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The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s
Reviewed by Glenn Howze
By Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik , eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002
Almost four decades after sit-ins at Sproul Hall launched the free speech movement on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, historians Robert Cohen and Reginald Zelnik have published an edited volume documenting the importance of this event for Berkeley and for American higher education. The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s is an uncommon mixture of scholarly essays that provide valuable analysis of existing documentation on the subject and personal memoirs by participants in the movement. While most of the articles present the movement in positive terms, some are critical of its goals, tactics, and results.
The book is dedicated to Mario Savio, a charismatic student leader and the best known of the movement's activists. Regardless of what he accomplished later in life, Savio would always be defined by his mesmerizing speeches to Berkeley student demonstrators in fall 1964. Throughout the book, contributors pay homage to his leadership, and the final few essays, written after Savio's death at the age of fifty-three in 1996, are essentially eulogies.
As good historians, Cohen and Zelnik include essays exploring the historical context of the free speech movement and its roots in two opposing forces: 1950s McCarthyism and 1960s civil rights activism. At the time that the free speech movement mushroomed, Berkeley, like other universities in California and around the country, had experienced attacks on civil liberties in the name of anticommunism. Despite a pretense that academic freedom and free speech were protected on campus, loyalty oaths were required of employees. The university was careful not to hire or tenure faculty with unconventional political views. Communists and other left-wing activists were banned from speaking on campus. The preface to the book quotes a president of Yale as having made a statement that might have applied to many campuses in the 1950s: "There will be no witch-hunts at Yale because there will be no witches."
In the early 1960s, McCarthy-era restrictions began to disappear. In one of the book's more interesting essays, Clark Kerr, who was president of the University of California system at the time of the free speech movement, describes his administration's attempts to rid Berkeley and other campuses of the vestiges of McCarthyism. The loyalty oath was removed and communists and other controversial speakers were allowed on campus. From Kerr's point of view, great progress had been made, and he notes that he and the University of California Board of Regents were awarded the AAUP's Alexander Meiklejohn Award for Academic Freedom in 1964 for their efforts to rid the university of undemocratic practices.
But despite Kerr's efforts, one questionable practice remained in place at Berkeley: "advocacy actions"—raising money and recruiting participants for political activism—were banned on campus, although they were permitted on a sidewalk close to campus. The sidewalk was heavily used. Like other students across the country, many Berkeley students had participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 or other aspects of the civil rights movement, and their eyes had been opened to racism and discrimination. They came to campus committed to ridding their own community and university of injustice, and they engaged in the sorts of advocacy actions that were still banned at Berkeley.
The vestiges of McCarthyism and the values of the budding civil rights movement came into open conflict in fall 1964, when the administration discovered that the sidewalk traditionally used for advocacy actions was technically part of Berkeley's campus, and prohibited its continued use. Students demonstrated at Sproul Hall, the administration building, and when police tried to arrest the protesters, students blocked the exit, preventing police cars from leaving. As the controversy escalated, students occupied the administration building and finally eight hundred of them were arrested en masse. The free speech movement was born.
Kerr and others have argued that certain faculty groups provided behind-the-scenes direction to student protesters, but in his essay in this volume Zelnik denies this, arguing that students and administrators drove the controversy. Zelnik provides a detailed account of a debate that took place in Berkeley's Academic Senate and resulted in a resolution supporting students' rights to advocacy speech on campus.
In her essay, Julie Reuben notes that in the early 1960s, the AAUP experienced some difficulty in drafting a statement on academic freedom for students; while academic freedom for faculty is predicated on their expertise, this claim does not apply to students. In 1967, the AAUP, along with student and administrative organizations, did issue a statement detailing the rights of students, indicating that "freedom to teach and freedom to learn are inseparable facets of academic freedom." The statement endorses the rights of students to engage in the same types of political activities that prompted the free speech movement.
What was the legacy of the free speech movement? Some contributors note that the free speech movement was the model for student protests across the United States and even internationally in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Certainly, campus-based protests against the Vietnam War owe much to the free speech movement. In addition, the free speech rights of students at Berkeley and across the country are more secure today than they were in 1964. On the other hand, as other contributors note, the free speech movement was largely responsible for the emergence of a right-wing political reaction that resulted in the election of Ronald Reagan as governor of California and a continuing assault on universities by conservatives. The attack on affirmative action at Berkeley and other California institutions is viewed by many as a reaction to the free speech movement.
Cohen and Zelnik's book is the most complete chronicle of the free speech movement to date. It is a "must-read" for anyone interested in the subject of academic freedom or the limits of free speech on campus.
Glenn Howze is professor of agricultural economics and rural sociology at Auburn University.
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