described himself as “the guy they call ‘old whan that Aprille’. “ 

Mr. Muscatine didn’t lecture us about politics, finding plenty to say about Chaucer, but later I learned about his personal history. 

Here’s Wikipedia’s account: 

“Shortly after he was hired, the State of California began enforcing a state law, the Levering Act, requiring public employees to sign a loyalty oath, and more than 11,000 University of California employees signed rather than risk losing their jobs.^[4] Muscatine was one of 31 academics who refused to sign the loyalty oath, and he was fired for his refusal.^[5] Muscatine later explained his rationale in refusing to sign the loyalty oath: 

‘I felt that in the first place it was a violation of the oath to the U.S. Constitution that I had already taken. And secondly it was a violation of academic freedom, which is the idea that in a free society scholars and teachers are allowed to express and believe anything that they feel to be true. As a young assistant professor, I had been insisting to the kids that you stick to your guns and you tell it the way you see it and you think for yourself and you express things for yourself and I felt that I couldn't really justify teaching students if I weren't behaving the same way. So I simply couldn't sign the oath.^[6] 

“Muscatine and others who were dismissed challenged the action in court and ultimately won a landmark victory when the California Court of Appeal in April 1951 ordered the University of California to reinstate the fired academics. In its decision, the Court of Appeal wrote: 

‘Any other conclusion would be to approve that which from the beginning of our government has been denounced as the most effective means by which one special brand of political or economic philosophy can entrench and perpetuate itself to the eventual exclusion of all others; the imposition of any more inclusive test would be the forerunner of tyranny and oppression. ... While this court is mindful of the fact that the action of the regents was at the outset undoubtedly motivated by a desire to protect the university from the influences of subversive elements dedicated to the overthrow of our constitutional government and the abolition of our civil liberties, we are also keenly aware that equal to the danger of subversion from without by means of force and violence is the danger of subversion from within by the gradual whittling away and the resulting disintegration of the very pillars of our freedom.^[7]’ “ 

Members of our family graduated from Columbia University in 1985. Their class walked out of their own graduation ceremony to protest the university’s investment in apartheid South Africa. But now that same Columbia University is caving to pressure from the Trump regime’s phony claims of antisemitism. Many more schools are on the chopping block. 

Is it too much to ask today’s Columbia and its peers to honor and defend the concept of academic freedom when they are bullied over trumped-up charges by Trump/Musk, as Mr. Muscatine and 30 UC faculty colleagues did during the Red Scare of the McCarthy era? 

Sadly, in that era most institutions of higher learning didn’t defend their faculty members and students any better then than some of their peers do now. But if academics – even individuals--stand up for principle they set an example for future generations. 

Another example: Chandler Davis, a distinguished mathematician and lifelong activist, went to jail in 1960 because he invoked the First Amendment in his refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1954 against former colleagues on the left. He lost, and served six months in federal jail when he’d exhausted his appeals. 

I was inspired as an undergraduate to join my first demonstration, in San Francisco in May of 1960, by what I’d learned about Chan Davis’s fight against HUAC. 

The University of Michigan publication reprinted below is a belated tribute to him. More detailed and more dramatic tributes to him from friends and admirers cano be found on the internet. 

From the University of Michigan press office: 

“The University of Michigan’s annual Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom was established by the University Senate in honor of three academics who were wrongfully dismissed by the university for refusing to cooperate in the witch-hunt led by the House Un-American Activities Committee. 

“In September 2022, H. Chandler Davis, the last surviving member of the group, passed away. Davis was a man of firm political commitments, a remarkable man of great and varied talents. Born in 1924 in Ithaca, New York, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and after the war undertook a Ph.D. in mathematics at Harvard, which he completed in 1950. 

“His principal research investigations involved linear algebra and operator theory in Hilbert spaces. Additionally, he made contributions to numerical analysis, geometry and algebraic logic. He also identified the properties of the remarkable fractal known as the “Dragon Curve.” 

After Harvard, Davis came to U-M as an instructor. It was at this time that he was called to testify before a hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee in Lansing. Alongside him were colleagues Mark Nickerson and Clement L. Markert, and his student friends Edward Shaffer and Myron E. Sharpe. All were “unfriendly witnesses, refusing to confess” their political dissent. 

Davis, unlike the others, based his refusal to answer only on the First Amendment, waiving his protection under the Fifth Amendment. Thereby he deliberately invited a citation for contempt of Congress, so as to give him standing to argue in court that the committee’s proceedings were unconstitutional. 

He got the citation, all right, but he did not prevail in court. His appeals were exhausted in 1959 when the Supreme Court refused to hear his case. He was sentenced to six months in prison, which he served in 1960. While in prison, he continued his mathematics research, and in a paper published in 1963 attached the acknowledgement “Research supported in part by the Federal Prison System. Opinions expressed in this paper are the author’s and are not necessarily those of the Bureau of Prisons.” 

Meanwhile, he and Nickerson had been dismissed from the university. This action of U-M’s administration drew censure from the American Association of University Professors. Unable to get a permanent job in the United States, Davis moved to the University of Toronto, where he stayed until the end of his career, becoming a Canadian citizen. 

He was a political activist throughout his life, embracing causes that fought against injustice and oppression. For several years he was a member of the Communist Party, but he had become disillusioned with it well before appearing before HUAC. Later in life he said he regretted his naiveté about the communist movement but not his activism, preferring to describe himself as “red-green eco-socialist.” 

He came to regret his military service because of the use of nuclear bombs by the U.S. During the 1960s, he campaigned against the war in Vietnam and visited North Vietnam in 1971. He chaired the Toronto Anti-Draft Program and frequently hosted draft dodgers in his family home. 

In more recent times, Davis became an active campaigner for Palestinian rights. He remained an activist to the last, giving an address from his hospital bed in July to an event organized in defense of the Russian mathematician Azat Miftakhov, a dissident who has been wrongfully imprisoned by the Russian authorities since 2019. 

A committed supporter of the Academic Freedom Lectures, Davis often attended in person, or remotely when he became too ill to travel. He was committed to a positive approach and welcomed the chance to speak to the university that had wronged him. 

At the 2018 lecture he said, “I haven’t always been sure of my own welcome here, but today I see a worthy collection of academics, some were administrators, the kind of higher ups to whom we address pleas for allowing free speech. I wish more had been from the other side of the scrimmage, those whose academic freedom is under threat. 

From Politico in March of this year: 

The University of Michigan — one of the leading academic bastions of diversity, equity and inclusion in the country — is shuttering the doors of its Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and shutting down its model DEI program. 

In an email on Thursday, the university’s leaders pointed to the court-order enforcement of President Donald Trump’s executive orders on “restoring merit-based opportunity” and ending DEI programs across the country, as well as the “Dear Colleague” letter from the Department of Education that threatened to eliminate federal funding for universities that did not eliminate their DEI efforts. 

Now the news is all about how Trump’s federal minions are exploiting genuine fear of antisemitism to force compliant administrators at many more institutions of higher learning to turn over personal details of faculty member, including signers of some open letters criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza. The University of California is getting the same kind of pressure as the University of Michigan. 

Trump/Musk will have succeeded if they use threats to force our academic institutions to dance to their tune. Today when we march with signs decrying Trump and Mosk, we might want to think about past examples set by courageous academic dissidents like Charles Muscatine and Chandler Davis, who backed up their opinions with action. 

This week’s good news is that – finally—Chan Davis’s alma mater is standing up to the Trump regime. Harvard has announced that it’s not ready to let the federal government succeed in what the Guardian describes as “gutting universities of what it sees as a liberal-left bias, while using antisemitism as a cudgel in an authoritarian power grab.” And at Yale (Mr. Muscatine’s alma mater), close to 900 faculty members have signed a letter urging administrators to stand tough against the threatened government takeover. It’s reported that Columbia is trying to walk back its concessions. 

Here in Berkeley, many of us are graduates, faculty members or employees of the University of California. Yesterday the UCB community rallied by the Sproul steps, launching point of the Free Speech Movement. Professor Robert Reich gave a rousing speech invoking past struggles and urging solidarity among threatened schools. 

UC has not—yet—announced compliance with the Trump regime. As the most prestigious public university it could set an example as Harvard has for private universities. Faculty members can follow the example of Charles Muscatine and Chan Davis. 

It’s a pilgrimage everyone can join. We are gathering together again with signs and petitions and letters and even impromptu brass bands to make it clear that impacted resisters are not alone. This week, for example, there was a Thursday rally at the Oakland Social Security office and another one at the Berkeley Tesla dealer on Saturday. 

The rain in April is almost past and the May weather promises to be fine for outdoor rallies. Avante!