“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
When I started college at the University of California at Santa Cruz in the late 1960s, I took to protesting like a duck to water.
When I started hosting controversial speakers at the University of Colorado in the early 2000s, I took to the silencing of protesters like a duck to water.
Different water. Same duck.
The people who watched me (Patty Nelson, Student and Protester) in Phase One compose a small sector of American society. The people who have watched me (Patty Limerick, Professor and Moderator) in Phase Two, pleading with protesters to permit the audience to listen without disruption, compose a slightly larger, but still very small sector of American society
Representatives from those two sectors of society have never encountered each other.
In our polarized times, I am convinced that it would be a good idea to summon those two phases into one reckoning.
Here is what I see as the upshot of that reckoning:
Moderators and protesters prove to be united in an intricate and interdependent market of supply and demand.
The undertaking of protesters, particularly when they silence speakers they disagree with, creates the market demand for moderators. In turn, the undertaking of moderators keeps protesters from overproducing dissent and exhausting the demand for it.
This hypothesis gives us a fresh approach to the often-asked-and-seldom-answered question, “Why are things going so poorly in American civic discourse these days?”
Things are going so poorly because the supply/demand ratio is extremely unbalanced, and there are a lot more protesters than there are moderators.
This imbalance could be corrected by the career choices of the thousands of talented young people who would be launching out into life right now if the pandemic hadn’t placed a moratorium on that launching.
But that moratorium could be lifted surprisingly soon.
The Apprentice Protester Signs A Statement Of Intent:
Enrolling At “Scru U”
In the late 1960s, going to class and going to protests were component parts of going to college. Accordingly, not long after I had written my first college-level papers, I also signed my name on the membership list for the “the Santa Cruz Radical Union,” with my affiliation with the acronym of this organization making me feel very daring indeed.
As readers of “Not my First Rodeo” will know, my father had worked at a Hollywood movie studio as a screenwriter. This meant that he had a number of acquaintances who did not fare well in the regime of Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. When I accepted the offer of the pen and clipboard and added my name to the membership list for a protest-organizing group, the twinge of anxiety that I felt was sufficient to fix that moment in my memory.
A Protester In Peril,
Saved By An Agile Moderator
Driving the Humpty Dumpty Diaper Service van, a very angry man nearly ended my barely launched career as a protester and nearly foreclosed my future career as a moderator.
On the occasion of my almost dire encounter with the diaper delivery service, I was in protest formation, marching back and forth to close the entrance to the campus. In this instance and in many others, I could not entirely locate the match between our setting and our goals—advance the civil rights movement and end the Vietnam War. How exactly would shutting down access to our campus in the redwoods lead to a reconsideration at the Pentagon of the wisdom of military intervention in Southeast Asia?
Leaving that conundrum for the sophomores, juniors, and seniors to figure out, I concentrated my efforts on making it hard for drivers to get past our checkpoint.
Luckily, we had with us a moderator, though we did not refer to him with that title.
One of the world’s most energetic conversationalists, my Western Civilization professor Jasper Rose was walking back and forth with us, engaging us in a dialogue about why we were obstructing traffic, while suggesting that, at some time in the future, we might decide to clear the road and go back to attending class.
By and large, the drivers we inconvenienced were tolerant, listening to our short statements of opposition to war, surrendering their intention to drive into campus and heading back into town.
The Humpty Dumpty Diaper Service van driver was nowhere near so compliant.
Stopped and exhorted to oppose military intervention abroad, this driver was mad. In hindsight, it was not hard to understand his frustration. There were several young faculty couples living on campus, some of whom had faculty infants. The Humpty Dumpty Diaper Service delivered a commodity they needed. No one can really fault the van driver for his inability to see that his refusal to deliver that commodity would set in motion a chain that would bring the troops home.
I can imagine why he was vexed and frustrated, but I cannot entirely imagine the reasons for what he did next.
He shifted his van into gear and started driving straight at us.
Just as suddenly, our professor/moderator shifted into gear himself. He moved fast and pushed a bunch of his charges to the side of the road. The van raced by. None of us got hit.
I doubt that the dons who trained and taught Jasper Rose at Cambridge had thought to demonstrate this particular pedagogical skill to their protégé. But Jasper Rose knew it by instinct.
Thus, the first mandate for a successful professor/moderator: pursue every opportunity to explore why your students (or any other group in your care) are engaging in odd behavior, like walking in circles at the campus entrance, and nudge them toward asking themselves if this is really an activity they will want to keep up for days. And then, when peril enters the scene, stop talking and move fast to keep your charges from endangering their own lives or the lives of others.
Since 1969, I have never forgotten how Mr. Rose chatted with us and protected us. At the time, this episode was just one part of college life, and I absorbed it in the manner of seventeen-year-olds who plunged along in life as if the universe had signed a contract to protect them.
Still, it would have been a very peculiar turn of events to be fractured and shattered in a collision with a vehicle bearing the title, “the Humpty Dumpty Diaper Service.”
Taking A Stand, As Puzzling As It Was Revolutionary:
Secretaries Kept At Bay
In the days before social media, letting us know where we were to report for protest duty involved a proliferation of pieces of paper. I don’t recall that SCRU ever held a meeting of the members, but I can easily believe that a particularly dedicated cadre of the SCRU leadership were the personnel who labored away at mimeograph machines to get the word out.
Following the instructions on one of those pieces of paper and putting aside the question of whether I should instead have gone to class, I walked several hundred yards from my dormitory to the campus’s Central Services building. For this protest, we did not take over the building, but we blocked the entrances. Once again, I had a tenuous grasp on the chain of influence running from the Central Services building to the Pentagon. So I took this as a matter of faith: keeping some pleasant secretaries from going to work was going to lead Secretary of Defense William McNamara out of the fog of war.
The experienced protesters among us saw themselves as the mentors of the fledglings. At the Central Services building, one old hand told us that university officials might call in a SWAT team to remove us. If that were to happen, these agents of law and order would have been instructed to step hard on the middle of our shoes in order to crush the arches of our feet.
This was disturbing news. But given how close I was to my dorm room, my panic proved easy to manage. I walked back to my room and traded my sneakers for the heavy boots I had picked up at a military surplus store. With my arches now well-protected, I also stopped at my mailbox, where I found a package of cookies sent from home.
Thus fortified, I then returned to my post.
The point of this story is simple: even when I was at my protesting peak, I did not achieve a comparable peak of admiration for my own bravery and daring.
And yet, in hindsight, I cannot mock the intensity of my hope that I might make a small contribution to the ending of the Vietnam War. Two friends from my high school, George Lopez and Lynn Shugart, had been drafted right after we graduated, and both had died in Vietnam. When I traveled home for a visit, I usually took Greyhound buses from Santa Cruz to Banning. On long, red-eye trips from San Jose to Los Angeles, I often had the company of active-duty soldiers on rest-and-recuperation leaves. Hearing their stories made me wish with all my heart that their R & R leaves would go on and on, and they would never have to return to war.
An Opponent Of Protesting Takes Aim And Lands A Blow,
And The Protester Reflexively Smites The Governor’s Car
The Regents of the University of California were meeting at UCSC, and their agenda included a motion to fire UCLA Professor Angela Davis. I didn’t know much about Professor Davis, but one of those mimeographed sheets of paper told me that it was my obligation to show up to protest her firing.
I did not make this decision easily, but my hesitation arose more from concerns about the heavens than about academic freedom. I was nervous about my astronomy midterm the next day, and the best solution I could think of (remember, my pre-frontal lobe was still in development) was to take my massive astronomy textbook to the protest and carry it around with me all day.
After hours invested in chanting slogans at Regents and dignitaries, I was not sure what I had accomplished. One thing that I had certainly not accomplished was learning what the Regents had decided about Professor Angela Davis, or how they had reached that decision.
Over the years, when I have mentioned in conversations that I attended this legendary meeting, people ask me what I made of the discussion I heard there.
I hadn’t heard a word of that discussion because I was part of a crowd of people who were chanting and shouting and making a ruckus, making me a strikingly ineffective eyewitness—and earwitness—to a historic decision.
On a far smaller scale of history, the Regents’ decision set in motion a chain of events that led to the one and only time that any human being has purposefully hit me.
As the Regents and Governor Ronald Reagan were leaving the dining hall where they had met, security officers cleared a path for them.
This mostly meant pushing students out of the way and onto the chairs that lined this path. This gave me a lasting memory of how being in a crowd of protesters permits a person to learn how a water molecule feels in a flood.
I did not have the slightest inclination to stand on a chair as the Regents and the Governor passed in front of me, and this seemed like a good time to shift my attention to astronomy. And yet, when a protest is in full swing and a path is being cleared for officials and dignitaries, individual preference and choice-making get pushed—literally—to the side.
Despite our stalwart efforts to keep from hearing anything any officials had said, news of the firing of Angela Davis had finally reached us. This inspired whoever was in charge of coordinating the oratorical genre we will christen “the protestorial chants” to lead us in shouting, “Shame! Shame! Shame!”
As I watched this unusual parade pass in front of me, one woman fixed her attention on me. She was about the age I am now, though she had had much more attention from hairdressers than I have now (or ever). She also had an enthusiasm for make-up that I do not share. Pausing in front of me, she looked me in the eye.
“Shame!?’” she said. “Shame on you!”
And then she wound up and hit me in the stomach.
If no one has ever hit us, we can go through life wondering if we would respond in kind. I remain happy to have had this opportunity to learn this about myself: hitting a heavily made-up older woman with coiffed hair was and is out of my repertoire of ripostes and replies-in-kind.
But I wasn’t exactly pacified.
Suddenly we all surged out of the building, and I found myself on the curb next to Governor Reagan’s car. Without my engaging in any cognitive process that could pass for reflection, the frustrations of the day surged.
I raised my hand and hit the back fender of the Governor’s car.
This seemed to carry no consequence; my hand was not even bruised; the car was undamaged; and the disruptions of the day seemed to have reached their end.
But they hadn’t.
Like many people in those times, my parents often watched the evening news while they ate dinner. The Regents’ firing of Angela Davis, and the vigorous student protest at their meeting, figured in the state’s news for that day.
So my parents encountered me on the TV screen in the living room, hitting the Governor’s car with my hand.
Oops.
Remember, my father had worked in Hollywood, and had come to know a few people whose activism landed them on blacklists later in life.
And so a letter appeared in my campus mailbox, unaccompanied this time by cookies. In the letter, my parents declared that my chances for success in life would improve if I were to recognize that impulsive youthful actions could trail a person through life.
A reader who overestimates the wisdom allotted to young people might think that this is where I made my choice, to withdraw from protests and to become a moderator who would ask protesters not to shout “Shame!” and to treat governors as public servants with whom we could—and sometimes should—disagree in civil and respectful ways.
On the contrary, I stuck with protesting, piling up a robust supply of impulsive youthful actions that may actually have trailed me through life and penalized me in ways you’d think I would have noticed.
But the denouement of the Regents’ meeting also demonstrates that my choice of colleges was wise and foresighted. In its origins, UCSC had only pass/fail grading. So my miserable performance on the astronomy midterm the next day narrowly made it to “Pass,” but did not thereby alter my GPA of “P.”
“People Get Set In Their Ways And Cannot Change”:
An Assumption That Even Fatalists Who Are Set In Their Ways Can Defy
From time to time, someone I encounter finds me to be breathtakingly naïve and unrealistic because I believe that people can change in very significant ways, even when their prefrontal cortexes are as developed as they are ever going to be.
Here is one reason why I do not see this belief as anything but realistic. After decades as a couch potato, when I was fifty-four-years-old, I turned into an exercise nut, which I am to this moment.
And yet thousands of people stand ready to tell me that people are incapable of such a transformation in habit.
And this brings us to my transformation from protester to moderator.
I have told several stories of my life as a protester, but if anyone doubts the evidence provided by those stories, I bet we could dig up plenty of documentation to support their accuracy. At many campus protests, there were men who were wearing suits who conducted themselves like the most committed of paparazzi, snapping our photographs at the most uneventful of protests. Those photographs could probably be uncovered if someone wanted to get going on Freedom of Information Act inquiries.
But the point now is that I changed course, and there is no shortage of photographs showing me in the role of moderator.
Why did I make this change?
This was not a matter of my reaching a life stage where I said to myself, “Since I have served my time and paid my dues as a protester, now I will become a servant of the status quo.”
If I am nothing more than a servant of the status quo, then the status quo really should arrange for better service.
Having eliminated that possibility, we return to the question, why did I change course?
I can identify several occasions when my old habits started to lose their grip on me.
Just a few years after my peak period as a protester, I was a teaching assistant racing to get my grades ready when semesters ended. In those races to the finish line, I would find myself thinking that I would be desperate and probably very angry if my students decided to go on strike, if they shifted from attending class to attending protests, and if they refused to turn in their papers and take their finals. With considerable discomfort, I saw why some of my professors had experienced their students’ embrace of noble and high-minded causes as a massive vexation.
The very fact that my students turned in their papers and took their finals brings our attention to the much bigger context of my shift: one reason I stopped attending protests was that there were far fewer protests to attend.
Still another vector of change gathered force when I finally faced up to the fact that I had never fully grasped how my protest activities were going to reach and influence the decision-makers whose minds I wanted to change. The disconnect—between where I protested and where the decision-makers clustered—had always left me at sea when I wrestled with the question: did protesting actually function as an effective way of standing up to convey dissent?
We would keep the secretaries from going to their desks at UCSC’s Central Services building, and across the Pacific in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland re-examines his assumptions?
My puzzlement as a protester had many dimensions.
Was protest actually the best channel for me to express my discontent with the status quo? The impossibility of presenting clear goals with shouted remarks and signs marked with a few words seemed hard to deny. Could protest convey defined and thought-through recommendations that might actually work?
But now we get to the deeper, stranger, and more mystifying reason for my change of course: I came to feel I had a calling.
At the start of this essay, I put forward the proposition that protesters and moderators hold roles that are inseparable from each other. Protesters must protest so that moderators can moderate. Moderators must moderate because protesters gain traction when their sharpness, shrillness and intensity are moderated.
There is no sign that the desire to protest is diminishing. Moderators are already understaffed and outnumbered. Anyone who hears even a faint calling to serve as a moderator had better say “Yes.”
Here’s the crux of the problem that moderators live to take on.
Given that a controversial person has a constitutional right to speak, and given that this person’s opponents also have a constitutional right to speak, what are the members of society supposed to do when those rights collide?
The answer: call in a moderator.
Let the moderator shoulder the burden of figuring out how both rights can be respected. And it is important to make clear that no seasoned moderator will be surprised or hurt when everyone on every side condemns the moderator for her failure to respond with perfect grace or wisdom to this collision.
Here is the prosaic and unsubtle proposition that keeps a moderator steady and on track:
An audience that came with the purpose of hearing a controversial person speak should be able to hear that person.
Here is a practical and forthright reason for the opponents of the controversial person to accept this proposition.
If you bitterly disagree with a certain set of speakers, and you make it impossible for those people to be heard, you have given your opponents a welcome, even a joyous opportunity to rally the troops and to parade around as victims or martyrs.
You can deny them that satisfaction and delight by giving the moderator room to operate.
This brings us to a physiological reality that may be the biggest reason why my shift from protester to moderator turned out to be permanent.
I was a teenager when I learned that protesters, by their activism, secure for themselves a supply of naturally produced adrenaline. With that wonderful chemical so reliably and easily unleashed, it is no wonder I stuck with protesting for a few years.
But when I learned that moderators secure for themselves an equally abundant—but higher quality—supply of adrenaline, then I was ready for a sustained shift.
No one—either the protester or the protested against—sees maintaining the comfort and ease of the moderator as a priority. This is entirely fine with the moderator, since ease and comfort would drastically reduce the flow of adrenaline, with its miraculous power to focus the mind and reveal life as clearly worth living.
And now, when it comes to adventures as a moderator, I face a serious narrative surplus, requiring an uncharacteristic severity in rationing of stories.
Here are a couple.
Amplifying Dissent
In the early 2000s, the Center of the American West hosted a series of interviews with former Secretaries of the Interior, some of whom were not favored figures in Boulder, Colorado. Preparing for these visits required me to anticipate any half-way imaginable problems and then to conjure up solutions to those problems.
In 1996, a brave and forceful Blackfeet Indian woman, Eloise Cobell, was the key figure in initiating a lawsuit against the Department of the Interior for the mismanagement of Indian trust funds. Beginning as Cobell v. Kempthorne and continuing as Cobell v. Norton, Cobell v.Babbitt, and finally settled as Cobell v. Salazar, the suit remained in progress as Interior Secretaries came and went.
When the Center hosted Secretary Gale Norton in November of 2004, several protesters interrupted the interview, standing up with a big banner and calling attention to the Cobell case. There was no reason to be surprised by this, and, indeed, I had a plan in place: Secretary Norton and CU Law Professor Charles Wilkinson, the co-founder of the Center who joined me in these interviews, would remain on the stage of the Glenn Miller Ballroom, and I would head into the audience to speak with the protesters.
The plan unrolled exactly as I had anticipated—with one big exception.
I said to the protesters that I hoped I could meet with them the next day, and that I would do everything I could to carry their message to the Secretary. I asked them to stop shouting and let the interview proceed, since a big crowd had come to hear our visitor.
At that moment, even though my attention was entirely focused on speaking persuasively to the protesters, I noticed an unexpected outcome of my effort at persuasion: I was asking them to be quiet, and they were getting much, much louder.
What was going wrong with my plan?
I was wearing a lavalier microphone, which the folks running the audio technology for the program did not disengage, and which I completely forgot I was wearing.
Having much more presence of mind than I was mobilizing, the protesters were shouting into my lavalier microphone.
At least everyone in the audience could also hear my effort at diplomacy.
When that effort had clearly failed, and I had to ask security to remove the protesters, I returned to the stage, and the interview resumed. Within a minute or two, the recognition—that I had actually amplified the protesters, rather than silencing them—finally hit me.
Even though I was very mad at myself for this witless behavior, I stuck with the program, finished the interview, talked with Secretary Norton and Professor Wilkinson and various members of the audience, went home, and then spent several hours reprimanding myself for my inattention to that lavalier microphone.
And then, as I sat in the living room and tried to make some peace with my regret and self-reproach, in the middle of the night my sense of humor suddenly came back to life.
The ridiculousness of my attempt at dealing with the protesters was suddenly overwhelming, and very funny.
Jeff Limerick was sleeping soundly, and the only witnesses to my late-onset merriment were two cats.
In the unending training program for moderators, the lesson was lasting and valuable.
The mandate to secure the right of the audience to hear the speaker can supersede the right of the protesters to express their grievances. But it cannot erase that right. The moderator lives under the obligation to exercise as much innovation, inventiveness, and creativity, as the moderator’s mind can encompass, to find a way to acknowledge the presence and the viewpoints of the protesters.
Leaving your lavalier microphone on proves to be a very effective way to make sure that the protesters are heard before you ask security to escort them out.
I will not conceal the fact that I supported the Cobell case, even as I realized that Interior’s mismanagement of the trust funds had not in any way originated with Secretary Norton. In hindsight, the lavalier microphone misadventure was far from the worst turn of events. The people who came to learn about the Department of the Interior had their evening enriched when I amplified the concerns of the tribes.
A Constant Quest
In 2012, the Boulder County Commissioners met to take up the issue of hydraulic fracturing at their December meeting. The discussion was delayed when anti-fracking protesters brought the meeting to a halt.
This turn of events was interesting to any citizen of Boulder County, but it was particularly interesting to me. The Center of the American West was about to start a series of public programs called FrackingSENSE, exploring many dimensions of the issue of oil and gas development, particularly involving hydraulic fracturing.
If the County Commissioners had to leave the room and wait for security to contain the protest, the prospects for tranquil community reflection at our FrackingSENSE events did not look promising.
What to do?
I began most of the programs with the offer of a free lunch—with me!—the next day, to any members of the audience who felt compelled to object to the evening’s speakers; the topic for discussion at the free lunch would be ways that I could more effectively serve as moderator and ways that my lunch companions could more effectively serve as protesters. [Bud Wilson, I am now reminded that I still owe you lunch!]. I also reminisced about my inability to hear a word that the Regents of the University of California had said at that meeting back in 1969, when they fired Angela Davis and I had heard nothing but myself and my fellow protesters shouting.
And then I initiated the ongoing Center of the American West campaign on behalf of respiratory protest.
The Center welcomed and even encouraged protest, I said, but we asked for a variation in the mode of expression. We welcomed and encouraged respiratory protest as the channel for expressing disagreement. So we asked protesters to convey their disapproval with sighs of exasperation, snorts of contempt, and gasps of disbelief.
But I have never again offered protesters the use of a lavalier microphone to amplify their dissent.
Ok, Joni Mitchell, It’s Your Turn
“I had no idea that it would become as popular as it has,” Joni Mitchell said of her song, “Clouds.”
When I started to write about protests, I had no idea that Joni Mitchell’s song, with a small variation in wording, was about to become the soundtrack playing in my mind on a repeating loop.
“I’ve looked at protests from both sides now,” she kept singing.
I’ve looked at protests as a protester myself, and I’ve looked at protests as a moderator who tells protesters to be quiet and to leave if they will not be quiet.
I’ve looked at protests from both sides now, from up and down, from the back of the room to the front of the room, from the stirring up of disorder to the imposing of order.
I feel I know protests pretty well, and yet I am light-years away from thinking I have them figured out.
I return to the question posed earlier:
Given that a controversial person has a constitutional right to speak, and given that this person’s opponents also have a constitutional right to speak, what are the members of society supposed to do when those rights collide?
I welcome ideas, insights, thoughts, understandings, and reflections responding to a riddle that still has the power to stump me—though not to stop me.
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Banner image photo credit:
“UC Santa Cruz student strike: students marching. 1969,” Digital Exhibits, accessed March 17, 2021.