Curated FSM Press Bibliography
Fight Truth Decay
4,087 items
This bibliography covers printed journalism
related to the FSM from 1964 on, with many illustrative quotations, and such links to the
actual texts as we can provide. Its compilation is discussed in the introduction.
This list is far from exhaustive, esp. for 1964-1965. The reader is referred to Google News Archives.
Items in this bibliography begin in 1964,
the oldest at the bottom of this page
12/14/2024, REVOLUTION 110, Trump and Netanyahu—Nazi Madmen on a Mission of Destruction, Bob Avakian,
"And all this has been accompanied by a severe wave of repression, especially on college campuses in this country—moving to shut down campus protest, cutting campuses off from the rest of society, and outlawing and punishing criticism and opposition to the genocide being carried out by Israel and the backing of this by the U.S. As a veteran of the Free Speech Movement on the UC Berkeley campus in 1964, I can readily recognize that the situation on college campuses today is even more repressive than what we faced then, and there is a need for massive defiance and active challenging of this severe repression—repression which, among other things, makes a mockery of ‘free speech’ and ‘academic freedom,’ revealing the actual dictatorship that is the essential reality of capitalist ‘democracy.’”
12/12/2024, Ashland.news, Ruth Bell Alexander, Obituary,
"At Berkeley, she became an early member of the student-led Free Speech Movement, which carried out the first mass act of civil disobedience on an American college campus, providing inspiration for the wider anti-Vietnam war movement soon to sweep the country. She was among hundreds of protesters arrested on the steps of Sproul Hall on Dec. 4, 1964.”
12/10/2024, California Magazine, Please Allow Him to Introduce Himself¶Rich Lyons is Berkeley’s 12th, and rockingest, chancellor, Pat Joseph,
"In 1964, students were told by the university administration that, even out at Telegraph and Bancroft, they couldn’t set up tables and talk to people out there. That was a very limiting context. In reaction, all of the student clubs across the political spectrum banded together. It really was students versus the university. And I think, today, the university leadership is very comfortable sort of saying, ‘Yeah, we got that wrong.’ And we will get other things wrong.”
12/10/2024, California Magazine, Math and Conscience, Pat Joseph,
"Of course, I was not there, having been born a year and a half later. But my friend and former editor of the Monthly, Dick Corten ’65, was. In preparing this issue’s retrospective on that special edition (p. 13), I emailed him to ask what it was like to experience events firsthand. He wrote: ‘At first, I didn’t know what to make of it—no scale to measure it by. But it became clear enough that the administrators and the FSM leaders weren’t speaking the same language… Not being on the inside of either camp, I wasn’t aware of the fine details, so I was left with my gut, which didn’t know which way to gurgle. At least not until I stuck around for the impasse of the surrounded police car. I listened to the (shoeless) speechifying from the roof thereof, some eloquent, some pointless. I grew more concerned about possible violence when some in the crowd began shouting at the speakers—not counterarguments, but hostilities.… The shouts coalesced into chants (‘Get off the car!’ and ‘You’re breaking the law!’). They started throwing lit cigarettes and matches into the circle of demonstrators seated around the car, and my gut told me it was time to leave. Whatever the next stage was, I didn’t want to see it or be enveloped by it. I did form a lasting impression, though. The counter-protestors who shouted ‘You’re breaking the law!’ were willing to inflict burns on their opposition. That struck me as violating a higher moral law, while the other students and their allies were staying civil, speaking in turns, even protecting the paint on the car, and, when the time came, willing to be arrested and possibly convicted for their cause.’”
12/4/2024, KALW, Almanac - Wednesday December 4, 2024, Kevin Vance,
"1964 – during the Free Speech Movement, Police arrest over 800 students at the University of California, Berkeley, following their takeover and sit-in at the administration building in protest of the UC Regents' decision to forbid protests on UC property.”
12/3/2024, Northern California Public Media, Mario Savio honored on 60th anniversary of "Bodies Upon the Gears" speech, Noah Abrams,
"Looking not just backwards at Savio's legacy, Professor Mary Gomes pointed forward to Savio's activism as a guide for campus struggles to come.
¶
That includes California State University's new so-called ‘time, place, and manner’ rules put in place following the flood of pro-Palestine student activism last spring.
¶
‘The chilling of speech can happen not only through active punishment, but through an intimidating atmosphere where people end up self-censoring,’ Gomes said. ‘And so part of, to me, the importance of having an event like this was the reminder to all of us of the reasons, and not to self-censor.’”
12/2/2024, Petaluma Argus-Courier, Sonoma State remembers former professor who helped lead the Free Speech Movement in 60s, Adriana Gutierrez,
"Les Adler, the former dean of Extended Education at Sonoma State University and professor of history since 1970, was present at Savio’s Berkeley speech. He was a history student working on his doctorate.
¶
‘The university of a place where we came to learn and to go to classes and behave well. We were products of the 1950s Silent Generation — people coming out of the Cold War where any kind of dissent was seen as threatening,’ Adler said.
¶
But not Savio. He spoke loudly against systems of power, Adler said, with passion and eloquence.
¶
His previous speeches were not as creative as ‘Bodies Upon the Gears,’ he added. Something was different on that day 60 years ago.
¶
‘The metaphor of the machine … became the hallmark of what people carried away,’ Adler said. ‘His critique of the university became something that all of us involved in these processes could not avoid thinking about.’”
11/30/2024, Truthout, Berkeley Free Speech Movement Forged an Organizing Blueprint That’s Relevant Now, Derek Seidman,
"On its surface, the Free Speech Movement was a two-and-a-half-month struggle at the University of California Berkeley for free speech rights on campus. But more deeply, it represented a mass emergence of the university as an openly political space and students as political actors. It warmed the chill of 1950s McCarthyism on campus and helped usher in the wave of student protest that came to be associated with the 1960s era (The Sixties).”
11/25/2024, The Brookhaven Courier, UTD’s The Mercury on strike, Erin Dion,
"As someone who briefly attended UC Berkeley, home of the free speech movement, and where protests occurred regularly, any action on the part of a public school’s administration to control its student media in any way is a gross infringement on student rights.”
11/4/2024, Washington Square News, NYU, UC Berkeley activists criticize crackdown on free speech at college campuses, Mariapaula Gonzalez,
"Bettina Aptheker, one of the speakers at the event and lead organizers of the 1964 movement at UC Berkeley, called NYU’s attempt to censor the event ‘a grave mistake’ and criticized the university for its current handling of free speech on campus.
¶
‘No matter what your position is on what’s happening in the Middle East or what’s happening with Gaza, don’t use that as a way of suppressing opposition to it, because that’s the issue now,’ Aptheker said in an interview with WSN. ‘The First Amendment is precious, and when you compromise it, ultimately it’s going to come back and bite you.’”
10/31/2024, The Times of Israel, From Nazis to Vietnam protesters, NY exhibit highlights history of campus antisemitism, Cathryn J. Prince Follow,
"While much of the exhibit focuses on antisemitism, it also spotlights Jewish student activism. As the exhibit points out, three of the four students that the National Guard shot and killed at Kent State in 1970 were Jewish. Additionally, the majority of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement steering committee in 1964 was Jewish.”
10/25/2024, The New York Times, Barbara Dane, Who Fought Injustice Through Song, Dies at 97, Alex Williams,
"In what became known as the Freedom Summer of 1964, Ms. Dane traveled to Mississippi to join civil rights activists registering Black voters. Around the same time, she climbed atop a police car parked on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, to serenade Free Speech Movement protesters.”
10/24/2024, Washington Square News, Faculty-led panel on free speech relocated after alleged ‘academic freedom violations’, Mariapaula Gonzalez,
"The professor, Robert Cohen — one of two faculty members organizing the event — said the university requested that they limit their discussions to the 1964 free speech movement and exclude topics of speech related to ‘anti-Gaza war’ protests. In an interview with WSN, Cohen said NYU’s alleged restrictions of the event’s content was consistent with the ‘suppression of the student protest movement’ last semester.
¶
‘No university ought to be censoring people because somebody in the administration doesn’t like what you’re talking about,’ Cohen said. ‘The deans and the administration don’t go into the classroom saying, ‘You can’t talk about this, you can’t talk about that’ — so why are they doing that in this academic session?’”
10/21/2024, The Berkeley Daily Planet, SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces: Falls, Calls, Balls & Brawls, Gar Smith,
"Anita Medal: What a fantastic FSM60 reunion and celebration we had thanks to The Forum. I hope those who couldn't be here in person were able to watch the Panel streaming. Robby gave great historical perspective, capturing the true history of Free Speech and the lead-up to and through the FSM. Lynne, Bettina and Jack hit the ball out of the park in their presentations. They were passionate, compelling and delightful. They started by standing and singing 'Hail to IBM' from the 'Joy to UC Free Speech Carols' the FSM's Christmas-time fund-raising record-album.”
10/21/2024, Revolution.com, 60th Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement: “standing against injustice… with largeness of mind and generosity of spirit,” Editor,
"Waldo Martin, as someone who has devoted a lot of his work to the history of the Civil Rights and Black Power movement, brought to the audience the important relationship between the struggle for Black people’s rights, especially in the South, and what developed as the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. He noted that many of the activists at Berkeley in the fall of 1964 had been involved in the Mississippi Freedom Summer just months before that fall semester. And he stressed how significant it was that what they learned from that experience motivated them in their determination to not be prevented by the University from bringing that struggle to the campus.”
10/17/2024, The Daily Californian, Panel of Free Speech Movement leaders commemorates 60th anniversary, Casey Chang,
"According to all three panelists, the initial police car sit-in was the most pivotal moment for the FSM. This ignited a campus-wide escalation into the FSM, a series of student-led mass protests against university restrictions on political activity.
¶
‘Until that police car came out there, and people sat down around it, and more and more, and suddenly I wasn’t the only weirdo making trouble; there were hundreds of us, thousands of us,’ Radey said.
¶
Teng pivoted the conversation to focus on current topics, highlighting issues that student activists face today and the use of nonviolence in participatory democracy.
¶
Aptheker and Savio emphasized the importance of forming a strong coalition, as well as having diverse political groups to share ideas with that were united under an executive committee.
¶
‘We believed in structure, and we believed in leadership and we believed in participatory democracy. And leadership and participatory democracy were not contradictory, and so we had a big structure,’ Savio said.
¶
Aptheker said that former chancellor Carol Christ ‘was a model of free speech,’ because of how she successfully negotiated a settlement with students who set up last year’s encampment rather than involving police to close it.’
10/16/2024, The Daily Californian, ‘Holding history in your hands’: Bancroft Library hosts pop-up Free Speech Movement exhibit, Sherry Carrera,
"’All of my life I have been taught to fight for justice, and I find out my country isn’t following that, even now with the limits of free speech on campus because of the student encampments,’ [FSM vet Anita] Medal said. ‘The lesson has not been learned.’”
10/14/2024, Berkeleyside, As Free Speech Movement turns 60, its original leaders are reuniting for Berkeley talk, Andrew Gilbert,
"As a professor of history and social studies who focuses on 20th century student activism and protest movements, [Robert] Cohen sees the lessons of the FSM as in perennial need of nurturing. While FSM activists were coming out of the cresting civil rights movement and incipient organizing against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, Mario Savio championed the principle of free speech as a moral and spiritual imperative itself more than a political tactic.
¶
‘One thing that the FSM did is they let people who disagreed with them speak at their rallies,’ Cohen said, noting that Associated Student Body President Charlie Powell spoke before Savio at one of the Sproul Plaza demonstrations and tried to recruit TAs to replace students who’d gone on strike in support of the FSM. ‘Powell was effectively recruiting scabs. Mario denounced him, but they let him speak.’”
10/7/2024, Revolution.com, 60th Anniversary of The Free Speech Movement, Editor,
"A further irony is that Bob Avakian, one of the students brought forward through participating in that historic movement, became the foremost revolutionary communist in the world today, developing a new communism.”
10/6/2024, Berkeley Daily Planet, Smithereens, Gar Smith,
"With many university administrations planning to roll out new restrictions on speech and protest gatherings on the country's campuses, today's generation of Berkeley students will soon have a unique opportunity to revisit the history of the Free Speech Movement and the galvanizing mass-arrests following the nonviolent Sproul Hall sit-in of 1964—with exhibits, receptions, and a late-afternoon panel discussion with FSM vets and historian Robert Cohen.”
10/1/2024, California Magazine, A Season of Discontent: The Free Speech Movement, as reported in real time by California Monthly, Nathalia Alcantara,
"Yet, despite their concerns, the editors recognized the historical importance of what was unfolding. Not only did they devote an entire issue to the Free Speech Movement, but they also appended a remarkably detailed chronology of the “three months of crisis.” The day-by-day, blow-by-blow timeline covered the period from Sept. 10, 1964, to Jan. 4, 1965. It was a departure from standard journalism but a valuable one, crafted by writers who seemed to understand that the information they gathered would be relevant for generations to come. At more than 36,000 words, it is as immersive as it is time-consuming. To mark the 60th anniversary of the FSM, California is sharing this much abbreviated sampling. We hope you find it edifying.”
10/1/2024, The New Hampshire Gazette, Tues, Oct 1, Editor,
"1964—Campus cops at U.C. Berkeley arrest Jack Weinberg; big mistake. The Free Speech Movement ensues.”
10/1/2024, The Lima News, Today in History, Associated Press,
"In 1964, the Free Speech Movement began at the University of California, Berkeley, as students surrounded a police car containing an arrested campus activist for more than 30 hours.”
9/26/2024, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 60 years after the day college students won free speech, their rights are vanishing, Will Bunch,
"But will today’s youth generation—coming of age in a more repressive time, saddled with problems like debt and rampant careerism not faced by their predecessors — be able to accept that torch? Huge issues, including the constitutional right of dissent and the future of colleges as bastions of open discourse and critical thought, hang in the balance. Sixty years later, America is desperately waiting for a second Free Speech Movement.”
9/18/2024, Legacy.com, Obit, Ursula Ellen Kennedy,
"While working for the Chancellor, she interacted with many notable figures of the day, including leaders of the Free Speech movement.”
9/11/2024, New Ideal, Gregory Salmieri, Free Speech as a Right and a Way of Life,
"Perhaps the most eloquent illustration of the perverse view that free speech amounts to a license to force oneself on others is the Berkeley ‘Free Speech Movement’ of 1964, which consisted of months of civil unrest perpetuated by thousands of University of California students, who objected to a university policy restricting certain political activities on campus. Even granting that such a policy on the part of a public university constitutes a violation of free speech, the aggrieved students had no right to make this point by forcibly disrupting the campus, thereby denying other students the education they had contracted for.” [Ed note: the FSM strike drew a quite permeable picket line, which students and workers could choose whether to cross.]
9/4/2024, The Gazette-Virginian, Mike Doan, MIKE’S MIC: Avoiding the dreaded B-word,
"This was all before the famous Free Speech Movement, which took place the year after I graduated in 1963. But there were precursors of student radicalism when I was there. There were demonstrations of some kind all the time. Even at our Daily Californian student newspaper, we sang revolutionary songs at our parties.”
8/30/2024, The Jewish News of Northern California, Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, Rabbi Michael Lerner, religious and political visionary, dies at 81,
"Lerner graduated from Columbia University and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from UC Berkeley. Like others at Cal, Lerner was radicalized by the Free Speech movement and became a leader of Students for Democratic Socialism. (At Cal, he roomed with anti-war activist Jerry Rubin.)”
8/28/2024, The Miami Student, Harry Hittle, The relationship between protests and American universities
"’I think it’s interesting to compare the current campus protests to the Free Speech Movement at [The University of California] Berkeley, which took place from 1964 to 1965,’ history professor Brian Danoff wrote in an email to The Miami Student. ‘The Free Speech Movement started when the university tried to ban students from engaging in political advocacy on campus.’
¶
The implementation of the restrictive policies escalated student protests at Berkeley, which eventually retracted its policies, Danoff said. The movement is widely seen as one of the first instances of mass civil disobedience on a college campus, precluding what is now a strong history of student activism on American campuses.
¶
While this spring’s protests polarized some campuses, like UCLA and The University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), the Free Speech Movement had a unifying effect among students.
¶
‘The Free Speech Movement was led by left-wing students, but a strikingly broad coalition of student groups at times got involved and worked together,’ Danoff said. He added that both the College Republicans group and socialist student groups took part.
¶
‘Whenever protests break out on campuses, the reflex is to compare them to the mythic 1960s,’ history professor Steven Conn said. ‘But the better analogy to what happened this spring is the divestment movement of the mid-1980s.’”
8/18/2024, 48 Hills, Caitlin Donohue, 2024 DNC protests may have little in common with 1968—let’s hope,
"Even seasoned protestors like Jack Weinberg, a leader of the UC Berkeley free speech movement who coined the infamous ‘don’t trust anybody over 30’ motto, declined to attend the 1968 DNC protests. That was partly out of his concern over their organizers’ tactics.
¶
‘My experience came out of the civil rights movement, and I always had the view that when you’re mobilizing people, it’s your obligation to let them know what they’re getting into,’ Weinberg, a labor and environmental activist who now lives in Chicago’s Loop neighborhood, where many of the DNC protests will take place, told 48hills over the phone. ‘[Yippie leader] Jerry Rubin’s view was you create a situation that you know was going to get out of hand, then you sit back and let it unfold.’
¶
‘I knew the protests in Chicago were going to end up with a lot of angry people and irrational police. It wasn’t the kind of organizing style I was accustomed to,’ Weinberg said.”
8/15/2024, The Chicago Blog, Ellen Schrecker, The University Betrayed: The Lost Promise of the 1960s,
"That promise disappeared—a victim of the backlash against the student movement and the concomitant neoliberal restructuring of the academy that began in the 1970s. College and university presidents proved unwilling to defend their own students and faculty members, and much of the American public was as unprepared for, and antagonistic to, the student protests as those administrators. Encouraged by Ronald Reagan’s successful gubernatorial campaign against the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1966, politicians rushed to enact punitive measures against student activists. While most bills failed to pass or proved unenforceable, the concomitant financial sanctions imposed on public higher education were devastating. State legislators cut back on their academic institutions’ operating budgets, even as enrollments continued to grow. The free, or virtually free, access to a rapidly expanding system of public higher education, as well as affordable tuition at many private institutions, gradually disappeared.”
8/12/2024 circa, QS Insights Magazine, Nicole Chang, When students speak up
"‘There shouldn't need to be encampments to begin with, they should allow students to have input into divestment and divestment policies,’ he [Professor Robert Cohen] says. ‘I don't even agree with a lot of the demands of the protesters,’ he adds. ‘But to me that's not even the point. The point is, what kind of governance do you have when students feel like they have to sleep outside to try to get some input into the universities' investment policies?’”
8/9/2024, Waging Nonviolence, Mark Engler and Paul Engler, How to make sure your disruptive protest helps your cause
"In one of the most famous protest speeches of the 20th century, Berkeley Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio stood before a crowd of several thousand on Dec. 2, 1964, and delivered an impassioned defense of disobedience: ‘There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part,’ Savio insisted. ‘You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop.’”
7/19/2024, The News Journal, obituary, Mary Erla Wolters, 1940-2024
”Mary then attended the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied mathematics and physics, marched in the free speech movement, and met her future husband Raymond at a Students for Kennedy party.”
7/12/2024, Oregon Artswatch, Bob Hicks, ‘Fists & Flowers’: The tumultuous 1960s
”And much of his account of the decade comes from the free-speech cauldron of the University of California, Berkeley, where [Richard] Hertzberg was a student from 1963 to 1968. He continued to live in Berkeley until 1971. The radicalization of Berkeley students and the growth of the free speech movement came in spite of (and perhaps prodded by) opposition from the university administration and even California Gov. Pat Brown, who ordered student occupiers arrested and hauled away.
¶
Yet the movement took root, and spread rapidly. And as Hertzberg points out, it didn’t spring only from the left. The 18 groups that joined the United Front to oppose the university’s suppression tactics ‘encompassed a wide spectrum of viewpoints, from Students for a Democratic Society and the Young Socialist Alliance to California Students for Goldwater and University Young Republicans.’
¶
They demanded, in brief, the full rights of U.S. citizens. Members of Berkeley’s United Front, Hertzberg writes, ‘asserted that the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and assembly, along with the due-process and equal-protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, should be applicable on university property and for students on campus.’”
7/4/2024, San Francisco Chronicle, Sam Whiting, Conn ‘Ringo’ Hallinan, beloved writing instructor and journalism adviser at UC Santa Cruz, dies at 81
”And he was Ringo when he was arrested during the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964, the year the other Ringo arrived with the Beatles.”
7/4/2024, National Geographic, Richard Franks, Berkeley was the birthplace of Californian punk. Today, the music plays on
”Punk is, at its core, anti-establishment, and its influence first grew in reaction to sociopolitical issues such as racism, segregation and gender identity. In 1964, UC Berkeley students were at the forefront of the radical free-speech movement, protesting in response to university administrators banning on-campus political activity. It remains one of the biggest anti-establishment protests in history, putting the city at the heart of the punk revolution.”
7/1/2024, Monthly Review, The Editors, Notes From The Editors
”On December 2–3, 1964, eight hundred Berkeley students occupied the central administration building until arrested by police. According to a journalist who covered the movement, ‘It wasn’t exactly that Berkeley was the first place where this mechanism kicked in [political protest] but it was the place where it went critical’ (‘Free Speech Movement,’ Bancroft Library Oral History Center, University of California, Berkeley, berkeley.edu; Hans Koning, Nineteen-Sixty Eight: A Personal Report [New York: Norton, 1987], 20; John Bellamy Foster, ‘The Spirit of ’68,’ Monthly Review 41, no. 7 [December 1989]: 47–54—much of the text in the following paragraphs draws on Foster’s article).”
6/27/2024, Portside, Charles Idelson, The Life and Times of Conn Hallinan, 1942–2024
”The involvement of Berkeley students produced a backlash by the administration, banning student tables and other political activism. It led directly to the eruption of Berkeley’s historic Free Speech Movement in the fall of 1964, also inspired by the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964 where several Berkeley students who led the Free Speech Movement had just returned. As the battle raged in late November, Ringo, who had transferred to Berkeley that fall, was among 800 fellow arrestees at UC Berkeley’s Sproul Hall in December 1964, along with brothers, Matthew Patrick, and prominent free speech leaders Mario Savio, Bettina Aptheker, Jackie Goldberg, and Jack Weinberg.”
6/26/2024, People's World, Jenny Farrell, The invisible front: An American woman’s memoir of spying for East Germany
”Beatrice’s newly published autobiography tells the extraordinary life story of these two left-wing Americans. Jeffrey [Schevitz], a graduate of the elite Princeton University, ‘had studied in Berkeley, California, between 1962 and 1969. He was an activist in the free speech movement and very active in the anti-Vietnam War movement in Berkeley and later at Washington University in St. Louis.’”
6/24/2024, Alta Journal, What Lies Beneath, Bethany Kaylor
”After studying chemistry for two years, [Deward] Hastings dropped out of Berkeley, moving to a house in the hills above campus. Although he was no longer a student, he joined the Free Speech Movement, which kicked off in 1964.
¶
Barbara Garson, a Free Speech Movement activist and playwright, met Hastings, whom she describes as “a nervous, thin person,” when he fixed an old Multilith printer for one of the student groups. Garson recalls him working day and night, rarely sleeping, as he refurbished the refrigerator-size machine.
¶
While Hastings’s technical contribution was minor compared with the actions of Free Speech Movement heroes like Mario Savio and Bettina Aptheker, it was precisely the sort of behind-the-scenes work that might have appealed to the young man who would eventually become the mysterious steward of the semi-legendary Essex Hot Tub.”
6/23/2024, San Francisco Chronicle, Obit, Howard P. Abelson
”After graduating from Fairfax High School, he attended Los Angeles State College and then transferred to UC Berkeley, where he was involved in student political groups and the early days of the Free Speech Movement.”
6/6/2024, The New York Times, Kurt Streeter, U.C. Berkeley’s Leader, a Free Speech Champion, Has Advice for Today’s Students: Tone It Down
”Berkeley, she said, must aspire to teach students how to have civil dialogue and debate. Without that ability, she said, ‘we are lost.’
¶
Dr. Christ recalled Mario Savio, known for leading Berkeley’s free speech movement in the mid-1960s.
¶
During one student rally, a police car was surrounded by student activists near Sather Gate. Savio, the chancellor noted, climbed onto the car to give a speech but first took off his shoes to avoid damaging its roof.
¶
Dr. Christ wondered aloud whether a present-day activist would do the same before climbing atop a police car. Probably not.
¶
In fact, she said wryly, they just ‘might kick in the windows.’
”
6/6/2024, Times Colonist, Calvin Sandborn, Free speech is indispensable to social justice and democracy
”Recall the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. In 1964 the University of California barred campus political advocacy.
¶
When a civil rights activist urged students to support Southern Black voter registration, authorities arrested him. Students responded with a ‘free speech’ sit-in where 800 were arrested.
¶
The Free Speech Movement became a major incubator of student radicalism — and profoundly advanced anti-racism, feminist, peace and environmental movements.”
6/4/2024, Time, Eddie R. Cole, Instead of Calling in Law Enforcement to Deal With Protesters, College Presidents Could Have Followed This Example
”Two months later, in May 1960, California students captured the nation’s attention for disrupting a U.S. House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee meeting in downtown San Francisco.
¶
At the state level, those activities motivated the California State Senate Un-American Activities Subcommittee to investigate student activity on the state’s college campuses. They were also responding to a shift in University of California policy. Whereas the university had previously denied recognition to student groups dedicated to specific causes, in fall 1960, UCLA’s new chancellor Franklin D. Murphy granted the campus NAACP chapter recognition as an official student group.
¶
The subcommittee released a report regarding ‘radical student groups’ in June 1961. It concluded that communist behavior would ‘plague California campuses in the near future.’ Politicians often conflated students’ civil rights activism and other activities with communism, which they treated as threatening to the United States.
¶
UC President Clark Kerr prepared a reply shortly afterward. Kerr noted that the subcommittee report ‘found no specific evidence of successful infiltration by subversive groups of our faculties or of our representative student organizations.’
¶
But he did not just defend the students from that charge. He framed his reply in terms of the principles that guided university leadership, including that: ‘Freedom to speak and to hear is maintained for students and faculty members.’”
6/3/2024, Red Flag, Amaya Castro Williams, Five student movements to remember
”The Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964 helped kick off a wave of student activism that would last well into the 1970s. The University of California Berkeley administration banned any activities related to 'off-campus political and social action', meaning that student activists were not allowed to organise information stalls, hold meetings or raise any funds.
¶
The attack was particularly aimed at Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) activists, who, inspired by Black civil rights student activists in the South, had been organising in San Francisco’s Bay Area against the racist hiring practices of local businesses.”
5/31/2024, The New York Times, Emily Bazelon and Charles Homans, The Battle Over College Speech Will Outlive the Encampments
”Debates over free speech on college campuses have invariably been debates about power. This became clear in 1964, when students at the University of California, Berkeley, handed out leaflets organizing demonstrations against the Republican National Convention, held in San Francisco that year. The dean of students barred them from using a campus-owned plaza. Months of protests and hundreds of arrests followed, until the university finally capitulated.”
5/25/2024, ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), Annabelle Quince, The student protests on US campuses—repeat of the 1960’s or something completely different?
”Robert Cohen, Professor of History and Social Studies at New York University, and author of Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s and The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s.”
5/22/2024, The Guardian, Arwa Mahdawi, Why is New York University making protesters watch The Simpsons as punishment?
"In an email to faculty, Robert Cohen, a professor of history and social studies and an expert in student protests, said that he couldn’t think of another example of a university administration forcing students to write that their protests were wrong. The closest thing he could come up with was the action of the judge in the mass trial of the hundreds of students arrested during the occupation of the University of California, Berkeley’s Administration Hall in 1964 during the free speech movement. The superior court judge Rupert J Crittenden asked students to write letters explaining their decision to break the law, hoping that they would explain why their decision had been wrong. Instead they explained why the sit-in was justified. Their letters angered the judge but are now being held up as valuable historical sources for student perspectives on the Berkeley free speech crisis."
5/20/2024, The Jewish News of Northern California, Maya Mirsky, Tent protests barely register, compared with ’60s and ’70s, says scholar
"Robert Cohen, one of the foremost scholars of U.S. protest movements, suggests this spring’s pro-Palestinian tent encampment protests haven’t been as influential as one might think, with a tiny fraction of American college campuses taking part.
¶
‘I don’t think we should exaggerate how widespread it is,’ said Cohen, a professor of history and social studies at NYU and an author of books about the Civil Rights Movement and the Free Speech Movement, which began at UC Berkeley in the mid-1960s.
¶
Cohen has been a go-to expert for the media, from USA Today to the Associated Press, since tent encampments sprang up in mid-April at Columbia University and quickly spread across the country. Cohen spoke with J. about the current wave of protests within the context of U.S. history and what he predicts will happen next. The interview has been lightly edited.”
5/20/2024, Salon, Tatyana Tandanpolie, The Gaza encampments and history: Is this the "right" kind of protest?
"One of the first incidents of the 1964 Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, for instance, saw thousands of students swarm a police car after a former student was arrested for passing out flyers without permission. Students surrounded the car for 32 hours, demanding that the young man be freed and delivering speeches from the car's hood, [historian Angus] Johnston explained. By the end of the decade, student protests had escalated to full-scale campus rebellions, violent exchanges with police and, in the most extreme cases, firebombing and burning down campus buildings.
¶
‘The student movement of the '60s was really, by the end of the decade, on many campuses a pretty violent revolt,’ Johnston said. “There's nothing even vaguely similar to that happening now.”
¶
Most Americans didn't much care for the peaceful demonstrations of the 1960s either, as Gallup polls from those moments show. Respondents to one 1963 survey said that mass demonstrations were more likely to hurt than help the chances of Black Americans obtaining racial equality.”
5/17/2024, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Editors, What Every Student Needs to Read Now
"Nicholas Dirks: ¶
Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s, by Robert Cohen. ¶
This authoritative biography of Mario Savio shows the deep links between the civil-rights movement and the struggle for free speech and academic freedom at Berkeley in 1964. Savio was relentless in his advocacy for political rights but also clear that with freedom came responsibility, both for democracy and for the institutional life of the university. ¶
Nicholas Dirks is president of the New York Academy of Sciences and a former chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley.”
5/15/2024, Moment Magazine, Noach Phillips, Letter from Berkeley | What Do Campus Encampment Protesters Really Want?
"Of course, this is not Sproul Plaza’s first student protest—in 1964, graduate student Mario Savio and others demonstrated here against UC Berkeley’s ban against on-campus political organizing, which catalyzed a mass wave of campus civil disobedience known as the ‘Free Speech Movement.’ The Free Speech movement, in turn, kicked off student protests as we know them today. Sproul Plaza was an active site of protest during the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, the divestment campaigns against apartheid South Africa, and many other historical moments.”
5/14/2024, The Berkeley Daily Planet, Gar Smith, SMITHERSCRAPS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces: Moms,Memes&Memos
"The Free Speech Movement Revisited: KPFA Interview ¶
NYU Professor of History and Social Studies Robert Cohen (author of ‘Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s’) was recently interviewed on KPFA during a week filled with media requests from the US and abroad. Cohen's take on the experience: ‘The past week was really a reminder that much of the nation, and especially most campus administrators and politicians, know little about student activism other than the fact that they do not like it.’”
5/11/2024, Breaking Latest News, unsigned, Fear a scenario à la Reagan and Nixon: why Gaza protests could be a big problem for Joe Biden
"Ronald Reagan is generally seen as the Republican president who caused his party to move significantly to the right. He took his first step to the White House in 1966 by winning the gubernatorial elections in California. His main campaign point was to ‘clean up the mess at the University of Berkeley,’ California. The ‘left’ Free Speech Movement (FSM) had occupied it to demand the right to free political expression at the university. Reagan accused then Democratic Governor Pat Brown of not taking hard enough action ‘against the beatniks and radicals,’ the ‘anarchy and rioting.’” [Ed note: The FSM was nonviolent]
5/10/2024, AmherstINDY, Art Keene, Opinion: Fight Back!
"The early movement was also spurred by networks of student protest already formed during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964 and the founding of Students for a Democratic Society in 1960.”
5/10/2024, Time, Adam Tomasi, The Protests That Anticipated Today’s Gaza Solidarity Encampments
"The Free Speech Movement, through bold protests, resisted UC Berkeley’s ban on political activity on the campus—established only to suppress students who raised money for the Southern civil rights movement.”
5/9/2024, USA Today, Dana Taylor, Will the pro-Palestinian college protests lead to lasting change? | The Excerpt
"Robert Cohen:
¶
To me, that's like a red herring. Students are out there because they're upset about the war, all the civilian casualties that come to them instantly on social media. They're not coming because someone's funding it. I mean, people can contribute whatever, but you don't need much money to go out and sit out on the lawn or sit in. All during the sixties, those kind of charges were made like Moscow Gold, the students are getting aid from communists. But the CIA investigated that under President Johnson and they said, ‘No, they're not like communist directed. The students are not dupes of the Communist Party.’ And Johnson was unhappy with that result. So he never publicized the study that came up much later, but I think that's an outside agitator argument.”
5/9/2024, The Conversation, Steve Friess, 5 books to help you better understand today’s campus protests
"‘Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s’
Oxford University Press¶
It took until 2009 for someone to write a definitive biography of Savio, a visionary who sensed how campus protests could change America.
¶
But New York University historian Robert Cohen’s 544-page tome, based on personal papers, recordings of speeches and countless interviews, brings to life accomplishments of a major leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. His ‘Bodies Upon the Gears’ speech in 1964 could easily be adopted as the mantra of today’s pro-Palestinian movement.”
5/9/2024, Honi Soit, Victoria Gillespie, Rain, graduations and pressure on management: Day 16 at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment
"Day 16 also saw two teaching events facilitated — one was run by Joel Geier, at the Quad alcove, speaking to his experience in the UC Berkeley free speech movement.”
5/7/2024, Nonviolence Radio, Alex Gil, Echoes of student activism — from the Free Speech Movement to the Gaza protests
Michael Nagler: ”But there were some reforms, like the fact that I was able to start the Peace and Conflict Studies program some years later. You couldn’t have dreamed of such a thing before the Free Speech Movement. And of course, Ethnic Studies were a little bit different, but it followed the same pattern. Protest followed by innovation.” [Ed note: One innovation was the student-led Free University of Berkeley.]
5/6/2024, Al Arabiya, Yusra Asif, Five times when student protests changed history
"The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was a watershed moment in 1960s student organizing which rejected the expansion of McCarthyist-inspired rules to silent political activities on campus, and won their basic rights to free speech.”
5/5/2024, La Tribune, Étienne de Metz, Etats-Unis: les étudiants de Columbia contre «Genocide Joe»
"La montée en puissance des mouvements propalestiniens est une aubaine pour les conservateurs, qui considèrent les campus d'université comme un terrain de bataille idéologique depuis plusieurs années. Leur dernière grosse prise de guerre remontait à cet hiver, avec la démission de la présidente de l'université de Pennsylvanie, suivie de celle de Harvard, profils intellos favorables aux démocrates. Après leur audition au Congrès devant la commission d'enquête sur l'antisémitisme dans les facs, diligentée par la trumpiste Elise Stefanik, les deux cheffes d'établissement de l'Ivy League avaient été morigénées pour ne pas avoir condamné plus fermement le risque d'attaques antijuives sur leurs campus. « Depuis, il y a une grosse pression sur les dirigeants d'université», explique Robert Cohen.” The rise of pro-Palestinian movements is a boon for conservatives, who have viewed college campuses as an ideological battleground for several years. Their last big war prize dates back to this winter, with the resignation of the president of the University of Pennsylvania, followed by that of Harvard, intellectual profiles favorable to the Democrats. After their hearing in Congress before the commission of inquiry into anti-Semitism in colleges, commissioned by Trumpist Elise Stefanik, the two heads of the Ivy League establishment were reprimanded for not having more firmly condemned the risk of anti-Jewish attacks on their campuses. “Since then, there has been a lot of pressure on university leaders,” explains Robert Cohen.
5/5/2024, BizNews, Stephen Mihm, Comparing pro-Palestine protests to the ’60s is wrong – and dangerous
"What became known as the Free Speech Movement borrowed the tactics and rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement, engaging in civil disobedience. In a typical speech, Mario Savio, one of its leaders, declared: ‘Last summer I went to Mississippi to join the struggle there for civil rights. This fall I am engaged in another phase of the same struggle, this time in Berkeley.’”
5/5/2024, The Washington Post, Reis Thebault and Hannah Natanson, College protests. A Trump trial. Raging wars. Is everything ‘on fire’?
"‘They always want to conflate the liberal university’s leadership with the radicals who are disobeying university leadership,’ Cohen said. ‘This is an old playbook.’”
5/4/2024, Berkeley Daily Planet, Gar Smith, SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces: Free Speech Edition
"Free speech must be defended, now as it was in our time.
¶
Free Speech Movement Archives Board
¶
Jack Radey, President; Anita Medal, Treasurer; Bettina Aptheker; Robert Cohen; Susan Druding; Lee Felsenstein; Barbara Garson; Jackie Goldberg; Steve Lustig: Lynne Hollander Savio; Gar Smith; Barbara Stack”
5/4/2024, Radio-Canada, Ximena Sampson, Manifestations étudiantes : quels parallèles entre 2024 et 1968?
"Robert Cohen: Les manifestations sont en fait l'expression de la mauvaise organisation des universités en matière de gouvernance et du fait qu'elles sont des lieux très peu démocratiques. Elles fonctionnent de plus en plus comme des entreprises, où les professeurs et les étudiants n’ont pas leur mot à dire.”
¶
The demonstrations are in fact an expression of the poor organization of universities in terms of governance and the fact that they are very undemocratic places. They operate more and more like businesses, where professors and students have no say.
5/4/2024, San Francisco Chronicle, Michael Cabanatuan, Jordan Parker, Pro-Palestinian encampment at UC Berkeley expands
"This is basically a camp for alumni of all the UCs to show support for the students and the Palestinian people,’ said Ellen Brotsky, a 1989 UC Berkeley graduate. ‘We have alumni here who participated in the encampments against apartheid and in the Free Speech Movement.’”
5/4/2024, Actual News Magazine, unsigned, A new generation trained at the school of protest in Berkeley
"On the steps and lawn of Sproul Hall, an emblematic building with neoclassical architecture at the University of Berkeley in California, a new generation of students has now rhymed with another past for several weeks, amid tents and messages supporting Palestinian rights and calling for an end to Israel’s war against the Gaza Strip. In connection with a movement that has spread across the country, but also with the spirit of the place.
¶
It was here that between 1964 and 1965, the clique of Mario Savio, Hal Draper and Steve Weissman laid the seed of May ’68 with their Free Speech Movement reclaiming their right to exercise political activities on campus, there that Martin Luther King Jr. delivered, in May 1967, a landmark speech calling for a “radical revolution of values” in the middle of the Vietnam War and in the midst of the country’s existential crisis on civil rights, there also that anger erupted is expressed against the apartheid regime in South Africa in the 1980s or against economic inequalities, fueled by the Occupy Wall Street movement at the end of 2011.”
5/3/2024, Inside Higher Ed, Ryan Quinn, Will Academic Freedom and Campus Free Speech Survive?
"[Robert] Cohen said ‘it’s hard always to distinguish’ between academic freedom and free speech. But he said he sees ‘a very severe threat’ to both. He said he’s never heard of protest encampments being evicted, and people being arrested—and all so quickly—in cases where the encampments weren’t disrupting university operations.
¶
‘You’re basically censoring an unpopular movement,’ Cohen said.
¶
In times of war, ‘academic freedom is always harder to defend,’ Cohen said. ‘Academic freedom applied to American foreign policy means that you’re free to question the reigning orthodoxies’ along with government policy, he said.”
5/3/2024, The New Yorker, Jay Caspian Kang, A Generation of Distrust
"But Savio’s words have since assumed a broader resonance for dissent and civil disobedience of any stripe. Like many other élite institutions of higher learning in America, Berkeley presents itself as a place where historic change took place thanks to the bravery of its former students; in 1997, the university installed a small plaque at the base of the steps and named them after Savio.”
5/2/2024, AP News, Allen G. Breed and Jocelyn Gecker, Today’s campus protests aren’t nearly as big or violent as those last century — at least, not yet
"Another disturbing difference between then and now, says Jack Radey, is the lack of respect on campuses for differing views.
¶
Radey was a 17-year-old activist during the original Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley. He says today’s students have succeeded in amplifying the Palestinian cause, but, in some cases, at the cost of civility.
¶
‘We did not look on those students who had not joined the free speech movement as idiots or traitors, but as people we needed to convince,’ said Radey, president of the movement’s archives. ‘You don’t do that by violence or with super-heated rhetoric.’”
5/1/2024, TRT World, Shabina S. Khatri, NYU professor: Gaza protests should spark dialogue, not campus crackdowns
"Robert Cohen: Well, I think it's really problematic because, first of all, in the United States, because of the First Amendment. Hate speech, as long as they don't threaten somebody, is not banned. It's a protected speech by the First Amendment. And the irony is that people on the right who are so critical when the left use that to try to prevent racist speakers from being on campus.
¶
Now they're using that same rationale that this hate speech is threatening the people. Now they're using it themselves to suppress speech because they're saying that it threatens Jewish students. Now, you know, I'm not denying that it's a big country. There have been some anti-Semitic incidents, but there's still a question as to whether people are too quickly equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.”
5/1/2024, Jacobin, Caitlyn Clark, How Labor Can Aid the Student Movement for Palestine
"During the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM) of the 1960s, organized labor played a crucial role in supporting the student strike on UC Berkeley’s campus. Joel Geier, a student activist in the International Socialists (IS) during the FSM, recalls:
¶
The local labor movement, including the campus unions — the Building Trades, SEIU [Service Employees International Union], the ILWU [International Longshore and Warehouse Union], and the San Francisco Labor Council — supported the strike. A contribution to shutting down the campus came from an unexpected force: the conservative Teamsters. I led a group of FSMers to meet with Teamster union officials, who agreed with us that crossing our picket lines would be scabbing, and they would prevent all deliveries to the campus. Within an hour, no trucks bringing supplies or food entered the campus, helping to halt the normal functioning of the university. The solidarity of campus workers was outstanding, particularly the underground support from secretaries and clerks of the main university administrators, who acted as part of our intelligence network, providing us with the enemy’s thinking, plans, and memos.”
5/1/2024, Berkeley Daily Planet, Gar Smith, SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces: Tents,Tenets&Tensions
"It looked like the lessons of the Free Speech Movement had left a lasting legacy here in Berkeley—an abiding respect for protest and debate limited only by the constraints of ‘time, place and manner.’ An exemplary model for other citadels of learning.”
5/1/2024, Spiked, Tom Slater, They aren’t revolutionaries. They’re bigoted brats
"So let’s retire the Sixties comparisons. In 1964, when Mario Savio – civil-rights activist and student leader of the Free Speech Movement – was leading a campaign of civil disobedience, aimed at liberating Berkeley students from censorship, his cause was just and he was happy to suffer the consequences of his methods. ‘There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious’, he famously said, ‘you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels… you’ve got to make it stop!’. Meal plans did not get a mention.”
4/29/2024, TV5 Monde, Maya Elboudrari, Manifestations pro-palestiniennes: "la plus importante mobilisation sur les campus américains du XXIème"
"Cette diabolisation du mouvement fait peur aux présidents d’université. Mais si eux ont peur, qui va défendre la liberté d’expression et la liberté académique?» Robert Cohen, chercheur spécialiste des mobilisations étudiantes.” [This demonization of the movement scares university presidents. But if they are afraid, who will defend freedom of expression and academic freedom?’ Robert Cohen, researcher specializing in student mobilizations.]
4/29/2024, The New Yorker, Louis Menand, Academic Freedom Under Fire
"Calling in law enforcement did not work at Berkeley in 1964, at Columbia in 1968, at Harvard in 1969, or at Kent State in 1970.”
4/29/2024, Times-Herald, Kristin J. Bender, Student protests: Are they the best and most efficient way to spark social change?
"In December 1964, 5,000 people gathered outside the administration to push ahead for a campus-wide strike to bring down the university ‘machine,’ but after 1,500 people entered the building for a peaceful sit-in demonstration and police became increasingly violent in efforts to remove demonstrators, Berkeley faculty voted overwhelmingly to support the movement.
¶
Today, the Free Speech Movement ‘stands as a symbol of the importance of protecting and preserving free speech and academic freedom,’ according to historical accounts from the university.
¶
Jack Radey, who protested during the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s and is now the president of the Free Speech Movement Archives, said students need to ‘fight smart’ when protesting.
¶
‘In general, threatening violence, or doing it, whether by destroying property, or disrupting a speaker or class, or throwing rocks at police who are not violently trying to prevent people from exercising their constitutional rights, is counterproductive, stupid, and fundamentally about good old fashioned macho posturing,’’ Radey said via email.”
4/28/2024, USA Today, Kayla Jimenez, A new generation at UC Berkeley pitches its tents
"Alex Morey, the director of campus rights advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, encourages universities to remain neutral in times of unrest and not to call in authorities unless a demonstration turns violent. The national nonprofit defends Americans rights to free speech and thought.
¶ ‘Peaceful protest is a hallmark of a healthy speech climate on American college campuses and it has been for decades – whether it's the Berkeley free speech movement, or students protesting the Vietnam War era or civil rights,’ Morey said. ‘Generations of students have felt passionately about certain issues and the open air places on campuses are great places to support their views.’”
4/27/2024, Vox, Nicole Narea, How today’s antiwar protests stack up against major student movements in history
"Recent protests have not yet reached the scale of the major student protests of the late 1960s against the Vietnam War or the 1980s against South African apartheid. But on campus, they may be ‘the largest student movement so far’ of the 21st century, said Robert Cohen, a professor of social studies and history at New York University who has studied student activism. In recent decades, there were mass protests against the Iraq War, as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and after the killing of George Floyd, but they were primarily happening off campus.
¶….¶
This isn’t specific to America. All around the world, college campuses are hubs of political activity and young people are at the forefront of social movements.
¶
But the more conservative elements of American society have never really wanted students to play that role. There was a persistent sense throughout major social movements in American history that young people were disrespecting their elders and the value of their education, with contemporary polls showing widespread disapproval of the sit-in movement against racial discrimination, the freedom riders, the free speech movement, and the antiwar movement of the 1960s, Cohen said.”
4/27/2024, The Guardian, Gabrielle Canon, A new generation at UC Berkeley pitches its tents
"’These protests and these days are very different from days past,’ [Dan] Mogulof said. ‘It is not the students united against the administration, as was the case in the early days with the free speech movement. It’s not the students united in opposition to a war or to apartheid – we now have student-on-student, faculty-member-on-faculty-member [aggression].’”
4/26/2024, The Christian Science Monitor, Simon Montlake and Leonardo Bevilacqua, Competing pressures of activism, order test US colleges
"Columbia isn’t facing a crisis on that scale now, and its leaders ought to have shown more restraint, says Robert Cohen, a historian at New York University and scholar of campus activism, who expresses dismay at the arrests of students. The pressures ‘on these administrations have made them much more willing to suppress dissent even when it’s not disruptive,’ he says. ‘It’s a terrible precedent for violating free speech and academic freedom on campus.’
¶
It’s also counterproductive, says Bettina Aptheker, a retired professor who co-led the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964, which set the stage for the student activism of the period. ‘When you repress them, you guarantee that more students are going to come out,’ she says.”
4/25/2024, Ethnic Media Services, Sunita Sohrabji, 60 Years Later, Freedom of Speech Still Eludes College Students
"Lynne Hollander Savio, widow of the late Free Speech Movement co-founder Mario Savio, told Ethnic Media Services she was bothered by the arrests of students asserting their right to speak for what they believe in. Hollander actively participated in the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964, and was herself arrested.
¶
‘I think it is absolutely craven,’ she said of Columbia University President Nemat Minouche Shafik’s decision to call in police.
¶
Academic Freedom¶
‘She should be standing up for academic freedom and for the freedom of her students to exercise their Constitutional rights of free speech. She should not be supporting this kind of squelching,’ said Hollander, who serves on the Board of the Free Speech Movement Archives, and is a secular Jew.”
4/25/2024, Gulf News, Fawaz Turki, Gaza war tests academic freedom across US campuses
"The unspeakable horrors that Israel has inflected, and continues as we speak to inflict on the people of Gaza over the last seven months have triggered an anti-war movement across the US, from universities like Yale, Columbia, MIT and New York University on the east coast to ones in the West Coast like UC-Los Angeles, California State Polytech University Humboldt and UC-Berkeley (the latter home of the legendary Free Speech movement, which erupted during the 1964-1965 academic year and which later built the foundation for the equally legendary protests against the war in Vietnam) as well as across campuses all the way from Michigan to Washington state.” [Ed note: Tom Hayden’s 1962 “Port Huron Statement” had a lot to do with building the anti-war movement.]
4/24/2024, Alternet, Robert Reich, How the Free Speech Movement was born — and how it helped Reagan into the White House
"The FSM stands as a model for nonviolent mass organizations built on transparency and consensus.”
4/23/2024, CBS News, John Ramos, UC Berkeley students vow they won't leave campus pro-Palestinian protest until they get results
"‘It's only when student organizers are present on campus that they're criminalized and they're demonized. And when they graduate they are celebrated,’ said Afaneh. ‘Any tour of Berkeley, they will proudly say these are the Mario Salvio steps and say how much they celebrated the Free Speech Movement. I would not be surprised if they do the same thing for us 50 years from now.’”
4/22/2024, NBC News, Alicia Victoria Lozano, Jewish students march in solidarity
"At the University of California, Berkeley, in the San Francisco Bay Area, members of the local Jews for Peace chapter camped alongside pro-Palestinian protesters on the Mario Savio steps, named after a founding member of the Free Speech Movement.”
4/22/2024, NBC News, Alicia Victoria Lozano, UC Berkeley becomes firstWest Coast campus to join pro-Palestinian call to action
"Dozens of students gathered on the Savio Steps, named for Mario Savio, the leader of the 1960s Free Speech Movement, at the University of California, Berkeley, today to protest the Israel-Hamas war and the UC system’s investments in companies that do business with Israel.
¶
….
¶
The movement is considered the first mass act of civil disobedience on a U.S. campus in the '60s as students demanded the school lift a ban on on-campus political activity and secure their right to free speech and academic freedom.”
4/21/2024, San Francisco Chronicle, Obit, Katura Schoene 1945-2023
"She attended UC Berkeley during the days of demonstrations and was part of the free speech protest in the 60's including an arrest at the protest.”
4/18/2024, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch, Fear and loathing on America’s college campuses as free speech is disappearing
"The national meltdown over campus protest is happening on the eve of this fall’s 60th anniversary of an event that defined campus politics for decades: 1964’s Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley. Harsh restrictions on where students could set up tables for political causes — from fighting racial segregation in the South to college Republicans — united a diverse array of protesters who staged an often-chaotic battle with administrators throughout that fall. The Free Speech Movement tugged at the essence of higher education: Are students essentially children who are wards of the college, or adults with the freedom to voice political opinions? With support from the faculty, the young people of Berkeley won.”
¶….¶
“In many ways, the uproar over Gaza feels like the new ‘Red Scare,’ borne back ceaselessly into the 1950s that preceded the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and everything that’s happened since. But I also agree with [Jonathan] Friedman that this low moment could also spark a turnaround. ‘That’s what censorship does,’ he said. ‘It makes [people] realize that free speech matters.’”
4/18/2024, San Francisco Chronicle, Sam Whiting, Kate Coleman, Free Speech Movement veteran who wrote courageous exposés, dies at 81
"On the 50th anniversary of the FSM, in 2014, Coleman recounted her involvement in an interview with the Chronicle. Asked to be reflective about the accomplishments of the movement, she responded in her usual frank and irreverent manner.
¶
‘It liberalized college rules that were ridiculously paternalistic,’ she answered. ‘But the nanny state still exists. Students don’t really have free speech because everybody is expected to be nice.’”
4/15/2024, The Daily Eastern News, Jason Farias, COLUMN: Concerns with free speech zones
"In response to the 1960s Berkeley Free Speech Movement led by Students for a Democratic Society and inspired by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War efforts, universities began passing policies regulating political activity to designated zones." [Ed note: It was the civil rights group CORE which was most active in the 1964 Berkeley FSM. SDS was more active on the east coast. Most anti-Vietnam War efforts came later.]
4/14/2024, Politico, Melanie Mason, ‘The Antisemitism Is Absolutely Disproportionate’ “The students overstepped the line,” says UC Regent John Pérez.
"When you look at the Free Speech Movement, it was about creating the space for all debate, including debate that one disagrees with. What we’ve seen of late is something very different, which is shutting down debate."
4/11/2024, NBC News, Alicia Victoria Lozano, A UC Berkeley law professor confronts a pro-Palestinian student during a backyard dinner
"UC Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, adopted guidelines in 1966 to help students and administrators navigate First Amendment issues, which included creating ‘time, place and manner’ policies."
4/8/2024, Berkekleyside, Carol Pogash, Kate Coleman, who chronicled the Bay Area and her life, has died
"Kate was active in SLATE and was an activist in the Free Speech Movement at Cal. In the 1970s, she wrote a regular column, “Where Angels Fear to Tread,” for the Berkeley Barb."
4/6/2024, New York Times, Clay Risen, Kate Coleman, Who Documented the Bay Area Counterculture, Dies at 81
"As an undergraduate at Berkeley, Ms. Coleman was an early participant in the university’s Free Speech Movement and was among the hundreds of students arrested in December 1964 for occupying Sproul Hall, a campus administration building."
4/5/2024, OB Rag, Frank Gormlie, In Memory of Herbert Shore — November 18, 1939 – February 12, 2024
"He took part in the 1960 Cambridge Woolworth pickets and leafleted for civil rights events. After graduating from MIT, Herb earned his Ph.D in physics at UC Berkeley. Herb stated with pride that he became a professor because he didn’t want a job where his boss told him when to wake up and when to show up for work. When Berkeley was the center of the Free Speech Movement in 1964, Herb participated in sit-ins dedicated to student free speech and academic freedom."
3/21/2024, Santa Barbara Independent, Obituary, Martin Shapiro
"Go West, Young Man By the time he graduated, he had become a skilled guitarist and was eager to continue his music studies. Attracted by the Bay Area student activism of the early 60s, he set his sights on UC Berkeley – and when he learned that Cal’s music department needed a lute player, he stepped up to meet that need.
¶
Marty and his lute caught the attention of young music major Marian Auerbach. The two bonded as humanist Jews and as idealists, supporting the Free Speech Movement, Anti-War and Civil Rights movements."
3/19/2024, The California Aggie, Joshua Clover, Form, Content, and Palestine
"As many readers will know, the Free Speech Movement was not born from repression of ‘speech’ in the abstract. Some students had spent the summer of 1964 taking part in Freedom Rides, a significant aspect in the Civil Rights Movement organized by the Congress of Racial Equality. That fall they and their friends set up tables on campus soliciting support for CORE. When the administration moved to suppress this via increasingly violent means, they were not suppressing ‘speech,’ they were suppressing racial justice organizing."
3/18/2024, Dogster, Brooke Billingsley, 7 Cool Off-Leash Dog Parks Near Berkeley, CA
"Berkeley is a college town in Northern California that is home to University of California at Berkeley, as well as just over 117,000 residents. This progressive city was the location of the Free Speech Movement of 1964 and 1965."
3/18/2024, Berkeley Daily Planet, Gar Smith, SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces: Balms, Bombs & BDS
"A report in The Forward, describes a recent confrontation on the Berkeley campus as follows:
¶
‘Last month, a violent mob of pro-Palestinian activists shut down a planned talk by Israel Defense Forces reservist Ran Bar-Yoshafat on campus, breaking windows and reportedly attacking other students.’
¶
The incident has triggered a federal civil rights investigation and university officials are treating the confrontation as a hate crime.”
¶
In response, a Jewish member of UC Berkeley's 1964 Free Speech Movement was moved to write the following:
¶
‘Sadly, there were also Jewish Groups [IfNotNow - INN] who 'shut him down.' I objected to their trampling free speech but was ignored. Attacks on free speech from the left are more upsetting to me. I identify with the left; I am [was] a member of INN…. "
3/18/2024, The College Fix, Micaiah Bilger, Israeli lawyer to return to Berkeley after antisemitic mob shut down speech
"‘I’m not that important. I’m a low-ranking officer,’ he said. ‘If you’re not even willing to have a dialogue or discourse, that’s really the end of free speech, which is quite amazing, because the 1964 free speech movement started at Berkeley.’"
3/14/2024, The New Paltz Oracle, Sara Vala, Turning Puppetry Into Protest: Redwing Blackbird Theater
"Prior to coming to New York, [Amy] Trompetter attended UC Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement, a mass campus protest starting in 1964 against the university’s policies prohibiting on-campus political activities. This exposed Trompetter to the true scope of free speech and what it could look like in her own life."
3/13/2024, Commentary, Seth Mandel, Berkeley’s Jews Show Some Spine
"In the late 1950s, the University of California, Berkeley started cracking down on campus politicking. By the ’60s, this effort almost became a total ban. The backlash congealed into the famous Free Speech Movement, whose strategy was to make sure that any rulebreakers were accompanied by dozens (or more) others. This way, the ban’s enemies could paralyze virtually any disciplinary enforcement. The signature moment was a march to a central campus building where participants held giant signs in favor of free speech."
3/12/2024, The American Thinker, Ethel C. Fenig, Bravely protecting ‘free speech’ at the University of California at Berkeley
"The Free Speech Movement began in 1964 when UC Berkeley students protested the university’s restrictions on political activities on campus. Small sit-ins and demonstrations escalated into a series of large-scale rallies and protests demanding full constitutional rights on campus. This led to the university overturning policies that would restrict the content of speech or advocacy. Today, the Movement stands as a symbol of the importance of protecting and preserving free speech and academic freedom. ...
"
3/10/2024, Truthout, Ed Rampell, Once a Fugitive, Attorney for Black Panther Member Recounts His Life Underground
"[ER:] You’ll soon be 82. What would you say is the legacy of the movements you were a part of?
¶
[Stephen Bingham:] I was in the civil rights movement in Mississippi in 1963 and 1964, Freedom Summer, which shook me awake and resonates down to this day in an extraordinary way. One of my housemates in Mississippi was Mario Savio of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. I was involved in the antiwar movement, which continues to reverberate."
3/4/2024, Israel National News, Jacob Gurvis, ‘They're giving a prize to the violent side’
"Berkeley, where student activists in the 1960s formed a Free Speech Movement advocating for unconstrained political speech on campus and touching off a wave of student civil disobedience, has seen multiple instances of unrest in recent years over right-wing speakers coming to the school."
2/16/2024, San Francisco Chronicle, Michael Cabanatuan, S.F. shows love for Tony Bennett with cable car dedication on Valentine’s Day
"The car also features shout-outs to a couple of female cable car pioneers: Mona Hutchin, a UC Berkeley student who in 1965 defied the tradition of allowing only men to ride on the outside of the cable cars, and Fannie Mae Barnes, the first woman to wield the grip controlling the cable cars in 1998." [Ed note: Mona Hutchin was arrested in the 1964 Free Speech Movement.]
2/8/2024, Daily Californian, Erkki Forster, Berkeley students aren’t as progressive as we’re made out to be
"This is not to say that UC Berkeley students aren’t at all progressive or involved in activism. In recent years, pockets of students have come out to defend People’s Park, advocate for the chess club and have supported the 2022 UAW strike. Yet, their numbers are dwarfed in comparison to the 1,500 students who sat in Sproul Hall as part of the Free Speech Movement in 1964, or the hundreds of students who defended People’s Park on “Bloody Thursday” in 1969."
2/5/2024, Prospect Magazine, Kate Demolder, Adam Doyle—otherwise known as Spice Bag—on his Northern Ireland mural for Palestinians
"Art by intuition is what created Free Derry Corner. Inspired by the 1956 Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the phrase “You Are Now Entering Free Derry” was coined by Eamonn McCann and painted by local youth Liam Hillen in January 1969." [Ed. Note: The Berkeley Free Speech Movement lasted from the fall of 1964 through the spring of 1965. AND after I wrote them they changed it to "the 1960s Berkeley Free Speech Movement."]
2/2/2024, The Wire, Sandeep Pandey, Watching the Steady Decline of Academic Freedom at IIM Ahmedabad
"Compare this to the Berkeley campus of the University of California, where any outsider can set up a table and say and distribute absolutely any material everyday at Sproul Plaza. The famed free speech movement in the 1960s earned this right on this campus."
1/31/2024, The Nation, Steve Wasserman, Paul Glusman, Judy Gumbo Albert, and Tom Dalzell, Should People’s Park Be Consigned to the Ash Heap of History?
"What’s at stake is history and who gets to make and write it. For years, Berkeley, a small American hamlet, has been a harbor for upstart students who won for it an outsize international reputation as a magnetic pole of rebellion. The San Francisco Bay Area more generally was engulfed by multiple and successive student protests. The most notable included the anti-HUAC protests of 1960, the great civil rights sit-ins of the spring of 1964 at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel in San Francisco, and the Auto Row demonstrations seeking an end to racial discrimination, which began in late 1963 and continued through the spring of 1964.
¶
The Free Speech Movement erupted here in the fall of 1964, followed by one of the nation’s first teach-ins, organized by the Vietnam Day Committee in May 1965; and, three months later, the efforts to block troop trains passing through Berkeley. In 1966 came the founding of the Black Panther Party in Oakland followed by the riotous anti-draft demonstrations in Oakland in 1967, then the use of tear gas to disperse the May 1968 demonstrations in solidarity with striking French students, followed by the violent effort to break the Third World Liberation Front strike at Cal in February 1969. All this culminated in the ruthless suppression of People’s Park protesters in May 1969.
¶
People’s Park, at its best, was an expression of the utopian yearnings of a generation that sought to make a better world."
1/30/2024, San Francisco Bay View, Cecil Brown, Being separate and unequal at UC Berkeley
"During the summer of 1963 and 1964, whites from all over the country came down to the South to participate along with Black college students in the effort to register Blacks to vote. One of the most inspiring leaders of that Free Speech summer was Mario Savio.
¶
At the end of his sojourn to the South, Mario Savio came back to Berkeley and inspired and starred in the Free Speech Movement."
1/25/2024, San Francisco Chronicle, Alissa Greenberg, How to spend the perfect day in Berkeley, CA
"For a small city, Berkeley, California has a remarkably large presence in American culture. That’s in part because of its role as the site of the early Free Speech Movement and related anti-Vietnam War protests, the Asian American movement, the country’s first dog park and so many more firsts and cultural touchstones." [Ed note: “early Free Speech Movement” suggests that there were activists who in 1966, 1967, 1968, etc. considered themselves to be participating in the FSM. Show me one.]
1/21/2024, San Francisco Chronicle, Lily Janiak, Joan Holden, longtime San Francisco Mime Troupe playwright, dies at 85
"Holden authored or collaborated on scores of plays, including ‘The Independent Female,’ the Obie Award-winning ‘The Dragon Lady's Revenge,’ ‘False Promises,’ ‘San Fran Scandals,’ ‘Seeing Double’ (another Obie winner) and others for the Mime Troupe; ‘FSM’ (about the Free Speech Movement) and an adaptation of ‘The Alchemist’ for Berkeley Repertory Theatre; and ‘Nickel and Dimed,’ an adaptation of Barbara Ehrenreich’s undercover investigation of minimum-wage life, for Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum. During her tenure at the Mime Troupe, the company won the 1987 Regional Theatre Tony Award, the highest nationwide honor a theater outside of New York can earn."
1/17/2024, San Francisco Chronicle, James Sullivan, Review: Writings of Chronicle music critic Ralph J. Gleason a master class in life
"He was on hand for, and often instrumental in, many of the landmark events of his adopted city’s cultural awakening — from the performance poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the founding of the Monterey Jazz Festival to the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, which kicked off 1967’s Summer of Love.
¶
‘His sense for watersheds minor and major was extraordinary,’ said activist Michael Rossman. Gleason considered himself an activist of sorts, writing about race relations, rampant consumerism and the inadequacies of partisan politics without ever falling out of earshot of the music."
1/12/2024, Berkeleyside, Jesse Arreguín, Opinion: Defending democracy in the face of incivility
"Berkeley is home to the Free Speech Movement. We cherish and protect our First Amendment rights. Yet some people who claim to be advancing the Free Speech Movement are the very ones defying the warnings of Mario Savio and suppressing the free speech of others in the name of their cause. In his famous speech on Sproul Plaza, Savio said that civil disobedience ‘doesn’t mean that you have to break anything,’ rightfully fearing that violence would undermine this movement."
1/10/2024, Rafu, Rafu Reports, Manzanar Committee Mourns the Passing of Community Leader, Activist, and Mentor Alan Nishio
"Nishio was born on Aug. 9, 1945, in the Manzanar concentration camp, one of more than 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans who were unjustly incarcerated in American concentration camps and other confinement sites during World War II. His activism and leadership work go back to the days of the Free Speech Movement in the late 1960s at UC Berkeley, where he helped form the Asian Americans for Political Action."
1/7/2024, San Francisco Chronicle, Jill Tucker, ‘Trump’s border wall’ in Berkeley: Will shipping containers keep protests out of People’s Park?
"A fortress of rusty, dented and secondhand shipping containers popped up overnight Thursday around People’s Park in Berkeley, creating an imposing and arguably ugly barrier around the controversial site — a piece of land now slated for housing rather than homeless tents or historic preservation of the Free Speech Movement’s mecca." [Ed note: Peoples' Park was never a mecca of the Free Speech Movement. It didn't exist yet. The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley lasted from September 1964 through April 1965, during which time the land now occupied by Peoples Park was full of houses. It was only after that the UC managed to buy up all the land and either remove or tear down the houses. The creation of Peoples Park was in 1969.]
1/7/2024, San Francisco Chronicle, Joe Garofoli, Why People’s Park protesters have lost the plot
"Never mind that Sproul Plaza — another storied home of the Free Speech movement — is a few blocks away on the UC campus and remains a regular stop for demonstrations of all kinds." [Ed note: Peoples' Park was never a home of the Free Speech Movement. It didn't exist yet. The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley lasted from September 1964 through April 1965, during which time the land now occupied by Peoples Park was full of houses. It was only after that the UC managed to buy up all the land and either remove or tear down the houses. The creation of Peoples Park was in 1969.]
1/1/2024, Le Temps, André Linden, What's the point of literary studies? An Answer: Letter
"But the big losers of the revolt were the students themselves. Through the breach they had opened for them, professors rushed to monopolize the only field of research, which Berkeley had a monopoly on, abandoning their teaching responsibilities to poorly trained assistants, confronted with crowded audiences, often of foreign origin and with little command of English. The mandarins, whom their students had once thought they had toppled from their pedestals, had remained riveted to it more than ever. More than half a century later, while Mario Savio's fiery words still ring in my ears, I see that little has changed."
12/31/2023, The Palm Springs Post, Bruce Fessier, 2023 In Memoriam Part 2
"Arlene Rosenthal, Oct. 17, Desert Hot Springs. 79. This philanthropist and custom clothing businesswoman couldn’t have been more of a Grace Robbins opposite. Like Grace, she was intelligent and cultured. She championed opera with the Palm Springs Opera Guild of the Desert and her own OperaArts organization, formed after splitting from the Guild. She was a product of the Berkeley free speech movement, and she never hesitated to speak her mind to power. She became president of the nonprofit homeless services provider, Well of the Desert, and, while others debated what to do about the homeless, she moved among them and fed and clothed them. She was an ardent LGBTQ+ activist and feminist who told me she managed people from a feminist perspective. ‘I like inclusivity as opposed to exclusivity,’ she said. ‘Feminism is basically everybody is equal. There is no top or bottom. So, the person in the leadership position must make sure to protect everybody.’"
12/30/2023, Reason, Robert Corn-Revere, October 7: A Turning Point for Free Speech?
"The university setting is precisely the place where these lessons need to be learned and reinforced. As the Supreme Court stressed over six decades ago, ‘The vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools.’ These principles emerged from the ideological struggles of the Joseph McCarthy era, the demands by students to discuss social issues in the Berkeley free speech movement, the campus demonstrations for civil rights and against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and ’70s, and numerous political disputes since then. As the Kalven Report concluded during the campus turmoil of the 1960s, ‘A good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting.’"
12/21/2023, Times Higher Education, Nicholas Dirks, Campus leaders shouldn’t be judged on their political pronouncements
"The question of institutional neutrality, however, merits further examination, especially after the recent forced resignation of Elizabeth Magill as president of the University of Pennsylvania. After all, there was a time, before the Berkeley free speech movement of 1964, when it meant prohibiting all political speech on campus. Even subsequently, many administrators tried to maintain a posture of neutrality – most famously at the University of Chicago, with the 1967 Kalven Report."
12/17/2023, The New Yorker, Molly Fischer, The Chancellor of Berkeley Weighs In Carol Christ reflects on campus protests, then and now
"This situation is so different from other situations of controversy in that it has really split the student body. If you go way back to the Free Speech Movement, for example, that was the students versus the administration—not a lot of controversy among students. The shape of this particular situation is really different because there is a deep, deep division on the campus."
12/14/2023, The Washington Examiner, Christopher Tremoglie, College campuses have been oppressive, left-wing bullying machines since the 1960s
"Consider the origins of the Left’s ‘long march’ with the vast number of agitators, hippies, and anti-war movements that started in the 1960s. Universities mobilized college students to do their dirty work and stage protests to promote radical left-wing ideals, values, and beliefs. One of the first such demonstrations occurred on Sept. 14, 1964, on the University of California, Berkeley, campus and was part of the deceptively named ‘Free Speech Movement.’" [Ed note: This is the opposite of what actually happened. The UC suppression of free speech on campus was at the behest of the CA Republican Party.]
12/13/2023, The Cinemaholic, Kumari Shreya, Rod Mullen: The Former Synanon Square is Happily Married
"Following his return home, Rod became a student at the University of Idaho before his 1963 transfer to the University of California at Berkeley. During his college years, Rod became more aware of the political climate of the USA and was even arrested during the 1964 Free Speech Movement. When Rod did come to know about Synanon, he could not help but be fascinated. In fact, he ended up donating all of his paternal inheritance to the organization, which apparently did not sit well with his then-wife and financial handler."
12/12/2023, Berkeley News, AJ Fox, Tender and aggressive: Student dancers embody Asian American Greek life
"In a nod to Berkeley’s vibrant history of protest culture, Tam also incorporated the use of bullhorns into the 20-minute performance, along with audio recordings drawn from the Free Speech Movement and the archives of the Department of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies."
12/10/2023, The Sacramento Bee, Susan Thompson-French obituary, 1947-2023
"She was an alumna of the University of California, Berkeley, and a veteran of the Free Speech Movement there."
12/8/2023, Daily Independent, Suzy Hallock-Bannigan, Sun City Learners question their moral compass
"But events in our formative years might even be more important; of course, it would depend on each person, whether the event was traumatic or memorable in some other way. [Robert] O’Donnell said he was attending the University of California at Berkeley during the free speech movement and how that may have shaped his own moral compass."
12/4/2023, North Texas e-News, Wikipedia, On this day -- December 4
"1964 – Free Speech Movement: Police arrest over 800 students at the University of California, Berkeley, following their takeover and sit-in at the administration building in protest of the UC Regents' decision to forbid protests on UC property."
12/2/2023, A terra é Redonda, Felipe Cotrim, Hal Draper
"Essa sua colaboração com o Free Speech Movement de Berkeley merece atenção especial em sua biografia política, pois a experiência histórica do movimento, do qual ele foi cronista, serviu de matéria-prima para suas reflexões e pesquisas – realizadas de modo independente – sobre a prática e a teoria política marxista, a que ele se dedicou dos anos 1960 em diante. O Free Speech Movement foi um movimento estudantil, com atuação especialmente no meio universitário, no contexto das lutas pelos direitos civis nos EUA (década de 1960). No caso específico do campus de Berkeley da UCLA, os estudantes questionavam o modelo educacional burocrático, hierárquico e industrial, e o conteúdo das disciplinas, que eles consideravam como um 'terreno baldio' (‘wasteland’) moral e intelectual.”
¶
Google Translation from Portuguese: “His collaboration with the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley deserves special attention in his political biography, as the historical experience of the movement, of which he was a chronicler, served as raw material for his reflections and research – carried out independently – on the practice and Marxist political theory, to which he devoted himself from the 1960s onwards. The Free Speech Movement was a student movement, operating especially in universities, in the context of the struggles for civil rights in the USA (1960s). In the specific case of UCLA's Berkeley campus, students questioned the bureaucratic, hierarchical and industrial educational model, and the content of the subjects, which they considered to be a moral and intellectual ‘wasteland’"
11/30/2023, H-Net, Jo Freeman, Book Review: Luca Falciola. Up against the Law: Radical Lawyers and Social Movements, 1960s–1970s
"The following year 773 of us were arrested at one time in the Berkeley free speech movement. The NLG did not have enough lawyers to represent everyone and Alameda County did not have enough space or personnel for multiple trials of small groups as had happened in San Francisco the year before.[3] This convinced the NLG that it needed to develop a strategy for mass defense. The strategy emerged as student demonstrations, race riots, and anti-Viet Nam War demonstrations spread over the country. By the time of the Columbia University sit-in in the spring of 1968, the Mass Defense Committee of the NLG was able to recruit several dozen lawyers to represent them pro bono. This strategy eventually resulted in mass dismissals."
11/28/2023, Berkeleyside, Ximena Natera, These are the people of People’s Park
"Berkeley was not originally a very progressive place. That is an inheritance of the Free Speech Movement and the park.
¶
Harvey Smith remembers the area before People’s Park was created. A row of houses stood along the tree-lined Haste and Bowditch streets. Only one of those redwoods remains today."
11/22/2023, GV Wire, Anya Ellis, War in Gaza Ignites Protests, Tensions at UC Berkeley. Would You Expect Any Less?
"The University of California, Berkeley has long been synonymous with student protests. Though most notable for 1960s demonstrations supporting the Civil Rights and Free Speech movements, as well as opposition to the Vietnam War, Berkeley students took to the streets as early as the 1930s against the U.S. decision to end its disarmament policy in an apparent march toward war."
11/21/2023, UCSC News, Tara Fatemi Walker, Bettina Aptheker honored for lifetime commitment to social justice
"A scholar-activist, Aptheker co-led the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley 1964-65, was a leader of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and co-led the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis (1970-1972) that organized a transnational movement for her freedom. She was also an avid supporter of the LGBT movement.
¶
In recognition of Aptheker’s deep and abiding commitment to causes of social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion, she was awarded the UCSC Ethos Award." [Ed Note: watch the video linked to the article!]
11/18/2023, SUPicket, Noche Gauthier, Free speech advocate works to bring a legacy of activism to Jefferson County
"Petitpierre started activism in his early teens at his hometown of Berkeley, California in the 1960s. He began as an advocate for free speech, getting hands-on experience with prominent activist Mario Savio and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.
¶
‘My time as an activist with the Free Speech Movement taught me about how important it is to have a right to express our opinion, but to also understand that this does not mean a lack of respect toward another’s experience,’ Petitpierre said."
11/18/2023, Washington Examiner, Timothy P. Carney, Raging against the wrong machine on the Bay Bridge
"Another problem is that while a majority of Oaklanders and San Franciscans may agree with them that Israel should stop bombing Gaza, it’s not clear how stopping commuters and parents and visitors from traveling between Oakland and San Francisco is, to use Mario Savio’s phrase, grinding ‘the machine’ to a halt.
¶
The ‘machine’ here is either the Israeli military or the U.S. government. The protesters weren’t inconveniencing the people providing aid to Israel or the people dropping bombs in Gaza. The only ‘machine’ they were grinding to a halt was the daily life of ordinary residents.” [Ed note: The FSM prevailed only after bringing the entire campus to a standstill.]
11/17/2023, Newsmax, Laura Hollis, Free Speech Doesn't Extend to Intimidation, Threats, or Violence
"We can arguably trace this back to the 1960s. Widespread objection to the Vietnam War and outrage over the discrimination against Black Americans prompted much of the campus unrest at the time.
¶
But activists went further than simply calling for justice for minorities and demanding that the U.S. get out of the wars in Southeast Asia. The expression, ‘Don't trust anyone over 30,’ attributed to University of California Berkeley student organizer Jack Weinberg (ironically, part of the ‘Free Speech Movement’ there), became the rallying cry for the ‘baby boom’ generation."
11/16/2023, The Daily Californian, Editorial, UC Berkeley students are not pawns in your political game
"It is no secret that college campuses have historically been the focal point of social movements in the United States. In fact, UC Berkeley has been the catalyst for student activism since the Free Speech Movement occurred in the 1960s.”.... ¶
“For more than a month now, we as an editorial board have grappled with what to say at a time when everyone is watching.”…. ¶
“This introduces a great paradox when examining activism on college campuses.
¶
“We are given no room to mourn, nor to learn. Anytime we speak out, someone is there with a magnifying glass and a microphone, ready to twist our words and destroy the reputations we have just begun to build.
¶
What we need the media to understand is that student activism is not just a headline or eye-catching report, but rather a demonstration of budding scholars exercising free speech to advocate during times of such tragedy and pain.”
11/13/2023, The New Yorker, Louis Menand, The War on Charlie Chaplin
"The Tramp was evoked during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the nineteen-sixties and the Solidarity movement in Poland in the nineteen-eighties. The Tramp stood for the Individual against the System." [Ed. Note: the source may be The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism by James J. Farrell, P304¶
[footnote] 58 “Savio’s image of people clogging the machine recalls Charlie Chaplin’s ‘Little Tramp’ in Modern Times and it was no coincidence that students occupying Sproul Hall watched Chaplin films.”]
11/12/2023, Miami Herald, Robert F. Sanchez, OP-ED Fight antisemitism, but don’t let free speech on campus be a casualty
"Unfortunately, [FL State University Chancellor Ray] Rodrigues, born in 1970, missed out on the campus protests of the 1960s and the lessons learned from them, but one sequence of events became the stuff of legend in higher education circles, so it may have come to his attention.
¶
The 'long-haired hippies' in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California’s Berkeley campus irked voters and contributed to Ronald Reagan’s victory in the 1966 gubernatorial election."
11/10/2023, Norwood News, Sile Moloney, Norwood Mourns Beloved Resident & Community Activist Lyn Pyle
"According to the National Council of Elders, Pyle’s activism began when she was arrested in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, California, and later became a longtime community organizer in The Bronx for most of her adult life."
11/09/2023, Los Angeles Times, Michael S. Roth, Opinion: College students were ‘woke’ in the ’60s, annoying to elders and drivers of social change. Meet their successors
"The Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley was created not just to defend students’ rights to express themselves but to challenge the framework of a society that offered what its most famous leader, Mario Savio, called a sick “utopia of sterilized automated contentment.” The movement engaged in civil disobedience to stop the evils produced by “the System.” Their aim was to awaken people to society’s injustices and the possibilities for radical change."
10/08/2023, Politico, David Freedlander, RFK Jr.’s Ultimate Vanity Project
"For most of the last century, the fight over “free speech” and censorship was coded as something that was mostly a concern of the left. In the early part of the century, the Industrial Workers of the World and their allies in the Socialist Party were arrested in droves for standing on soapboxes at factory gates to make their spiel. The Free Speech Movement began in Berkeley after students protested restrictions on who could set up a table on the plaza of a public university. In the 1980s and 90s, there were battles over profanity on rap albums and whether or not the National Endowment for the Arts should have a say on the work its grantees produce."
10/06/2023, The New Hampshire Gazette, unsigned, Sun, Oct. 1
"1964—Campus cops at U.C. Berkeley arrest Jack Weinberg; big mistake. The Free Speech Movement ensues."
10/01/2023, Clinton Herald, AP, Today in History: October 1, man kills 58 in Las Vegas country concert shooting
"In 1964, the Free Speech Movement began at the University of California, Berkeley."
10/01/2023, Times of India, Anuj Tiwari, 1 October What Happened On This Day In History
"There are several notable events that happened on October 1 throughout history, and that's why it's an important day in Indian and world history.
¶
- In 1964, the Free Speech Movement began at the University of California, Berkeley."
10/01/2023, Quotidiano di Sicilia, Editorial Staff, Today’s almanac
"1964 – Il Free Speech Movement viene lanciato dal campus dell’Università di Berkeley"
10/01/2023, Futuro Europa, Gianni Dell'Aiuto, Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement
"It all probably started with the Huron Manifesto, the official document with which young Americans became aware of their situation in the new world they were heading towards, but without a doubt the Free Speech Movement had a fundamental importance for the development of the rights movements civilians that moved in the 1960s to give rise to 1968.
¶
The Free Speech Movement, led by university student activists, erupted like a storm of change and freedom. At the center of this movement was a charismatic young leader, Mario Savio, of Italian origins, who became the face of free expression activism. His passion for social justice and his ability to inspire the masses marked a turning point in the history of the student movement and had a lasting impact on his fight for freedom of expression."
9/30/2023, Los Angeles Review of Books, Johanna Isaacson, World Revolution of Youth! On Abigail Susik’s “Resurgence!”
"As the group’s thoughts evolved, they underscored the relationship of teen revolt to key issues of the day: the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the anti-war movement, Black Power, and an array of Third World guerrilla liberation movements."
9/27/2023, Berkeleyside, Family and friends of Gene Poschman, Remembering Gene Poschman, master of Berkeley’s Zoning Code, savior of Tilden’s dog walkers
"As a graduate student at Cal, he received an M.A. in political science and went on to pursue a Ph.D. in political theory and California politics. Among his notable mentors were political science professors Jack Shaar, a prominent faculty advisor to the Free Speech Movement, and Sheldon Wolin, preeminent author and political theorist. Gene’s Ph.D. was awarded in 1970."
9/26/2023, AlterNet, Robert Reich, When the Klan murdered my protector
"As Savio told TheWashington Post, there was a direct connection between the Civil Rights Movement and the Free Speech Movement. Both raised the question of whose side one was on.
¶
‘Are we on the side of the civil rights movement? Or have we gotten back to the comfort and security of Berkeley, California, and can we forget the sharecroppers whom we worked with just a few weeks back? Well, we couldn’t forget.’" [Ed Note: The FSM is associated with the 1st Amendment. But the FSM first embraced the 14th.]
9/22/2023, The Detroit News, Obituary, Peter Stine
"After graduating from Amherst, Peter headed west to earn his doctorate in English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he proudly participated in the Free Speech Movement. During this time he also worked for voting rights in Selma, Alabama; taught at South Carolina State University, a Historically Black University; and led writing classes at San Quentin and Jackson state prisons. His post-graduate studies behind him, he moved back to Michigan to teach at Wayne State University, and then at Oakland Community College."
9/21/2023, Berkeleyside, Brock Keeling, Home where Berkeley soaked in famed communal hot tub is for sale
"Before gaining a reputation for his hot tub, [Deward] Hastings, whose identity was publicly revealed after his death by his estranged wife, was active in the free speech movement while an undergrad at UC Berkeley.
¶
‘In the mid-1960s he was a press operator, putting ink on paper for the movement, first for UC Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement and later at the Berkeley Free Press,’ said archivist and former UC Berkeley librarian Lincoln Cushing. Hastings helped produce hundreds of thousands of printed leaflets for left-leaning groups in the Bay Area during the height of the ‘60s civil rights era. Hastings also worked as a musical engineer."
9/20/2023, UCSC NEWSCENTER, Haneen Zain, Celebrating UCSC’s 2023 Alumni Award Recipients
"The UCSC Ethos Award recognizes alumni who have demonstrated a deep and abiding commitment to causes of social justice, diversity, equity and inclusion, and who exemplify and enrich UCSC’s principles of community. Bettina Aptheker, alumna and Professor Emeritus of Feminist Studies at UCSC, will receive the award for her scholar and activist work during the Free Speech Movement, the LGBT Movement, and the international movement to free Angela Davis. Her actions during pivotal moments in history, along with her 40-year teaching career at UCSC, embody the ethos of the university."
9/20/2023, Digital Journal, Press Release, New book “Rise of the Liberal Colossus” by Carl Boggs is released
"After receiving his Ph.D. from U.C., Berkeley in 1970, Carl Boggs taught at Washington University in St. Louis and then at UCLA, Los Angeles before concluding his career at National University in Los Angeles, focusing on the education of working adults. He participated in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, among other activities, and then was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement."
9/19/2023, Berkeley News, Gretchen Kell, Sydney Roberts: New ASUC president shares her goals, inspirations
"I visited UC Berkeley the summer before my senior year of high school. It was my dream school. I was in awe of Cal's history and culture. Learning that members of the Black Panther Party spoke here, and that the Free Speech Movement ignited here, inspired me. I wanted to be surrounded by changemakers and in a city with a strong culture."
9/17/2023, Newsd, Newsd, Who is the Co-Founder of Rolling Stone?
"As a student at Berkeley, he was an active participant in the Free Speech Movement."
9/11/2023, Deseret News, William Deresiewicz, Miseducating the American mind
"Already by the 1920s, students were fed up. In 1922, the National Student Forum, a gathering of undergraduate leaders, issued a blistering declaration. ‘To put it baldly,’ it read, ‘a great deal of college is just so many hours of deadly boredom.’ The statement signaled the beginning of a decade of student rebellion at schools from coast to coast. It was then that the teaching evaluation was invented: by students, for students, collected in course guides that were published by students (and only much later co-opted, and taken private, by self-protective institutions). Another wave of protest followed in the 1960s. Both the Port Huron Statement of 1962 and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964, the twin beginnings of the larger student movement, included outrage at the state of college teaching as part of their larger indictments. When Richard Nixon appointed a commission to investigate the causes of the decade’s campus turmoil, it pointed, above all, not to the war in Vietnam, but to the shoddy state of undergraduate instruction." [Ed note: The Free Speech Movement gave birth to several strands of education reform, perhaps the most important, the Free University of Berkeley, 1965-1972, was mentored by Paul Goodman.]
9/10/2023, ScheerPost, Chris Hedges, The Pedagogy of Power
"Sheldon Wolin, our most important contemporary and radical political philosopher, who mentored a young Cornel West when he was Princeton University’s first Black candidate for a doctorate in philosophy, gave us the vocabulary and concepts to understand the tyranny of global corporate power, a system he called ‘inverted totalitarianism.’ As a professor at Berkeley, Wolin backed the Free Speech Movement. Wolin, while teaching at Princeton, was one of few professors who supported students occupying buildings to protest against South African apartheid. At one point, Wolin told me, the other professors in Princeton’s political science department refused to speak with him."
9/9/2023, Los Angeles Times, Michael S. Roth, Opinion: College students were ‘woke’ in the 60s, annoying to elders and drivers of social change. Just as they are now
"The Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley was created not just to defend students’ rights to express themselves but to challenge the framework of a society that offered what its most famous leader, Mario Savio, called a sick ‘utopia of sterilized automated contentment.’ The movement engaged in civil disobedience to stop the evils produced by ‘the System.’ Their aim was to awaken people to society’s injustices and the possibilities for radical change."
9/6/2023, City Journal, Martin Gurri, Brian C. Anderson, Digital Censorship
"Martin Gurri: I am not a young person, Brian. I have lived through the free speech movement in Berkeley, and the idea that Left progressivism is an extreme version of individualism that must be protected against institutions, and this is a complete reversal of that. It basically suggests pretty explicitly that the vast majority of the public are lambs that can be led to the slaughter by these wolves. And of course the head wolf is Donald Trump, but Elon Musk is not too far behind. These are people who by basically telling persuasive lies can bamboozle millions into acting against their own interest and that the role of government therefore is to intervene in the conversation. So these people are not bombarded by lies. As you say, the Jeffersonian idea that is the one that I grew up with, is that the government is the thing we need to fear, and these people, I have to say, are making indirectly a very good case for that."
9/2/2023, Royal Examiner, James Finck, The Free Speech Movement
"In response to the arrests, the FSM called for a general strike. Both liberal and conservative students supported the idea of free speech, making it almost impossible to hold classes as most students and even some professors refused to attend class. After a couple of more days of chaos, the faculty senate met and voted to support the Free Speech Movement and remove all political restrictions on campus.
¶
One often overlooked aspect of the faculty motion was a proposed amendment which would have limited hate or violent speech. The motion was rejected because faculty understood free speech allows for all speech and that people are supposed to use their own minds to decide if they agree or not."
8/24/2023, ScheerPost, Robert Scheer, The Liberal Darling That Wasn’t: UC Berkeley’s Troubled Past
"Tony Platt: Military training on the Berkeley campus was obligatory until the end of the 1950s. It went on forever, but there’s a long tradition of opposition to that. There was also tremendous political organizing on campus in the twenties and thirties, antiwar organizing that went on. There’s also been a long tradition of activism around free speech issues that went on for many, many decades before the Free Speech movement became successful."
8/10/2023, Albany Democrat-Herald, R. Charles Vars Jr., Obituary
"Charlie represented graduate students in the Free Speech Movement."
8/10/2023, American Greatness, The Left’s War on Free Speech, Jim Nelles
"In 1964, Mario Savio and 500 fellow students marched on Berkeley’s administration building to protest the university’s order. He and other leaders called for an organized student protest to abolish all restrictions on students’ free-speech rights throughout the University of California system – and the free speech movement was born." [Ed note: the FSM ended on 4/28/1965 and concerned itself with political speech.]
7/25/2023, The Vacaville Reporter, July 27 Vallejo/Vacaville Arts and Entertainment Source: San Francisco Mime Troupe: U.S. in ‘Breakdown’ mode, Richard Bammer
"‘We talk a little about The Great Depression in the show,’ said [Daniel] Savio, the youngest son of Mario Savio, a key member of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the mid-1960s. ‘There was a law that, when any public housing was torn down the government had to replace it. The law no longer exists.’"
7/25/2023, Harlem World Magazine, LongHouse Reserve Summer Benefit Honoring Mary Heilmann, And A. M. Homes, unattributed
"Influenced by 1960s counterculture, the free speech movement, and the surf ethos of her native California, Mary Heilmann ranks amongst the most influential abstract painters of her generation."
7/14/2023, Counterpunch, Affirmative Action and Me: A Tale of an Old Boys’ Network, Teaching and Politics, Jonah Raskin
"Through an old boys’ network, the university also hired controversial figures such as Mario Savio, who had been unable to find a teaching position on a college campus, perhaps because he was white and male and perhaps because of his notoriety as one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Some qualified candidates seem to be discriminated against, not because of gender, ethnicity or class, but because of political beliefs and actions. Savio is a prime example of that."
7/12/2023, Cowboy State Daily, “The Machine” And The Consent Of The Governed, Rod Miller
"Here’s a hint. That is an excerpt from Mario Savio’s speech on the steps of Sproul Hall during the Free Speech Movement at the Berkeley campus of the University of California in 1964. So it definitely comes at us from the Left.
¶
But it could just as easily have come from today’s Proud Boys or from John Calhoun and his secessionist fire-breathers of the mid-19th Century.
¶
Dissatisfaction with government is not unique to one political philosophy or another, it is not the sole province of the Left or the Right. To either side, ‘The Machine’ can be a government they view as anathema to their interests."
7/8/2023, The Rafu Shimpo, JACL Announces Four National Awards, Rafu Reports
"From his early involvement in the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley to his instrumental role as a founding staff member for the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, [Alan] Nishio has tirelessly championed the rights and empowerment of marginalized communities."
7/6/2023, The Siuslaw News, Caroline Clarice Estes passed away, July 13, 2022, Obit
"Caroline became active as an organizer, facilitator and consultant in movements for peace and social action, beginning with the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the mid-1960s. Here she first used the training and experience of Quaker business meetings to facilitate diverse groups of hundreds of people in making decisions by consensus, at a time when this was virtually unknown outside of Friends."
7/5/2023, The New European, Free speech does not belong to the right… it’s a precious progressive value, Matthew d’Ancona
"This alliance between free speech activism and the liberal left had deep roots. In the 20th century, WEB Du Bois, Martin Luther King, and congressman John Lewis had recognised that, for minorities and the disenfranchised, free expression was the first line of defence.
¶
‘Without freedom of speech and the right to dissent,’ said [John] Lewis, ‘the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings.’ In the 1960s, the same was true of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and its student leaders such as Mario Savio; and, in the 1980s, of eastern European dissidents such as Vaclav Havel who battled against the totalitarianism of the Soviet bloc."
6/26/2023, The Roanoke Times, Letter: Tech policy has a 'Big Brother' vibe, Bill Zutt
"A second, equally insidious policy challenged in the case involves Virginia Tech’s prohibition of petition-gathering and literature distribution except at pre-reserved locations, and then only if one or more of the participants are members of, or sponsored by, a university-recognized organization. This so-called “Informational Activities Policy” appears much like the repressive conduct which spawned the free speech movement at U.C. Berkeley back in the ‘60s."
6/14/2023, Jacobin, How American Universities Turned Red, Steve Fraser
"Rebellions erupted against the ‘multiversity,’ against its depersonalized treatment of students and its bureaucratization, its emphasis on slotting students into vocations, and its studied unwillingness to challenge the established order. This new climate riled up students, who responded across the country with protests, most famously at Berkeley, where student activist Mario Savio gave his famous speech decrying the ‘odious’ workings of an administrative machine that could only be halted by throwing your ‘body upon the gears’ to halt it."
6/13/2023, The Washington Post, L.A. school board president says anti-gay protests make students afraid, Jonathan Edwards and Amber Ferguson
"Her fiery, six-minute speech married Goldberg’s decades-long career as a politician with the lifelong activism that started with her work as a leader of the free speech movement at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s."
6/7/2023, The Daily Progress, Decision in Virginia Tech case amounts to state-sponsored censorship, Bill Zutt
"A second, equally insidious policy challenged in the case involves Tech’s prohibition of petition-gathering and literature distribution except at pre-reserved locations, and then only if one or more of the participants are members of, or sponsored by, a university-recognized organization. This so-called ‘Informational Activities Policy’ appears much like the repressive conduct which spawned the free speech movement at U.C. Berkeley back in the ‘60s."
6/4/2023, New York Times, A Tale of Paradise, Parking Lots and My Mother’s Berkeley Backyard, Daniel Duane
"This was all in the air when, in the fall of 1964, university administrators abruptly started enforcing policies prohibiting the use of campus property for political organizing. But one activist defied the ban on Oct. 1, 1964, setting up an outdoor information table for the Congress on Racial Equality. Campus police officers arrested that activist and put him in a squad car, so students sat down around the car — in what turned out to be the opening act of the Free Speech Movement, which soon became about so much else: not just Vietnam but anticapitalism and the nascent environmental movement too." [Ed Note: this use of “Free Speech Movement” encompasses both the Berkeley FSM but the widespread youth movements which preceded and followed. The Berkeley FSM was finite and fell within specifiable dates, and the youth movements both predate and follow the FSM. And of course all that took place all over the world. But in Berkeley, in an article about Berkeley, this decade-long FSM is a fiction and a product of unnuanced hindsight.]
5/25/2023, UC Berkeley News, How does the universe work? Promoting diversity can help answer that, Ivan Natividad
"My parents were students here during the Free Speech Movement. And my dad’s 1976 Ph.D. dissertation, ‘Economic Ethnicity: implications for educational and metropolitan policy and planning,’ can still be found in the stacks of the Doe Memorial Library. So, being at Berkeley made me very cognizant of what was possible in higher education, and the power students and faculty had to make a difference."
5/24/2023, The Daily Californian, In defense of ‘niche subjects’: Ron DeSantis got it wrong, Editorial
"It is no secret that UC Berkeley has long been seen as a beacon for pushing the envelope. From the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s to the Third World Liberation Front’s support for the ethnic studies department in the 1990s, students have consistently been at the forefront of advocating for an all-encompassing educational experience." [Ed note: Following upon the FSM at Berkeley came the Free University of Berkeley, 1965-1972, inspired in part by Paul Goodman. FUB included student research projects and student-designed courses. A good collection of source documents is to be found here:
https://www.fsm-a.org/FSM%20Documents/Free%20University%20Berkeley/Webpages/gallery-01.html]
5/14/2023, UCSD Guardian, UCSD’s Riot Conspiracy Theory, Justin Cho
"In the summer of 1964, philosophy major Mario Savio went to Mississippi to aid the Freedom Summer Project, a cause aimed to help African Americans vote. After this experience, he set up information tables and collected donations on UC Berkeley’s campus. However, the efforts were shut down by the university, as fundraising for political groups on campus was limited to a few select organizations. Savio was enraged that the university had blocked his efforts to spread the campaign, and his efforts to fight back ended up being the origin of the Free Speech Movement."
5/8/2023, CleanTechnica, Student-Led “End Fossil—Occupy!” Protests Shut Down Schools In Europe, Steve Hanley
"The End Fossil Occupy organizers hope this latest wave of climate protests will recapture and recreate the radicalism of May 1968, when anti-imperialist protests by university students in Paris were joined by striking workers and precipitated a wave of revolt across the continent
¶
Being a product of the 60s, I well remember the excitement of living in a time when it seemed like a great leap forward in human relations was taking place. Bob Dylan was singing about how the times they were a’changing and the Smothers Brothers did their weekly dance with the network censors to see how much they could get away with.
¶
The free speech movement was in full swing at Berkeley and change was in the air. On Broadway, Hair! featured nude actors, David Crosby sang about how he almost cut his hair, and hair became a symbol of the Black Power movement."
5/5/2023, Wesleyan Argus, Renewed Chalking Controversy Emerges During WesFest, Sulan Bailey
"On the other hand, Associate Professor in the College of Letters Jesse W. Torgerson highlighted that on other college campuses across the country, limitations placed on chalking are being debated as a free speech issue, rather than one of vandalism and visual eyesores.
¶
'From a beyond-Wesleyan perspective it makes sense that on public university campuses chalking has recently been framed as an issue of free speech and has even been raised as such on venues like Fox News,' Torgerson wrote in an email to The Argus. 'My graduate school years were at UC Berkeley—the birthplace of the so-called Free Speech Movement—where chalking (along with large signs and literal soapbox speeches) was and is a constant feature of the campus pavements.'"
4/30/2023, The San Francisco Chronicle, Malcolm Burnstein: December 2, 1933 - March 6, 2023, obituary
"During the 1960s Mal was active in the National Lawyers Guild, and the lead attorney for the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley."
4/13/2023, The Daily Californian, 'Fight for it': Campus ethnic studies department traces roots in student activism, liberation, Ananya Rupanagunta
"‘You could say that the Free Speech movement paved the way for this idea of speaking out, and the Third World movement was of third world people of color seeking self-determination,’ said Harvey Dong, campus ethnic studies lecturer who teaches Asian American and diaspora studies. “You had the main speakers being third-world people—African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Chicanos … that was a big difference, in terms of leadership.’" [Ed note: the FSM was primarily inspired by the American civil rights movement. I would say that any paving of the way in that era was done by people of color.]
4/13/2023, The Daily Californian, Campus cafe, oral history project commemorate Free Speech Movement, Sandhya Ganesan
"There are nearly 50 interviews within the oral [history] project conducted between 1999 and 2001 by historian Lisa Rubens, who was also a student on campus at the time of the FSM. Some of the interviews are still getting added to the archive, according to the library website. One of its focuses was finding subjects that represented the wide spectrum of political beliefs, reflected in the organizations which composed the FSM Executive Committee."
4/12/2023, The Daily Californian, How nonviolent protesting has evolved from '60s to now, Emewodesh Eshete
"This immediately followed the Free Speech Movement in the mid-1960s, the movement that was the beginning of many movements to come and UC Berkeley’s history of protest.” [Ed note: UC has a long history of protest predating the FSM. See Robert Cohen, "When the Old left was Young."]
4/12/2023, The Daily Californian, Matt Walsh, Ann Coulter: What freedom of speech means to UC Berkeley now, Kelsey McIvor
"[Daniel] Sargent emphasized that campus’s adamant support of free speech is a fairly contemporary result of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.
¶
'The Free Speech Movement revolts against this idea of the university as an institution that exercises its right to local parentis,' Sargent said. 'What Mario Savio and the others leaders of the Free Speech Movement advocate for and to a degree realize is a different vision of the university, that of an unfettered marketplace for ideas.'
¶
Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement made it possible for student organizations to both organize and host free speaker events with minimal restrictions, Sargent noted.
¶
Sargent also highlighted the importance of peer review and 'the responsible self regulation of the university by the university' rather than punitive restrictions by the university.”
4/12/2023, The Daily Californian, Alice Waters, Daniel Savio reflect on Free Speech Movement, 58 years later, Rae Wymer
"‘The main lesson is don’t give up,’ Daniel said. ‘You can in fact have an effect but that takes organization, it takes work, it’s not a certain thing and it’s not necessarily going to have all of the effect that you want in the timeframe that they ought to happen. But that doesn’t mean it is not worth the effort and that you can have an effect.’"
4/09/2023, San Francisco Chronicle, Dan Barki, Obituary
"On to Willard Jr. High and Berkeley High before going east to Brandeis where he studied for 2 years. However, that was 1964 and there was a lot going on in Berkeley, so Dan came back to participate in the action, graduating from Cal in 1966. Dan was arrested in the Sproul Hall sit-in, spent a night in the Santa Rita jail and later, given a choice of paying $350 bail or spending 3 weeks in jail, chose the latter. Dan remained politically concerned and active the rest of his life."
3/26/2023, San Francisco Chronicle, Oscar Pemantle Obituary, Robin Pemantle
"Later, as a graduate teaching assistant at UC Berkeley, Oscar became known for his use of Socratic methods. His Poly Sci 1 section was taught to standing-room-only audiences, especially attracting the leaders of the Free Speech Movement in the early 60's."
3/22/2023, Los Angeles Times, How DeSantis’ attack on education draws from Ronald Reagan’s war on UC Berkeley, Michael Hiltzik
"Let’s revisit Reagan’s war on Berkeley, then show how DeSantis, like other GOP culture warriors, draws from his playbook.
¶
Berkeley was simmering with discontent in the mid-1960s, manifesting at first in protests supporting the civil rights movements. When administrators moved to quarantine political organizing and rallies off-campus, the Free Speech Movement, which became the chief instrument of protest, was born."
3/19/2023, Legacy, Bruce Barthol Obituary, unattributed
"In 1964, as a 16-year-old guitar-playing UC Berkeley freshman, Bruce hung out at the Jabberwock coffeehouse on Telegraph Avenue, hearing many old blues greats, folk musicians, and singer-songwriters. He joined the Free Speech Movement, but to his lasting regret he was spared arrest for occupying Sproul Hall when FSM leaders made juveniles leave. He quit school when his roommates Barry Melton and Joe MacDonald invited him to play electric bass in what became Country Joe and the Fish."
3/17/2023, Berkeleyside, Remembering Malcolm Burnstein, attorney for the Free Speech Movement, Catherine Trimbur and Loni Hancock
"During the 1960s Mal was active in the National Lawyers Guild, and the lead attorney for the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. He was one of the trial counsel for the Oakland 7, who were charged with felony conspiracy in connection with anti-draft demonstrations at the Oakland Induction Center and who were acquitted. He also won an acquittal for Dan Siegel, one of the leaders of the People’s Park demonstrations in Berkeley in 1969."
3/16/2023, Portside, The Too-Large-For Life Harry Bridges, Paul Buhle
"The Right and the Center made one more big effort to get rid of Harry. The House Committee on UnAmerican Activities hilariously charged that Berkeley’s political cadre, from local anti-racist demonstrations at hotels to the Free Speech Movement, operated as puppets of Bridges. Attorney-General Robert Kennedy attempted to oust Bridges’ leadership by legal maneuvers, and successfully hurt Bridges’ prestige indirectly, thanks to John Kennedy’s support within the Bay Area Black community during the 1960 election and after."
3/14/2023, Daily Californian, Remembering Free Speech Movement artist, activist David Lance Goines, Madison Creekbaum
"[Tom] Weller said he worked with radical figures during the start of the Free Speech Movement and asked Goines to do lettering for the SLATE Supplement, a student political organization at UC Berkeley.
¶
'That’s how he ended up sitting at a table on Sproul Plaza selling copies on that fateful day when the deans came around and suspended everyone manning tables, thus launching the Free Speech Movement,' Weller said in an email. 'Thus he was plunged into the political upheavals of the 60s, to which he brought his characteristic intensity. He was immensely proud of his 14 arrests.'"
3/13/2023, American Theatre, Bruce Barthol, the Musical Conscience of the SF Mime Troupe, Michael Gene Sullivan
"Bruce arrived at UCB just in time for the explosion of the Free Speech Movement, that amazing moment in American political history we all benefit from, and which conservatives have been at war with ever since. Sit-ins, strikes, occupying buildings—all in the name of educational freedom, of Civil Rights, of teaching real politics and history rather than just corporatist propaganda. You know, all the freedoms of educational thought the right-wing governor of a certain dangly Southern state is trying to undo today."
3/13/2023, Berkeleyside, Remembering Vic Garlin, radical economist, restorer of vintage Jaguars, Family of Vic Garlin
"At Cal, Garlin was politically engaged in campus activities and national movements including Students to Combat McCarthyism, the Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee, the student political party SLATE, and the Free Speech Movement. Garlin wrote for the Daily Cal newspaper and was on the editorial board of Root and Branch, a short-lived journal of radical scholarship."
3/10/2023, Berkeleyside, Michael Delacour, People’s Park co-founder, dies at 85, Supriya Yelimeli
"A few years before Delacour became deeply involved in the movement at People’s Park, he lived in the Southside neighborhood with Liane Chu, who had been part of the Free Speech Movement in the early 1960s."
3/9/2023, Berkeleyside, Remembering Tom Luddy: ‘A champion for cinema’, Annie Sciacca
"He was also active in the politics of the time, including the Free Speech movement of the mid-1960s."
3/6/2023, The New York Times, David Lance Goines, Who Shaped the Counterculture Aesthetic, Dies at 77, Penelope Green
“It was an earlier antiwar protest, the Free Speech Movement, which erupted on the Berkeley campus in 1964, that set him on his path. He was a classics major swept up in the politics of the time, and when he and others were threatened with expulsion for handing out political leaflets on campus, it galvanized more than a thousand students to take over Sproul Hall, where the administration offices were.
¶
The sit-in there made national news when nearly 800 students, Mr. Goines among them, were arrested.
¶
He was proud to say he was arrested 14 times in the ’60s. He was thrilled, too, to have been thrown out of school, which he hated, and by the art of printing, which he learned as an apprentice at the Berkeley Free Press, a small publishing house and haven for radicals dedicated to producing material for all sorts of political groups.
¶
‘The revolution ran on paper and ink and the BFP was where it all came from,’ Mr. Goines wrote in his account of the times, ‘The Free Speech Movement: Coming of Age in the 1960s,’ published in 1993. ‘The antiwar and civil rights movements kept us running at full capacity.’”
3/5/2023, Berkeley Daily Planet, SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces:Tidbits&Obits, Gar Smith
"¡Bruce Barthol, Presente!
¶
Reposted from the Free Speech Movement Archives.
¶
Born at Alta Bates, Bruce Barthol was one of the six juvenile participants in the Sproul Hall sit-in, but he left before the arrests (when minors were told to because only their parents would be able to bail them out of juvenile hall.) A couple of years later, he became one of the founding members of Country Joe and the Fish (Bruce played bass guitar on the 1967 studio album I’m Fixing to Die.)"
3/3/2023, San Francisco Chronicle, David Lance Goines, Berkeley poster artist for Chez Panisse, dies at 77, Sam Whiting
"He was a sophomore pursuing a major in classics in the fall of 1964. At the time, the university was cracking down on people handing out what administrators considered objectionable political materials in Sproul Plaza, which is outside Sather Gate but still on the university campus. Goines was one of those people staffing an information table, which earned him a suspension from school.
¶
His suspension afforded him more time to devote to the cause that took hold when Jack Weinberg was arrested for similar activity and placed in a squad car that was instantly surrounded by students and activists. The car, with Weinberg inside, did not move for 32 hours, partly because Goines sat down behind a rear tire and let the air out.
¶
That was the start of the free speech movement, and in December 1964, Goines was among 800 people arrested for occupying Sproul Hall, the campus administration building. In his citation of Dec. 3, 1964, Goines gave his race as ‘human.’
¶
‘After getting arrested at Sproul Hall, I went on to get arrested about once a week for a period of time,’ Goines wrote in his encyclopedic memoir, ‘The Free Speech Movement: Coming of Age in the 1960s,’ published in 1993."
3/2/2023, Alta, Remembering Berkeley artist David Lance Goines, Steve Wasserman
"David had been expelled from UC Berkeley for his participation in the Free Speech Movement. He liked to joke that he never attended the demonstrations that were mounted in those turbulent years, as he was too busy printing leaflets for the protests that others organized.
¶….¶
He wrote several books, including A Constructed Roman Alphabet, which received a 1983 American Book Award for typographical design, and, perhaps most dear to his heart, his nearly 800-page The Free Speech Movement: Coming of Age in the 1960s."
3/2/2023, Blind Magazine, Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party, Robert E. Gerhardt
"'I graduated from high school in ’65, which was the year that the Voting Rights Act was passed by Lyndon Johnson,' [photographer Stephen] Shames says. 'In ’65 my parents were living in Los Angeles, Santa Monica. And so I applied to Berkeley and I got in. Of course 1964 was also the free speech movement at Berkeley, which is why I wanted to go [there]. My dad wanted me to go to Stanford or Harvard, but I wanted to go to Berkeley.'"
2/24/2023, New York Times, Tom Luddy, a Behind-the-Scenes Force in Cinema, Dies at 79, Penelope Green
"A transplant from the East Coast, Mr. Luddy landed in Berkeley in the 1960s, just in time to join the radical political activity that was afoot there, notably the Free Speech Movement that dominated the University of California campus in 1964."
2/24/2023, Berkeleyside, David Lance Goines, iconic Berkeley printmaker, dies at 77, Ally Markovich
"In the 1960s, Goines famously printed the leaflets publicizing the myriad protests of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, a job that got him expelled from the university. After a brief stint back on campus, Goines left for good to pursue printmaking.
¶
A political activist, Goines also used his art to draw attention to causes like AIDS prevention and the anti-war effort. He also published four books, including an 800-page memoir about the Free Speech Movement on campus, and collaborated on three. His work was also the subject of six books."
2/23/2023, The Stanford Daily, Bowling, breakfasts and blunders: Reflections from Daily alums, Staff
"Mary Kay Becker ’66 — News Editor and Night Editor:
I remember holding down the fort an The Daily shack in Dec. 1964 to maintain contact with intrepid reporter (and future editor) Jon Roise ’67 and our brilliant photographer, Bruce Wilcox ’67, when they went to Berkeley to cover the Free Speech Movement demonstrations. They managed to climb to the top of a campus building to get the best possible view."
2/14/2023, Legacy, STEPHEN KAHLER OBITUARY,
"Several memorable recollections of the VCB [UCB] graduate years: (I) The 1964 Free Speech Movement was a campus wide event of which he and fellow physics grads and roommate Abe Bookstein were avid supporters. Anti-war marches were another Berkeley staple for the remaining graduate years."
2/11/2023, Mad in America, Will Hall, 1946-2023, Summer Mad Camp 2023
"Jay [Mahler] came up in the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, and he had been part of the very early days of the ‘60s New Left, anti-war, and civil rights protests that were the crucible for protests and activism to abolish psychiatry, days that gave birth to everything in mental health activism today."
2/9/2023, San Francisco Chronicle, Janet Abelson, 1946-2023, Obituary
"She was raised in Southern Illinois and Phoenix, Arizona and moved to California to attend UC Berkeley, where she participated in the Free Speech Movement."
2/9/2023, World Socialist Website, Los Angeles school workers hold strike authorization vote after years-long contract impasse, Dan Conway
"The 78-year-old Goldberg was a student leader of the 1964–1965 Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. Goldberg long ago gave up the radical leanings of her youth to become a Democratic Party official, holding office in the Los Angeles City Council, California State Assembly and the LAUSD school board. She is now a member of the Democratic Socialists of America."
1/26/2023, The Berkeley Daily Planet, SMITHEREENS", Gar Smith
"In this 90-minute California Historical Society video, Bettina Aptheker discusses her new book, "Communists in Closets: Queering the History 1930s–1990s." The book explores the history of gay, lesbian, and non-heterosexual people in the Communist Party (despite its sixty-year ban on LGBT members). Queer communists contributed to the political and theoretical foundations for lesbian and gay liberation and women’s liberation; they also helped advance peace, social justice, civil rights, and Black and Latinx liberation movements. Focusing on queer communists in California, Aptheker is in conversation with Estelle Freedman, author and Professor Emerita at Stanford University.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw9ODZqHeZo&t=4s"
1/26/2023, The Lancet, Offline: America—a codicil, Richard Horton
"Conflict within universities, sometimes extremely violent conflict, broke the confidence of the public. Universities dismissed student demands for free speech. The flame of student resistance was ignited in October, 1964, at Berkeley when thousands blocked a police car from taking one activist to jail."
1/26/2023, Berkeleyside, Remembering Maria Cranor, rock climber, physicist shaped by time as Berkeley student during Free Speech Movement, Obituary
"She studied anthropology as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley from 1963-68 in the heyday of the Free Speech Movement, the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War protests. She attended marches led by Mario Savio and attended rallies where students put flowers in the bayonets of the National Guard sent to quell the dissidents. By her own account, she was transformed by her time at Berkeley, and left the university intellectually challenged, energized, and committed to progressive politics."
1/25/2023, The Daily Californian, ‘Real origins here on this campus’: Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner discusses magazine, career, Clara Brownstein
"[Greil] Marcus noted how the Free Speech Movement, which he cited was a possible catalyst for Berkeley Alice Waters’ restaurant Chez Panisse, perhaps spurred similar inspiration for the magazine."
1/23/2023, UnHerd, Why gamers can’t play politics, Oliver Bateman
"Though it still sounds somewhat absurd to make this claim, an argument can be made that GamerGate was almost as important as the violent ideological clashes that defined the turbulent Sixties; it was roughly analogous, then, to the Free Speech Movement that took place on the University of California-Berkeley campus during the 1964-1965 academic year, a seemingly minor event in the scheme of things that in hindsight had extraordinary societal ramifications."
1/18/2023, California Globe, 78-Year-Old Jackie Goldberg Elected as Los Angeles Unified School Board President, Evan Symon
"Goldberg, a UC Berkeley and University of Chicago graduate, first entered both education and politics in the mid-1960’s, becoming a student leader in a free-speech movement while receiving her teaching degree at Berkeley."
1/17/2023, Los Angeles Times, Goldberg elected L.A. school board president amid tense labor negotiations, Howard Blume
"Goldberg’s first significant political involvement was as a student leader in the free speech movement at UC Berkeley in 1964. She also worked as a classroom teacher in Compton for 16 years, among other roles."
1/17/2023, Sippican Week, Robert Sanderson, 79, obituary,
"Bob attended Sippican School in Marion, Phillips Academy, Andover, and the University of California, Berkeley where he was active in the free speech movement and played with several jazz bands."
1/12/2023, Chestnut Hill Local,For Local board member, news is a family commitment, Len Lear
"Buddy [Stein], who is six years older, majored in English at Columbia University and went on to graduate school at the University of California. His activism as a member of the college’s free-speech movement led to his arrest during a sit-in at the President’s office and his withdrawal from graduate school. He contributed articles to an underground newspaper, The Berkeley Barb, before finding work editing scholarly editions of Mark Twain's writings for the Mark Twain Project at the university’s Bancroft Library."
1/6/2023, Berkeleyside, Court ruling could upend Cal’s plan to build on People’s Park, Supriya Yelimeli
"The court has tentatively sided with plaintiffs, who have maintained that the park is a historic commodity due to its civil rights impact and connections to the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s." [Ed. note: If ‘history is worth protecting,’ then you should you should stop repeating the falsehood that People’s Park bears ‘connections to the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s.’ The Free Speech Movement, 1964-65 was long over when People’s Park came into being. In 1964-65 that area was still a block of inhabited houses.]
12/29/2022, IndyBay, America’s student loan crisis stems from a war on education as a public good, Lynda Carson
"Though it is under attack by political forces that want to demolish it, for over the past 50 years, People's Park in Berkeley has been a beloved location of nearly 3 acres of land that has been used for anti-war protests, the free speech movement, music concerts, rest and relaxation, a space for the homeless, art shows, political events, a place to meet others, and a special location that Food Not Bombs feeds the people at 5 days a week or more, among other things." [Ed. note: The Free Speech Movement, 1964-65 was long over when People’s Park came into being. In 1964-65 that area was still a block of inhabited houses.]
12/29/2022, The Washington Post, America’s student loan crisis stems from a war on education as a public good, David A. Love
"California Gov. Ronald Reagan fired the first shot by cutting funding to the University of California system and then for the first time making in-state students pay tuition as well as fees, as part of an effort to politicize education and make it a wedge issue. At the time, California public colleges and universities had become centers of student antiwar and civil rights activism. The Free Speech Movement formed at the University of California at Berkeley when students challenged campus policies against political protest and free speech. That student movement was later motivated by opposition to the Vietnam War."
12/23/2022, Malaysian Digest, Exploring The Legal Framework For Protecting Free Speech In The European Union, Julie
"The Free Speech Movement of 1964-65 was a watershed moment in American history, showcasing the power of citizens to take on authority and fight for their rights. The demonstration sparked a nationwide campaign to protect free speech, which was already protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Movement, led by Mario Savio, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, lasted through the academic year of 1964, and lasted for more than a year. Savio’s stirring speeches and his call to students to “Let the students decide!” emphasized the importance of free speech, and he also emphasized the power of citizens to challenge authority and demand their rights. A key component of the Movement was its success in bringing national attention to the issue of free speech and ensuring that the right to free expression would remain available in the future. [Ed. Note: The FSM lasted less than a year and ended 4/28/1965.]
12/21/2022, Above the Law, Much Ado About Nothing: Law Schools Had An Odd Fixation On Free Speech This Year, Chris Williams
"Other legal experts noted that the controversy showed just how mangled the understanding of the First Amendment had become, even at a place like Berkeley, the epicenter of the 1960s free-speech movement. The debate, they said, should focus on whether these bans align with the academic ideal of open, intellectual debate. Even if student groups can prohibit speakers, should they? And should such bans be codified — formally adopted with a bylaw?" [Ed. Note: this seems to be a quote.]
12/21/2022, Legacy Remembers, David Makofsky, 1938-2022, obituary
"He entered UC Berkeley's PhD program in the '60s. Soon, he was protesting the war and sitting in vigils for the Free Speech Movement."
12/20/2022, Berkeley Daily Planet, Free Speech Movement Memories On-air in Australia, Gar Smith
"Robby Cohen, professor of Social Studies at New York University and author of Freedom's Orator (a profile of Free Speech Movement activist Mario Savio) recently conducted a half-hour radio interview on the Free Speech Movement with the host of Australia's Nightlife show. ¶
The publicity for the interview included a photo of Jackie Goldberg standing atop a police car that had been sent to the UC campus to arrest a campus activist—but wound up being nonviolently captured by a swarm of protesting students. The photo of Goldberg speaking from atop the cop-car-turned-lectern was an appropriate choice given the interviewer's focus on the role of women in the FSM.
12/18/2022, Tablet Magazine, Self-righteous professors have spawned self-righteous students and unleashed them into the public square, Russell Jacoby
"The new arguments that question free speech stem from robed academic leftists, an irony that is sometimes noticed. The Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley virtually inaugurated the ’60s student protest. Historically on and off the campus leftists fought censorship and defended free speech. No longer.
¶
Now law professors, who often call themselves anti-pornography feminists and critical race theorists, advance ideas to curtail free speech." [Ed note: UC students rekindled their advocacy in 1960 with the SF City Hall protests against HUAC. The FSM was as much about the 14th Amendment as the 1st. Contemporary interest in the FSM seems more opportunistic sparring than reasoned. The FSM ended in 1965.]
12/3/2022, Redheaded Blackbelt, ‘DRAG ME OUT LIKE A LADY: AN ACTIVIST’S JOURNEY’ BY LOCAL AUTHOR, JENTRI ANDERS
"Starting with with her Dixiecrat family in the deep South, she moves through the women’s rebellion she led at a Bible college in Georgia, her arrest in the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley and her subsequent participation in the anti-war and People’s Park movements there in the 1960s, to dropping out and becoming a country hippie."
12/3/2022, People’s World, Despite the ban, queers made important contributions to U.S. Communist movement, Eric A. Gordon
"While attending UC Berkeley, she was an activist in the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs, the youth group of the Communist Party USA. She became a leader in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement during the fall of 1964."
11/30/2022, The Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Longtime Alexander Valley vintner and journalist Dick Hafner dies at 96
"In 1961, he went to work for UC Berkeley as its public affairs officer — just as the university was headed for a historic run of protests and agitation over issues that included the free speech movement, the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, revolutions in Central America, People’s Park, South African apartheid and civil rights."
11/29/2022, Legacy, Richard Herr Obituary
"Sympathetic to student protests during the Free Speech Movement, he was one of three faculty members to take collected donations and post bail for the students arrested in Sproul Hall in 1964”
11/20/2022, Berkeley Daily Planet, SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces/ Commies In The Closet
"In related news, on January 24, 2023 (5:30PM live via Zoom), the California Historical Society will be hosting a free 'Communists in California' discussion between Bettina and Estelle Freedman, author and Professor Emerita at Stanford University. More Info and Register."
11/10/2022, Alameda Post, Today’s Alameda Treasure – 2242 San Antonio Ave. – Part 11, Steve Gorman
"In our last chapter we learned a little bit about Arthur Lipow, who was an academic and historian. He was born in 1935 and grew up in Southern California, receiving a B.A. in sociology from UCLA in 1955. He then studied at UC Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. in political sociology in 1969. It was there in Berkeley that he met his future wife, Gretchen Kittridge, when they both became involved in the Free Speech Movement. They would eventually go on to marry other people and raise families of their own, all the while remaining friends."
11/4/2022, Legacy Remembers, IRENE HEINSTEIN, Obituary
"She was one of the early members of SLATE, formed in 1958 at UC Berkeley, which significantly influenced the subsequent Free Speech Movement and counterculture era."
10/31/2022, Centre Daily Times, Under the baobab: Penn State protest messy, chaotic — as democracy often is, Charles Duman
"’But to discuss is not enough. The democratic process is one of carrying into action the ideas and issues freely aired in free discussion. Free speech means not only freedom to discuss issues in abstract intellectual terms, but means freedom to advocate actions based on such discussion ...’ -FSM petition"
10/31/2022, The Daily Beast, Sacrificing Free Speech for ‘Civility’ at UC-Berkeley, Robert McCoy
"As New York University professor Robert Cohen writes in The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s, to the opponents of the FSM and broader New Left, ‘the FSM pioneered a new and ultimately destructive style of mass student action,’ which ‘politicized the university and ended the reign of civility within the college gates.’"
10/28/2022, The Daily Californian, ‘His humility was a superpower’: Haas professor emeritus John Myers dies at 89, Ella Carter-Klauschie
"Arlyn [Myers] said her husband was always happy to attend ASUC board meetings that ran late and enjoyed learning from speakers on Sproul Plaza during the Free Speech Movement."
10/23/2022, The Stanford Daily, I was a Jewish student at Stanford in the 60s. Here is what I remember, Lenny Siegel
"I believe it was because they believed that Jewish radicals would threaten the status quo. Jews had long been among the leaders and foot-soldiers of left-wing movements throughout Europe and the United States. Many of the leaders and other activists in Berkeley’s 1964-65 Free Speech Movement, including my own sister, were Jewish. The people who ran Stanford did not want to see a repeat of the rebellion already happening at the larger university across the Bay."
10/20/2022, Santa Cruz Sentinel, 'Communists in Closets': Book Sheds Light on History of Queer Revolutionaries Amidst Anti-Communism and Homophobia, John Malkin
"Bettina Aptheker: Everyone talks about 'coming out' as a queer person. So, I’m using this phrase in a funny way. I came out that way because I was running for election at UC Berkeley in the aftermath of the Free Speech Movement and I thought if students were going to vote for me, they should know I was a member of the Communist Party. The headline in the San Francisco Examiner said, 'Bettina admits it. She's a Red! '"
10/19/2022, The New Republic, Is College Driving Political Division?, Jake Bittle
"The other problem was that the first generation of students who entered this new higher ed ecosystem also happened to be one of the most liberated and rebellious in history, and the colleges became laboratories for their struggle against the old world. The protests and demonstrations led by the likes of Mario Savio, leader of the Berkeley free speech movement, soon provoked a backlash from the powers-that-still-were, a political turnabout Bunch captures in the chapter title 'Why the Kent State massacre raised your tuition.' The causality isn’t quite as neat as that, but the big picture is accurate: The haywire activity of the ’60s provoked a hostile reaction from the so-called Moral Majority, focused in part on the radicalism of the decade’s college-age population. As Bunch sees it, this was the origin point of a political anti-intellectualism that would later lead conservative politicians to shift resources away from higher education."
10/18/2022, 48 Hills, In “Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate,” rule-breaking becomes the rule, Genevieve Quick
"The exhibition 'Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate,' co-presented by Casemore and Rena Bransten Galleries, draws upon a slogan from the 1964 Free Speech Movement that Stanford communications Professor Fred Turner addresses in his fascinating 2008 book From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Turner explains that when UC Berkeley students protested the computerization of student records, a protesting student pinned a punchcard to his chest printed with, 'I am a UC student. Please do not fold, spindle, or mutilate me.' [Ed note: source was FSM Newsletter No. 5, p2, https://www.fsm-a.org/FSM%20Documents/FSM%20Newsletters/1964%2012-10%20FSM%20Newsletter%20V.pdf]"
10/6/2022, Washington Blade, Despite the hype, Wenner memoir is a buzzkill, Kathi Wolfe
"He went on to college in Berkeley, Calif., during the height of the Free Speech movement. At 21, he was able to obtain the money he needed to start ‘Rolling Stone.’"
10/3/2022, Berkeley Daily Planet, Barbara Dane: A Life, a Book, a Documentary and a Berkeley Book Party!, Gar Smith
"In October 1964, Barbara Dane, stood in Sproul Plaza atop a police car containing an arrested activist named Jack Weinberg. Dane sang some rousing, FSM-customized versions of classic spirituals like Go Tell It On The Mountain and then lowered her guitar to address the crowd of student protesters: 'It was a long time there in the early fifties—especially when you couldn’t seem to get a rise out of anybody about anything, 'cause everybody thought they had to play it safe, play it cool, don’t take part, and I want to say that I, as a waiter and watcher and prodder and hoping that things would get moving again, I want to thank you all for being here. It’s marvelous.'"
9/30/2022, Daily Press, Today in History: Oct. 1, The Associated Press
"In 1964, the Free Speech Movement began at the University of California, Berkeley."
9/26/2022, Berkeley Daily Planet, SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces: SmitherDips&Doodles, Gar Smith
"FSM vet (and author) Barbara Garson writes:¶
'When the FSM was still back in the age of mimeography, Deward Hastings helped excavate and repair a photo-offset press. Working on it for days without a break, Deward had it ready for the first issue of the FSM newsletter.
¶
'When I expressed concern about his hours without sleep and rapid movements someone explained that Deward was a 'speed-freak.' I couldn't tell then nor do I know now if that were true.¶
'At the Berkeley Free Press, the machine he restored went on to turn out hundreds of thousands of beautifully printed leaflets for left groups in the Bay Area. Deward was there before there was any press in the Berkeley Free Press.'"
9/21/2022, San Francisco Chronicle, Jann Wenner reflects on the power of music, love of S.F. and his wild ride, Jessica Zack
"I don’t think you would’ve had Bill Graham or even a rock scene without Ralph [Gleason]. Ralph was the only person writing about the rock and roll culture in anything I could read, and about the free speech movement and the Beatles, and it was in the Chronicle."
9/21/2022, East Bay Times, ‘Bastion of weirdos’: Berkeley mourns Hot Tub Guy after nearly 50 years of free soaks, Katie Lauer
"He [Deward Hastings] spent a lifetime wearing many hats. He studied engineering, chemistry and physics at UC Berkeley and operated a printing press during the Free Speech Movement."
9/20/2022, NPR, Some compare today's political divide to the Civil War. But what about the 1960s?, John Burnett, Marisa Peñaloza
"[John] BURNETT: On the West Coast, back in the day, the center of the tempest was the University of California, Berkeley. [Ruth] Rosen was an impassioned grad student and an early activist in the feminist movement. She sits on a bench by a fountain, watching students hurrying past, eyes glued to their smartphones. Fifty-eight years ago, the university was roiled by protests over a ban on campus political activity.
¶
ROSEN: There was a tremendous amount of energy in the antiwar movement and in the free speech movement as well.
¶
BURNETT: She recalls how thousands of students would gather in Sproul Plaza, in front of the administration building, to listen to speakers and sing."
9/20/2022, Berkeleyside, 2 groundbreaking Berkeley mental health institutes celebrate 50 years, Joanne Furio
"In Berkeley, the free speech movement also had an effect, inspiring people to discover their own authority and voices, not only politically but psychologically."
9/18/2022, The San Diego Union-Tribune, Reconciling antisemitism and free speech on college campuses, Steven P. Dinkin
"That idea first took hold in the 1960s. Students at the University of California, Berkeley, had been banned from participating in political activities by school administrators, fearful of the spread of Communism. A group of 500 students marched in protest of the university’s order, and the Free Speech Movement was born. It gave voice to their concerns about civil rights and the Vietnam War."
9/15/2022, Rolling Stone, Watch Bruce Springsteen, Jann Wenner Talk Origins of Rolling Stone, Emily Zemler, Althea Legaspi
"He said during his time at University of California, Berkeley three elements came together. 'It’s a hotbed of political protests. It was the beginning of the student protest movement in the United States' and the free speech movement was in full swing, and sit-ins and other early organizing was taking place.
¶
...He said he had an epiphany during a sit-in demonstration where he heard Joan Baez performing Bob Dylan’s 'With God on Our Side.' He said at that point he was a 'preppy sort of fratty type' but her beautiful singing and the ideas behind Dylan’s song 'made me start to question everything and think I have to do something. You know? And I was hearing it in the music.'"
9/8/2022, Mondoweiss, Teaching Palestine 2022: Pedagogical Praxis and the Indivisibility of Justice, Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi
"In this framework, the rise of the corporate university, which is directly relevant to Teaching Palestine‘s pedagogical praxis, has shrunk the emancipatory spaces expanded by the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Epistemological and pedagogical transformations challenged Eurocentric colonial education in the U.S. and internationally: New York City’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville; Berkeley’s Free Speech movement; and the student strike at San Francisco State University, led by the Black Student Union and Third World Liberation Front in 1968-69, or what we refer to as The Spirit of Bandung or the The Spirit of ‘68."
9/5/2022, Balkan Insight, PROPAGANDA POSING AS PEDAGOGY: POLAND’S CONTROVERSIAL NEW HISTORY TEXTBOOK, Tom Junes
"In the West, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the anti-Vietnam War protests, and the sexual revolution are lumped together with the 'hippie revolution' and portrayed as a violent communist sex cult trying to equate dogs and men, of which Charles Manson and the Sharon Tate murder was the logical outcome. This elaboration on the youth revolt of the sixties is then paradoxically illustrated with a photo of a contemporary Pride March in Poland."
9/5/2022, Belfast Telegraph, Dissident republican attempts to hijack Free Derry corner slammed by veteran civil rights campaigner, Eamonn McCann
"The famous gable wall in the Bogside with the slogan, ‘You are now entering Free Derry’, has been a fixture in the city for over 50 years.
¶
Eamonn McCann, a former MLA and councillor with People Before Profit, had picked the words which he adapted from a slogan used by students in the Free Speech Movement in the University of California in Berkeley. The sign in Derry was painted in 1969 following a heavy-handed police crackdown in the area."[Ed note: no such language was used during the Free Speech Movement. If it was used in Berkeley, it would more likely have been during the 1969 People's Park.]
8/22/2022, SFist, A Violent Weekend at People's Park In Berkeley With a Hate-Crime Assault, Arson and More, Jay Barmann
"These incidents come at a time of high tension around the park, which has been the site of homeless encampments and drug use for many years, in addition to being a symbol of late-60s activism, anti-gentrification protest, and the Free Speech Movement." [Ed note: during the 1964-65 Free Speech Movement the block which became People's Park was full of houses. Yes, there is a shared theme of protest and resistance between the FSM and PP, but it is the accident that the wall opposite PP became available for a mural which depicted a campus scene from the FSM which firmed up the otherwise at-best weak association.]
8/21/2022, The Independent, Long March Through the Institutions, Tom Garrison
"Another fundamental American value is free speech via the 1st Amendment. Liberals and leftists used to be staunch supporters of free speech. The modern day free speech movement began at the Berkeley campus of the University of California in 1964.
¶
But since then, the Left, and too many liberals, have twisted free speech so that uncomfortable speech is labeled hate speech or violence. An example of campus intolerance for free speech involved Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers at the Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon in 2018." [Ed note: the left has supported free speech and truth the whole time. Either you believe that there exists such a thing as hate speech and hate crimes as defined by the federal government, or, somehow, you do not. The Berkeley FSM ended in 1965.]
8/16/2022, South Seattle Emerald, The Call for a National Moral Revival — Part 1, Chardonnay Beaver
"In 1964, [Susan] Partnow enrolled at University of California (UC) Berkeley. Simultaneously, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement was in full effect, sparking a fight against the prohibition of free speech on campus."
8/12/2022, The American Conservative, It's Not Those People's Park, Katya Sedgwick
"The University of California acquired the plot in 1967 on the cheap using eminent domain. The school first wanted to build dormitories and offices, then a soccer field, but ran out of money. That’s when the local activists, most of them veterans of the Free Speech Movement, swooped in, quickly organizing a community. With freedom of speech on campus but a distant memory in woke America, People’s Park survives as the sole remnant of 1960s-Berkeley radicalism." [Ed note: what is the source on FSM vets constituting most of the PP activists?]
8/10/2022, Common Dreams, Is the Clock Running Out on Donald J. Trump?, H. Scott Prosterman
"Don't you just love how rabid right-wingers love to expropriate leftist concepts for their own misapplication? Their effort to co-opt the Free Speech Movement of Berkeley and Ann Arbor made them look silly."
8/3/2022, San Francisco Examiner, Honoring the Bay Area skywalkers who built the Salesforce Tower: Joe Blum’s mighty photos, Jonah Raskin
"The exhibit is also dreamland for Blum, who was born in 1941 in Manhattan, to a middle class family, attended UC Berkeley, joined the Free Speech Movement and was arrested and jailed. Blum edited The Movement newspaper that became essential reading for the New Left. Originally a mimeographed newsletter for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), it became a monthly publication affiliated with SNCC and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)."
8/3/2022, WUNC, College is increasingly out of reach for many students. What went wrong?, Terry Gross
[Will Bunch:] "There was just very palpable excitement, first at the HBCUs. But then a lot of white kids said, we want to support this movement. Students at predominantly white universities started going to the Woolworths in their hometowns and started protesting. And it started this cycle - you know, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964, which was basically over, what rights do students have to express their political views on campus? And, you know, students basically won that protest. They convinced the faculty to side with them. And they won the right to speak out and distribute literature on campus. And that just flowed right into the anti-Vietnam War movement. And you had a conservative establishment that thought this was going too far or it was getting out of hand."
8/3/2022, San Francisco Chronicle, UC Berkeley closes off People’s Park as construction begins on controversial student housing, Sarah Ravani
“'It’s 53 years of resistance,' Teague [Lisa Teague, a member of People’s Park Council] said. 'This is a vital piece of the history of Berkeley, of the history of the free speech movement, of the history of the anti-war movement. We all feel its pretty sacred land.'” [Ed note: People’s Park played no role in the Free Speech Movement as it didn’t exist yet. In 1964-65 the block was still filled with houses.]
8/2/2022, Shore Fire Media, Ace of Cups To Release Extended Play E.P., Press Release
“'You Don’t Understand' is a shimmering gem of Byrdsy psych-pop jangle, infused with Spector-esque tension, and propelled by the band’s lock-tight musicianship. The song was penned by Denise Kaufman, who had been active in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, when revered music critic Ralph J. Gleason caught her blowing fiery blues harp at a campus protest."
8/2/2022, New York Times, Why Is America Fractured? Blame College, a New Book Argues., Kevin Carey
"Bunch’s history tracks the missed opportunities to define and finance college as a public good, beginning with the 1944 G.I. Bill’s unexpected success in sending millions of white veterans to college, free of charge. President Harry S. Truman’s Commission on Higher Education followed up in 1947 with a far-reaching vision of enlightened, productive citizens educated by federally financed colleges and universities.
¶
But like so many good things, the idea was spoiled by racists — in this case, Southern lawmakers who worried that federal programs might require them to educate Black people. While an undergraduate named Mario Savio helped found the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley (after registering Black Mississippi voters during the Freedom Summer of 1964), an aging actor named Ronald Reagan saw an opportunity to ride middle-class revulsion toward campus radicals all the way to the California governor’s mansion. Reagan went on to champion an antitax, small-government philosophy that would erode public education revenues for decades to come."
7/17/2022, Berkeley Daily Planet, SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces:SMITHERMATAZ, Gar Smith
"When I stood trial for the Free Speech Movement occupation of Sproul Hall in 1964, I was among those who refused probation—because it would have required that we not engage in political protests for a set period of time.
¶
That precondition was clearly a denial of First Amendment rights, so myself and others opted to do time at Alameda County's Santa Rita prison. In my case, that meant I'd spend 25 days in jail but would emerge with the freedom to continue to demonstrate and agitate.
¶
During my stretch at Santa Rita, I was assigned to work on an agricultural chain-gang—hoeing a field of sugar beets under a blazing, ear-burning sun and under the watchful glare of several deputies armed with shotguns.
¶
We usually were trucked to the field in a small bus but sometimes, I'd find myself bouncing down a road in the back of a pick-up truck. On one of these jaunts, I decided to stand up in the open bed of the vehicle while leaning forward on the roof of the cab to steady myself.
¶
That's when I happened to look down and notice a number of messages scratched on the vehicle's roof over the years. The most prominent message read: 'Sonny Barger was here.'"
7/1/2022, The Washington Post, The transformative 1960s still have a grip on America, Michael Bobelian
"He makes a convincing argument. The list of transformative events within this time span included the Kennedy assassination, two historic civil rights bills, the conservative takeover of the Republican Party, a sweeping immigration law, the escalation of the Vietnam War, the Freedom Summer in Mississippi, the launching of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley and the Watts riots." [Ed note: both the launching of the FSM and its end a few months later.]
6/27/2022, Truthout, This Country Is a Living Nightmare, William Rivers Pitt
"Before — and probably after — those ballot actions, the time has come for the majority in this country to recognize the inflection point we have arrived at, lest we find ourselves utterly undone by our preference for pleasing arguments over mass action beyond the ballot. I am reminded of the words of Mario Savio, the poet laureate of the Berkeley Free Speech movement:
¶
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"
6/26/2022, The Sacramento Bee, William Ansley Dorman 1941-2022,
"He was deeply influenced by his involvement with the free speech movement and civil rights movement."
6/22/2022, The Daily Californian, ‘Incredibly vibrant’: Queer organizations foster welcoming environment, Zachary Khouri
"Its roots stem from the Queer Alliance and the Queer Resource Center, which began with student leaders involved in the Free Speech Movement. " Was that the 1964 Free Speech Movement, where there were several queer leaders? [Ed. note: it's unlear whether this refers to the 1964 Berkeley FSM, although there is no doubt tha there were multiple powerful gay leaders.]
6/19/2022, San Francisco Chronicle, Artisan printer creates one-of-a-kind posters for events, organizations around the world, Marcus Crowder
"His non-fiction history/memoir 'The Free Speech Movement: Coming of Age in the 1960s' was published in 1993.
¶
'I think that what had happened during the Free Speech Movement, the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement, we had formed a community without really knowing it,' Goines said. 'When you have 800 people getting arrested all at once, and then you keep on going, and through People’s Park and the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement, we formed a very strong bond and tended to support one another.'"
6/17/2022, FIRE, From Berkeley to Haverford: Have we forgotten the progressive history of free speech on college campuses?, William Harris
"In the 1960s, students at the University of California, Berkeley formed the storied Free Speech Movement to counter 'the old-school ideas of paternalistic university supervision' that prevented them from fully participating in Vietnam War protests and the civil rights movement. Their civil liberties victories helped catalyze new waves of political expression on college campuses across the country, with the effects reverberating for decades afterward."
6/5/2022, Ricochet, The Myth of the Boomer Bogeyman, Austin Ruse
"And who were the political heroes of the New Left? There was the aforementioned Tom Hayden, who drafted the highly influential 'Port Huron Statement.' There was Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement, founded at Berkeley because the administration would not allow on-campus political activity. He was born in 1942."
6/2/2022, San Francisco Chronicle, A fight for the future of Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley is underway with a car-free movement, Katherine Li
"Spanning 4.5 miles in length with some of the highest volumes of pedestrian foot in the East Bay, Telegraph has a long history of being a vibrant and diverse community. Born from a 19th century telegraph line connecting Oakland to Sacramento, the avenue evolved from being a commercial district into an epicenter for counterculture intellectuals and progressive change in the 1960s during the Free Speech Movement."
6/1/2022, The Daily Californian, People’s Park entered into National Register of Historical Places, Lance Roberts
"Berkeley’s People’s Park has been entered into the National Register of Historic Places for its role in the Free Speech Movement." [Ed. note: People's Park had NO role in the Free Speech Movement because it didn't yet exist. It was a block of houses.]
6/1/2022, Capital & Main, A Photojournalist’s Lens on ‘More Than a Wall’ David Bacon, Gabriel Thompson
"His path toward journalism passed through activism. As a young child in Oakland, he was questioned by the FBI about his blacklisted radical-leftist father. He was later drawn to Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement and got arrested for the first time when he was just 16, for taking part in a sit-in at Sproul Hall, which was then the main administrative building at the University of California at Berkeley."
5/17/2022, The Christian Century, The most important American Old Testament scholar of the last century is Norman Gottwald, Walter Brueggemann
"He worked amid an emerging liberation theology informed by Marxian categories of analysis. More specifically, he lived and worked in the Bay Area as a faculty member of the Graduate Theological Union in the wake of the Vietnam War. The free speech movement in the university pitted protesting students against an unresponsive administration that was supported in its intransigence by the ideological fervor of California governor Ronald Reagan and his board of regents. The conflict—between gods and between social systems—that Gottwald discerned in the biblical tradition was being reperformed before his very eyes."
5/12/2022, NJArts.net, Writing with rhythm and intensity, Lenny Kaye explores 10 great rock scenes in new book, Cindy Stagoff
"He writes about the beat poets, the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley and Ken Kesey’s acid tests."
5/8/2022, Berkeleyside, Why hasn’t UC Berkeley built more student housing?, Frances Dinkelspiel
"Kerr comments in his memoir about how bringing students onto campus rather than having them scattered around Berkeley broke the political hegemony of the conservative Greek system and laid the groundwork for the Free Speech movement in 1964. (The Regents fired Kerr in January 1967 because of the student unrest.)"
5/2/2022, The Baffler, Milosz’s Magic Mountain; Czeslaw Milosz in California, Joy Neumeyer
"While Berkeley’s hills remained a serene retreat, life grew rowdier down below. Bewildered by the succession of Zen Buddhists, Merry Pranksters, and Black Panthers circulating through the East Bay, Milosz played the ornery grandpa to their unseasoned radicals. In the essay collection Visions from San Francisco Bay (1969), he expressed disdain for 'youth brought up in affluence, masquerading in beggars’ clothing and revolutionary ideas.' Like Adorno, he was suspicious of some protesters’ proclivity to violence, and he dismissed Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement as 'trivial.'"
5/2/2022, Higher Ed Dive, Why free speech and diversity and inclusion go hand in hand on campus, Lori White
"This view was shaped by my time as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, the home of the 1960s Free Speech Movement. This movement started because conservative lawmakers wanted to prevent “lefty” students from criticizing the Vietnam War and later expanded to include students speaking out about other critical issues. [Ed. note: the Free Speech Movement concerned itself with organizing for the civil rights movement. The anti-war movement FOLLOWED the Free Speech Movement.]
4/30/2022, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Local activist Dan Kovalik takes on liberal cancel culture, Lorraine Starsky
"As part of the generation whose political teeth were cut in the late 60s and early 70s, I was aware of the vigorous fight against rigid northern university administrators who banned representatives of the NAACP and the South Christian Leadership Conference from coming to campuses to describe firsthand the struggles against segregation. Students were prohibited from staffing information tables and collecting funds for Civil Rights organizations, which were branded as 'outside.' This campus policy was widely practiced around the country. The famed Berkeley Free Speech movement put an end to these restrictions against speech and association." [Ed note: thr FSM established rights of students at public universities]
May, 2022, Princeton Alumni Weekly, His Secret Life: Jeffrey Schevitz ... a Cold War spy for East Germany, Adam Tanner
“In 1964, Schevitz joined Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement. And as U.S. intervention in Vietnam intensified, Schevitz became a fervent antiwar activist. Eventually even liberal Berkeley appeared constraining.”
4/25/2022, LA Weekly, MEET PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE WORLD AS A STAGE: SARA JANE BOYERS, Shana Nys Dambrot
"I started UC Berkeley carrying my dad’s Rollei but majoring in poli-sci, but was dragged home when the Free Speech Movement exploded...."
4/21/2022, The Daily Blog, Passing Down The Power, Chris Trotter
"Big Business, Big Government, Big Unions, Big Universities – Big Gangsters! – there had to be a better way! Because, as the Free Speech Movement’s leader, Mario Savio, so eloquently put it:
¶
'There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all.'
¶
Stirring rhetoric! But if Savio believed the sentiments he was expressing were new, then he was wrong. Outrage at 'the operations of the machine' is not a new thing, it goes back a long way. And the sort of people and institutions who have given voice to that outrage might surprise you."
4/13/2022, Berkeleyside, Will new falcon be named Savio, Takaki or Ned? You decide, Gretchen Kell
"Savio, for Mario Savio (1942-1996). Savio, who briefly attended Berkeley, led free speech demonstrations on campus in 1964 in reaction to the university curbing the activities of civil rights and political groups there. He helped lead the Free Speech Movement, a model for the Vietnam War protest movement."
4/9/2022, Marin Independent Journal, Theater musical director Daniel Savio helps tell, transform stories, Colleen Bidwill
"My father is Mario Savio. He was instrumental in the free speech movement in Berkeley in the 1960s and he was an important part of my life. In 1996, he died about three weeks before the opening night of our school musical, 'Quilt,' which is about the AIDS memorial quilt. My life is divided into before my father died and after he died, because he was that important to me, to my family and sense of community and being in that particular show at that time both was incredibly cathartic and set me on the path of musical theater being so important in my life."
4/2/2022, The Daily Beast, What the Left Keeps Getting Wrong About Free Speech, Ben Burgis
"I’d beg people who’ve learned to roll their eyes (or make jokes about frozen peaches) when they hear the phrase 'free speech' to look into the history of Ida B. Wells’ newspaper The Memphis Free Speech, or the 'free speech fights' waged by radical labor unionists in the early 20th century, or the role of the Free Speech Movement at UC-Berkeley in giving birth to the New Left."
3/31/2022, The Republican Journal, Morris shares ‘Ode to Hunter S. Thompson’ April 24, press release
"Thompson wrote for the New York Herald Tribune, National Observer, The Reporter, The Nation, Spyder (the voice of the free speech movement at Berkeley) and Playboy magazine." [Ed note: Spider Magazine followed the FSM. Thompson's poem was published in the June, 1965 issue.]
3/28/2022, Mondoweiss, Remembering Madeleine Albright and the Berkeley Commencement, Nadia B. Ahmad
"A protest open to the public was held at the Mario Savio steps of Sproul Hall. The Savio Steps are dedicated to the student protester who led the free speech movement.
¶
Savio is famous for his remarks: 'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels … upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!'"
3/25/2022, Muskogee Phoenix, Remember the Ladies: Astronomer, mathematician, statistician and more, Edwyna Synar
"[Elizabeth] Scott joined the mathematics faculty at Berkeley in 1951, although her degrees were in astronomy. In 1962, she became the first female professor in the statistics department. During the 1960s, Scott also addressed social issues, by fundraising for Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement and raising bail for students arrested during the Free Speech Movement."
3/24/2022, Above The Law, Random Neural Firings On Free Speech In America, Jill Switzer
"Whither free speech? I was at Berkeley in the late 1960s, the birthplace of the free speech movement (FSM). Joe Patrice’s post about the latest kerfuffle at Yale Law School (where else?) is just the latest iteration of how much free speech on college campuses has changed in the past 60 years. Berkeley was ground zero for the FSM. I wonder how Mario Savio, the FSM leader, and other FSM leaders would regard today’s happenings, particularly what they would think about cancel culture.
¶
A little background: in the 1950s, McCarthyism was the order of the day and said essentially that there 'was a Red under every bed.' The result: a limitation on student political activities at Cal and elsewhere. Under pressure from Sacramento (Berkeley was and is a state school), Berkeley administrators ordered that students be barred from political activities near campus. Obviously, that did not sit well with the students. In the early 1960s, Cal student Mario Savio and others said 'phooey,' (or less polite language) to those restrictions, and those protests culminated in what became the FSM."
3/18/2022, Berkeley High Jacket, Street Art Displays Berkeley’s Radical Past and Colorful Present, Sofia Rodriguez
"The wall of Amoeba music is home to the People’s History of Telegraph, one of Berkeley’s most famous historic murals. The piece was designed by Osha Neumann, a local civil rights lawyer, and painted by O’Brien Thiele, Janet Kranzberg, Daniel Galvez, and others in 1976. It depicts several scenes associated with the Free Speech Movement that began on campus at the University of California, Berkeley. These include anti-war protests, the emergence of the Black Panther Party, and the People’s Park protest in May of 1969."
3/16/2022, Berkeleyside, Berkeley-reared pianist Michael Wolff pens memoir of ‘jazz, tics and survival’, Andrew Gilbert
"His parent’s marriage didn’t survive the move and his mother, Elise Blumenfeld, threw herself into Berkeley’s two primary pursuits in the 1960s, politics and education. She protested with the Free Speech Movement and against the Vietnam War and earned a series of degrees, including a doctorate in social work."
March 2022, Harper's Bazaar, Fanny Singer reflects on the legacy of her mother, Alice Waters - and the part she's played in it., Fanny Singer
"An ethos of collaboration and dialogue and an emphasis on the power of gathering have been central to Chez Panisse since its beginnings amid the turmoil of the Vietnam War and the free-speech movement. Activists, writers, artists, and farmers have always animated the dining rooms of Chez Panisse and have given the restaurant a raison d'être."
3/4/2022, Jacksonville Journal-Courier, Dr. Allan A. Metcalf,
"Allan returned to the U.S., switching coasts to the University of California, Berkeley - just in time for the Free Speech Movement. What more could a lover of language ask for while working on his Ph.D.? "
3/3/2022, San Francisco Chronicle, David Melnick, a Bay Area poetry pioneer and co-founder of Gay Artists and Writers Kollective, dies at 83, Sam Whiting
"He then transferred from the University of Chicago to UC Berkeley, arriving just in time for the Free Speech Movement in 1964. He was part of the Sproul Plaza sit-in around the police car holding Jack Weinberg, a leader of the movement, and was arrested and sent off to Santa Rita Jail."
3/2/2022, History News Network, INSIDE THE STUDENT MOVEMENT IN THE SIXTIES: AN INTERVIEW WITH RENOWNED SEATTLE MUNICIPAL LEADER AND AUTHOR NICK LICATA ON HIS NEW MEMOIR, Robin Lindley
"Nick Licata: The student power movement began with the Free Speech Movement (FSM) on the Berkeley University of California campus in the fall of 1964. There were sit-ins in response to the administration banning organizing and soliciting funds for off-campus political action groups. Police subsequently arrested 773 students, and a student strike shut down the campus for five days.
¶
The core movement philosophy was that students, and workers by extension, should have some say over the governance of the places where they studied and worked. That belief spread across the nation's universities resulting in student organizing for institutional changes on and off-campus for a decade."
3/2/2022, Current, A patriotism reclamation narrative?, John Fea
"Earlier, the unpatriotic culprit was the heterodox left of the 1960s, a collection of dissenting social movements that stirred the vehemence of public intellectuals, notably John Schaar, a professor of political theory at Berkeley and erstwhile fellow traveler of the movements--Schaar had been an influence on the student-led Free Speech Movement in 1964. In a later essay, 'The Case for Patriotism,' Schaar would issue a rejoinder to the student movements he helped spur. 'The patriot,' Schaar wrote, 'is one who is grateful for the legacy and recognizes that the legacy makes him a debtor. There is a whole way of being in the world, captured best by the word reverence, which defines life by debts.'"
2/11/2022, Michigan Today, The first Teach-In, James Tobin
"Stephen Spitz - 1968 [Comment]: 'I remember meeting students from Berkeley who had been part of the free speech moment there. It was exciting and mind blowing to say the least.'"
2/10/2022, Cannon Beach Gazette, Column: Author of thrillers, followed by sharks, Chicago and the long sixties, Joseph Bernt
"Other changes since WWII that contributed to the shattering were McCarthyism, the FBI's harassment of dissidents, the Free Speech Movement begun at Berkeley and liberated college students throughout the nation, the success of the 1964 Goldwater campaign in winning five traditionally Democratic states in the Deep South, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965."
2/8/2022, American Theatre Magazine, THEATRE HISTORY FEBRUARY 8, 2022,
"Barbara Garson’s political parody MacBird! opened Off-Broadway this month at the Village Gate Theatre, where it ran for 386 performances, starring Stacy Keach and Rue McClanahan. The play was developed by Garson when she was an undergrad at Berkeley in the ‘60’s. At a rally for the Free Speech Movement, Garson was made a slip of the tongue when referring to the country’s First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson; she meant to compare her to Lady MacBeth but instead said 'Lady MacBird.' The idea of an audacious adaptation of Macbeth with LBJ and Lady Bird as the leads came to her in that instant."
2/3/2022, The Chronicle of Higher Education, From Legendary Activist to Adjunct Agitator, Hollis Robbins
"As an undergraduate, Savio had spent the summer of 1964 - Freedom Summer - in Mississippi, registering Black voters. He returned to Berkeley in the fall with a fiery commitment to freedom in all its forms.. At the time, Clark Kerr, president of the University of California, sought to keep political speech off the UC campuses. But students across the political spectrum wanted to advocate for their beliefs, to meet and pass out pamphlets on Sproul Plaza. Frustrated, Savio united left and right in common cause. On December 2, 1964, Savio helped inspire the speech movement's culminating sit-in with a passionate appeal that would become the most famous dissident speech ever given on an American college campus. A university ought not to be a machine for turning students, 'raw materials,' into a product to be bought by the university's clients, but a place where freedom could be studied, learned, and exercised. If the university couldn't live up to that ideal, its operations should be interrupted:"
2/2/2022, Eureka Times Standard, Letters to the editor: Where have all the hippies gone?, Eric Cortez
"I have seen college students questioning everything and everyone over 30. Now they buy everything the 'establishment' feeds them. They hide in their safe spaces, regurgitating what they hear in their bubbles. From the free speech movement at Berkeley to now canceling anyone who threatens their safe space with opposing ideas."
2/2/2022, Berkeleyside, Remembering Peter Haberfeld, labor attorney who worked alongside Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, Robbin Henderson
"Peter was proud of his arrest record: During the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement"
2/1/2022, Wall Street Journal, Spotify and Rogan, the Real Adults, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr
"Neil Young found a way to remind you he exists. So did Joni Mitchell. These children of the '60s may not recall the spirit of the Berkeley free speech movement, but they do the era's sanctimony, with their ultimatum to Spotify to stop streaming their music if it continues to host the antic, disobedient podcast of comedian and actor Joe Rogan."
2/1/2022, Contrasting the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement to now, Stephen Hicks
"The Berkeley Free Speech Movement, was a student-led initiative to increase and enhance the free-speech rights of students."
1/30/2022, 48 Hills, Peter Haberfeld, lawyer, organizer, and legendary community activist, dies, Stephen Bingham
"Peter was proud of his record of four arrests:¶
-during the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement;¶
-while serving as a poll watcher during the election campaign of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to elect candidates to the state's legislature in 1967;¶
-at People's Park in 1969;¶
-and with his wife Victoria Griffith in San Francisco protesting the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq."
1/29/2022, Stacker, Most liberal colleges in America, Caroline Delbert
"The University of California, Berkeley, [#24] has been the symbol of the progressive movement for at least the second half of the 20th century. The campus was instrumental in the Free Speech Movement of 1964, opposition to the Vietnam War, and the People's Park Protest of 1969-where the National Guard was called against the student protesters."
1/28/2022, The New Republic, Hunter S. Thompson and the Four Secrets to Gonzo Journalism's Success, Peter Richardson
"By that time, Thompson had struck up a correspondence with Jann Wenner, who invited him to contribute to Rolling Stone. In many ways, it was an odd match. Wenner often recruited fellow students from the University of California, Berkeley, where he wrote for the student newspaper and covered the Free Speech Movement. Ten years older than Wenner, Thompson was an Air Force veteran who started as a sportswriter and never earned a college degree."
1/27/2022, Jacobin Magazine, Mike Parker, a Life Well-Lived on the Left, Gay Semel
"In 1964, Mike moved to Berkeley, California, as a graduate student in political science and became part of the political ferment of the moment. Mike was a leader of the campus Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and he was on the Steering Committee of the Free Speech Movement (FSM), one of the wellsprings of the 1960s movement for change. The university had imposed a rule, under pressure from corporate politicians like former US senator William Knowland, banning the recruitment of other students to join the civil rights movement.
¶
Mike Parker was always drawing activists around him. One of them was Senator Bernie Sanders.
The FSM not only won free speech at UC Berkeley but also helped spawn a new generation of activists. It was then that Mike, along with well-known Marxist scholar Hal Draper and other young activists, formed the Independent Socialist Club (ISC). The ISC stood for 'socialism from below,' meaning that working people themselves would shape the socialist struggle. It rejected the existing Communist states as another form of class society. The ISC recognized that middle-class students could be an important pool of activists, but that socialists should orient toward the diverse working class."
1/20/2022, LaborNotes, Rest in Power Mike Parker, 1940-2022, Alexandra Bradbury
"Mike's political work throughout his life stretched beyond the labor movement. As a college student in Chicago he was a leader in the Student Peace Union and the Young People's Socialist League (along with Senator Sanders). In Berkeley in the 1960s he was active in the Free Speech Movement and was instrumental in building an alliance between the Black Panther Party and the Peace and Freedom Party."
1/17/2022, DePauw University, VIRTUAL READING ROOM (FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION),
"R. Cohen and R.E. Zelnik (eds), The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s, 2002 University of California Press"
1/14/2022, The Press Democrat, West County High School students walk out of classes again over name change reversal, Austin Murphy
"Back at the Plaza - named, incidentally, for Mario Savio, who gained renown five decades ago as a member of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement - Hartsock was followed by senior KatieAnn Nguyen, the morning's most Savio-like speaker."
1/14/2022, Ultimate Classic Rock, 55 Years Ago: Hippies 'Turn on, Tune in, Drop out' at Human Be-In, Martin Kielty
"'We had realized that the change in consciousness and culture we were experiencing had to be communicated throughout the world,' [Allen] Cohen wrote later.
¶
'We felt that the ideals of Peace, Love and Community based on the transcendental vision could transform the world and end the war in Vietnam. In short, we wanted to turn the world on. ... The anti-war and free-speech movement in Berkeley thought the hippies were too disengaged and spaced out. Their influence might draw the young away from resistance to the war. The hippies thought the anti-war movement was doomed to endless confrontations with the establishment which would recoil with violence and fascism. We decided … we had to bring the two poles together.'"
1/12/2022, Monterey Herald, Barbara Shipnuck 1942 - 2022,
"Her tour guide, arranged by a mutual friend, was David Shipnuck, who had been raised in the California wine country and as an undergrad at Cal was part of the nascent Berkeley Free Speech Movement."
1/12/2022, Anchorage Daily News, Letter: The Free Speech Movement, Lee Felsenstein
"Stephan Paliwoda's letter (ADN, Jan. 7) describing the parallels between the Jan. 6, 2021, events at the Capitol with his description of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 repeats many statements from the time that were then and still are either not true or misrepresentations.
¶
As a founding member of the Board of the Free Speech Movement Archives, I would like to direct anyone interested to an important resource of documents, photographs and publications from that time - our website, located at www.fsm-a.org.
¶
I invite your readers to peruse our archive in order to make their own judgments as to his interpretations and conclusions."
1/7/2022, Anchorage Daily News, Letter: Coup parallels, Stephan Paliwoda
"When I was a student at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s, I was witness to many political demonstrations, including a series in the fall of 1964 called the 'Free Speech Movement.' These demonstrations by students and nonstudents were fomented by politically radical part-time students, who promoted a lie that the university's administration was working to curtail the exercise of free speech at Cal." [Ed note: the FSM was a broad right-to-left coalition which took on an inept and dishonest admnistation. And prevailed.]
12/20/2021, The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley commencement for class of 2021 speaks on preservation, Luis Saldana
"[Sahar] Formoli said. 'We are a part of a university that led the free speech movement; a university that didn't back down from a fight for justice; a university that, regardless of what the world said, marched forward for a fight for justice.'" [Ed note: The Berkeley FSM did not lead another FSM. That was it. It did inspire further youth activism world-wide.]
12/17/2021, Berkeleyside, Looking for a good read? Check out these 9 nonfiction books with Berkeley connections, Frances Dinkelspiel
"Czeslaw Milosz: A California Life
¶
He was at odds with the young protesters of the Free Speech and anti-Vietnam movements."
12/15/2021, The Daily Californian, ASUC EAVP supports student-led movement at Turkish university, Riya Chopra
"Master's office put out the statement in response to student leaders of the movement, who reached out to the ASUC requesting support. Despite being across the world, they did so because UC Berkeley is known internationally for being home to the Free Speech Movement - a famous example of student resistance succeeding, said Bailey Henderson, EAVP federal government relations director.
¶
One graphic created by the Bogaziçi University movement depicts a student at a recent protest standing on top of a car along with a 1964 photo of Berkeley student Mario Savio doing the same thing in a famous student demonstration on campus, said Master."
12/12/2021, Berkeley Daily Planet, SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces, Gar Smith
"A newly published book by Ellen Shrecker, The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s, includes a chapter on Berkeley's Free Speech Movement (Chapter 4: 'The Berkeley Invention').
¶
New York University (NYU) history prof Noam Chomsky (who taught at UCB during the Sixties) has called Schrecker's book a 'careful and enlightening account.' NYU history professor Robert Cohen calls the book 'by far the best yet on the national campus political scene, which is not surprising since Ellen is the author of the classic work, No Ivory Tower, on academic McCarthyism.'"
12/10/2021, Columbia University Political Science, Robert Jervis, 1940-2021,
"In 1962, he entered the PhD program for Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley, where he distinguished himself by sleeping on a closet shelf and 'almost getting arrested' for his activities in the Free Speech Movement."
12/11/2021, San Francisco Chronicle, Ronald Reagan's ghost runs the UC system. Expect strikes until that changes, Sammy Feldblum and John Schmidt
"The explosion of free speech protests at UC Berkeley in 1964, however, diluted voter support for higher education in California. The student movement became a central aspect of Ronald Reagan's gubernatorial campaign the following year, which he launched with the promise to 'clean up the mess at Berkeley.'"
12/7/2021, City Limits, All Ages Bond Over Oysters in The Bronx, Khushba Ahmed, Filomena Baker, Fatoumata Doumbouya and Jeshua Guerrero Lopez
"[Barbara] Zahm, who describes herself as a 'senior activist' originally found her calling in social justice as a college student in the 1960s protesting the Vietnam War and working in the Free Speech Movement.
¶
As a student at University of California-Berkeley, Zahm was horrified to hear about the human rights violations during the Vietnam War. While some of her friends were drafted into the military, she became part of the resistance.
¶
'I couldn't go on with my own life until the war ended,' she said.
¶
As a part of the G.I movement, Zahm participated in protests and organized around military bases, asking veterans to share their experiences. After college, she produced two documentaries: 'Bombs Will Make the Rainbows Break,' portraying the fear of nuclear war that Americans felt in the 1980s, and 'The Last Graduation,' chronicling the education system in prisons and how many such programs were eventually wiped out following the Crime Bill in the 1990s."
12/5/2021, San Francisco Chronicle, Phyllis Willett: June 1, 1945 - July 9, 2021,
"Born into a politically radical family in Brooklyn, New York, Willett moved to Berkeley in 1963. She became active in the Free Speech Movement and played an integral role in a community of activists who fought for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam."
12/3/2021, Easy Reader & Peninsula Magazine, Widman helped preserve small town Hermosa Beach during Good Government era, Kevin Cody
"[Lance] Widman began teaching government at El Camino in 1971, after earning a graduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley, where he lived in Sproul Hall during the Free Speech movement Mario Savio led from the steps of Sproul Hall."
12/3/2021, Los Angeles Review of Books, Semipublic Intellectual Sessions: "Where's 'the Discourse'?", Lili Loofbourow, Daphne A. Brooks, Jesse McCarthy, Sarah Marshall, Lexis-Olivier Ray
"Chancellor Nicholas Dirks at UC Berkeley, when he was commemorating the Free Speech Movement, specifically said that free speech and civility are two sides of the same coin."
12/2/2021, Washington Examiner, School principles, Virginia Aabram
"UC Berkeley had bowed to protesters' demands to end a ban on political activity and fundraising on campus. Graduate student Mario Savio proclaimed:
¶
'It's been said that we've been revolutionaries and all this sort of thing. In a way, that's true. We've gone back to a traditional view of the university. The traditional view of the university is a community of scholars, of faculty, of students … who get together with complete honesty, who bring the hard light of free inquiry to bear upon important matters. ... We're asking that there be no restrictions on the context of speech save those provided by the courts, and that's an enormous amount of freedom.'"
12/2/2021, Associated Press, This Day in History: December 2, Associated Press
"On this date:¶
Mario Savio, facing camera foreground, leader of the so-called Free Speech Movement at the University of California, gathered a crowd of some 3,000 students in front of Sproul Hall on the Berkeley campus on Dec. 2, 1964. Savio, 21, told the crowd that sit-in demonstrators planned to occupy the second floor of Sproul Hall until the administration dropped disciplinary action against four free speech leaders. (AP Photo)"
11/30/2021, New York Times, Jim Warren, Early Influencer in Personal Computing, Dies at 85, Steve Lohr
"He embraced the liberal politics of the region, marching in rallies to protest the war in Vietnam and supporting the Free Speech Movement, centered at the University of California at Berkeley."
11/29/2021, Rocky Mountain Collegian, CSU's history of student activism is worth celebrating, JD Meltzner
"College campuses often serve as a ground zero of sorts for national social movements that have lived on into the 21st century.
¶
Some notable examples of collegiate activism may come to mind first: the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, The Harvard student strike of 1969 against the Vietnam War or even the tragic shooting at the Kent State University protests. But what about Fort Collins' own Colorado State University? It may seem odd to consider a former agricultural school in Northern Colorado as a hotbed of social activism and protest, but it's the truth."
11/26/2021, Akron Beacon Journal, Commentary: Interests of 1960s anti-war students, Black Panthers sometimes intersected, Rick Feinberg
"My primary focus as a student activist was the Vietnam War. However, both the anti-war movement and the Panthers were connected to the civil rights movement. Berkeley's 1964 Free Speech Movement, which helped launch a decade of student activism, coalesced in response to a university edict that prohibited civil rights organizing on campus."
11/19/2021, The Progressive, Koch's Campus Free Speech Ploy, Isaac Kamola, Ralph Wilson
"Much of the [conservative & libertarian] free speech movement on college campuses is driven by the Koch donor network."
11/17/2021, The Daily Sentinel, Letter, Charlie Quimby
"'Don't trust anyone over 30' originated out of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley that championed the student right to political speech on college campuses, which in turn helped spark broader national activism related to civil rights and ending the Vietnam War.
¶
Berkeley activist Jack Weinberg, not Bob Dylan, first said 'we don't trust anyone over 30' to dismiss a reporter who kept asking him who was really behind the protests, implying that the Communist Party was pulling the strings. The off-hand quote got picked up by newspapers nationwide, sparking outrage from the establishment and adoption by the movement."
11/11/2021, Philadelphia Inquirer, 'Anti-woke' University of Austin is right that college is 'broken,' but its founders are wrong about everything else, Will Bunch
"But I also think the far greater threat to free speech on college campuses is the same danger that animated the Berkeley Free Speech Movement way back in 1964: a political clampdown on academic freedom and expression from an all-powerful government."
11/10/2021, The Williams Record, With free speech under attack at MIT, Williams must commit to free speech, Niko Malhotra
"It is disheartening that the university that was home to the Berkeley Free Speech movement of the 1960s is unwilling, in 2021, to stand up for the principles of free speech and academic freedom so integral to its history."
11/9/2021, Associated Press, Pandemic sparks union activity where it was rare: Bookstores, Hillel Italie
"Moes Books was founded in the late 1950s by the activist Moe Moskowitz, part of the Free Speech and anti-war movements in the 1960s. Moe's is now run by his daughter, Doris Moskowitz, who has spoken of the store's egalitarian atmosphere and its tradition of valuing social consciousness alongside making a profit."
11/1/2021, The Daily Californian, People's Park recommended for National Register of Historic Places, Christopher Ying
"'People's Park qualifies for the National Register due to its critical role in the Civil Rights, Anti-Vietnam War and finally the Student Protest Movement,' said Joe Liesner, a member of the People's Park Council, in an email. 'More specifically, it is the Free Speech Movement that changed the entire character of protest in the 1960s and ignited nation-wide campus results.'" [Ed note: consider the youth movement as the larger context for the student movement; and the FSM as having little to do with People's Park.]
10/25/2021, New York Times, The Past and Future of People's Park, Soumya Karlamangla
"Berkeley had become the center of the nation's counterculture movement, home to huge protests about the Free Speech Movement and against the Vietnam War. And thousands of those left-leaning activists had settled on the affordable south side of campus, exactly where officials were ousting residents."
10/24/2021, Omaha World-Herald, Dr. Richard Zevitz 1944 - 2020,
"Like any respectable young liberal of his day, he then packed his car with Joan Baez records and moved to California on the heels of the Free Speech Movement, where (rather than live out his twenties in a commune) he pursued a doctorate in Criminology from the University of California Berkeley."
10/22/2021, Berkleyside, Apartment building could rise at former site of Albatross Pub, Nico Savidge
"The space at 1822 San Pablo Ave. has been vacant for nearly a year, since its tenant for more than five decades, the historic Albatross Pub, closed its doors. The business — known to locals as 'The Bird' — began as a gathering space for members of the free speech movement and quickly became a destination for nearby residents and UC Berkeley students."
10/18/2021, Tablet Magazine, A Park for the People, Jonah Raskin
"Indeed, the spirit of the '60s-which was born in part during the '64 Free Speech Movement and that flowered in '69 when hippies, freaks, and radicals turned lot 1875-2 into People's Park-has never really ended in 'Berzerkeley,' as it has been characterized, perhaps unfairly." [Ed note: there's a good case to be made for the Sixties having started in 1960.]
10/17/2021, Berkeley Daily Planet, SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces, Gar Smith
"As NYU Prof. Robby Cohen (author of The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s) notes: 'Yes, a Cal student was subpoenaed by HUAC in 1960, Douglas Wachter, a soph, who was a red diaper baby and CORE activist. Another Cal student, Meisenbach, was falsely accused of assaulting a cop at the SF City Hall protest…. Or course all this was 4 years before the FSM."" [Ed note: FSM leader Michael Rossman was another vector. In 1961 he became the Recording Secretary of BASCAHCUA, Bay Area Student Committee for the Abolition of the House Committee on Un-American Activities]
10/14/2021, East Bay Times, Former Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times journalist Larry Spears dies at 86, Andrew McGall
"From the 1960s into the 70s, he covered UC Berkeley during its turbulent period of student activism, including the Free Speech Movement and the civil rights and Vietnam war protests."
10/11/2021, Berkeley Daily Planet, The City of Berkeley Should Not Install a Public Toilet in Front of the People's Park Mural, Osha Neumann
"And now you want to block 10 ½ feet of it with your toilet. What section will it be? Maybe the section depicting the Free-Speech Movement, with Mario Savio's words from the famous speech he gave standing atop the police car on Sproul Plaza:
¶
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus -- and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it -- that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!"
10/11/2021, The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley must accurately portray its relationship with People's Park, Editorial Board
"Campus should not boast about the Free Speech Movement while sugarcoating the history of People's Park and the opposition its development still faces." [Ed note: apparantly what they have in common is that they are both historical.]
10/10/2021, TheNational, Columbus Day 2021: What the holiday means and why many in the US want to change it, Katarina Holtzapple
"Berkeley, California, the birthplace to the campus free speech movement in the 1960s, was the first city to adopt Indigenous Peoples' Day in 1992 as a counter-protest to a 500th anniversary celebration of Columbus's arrival."
10/8/2021, The Daily Californian, 'I'm not American, I'm from Berkeley', Stanley Stott-Hall
"Free Speech Movement Cafe's namesake was, in part, triggered by a House Un-American Activities Committee subpoena issued for a UC Berkeley student. It is in the name; the very idea of 'un-American' is synonymous with Berkeley." [Ed note: “triggered” is an overstatement. There were many, many contributing circumstances. https://www.fsm-a.org/Earlier%20Student%20Activism.html]
10/7/2021, San Francisco Chronicle, Alice Waters on the future of Chez Panisse and why she doesn't believe in retirement, Janelle Bitker
"Waters doesn't plan to retire because she doesn't believe in the concept, which she described as 'an American idea' of working too hard and then going off on a cruise ship and feeling lost late in life. She credits attending UC Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement for her anti-careerist attitude, lacking traditional expectations for Chez Panisse and instead thinking about how she simply wants to live life. She still wants to start a commune, perhaps on a farm in Italy."
10/6/2021, BroadwayWorld, Syracuse Stage Opens Season For Live Performance With EUREKA DAY, Stephi Wild
"'I think to varying degrees, many of the clichés about the Bay Area and Berkeley specifically, are true: very smart, very to the left, wanting to feel like it is always more to the left than anywhere else because of the legacy of Berkeley in the 60s as a place where so many progressive movements-the free speech movement, the disability rights movement-so many progressive movements got their start. So there is a feeling of always wanting to be at the forefront,' [Jonathan ] Spector said. 'That makes it a particularly interesting place to examine these moments where different sets of values come into conflict and where you reach irreconcilable conflicts to values.'" [Ed note: The Berkeley Free Speech Movement ended on 4/28/1965.]
10/1/2021, NNY360, Looking Backward,
"1964: The first Free Speech Movement protest erupts spontaneously on the University of California, Berkeley campus; students demanded an end to the ban of on-campus political activities."
10/1/2021, KALW Radio, Almanac,
"1964 - The Free Speech Movement is launched on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley."
9/30/2021, Berkeleyside, The end of the 1960s? Regents vote to put housing in People's Park., Frances Dinkelspiel
"The area that is now People's Park was once covered with classic Berkeley brown shingle homes. In 1968, the university started buying up houses and bulldozing them, ostensibly because it wanted the young radicals living dispersed. But for seven months, the land sat empty and became a muddy parking lot.
¶
The Vietnam War was raging, the Black Panthers were amassing influence and Berkeley had already seen a decade of political protests and cultural ferment, including the 1964 Free Speech Movement and the Third World Liberation Front strike. Many young people saw the university as complicit with the government and the ruling class."
9/30/2021, San Francisco Chronicle, Controversial housing plan for Berkeley's historic People's Park could get final nod this week, Nanette Asimov
"Before the late 1960s, there was no People's Park, just the homes of professors and others who had no wish to sell. In 1967, the regents used eminent domain to force them out. UC bulldozed the homes - then ran out of money. What had been a block of cozy houses became a deserted junkyard.
¶
Students planted a garden in the rubble-strewn field, expecting to turn it into a park where the ideals of the Free Speech Movement of 1964 could percolate. Instead, Gov. Ronald Reagan sent police in to remove the plants and fence the site."
9/30/2021, Culver City News, Eleanor Osgood 1945 - 2021,
"She then transferred to the University of California at Berkeley where she was involved in the Free Speech Movement before earning her BA."
9/27/2021, Under The Radar, The Beach Boys - Reflecting on the 50th Anniversary of "Surf's Up", Austin Saalman
"'Disney Girls' is followed by the somewhat disconcerting 'Student Demonstration Time,' Mike Love's confounding attempt to offer his interpretations of several major events such as the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the People's Park protests, the burning of Isla Vista's Bank of America, and the Kent State massacre. Set to the raw, fuzzed-out melody of R&B standard 'Riot in Cell Block Number Nine,' 'Student Demonstration Time' is certainly one of the group's heaviest songs to date, rollicking to and fro as Love barks cultural observations through a bullhorn, but ultimately achieves little for the band in terms of integrating them into the generation's youth culture."
9/24/2021, The New York Times, Charles G. Sellers, Historian Who Upset the Postwar Consensus, Dies at 98, Clay Risen
"Among the first things Dr. Sellers did when he got to Berkeley was join the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. Working with the chapter, he fought against housing and job discrimination around Berkeley, and in 1961 he traveled with a contingent to Mississippi to support the Freedom Riders. Dr. Sellers was arrested, but he was let off with a suspended sentence.
¶
In 1964 he was among the first and most vocal faculty members to support the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, which opposed efforts by the administration to curtail campus activism.
¶
His involvement began when he saw one of his colleagues arrested during a protest and put in a police car. Immediately, Dr. Sellers joined several students in surrounding the car for hours.
¶
He recalled sitting on top of the car when another colleague passed by.
¶
'Charles, what are you doing up there?' his colleague asked.
¶
'What are you doing down there, Waldo?' Dr. Sellers replied, paraphrasing a quotation from his hero, Henry David Thoreau, who had been imprisoned for not paying taxes as a protest against slavery and the war against Mexico. ('Waldo' referred to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who visited Thoreau in prison.)
Dr. Sellers's radicalism won him few friends among the faculty, but the soft-spoken Southerner became an inspiration for Berkeley's more militant students. He introduced Malcolm X when he came to speak on campus, and he later spoke to a crowd of 7,000 at an anti-Vietnam War rally."
9/22/2021, University of Toledo, UToledo Virtual Gandhi Lecture To Feature Peace Activist, Filmmaker, press release
"[Michael] Nagler is professor emeritus of Classics and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, where he founded the Peace and Conflict Studies Program and taught upper-division courses on nonviolence, meditation and a seminar on the meaning of life. Nagler also participated in the Free Speech Movement."
9/18/2021, Berkeleyside, Remembering Frank Daar, who helped bring leftist Berkeley candidates to power in the '70s, Roberta Brooks and Loni Hancock
"Frank met his adored wife, Sheila, at a demonstration during the Free Speech Movement in the mid-1960s."
9/16/2021, University of Saskatchewan News, A student for life, Chris Putnam
"Born and raised in California, Cowsill earned his first degree-a Bachelor of Arts in English-from the University of California, Berkeley in 1969. He was profoundly affected by the famous Berkeley Free Speech Movement, in which thousands of students protested for their rights to speech and academic freedom on campus.
¶
Cowsill remembers walking to Berkeley as 'a naïve 17-year-old' one morning in December 1964 and witnessing hundreds of peaceful protesters being hauled away by police in one of the largest peacetime arrests in American history.
¶
'It just shattered all of my illusions about being in that country.'
¶
He became involved in the free speech, civil rights and antiwar movements. By the time he graduated from Berkeley, Cowsill felt alienated from his home country and was determined to move elsewhere. He and his wife emigrated to Canada in 1973."
9/10/2021, KCRW Radio, Celebrating 50 years of Chez Panisse with Alice Waters, Evan Kleiman
"'I was swept away by the free speech movement, civil rights. I never lost my optimism because of that time, and I felt like if we all got together to do something, we could,' says Alice Waters of empowering people to value sustainability."
9/1/2021, LA Progressive, Is GOP Flirtation with Fascism Becoming a Marriage?, H. Scott Prosterman
"Ironically, the Free Speech Movement arose in Berkeley and San Francisco from 1960 through its formal founding in 1964, as a direct reaction to the last years of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)." [Ed note: The problem with claiming that the 1964 FSM started in 1960 is that there were prior such movements, as the 1934 UCLA Free Speech Movement. Read Robert Cohen, "When the Old left was Young." The people who were active in 1964 and 1960 would call this the "student movement."]
8/20/2021, The Australian Financial Review, How the civil rights movement shaped this BCG Australia co-founder, James Thomson
"Drawn by the promise of the free speech movement centred on the University of California, Berkeley, he [Colin Carter] took an apartment near People's Park, which would become the centre of protests that became so violent that the area was put under martial law."
8/17/2021, Calaveras Enterprise, Gilbert Gerald Agatha,
"...as a Highway Patrol Officer....He worked the back-to-back hotspots in the Watts Riots and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement."
8/12/2021, New York Times, Leon Litwack, 91, Dies; Changed How Scholars Portray Black History, Clay Risen
"He returned to Berkeley in 1964, just as the campus was roiling with student activism. Unlike many of his fellow professors, Professor Litwack fully supported the protesters — he canceled his class the day after the police arrested 800 of them during a sit-in at Sproul Plaza."
8/12/2021, New York Magazine, Ben Shapiro's Book Is a Glib Rationale for Right-Wing Authoritarianism, Jonathan Chait
"In another odd aside, he argues that the 1960s Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was actually 'authoritarian.' The students simply wanted power, and they seized university land and gave it over to … unregulated space for the exercise of free speech." [Ed note: Students had long been free to engage in free speech at a spot on the south edge of campus. In Sept. 1964 the UC admin abruptly banned it. There was then no free speech space on campus.]
7/30/2021, The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley ranked 2nd-most progressive college in US, Nadia Farjami
"As for campus's score in the freedom of speech category, the 1960s saw UC Berkeley student Mario Savio light the fire for the Free Speech Movement, propelling a legacy of student activism in the years following, according to a previous article from The Daily Californian." [Ed. note: UC's legacy of activism predates Mario Savio. For example, there was a 1934 Free Speech movement at UCLA and 1949-51 student protests at UCLA and UCB over the Speaker Ban. In May 1961, Malcolm X was not allowed to speak at UCB. More here: https://www.fsm-a.org/Prior%20Student%20Movements.html]
7/28/2021, The-CNN-Wire, Remembering the most important civil rights hero most Americans have never heard of, Peniel E. Joseph
"Freedom Summer's influence--and [Bob] Moses'--persisted throughout the 1960s and beyond. White participants, such as Mario Savio, organized social justice movements like the Berkeley Free Speech Movement on college campuses that amplified work already being done by Black activists."
7/27/2021, Counterpunch, Ben Shapiro's Authoritarian Moment, John K. Wilson
"Shapiro is also attracted to conspiracy theories, some of them quite odd. He denounces Berkeley's 1964 Free Speech Movement at the University of California, claiming that it 'was actually a mere pretense designed at gaining power and control.' (p. 89) In reality, the Free Speech Movement united liberals and conservatives alike who objected to campus bans on political speech, but Shapiro argues that 'the students had plenty of areas designated for such activity' and happily endorses speech zones suppressing free speech on campus, at least when he thinks conservatives are not the victims." [Ed note: before the FSM the only free speech area was OFF CAMPUS.]
7/22/2021, Washington Examiner, The Left's war on speech is not the first time it betrayed its values, Samuel Kim
"Democrats' cooperation with social media companies to quell speech is a far cry from the free speech advocacy that came to define the old Left. Liberals would not have dreamed of silencing heterodox voices when they were under attack from college administrators less than 60 years ago.
¶
In fact, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, which came to define student free speech rights, was supported by activist liberal groups like Students for a Democratic Society and civil rights groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee." [Ed note: in 1964 these 2 groups would have termed themselves radical. The FSM was a broad left-right coalition, including Youth for Goldwater, Young Republicans, Catholics for Social Action, and Young Socialist Alliance.]
7/21/2021, The Daily Californian, Free Speech Movement Cafe reopens after extended closure, Lianna Leung
"'Berkeley has long been an epicenter of activism, from free speech to social justice,' Dupuis [Elizabeth Dupuis, director of Doe, Moffitt and the Subject Specialty Libraries] said in an email. 'The Library proudly serves as home to the Free Speech Movement Café as a reminder of the impact that everyday people, working together in common cause, can have in shaping our world.'"
7/19/2021, Dallas, TX, Patch, Liberals Began The '60s Pushing Free Speech. Now They're 'Woke', Kevin Phinney
"And here's the real problem: Policing people's speech does not change their beliefs, and we've been through this before when the Berkeley Free Speech Movement sprang up in the wake of the communist witch hunts of the 1950s.
¶
In that moment, liberals decided that silencing opposing viewpoints was antithetical to rigorous debate, and after multiple protests and arrests pressing for free speech, the faculty at Berkeley voted overwhelmingly to support their students." [Ed note: the 1964 FSM was a broad coalition, not just liberals and radicals.]
7/16/2021, The Daily Californian, Berkeley staple Chez Panisse celebrates 50th anniversary, Kavya Gupta
"Waters attended UC Berkeley in 1964 during the height of Mario Savio's Free Speech Movement, which she cited as having greatly changed her life. She added that the university system was one of the forerunners of 'school-supported agriculture.'"
7/15/2021, Santa Cruz Sentinel, Revolutionary Persistence: Musical Director Daniel Savio on S.F. Mime Troupe's 62nd Season, John Malkin
"'I was born in 1980, 16 years after the Free Speech Movement,' Daniel Savio explains. 'So, I grew up thinking of my father, Mario, as somewhat of a heroic figure. And my mother as well, but she was not as much of a public figure, although she was also involved. I grew up thinking of progressive politics as pretty normal.'"
6/27/2021, The Berkeley Daily Planet, SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces, Gar Smith
"The Berkeley vets who oversee the Free Speech Movement Archives are frequently compelled to correct misleading references to the FSM. Recently an article in The Oxford Student surfaced that alleged a link between the Free Speech rebellion and Marvin Gaye's mega-hit 'What's Going On.' (The song is famous for its refrain: 'Mother, mother/ There's too many of you crying. Brother, brother, brother/ There's far too many of you dying.')
¶
The article asserted that: 'The song was inspired by an incident of police brutality during protests in Berkeley, California as part of the Free Speech Movement and protests of the Vietnam War.'
¶
FSM vet Anita Medal took a deep dive into the history of the sixties and discovered that there was, in fact, a Berkeley link to Gaye's 'Anthem for the Ages.' But is didn't have anything to do with the FSM or the anti-war movement.
¶
Medal doubted the alleged FSM-link from the get-go. 'We weren't dying or heavily black. It was black sons, brothers and fathers who were being disproportionately conscripted and senselessly dying in Vietnam,' she initially reported. 'I doubt it's a quote from Gaye.'
¶
Medal doubled down researching the source of the idea and finally announced the surprising news: 'It's neither the FSM nor the Vietnam War. It was People's Park!'"
6/22/2021, The National Post, Analysis: The 'feedback loop' that pits students against politicians in the campus free speech crisis, Joseph Brean
"The recent moves by Conservative governments in Ontario and Alberta to enforce codes of campus free expression are the first major Canadian illustrations of this 'feedback loop' that has become a major strategy of right-wing American campaigning since the mid-1960s, when Reagan capitalized on student protests at the University of California, Berkeley, to win the California governor's race by a landslide.
¶
True to form, it began with a campus free speech crisis. The Free Speech Movement was a major student protest against a university policy banning political activity on campus, which was focused on the anti-war and civil rights movements, and a key moment in the emerging counterculture. Berkeley became a battleground in the culture war. To Reagan, who was seeking to unseat a two-term Democratic governor, it also became an opportunity, so a central pledge of his campaign was to 'clean up the mess' on the Berkeley campus. It worked beautifully."
6/18/2021, The Oxford Student, 'What's Going On': Marvin Gaye's Anthems For The Ages, Freddy Foulston
"The album's title song begins with a smooth bongo shuffle leading into an alto sax flourish before we hear Gaye's voice calling out, 'Mother, mother/ There's too many of you crying. Brother, brother, brother/ There's far too many of you dying', a sorrowful verbal opening to a song that is light and pleasant on the ear. The song was inspired by an incident of police brutality during protests in Berkeley California as part of the Free Speech Movement and protests the Vietnam War." [Ed. Note: The FSM was non-violent. Wikipedia points to the 1969 Berkeley People's Park protest as the inspiration.]
6/17/2021, San Francisco Chronicle, In person? At home? Bay Area summer theater has a show for you, Lily Janiak
"This year, the troupe [San Francisco Mime Troupe] extends the idea with 'Tales of the Resistance, Volume 2: Persistence,' which features special guest performances by Francis Jue and music and lyrics by Daniel Savio, son of Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio."
6/15/2021, New York Times, Ezra Klein Interviews Louis Menand, Ezra Klein
"On the one hand, it's true the Berkeley Free Speech Movement was literally about free speech. So this happens in 1964. And the administration at University of California at Berkeley banned political tables on campus. Political tables were like card tables that students would set up with political literature on them to promote civil rights or other causes. And the university banned those from campus. And the students revolted and occupied the administration building, Sproul Hall, and basically forced the university to back down.
¶
And it was called the Free Speech Movement because that's really what the stakes were in that particular protest. But for a lot of the people who were involved in the protest, for a lot of the students involved in the protest, there was a bigger issue, which was the nature of the post-war university. And they regarded the university as treating them as basically human material to be manufactured to serve the needs of government and industry."
6/8/2021, Red Flag, Vale Anthony Ashbolt, Chloe Rafferty
"As an academic, Anthony was always keen to preserve the lessons of past struggles. In particular, his writing on the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 1960s was a defence of the radical left's support for free speech."
Summer 2021, California, Uncovered Letters Reveal a Forgotten and Tumultuous Journey, Andrew Leonard
"But the jewel in the crown of this collection is an 11-page handwritten letter dated December 6, 1964--just four days after the FSM sit-in. It is a blow-by-blow account of the protest and his subsequent arrest. I could hardly contain my excitement as I started to read. For a reporter or historian, a document of this sort is pure gold, the very definition of a 'primary source.' I've read many accounts of the sit-in, but most of them are blunted by the passage of time, or the knowledge of what happened afterward. Ken's account is fresh and of-the-moment." [Ed Note: arrestee Kenneth W. Leonard]
6/1/2021, RealClearPolitics, Group of Tech Execs Takes On Social Media Censorship, Susan Crabtree
[Mike Matthys, a tech venture capital executive who has worked in Silicon Valley for several decades:] "'We're nonpartisan and we like to remind people that if you really dislike Trump or you dislike conservative views, just remember what happened in the 1950s and 1960s when we had the McCarthy era and the Berkeley free speech movement.'"
5/29/2021, Denton Record-Chronicle, R. Sheldon Newman 1934 - 2021,
"He wrote a semi-regular newsletter, Teski Zeiti (roughly translated from German as 'Times are Bad'), which chronicled his community's protests of what was happening in the world, and is included in the Free Speech Movement Papers collection at the University of California at Berkeley."
5/20/2021, Jewish Journal, Heroes of Free Speech, Larry Greenfield
"The 1964 Free Speech movement at UC Berkeley has long since been replaced by illiberal indoctrination, bullying and bias. Conservative speakers are frequently harassed or disinvited. Most recently, a video of a teacher berating a student for respectfully offering a more nuanced opinion about American policing went viral." [Ed Note: the FSM was a production of students activism, not the institution.]
5/15/2021, Berkeley News, Keynote speaker [Adewale "Wally" Adeyemo] to graduates: 'The success of our country is in your hands', Public Affairs, UC Berkeley
"After all, it was Berkeley students who in the '60s, awakened by the civil rights movement, launched a free speech movement that would shape our country. Twenty years later, Berkeley students who recognized that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere started a divestment movement that helped to topple apartheid in South Africa."
5/11/2021, Monthly Review, on the guidance offered in "Sensing Injustice" by Michael Tigar, Jennifer Laurin
"We see Michael as a Berkeley undergrad and law student in the foment of the 1960s - literally finding his voice at the college radio station, and more figuratively in his journey in and out of the Navy reserves, his work challenging loyalty oaths and representing leaders in the Free Speech Movement, and the deep historical dives that he pursued in his earliest legal scholarship."
5/5/2021, The New Republic, Our Friend, the Trump Propagandist, Ronald Radosh, Sol Stern
"Meanwhile, [David] Horowitz had already published his first book, Student. The short volume vividly described the growing unrest on college campuses as students took a leading role in the civil rights and anti-war protest movements. Now 23, Horowitz anticipated the Free Speech Movement, which erupted on the Berkeley campus two years later as students rose up against the university administrators they saw as oppressive. Mario Savio, the movement's firebrand leader, later revealed that he had read Student in New York City. The book so excited him that he transferred to Berkeley." [Ed Note: Savio had moved to LA with his family and also read newspapers.]
5/5/2021, Common Dreams, Cariol Horne, Social Justice Hero, Joan Steinau Lester
"Simply 'put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers,' Mario Savio famously said during Berkeley's 1964 Free Speech Movement, urging listeners to act whenever they saw injustice. That ethic, learned from my parents, was the core of our family values."
4/18/2021, History News Network, Don't Erase Women's Leadership in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Robert Cohen
"To begin with, the first spokesperson for the free speech struggle at Cal-the movement's key voice before Savio and before it even took on the name "Free Speech Movement"-was Jackie Goldberg, a veteran student leader who chaired the initial negotiations with the UC administration. Though Goldberg would soon be replaced by Savio as the Free Speech Movement's key spokesperson, before that happened she played an essential role in achieving a peaceful resolution of the police car blockade."
4/12/2021, The New Yorker, Letters respond to Louis Menand's essay about the New Left, Hannah Leffingwell
"I read with interest Menand's reflection on the legacy of the New Left, but was disappointed to see this nuanced essay about politics in higher education echo a pernicious myth about late-sixties activism: that "American politics descended into chaos" with the rise of the Black Power movement, the women's movement, and the gay-liberation movement. Such language seems to dismiss the significant gains made by these movements and to cast any violence committed by their members as somehow less pure or less effective than the utopian nonviolence of many New Left participants. In addition, this myth allows one to gloss over the power dynamics at play when some activists are portrayed as dreamers and others-depending on their class, gender, race, and profession-are portrayed as miscreants."
4/11/2021, Berkeley Daily Planet, Smithereens, Gar Smith
"Remembering 'Freedom Summer' ¶
The Free Speech Movement Archives (www.FSM-A.org) recently reached out to the hundreds of FSM veterans on its mailing list to share an invitation from the Bob Hicks Foundation. The appeal follows:
¶
Are you a civil rights worker who spent time in Louisiana (esp. Bogalusa and Washington Parish) or other parts of the South where the Deacons for Defense and Justice were active?'"
3/27/2021, Bloomberg Businessweek, Asian Americans Are Ready for a Hero, Karl Taro Greenfeld
"The multiethnic Free Speech Movement and Students for a Democratic Society demanded cultural studies programs for each of the ethnic groups whose histories academia had overlooked."[Ed Note: the demand for ethnic studies came some years after the FSM.]
3/26/2021, The Cavalier Daily, MCCOY: Our Vietnam-era predecessors needed free expression and so do we, Robert McCoy
"[Thomas] Hanna describes that [Dean B.F.D.] Runk's censorship led to a divorce between the University Press and The Cavalier Daily. Still, some University leftists, frustrated that existing publications "virtually ignore[d] issues" such as 'the undeclared war in Vietnam,' founded the leftist Iconoclast in 1966 and The Virginia Weekly in 1967. The latter of the two, according to its founder, was 'designed [to] transform the staid University of Virginia into the Berkeley of the South,' referring to Berkeley's famous Free Speech Movement of the mid-1960s. According to author Dale M. Brumfield, the Weekly published 'headlines from the rapidly emerging New Left movement, including … escalating anti-war fervor on campus.'"
3/23/2021, The Atlantic, The Show That Changed Television Forever, Ronald Brownstein
"In 1964, when the first demonstrations by the free-speech movement erupted at UC Berkeley, [Robert D.] Wood, in one of his on-air editorials, called the demonstrators 'witless agitators' and insisted that they 'be dealt with quickly and severely to set an example for all time to those who agitate for the sake of agitation.'"
3/22/2021, The New Yorker, The Making of the New Left, Louis Menand
"'What can I call it: the existential amazement of being at The Edge, where reality breaks open into the true Chaos before it is reformed?' one of the F.S.M. leaders, Michael Rossman, wrote ten years later:
¶
I never found words to describe what is still my most vivid feeling from the FSM . . . the sense that the surface of reality had somehow fallen away altogether. Nothing was any longer what it had seemed. Objects, encounters, events, all became mysterious, pregnant with unnamable implications, capable of astounding metamorphosis."
3/22/2021, The Flat Hat, What does freedom of speech actually give us freedom to say?, Ezzie Seigel
"When UC Berkeley prohibited political activities on and near campus amidst the civil rights movement and the ongoing Vietnam War, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM) was founded in order for students to be able to organize. After a non-violent protest with over 1,500 people, UC Berkeley got a new Chancellor who granted the demands of FSM."
3/21/2021, The Berkeley Daily Planet, Smithereens: Reflections on Bits & Pieces, Gar Smith
"Meanwhile, [Mark] Kitchell's YouTube Channel is featuring Archival Gems and Deleted Scenes from Berkeley in the Sixties, including these Kitchell favorites: 'The Hells Angels volunteering for Vietnam; the Free Speech Movement's Mario Savio receiving a clip-on tie for a birthday present the day after getting dragged off the stage of the Greek Theater by his tie; '"
3/20/2021, The Daily Californian, More than a professor: The enduring impact of Leon Litwack, Gary Pomerantz
"He dismissed his survey course only once, in December 1964, after police arrested more than 800 students who had gathered for a Free Speech Movement sit-in at Sproul Hall. Litwack supported the movement, and the next morning, he told his students at Wheeler that the day's class was canceled. It would be inappropriate to study, and perhaps celebrate, rebels of the past, he explained, while rebels of the present were being silenced."
3/20/2021, The Daily Californian, Alumni revisit Daily Cal experiences, Sarah Harris and Jocelyn Huang
"'Of course, the Free Speech Movement was the main story in my time there, running from September all the way through January, with mass crowds and protests, celebrities and sheriffs all over campus and so on. I left before the tear gas and bullets started to fly on campus in later years. I did meet a man at a conference in 1995 who showed me his finger that had the end shot off by a shotgun pellet during the People's Park riots. Protests were much more civilized in 1964-65.'¶
- Ron Enfield '66, chief photographer"
3/20/2021, Los Angeles Times, The 'No-Nos' of Tule Lake, Phi Do, Jennifer Lu and Aida Ylanan
"[Satsuki] Ina didn't learn her parents had renounced their citizenship at Tule Lake until she was a college student at UC Berkeley during the Free Speech movement in the 1960s."
3/15/2021, American Institute for Economic Research, WELCOME TO WORD TYRANNY AND CULTURAL BALKANIZATION, Richard Ebeling
"America has entered into a new era of thought control. Back in the 1960s, there was a determined campaign by many conservatives to resist the free speech movement symbolically headquartered on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Then, the idea was to respect people's right to say what was on their minds, even when it was considered crude, rude and offensive. That many of the students involved in this effort were often radically inconsistent and disrespectful of others' property clouded the message. But at the end of the day, freedom of speech was the underlying principle." [Ed note: The FSM began, ended, and took place on the campus of UC Berkeley, Fall 1964 to spring, 1965.]
3/10/2021, San Francisco Chronicle, Citing 'many incidents' of 'poor safety,' Berkeley institution Moe's Books unionizes, Katie Dowd
"Moe's is one of the last legends standing of Telegraph Avenue's once-vibrant used book scene. Gone are Cody's Books and Shakespeare & Co., leaving the anti-establishment, four-story mecca to carry the torch. Moe's Books was founded in 1959 by Moe Moskowitz and his wife Barbara Stevens and soon became a counterculture hotspot. During the Free Speech Movement and Berkeley's frequent anti-war protests, Moe's was kept open in defiance of curfews to shelter protesters."
3/4/2021, Santa Monica Daily Press, OUR HIDDEN HUMAN TREASURES, Charles Andrews
"'I practically lived at the Ash Grove,' she [Elaine Golden-Gealer] said. 'But I never performed there. When I left LA and moved to Berkeley, for the Free speech Movement, I was living with Carroll Perry, the former manager of the Ash Grove. We opened a coffee house called the Cabal Creamery, later renamed the Good Buddy, and started booking acts there. We would get a lot of the people who played the Ash Grove, making a small circuit. They would usually add some place in San Francisco and then have three gigs instead of just one."
3/3/2021, The Northwest Labor Press, Burton David White, 1930-2021,
"White attended UC Berkeley to study for a Ph.D. in Middle English. There, he joined the Public Affairs staff of Berkeley's listener-sponsored radio station KPFA, covering the 1964 Free Speech Movement for the station."
2/23/2021, San Francisco Chronicle, Leave the park alone, Neal Fishman
"Regarding 'Let UC Berkeley build its housing in peace' (Letters, Feb. 20): The author got his facts wrong about People's Park in Berkeley. It was not the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement. The movement to save the land was an echo of the FSM that had occurred several years before."
2/22/2021, Socialist Worker UK, Gavin Williamson's 'free speech' is an attack on our rights to organise,
"The Berkeley Free Speech Movement in California in 1964-65 fought for the right of students to organise politically and for academics to research and teach radical ideas."
2/20/2021, San Francisco Chronicle, Letters to the Editor: Let UC Berkeley build housing in peace, Kenneth Lowe
"As a student long ago, I learned of the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement and its birthplace, People's Park. Many years later, upon joining the faculty of that famed institution, I was thrilled to learn that my assigned parking space was across the street from People's Park." [Ed note: The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley lasted from September 1964 through April 1965, during which time the land now occupied by Peoples Park was full of houses. It was only after that the UC managed to buy up all the land and either remove or tear down the houses. The creation of Peoples Park was in 1969.]
2/19/2021, The Berkeley High Jacket, The Unknown Future of People's Park: Housing Crisis vs. Community Legacy, Asha Baudart-Gehlawat
"The park has lived through protests, shootings, and the turn of the millennium. It quickly became a hub for the free speech movement and communities of all ages. As Bekka Fink, an activist and former Berkeley High School (BHS) student said, 'I grew up in this park, as an activist in the free speech movement and in the women's movement.'" [Ed note: The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley lasted from September 1964 through April 1965, during which time the land now occupied by Peoples Park was full of houses. It was only after that the UC managed to buy up all the land and either remove or tear down the houses. The creation of Peoples Park was in 1969.]
2/15/2021, New York Times, Kathleen Ham, Who Met Her Rapist Twice in Court, Dies at 73, Katharine Q. Seelye
"Kathleen went to the University of California Berkeley, where she majored in political science and graduated in 1969. 'We spent most of our time going to protests and being totally involved with the Free Speech movement,' Ms. Russell said."
2/8/2021, Newsweek, The Left Has Replaced Social Liberalism with Social Control | Opinion, Zaid Jilani
"But you don't get the sense that Democrats, or the wider progressive movement, really fear that the measures they are advocating will ever be turned against them. During the Trump years, left of center America slowly shed its old politics of social liberation--the one born in UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, sexual liberation, and the civil rights revolution--and have replaced it with something else: a politics of social control.
¶
This new politics of social control means using public and private institutions, almost all of which are now controlled by left-leaning people, to coerce individuals into their preferred modes of being and even thinking."
2/4/2021, The Times and Democrat, Left's assault on free speech, Bill Connor
"Going back to the 1960s, in dynamics like the Berkeley Free Speech movement, liberals staunchly held to Voltaire's famous quote: 'I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.' Unfortunately, the modern left has taken the socialist views on free speech.
To Karl Marx and later socialist/communist leaders, free speech was always to be subordinated to the good of 'the people.' The Soviet Union had its own version of the Cultural Revolution 'struggle sessions' to root out 'counter-revolutionaries.' This dynamic can be seen in virtually all socialist regimes. The modern left has become heavily influenced by the socialist understanding of speech as a subordinated 'right.'"
2/3/2021, Indiana Daily Student, Aggressive student unions are powerful tools for activism abroad. We need one at IU, Brian Hancock and Nathan Ryder
"Today -- in an ever corporatized vision of higher education where tuition skyrockets along with enrollment -- student unions create the necessary tools to combat a university increasingly treating its students like raw materials, an analogy originally employed in 1964 by student activist Mario Savio, a leader of the Berkeley free speech movement."
1/27/2021, The Patriot Post, 'Journalists': The New Censors, Douglas Andrews
"Was it mere coincidence that this was where the one-time radicals of the '60s had become the tenured professors of the '80s? And might it be that these leftists now found free expression to be both inconvenient and unnecessary, since they already enjoyed academic freedom? In its place, our universities ushered in political correctness and promptly reversed the First Amendment gains made by the Free Speech Movement begun at Cal-Berkeley in 1965. It was a violent death." [Ed note: FSM began 1964; ended 1965]
1/25/2021, Potomac Local News, Ann Gurtler, founder of award-winning non-profit Trillium Center, dies, Press Release
"She went to UC Berkeley and got a degree in history; she was at Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement, which had an important effect on her life."
1/24/2021, Berkeley Daily Planet, The American Muddle: Notes from a Podcast, Gar Smith
"By way of introduction, I'm a long-time activist and journalist based in Berkeley, California. I'm the founding editor of Earth Island Journal and a co-founder of Environmentalists Against War, a global coalition of more than 100 peace organizations founded in 2003.
¶
In 1964, I was one of the 800 students arrested during the Free Speech Movement sit-in sit-in at the University of California. The next year, I stood in front of the first troop train to come through Berkeley, carrying soldiers to Washington's Vietnam War."
1/22/2021, Jewish Journal, The Reverse Gold Rush: Is the California Dream Fading Away?, Larry Greenfield
"And California's rich political and social history gave space to a wide variety of democratic experimentation and grassroots passions. The political left can point to the progressive era of reform early in the twentieth century; the agricultural worker's rights movement of Cesar Chavez; the 1960's free speech movement at U.C. Berkeley; and the modern push for marriage equality in San Francisco. The political right admires the legacy of national GOP political leaders, such as California's first U.S. Senator and abolitionist John C. Fremont, and Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, as well as being the base for the national tax revolt movement, which began with 1978's Proposition 13's People's Initiative to Limit Property Taxation."
1/20/2021, The California African American Museum, The long fight leading to Kamala Harris, Susan D. Anderson
"One important aspect of the Bay Area's civil rights movement was 1964's Free Speech Movement (FSM). The year Harris was born in Berkeley, students from UC Berkeley and other campuses joined protests by CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality), the NAACP, and the Ad Hoc Committee Against Discrimination to challenge segregation and racism in Northern California. Cal students set up tables along Sproul Plaza (a well-trafficked campus hub) and distributed civil rights literature asking for donations and new members. Then UC Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr "saw the spread of the Civil Rights movement to the U.C. campus…and tried to stop it." Kerr suspended eight students, including Mario Savio, and arrested student Jack Weinberg. When Berkeley students sat and surrounded the police car in which Weinberg was being held, the FSM was born. As Picture This, a project of the Oakland Museum of California notes: "the FSM not only symbolized the power of student activism, but the influence of the Civil Rights movement on California students." [2]"
1/18/2021, Gwinnett Daily Post, "I have a dream" and the rest of the greatest speeches of the 20th century, Isabel Sepulveda
"#74. Mario Savio's "Bodies Upon the Gears"¶
Delivered Dec. 2, 1964, in Berkeley, Calif.
¶
Mario Savio was a student leader during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, which worked to end the school's restriction on students' political speech. Known for his fiery speeches, Savio delivered his most famous one during a sit-in at Sprout Hall, advocating for civil disobedience: 'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! ... And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels...and you've got to make it stop.' This inspired hundreds to occupy an administrative building overnight, and they continue to inspire countercultural and anti-government movements around the world."
1/14/2021, Daily Californian, Henry di Suvero: A passion for justice and life, Michael Miller
"In 1958, he was one of the founders of SLATE, a campus political party that expressed the early northern student movement and was a precursor to the Free Speech Movement."
1/11/2021, Berkeleyside, Berkeley Rep launches 'Place/Settings,' 10 audio stories set in Berkeley, Daphne White
"While this 'nostalgia for a radical past is not based in reality and is certainly not the present, I really appreciate living in a part of the world that's at least going for that,' [Aya] de León said. 'Even if the Free Speech Movement hasn't been fully realized, Berkeley attracts people who hold that vision and are trying to fight for that vision.'"
1/7/2021, Spiked, Who will defend free speech?, Jim Butcher
"Yet many who took part in the rights-based and liberation movements of the 1960s actually called for greater freedom of speech. Indeed, such was the demand for more freedom of speech during this period that in the mid-1960s students at the University of California, Berkeley, staged a year-long protest known as the Free Speech Movement."
1/6/2021, The Times and Democrat, 2020 casualty: free speech, Bill Connor
"Unfortunately, the influences of critical racial theory and intersectionality pervade among the media and big tech elites. In this, traditional America is considered racist and fundamentally flawed. If you do not hold to this world view, you are considered racist and part of what must be transformed. Views outside this elite world view are considered worthy of being suppressed.
¶
This ethos is contrary to the liberal view of free speech from the civil rights era. The Berkeley free speech movement was about defending all speech, including that which might offend. The ACLU previously defended the rights of Klan members to organize and speak, even while in vehement disagreement."
12/21/2020, Jacobin Magazine, Radicals and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Joel Geier
"The ISC meeting, originally called for 7:30 PM, was rescheduled to 6 PM, so that people could leave for the first organizing meeting of the United Front, the initial name of the Free Speech Movement. Attending the ISC foundation were Mario Savio and Jack Weinberg, who within days emerged as the two central leaders of the FSM. Jack joined the ISC that evening, although he dropped out during the FSM and rejoined a year later. Mario, an inactive YSPL member, did not join, but remained a close collaborator throughout the decade. He agreed with our third-camp politics, civil rights militancy, and emphasis on radical democracy from below, but not with our opposition to all Democratic Party candidates. He was torn between our view and the Communist Party's popular front strategy on elections, which entailed support for some Democrats.
¶
A critical factor in the Free Speech Movement's success was that it remained a broad-based coalition, committed to not excluding any political tendency - a legacy of the anti-HUAC campaign."
12/14/2020, Whatcom Cremation and Funeral, John C. Leggett, Professor of Sociology, Dies at 90, obituary
"John began his academic teaching career at the University of Michigan’s School of Social Work as a Lecturer and Research Associate. While there, he helped to found Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and supported the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He then joined the faculty of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1962.
¶
In his time at Cal from 1962-66, John became an active faculty leader of the Free Speech Movement (FSM), symbolized by his holding the “Free Speech” banner, an iconic image of the Civil Rights Movement re-published in California Magazine, 2014. He was also an active anti-Vietnam War organizer, and member of the Farm Labor Support Committee at UC Berkeley supporting Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta in organizing Mexican farm workers. He interviewed Malcolm X in 1963 after the Birmingham Church Bombing, an interview that has inspired generations of students and civil rights activists."
12/3/2020, The Silhouette, "Never Again" all over again, Nina Sartor
"University students have a long and venerable tradition as progressive champions of human rights. From the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley campus to climate change advocacy, university students have a unique cohesion and shared experience that makes organization and protest against injustices a successful weapon of change."
12/3/2020, KSAT, Today in History, Dec. 3, Associated Press
"In 1964, police arrested some 800 students at the University of California at Berkeley, one day after the students stormed the administration building and staged a massive sit-in."
12/1/2020, The Penn, December's start brings events that will be remembered for years, Heather Bair
"Dec. 3, 1964
¶
800 students arrested at Berkeley due to protest
¶
The Free Speech Movement (FSM) took place during the 1964-65 academic year at the University of California, Berkeley. Thousands of students participated, and the FSM was the first mass act of civil disobedience on a college campus.
¶
In 1958, students organized a campus political party known as SLATE to promote the right of student groups to support off-campus issues.
¶
In the fall of 1964, student activists set up information tables on campus and were asking for donations for causes connected with the Civil Rights Movement. According to the school rules at the time, fundraising for political parties was only allowed by the Democrat and Republican school clubs."
11/30/2020, The Daily Campus, This Week In History: Nov. 30 - Dec. 4, Gino Giansanti
"Since the administration did little to accommodate the requests of the student-led organization, the FSM launched a campaign to bring university operations to a screeching halt. 6000 students flooded the campus, blocking all access to the main administrative building. Students then staged a sit-in, remaining in the administrative building past closing and through the night, planning to stay until the university met their demands. [Ed note: first came the sit-in and then the supporting picket lines, which were porous.]
¶
At the command of Chancellor Edward Strong, campus police arrested and forcibly removed 776 students over the course of 12 hours on Dec. 3. [Ed note: Not just campus police; and not initiated by Strong. See Berkeley Police Report here: http://www.fsm-a.org/FSM%20Documents/FSM%20Dec%20Documents/Webpages/gallery-01.html]
¶
The administration's handling of the situation only enraged the movement and fueled the fire for future student dissent. As the 60s continued, UC Berkeley would become a hotbed for the political protest of American young people."
11/20/2020, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Right-Wing Medievalist Who Refused the Loyalty Oath, Simon During
"[Jack] Spicer's academic career was impeded when he joined [Ernst] Kantorowicz in refusing to sign the loyalty oath. But [Robert] Duncan transferred the passions of Kantorowicz's ultraconservative recalcitrance to a later political moment of a very different kind, when he joined Berkeley's free-speech movement in 1964. The movement was the campus's first mass act of civil disobedience, and it introduced white America to that form of movement politics which we now associate with 1968. It also established Berkeley's reputation as a hotbed of radicalism. It is worth remembering that the radical left's insistence on autonomy, freedom, and something like personal dignity carries traces, via Kantorowicz, of an ultra-conservative political theology."
11/20/2020, Berkeleyside, Berkeley has started removing the Big People statues on the I-80 pedestrian bridge, Frances Dinkelspiel
"The 28-foot-by-12-foot-by 12-foot sculpture on the bridge's east side depicts what many say Berkeley is all about, free speech, protest and Berkeley cultural contributions. It includes depictions of Mario Savio as he helped launch the Free Speech Movement, the People's Park protests, a musician from the Berkeley Symphony, a man using a wheel chair and the tree-sitters outside UC Berkeley's Memorial Stadium."
11/19/2020, Sonoma West Times & News, Faces of West County: Bill Spence, Steve Einstein
"About 1961, right after my service and the Kennedy election, I went to UC Berkeley, and there was an enlightenment starting up there. In '63, we suddenly started smoking that whacky weed, Mary Jane, and we began to start doubting the government, and what was really true and what wasn't. I became involved in the civil rights movement and eventually got into the Free Speech Movement."
11/9/2020, San Francisco Chronicle, A tour of Kamala Harris' East Bay, from her place of birth to her Berkeley school, Amy Graff
"'In 1964, the year of her birth, the Free Speech Movement, the first great student protest of that era, exploded in Berkeley and helped give birth to the student New Left,' [Charles] Wollenberg, author of 'Berkeley: A City in History,' wrote in an email. 'When she was 1 year old, Vietnam Day on the Cal campus began a decade to anti-war activism, and when she was 2, the Black Panther Party started in South Berkeley and North Oakland. By then, Telegraph Avenue had become a major locale of the decade's counter culture.'"
10/28/2020, Inside Higher Ed, Joe Biden as Joe College, John R. Thelin
"The most publicized political protest of 1963-64 was the Free Speech Movement (known as the FSA) [Ed note: Really?] at the University of California, Berkeley. When campus administrators banned student groups from setting up tables to hand out political brochures on campus, it was the one issue that united all students -- left, right and center. Young Republicans and Students for a Democratic Society put aside political differences. They channeled their collective anger into organized resistance against deans and campus staff. All student groups felt their rights to a campus forum had been violated."
10/28/2020, Berkeleyside, Berkeley antiwar organizers separate fact from fiction in 'The Trial of the Chicago 7', Frances Dinkelspiel
"Jerry Rubin came to study sociology at UC Berkeley in 1963 and closely observed the Free Speech Movement, according to Berkeley at War: The 1960s by W.J. Rorabaugh."
10/24/2020, San Francisco Chronicle, Bay Area couple capture the drama in 65 years of American protests, Sam Whiting
"But there are also non-obvious and rarely seen images like Jack Weinberg reaching out the window of the police cruiser in which he is about to spend 32 hours to launch the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley; " [Ed Note: click link to see photo. The authors are Ken Light and Melanie Light]
10/20/2020, Antiques and The Arts Weekly, Q&A: Christen Carter & Ted Hake, Madelia Hickman Ring
"[Ted Hake]: The early 1960s growing Civil Rights Movement, which had long used the button as a symbol of membership and a weapon of nonviolence, by the spring of 1964 extended its use on May 2 to mark the first major student protest against the Vietnam War and, that fall, expanded to symbolize support for the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley at the University of California. By 1965, buttons were everywhere. "
10/19/2020, Inside Higher Ed, Liberal, Conservative or Somewhere in the Middle?, Terry W. Hartle and Phil Muehlenbeck
"Ronald Reagan launched his political career by using colleges as a political foil, particularly the Free Speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley. While running for his first term as governor of California, he criticized both the students and professors at Berkeley and vowed to crack down on protests."
10/15/2020, Lockport Union-Sun & Journal, CALLERI: The 1960s return in three movies that offer vital points in history, Michael Calleri
"First came the Free Speech Movement. This epic student protest took place during the 1964 - 65 academic year on the University of California at Berkeley campus under the informal leadership of Berkeley graduate student Mario Savio. His most famous words, spoken at Sproul Hall on December 2, 1964, were: 'Put your bodies upon the gears.' [Ed Note: Savio was an undergrad. The SF student-led anti-HUAC Black Friday action of May 13, 1960 was a key precursor of the FSM. and of sixties youth activism.]
10/15/2020, InMenlo, UNAFF goes virtual - and honors Joan Baez with its Visionary Award, Contributed Content
"She has been among the first to recognize wrongs, and speak out - and sing out - to inspire change. The struggles she stood behind include the 1960s Civil Rights struggle, the Free Speech movement at UC Berkeley, opposition to the Vietnam war, support for migrant farm workers striking for fair wages, opposition to capital punishment, ending the violence in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, support for gay rights, the nuclear freeze movement, opposition to the Iraq war, many environmental causes, and others. She is cited for having an impact on the transition to a peaceful Chile, Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, and the new millennium's protest movement against economic inequality."
10/15/2020, Fast Company, How one tiny accessory popularized some of the most iconic slogans of the 20th century, Lilly Smith
"By the 1960s, buttons were everywhere. They commemorated major scientific events, such as the first American to orbit the Earth; pop culture, like Tommy Smalls, a DJ known as Dr. Jive who ushered in early rock and roll; and the counterculture. Hake's favorite is a button made by the 1964 Free Speech Movement after its first event in Berkeley, California, which he says 'kicked off a decade of revolution.'"
10/14/2020, Dissent Magazine, Can Biden Be Pushed Left?, Bob Master
"And once Johnson was re-elected, the pace of reform accelerated. The ongoing Black Freedom struggle, coupled with an outbreak of student protests like the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, California, created a movement moment."
10/8/2020, Red Flag, Turning rebellion into revolution: Socialism 2020 conference in Perth, Clare Francis
"Activists from the last major upsurge in global struggle, the 1960s and 1970s, addressed the conference. Gumbainggir radical Gary Foley spoke about the electrifying Black Power movement in Australia, which he was central to. US socialist Joel Geier-who was part of the Freedom rides and Berkeley Free Speech movement-spoke about the wave of struggled during the 'long sixties' (1960-75). He gave an insider's account of how the process of mass struggle radicalised a generation and far-left organisations mushroomed in size."
10/8/2020, Cannon Beach Gazette, Missionaries, Yippies and climate change, Joseph Bernt
"Alpert and Judy Gumbo, soon to marry, first met in Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement, split when Judy became a dedicated feminist and eventually reunited before the Mayday Protest." [Ed note: per Judy Albert, "He was Albert not Alpert (Baba Ram Das) And that we met at a meeting for the Oakland 7 in either late 1967 or very early 1968 - not the FSM. And that we reunited in 1973 & Mayday was in 1971."]
10/2/2020, Berkeleyside, Remembering Sheila Daar, profoundly accomplished and a positive spirit in the world, Roberta C. Brooks
"She attended UC Berkeley where, as well as completing her studies, she was arrested during the Free Speech Movement and became an activist against the Vietnam War."
10/1/2020, Splice Today, 1964-2020: From Free Speech to Policing Speech on College Campuses, Chris Beck
"Berkeley students fought hard, but peacefully, that entire academic year to win the right to express themselves freely. In the years that followed, American college students owed a debt to those rebels, but the zeal for free speech on our campuses hasn't endured. The Berkeley students agitated for the right to express political opinions, but some universities today define bias incidents as including expressions of bias against particular political affiliations. This is dangerous territory. These schools are encouraging their own students to squeal on others for making political statements that aren't considered polite. As civil discourse has given way to outrage, free speech is viewed as freedom to oppress."
10/1/2020, Orange County Breeze, Today, HistoryNet
"1964 The first Free Speech Movement protest erupts spontaneously on the University of California, Berkeley campus; students demanded an end to the ban of on-campus political activities." [Ed note: perhaps not so spontaneously.]
10/1/2020, KALW, Almanac, Kevin Vance
"On this day in history…1964 - The Free Speech Movement is launched on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley."
9/28/2020, The California Aggie, From the FSM to COLA: A history of labor organization at the UCs, Sophie Dewees
"Graduate students also began organizing at Berkeley. Amid the wide-scale protests against the oppression of free speech during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM) in the 1964-1965 school year, graduate students formed the first graduate employee union."
9/21/2020, ESPN, NBA playoffs: The Celtics' Jaylen Brown is a player for this moment, Baxter Holmes
"But he wasn't just going to a world-class institution of higher learning. He was going to Berkeley, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to a crowd of thousands in 1967; where the student-led Free Speech Movement of the era was born; where the Black Panthers organized; where rallies, seminars and peaceful protests helped establish a global reputation as a heartbeat of free speech and activism against social injustice. When Dr. Ameer Hasan Loggins, who taught a class on Black representation in the media, met Brown in a recreation center gym on campus, he recalled Brown saying, 'I came out here on my own dime. And I came out here because I want the intellectual rigor, but also want to be involved in the culture of the Bay Area.'"
9/18/2020, Scroll.in, South Asian history is hidden around Berkeley. Two Indian Americans are bringing it into the light, Vandana Menon
"'We don't hear about this radical legacy enough,' said [Barnali] Ghosh. 'People see the Free Speech Movement in 1964-'65 as the start of Berkeley's legacy of activism, but the first ever South Asian protest that we know of happened in the city in 1908.' In 1908, 16 of the 17 South Asians at UC Berkeley protested an event in which a Christian missionary was critical of Hinduism and defended British colonialism."
9/8/2020, The Brooklyn Rail, What's the Use of a University?, Samuel Feldblum and John Schmidt
"Protestors appear in Kerr's thinking, then, as a nuisance to be managed and controlled as the knowledge industry rolls along: an easy prospect, he assures his reader, as 'today men know more about how to control protest, as well as how to suppress it in its more organized forms.' It seems he did not know well enough. As soon as Kerr published these thoughts, of course, they were given the lie. Ronald Reagan, who came to political prominence in part through his revanchist opposition to the Free Speech Movement and the way Kerr was managing it, promised California voters he would be the man to 'clean up the mess at Berkeley.' Elected governor in 1967, he moved swiftly to oust Kerr and violently suppress the student movement."
9/5/2020, The Telegraph, Extinction Rebellion's assault on the free press is an attack on democracy, Janet Daley
"Earlier generations of protesters who fought against racism in the United States or what they believed to be evil wars were often militant and they sometimes broke existing laws when they believed them to be unjust. But they did not, as a rule, try to shut down debate and free speech. (Indeed, the original Berkeley student revolution was called the Free Speech Movement.) Argument was what it was all about. Without argument, democracy is dead and what takes its place is something much, much worse."
9/4/2020, The Wall Street Journal, Land of Free (and Fettered) Speech, Adam Kirsch
"The problem of free speech takes different forms in different settings. Speech controversies on college campuses affect relatively few Americans, but they receive a great deal of attention, since colleges have traditionally been centers of open debate. Students once jealously guarded their speech rights. The Free Speech Movement, the first great student protest of the 1960s, erupted at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, when a former student was arrested by a campus police officer for leafleting on behalf of the civil rights organization CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. At the height of the protest, up to 4,000 students demonstrated in favor of free speech on campus, and 800 went to jail."
9/3/2020, Jacobin, The Berkeley Free Speech Movement, 56 Years Later, Samuel Farber
"He [Hal Draper] follows that dynamic in detail, from the moment the movement starts, when power rested with the campus authorities backed by enormous economic and political interests, to its end, when power had shifted to the side of the students, who obtained the support of the great majority of professors when faced with an intransigent and politically tone-deaf campus and university administration."
9/3/2020, Adventist Review, A Journey and a March, Bill Knott
"Milton [Hare] threw himself into a sequence of marches and demonstrations organized by the Free Speech movement, and soon was lining up pro bono lawyers and raising thousands of dollars in bail money for the hundreds of students who were arrested in the university's crackdown on the protests. As his grades dropped and the Free Speech crisis wound down through the winter of 1964-1965, Milton found himself back in the orbit of his PUC suitemate, Paul Cobb."
8/28/2020, Berkeley News, Berkeley Talks transcript: Why the 1960s song 'Little Boxes' still strikes a chord today, Nicholas Mathew
[Nancy Schimmel,, daughter of Malvina Reynolds] "It seems like every so often a generation of students gets politicized by the police. And that certainly happened with the free speech movement and it happened in 1961. There were students at the HUAC - the House Un-American Activities Committee - hearings in San Francisco in the city hall. They got washed down the stairs with fire hoses and they got politicized. My mother wrote a song about that. It was to the tune of 'Billy Boy.'"
08/25/2020, Counterview, Left-liberals' 'churlish' call to boycott Delhi riots book has one parallel: Dina Nath Batra, Aviral Anand
"Interestingly, in 1964 Berkeley was home to the Free Speech Movement, with left-leaning students demanding the right to distribute anti-war literature." [Ed note: a broad-based coalition of students was demonstrating to to gain the right to distribution pro-Civil-Rights-Movement literature. The Anti-War Movement came a bit later.]
8/25/2020, 7x7, The East Bay's Best Independent Bookstores, Sarah Medina and Mikaela Luke
"Moe Moskowitz became a Berkeley icon when he opened a bookstore on Telegraph Avenue in 1959, right in the midst of the Free Speech Movement and the political chaos that sparked throughout Berkeley." [Ed note: the Free Speech Movement began in September, 1964. It was disbanded in April, 1965.]
8/22/2020, The Arts Fuse, Film Review: More Movies to Watch While Sheltering in Place - Campus Best, Post 1980, Gerald Peary
"Berkeley in the Sixties (1990) — Mark Kitchell’s excellent documentary about campus politics on the University of California campus, from the Free Speech Movement through anti-war protests and the Black Panthers, with Joan Baez and Huey Newton on the left, and then California governor Reagan leading the unapologetic right."
8/21/2020, Wyoming Public Media, Documentary Chronicles Students' Fight For Black Rights During 'Freedom Summer', Dave Davies in for Terry Gross
"[Charles] COBB: One important gain was the challenge of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party changed the national Democratic Party. It's out of this challenge that you get what are now known as the McGovern rules, which expanded the participation of women and minorities in the Democratic Party. And I think attitudes were changed in Mississippi. People saw that it was possible, in a wider sense, to struggle against white supremacy, and it changed the attitude of those students who participated in that. Mario Savio, who would shortly lead the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in California, was a volunteer in Mississippi. So was Barney Frank. I think it changed the attitude of these young people who came South. And it's interesting to note in passing that a number of them have stayed in touch with these communities that they worked in in 1964."
8/12/2020, Fox News, Rep. Eric Swalwell: Kamala Harris will be a great VP and help Biden undo harm Trump has caused, Eric Swalwell
"Within Harris is the girl who saw her mother active in the Free Speech Movement, who rode the desegregation bus across Berkeley, who followed her mother's example to study hard and excel." [Ed note: Harris was born 10/20/1964; the FSM ended 4/28/1965. Perhaps Harris was more inspired by than witness to the FSM.]
8/1/2020, Berkeley Daily Planet, Smithereens: Reflections on Bits & Pieces, Gar Smith
"For decades, in and out of politics, John Lewis was an advocate for 'Good Trouble.' So it's no surprise that he reached out to the students who were arrested and beaten for occupying Sproul Hall during what became known as Berkeley's Free Speech Movement.
¶
Earlier today, while thumbing through a thumbdrive filled with copies of old documents, I came across a letter of solidarity that Carl Lewis, then chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), had written to the young protesters in Berkeley. The letter, written from SNCC's New York office on December 3, 1964, reads:
¶
'We wish to express our support for our brothers and sisters at the University of California in their fight for full free speech on the university campus.
¶
'University administration attempts to curtail the activity of the Friends of SNCC are an attack on the civil rights movement in the deep South.
¶
'We are shocked at the brutality used by police against the students who sat in at the University's administration building. Police brutality in the South is nothing new to us-but what is happening in the so-called liberal community of Berkeley?
¶
'Students have the right to participate in political activity on and off the campus. We know well the attempts by administrators on the campuses of Southern Negro colleges to break the civil rights movement by not allowing students to meet and advocate ideas on the campus. Now university administrators in the North are borrowing these same tactics. Such denial of students' rights-North or South-is an affront to the ideals of American democracy.'" ¶ [Ed note: see it here: https://www.btstack.com/Black_Support_of_FSM.html]
7/28/2020, Sonoma News, Sonoma's Mike Smith, still fighting the non-violent fight, Christian Kallen
"Smith's life of activism goes back to his youth in Marin County, and his admission to UC Berkeley. His first arrest was there, as he became involved in the Free Speech Movement of 1964 - when he was arrested for distributing political material from what he was told was an 'illegal table.'"
7/28/2020, San Francisco Chronicle, On the ADA's 30th anniversary: The heroes among us, Brad Bailey
"What many people may not know, however, is that Hale [Zukas] is one of the country's premiere disability pioneers and that Berkeley is the birthplace of the modern disability rights movement. He was a math major at UC Berkeley, and is fluent in Russian. At the height of the Free Speech movement, Hale was taking classes while Joan Baez was playing in Sproul Plaza."
7/28/2020, Frieze, Lynn Hershman Leeson's Game of Doubles, Jennifer Kabat
"This quest for human connection and healing is key to Hershman Leeson's work. Although Breitmore and Lorna were reclusive, searching for fulfilment within their own sealed-off worlds, their creator has a fundamentally optimistic view of technology. When we met, she spoke about the importance of San Francisco to her work, and her participation in the 1960s Berkeley free-speech movement that inspired the technological utopianism of early computer programmers."
7/28/2020, Cannon Beach Gazette, Column: Mario Savio branded radical for demanding constitutional speech rights, Joseph Bernt
"The consequences of the Free Speech Movement's victory went far beyond Berkeley. Colleges and universities revised student handbooks to acknowledge the First Amendment. Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas suggested in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District that teachers and students 'do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech and expression at the schoolhouse gate.'"
7/27/2020, The New York Review of Books, A Brief History of Dangerous Others, Richard Kreitner and Rick Perlstein
"Four months before Selma, an organizer of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley had been asked by a reporter whether the student activists had received behind-the-scenes direction from Communists. He responded, 'We have a saying in the movement that we don't trust anybody over thirty'--a now-famous line whose forgotten contextual significance was that it was quite impossible to imagine activists under thirty (including SNCC members) having anything to do with an institution so old-fashioned and sclerotic as the CPUSA. And yet a marquee voice of the American establishment could hardly explain 'SNCC's far out radicalism' in any other way-even as, meanwhile, Americans were being beaten and murdered merely for requesting the right to vote."
7/27/2020, Daily Emerald, Opinion: The forgotten power of Berkeley, Parsa Aghel
"Institutions, by their very nature, seek stability through the status quo. Every so often, though, the status quo becomes so egregious that our institutions' consciences awaken, rising to check a government that teeters toward tyranny. In 1964, peaking anti-communist paranoia compelled universities like the University of California, Berkeley, to ban student political activism groups, inciting rageful dissent among students and the birth of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. The university's unique response has come to define the institution, even half a century later.
¶
Berkeley faculty overwhelmingly supported the movement. The administration, too, hired a chancellor solicitous to student activism, sanctioning the demands of FSM. The administration sided with justice.
¶
This became the essence of Berkeley: pedagogical success by promoting student activism. Berkeley became renowned for being America's radical institution, creating an environment where learning transcended the classroom walls. Its professors, like Sheldon Wolin, are known for rebirthing modern political theory. Wolin's theory of grassroots democracy, in particular, drew from the FSM movement. Empowering students became a newfound responsibility of the university, allowing the institution to take a stand against the government while engaging both its students and faculty."
7/24/2020, Daily Californian, Let's rename Barrows Hall for Margy Wilkinson, Nancy Lemon
"I suggest that the new name should honor Margy Wilkinson (1943-2020), who received her bachelor of arts from UC Berkeley in 1966. Wilkinson was a devoted campus community member, working at UC Berkeley for 40 years, leading a strike for pay equality for service workers and acting as a mother to the Cal Band. Moreover, she was an industrious activist for workers' rights, organizing a local chapter of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, helping to create the Coalition of University Employees--the union for clerical workers, with 19,000 members statewide--and acting as its chief negotiator.
¶
A driving force in the labor movement in the UC system for more than 40 years, Wilkinson demonstrated in the Free Speech Movement and in favor of the Black Panthers and Angela Davis, and was part of many other progressive causes. Her dinner table was a community meeting place for many organizers."
7/21/2020, Fox&Hounds, How California helped inspire "Union", By Jordan Blashek and Christopher Haugh
"Somehow, the Golden State fashioned our two different--and at times opposing--worldviews. Chris, a Berkeley kid, was inspired by the afterglow of the Free Speech Movement, the Black Panthers down the way in Oakland, and Rolling Stone back when they still published out of San Francisco. It was their foil, Ronald Reagan, who formed Jordan's earliest political consciousness a few hundred miles south in the hills of Encino."
7/16/2020, Berkeley News, Femi Ogundele: A diverse student body fosters excellence, Public Affairs, UC Berkeley
"But it's also the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, and activism still takes place, in many forms, on our campus. It's definitely an institution built for students, by students."
7/14/2020, Spiked, David Starkey and the threat to academic freedom, Benjamin Schwarz
"Such institutions cannot, therefore, apply any political or moral litmus test to the ideas and speech of their constituent scholars. Thus, in a controversy that heralded the Free Speech Movement, Ernst Kantorowicz, the German emigre medievalist and deeply conservative anti-Communist (and anti-Nazi), famously argued in 1949 that, by requiring a loyalty oath to weed out Communists and Communist sympathisers on its faculty, his adopted institution, the University of California at Berkeley, would destroy itself as an academic community. For the academy to serve its proper function, Kantorowicz recognised, the only criteria for membership must be professional competence and scholarly ability--not the forswearing of any creed, however apparently reprehensible."
7/13/2020, San Francisco Chronicle, Margy Wilkinson, Berkeley protester for 60 years, dies at home at 76, Sam Whiting
"It was May 1960 and Wilkinson, then known as Margy Lima, was an Oakland Tech high schooler who'd crossed the bay to protest McCarthyism. Three years later, she drove cross country to witness Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech on the Mall in Washington, and a year after that, she was inside Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley, proudly being arrested while helping launch the Free Speech Movement."
July 2020, Jacobin, The Threat to Civil Liberties Goes Way Beyond "Cancel Culture", Leigh Phillips
"Frederick Douglass recognized that there could be no struggle for abolition without a defense of freedom of speech, and that abridgment of that freedom is a double wrong, for 'it violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker'; Eugene Debs was tried and convicted for sedition, and his trial and those of his comrades would set in play the crystallization of American free speech legal protections that are the envy of the world entire; and the New Left and counterculture of the Sixties that in many ways gave birth to the current left began with the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 under the leadership of giants like Mario Savio."
7/9/2020, Berkeleyside, Remembering Stuart Fredrick Pawsey, Guest contributor
"Outside of work, Stuart was engaged in the larger community. His political activity extended from the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s to supporting immigrants in 2019. As an active volunteer, he contributed to La Pena Community Chorus, International House Board of Directors and House Committee, St. John's Presbyterian Church Grounds and Facilities Committee and Berkeley High's math classes for English language learners. He and Glenda often hosted international students for extended stays in their home."
7/8/2020, The Sacramento Bee, From McClatchy High School to University of California president: A Q&A with Michael V. Drake, Sawsan Morrar
"I've always been an active protector of free speech. I think it's an important part of who we are, and there's a great line that (past UC president) Clark Kerr said that it's not our job to make speech safe for students; it's our job to help make students safe for speech. We do what we can to help develop the whole person so that our students can interact appropriately with information that they receive, and are adult enough and intelligent enough to be able to process. I've always actively championed the content neutral policy toward speech and speakers. I would say that that requires that speech and speakers be heard, so content neutral means content neutral. One doesn't have to like or approve of what someone is saying. We are a place where people can bring ideas and where our students can participate and make up their own minds. So I'm an active supporter of the First Amendment. I think it has served this country well, and we need to continue to support it."
7/5/2020, LA Progressive, Will Capitalist Consumer Culture Absorb Another Generation of Protest?, Walter G. Moss
"In his Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000), conservative columnist David Brooks wrote: 'We're by now all familiar with modern-day executives who have moved from S.D.S. [a radical student organization that flourished in the 1960s] to C.E.O. . . . Indeed, sometimes you get the impression the Free Speech Movement [begun in 1964 at the University of California, Berkeley] produced more corporate executives than Harvard Business School.'"
7/3/2020, San Francisco Chronicle, Veterans of social justice protests reflect on a lifetime of taking it to the streets, Jan Newberry
"Peter Haberfeld, 78, retired attorney, Oakland. 'I was arrested for the first time at Sproul Hall at Berkeley during the Free Speech protests in 1964 and marched against the Vietnam War in '65 and '66. Later I was a poll watcher for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in Holmes County, Miss., where I was beaten, arrested and charged with assault on a 'peace officer.'
¶
This feels like a watershed moment. It's exhilarating that there are so many determined people angry at the system. People are more informed now than they were in the 1960s. We owe a lot to Black scholarship and journalism. I'm confident that there will be a backlash. There will always be high points and low points. It's important not to get discouraged.'"
7/2/2020, Berkeleyside, It's summertime. Dig into these books with a Berkeley connection, Michael Berry
"In her award-winning novel, Shrug, Lisa Braver Moss recaptures the revolutionary mood in Berkeley during the Sixties, when Beatlemania and the Free Speech Movement left the town rocking. Told from the perspective of Martha Goldenthal, a teen dealing with domestic abuse and an embarrassing muscular tic, the book explores the connections between art and independence."
06/29/2020, Berkeleyside, Remembering Margy Wilkinson, a life-long organizer for social, economic and racial justice, Guest contributor
"Before she got involved with city issues, Wilkinson was at UC Berkeley, where she was involved with the Free Speech Movement in 1964 and then went on to organize the first contract for classified workers at the university." Ed Note: Margy was arrested in the FSM.
6/18/2020, Daily Freeman, Letter: Many people of Italian descent more deserving of statues than Columbus, Michael Erwin
"There are so many people of Italian descent who are actually worthy of celebrating, because they played an active role in the struggle for labor rights, LBGTQ rights, human rights and civil rights. A few examples: Ferdinando Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (anarchists and social/economic justice activists framed and executed for murder), Maria Barbieri and Angela Bambace (who helped organize garment workers in the sweatshops of New York City), Carlo Tresca (who was involved in the Industrial Workers of the World and the Italian railroad workers' federation and published two progressive newspapers), Mario Savio (one of the founders of the free speech movement at Berkeley), Vito Russo (a gay rights activist and film historian, and founding member of ACT UP and GLAAD), and Sylvia Baraldini (an anti-imperialist who did solidarity work with both the black liberation and Puerto Rican independence movements)."
JULY/AUGUST 2020, Commentary Magazine, How I Ran Afoul of Campus Cancel Culture, Steven F. Hayward
"The wall in the middle of the wood-paneled main hall of the Goldman School on Hearst Street features a photo of Aaron Wildavsky, the founding dean of Berkeley's public-policy graduate program in the late 1960s. Wildavsky had been the chair of the political-science department during the free-speech movement of the 1960s and thus had a front-row seat for the evolution of radical student politics over the last third of the 20th century."
6/12/2020, The Irish Post, Seattle protesters' takeover of city blocks echoes 'Free Derry' of the Troubles, Rachael O'Connor
"The Troubles was sparked in part by a civil rights campaign which took inspiration from the 1960's US movement led by Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.
¶
The US movement included the 1964 occupation of Sproul Hall in Berkeley, California, which saw 1,500 activists from the Free Speech Movement and other student political groups take over the hall in protest before being removed by police, with 773 students being arrested for their involvement."
6/12/2020, Fox News, Laura Ingraham bashes 'Marxist' demonstrators, says 'they want you to think that all hope is lost', Victor Garcia
"'There's nothing about this bunch that's liberal because the old liberals started the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 and it was devoted to reversing the prohibition on political activities on campus,' she explained. 'Now, don't get me wrong, they were radicals, but at least they actually believed in free expression. I think they generally liked the country.'"
5/24/2020, Facing South, Remembering Ray Eurquhart, a lifelong activist radicalized in the military, Kerry Taylor
"While he had not been involved in the civil rights movement or any other 1960s-era protest movements, Eurquhart developed sharp political views during his time in the military. He began discussing politics with airmen who provided firsthand accounts of campus protests like the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, California."
5/14/2020, Berkeley Daily Planet, The Golden Age of May 1970, Phil Allen
"It seems like only yesterday. In rainy autumn of '64, I was a high-school sophomore who'd read the accounts of the burgeoning Free Speech Movement-before the name was coined-in the Chronicle I threw each dawn. Gratis the UC administration."
5/9/2020, The Wake Weekly, A progressive case for campus free speech, Corey Friedman
"Liberal students who opposed the Vietnam War spearheaded the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, bucking a ban on campus political activism to hold protest rallies and sit-ins in the mid-1960s. Mario Savio, a grad student regarded as one of the movement's key leaders, was an avowed socialist."
5/7/2020, Nichi Bei Weekly, Q-and-A with longtime activist and mentor Alan Nishio, Glen Kitayama
"AN [Alan Nishio]: The Free Speech Movement had a tremendous impact on my life because it was the first time that I became involved politically. When the student strike was called and picket lines were formed, I found that I could not be neutral. I either had to cross the picket line or join it. I learned more about the issues involved and then joined the strike. This experience was one that forever moved me as I changed my major from accounting to political science and never looked back!"
5/6/2020, New Frame, New Books | Set the Night on Fire: LA in the Sixties, Mike Davis and Jon Wiener
"Then Republicans, led by Ronald Reagan (then a candidate for governor), started attacking welfare recipients, calling them 'welfare queens', as the centrepiece of their campaign (along with attacks on Berkeley's Free Speech Movement). Reagan won the election that November."
4/29/2020, Berkeley Daily Planet, New: People's Park: Chancellor's Mistakes Redux, Christopher Adams
"Whether that legend is true or not, by the 1950s the campus was eyeing much of the area south of the campus for expansion. Its first move was to buy the commercial blocks on Telegraph Avenue just south of Sather Gate (actually the 'gate' is a bridge over the creek).
¶
That move precipitated the University's first big fight over land use in l964. The students had used the sidewalks leading up to Sather Gate to set up tables for every sort of political and social cause. Once the land became part of the campus, the chancellor, Edward Strong, decreed that the tables would have to go. The students rebelled, and the Free Speech Movement was born."
4/15/2020, The Guardian, Erased from utopia: the hidden history of LA's black and brown resistance, Mike Davis and Jon Wiener
"For the past half century, a number of stereotypes have framed our recollections of this age of revolt, but the Los Angeles experience confounds most cliches. In the standard narrative, for instance, college students, organized as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Free Speech Movement (FSM) in Berkeley, were the principal social actors, and the great engine rooms of protest were found at huge public university campuses in places like Berkeley, Madison, Ann Arbor, and Kent. (The exceptions, according to this narrative, were some historical Black colleges and Ivy League Columbia.)"
4/9/2020, Illinois Times, U of I protests of the 1960s, Cinda Ackerman Klickna
"[Michael V.] Metz explores the Free Speech Era, 1965-1967, in Part II. The impact of a 1964 large student protest against the prohibition of political activity at the University of California, Berkeley, spilled over onto other campuses."
4/2/2020, The Daily Californian, 'They carried a torch for a period of time': Female business owners in Berkeley share their stories, Thao Nguyen and Clara Rodas
"Impressionable and inspired, Alice Waters attended UC Berkeley in the 1960s before eventually establishing the renowned Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse. Waters quickly became a part of the Free Speech Movement, impressed by Mario Savio's leadership.
¶
"I felt always empowered, I felt like I could do what I wanted to do and I never thought I wasn't able to do that because I was a woman," Waters said."
3/27/2020, Berkeley Daily Planet, SMITHEREENS: Reflection on Bits & Pieces, Gar Smith
"FSM Activists Still Active
¶
One of the veterans of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement (now a teacher and a boardmember of the Los Angeles Unified School District) has long been a progressive voice in Southern California politics. She recently sent a message to colleagues in the Bay Area who have been working hard to secure the transfer of the Free Speech Movement Archives to UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library. Her message underscored the alarming impact of the coronavirus infection that is rampaging across the state.
¶
"Hope all of you are well, as are we in Echo Park. I must apologize for being unavailable, but since last Wednesday-in five workdays-LAUSD [Los Angeles Unified School District] has given out more than a million meals to our students, their families, and the homeless. And we are spending about $100 million to get 100% of our students connected to the Internet and with an I-pad or Chromebook to use while schools are closed. I just cannot focus on anything but all of this right now."
¶
Once an activist, always an activist."
3/25/2020, SF Reporter, Spring Poetry Search, Julie Ann Grimm
"[Terence Gilmore ] Cady is a recovering semi-retired trial lawyer, nationally certified child welfare law specialist. Graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, class of 1965. Active in the Free Speech Movement at Cal-Berkeley, 1964-65. He has lived and worked in Santa Fe since 1993 and written two novels, numerous short stories and poems which feature the darker sides of socially marginalized people, including children who are victimized by predatory and just plain mean adults and, in some cases, by lawyers and judges."
3/12/2020, Voices of Monterey Bay, Suffrage and suffering, Kathryn McKenzie
"Aptheker's own background has been steeped in activism and feminism. Born in 1944, she grew up as a 'Red Diaper Baby,' the child of a union organizer and a Marxist historian. She was a leader in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964, and in the 1970s, worked to defend Angela Davis, a longtime friend and fellow Communist Party member, in her high-profile trial."
3/11/2020, The Washington Post, Higher education's mandatory political participation, George F. Will
"The Free Speech Movement, an early tremor of the earthquake that shook campuses in the 1960s, began on Sproul Plaza at the University of California at Berkeley, in 1964. Today eight of the 10 universities in the UC system are administering faculty hiring practices that involve coerced speech, enforced political conformity and mandatory political participation.
¶
Any academic seeking a position is required to write a 'diversity, equity and inclusion' (DEI) statement affirming support--sometimes even 'enthusiastic' support--for, and demonstrating activism in support of, a systemwide orthodoxy. In the required statement ('Demonstrating Interest in and Ability to Advance Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion'), an applicant should show that he or she has been active, and must promise to be active, in advancing the approved agenda. This process explicitly subordinates assessments of academic excellence." [Ed note: Will's definition totalitarian is forced participation in matters of state. Thus fostering faculty and diverse student participation is a totalitarian act. Fostering is not forcing. The FSM began on Bancroft Avenue. Sproul Plaza was off-limits for political speech.]
3/8/2020, Finger Lake Times, Freedom is a shared value, Tony Del Plato
"Living freely means speaking, voting, marching, standing or sitting for what matters, without threats. In 1964, the "Berkeley Free Speech Movement" arose because students insisted that the university lift the ban on campus political activities. Students asserted their right to free speech and academic freedom."
03/02/2020, Berkeley Library News, "They Got Woken Up": SLATE and Women's Activism at UC Berkeley, Amanda Tewes
"SLATE--so named because the group backed a slate of candidates who ran on a common platform for ASUC (Associated Students of the University of California) elections --operated between 1958 and 1966, and ignited a passion for politics in the face of looming McCarthyism and what many perceived as the University of California's encroachment on student rights to free speech. These students translated political theory they learned in the classroom to action, even when it went against University policies. Perhaps SLATE's most important ideological contribution to Berkeley's campus and to other social movements is the 'lowest significant common denominator.' This concept allowed the group to form a big tent coalition between Marxists, liberal Democrats, and others by only choosing political positions and actions that the whole group could agree on."
2/25/2020, The New Republic, How Business Schools Fail Up, David Sessions
"Clark Kerr saw his own field of industrial relations, Schrum writes, as an effort to 'steer labor protest movements in the underdeveloped world away from communism' and to create 'a general strategy to inform U.S. tactics in that area.' The participation of dozens of American universities in government-funded economic development projects in the postcolonial world likewise was part of a broadly conceived effort of national defense against communism. When the Berkeley Free Speech Movement made Kerr its central villain, it was precisely because his vision of the university was so thoroughly associated with the military-industrial complex and the horrors of the Vietnam War."
2/25/2020, Indybay, The Art of Protest - Speakers,
"U.C. Berkeley, birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, paved the way for mass protests and prolonged student strikes across the country against the Vietnam War and the draft, for black liberation and ethnic studies, and a variety of other struggles for social justice. This legacy of protest continues to be felt in the social movements of today."
2/23/2020, Mashable, On college campuses in the 2020s, there's a new movement afoot, Natasha Piñon
"Nearly 60 years ago, Jack Weinberg, a U.C. Berkeley student whose arrest spurred the era-defining Free Speech Movement, made a simple, somewhat tossed-off, comment to a reporter: 'Don't trust anyone over 30.' In the process, he helped further ignite a generational wedge that sticks with us today, marking college campuses and the young people they contain as the initiators and supporters of a host of social movements, from anti-war protests to Occupy Wall Street. "
2/21/2020, Rafu Shimpo, ALAN NISHIO TO BE KEYNOTE SPEAKER AT 51ST MANZANAR PILGRIMAGE,
"Nishio, 74, was born on Aug. 9, 1945, at the Manzanar concentration camp. His activism and leadership work go back to the days of the Free Speech Movement in the late 1960s at UC Berkeley, where he helped form the Asian American Political Alliance."
2/19/2020, Jewish News, Rabbi Michael Lerner talks spiritual activism, revolutionary love, Ellen O'Brien
"Still, it wasn't until he became involved in the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley that Lerner himself became an activist and a leader. His involvement culminated in a sit-in at Sproul Hall on Dec. 2, 1964, where 800 students were arrested the next morning. The arrests led to a student strike, the firing of the university chancellor and an agreement by the university not to limit the content of students' speech and advocacy.
¶
'What I learned in this is something quite amazing: That ordinary people could have an impact on history, on what was going on. That is an insight that carried me to this moment,' Lerner said. 'By standing up for what we believed in and being willing to sacrifice for it, we made a tremendous impact on the consciousness of people at that time. And that convinced me that the realists were mistaken. Even though it was true that they had a lot of power, there was also a lot of power in us, and that showed up again many, many times in my life.'"
2/13/2020, Berkeleyside, Protesters interrupt an open house on building student dorms at People's Park, Brandon Yung
"'I think that the spirit of Berkeley is individuals sharing freely their thoughts and opinions,' Kyle Gibson, the director of communications for Capital Projects, told Berkeleyside. 'If we're talking about a site that has ties to the free speech movement that has to be part of the process of how we are going to address it. More than anything I think those voices contributing to how we are going to memorialize People's Park are exceptionally crucial.'" [Ed note: During the FSM there was no People's Park. The land held houses that were later torn down.]
2/12/2020, Berkeley News, Made of honor: History major secures plaque for Spanish Civil War hero, Gretchen Kell
"'A few of their descendants have already reached out to me," he [Milton Zerman] said, 'One, a Berkeley grad himself, said that tales of his father's exploits in Spain motivated him to take part in the legendary Free Speech Movement.'"
2/11/2020, The Daily Californian, An ode to Berkeley, Atharva Palande OR Katherine Shok
"UC Berkeley, at the time, had prohibited protests and any such acts of civil disobedience. Going to UC Berkeley, of course, students protested this. When one student, Jack Weinberg, was arrested, Savio took the lead of an impromptu sit-in that lasted for more than 30 hours. While the Free Speech Movement merged with the anti-war movement, Savio emerged as a prominent student activist who would help alter the course of free speech not only at UC Berkeley but throughout the nation." [Ed note: Jack Weinberg was arrested on Oct. 1, 1964; the sit-in around the police car happened spontaneously and was not led by Savio.]
2/4/2020, San Jose Mercury News, Not just Market Street: This iconic Bay Area avenue could ban cars too, Nico Savidge
"As the gateway to Sproul Plaza on the Cal campus, Telegraph Avenue served as a backdrop to some of the most historic events in Berkeley history, from the Free Speech movement in the early 60s, to the anti-war protests later in the decade."
2/1/2020, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, McDermott: 'Cancel culture' is a betrayal of everything liberalism once stood for, Kevin McDermott
"The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the mid-1960s--an early offshoot of the Civil Rights movement and one of modern liberalism's proudest moments--didn't demand that people express certain opinions; it demanded that people be allowed to express their opinions, period. Confident in the truism that unfettered debate tends to elevate what should be elevated and debunk what shouldn't, they embraced the classic liberal axiom: I disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
1/28/2020, The Signal, Impeachment sparks student activism, Kevin Hornibrook
"No experience stands out more than that of college students - throughout American history, the youngest demographic of voters have demanded change. The year 1963 saw University of California at Berkeley students stand up for free speech, sparking a nationwide dialogue in their Free Speech Movement. The 2010s saw demonstrations for womens' rights, racial equality and environmental issues." [Ed note: the FSM spanned 1964-65]
1/27/2020, San Jose Mercury News, Mavis Staples: Legendary singer's momentous weekend in SF, Andrew Gilbert
"'We were a big family, really -- Albertina Walker, Sister Mahalia Jackson, they would come over to the house,' Mavis wrote me in an email exchange after she spoke on a panel discussion on music and protest at UC Berkeley as part of the campus commemoration of the Free Speech Movement's 50th anniversary."
1/26/2020, The Daily Californian, Free Speech Movement Cafe celebrates 20 years at UC Berkeley, Olivia Buccieri
"In fall 1964, thousands of campus students protested at Sproul Hall after campus administration banned political expression on Sproul Plaza. Savio then made his famous "Operation of the Machine" speech on Sproul's steps, calling for expanded free speech on campus. His acts of civil disobedience were pivotal moments for the campus Free Speech Movement.
¶
Ross said he admired Savio's actions when he was on campus majoring in philosophy, but felt the movement had died down by the 1980s. Those involved in the Free Speech Movement inspired him and others to establish the café because people like Ross wanted to publicly spread awareness of the movement to future generations."
1/22/2020, Yale Daily News, IFTIKHAR: The students before us, Iman Iftikhar
"The first mass act of civil disobedience on an American college campus, the Free Speech Movement of 1964-65 at the University of California, Berkeley, was influenced by the emergence of the New Left, the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement - all of which originated on the political left. But even before students at U.C. Berkeley rose in defiance of on-campus political silence, black students in the U.S. South were creating new ways of practicing freedom of speech. In 1917, thousands of African-American students from across the nation participated in the anti-lynching "Silent Parade" in New York. In 1924, at Fisk University in Tennessee - influenced by W.E.B. Du Bois' commencement speech at the school - students staged walkouts in light of concerns surrounding the university's disciplinary rules that undermined black identities." [Ed note: the anti-war movement FOLLOWED the Free Speech Movement.]
1/15/2020, Chicago Magazine, Troublemakers, Erik S. Gellman
"Objecting to the government's use of special test scores and class rank in deciding who got deferred from the draft, some 450 students took over the U. of C.'s administration building for five days in May 1966. They demanded that the school stop testing and reporting the data to the Selective Service, arguing that it buttressed a caste system. [Art] Shay's emblematic photo features U. of C. grad student Jackie Goldberg, who had been a leader of the Free Speech Movement protest while at Berkeley, guiding activists in a discussion. A sign behind her states, 'Don't Use My Grades to Murder Students.' The demonstration and others on campuses around the country helped end the use of this information as major criteria for the Selective Service, even if the burden of the draft still fell disproportionately on working-class and minority youths." [Ed note: see photo at link]
1/10/2020, Policy Options, The complexity of protecting free speech on campus, Dax D'Orazio
"Although critiques of higher education likely predate the socio-cultural upheavals of the 1960s, that period is essential for understanding the contours of the contemporary debate. An obvious exemplar is the Free Speech Movement on the University of California - Berkeley campus, in the early 1960s. Student activists, some of whom had recently returned from volunteering in the Freedom Summer of 1964 were incensed that the Berkeley administration forbade political advocacy (aside from political parties). Protests and sit-ins attracted thousands of students, eventually led to the administration relenting, and galvanized student movements across the country and around the world."
12/17/2019, Berkeleyside, Opinion: The future of Telegraph Avenue is a shared street, Rigel Robinson and Stuart Baker
"Telegraph Avenue was the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, where thousands of UC Berkeley students fought for their right to engage in political activism on campus."
12/10/2019, Los Angeles Times, Adulting' is hard. UC Berkeley has a class for that, Hannah Fry
'Adulting is one of dozens of student-run courses in the university's DeCal (Democratic Education at Cal) program, in which students create and facilitate their own classes on topics that include those practical and fun and often aren't addressed in traditional curriculum. The project is rooted in the ideals of Berkeley's free speech movement, launched in the 1960s when students pressed for and won greater academic rights.'
12/3/2019, The Inquirer, Resist and Revolt: What students today can learn from Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, Prabhat Jain
"'Listen up everybody! All foreign students, people who are not registered at the University, seniors and disabled people all need to leave right now. If you do not leave, you will be arrested and many of you will be shipped to the country where you came from and others thrown into jail for trespassing on private property,' Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement, screamed into the loudspeakers."
11/23/2019, The Times-News, Don't apologize for doing your job, Robin Abcarian
"I talked about this a short while later over coffee with a couple of fellow Berkeley graduates, all of us free speech nuts. We agreed that if we ran the world, we'd call out the National Guard to protect free speech on campus, to give even the loathsome Milo a mic.
¶
Of course, the irony of the Northwestern students' 'invasion of privacy' backlash is that we are in an era where privacy is practically dead. Instagram, Snapchat, whatever: pictures, or it didn't happen! And yet students object to news coverage of themselves publicly protesting odious political policies because they may suffer some theoretical harm."
11/21/2019, Time, 'OK Boomer' Captures the Tension Between Young and Old. Must It Be So Dismissive?, Stephanie Zacharek
"Maybe this is the time to remind everybody of a much older catchphrase, a meme of its day. The words 'Don't trust anyone over 30' originated in the mid-1960s with Jack Weinberg, an environmental activist and a leader of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, a group of young radicals who fought for the kind of change that many in today's younger generations also desire. It's young people's right to want to change the world, and to find their own words, but it's the action behind the words that counts. OK, Gen Z. Show us what you've got."
11/21/2019, The Saint, Fight to protect your freedom of speech, Missy Bolt
"Similarly, free speech used to be a hallmark of university life at the University of California, Berkeley. The Free Speech Movement originated there, with students holding mass protests against limitations on academic freedom and free speech on university campuses US-wide. But today's UC Berkeley? It has become a cariacature of itself. In recent years, its students have attacked and banned 'controversial' speakers instead of debating them. Attacked! Banned! Hardly what the Free Speech Movement fought for."
11/19/2019, The Daily Californian, Protests are important for making political change, Charles Lea and Tessa Stapp
"The campus has co-opted this movement into its identity in order to take credit for speaking out and being the first to do so. However, the campus itself was the adversary students fought against at the time of these movements. This co-opting of political activism as part of the establishment is not unique to UC Berkeley."
11/13/2019, Washington Post, The problem with 'OK, boomer', Holly Scott
"Yet, generational slogans were more complicated than memory has it. Even the line 'don't trust anyone over 30,' first uttered during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964, wasn't originally meant as a barb at older people. Tired of reporters insinuating that the student movement was secretly directed by communists, Jack Weinberg made up the line to deflect red-baiting. By saying students didn't trust anyone over 30, he meant there were no communist puppet masters pulling the strings."
11/12/2019, Daily Californian, Campus herbicide use works against UC's sustainable mission, Herbicide-Free UC Team
"In addition to its scientific leadership, the UC system also serves as a moral leader, stretching back to the Free Speech Movement."
11/11/2019, Esquire, Yeah, It's Funny That Donald Trump Junior Was Silenced by Free-Speech Conservatives, Jack Holmes
"Essentially, the 'campus free speech' crowd's playbook consists of: one, saying liberal college students are hostile to free expression; two, going to college campuses and saying things that will piss off liberal college students; three, declaring the protests that inevitably ensue-which they had the clear intent of attracting-constitute a campaign by liberal college students to 'silence' them. There's never any mention of, say, the extensive efforts at both the state and federal level to make it functionally illegal to criticize Israel's policies towards its Palestinian residents. And of course there's no mention of the fact that the President of the United States has declared the free press to be an enemy of the state. Those are the kind of First Amendment issues these folks are less concerned about."
11/8/2019, The New York Times, With ‘Shadow Stalker,’ Lynn Hershman Leeson Tackles Internet Surveillance, Tess Thackara
"SAN FRANCISCO -- 'I found my voice through technology,' artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson is saying, sitting in an old-world bar here, wearing a long jacket with quotes from French philosophers embroidered on it.
¶
She has lived in the Bay Area since the 1960s, spending formative years in Berkeley and participating in the free speech movement. Through technology, she said, she 'found amplification, microphones--and it was an era when women were silenced.'"
11/7/2019, California Magazine, At Berkeley's California Typewriter, the Selectrics Keep Humming, Cirrus Wood
"UC Berkeley was an IBM campus, so every department had its own collection of machines. And since the campus was vast and hilly, and the typewriters heavy, [Herbert] Permillion would cover his route in a three-wheeled motorized cart. 'I've gone through some of the action that's happened at the University,' he said nonchalantly. Once, during the Free Speech movement, he got caught in a crowd on campus. He doesn't remember who was speaking, but the students surrounded his cart and climbed on top, first to gain a better view, then to spout their beliefs."
11/4/2019, Reporter Magazine, MORATORIUM TO END THE WAR: 50TH ANNIVERSARY, Morgan LaMere
"'It started in Harvard University, it's an outgrowth of McCarthy-era suppression of labor unions and left-leaning activists in general when people were being purged from the U.S. government,' she [Tamar Carroll] said. 'A film that showed an HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) committee meeting was shown at Harvard University, and students felt that [what] the film depicted was contrary to democracy as they understood it.'
¶
Carroll suggested this was where students began protesting the Cold War, and where the activism of the New Left, a new form of student social activism, first originated. Later, the University of California Berkeley would help create the Free Speech Movement and protest for other causes alongside those who participated in the 1960 HUAC protest. It was from this early activism for free speech that protests arose in the Vietnam era."
11/1/2019, Berkeley News, Berkeley Talks: Author Andrew Marantz on the hijacking of the American conversation, Public Affairs, UC Berkeley
"Christ first met Marantz in 2017, when he was working on a New Yorker story about free speech issues on campus, after the cancellation of an event with then-Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos led to a wave of criticism that Berkeley--home of the Free Speech Movement--had tried to shut down free speech.
¶
'When I was here covering the Milo circus,' said Marantz, 'the underlying premise was, 'This is a public university, therefore, the First Amendment applies, therefore, he has to be able to speak.' …What I'm questioning is whether that should be the interpretation of First Amendment law for time immemorial, or whether we can change our interpretations of laws just like we've always changed our interpretations of laws.'"
10/28/2019, Simmons Voice, And Then There Was the Word, Sidney Berger
"Sometimes the situation dictates how a word or phrase is to be taken, even if that interpretation is wrong. When I was an undergrad at Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement was on (I just dated myself!), and students were bent on shutting down the campus to get across to the administration that students' rights had been trampled on. The grinding to a halt of all campus operations was called a moratorium--literally, a pause, a delay of action. The classes were going to be stopped; so was the normal operation of the campus. There was going to be a moratorium of normal activities."
10/26/2019, The Berkeley Daily Planet, ¡Patrick Hallinan, Presente!, Gar Smith
"excerpt from his official biography ...
¶
'Patrick began his social activism at age six by selling stamps in support of refugees of the Spanish Civil War. He delivered his father's acceptance speech for the Progressive Party Presidential nomination in 1952 while his father was in jail on a contempt of court charge arising from his defense of labor leader Harry Bridges. During his father's incarceration, Patrick traveled the country with Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Dubois in support of his father's candidacy and the progressive movement. He was a leader in the Free Speech Moment at Berkeley, directed the West Coast Mobilization against the War in Viet Nam and, along with his entire family, was arrested in the San Francisco Auto Row sit-ins.'"
10/26/2019, Berkeley Daily Planet, Remembering Brad Cleaveland, Author of the Magna Carta of Student Rebellion, Gar Smith
"Herbert Bradford Cleaveland, one of the founders of the Free Speech Movement and a longtime resident of Berkeley's Redwood Gardens, passed away on October 21 at the Oakland Health and Wellness Center. Brad had been in fading health for the past few weeks."
10/24/2019, Newsmax, Scott Johnston to Newsmax TV: College Liberalism Has 'Taken a Very Dark Turn', Theodore Bunker
"'Colleges have always been liberal,' Johnston admitted on 'America Talks Live,' to host John Cardillo. 'Yale was a very liberal place when I went there, but it's taken a very dark turn, particularly on matters like speech. The free speech movement started at Berkeley in the 1960's . . . and that was a movement by campus leftists.'" [Ed note: the 1964 FSM coalition included Campus College Republicans, Cal Students for Goldwater, Conservatives for an Open Campus, and University Society of Libertarians]
10/20/2019, History News Network, Can a 1960s-like Counterculture Emerge?, Walter G. Moss
"What followed in the 1970s and 1980s was the disappearance of the 1960s counterculture and the absorption of many of its former adherents into the 'system.' In his Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000), conservative columnist David Brooks wrote: 'We're by now all familiar with modern-day executives who have moved from S.D.S. [a radical student organization that flourished in the 1960s] to C.E.O. . . . Indeed, sometimes you get the impression the Free Speech Movement [begun 1964 at the University of California, Berkeley] produced more corporate executives than Harvard Business School.'"
10/18/2019, The Berkeley Daily Planet, The Battle for People's Park, Gar Smith
"I was one of the post-FSM activists who lost my home when UC ordered the demolition of the houses in the Dwight/Haste/Telly neighborhood. As Stew Alpert put it in his 'Hear Ye! Hear Ye!' broadside, UC 'tore down a lot of beautiful houses to build a swamp.'
¶
It was no coincidence that one of the houses targeted for demolition contained a den of 'off-campus agitators,' including Free Speech Movement vets and civil rights activists. The residence came complete with a phone bank, meeting rooms, and printing machines (which, in those days, meant hand-cranked mimeographs)."
10/18/2019, The Berkeley Daily Planet, SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces, Gar Smith
"Back in 1965, Rabbi Michael Lerner served as a member of the Free Speech Movement's coordinating committee before getting himself indicted by Nixon's Justice Department for organizing anti-war demonstrations at U of Washington. Over the past half-century, he's written 11 books, including 'The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country From the Religious Right.' And now. Rabbi Lerner has written a new book, Revolutionary Love: A Political Manifesto to Heal and Transform the World (University of California Press).
¶
Lerner, who has worked as a psychotherapist studying political and social movements as well as 'studying the psychodynamics of American society (in part as principal investigator of an NIMH supported systematic study of the American middle class)' believes he has hit upon "a new strategy for healing and transforming our world before the life support system of the planet is destroyed and before reactionary white nationalism becomes the shaper of the politics of the 2020s and 2030s.'"
10/15/2019, Berkeley News, Author Andrew Marantz talks trolls, tribulations and tumult, Roqua Montez
"Berkeley, of course, also has a bit of experience dealing with right-wing provocateurs and the subsequent issues revolving around free speech. In one of the more notable events, campus police had to evacuate the then-Breitbart editor and controversial speaker Milo Yiannopoulos from campus and cancel his February 2017 event amid an apparently organized response that resulted in the destruction of property at UC Berkeley's Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union.
¶
A wave of criticism followed, with free speech advocates advancing the erroneous claim that Berkeley--the home of the Free Speech Movement--had tried to shut down free speech. A long list of conservative speakers lined up to speak on campus in an effort to test that unfounded assertion."
10/13/2019, Davis Enterprise, As if a $5 coffee wasn't bad enough, Bob Dunning
"I still remember back during the revolutionary '60s how Mario Savio and his buddies would come up to Davis to tell those of us attending the University Farm exactly what the Free Speech Movement was all about."
10/8/2019, Lebanon Express, Gloria Tafralian Wilson 1942-2019,
"Glo worked her way through college using work study programs and finding work during holiday breaks and during the summer. After graduating, Glo continued working at Cal. These were interesting times in Berkeley--the Free Speech Movement, People's Park protests, and anti-war demonstrations. Rather than go into detail about her experiences, it is sufficient to say that she knew and never forgot what it's like to be tear gassed."
10/2/2019, The Leader, Today in History, Oct. 2, AP
"Standing atop the crushed roof of a campus police car, a University of California student asks Cal students to identify themselves during third day of Free Speech Movement demonstrations at Berkeley, Ca., Oct. 2, 1964. One student has been arrested and confined in the police car which is surrounded by the demonstrators. (AP Photo)"
10/1/2019, San Francisco Chronicle, Carl Irving 1928 - 2019,
"...Carl went to work for the Oakland Tribune. During his time there he was assigned to cover higher education, including UC Berkeley. In 1964, he made an inquiry to the UC administration regarding the legal status of a small strip of property at the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph Avenues where students manned tables advocating on political issues. The answer to that question (that the property actually belonged to the University, not the City of Berkeley) and the article that Carl wrote, eventually sparked the famed free speech movement ..." [Ed note: perhaps best to consider this to be among the sparks.]
10/1/2019, Jamaica Observer, This Daily In History - October 1, AP
"1964: The US Free Speech Movement is launched at the University of California at Berkeley."
9/28/2019, Liberation News, UC Berkeley students say 'No tech for ICE', Zach Chacon
"As students marched past California Hall, housing Chancellor Carol Christ's office, they chanted, 'Carol Christ, you know it's true, the crimes of ICE depend on you,' pointing out the hypocrisy between the campus's words and its actions. Students then marched through the historic Sather Gate and onto the Free Speech Monument, contrasting the school administration's idealization of its radical past with its resistance to present-day progressive voices."
09/27/2019, Random Lengths News, Above the Fold: The Story of a Renegade Journalist, James Preston Allen
"If you're old enough to remember the free speech movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s, the anti-war demonstrations that came later or the confrontation over People's Park on Telegraph Avenue when Gov. Ronald Reagan called out the National Guard, then the name Robert Scheer and Ramparts magazine probably sound familiar."
9/20/2019, The Daily Californian, Berkeley leadership for social movement on climate and justice, Daniel Kammen
"The climate crisis we now face cries out for an even greater wave of use-inspired basic and applied research, and critically, for social activism. This will take different forms for each of us, but in the tradition of the Free Speech Movement, I am convinced that there is no better place to get this done than at UC Berkeley."
9/20/2019, Berkeley News, Admissions director Femi Ogundele on what makes a Berkeley student, Femi Ogundele
"And then I also think it's important for us to really uplift the work that has been done around building equitable spaces on this campus for years. I think one of the things that I've noticed when I was applying for the institution versus what I know now, the free speech movement is obviously something that Berkeley's incredibly proud of, but student activism has been a threat ever since. And when we take a look at all of the other things that the student activism has created here, I think that it's a very easy and compelling argument to go out and talk to a teenager and tell them, if you're looking for an institution that will respond to the student voice, Berkeley is the place to be."
9/18/2019, Heavy.com, The Revolution Club: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know, Elizabeth Sloan
"[Bob] Avakian became a political figure during the turbulent time of the 1960s, his biography states. He was first introduced to political life during the Free Speech Movement while he was studying at University of California, Berkeley. He went on to join and become a leader of the resistance and protests against the Vietnam War. Then he reportedly became an early and supporter of the Black Liberation struggle and closely associated with the Black Panther Party. Later, Avakian's biography says that he played a critical leading role in the political and ideological struggles of the New Left Movement, which ultimately led to the founding of the Revolutionary Communist Party."
9/13/2019, Los Angeles Times, Column: Justice Gorsuch calls for 'civility,' always a code for shutting down free speech, Michael Hiltzik
"Prior to that, Nicholas Dirks, then the chancellor of UC Berkeley, stepped into a quagmire when he marked the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement on that campus by asserting, 'We can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility. Simply put, courteousness and respect in words and deeds are basic preconditions to any meaningful exchange of ideas.'
¶
Dirks got hit with an uncivil reaction from critics who properly interpreted the call for civility as a weaselly dodge around the principle of free speech. As Ken White of the group legal blog Popehat observed: 'Civility is an admirable value. ... But speech need not be civil to be entitled to robust protection. Berkeley's free speech movement did not seek to protect civil speech; the Vietnam War was not an occasion for civility.'"
9/12/2019, Broadway World, Rainbow Theatre Project Kicks Off Season With BLUE CAMP, BWW News Desk
"'Blue Camp is set in 1964. The year of the Civil Rights Act, of the first demonstration against the gay ban in the military, of the Beatles first album released in the U.S., of the war on poverty, of the release of the Warren Commission Report, of Malcom X's 'Bullets or Ballots Speech,' of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, of Susan Sontag's 'Essay on Camp," and of The Gulf of Tonkin,' states Hanna. 'Against this background and facing a dishonorable discharge from the Army a group of gays and a group of straight soldiers who have committed crimes come to terms with the possible loss of the G. I. Bill and the real possibility of being swept up in the fervor of events leading to the Vietnam War.'"
9/10/2019, CNN, Free speech wars miss the point of college, Michael S. Roth
"Some older liberals may wax eloquent about the Free Speech movement and People's Park, but they rarely repeat the powerful words of its leader, Mario Savio: 'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop!' It wasn't civility this leftist icon of free speech was calling for; it was passionate disruption."
9/9/2019, Townhall, Free Speech Should Not Be A Partisan Issue, Eric Cervone
"While conservatives have long had a reputation for being uptight prudes, progressive puritans are increasingly the gatekeepers of acceptable ideas. Today, Americans across the political spectrum are increasingly afraid to speak their mind. On college campuses, conservatives are highly reluctant to speak up during class discussions related to race, politics, and gender out of fear of retribution from professors and classmates.
¶
It wasn't always this way. The term 'free-speech movement' is synonymous with campus protests that took place at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s. The students involved in those protests generally affiliated themselves with the New Left, and advocated positions that certainly were not considered conservative."
9/9/2019, Marin Indpendent Journal, A hero to those who remember, a gray-haired math professor to those who don't, Susan Mines
"What? A math professor admitting he preferred English? He was probably just being kind. Trying to make me feel less idiotic.
¶
There was something familiar about that face. Especially the deep dimple in his chin. Where had I seen him before? Weren't the students addressing him by his first name? What were they calling him? Mario?
¶
Suddenly it all came together. Shock overcame any discretion I might ordinarily have possessed. I blurted out--loudly enough to cause snickers around the room--'Oh my God! You were our hero.'
¶
He smiled shyly and nodded in a diffident, self-conscious way. Clearly this wasn't the first time he had dealt with this situation. He seemed uneasy. And maybe a tiny bit pleased.
The last time I encountered this man he was standing barefoot on top of a police car trapped in a mob of thousands of students in Sproul Plaza on the UC Berkeley campus in the early, heady days of the Free Speech Movement. And he was speaking to the crowd. Not speaking. Orating. What an inspiration he was! What confidence he showed! What brilliance!
¶
But that was over 50 years ago. That era--my youth--was out of the pages of history books to the bemused students in the computer lab who indifferently returned to their machines after my outburst. After all, they weren't even born when this fiery young graduate student with the movie star name of Mario Savio became our hero. To them he was just Mario, the gray-haired math teacher."
9/5/2019, People's World, Leon Wofsy: The Organizer (1921-2019), Conn Hallinan and Max Elbaum
"In the fall of that year, the university was embroiled in a battle over free speech and the right of students to organize politically on the campus. It was a critical moment in the history of the country. Students had gone into the South during Freedom Summer to help register black voters and challenge Jim Crow laws. When Bay Area students came home in the fall, they joined the growing northern civil rights movement that was confronting racial discrimination in San Francisco and Oakland.
¶
The ability to use campuses to organize boycotts, picket lines, and sit-ins was essential to the civil rights movement, and the university was determined to choke off that venue. That it failed was in part because of Leon Wofsy.
¶
There were many reasons the university was forced to retreat from its efforts to muzzle political activism, but a key moment for the Free Speech Movement (FSM) was when the Faculty Senate supported the student's demands. That might not have happened were it not for Leon.
¶
At the time, the FSM's nickname for the Faculty Senate was 'the hutch,' a body composed of rabbits that would bolt for their burrows at the first hint of trouble. But Leon could organize anything, even rabbits. He didn't do it alone, of course, and many other faculty members contributed, but Leon knew how to get people who spook easily to hold their ground.
¶
He built up a core of people and began to push the Senate--gently, because rabbits are timid--to act. This was not something he did out front. He was a formidable debater (as Ronald Reagan would discover), but his style was small meetings, phone calls, breakfast gatherings, persuasion. He got people to move at their own pace--and then to go a bit further.
¶
Good organizing means dampening one's ego, particularly in academia, where high self-regard is sort of part of the job description. But Leon always knew that the people being organized, not the organizer, were the point. It was frustrating and at times plain painful, but the Senate majority stood up to the university in 1964, even if its fortitude later diminished."
9/3/2019, Berkeley Library News, From Chez Panisse to Silicon Valley: Podcast explores UC Berkeley's undeniable influence, Virgie Hoban
"But this was Berkeley, after all; the restaurant is nestled on Shattuck Avenue, a few blocks from campus. For Waters, an activist on campus during the heydey of the Free Speech Movement, revolution was nothing new.
¶
'What Alice Waters and the Chez Panisse team did was probably the most radical gesture in restaurants and cooking in America in the last century,' said food writer Chris Ying, in an interview conducted by The Bancroft Library's Oral History Center. 'It's important that it happened in Berkeley.'"
8/30/2019, San Francisco Chronicle, Leon Wofsy 1921 - 2019,
"Also while at Berkeley, Leon was a leader among the faculty in supporting students during the Free Speech Movement, opposing war, fighting apartheid, supporting progressive movements in Latin America, and increasing the representation of women and minorities in the sciences and the broader academic community."
8/23/2019, Biddeford Journal Tribune, California may define the 2020 race, David M. Shribman
"Like states big and small, California and its electorate are not monolithic. California, after all, spawned both the conservatism of William F. Knowland and the liberalism of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and was the birthplace of both Haight-Ashbury flower power and Breitbart News alt-right disruption."
8/22/2019, ChristianHeadlines, The Declining Respect for Clergy: Cultural Trends and Self-Inflicted Wounds, John Stonestreet and Roberto Rivera
"Actually, the decline in trust and disregard for institutions predates Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War. After all, the 1964 Free Speech movement at Berkeley had a signature saying: 'We don't trust anyone over thirty.' It's a line that came to sum up the view of many Baby Boomers towards all authority. Governmental, parental, and clerical included." [Ed note: many clergy took respected roles during the fsm: see: http://www.fsm-a.org/FSM_Religious_Voices.html]
8/21/2019, The New Republic, Who Gets to Speak Freely?, Jacob Bacharach
"The reportage is more engrossing than the history, which can occasionally shade into a kind of term-paper gloss on complex events and politics. A history of the ACLU's transformation from a radical labor organization that viewed equality of material conditions as a necessary precondition to any universal right of expression into a bastion of 'milquetoast progressivism' is a captivating and well-told piece of context. The sections on the Berkeley-led campus free speech movement are less so, and I would have liked to see a deeper engagement with the way the radical individualism of 1960s counterculture moved leftism away from a more collectivist and labor-oriented outlook. (The antics of 'alt-right' figures like campus barnstormer Milo Yiannopoulos or white nationalist media personality Richard Spencer are self-consciously derived from '60s individualistic radicalism, with its penchant for shocking the squares, for épater le bourgeois.)"
8/21/2019, Berkeley News, Carol Christ to new students: 'Shape Berkeley, even as it shapes you', Public Affairs, UC Berkeley
"Free speech-the constitutionally protected right to believe what we wish and to express ourselves as we wish-is fundamental both to our democracy and to our mission as a learning institution. It has a special meaning at Berkeley, home of the Free Speech Movement, in which students in the 1960s united to fight for the right to advocate political views on campus.
¶
A commitment to free speech involves not just defending your right to speak and the rights of those you agree with, but also defending the right to speak by those you strongly disagree with. This is not easy. You may feel that some speech attacks your very identity. However, rather than seeking to shut down or shut out those we disagree with, the right response is to question, contest, debate. Universities exist in search of truth - we must embody and model a community that responds to things like hate speech with more speech, with rebuttal, with counterpoint."
8/19/2019, The Daily Californian, Berkeley bops to set your 1st year to, Pooja Bale
"'Student Demonstration Time'--The Beach Boys
¶
The Beach Boys took a pause from their classic surf rocks songs to write an ode to student activism at various colleges, and UC Berkeley is the first one mentioned. Step back into the nostalgia of the Free Speech Movement as your walk through Sproul Plaza is soundtracked by this inescapably catchy song." [So this is the historial impact? Sigh.]
8/18/2019, The New Yorker, The Misconception about Baby Boomers and the Sixties, Louis Menand
"Even the younger activists in the civil-rights movement were not boomers. John Lewis was born in 1940, Diane Nash in 1938, Bob Moses in 1935. The three activists who were killed during Freedom Summer in Mississippi, in 1964, were all born before 1945. Stokely Carmichael was born in 1941 (in Trinidad and Tobago), Bobby Seale in 1936, Huey Newton in 1942. Malcolm X was born in 1925, four years before Martin Luther King, Jr.
¶
Mario Savio, the de-facto leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, was born before 1945. Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, and Abbie Hoffman were all born before 1940."
8/17/2019, The Daily Post, News photographer Al Bullock captured history, Emily Mibach
"Bullock worked at KGO until 1992. During his tenure there, he was behind the camera, catching the best shots for stories about the Free Speech movement in Berkeley in the late 1960s, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst in 1974, and the Jonestown massacre and assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978."
8/14/2019, EdSource, High school starts early for California freshmen in 'summer bridge', Sydney Johnson
"During this year's visit to UC Berkeley, Ukiah freshmen toured campus libraries and went to the top of the Campanile, a clock tower that overlooks the San Francisco Bay Area. One program leader stood on Sproul Plaza reciting an excerpt from activist Mario Savio's famous speech during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement."
8/14/2019, Berkeleyside, Berkeley arts commission votes to remove controversial sculptures on I-80 bridge, Tony Hicks
"The sculpture on the east side of the bridge, closer to Aquatic Park, depicts what many say Berkeley is all about: free speech, protest and Berkeley's cultural contributions. The 28-foot-by-12-foot-by-12-foot piece shows linchpin moments in the city's history, including the People's Park protests, Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement and the tree-sitters outside Memorial Stadium. The west side sculpture includes someone flying a kite, a boater, a jogger, a dog catching a Frisbee and a bird watcher looking through binoculars."
8/13/2019, San Francisco Chronicle, Charles Franklin Rudnick May 11, 1945 - August 10, 2019,
"While at Berkeley in the 1960's, Charles witnessed firsthand the Free Speech Movement through his camera lens."
8/11/2019, History News Network, Counterculture 1969: a Gateway to the Darkest and the Brightest, Harlan Lebo
"The Free Speech Movement--which had developed at UC Berkeley in 1964 as a response to, of all things, the university's policies that restricted political activities on campus--took root as the first significant civil disobedience on college grounds; most other major universities would soon follow with their own protests, especially in support of civil rights and opposition to the war."
8/1/2019, Princeton NJ Patch, Princeton Seniors Celebrate 'Surfer Girl' Anniversary, press release
"Another big topic of interest recalled by many residents was The Free Speech Movement that took place during 1964-65 at UC Berkeley."
7/27/2019, Alternet, Before Occupy, there was People's Park, Truthdig
"What, then, are readers to make of all this? Steve Wasserman offers some perceptive historical observations in his afterword. He places the battle for People's Park in the longer history of radical protest in Berkeley. He notes the controversy of the protest against the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1960; the great civil rights sit-ins of spring 1964 at the Sheraton Palace Hotel in San Francisco and the Auto Row demonstrations, peopled largely by Berkeley students; the historic free speech movement of fall 1964 on the Berkeley campus; the historic antiwar teach-in organized by the Vietnam Day Committee in May 1965; the efforts to block troop trains in Berkeley in 1965; and the Third World Liberation Strike at UC in February 1969 to create ethnic studies programs. This is the context for the People's Park battle."
7/23/2019, Los Angeles Times, Bob Olodort, the inventor of the label printer and portable keyboard, dies, Dorany Pineda
"After graduating from Hamilton High School, he studied psychology and photography at UC Berkeley, where he participated in antiwar protests and the Free Speech Movement."
7/15/2019, ABC7, 70 Years of ABC7: See the 1960s Bay Area through the lens of local TV, Jennifer Olney
"In 1964, Channel 7 news broadcasts included devastating floods in Northern California, Native Americans' first attempt to take back Alcatraz and the start of the free speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley.
¶
People sitting in their living rooms could see students, spurred by the civil rights movement, demanding their right to speak on campus. A massive sit-in forced classes to be canceled. More than 800 students were arrested. Viewers saw police drag some of them down stairs and heard the fiery rhetoric firsthand." [Ed note: includes FSM video, some rarely seen.]
7/8/2019, Chicago Monitor, Muslim Student Associations: Fostering Community and Promoting Activism, Afreen Mohiuddin
"In 1964, students at the University of California at Berkeley started the Free Speech Movement, protesting policies that restricted their free speech and academic freedoms."
7/5/2019, Tablet Magazine, Another Summer of Love, Andrea Cooper
"[Denise] Kaufman drew upon that foundation of activism when she was arrested as a freshman at Berkeley as part of the Free Speech Movement. She spent the next year crossing the U.S. on the bus with the Merry Pranksters, a group of friends led by author Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) who some credit with launching the psychedelic era."
7/4/2019, The Berkeley Daily Planet, In the East Bay-- San Francisco Mime Troupe's TREASURE ISLAND, a New Musical, Margot Smith
"The lyrics for TREASURE ISLAND are written by Daniel Savio. Daniel is the son of famed 60s activist Mario Savio--a leader of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the 1960s."
6/27/2019, The Epoch Times, Booker's Attack on Biden Reveals Important Divide Between Progressives, Liberals, Clifford Humphrey
"A fourth core belief liberals maintain is free speech. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement was born out of the intolerance students perceived toward the first stirrings of neo-progressivism itself. Now that same campus is infamous for its riots against certain political speakers."
6/19/2019, Splinter, The Revenge of the Poverty-Stricken College Professors Is Underway in Florida. And It's Big., Hamilton Nolan
"Susan Peterson has lived a colorful life. She married and divorced a rock star. She's been a champion collegiate swimmer. She was at UC Berkeley during the legendary Free Speech protest movement. She's worked as a mime, and ran a successful company offering mermaid-themed birthday parties to Florida children. She also taught English as a second language off and on for years, both at colleges and in public school systems. In 2012, she began teaching at Miami Dade College.'
6/19/2019, Inside Higher Ed, 'Panic Attack' on Campus Radicals, Jeremy Bauer-Wolf
"This unwillingness to hear out certain opinions is much more evident in [Robby] Soave's free speech chapter, though. Here, he discusses how the Free Speech Movement, which originated at the University of California, Berkeley, originally benefited liberal activists. He questions why students do not seem to support the concept of free expression."
6/10/2019, SF Station, SF Mime Troupe Celebrates 60 Years of Comedic Theater, staff
"This year, using the classic tale of Treasure Island as its inspiration… the show follows Hawkins, a civil servant in San Francisco, who accidentally stumbles upon the unethical plans of a developer, L.J. Silver. The lyrics are written by Daniel Savio, son of famed Free Speech Movement leader, Mario Savio."
5/30/2019, New York Times, Can Californians Still Find a Path to Mobility at the State's Universities?, Miriam Pawel
"Then came more complicated decades: the Free Speech Movement, which helped propel Ronald Reagan to the governorship; Proposition 13, which slashed state revenues; Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action; and multiple recessions."
5/24/2019, Robotics Business Review, The Essential Interview: Dr. Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley, Joanne Pransky
"[Ken] Goldberg: My proudest moment was when I was hired at UC Berkeley in 1995. Since I was a kid in the 1960's I've always idolized Berkeley including the Free Speech Movement--and social justice movements during a time when its students questioned authority. Berkeley is a public university and has this amazing reputation in terms of innovation and rigor, not only in the sciences and engineering, but also in the arts, humanities and social sciences."
5/19/2019, The Berkeley Daily Planet, SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces, Gar Smith
"Former Free Speech Activist Scores a Stunning Election Win
¶
According to the independent news platform, L.A. TACO, former Berkeley Free Speech Movement activist and State Assemblymember Jackie Goldberg has won 'a blowout victory' in a runoff for a critical seat on the Los Angeles Unified School Board (LAUSB). Goldberg, 74, enjoyed the solid backing of the teachers union for campaigning as a critic of charter schools. Goldberg won a whopping 71 percent of the vote.
¶
Goldberg's victory shifts the LAUSB majority. Now only three of the seven members are charter-friendly. Goldberg will replace LAUSB president Ref Rodriguez, a pro-charter advocate who was forced to resign after pleading guilty to felony conspiracy charges.
¶
Evoking her Berkeley past, Goldberg told a room of cheering supporters in Echo Park: 'This is not the end, this is the beginning. We need a movement to make the changes we need.'"
5/15/2019, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Party of Utopia: A Report from the 43rd Annual Society for Utopian Studies Conference, Bonnie Johnson
"1968 WAS A MOMENT of reckoning across the country, but perhaps nowhere more than in Berkeley. UC students there had already protested war and McCarthyism in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s--and in 1964, when the school administration tried to curtail campus organizing for civil rights, the Free Speech Movement was born."
5/15/2019, L.A. Taco, JACKIE GOLDBERG WINS SCHOOL BOARD ELECTION, SHIFTING LAUSD CHARTER SCHOOL BALANC, Erick Galindo
"'This is not the end, this is the beginning,' Goldberg told her supporters Tuesday night in Echo Park. 'We need a movement to make the changes we need.'
¶
Goldberg, 74, represented this same district in the 1980s, when she cemented a legacy as a progressive activist that goes back to the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the early 1960s"
5/10/2019, Berkeleyside, 11 years of radical thought and action in Berkeley led to creation of People's Park, Tom Dalzell
"And then came the Free Speech movement in the fall of 1964. It was the first mass act of civil disobedience as practiced in the civil rights movement on an American college campus in the 1960s.
¶
Students insisted that the university administration lift the ban on on-campus political activities and acknowledge the students' right to free speech and academic freedom. The Free Speech Movement burst into the headlines on October 1, 1964, when Jack Weinberg was sitting at a CORE information table on campus. He was arrested when he refused to show identification and placed in a police car in Sproul Plaza. Up to 3,000 students and supporters surrounded the police car; speeches and the Free Speech Movement began. He was released without charges 32 hours later.
¶
On December 2, 1964, several thousand students occupied Sproul Hall in support of the Free Speech Movement. In the early morning hours of December 3, law enforcement moved in and almost 800 protesters were arrested.
¶
In January 1965, the university relaxed rules for political activity on the Berkeley campus
¶
The next manifestation of the growing student movement was a 35-hour-long teach-in about Vietnam at Cal. on May 21 and 22, 1965."
5/1/2019, KentWired, The times they are a-changin: protest music from May 4 to today, Adriona Murphy
"In 1971, the Beach Boys also had their say with 'Student Demonstration Time.'
¶
This particular song references four other instances in which police or military intervened in student protests: the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley; Bloody Thursday at People's Park in Berkeley, the Isla Vista riots in Santa Barbara and the Jackson State shootings."
4/15/2019, Berkeleyside, Opinion: Support Berkeley's Kamala Harris during the presidential campaign, Alan Tobey
"Demonstrator in utero? Kamala's mother was a research chemist who had been on campus since 1960, not forgetting her civil rights past. She was noted for working through both of her pregnancies to the last possible hour. The Free Speech Movement officially started on Sept. 14, 1964, when the campus administration cracked down on protesters, and it reached a first dramatic peak when thousands occupied Sproul Plaza on Oct. 1 and heard the famous Mario Savio speech. Kamala was born on October 20. This is an unconfirmed speculation, but surely Kamala's activist mother had to have been present for some of these protest scenes, especially including the big one, with Kamala on board. If so, Kamala's involvement in civil rights work began in Berkeley even before she was born."
4/10/2019, The Williams Record, Students, faculty spar over free speech, speaker invitations, Arrington Luck
"Gerrard posed several questions to [Luana] Maroja and Perina, including, 'Given the benefits of speech, given that the costs are not borne equally, do you have suggestions [for] what we do with that situation?' To this, [Nico] Perino responded with an anecdote from Hosea Williams, a Black civil rights leader, to support her statement that 'the free speech movement is truly a movement born out of the civil rights struggle.' Maroja reiterated her belief that speech is essential to learning. 'Yes, it is a burden,' Maroja said of free speech, 'but it is a burden I want to fight.'"
4/1/2019, Legaltech News, Nervous System: The First Social Network, David Kalat
"This overlap between the worlds of computer science and the Bay Area's fabled counterculture emerged, naturally enough, from a Bay Area countercultural computer scientist. Lee Felsenstein was an engineer at Ampex, an American electronics company. He was also an antiwar activist and member of the Free Speech Movement who lived in a commune. He and his housemates dreamed of connecting the entire city of Berkeley to a single computer network."
Spring 2019 issue, California, The Strange Case of Ex-Radical David Horowitz, Chris A. Smith
"Although he missed out on the Free Speech Movement, his 1962 book, 'Student,' on Berkeley's burgeoning student movement, inspired Mario Savio to enroll at Cal."
3/21/2019, San Francisco Chronicle, UC Berkeley in spotlight as Trump expected to issue campus free-speech order, Michael Cabanatuan
"On Wednesday night, the Associated Students of the University of California was considering a resolution supporting free speech, condemning violence and noting that UC Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, has come under a 'misconception... that depicts the University to be one that is against free speech.'"
3/12/2019, The Daily Californian, UC faculty must have right to boycott Israeli academic partnerships, Andrew Ross and John King
"Why is it disturbing for us to see an administration at UC Berkeley so much at odds with faculty and student opinion? For one thing, we expect UC Berkeley administrators to act as stewards of the legacy of the Free Speech Movement. They are abdicating that role by failing to support the right of community members to boycott Israel. Indeed, UC Berkeley was widely criticized by students, faculty and alumni in the course of a similar face-off over another country's racially abhorrent policies in the mid-1980s, when the administration opposed the student push for divestment in South Africa. The resulting conflict convulsed the campus for almost two years and ended with a significant victory for faculty and students of conscience. In the annals of the anti-apartheid movement, Berkeley is remembered as a landmark struggle. Indeed, on the occasion of Nelson Mandela's death, a university chancellor praised it as 'one of Berkeley's finest moments,' neglecting to recall, however, the harshly punitive measures--fines, arrests and threats of suspension--rolled out by the administration in response to student and faculty advocacy of a just cause."
3/11/2019, The [UC San Diego] Guardian, UCOP Addresses Trump's Idea to Tie Federal Funding to University Free Speech, Troy Tuquero
"Berkeley is regarded as the birthplace of the 1964 Free Speech Movement, which was inspired by the Civil Rights Movement and opposition to the Vietnam War. Student activists launched massive, year-round protests against the administration's ban on on-campus political activities." [ed note: Opposition to the Vietnam War came AFTER the Free Speech Movement.]
3/8/2019, The American Prospect, The Charter School Movement Washes Out in California, Rachel M. Cohen
" [Jackie] Goldberg has been a well-known figure in local progressive politics for decades. A veteran of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley and later a public schoolteacher, she was elected to two terms on the Los Angeles school board from 1983 to 1991. After that, she served six years in the state assembly and eight as the first openly gay member of the Los Angeles City Council, where in 1997 she authored and passed what was effectively the nation's first living-wage ordinance. This earned her the reputation as a real darling of the progressive left in the city. Goldberg was also a strong supporter of the recent Los Angeles teachers strike, and the teachers union spent roughly $660,000 to elect her."
3/8/2019, Jerusalem Post, 1960S ALL-FEMALE SUMMER OF LOVE BAND REACHES NIRVANA 50 YEARS LATER, Howard Blas
"'Outside of Sprout [sic] Hall, every political perspective was represented by the card tables full of brochures and people on soapboxes. There was a sense of 'We can do this! We can change the world. We have to!' I was in heaven there!'
¶
[Denise] Kaufman vividly recalls that, within a few weeks of arriving at Berkeley, the campus police removed all the tables and told the organizations that they could no longer operate in any way on the campus.
¶
'This started the Free Speech Movement,' she continued. 'From the first day, I was one of the students ready to fight this battle. Within two months, 700 of us got arrested and our free speech rights were eventually upheld.'" [Ed note: Denise Kaufman was arrested in the 1964 FSM.]
3/4/2019, University of California Press Room, Statement affirming the University of California's commitment to free expression, UC Office of the President
"The University of California has a longstanding history of fighting for and protecting free speech for all. Our university was the home of the free speech movement in the 1960s, and our steadfast commitment to upholding the values of free expression and the robust exchange of ideas has not wavered since. President Trump's announcement of a possible executive order mandating that colleges allow free speech on their campuses or lose critical federal research funding is misguided and unnecessary; UC already has clear policies and procedures in place that protect anyone's right to peacefully protest or speak on our campuses."
3/4/2019, KNOCK, Vote For Jackie Goldberg For School Board, Miranda Cristofani
"4. Civic Integrity. Let's put it bluntly: Jackie Goldberg is a badass woman who has always been on the right side of activism and history. She has a long history of working for democracy and equality in education. In the early 1960s, she emerged as a prominent leader in the Free Speech movement at Berkeley (see the picture of her standing on a car speaking to a crowd)."
3/4/2019, Breitbart, Pollak: Students Want College to Be 'Political Utopia that Doesn't Allow for Dissent', Pam Key
"He [Joel Pollak] continued, 'Broadly it requires a much bigger effort. I think the problem is oddly generational. At some of these campuses, Berkeley for example, the faculty and members of the administration actually have in some cases a more open attitude toward free speech than some of the students. You have this campus, which in 1964 was the birthplace of the free speech movement, generating graduates who have become professors and administrators who really do believe in having every idea on campus that they can. And they are struggling with a student body and an activist community around the university that does not like free speech. And that views the university as a kind of microcosm where they want to create a kind of political utopia that doesn't allow for dissent. So we have to move toward a cultural shift that administrators and professors are able to do and that comes into the culture in general.'"
3/1/2019, New York Times, A Right Hook in Berkeley Revives Debate Over Campus Speech, Thomas Fuller
"The attack on Feb. 19 took place at Sproul Plaza, the birthplace and symbol of the Free Speech movement, the protests by students in the 1960s demanding greater political expression."
2/25/2019, Berkeley Daily Planet, SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces, Gar Smith
"So how do FSM vets feel about being used as a UC fund-raising tool? Here's a sample of responses that trickled in following UC's announcement:
Vet 1: 'Big Give'? More like 'Big Take.' Invoking the FSM to 'win big prize money'? That takes the prize.
Vet 2: The FSM did provide 'life-altering discoveries' but UC's role was akin to the role the influenza virus played in the discovery of the flu vaccine.
Vet 3: I'll tell them how much we appreciated all the time and effort the University put into helping us create the Free Speech Movement: 'Without their effort, it would not have been necessary.'"
2/17/2019, L.A. Taco, JACKIE GOLDBERG IS BACK: LIBERAL L.A. VETERAN TAKES ON CHARTER MOVEMENT IN L.A. SCHOOL DISTRICT SPECIAL ELECTION, Philip Iglauer
"One figure relishing the new atmosphere after the strike in January is Jackie Goldberg, who has emerged as the candidate to beat by virtue of her massive name recognition and liberal street cred. Goldberg, a veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, sat down for an interview with L.A. Taco at her home of 40 years in Echo Park."
2/16/2019, Berkeley Daily Planet, SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces, Gar Smith
"On Feb 15, 2019, Barbara Stack, the dedicated steward who looks over the Free Speech Movement Archives (FSM-A), flashed word that www.fsm-a.org had received its first online visit from a resident of Ho Chi Minh City."
2/14/2019, UC Berkeley News, Buxbaum still going strong after seeing Berkeley through years of turmoil, John Hickey
"His first taste of the building tide of unrest that would engulf Berkeley came in 1964. One of his law students came to him with the news that a couple of her sorority sisters had been at an FSM sit-in, had been arrested and were sitting in Santa Rita Jail in Dublin. Could Buxbaum do something to help bail them out? He could. And he would make multiple trips to Santa Rita in the coming weeks to attempt to free dozens of others.
¶
'The work that had to be done started with those December 1964 arrests,' Buxbaum says. 'I was like the frog in slowly heating water. I was in.'
¶
The FSM trials began in April of 1965 and ran into the summer. Of the approximately 800 arrested, 773 pleaded not guilty. By having those 773, including most of the FSM ringleaders, take the same plea, that meant they would all get the same sentence. It took two years before the final appeals of sentences--mostly fines and probation--were made."
2/7/2019, EdSource, CA Gov. Newsom's higher ed advisor to tackle access and financial aid issues, Larry Gordon
"Going back 55 years ago to the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, there has always been tension between governors and the boards that govern university systems. Other than the budget, what are the governor's goals in how these systems are run?"
2/7/2019, Berkeleyside, Accusations of elder abuse and lies swirl around landmarking process for Save the Bay founder's home, Frances Dinkelspiel
"[Marion] McNiven prepared the landmark application for both houses. She argues that 1450 Hawthorne Terrace is not only eligible for architectural reasons, but for cultural ones as well. She makes the point that Donald McLaughlin held a UC Regents meeting in the house during the turmoil of the 1964 Free Speech Movement. Sylvia McLaughlin was inspired to fight bay fill by what she saw out of the window. Sperry fought to save old-growth redwoods and was an early member of Save the Redwood League, according to the application."
2/6/2019, UCI News, Safeguarding the First Amendment, Jim Washburn
"'There are constant issues with regard to free speech on campuses across the country--and related issues in terms of how to promote civic engagement on campuses,' Chemerinsky says. 'As a university administrator, I'm always excited to create programs nobody else is doing. It's so important to have a sustained and systematic study of these issues, and the University of California should be the leader. The free speech movement started at the University of California.'
¶
Prior to that mid-1960s, Berkeley-based effort, political activism was routinely prohibited on campuses. The hard-fought successes of the campaign opened the door for students to advance civil rights and women's rights, oppose the Vietnam War, and have a voice in other controversies."
2/6/2019, The Crimson, Student Activism Has Lost Its Spirit, Sahil Handa
"Young skins have become thinner, aspirations have grown smaller, and bigots have seized the countercultural mantle. Potential allies have been left politically deserted and students have grown perennially distracted. The notion that members of the free speech movement could have once marched alongside sexual liberators and drug legalizers is becoming increasingly difficult to imagine." [Ed note: Unity requires communication and organization. In 1964 The Crimson covered the FSM and Mario Savio visited the campus. See Crimson articles below, December 8-15, 1964]
1/24/2019, Detroit Free Press, Decades of poetry, activism earn Gloria House prestigious Kresge Award, Julie Hinds
"As a young woman, House played a role in some of the key justice movements of the 1960s. She joined the free speech movement as a graduate student in comparative literature at the University of California Berkeley, then left campus in 1965 to work for the civil rights movement in the deep South, specifically for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee."
1/24/2019, Berkeleyside, Did Kamala Harris' Berkeley childhood shape the presidential hopeful?, Natalie Orenstein
"'Growing up in the flatlands of Berkeley, I was raised on stories of activism of the 1960s,' Harris told Berkeleyside. 'From my mother, I learned about the civil rights movement, which was of course allied with the anti-war movement and the Free Speech Movement. She would tell us about students picketing Mel's Drive-In for not hiring black servers and CORE organizing sit-ins to protest the federal government's inaction to combat discrimination in the South, and Maya Angelou or Fannie Lou Hamer holding forth at the Rainbow Sign."
1/22/2019, Angelus, Made in LA: A Catholic contrarian, Greg Erlandson
"Dale's [Dale Vree] biography can be found in his fascinating memoir and social commentary titled 'From Berkeley to East Berlin and Back.' He left UCLA for Berkeley in the early 1960s, becoming a Marxist and an atheist and active in the Free Speech Movement."
1/21/2019, Washington Post, Nathan Glazer, urban sociologist and label-defying intellectual, dies at 95, Harrison Smith
"Dr. Glazer sometimes traced the pivotal moment in his intellectual evolution - his 'mugged by reality' moment, as it were--to the 1960s, when he became disillusioned with the student Free Speech Movement while teaching at Berkeley. But that was just the beginning of a career spent grappling with the chief tenets of the left and the right."
1/20/2019, The Associated Press, Sociologist and intellectual, Nathan Glazer, dead at 95, Hillel Italie
"Glazer himself would prove unhappy with the new thinking of the 1960s. As a faculty member in 1964 at the University of California at Berkeley, he was appalled by the student Free Speech Movement and condemned its 'enthusiastic and euphoric rejection of forms and norms.' He and Kristol soon helped launch a seminal neo-conservative journal, The Public Interest, which Glazer edited from 1973 to 2002."
1/19/2019, New York Times, Nathan Glazer, Urban Sociologist and Outspoken Intellectual, Dies at 95, Barry Gewen
"He had taken a teaching post at Berkeley in 1963, just as the student rebellions of the 1960s were erupting. Opposed to the growing American military involvement in Vietnam and supportive of social policies designed to help the poor, he initially sympathized with the student protesters. But as they grew more extreme--'nihilistic' was Mr. Glazer's word--he turned away from them and his own leftist past as well. He moved toward what he saw as a hard-won pragmatism but what others saw as a reactive conservatism."
1/5/2019, The Irish Times, 'You are now entering Free Derry': 50 years on, Freya McClements
"In the early hours of January 5th, 1969, he scrawled the words 'You are now entering Free Derry' across the house's gable end--and Free Derry Corner was born.
¶
The words were those of author and politician Eamonn McCann, adapted from a similar slogan used by students involved in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California in Berkeley." [Ed note: there is no evidence that this slogan was used during the Free Speech Movement. It may have been used by persons who had been involved in the FSM along their future life trajectories and as part of other projects.]
12/28/2018, KCBS Radio, Protesters Thwart Plans To Cut Down People's Park Trees, Bob Butler
"The park got its name in the 1960s when it became an unofficial headquarters for the free-speech movement that flourished on Berkeley's campus." [Ed note: People's Park was established in 1969. The Free Speech Movement lasted from 10/3/1964 when the name was adopted to 4/28/1965 when it was explicitly dissolved. The only connection is the Free Speech Movement image on the mural near the park.]
12/21/2018, Davis Enterprias, Obituaries: Geraldine Jane Hagie,
"Among her many fascinating experiences were, attending UC Berkeley during the free speech movement, working for D-Q University in its heyday, and raising her family in Davis."
12/20/2018, Berkeleyside, As staffing crisis continues for Berkeley police, officers who left reveal why, Emilie Raguso
"It's undeniable that many in Berkeley have strong feelings about how they want their police force to function.
¶
'This community is very sensitive to government overreaching,' said Alison Bernstein, who has lived in Berkeley since she was 4 and served on the city's Police Review Commission for many years. She said Berkeley's history with the Free Speech Movement and other significant political efforts has definitely shaped community expectations. 'With the history that we've come through, I understand why people are loath to have helicopters and canines.'"
12/15/2018, San Francisco Chronicle, Contest of opinion, Gar Smith
"Regarding 'Free speech isn't supposed to be easy' (John Diaz, Insight, Dec. 9): As a veteran of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, I share the concern over the 'prior restraint' of inflammatory speech. Still, when a provocateur known for preaching violence, division and hatred comes to campus and you need to arrange for extra insurance and police, it's clear that you've got a problem. But there are better ways to handle controversial speech. Consider, for instance, the hallowed tradition of the academic debate. Instead of giving a single polarizing speaker total control over the podium, host a public contest of opinion."
12/12/2018, Berkeleyside, How a little-known Berkeley group sparked the 1960s student movement, Liam O'Donoghue
"The narrative about Berkeley's emergence as a mecca of the counterculture and leftist politics often puts its start with the launch of the Free Speech Movement. The raucous protests that erupted on Sproul Plaza in 1964 helped incite a confrontational student movement that would spread across America and become one of the defining forces of the decade. National media coverage of impassioned young people giving fiery speeches while standing atop a police car also made Berkeley a magnet for idealistic students, militant activists and curious rabble-rousers. Thousands arrived, ready for action. This town, and the rest of the country would never be the same again.
¶
However, a crucial chapter of this story is usually overlooked--the years of organizing that made the Free Speech Movement possible. The roots of this pivotal moment go all the way back to the mid-1950s when a group of students began efforts to shift the focus of student government from campus activities towards political issues such as civil rights. By 1958, this group established a political party called SLATE."
12/8/2018, San Francisco Chronicle, Truce achieved in Berkeley free speech fight, John Diaz
"Here is the welcome bottom line: Conservatives are guaranteed a platform at the university of the 1960s Free Speech Movement. The demonstrators who have tried to silence high-profile appearances by right-wing provocateurs such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro and Ann Coulter will not be able to stop future appearances by threatening havoc.
¶
And, just as important: The conservatives who have tried to claim censorship and martyrdom when they encounter the conditions imposed on all other groups have lost their talking point. The Young America's Foundation agreed to this deal and will be paid $70,000 of its attorney fees."
12/3/2018, The News-Gazette, This day in history, Dec. 3, 2018, The Associated Press
"In 1964, police arrested some 800 students at the University of California at Berkeley, one day after the students stormed the administration building and staged a massive sit-in."
12/3/2018, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Who tragedy, and other iconic photos from December 3, Associated Press
"1964: College Demonstrations ¶
University of California students and sympathizers of free speech movement are sealed off behind police line in front of Sproul Hall in Berkeley, Calif., Dec. 3, 1964. More than 200 officers were removing 500 limp demonstrators from the hall where they had been locked up for the night. (AP Photo)" [ed note: 800+ were arrested]
12/2/2018, The Daily Californian, What is UC Berkeley? 8 times when UC Berkeley was an answer on 'Jeopardy!', Camryn Bell
"Episode: #3995 ¶
Category: Freedom Fighters ¶
Question value: $400 ¶
Question: Mario Savio set off the Free Speech Movement when political activities were banned on this UC campus in 1964. ¶
The Savio Steps are indicative of how significant Mario Savio has been to UC Berkeley and its role in the Free Speech Movement. Luckily the contestant got this one right."
11/28/2018, Inside Higher Ed, Civility at Berkeley, Jeremy Bauer-Wolf
"In October 2017, members of the College Republicans moved to oust the president of the group, Troy Worden, who had supported Yiannopoulos's 'free speech week.' Worden is now an intern for The Daily Signal, which is published by the Heritage Foundation. He has still clashed with the Berkeley administration as of just last month, when he wrote a piece for The Daily Signal claiming Berkeley was limiting free speech. Mogulof said it was riddled with inaccuracies and misinterpreted the institution's new policies. The College Republicans did not respond to a request for comment."
11/27/2018, Los Angeles Times, A dream deferred: Pioneering all-female rock band Ace of Cups is finally having its moment, Michele Willens
"They were soon part of the fabric of their place and time. None more so than [Denise] Kaufman, who dropped out of UC Berkeley (where she was arrested in the free-speech protests) at 18, and temporarily hopped on Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters bus. At various points, she was apparently the focus of many a famous male's life. (Hint: Check out the current biographies of Paul Simon and Jann Wenner)"
11/23/2018, Corvallis Gazette-Times, Letters show dip in civil discourse, George Ice
"One of the reasons I attended the University of California at Berkeley as an undergraduate was its legacy from the Free Speech Movement. It is disappointing to see our debates dissolving to name-calling rather than civil disagreement and resolution. If my attributions about either party are incorrect, then let's see some resolution."
11/20/2018, World Magazine, Convictions and consequences, Sophia Lee
"UC Berkeley birthed the Free Speech Movement in 1964, but this incident is just the latest crisis threatening the school's historic image as a bastion for free speech and inclusivity. One student at the meeting said there was no space for conservatism that was 'hateful,' adding that for such ideas, freedom of speech should be revoked. Another called [Isabella] Chow's speech 'corny as hell' and said remarks can kill people."
11/19/2018, The Washington Examiner, At Berkeley, rational discussion descends into darkness, Mark J. Perry and Sean Kennedy
"The deep irony of the campus mobs devouring one of their own is not the what or the why, but the where. Berkeley was the home of the 1964 Free Speech Movement--where the unlikely bedfellows of leftists, anarchists, and even arch-conservative Barry Goldwater backers, came together to stand up for students' right to protest, speak up, and actively participate in the campus discourse."
11/15/2018, Wired, A 1970s ESSAY PREDICTED SILICON VALLEY'S HIGH-MINDED TYRANNY, Noam Cohen
"As political organizations became more radical during the 1960s, [Jo] Freeman told me, she would think back to the first organization she joined while on campus-the Young Democrats. They may have lacked the passion of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, which Freeman also joined, but they were able to get things done by having clear leaders and clear rules of governance. 'At the Young Democrats, I watched men--there weren't any women chairs--chair meetings using Robert's Rules of Order and get through an agenda in three hours that would have taken the Free Speech Movement three days.'"
11/10/2018, Santa Cruz Sentinel, Cruzin': Santa Cruzans not afraid to speak up, Steve Kettmann
"Coonerty, a former Santa Cruz mayor and current member of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors, then went on to cite the words of the leader of the 1964 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, Mario Savio.
¶
''There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part,'' Coonerty recited, quoting from Savio's famous Sproul Plaza speech of December 1964. ''You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.''
¶
If you're a Bay Area person of a certain age, you've heard those lines a thousand times. You know just where Savio's voice would catch, you know it by heart like some early Dylan song you long ago memorized. And those words have probably been cited too often, 'Fire' shouted too often--but not this time."
11/9/2018, The Berkeley Daily Planet, The Times, They Were A-Changing. Paula Friedman Tells a Sixties Tale in The Change Chronicles, Gar Smith
Paula Friedman first came to the attention of local booklovers with her 2011 novel, The Rescuer's Path, which Ursula K. Le Guin called 'exciting, physically vivid, and romantic.' The Change Chronicles is equally involving, especially since it is rooted in Friedman's personal experience as a reporter for the Berkeley Barb and a participant in what became known as the 'Port Chicago Vigil.'
¶
As Friedman noted during her BHS reading, her novel covers a period of critical historical transformation-- following Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, paralleling the anti-war movement, and anticipating 'the junction before the women's movement.'
¶
This new tale of love and political struggle begins in 1965 as it follows the political and emotional adventures of a young Berkeley Barb reporter named Nora Seikh. After bravely disengaging from an abusive relationship, Nora falls for a 'flamboyant activist' who sweeps her off her sandals only to bid a fond adieu when he discovers he's left her pregnant.
11/6/2018, The Daily Californian, Vote to uphold UC Berkeley's free speech legacy, Lynne Hollander
"When Savio returned to Berkeley in the fall of 1964, eager to continue the struggle for civil rights, he and other student activists were told that they could not use the Bancroft strip, the little piece of land at Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue--or any place else on this campus--to support voter registration in Mississippi or any civil rights activities, whether in the South or in Berkeley. They wouldn't be allowed to raise money, recruit members or advocate on behalf of any other political or societal concern.
¶
In response, students formed the Free Speech Movement. We fought the ban with civil disobedience, direct action and eventually were able to get it overturned. The UC Board of Regents agreed to abide by the Constitution of the United States and allow free speech and its associated activities to take place on campus. There were many leaders in that struggle; Savio's moral clarity and eloquence led him to become the most famous."
11/5/2018, Document Journal, Has the internet broken the marketplace of ideas? Rethinking free speech in the Digital Age, Cody Delistraty
"'Those who identify as 'extremely liberal,' have always been, on average, the most supportive of free speech (even for racist speakers),' wrote Justin Murphy, an assistant professor of politics and international relations at the University of Southampton, who analyzed the data. 'Historical phenomena such as the left-wing Berkeley Free Speech movement of the 1960s has not been reversed by contemporary SJWs [Social Justice Warriors]; extreme liberals carry on that tendency' of supporting free speech. 'The inference here,' Murphy continues, 'is simply that SJWs are actually not extreme liberals.'" [Ed note: the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement was a left-right coalition.]
11/3/2018, Reason, Students for a Freer Future, Robby Soave
"Libertarians had their own clubs too. An Alliance of Libertarian Activists came into existence at Berkeley in the '60s. A leader of that group, Danny Rosenthal, was arrested over his involvement with the Free Speech Movement, which united all kinds of politically active students against the University of California's censorious administration." [Ed note: Danny Rosenthal wasn't arrested in the Free Speech Movement, but in the subsequent Obscenity or Filthy Speech Movement. However, the University Society of Libertarians appears as part of the FSM coalition on a document dated 12/4/1964.]
11/2/2018, The Paisano, Be comfortable being uncomfortable, Editorial
"One of the purposes of protest is to bring attention to societal problems, that would not otherwise be addressed. In the 1960s, The University of California, Berkeley heavily restricted the activity of political student organizations on campus. Students who wanted to stop racial discrimination and the United States' participation in the Vietnam War could not have those discussions with their campus peers. This culminated in the Free Speech Movement, which challenged the administration at Berkeley through protesting. Because of their efforts, universities remain spaces of open debate. If universities were to censor speech because some students disagree with the message, then the university would be undermining its duty to expose students to new ideas."
10/30/2018, The Daily Californian, Original Free Speech Movement members speak at voting rally at Sproul Hall, Sarah Chung
"Dean of Students Joseph Greenwell urged voters to appeal to friends, partners, family, and even those with opposing opinions to vote and help advocate for those who are unable to vote.
¶
'I came to this campus because of the Free Speech Movement,' Greenwell said. 'That (movement) has changed systems. That has changed the world and has given us a little bit of a better place that we live in, but it is not over — we have got to continue in this path.'"
10/29/2018, ABC News San Francisco, Leaders from free speech movement rally students at UC Berkeley to get out, vote, Anser Hassan
"It's been 54 years a since the Free Speech movement ignited on the steps of Sproul Hall at U.C. Berkeley.
¶
The student-lead protest fought to overturn an on-campus ban on political activities. Some of the original members spoke Monday afternoon at Sproul Hall with a specific message for students.
¶
'There is never enough that you can do. And we will see if (young people) turn out to vote. That's the least you can do,' says Lynne Hollander Savio, the widow of Mari Savio, who lead the free speech fight more than half a century ago. Her message to young voters: use your vote as a voice for change.
¶
'Don't be apathetic. You can affect change. And, you should be working for change because we need a lot of improvement,' says Hollander Savio."
10/28/2018, History News Network, Will Voters Trust Candidates Under 30?, Wallace Hettle
"In fairness to [Jack] Weinberg, it is worth giving some context. He helped lead the Berkeley Free Speech movement in 1964, when students fought against the suffocating control of the university. Weinberg was arrested while distributing literature from the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) without permission from the school. Students surrounded the police car with Weinberg inside, preventing it from moving. Electrifying photos of graduate student Mario Savio speaking from the car's roof marked a dramatic turning point for student politics.
¶
In its wake, Weinberg was interviewed by a reporter whose questions implied 'we were being directed behind the scenes by Communists . . . . I told him we had a saying in the movement that we don't trust anybody over 30. It was a way of telling the guy to back off, that nobody was pulling our strings.'" [Ed Note: There were a lot of older people who advised and shaped the FSM: Bill Mandel on the Executive Committee, Socialist historian Hal Draper, Howard Jeter of the Democratic Party, psychiatrist Neal Blumenfeld, attorney and activist Ann Ginger, pacifist Ira Sandperl, firebrand Brad Cleaveland, Women for Peace activists Alice Hamburg and Madeline Duckles, singer and activist Barbara Dane, and clergy including Rev. James Fisher and Walter Herbert. And many more.]
10/18/2018, The Daily Californian, Third World Liberation Front Research Initiative launches crowdfund, Shelby Mayes
"Pablo Gonzalez, lecturer in Chicanx studies, said the research initiative is important to Berkeley's history, and he expressed that the Free Speech Movement is an overrepresented part of Berkeley's history.
¶
'The Third World Liberation Front research is in part where we see the TWLF offer something to the Free Speech Movement, which has been primarily viewed as white male,' Gonzalez said. 'The FSM doesn't happen if students of color don't protest the fact that while they are coming to the university, they are still feeling that what they're learning does not only not reflect their experiences but also has a racist pedagogy.'" [Ed note: The 1964 Free Speech Movement did, in fact, include both male and female people of color among its participants and arrestees.]
10/15/2018, Washington Post, 'Going low' only validates Trump and debases America, Richard Cohen
"You might disagree. But recent political history strongly suggests that bad manners make for bad tactics. Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California twice by running against student demonstrators at the University of California at Berkeley. Reagan, who is invariably lauded as a gentleman, called the campus 'a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters and sex deviants.' The demonstrations did little to change America, but they eventually made Reagan president of the United States." [Ed note, with thanks to Prof. Robert Cohen: this theme played a very minor role in Reagan's campaigns. The FSM did not cause his electoral victories.]
10/15/2018, USA Today, 10 reasons you need to explore quirky Berkeley, Lois Alter Mark
"This plaque in Sproul Plaza pays tribute to the Free Speech Movement
¶
Sproul Plaza, on the UC Berkeley campus, played a pivotal role in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the 1960s. It commemorates some of those historic moments with a plaque that honors Mario Savio, leader of the movement, right by the steps where he gave his own speech.
¶
There's also a round cement stone set into the walkway, which reads, 'The soil and the air space extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity's jurisdiction.' The actual monument is the invisible air space rising from the soil-filled hole in the stone, providing an area for anyone to speak their mind.
¶
These tributes to the importance of free speech are powerful and sobering, and as relevant as ever."
10/15/2018, The New Yorker, The Rise and Fall of Affirmative Action, Hua Hsu
"A person ran up the slope toward us to say that Mario Savio, a hero of Berkeley's free-speech movement in the sixties, had just died. Through a bullhorn, another person recited the famous speech that Savio had delivered on the steps of Sproul Hall: 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels . . . upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that, unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!'
¶
I remember wondering whether we weren't actually defending the machine. Our idea of freedom seemed so limited compared with that of the people who came before. Decades after John F. Kennedy's grand vision to act affirmatively, affirmative action's last stand involves seats at the most élite universities in the world."
10/10/2018, The Daily Signal, UC Berkeley Limits Free Speech … Again, Troy Worden
"The University of California at Berkeley, regarded as the birthplace of the free speech movement, has done away with one of its historic 'free speech zones.'
¶
Carol Christ, chancellor of UC Berkeley, last month emailed a statement to students, faculty, and staff detailing changes to the university's policy regarding free speech events on campus.
¶
Among the changes is designation of the West Crescent section of campus as a 'free speech zone,' meaning it will not be subject to additional restrictions imposed last year on other areas of campus.
¶
But Christ also announced that Lower Sproul Plaza, which historically has been considered a free speech zone, along with Upper Sproul Plaza, now will be subject to those restrictions."
10/9/2018, Overton County News, UC-Berkeley settles discrimination suit,
"YAL [Young Americans for Liberty] President Cliff Maloney Jr. added, 'As the birth place of the Free Speech Movement and a public university, UC-Berkeley has done the right thing in agreeing to respect the First Amendment in this matter. I applaud the students for standing up for their constitutionally protected freedoms and advocating for a level playing field.'"
10/5/2018, The Spectator, Free speech and expensive schools in South Dakota, Joseph Bottum
"The old liberal demand for free speech (enshrined in adulatory accounts of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964) is being battered these days by a newer liberal demand for protection from offense. Given the general leftward drift of American colleges over the past 40 years, the transition may indicate nothing more than the fact that everybody praises dissent until they win, becoming the ones dissented against. But one way or another, 'free speech' has now become a rallying cry for those perceived as academic conservatives--with 'free speech equals hate speech' the counter-chant from academic radicals."
10/3/2018, San Francisco Chronicle from Washington Post, The bipartisan war against speech, Max Boot
"At my alma mater, the home of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, violent protesters last year forced the cancellation of appearances by Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos. Both are absurd and sinister figures who should never have been invited in the first place, but once the invitation was extended it should not have been rescinded under threat of force.
¶
Yet many of those who claim to speak for liberalism have a different view. A Cato Institute-YouGov survey last year found that 52 percent of Democrats favor a ban on hate speech, while 72 percent of Republicans oppose it. So does that mean that Republicans are pro-speech? Hardly. A more accurate interpretation would be to say that most members of the overwhelmingly white Republican Party aren't bothered by defamation of minorities, i.e., people unlike them."
10/2/2018, Pacific Standard, IN 1850, MODERATES IN CONGRESS STRESSED COMITY-AND BROUGHT ON THE CIVIL WAR, Oliver Lee Bateman
"That 'Great Debate,' which raged from January of 1850 until the various parts of the Compromise of 1850 were passed separately that September, is the subject of historian Stephen E. Maizlish's new book, A Strife of Tongues: The Compromise of 1850 and the Ideological Foundations of the American Civil War. Maizlish, who was himself a participant in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California-Berkeley in the early 1960s and is now a professor at the University of Texas-Arlington, spent years reading all the House and Senate speeches related to the Compromise of 1850 that were published in the Congressional Globe, as well as a good deal of the surrounding correspondence between congressmen and their friends, constituents, and spouses."
10/1/2018, The Vindicator, Today in History, Associated Press
"1964: The Free Speech Movement begins at the University of California, Berkeley."
9/28/2018, The Orion, Erwin Chemerinsky talks campus free speech at Chico State, Justin Jackson
"'Every generation thinks it's the first to discover the issue of free speech on college campuses,' WChemerinsky said, 'but the reality is that the controversies about this are about as old as colleges and universities.'
¶
The image he brought up, what he believes most people see when they think of free speech issues on campus, the free speech movement that happened in Berkeley in the mid-1960s. He also showed how times have changed since then. Instead of going against the administration for free speech on college campuses, the current issue is outsiders wanting to come to campus and speak."
9/27/2018, UC Berkeley News, Chancellor Christ: Our authentic and ever-changing story, Carol Christ
"For our university, the defining events of the past year revolved around free speech. We began the autumn with two free speech 'events'--a speech by the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, and a 'free speech week' planned by the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. It was both a legal obligation and a reputational necessity that the university do everything it could to enable the speeches to take place. Shapiro's did; Yiannopoulos tried unsuccessfully to provoke the university into cancelling his event in pursuit of his desired narrative-cum-headline: Berkeley, home of the free speech movement, denies free speech. We called his bluff, the charade collapsed and his student hosts cancelled the event. Together, our words and deeds succeeded in supporting a story both simple and true: Berkeley's commitment to freedom of expression is unwavering."
9/25/2018, UC Davis News, Guest Chancellor to Address 'Free Speech on Campus', Dateline Staff
[UC Irvine Chancellor Howard Gillman in a lecture last year:] "'But, on top of that, as a result of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, an additional zone of free speech was insisted upon correctly: Outside of the professional environment, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement established the proposition that the public spaces in campus should be free for the expression of even unprofessional, uncivil, profane and even hateful points of view.'"
9/25/2018, The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley campus must continue to protect free speech, Alexandra Barr
"UC Berkeley students have the honor to walk the Sproul Plaza steps as did Mario Savio, the voice of the Free Speech Movement. Savio is often pointed to when the media criticizes our campus for being hypocritical. Yet it is also important to remember that Savio clarified free speech as a means of responsible discourse. Savio emphasized that the best use of our free speech is that which is thoughtful and holds significance. Savio used his words to inspire and to create change. Savio did not use his words to degrade individuals or to instigate conflict. Channeling the Savio within all of us will encourage speech with intent rather than senseless rhetoric. While we must do everything to protect free speech, we must also recognize that it is incumbent upon us as citizens to practice this right responsibly."
9/25/2018, Independent Australia, Dan Tehan wants students to pay for 'free' speech, Con Karavias
"Beyond this, such charges are a major attack on civil liberties. The right to political organisation and expression should be a universal one. It is one that generations of student activists have fought for, dating back to the monumental Free Speech Movement at Berkeley University. In imposing onerous costs on demonstrators the Liberals would tilt the scales even further in favour of the wealthy when it comes to political expression."
9/17/2018, The Washington Times, Jeff Sessions: Colleges, universities that stifle free speech are 'bullies', Jeff Mordock
"In his speech Monday, Mr. Sessions said Berkley's is largely known as being the home of the 1960s free speech movement.
¶
The Berkeley case is one of four in which the Justice Department has filed a statement of interest claiming a university has blocked student's First Amendment right to free speech."
9/17/2018, The Conversation, In 1968, computers got personal: How the 'mother of all demos' changed the world, Margaret O'Mara
"The Vietnam-era counterculture already had made mainframe computers into ominous symbols of a soul-crushing Establishment. Four years before, the student protesters of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement had pinned signs to their chests that bore a riff on the prim warning that appeared on every IBM punch card: 'I am a UC student. Please don't bend, fold, spindle or mutilate me.'"
[referenced source: http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/FSM_fold_bend.html]
9/12/2018, Bay Area Reporter, Out candidates vie for Berkeley City Council, Alex Madison
"'I want to save the legacy of the free speech movement and People's Park,' [Aidan] Hill said."
9/10/2018, BuzzFeed News, Opinion | Dear College Students: Don't Let Trolls Own Free Speech, Jamie Kirchick
"But throughout American history, it has more often than not been people on the left whose free speech rights have been abrogated. From World War I pacifists and anarchists to McCarthyism to the 1960s Free Speech Movement and the Reagan- and Bush-era fights over controversial art exhibitions, progressives and radicals have repeatedly been forced to invoke their First Amendment rights against societal efforts to shut them up or lock them away. Every movement for social justice in this country--from abolitionism to civil rights, women's liberation to gay liberation--has depended upon the freedom of speech and association guaranteed by the First Amendment to advance its cause. Considering the censorious proclivities of the president and his supporters, it is all the more important that those who oppose him be consistent in defending the principle that freedom of speech is sacrosanct, for all of us."
9/2/2018, San Francisco Chronicle, Malcolm Zaretsky,
"He was a resident of Berkeley since 1961, where he was active in political action, including civil rights and opposition to the war in Vietnam. He was closely involved in the Free Speech Movement when he was a graduate student, and worked on voter registration in Mississippi in the 'Freedom Summer' in 1964. Until poor health prevented it, he was active traveling, hiking, back-packing, skiing, bicycling. And he always enjoyed spending time in a coffee shop with friends, talking about politics, over a cappuccino."
9/2/2018, Quilette, Is Safetyism Destroying a Generation?, Matthew Lesh
"Historically, campus censorship was enacted by zealous university administrators. Students were radicals who pushed the boundaries of acceptability, like during the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. Today, however, students work in tandem with administrators to make their campus 'safe' from threatening ideas."
8/27/2018, Berkeleyside, Barbara Garson's 7 years in Berkeley: From Cuba to 'MacBird', Tom Dalzell
"When she and Marvin arrived in Berkeley, they had seen Operation Abolition, a short film produced by the House Committee on Un-American Activities documenting demonstration and rioting during the San Francisco hearings in May 1960. The film was produced in an attempt to discredit the protesters at the HUAC hearings. Operation Abolition was shown around the country during 1960 and 1961. It was clumsy propaganda at best and it did more to build the young movement than to demonize it as Communist-inspired. Berkeley became a beacon and a magnet, the place to inspire and the place to go for young people feeling the awakening of the political forces that would shape the '60s. It was a draw for Garson, and it was a draw for others."
8/26/2018, KPIX-TV, A Tidal Wave Of Student Protests Swept Over The Bay Area In the 1960s [video],
"That video of those students getting hosed down the steps and dragged out into Civic Center Plaza is just as incredible now as it was then, but in 1960, no one could have anticipated that what was happening at San Francisco City Hall was just the beginning of something much larger.
¶
'Maybe television was responsible,' says [Mark] Buell. 'I don't know, but it riled up everybody.'
¶
Watching that HUAC protest on television, an incoming wave of students that would make history.
¶
'Because of HUAC, I came to Berkeley,' laughs Dr. Bettina Aptheker, who would become a central figure in Free Speech and anti-war protests of the 1960s. 'I watched the protests there and I told my parents: 'I'm going to Berkeley!' It was explosive, all these political things were happening, the Civil Rights Movement, and [the school administration] suddenly said 'you can't organize and you can't picket and you can't hand out leaflets and you can't have rallies.' That's what started the free speech movement.'"
8/22/2018, CNN, The toppling of a Confederate statue shows students' strength, Nicole Hemmer
"Historically, universities have been (and some remain) institutions that favor order over other values. At the University of California Berkeley in 1964, for instance, student civil rights activism led university officials to strictly enforce the campus ban on political activity.
¶
That the campus had a ban on political activity was a sign that the university was conflict-averse. The crackdown led to the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, and over the course of the 1960s, campus protests spread, linking civil rights and anti-war activism with much-needed reforms at universities, which at the time were quite conservative institutions. They resisted integration by both black students and women, while emphasizing a strictly hierarchal structure in which students had no real voice."
8/18/2018, Quirky Berkeley, Barbara Garson--The Berkeley Years, Tom Dalzell
"After it all, Garson had good things and bad things to say about the FSM.
¶
The good: 'The spirit of solidarity was great. Ten thousand supporters on Sproul Plaza would decide tactical questions in an ego-less, cooperative way. Republicans, religious groups, sororities, fraternity boys -- everyone stayed together. The DuBois Club was very reliable, you could count on them.'
¶
The bad: 'The FSM started when powerful California businessmen pressured the University to limit our free speech on campus because we are using it to help minorities and working people off campus. But the exhausting year of fighting for our own rights diverted us from the causes we started organizing about. After the FSM many of us segued into the anti-Vietnam war movement. We didn't know enough about economics and didn't focus on how American working people were getting more desperate.'
¶
The bad, more: When asked about sexism in the FSM, Garson admits that she didn't even think about it then. She remembers being embarrassed by a few women who wanted to do laundry or feed the male leaders, but she thinks that this also embarrassed the male leaders like Jack Weinberg and Mario Savio.
¶
And: The treatment of women within the FSM itself was not bad, but the press was bad. Newspapers, which could not shed the idea that the movement had to be leader-based, tended to male identification of active and visible women -- Art Golderberg's sister or Herbert Aptheker's daughter or so-and-so's wife or girlfriend."
8/18/2018, Quirky Berkeley, Barbara Garson's Free Speech Movement Letters, Tom Dalzell
"Now that they've allowed things to take this course, some of the more militant people, Jack, Mario etc. seek adventurist ways to get the action going again, however, they reject the suggestions of the good hard work it takes to really involve the rank and file at the current stage. Remember, there are hundreds of students who were willing to get arrested on this and literally thousands who have asked to help. (On the other hand interest would be diminishing over time even if the process was not being speeded by decisions of the executive committee.) I have very little influence with them because I am working too hard. I guess I made a bad mistake. Anyone who sells newsletters on the corner, who types, who makes chain phone calls, is written off as a peon."
8/17/2018, Paste, SWMRS Are Back and "Berkeley's On Fire", Anna Haas
"This track is the music you'd hope to get from SWMRS--a song that expresses their oft-shared frustrations with the political/social climate. 'Too many motherfuckers confusing this freedom speech with swastikas,' Cole rages, and Max jumps into the forefront for a moment to call out Milo Yiannopoulos. Yiannopoulos' planned speech at Berkeley last year was canceled when '150 masked agitators' showed up to an otherwise-peaceful protest to disrupt the event. The song harkens back further to Berkeley's history: The Free Speech Movement was led by students on campus in 1964 protesting a ban on on-campus political activities, and demanding their right to free speech and academic freedom. Even more of California seeps into the song with the surf-rock guitar solo."
8/13/2018, The National Review, Fantasyland, Alexander Nazaryan
"The riots remain in planning stages, I am happy to report. But they wouldn't have been the first Berkeley riots in the age of Trump. The first took place about a week after Trump's inauguration, when former Breitbart senior editor Milo Yiannopoulos was slated to give one of his witless 'talks' on campus. Leftist activists saved him the trouble by rampaging through campus and town, punishing for his alleged transgressions an outlet of Starbucks, which had recently committed to hiring thousands of refugees. It was an ugly scene that earned denunciations from both Fox News commentators and original members of the Free Speech Movement."
8/8/2018, The Daily Californian, 'Radical and reformist': The legacy of UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, Alexandra Reinecke
"Former ASUC president and National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement fellow Will Morrow, however, resents that conservatives have cast campus protests against conservative speakers as suppression of conservative speech rather than an expression of the protesters' own liberal speech -- to do so, Morrow believes, is to distort the values of the Free Speech Movement.
¶
'These speakers want to come to Berkeley to provoke outrage and incite chaos under the guise of 'defending free speech' by deliberately misrepresenting the legacy of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement,' Morrow said in an email."
7/30/2018, San Francisco Chronicle, Ron Dellums, former congressman and Oakland mayor, dies at age 82, Rachel Swan
"Lee and others saw Dellums as a staunch supporter of three social movements that converged in the Bay Area during the 1960s: the free speech movement, the Black Panther Party movement, and the antiwar movement. It was a period of rowdy protests on college campuses and bloody standoffs between demonstrators and police."
7/27/2018, National Public Radio, James Kirchick: Who Benefits From Unrestricted Free Speech?, James Kirchick and Guy Raz
"KIRCHICK: I think there is a fundamental difference. I graduated from Yale in 2006, and when I look back on the Halloween costume controversy and other controversies that are happening across campuses today, something snapped in the past couple years. There is a different notion of what freedom of speech means. If you look back at the last great student revolt in the United States, it was in the late 1960s, and you look at the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, what was that about? It was about protecting the rights of, you know, left-wing anti-Vietnam War student protesters having the right to speak. They wanted to resist power. And they wanted to resist the governments in cahoots with their universities clamping down on their freedom. What are students now calling for? They want to collude with power. They want to collude with the administration and the government to shut down people with whom they disagree. It's the complete and utter opposite of the spirit that the student protesters in the '60s were fighting for." [Ed note: the FSM had nothing to do with the Vietnam War. The background issue was Civil Rights.]
7/18/2018, The Australian, Campus concern as free speech at American universities is under threat, The Economist (reprint)
"University administrators, whose job it is to promote harmony and diversity on campus, often find the easiest way to do so is to placate the intolerant fifth.
¶
The two groups form an odd alliance. Contentious campus politics have been a constant feature of American life for more than 50 years, but during the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, students at Berkeley demonstrated to win the right to determine who could say what.
¶
Now the opposite is true. Student activists are demanding that administrators interfere with teaching, asking for mandatory ethnic studies classes, the hiring of non-white or gay faculty and the ability to lodge complaints against professors for biased conduct in the classroom. This hands more power to administrators.
¶
College administrators at public universities are subject to the full demands of America's First Amendment, which allows, among other things, hate speech and flag burning. Federal courts have struck down every speech code enacted at a public university, and the Supreme Court has declared academic freedom a 'transcendent value' of 'special concern to the First Amendment'."
7/13/2018, Nonprofit Quarterly, Is It Civil Disobedience When the Cops Shut Down the Freeway for You?, Steve Dubb
"When might a social movement decide that civil disobedience is appropriate? 'Direct action,' Hayes and colleagues note, 'is often an escalation and a tactical response to a system that is not offering acceptable outcomes.' Or, as Berkeley free speech movement activist Mario Savio once more dramatically put it:
¶
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
¶
So, if you are trying to stop the machine, how should you do so? Building on the work of Dean Spade, Peter Gelderloos, and others, Hayes, Kaba, and Trinidad provide a valuable concise guide of key questions to ask yourself, which are paraphrased below. These include:
¶
Does your action legitimize harmful institutions?
Does it legitimize or expand a system you are trying to dismantle? (For example, what does it mean to cooperate with cops as part of organizing your action? If the goal is to shrink the power of policing, why are you thanking them for their presence rather than calling for their removal?")
Does it have elite support?
Is the action colluding with power or resisting it?
Is there a clear demand that will improve the lives of the most marginalized?
To summarize: If you are colluding with authority and lack a clear demand, then you're doing something other than direct action. It also, the authors emphasize, matters who benefits from the action and who is organizing it."
7/11/2018, The Federalist, Revisiting Battlestar Galactica: 'Lay Down Your Burdens' (Parts 1 and 2), Warren Henry
"The writers draw upon American history in portraying Tyrol as a union agitator. His speech bor-rows from Mario Savio's address to Berkeley's Free Speech Movement before its 1964 sit-in. In turn, the reference to putting bodies on the machine recalls both the protests of Luddite labor activists and Ghandi's supporters blocking railroad tracks."
7/11/2018, New York Times, Oakland in Their Bones, and in Their Films, Brooks Barnes
"Oakland has been such fertile cultural ground for a variety of reasons. Geographically isolated on the east side of San Francisco Bay, the region became a center for African-American liberation in the early 20th century, with people moving from the rural South as part of the Great Migration. The subsequent influx of Latino and Asian immigrants 'made the area an unusual confluence, a place that offered a collective safety -- a unique cultural opportunity to be free and imaginative,' said Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the Bay Area-based arts activist and performer.
¶
Add as kindling the Free Speech Movement (born at the nearby University of California, Berkeley) and oppression by a police department notorious for abuse and misconduct. The Black Panther Party originated here for a reason."
7/4/2018, KPFA, Voices of Independence--The Free Speech Movement: Sounds & Songs of Demonstrations,
"We are pleased to present the Sounds and Songs of Demonstrations, a verite-like sound production of moments and events during Free Speech Demonstrations at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964 and 1965."
7/3/2018, Socialist Worker, 1968: SDS AND THE REVOLT OF THE CAMPUSES, Geoff Bailley
"But the beginning of the fall semester in 1964 gave a new direction to SDS: the explosion of the Berkeley Free Speech movement showcased the simmering anger among a new generation of students and showed the potential power of an organized student movement. SDS returned its attention to organizing on campus just as the Vietnam War was about to expand."
7/3/2018, San Francisco Chronicle, UC Berkeley settles conservative students' free-speech lawsuit, Nanette Asimov
"Cliff Maloney Jr., president of the national Young Americans for Liberty organization, praised the settlement and the university.
¶
'As the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement and a public university, UC Berkeley has done the right thing in agreeing to respect the First Amendment in this matter,' Maloney said in a statement. 'I applaud the students for standing up for their constitutionally protected freedoms and advocating for a level playing field.'"
7/2/2018, The New Yorker, Fighting Words, Andrew Marantz
"In 2014, at a teach-in commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, Wendy Brown spoke against trigger warnings and in favor of exposing students to new ideas. 'When we demand, from the right or the left, that universities be cleansed of what's disturbing,' she said, 'we are complicit with the neoliberal destruction of the university.' Back then, Milo Yiannopoulos was still an obscure opinion journalist, and Donald Trump was still a reality-show magnate. 'I haven't radically shifted my position, but it's fair to say that I've shifted my emphasis,' Brown told me. 'I've become newly attuned to how free speech can be used as cover for larger political projects that have little to do with airing ideas.'
¶
Carol Christ told me that the events of the past academic year hadn't changed her faith in the First Amendment, but that they had made her wonder how an eighteenth-century text should be interpreted in the twenty-first century. 'Speech is fundamentally different in the digital context,' she said. 'I don't think the law, or the country, has even started to catch up with that yet.' The University of California had done everything within its legal power to let Yiannopoulos speak without allowing him to hijack Berkeley's campus. It was a qualified success that came at a steep price, in marred campus morale and in dollars-nearly three million, all told. 'These aren't easy problems,' Brown told me. 'But I don't think it's beyond us to say, on the one hand, that everyone has a right to express their views, and, on the other hand, that a political provocateur may not use a university campus as his personal playground, especially if it bankrupts the university. At some point, when some enormous amount of money has been spent, it has to be possible to say, O.K. Enough.'"
6/25/2018, GetReligion, New York Times shows how to do a religion-free report on campus First Amendment wars, Terry Mattingly
"The bottom line: Political conservatives are attacking academia. The radical defense of free speech has become a 'conservative' thing, since liberal crowds shouting down conservative speakers is the big issue. If conservative students attempted to shout down liberal professors, that would be a normal (in other words 'real') First Amendment?
¶
You can tell that religion is hiding in here somewhere, because the Times piece stresses that these particular free-speech efforts offer, in the eyes of academia, an 'overly paternalistic approach' and are mere 'ammunition in the culture wars.'"
6/14/2018, The New York Times, In Name of Free Speech, States Crack Down on Campus Protests, Jeremy W. Peters
"Wisconsin is not alone. Republican-led state legislatures in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina have imposed similar policies on public colleges and universities, and bills to establish campus speech guidelines are under consideration in at least seven other legislatures. These efforts, funded in part by big-money Republican donors, are part of a growing and well-organized campaign that has put academia squarely in the cross hairs of the American right.
¶
The spate of new policies shows how conservatives are successfully advancing one of their longstanding goals: to turn the tables in the debate over the First Amendment by casting the left as an enemy of open and free political expression on campuses. It was at schools like Berkeley, after all, that the free speech movement blossomed in the 1960s.
¶
The new efforts raise a question that has only grown more intractable since President Trump took office: When one person's beliefs sound like hate speech to another, how do you ensure a more civil political debate?
¶
What conservatives see as a necessary corrective to decades of political imbalance in higher education, liberals and some college administrators see as an overly paternalistic approach to a problem that is being used as ammunition in the culture wars."
6/14/2018, The Mercury, Four campus free speech problems solved, David Moshman
"Instead of trying to restrict free speech to tiny areas, I suggest college and university leaders — in the spirit of the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement — start with the presumption of intellectual freedom across the campus."
6/13/2018, The Stanford Daily, Stanford's history with free speech, Mini Racker
"By the 1960s, fueled by the free speech movement across the bay at Berkeley, major concerns about the Stanford administration suppressing speech began to emerge.
¶
'When I first arrived in 1966, the administration was trying to limit the activities of recognized student organizations,' said Lenny Siegel, former leader of Stanford's Students for a Democratic Society and current Mountain View Mayor.
¶
As far as Siegel remembers, the administration attempted to dictate which groups could have permits to hold rallies, as well as which could have a desk in the ASSU space. Generally speaking, however, publicly challenging such attempts was enough to thwart them."
Summer 2018, California Magazine, Houses in the Hills: Berkeley's Early Bohemian Architecture, Barry Bergman
"The blurring of lines between social and political resistance can be seen in the Free Speech Movement, says Sean Burns, who teaches a course at Berkeley on 'Social Movements, Urban History, and the Politics of Memory.' Beyond winning the right to organize around off-campus political causes, he says, 'perhaps the most significant legacy' of the FSM was far-reaching and foundational, 'the rethinking of what education should and could be.'"
6/2/2018, Berkeley Daily Planet, Save the Murals, Gar Smith
"In 1976 (the Bicentennial of the American Revolution) a talented team of volunteer artists painted over the side of what is now Amoeba Records on Berkeley's Haste Street. Osha Neumann, the Berkeley lawyer-activist-artist who conceived and executed the mural, believed that Berkeley deserved a memorial to its own revolution-beginning 1964 with the Free Speech Movement and continuing through the creation of People's Park.
¶
'A People's History of Telegraph Avenue' (popularly known as the "People's Park Mural") has survived, graffiti-free for 42 years but the mural now is badly in need of repainting. Without a proper restoration, it could soon be lost forever.
¶
A fund-raising campaign has been initiated to save the mural. Tax-deductible donations can be sent to this Indiegogo account
¶
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/save-the-people-s-park-mural/x/3220044#/ and checks can be mailed to: Green Cities Fund, Inc., 725 Washington St., Ste. 300, Oakland, CA 94607. (Memo line on the check: 'People's Park mural.')"
5/19/2018, Centre Daily Times, Obituary Larry David Spence,
"From Monterey, he decided to go back to school and both he and Maya attended UC Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement and anti-war demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. As a journalist interested in politics, he wrote about the political struggles on campus, impressing the Political Science Department Head who offered him admission to the Ph.D. Program."
5/16/2018, The Lilith Blog, Leslie Cagan's Half-Century of Activism, Eleanor J. Bader
"LC: I went to the State University of New York in Fredonia for my first year of college. I thought I wanted to leave New York City but it was too isolated for me upstate. The free speech movement in Berkeley was just then hitting the news--it was 1964 and 1965. I realized that I wanted to be in a metropolitan area where activism was happening so I transferred to New York University (NYU)."
5/3/2018, The Chronicle of Higher Education, After Spending Millions on Provocative Speakers, Here's How Berkeley Is Trying to Avoid a Repeat, Chris Quintana
"The commission also suggested that Berkeley, along with the Board of Regents of the University of California system, solicit state lawmakers to help fund efforts to protect free speech on the campus, given its status as the birthplace of the free-speech movement.
¶
'The Berkeley campus is a lightning rod for free-speech issues,' the report says, 'and therefore carries the burden of protecting the First Amendment for the State of California and for public universities across the nation.'
¶
In a public email, [Chancellor Carol] Christ said she supported the commission’s findings. It’s unclear, though, how many will be put into effect. 'I will work with my leadership team to determine what is feasible for us to carry forward over the course of the next weeks and months,' she wrote."
5/2/2018, UC News, How students helped end apartheid, One Bold Idea
"In March of 1985, Pritchett and other activists decided to start a sit-in. They hauled their sleeping bags to Sproul Hall and renamed the plaza 'Biko Plaza' in honor of slain South African activist Steve Biko.
¶
It wasn't just your average protest. Day after day, night after night, students were attracted to the Sproul steps. Soon there were thousands of attendees and hundreds camping out, a level of activity the campus hadn't seen since the '60s. It had only been a week. The sustained growth was promising.
¶
Police attempted to crack down, arresting 158 protestors. In response, 10,000 students boycotted classes, and celebrities, from Kurt Vonnegut to Alice Walker to the Free Speech Movement's Mario Savio, came to Berkeley to show their support. The protest had become a movement. Anti-apartheid hero Bishop Desmond Tutu visited the Greek Theatre on campus that spring:
¶
As God looks down on you today, he's saying, hey, hey, have you seen my children in Berkeley? Eh? Don't you think that they're something else?"
5/2/2018, Spiked, WHY THE LEFT HAS TURNED ITS BACK ON FREEDOM OF SPEECH, Brendan O'Neill
"To those of us who know that Western leftists were often at the forefront of struggles for greater political and cultural freedom in the 20th century -- whether they were agitating against McCarthyite censorship of communist ideas, or setting up the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the early 1960s, or arguing against the idea that 'video nasties' warped minds and therefore should be banned -- it feels tragic that many leftists now agitate for the blacklisting or destruction of 'offensive' ideas and culture.
¶
When they call for far-right marches or speakers to be banned, leftists repeat the censoriousness of McCarthyism. (Indeed, the House Un-American Activities started as a purge of fascism from America before moving on to communism.) When some on the left fret that lads' mags or 'sexist' songs like 'Blurred Lines' or old books that contain the word nigger will unleash readers' and viewers' base instincts and potentially destabilise society, they echo the stiff, Christian censorship radicals once opposed. When leftists brand as 'phobic' -- that is, irrational -- anyone who thinks a man cannot become a woman, they repeat the terrible thing that was once done to them: they brand those who hold views they find difficult or offensive as 'ill', unstable, a threat to society."
4/23/2018, UC Irvine News, UC's National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement selects executive director,
"The University of California -- birthplace of the Free Speech Movement -- launched the National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement to support and advance research, education and advocacy on these challenging issues.
¶
In February, the center announced its first 10 fellows. These scholars, students and analysts from across the country are spending a year researching timely, vital First Amendment topics. Their work will include developing tools, analyzing data and deriving lessons from history. Each will reside for a week at one of the 10 UC campuses to engage with students, faculty, administrators and community members."
4/16/2018, Jyllands-Postens, TageKampen for ytringsfrihed begyndte med 32 timer på bagsædet af en politibil, Jørgen Ullerup and Heidi Plougsgaard
"Ifølge professor Robert Cohen fra New York University, der har skrevet flere bøger om 1960'ernes kamp for ytringsfrihed i et meget konservativt USA, er det vigtigt at forstå, at gnisten til oprøret kom fra borgerretsbevægelsen, men at bevægelsen for ytringsfrihed i de følgende år satte gang i en kædereaktion.
¶
"Da præsident Johnson eskalerede Vietnamkrigen og begyndte at tæppebombe Nordvietnam, var de samme studerende fra Free Speech-bevægelsen klar til at protestere mod krigen," fortæller han."
4/13/2018, Los Angeles Times, 5 protest movements that shook college campuses in California, Alex Wigglesworth
"In what some would later describe as a blueprint for subsequent campus demonstrations, protests erupted at UC Berkeley after student groups were told they could no longer use a plaza for "off campus" political action. On Oct. 1, 1964, a crowd of students gathered around a police car to prevent the arrest of an activist who had defied the policy.
¶
The movement culminated with a sit-in at the university's main administration building on Dec. 2 that saw hundreds of protesters arrested.
¶
In the end, the Free Speech Movement succeeded in overturning the campus ban on promoting off-campus movements. Many also credited the movement with introducing to college campuses civil disobedience tactics widely employed in connection with the civil rights movement."
4/9/2018, Berkeley Daily Planet, New: SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces, Gar Smith
"Back on January 25, a news crew from Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based global news organization, visited the Berkeley campus to film interviews for a program on the collision of political extremism and 'free speech.'
¶
The 30-minute Faultline documentary has just been released. (You can watch the complete broadcast below.) ¶
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNfTPG7nVrg&feature=youtu.be
¶
In addition to resurrecting film clips of Berkeley's historic Free Speech Movement, the film crew also interviewed three FSM vets--Anita Medal, Steve Lustig, and yours truly. The final result, as the title reveals, is less about philosophical debates over the First Amendment and more about the tactics of the Black Bloc anarchists that comprise the anti-fascist (Antifa) clique.
¶
One surprising take-away from the up-close-and-personal interviews with protagonists on both sides of the Great Trump Split, is how reasonable the Alt-Right reps sound when contrasted to members of Antifa."
4/6/2018, Rasmussen Reports, #Neveragain Movement: Settle On A Clear Demand, Ted Rall
"At almost all these events, speakers proclaimed themselves present at the continuation or initiation of a movement. But sustained movements must be organized. These were, like the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964, political spasms. Perhaps not theater as farce -- but theater at most. At best, some presaged something later, bigger and effective."
4/5/2018, United Federation of Teachers, Noteworthy graduates: Frank Wilczek, Nobel laureate in physics, Suzanne Popadin
"In retrospect, Van Buren was an extraordinary place then, with students like inventor Ray Kurzweil, political activist Mario Savio and Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth within a few years of one another. Everyone helped each other and set a level of ambition that was quite unusual. We were strivers: We wanted to improve ourselves and the world."
4/4/2018, Los Angeles Times, The iGeneration, inclusivity, and free speech on college campuses, Jiin (Jenny) Huh
"Battles over campus free speech have been continuous throughout American history. The student free speech movement began at the University of California Berkeley in 1964. Faculty members stopped students from distributing flyers and spreading information about the Civil Rights Movement in the South. Student Jack Weinberg was arrested for distributing civil rights literature. In protest, other students at the site sat on the road, blocking the police car with Weinberg for 32 hours. The confrontation proved too much for the university, and the faculty voted to end all restrictions on political activity. One of the first student movements proved victorious." [Ed. note: it was the Administration not Faculty which stopped students from distributing flyers.]
3/30/2018, Common Dreams, Trump's War Cabinet and Coming American Despotism: Will We the People Rise Up?, Nozomi Hayase
"Solidarity of civil disobedience that united the destiny of black and white people appeared in the Bay Area in 1964. Mario Savio, a young student of the University of California at Berkeley, upon returning from his volunteer in Mississippi Freedom Summer saw the similar struggle on the campus in the administration's ban on students' political activities and their effort to regulate the content of speech. Inspired by the courage of black people fighting for first class citizenship, students who had been treated as raw materials that are to be made into products, began pushing the boundaries of free speech.
¶
With sit-ins, picket lines and weeks of demonstrations, white middle class youth exercised speech that had consequences to rebel against bureaucracy and the university's crackdown on students who were participating in the civil rights movement. In his impassioned speech, Savio liberated human emotions that have been oppressed by the dictatorship of reason. The iconic image of this freedom's orator atop the police car ignited radical politics, giving birth to the free speech movement (FSM) that put the city of Berkeley at the center of world's attention."
3/25/2018, The New York Times, Dr. Sherwood Parker Obituary,
"Inspired by his family of Russian immigrants and Holocaust survivors, Dr. Parker fought for human rights throughout his life. At the University of Chicago as an assistant professor, he was one of only two faculty members who supported then-student Bernie Sanders' successful attempt to desegregate student housing in 1962. Dr. Parker continued to defy segregation in the 1960s with the Freedom Riders. At Berkeley, he became a passionate participant in the Free Speech Movement. Dr. Parker counted Mario Savio as a personal friend."
3/23/2018, The Daily Californian, 'A political instrument': UC Berkeley chancellors of years past recount attempts to balance politics, reputation, Sophia Brown-Heidenreich
"The chancellors and presidents of UC Berkeley have always dealt with passionate protesters. It is they who ultimately face the the trial of decision-making when politics risk disrupting their institution's academic purpose.
¶
Whether in reaction to Mario Savio's demands, the ban on affirmative action or the fiery Milo Yiannopoulos protests last spring, chancellors continually find themselves caught between the rock of student opinion and the hard requirements of their job description." [Ed note: Savio was among the leaders of the FSM. The demands were hardly his, alone.]
3/22/2018, The Daily Californian, Key UC Berkeley highlights throughout the decades, Sunny Sichi
"1960s
¶
It's not a list about UC Berkeley without a mention of the Free Speech Movement. In 1964, students protested a ban on campus activities, which led to protests over the Vietnam War, the 'Free Huey' movement and protests in People's Park throughout the decade. This momentum continues into present day, making UC Berkeley one of the most politically notorious schools ever." ¶
https://calisphere.org/exhibitions/43/the-free-speech-movement/
3/22/2018, Berkeleyside, New app lets you walk back in time on Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue, Daphne White
"The tour introduces visitors to events such as the Free Speech Movement; the building of, and riots at, People's Park; the civil rights shop-ins at Lucky's Supermarket; a landmark related to the Japanese internment; milestones in the disability rights movement; as well as some iconic book stores and theaters. On every corner of Telegraph Avenue, it seems, history rubs shoulders with characters and businesses that are still very much alive today.
¶....¶
There are 11 stops on the walking tour, each one featuring an audio interview with a Berkeley resident who was an eyewitness at the event. It's a kind of living history project, one that can be enjoyed and re-experienced on city streets rather than at a historical park. Jack Radey talks about the Free Speech Movement; Osha Newman talks about People's Park; Doris Moskowitz talks about her father, Moe Moskowitz, who owned Moe's Books; and Steve Wasserman remembers foreign cinema and literary culture on Telegraph in the 1950s and 60s.
¶....¶
[Stuart] Baker added that a lot of Europeans come to Telegraph because they have heard about 'the mystique of Telegraph, and they want to see it for themselves. I hear French people all the time, standing in front of the mural by the Amoeba, trying to tell their kids: 'This was the start of the 60s. In Paris we had the Sorbonne, and in the US they had Berkeley.''"
3/19/2018, San Francisco Chronicle, Oakland students' walkout in keeping with Bay Area history of protest, Otis Taylor, Jr.
"We live in area where student activism causes change.
¶
The Free Speech Movement began with a yearlong protest at UC Berkeley led by Mario Savio after students were barred from fundraising and distributing political flyers on campus. The university eventually relented, but student-led civil disobedience quickly spread to college campuses throughout the country in the '60s, coalescing into protests of the Vietnam War.
¶
Tuition for UC and California State University students remained frozen from 2011 to 2016 because Gov. Jerry Brown listened to student protesters.
¶
Merritt College students Huey Newton and Bobby Seale met in 1962 and four years later formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. As their movement grew, the Panthers' foot soldiers concentrated on building free breakfast programs.
¶
The breakfast program spread to cities across the country and at its height fed 10,000 children grits, eggs and toast each morning before school. The student activists' hard work became the blueprint for today's federal school breakfast program.
¶
Student-led social change doesn't just happen on college campuses. It's also happening in high school hallways."
3/14/2018, The New York Times, California Today, Tim Arango and Julie Turkewitz
"The tour has 11 stops with titles like 'the Free Speech Movement' and 'Satanic Verses and Cody's Books,' and it is narrated by people who participated in the avenue's history. Among them is Osha Neumann, a lawyer and painter of the People's Mural, which depicts social movements of the 1960s. This includes Bloody Thursday, a 1969 clash between students and police officers over the park that led to the death of a man named James Rector."
3/13/2018, Berkeleyside, Opinion: The Free Speech Movement in Berkeley was a defense of civil rights activism, Mukund Rathi
"The FSM began in the context of a militant civil rights fight against Bay Area businesses that were discriminating against Black workers. The UC Berkeley administration, responding to pressure from the business community and politicians, ramped up already-severe restrictions on student political organizing. Civil rights activists organized a coalition of groups called the Free Speech Movement in response and led thousands of students in militant direct actions to force the administration to allow free speech on campus. Right-wing forces on campus -- including students, faculty, and administration -- consistently opposed the FSM's principles and tactics and sought to repress the movement."
3/12/2018, East Bay Times, New walking tour app highlights Telegraph Avenue's history in Berkeley, Marta Yamamoto
"The 11 stops and titles include: the Free Speech Movement; Street Artists; Computer Memory at Leopold's Records; Japanese American Internment and the First Congregational Church; Foreign Cinema and Literary Culture; and People's Park Mural and the Riots of 1969.
¶
One stop, 'Race, Discrimination and the Shop,' narrated by Anita Medal, tells the story of Lucky's supermarket, a target of civil rights demonstrations until 1965 because of its anti-black hiring practices.
¶
She describes being there as CORE shoppers filled their baskets to the top, took them to the checkout and then refused to pay. At the time, she felt this was rude and disruptive but when she learned that three Civil Rights workers in Mississippi had disappeared and were found dead, her feelings changed.
¶
'What I saw at Lucky's I questioned and was uncomfortable with. I didn't understand how dire it was,' she said. 'Then I realized what it takes to create change, that was the whole point of it, to educate people and make them aware of how much discrimination and prejudice existed just under our noses and not just in the South.'"
3/11/2018, The Daily Californian, Has the message of the Free Speech Movement been lost? An interview with FSM veteran Sam Farber, Mukund Rathi
"Sam Farber is a professor emeritus of political science at the City University of New York. He was a graduate student in the department of sociology at UC Berkeley from 1963 to 1969, where he obtained his doctorate. He was active in the Free Speech Movement and the UC Berkeley chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality.
¶
He, along with Joel Geier and Hal Draper, founded the Independent Socialist Club in 1964, which played a key role in organizing the Free Speech Movement."
3/10/2018, openDemocracy, In defense of free speech, Samir Gandesha
"Of course, once upon a time, it was the Left that led the battle for freedom of speech and expression, a tradition that can be traced all the way back to the origins of the Left itself in what Jonathan Israel calls the 'radical Enlightenment' and the writings of Condorcet, d'Holbach, Diderot and heterodox Jew, Baruch Spinoza.
¶
It was the radical Enlightenment that played an instrumental role in challenging an ancien regime grounded in tradition, faith and authority which culminated in the revolutionary tradition that inspired among others the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804. Invoking this tradition of radical Enlightenment, the Free Speech Movement, led by Mario Savio, was born in the 1964-65 term on the campus of UC Berkeley. The long-standing FSM agitated for the lifting of restrictions on free speech and for academic freedom for students."
3/4/2018, San Francisco Chronicle, Torch has passed to new generation of activists, Willie Brown
"All successful movements have a moment when they gather momentum. The great push for civil rights acquired its force thanks to Rosa Parks and the buses of Montgomery. The Free Speech Movement helped create the climate for mass opposition to the Vietnam War.
¶
It's possible that the attack in Parkland, Fla., will be that defining moment for the movement against rampant gun violence in the United States.
¶
The courageous students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who lost 17 of their classmates and school staffers allegedly to a 19-year-old with an assault rifle, have set in motion a reaction that goes beyond politics."
3/3/2018, Truthdig, Alice Waters: Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook (Audio and Transcript), Robert Scheer
[Robert Scheer] "You, as I say, in terms of career you were at Berkeley and you got involved in the Free Speech Movement, the Civil Rights Movement. And then in this campaign, and the Vietnam Day Committee, and then my own campaign, which was basically against the war and also working on poverty, to eradicate poverty in Oakland, which we failed on."
2/24/2018, Quirky Berkeley, Frank Bardacke -- He Stood Tall, Tom Dalzell
"Bardacke remembers: ... 'This was the time that Lenny Glaser was giving his talks at Bancroft and Telegraph. As the students left Madam Nhu's speech, Lenny, the practiced outdoor orator, was standing on the ledge above the steps delivering his own speech, admonishing the students for applauding. Here's the part I remember. 'You failed today. You failed a test in politics. And when you fail in politics it isn't like failing in school. It matters. And you will pay. You will pay in the jungles of Vietnam, in the pampas of Argentina, in the mountains of Nicaragua. When you fail in politics, you pay in blood.' It was magnificent. He held the attention of so many students, that the street across from Harmon was blocked. After a while the cops came. Made their way slowly through the crowd in a cop car with the siren blaring. The arrested Lenny. Put him in the car. Immediately some one sat down in front of the car, and was followed by many others. Lenny was in the back seat, delighted. 'Oh you are in trouble now,' he told the cops. For a while it was stand off. Finally, the confused cops let Lenny go, and were permitted to drive off. It was dress rehearsal for Jack Weinberg. and the FSM.'"
2/24/2018, CNN, What it will take for Parkland students to win the battle ahead?, Julian Zelizer
"In 1964, University of California student Mario Savio delivered powerful words during a free speech movement. Protesting the university prohibition on political activity, Savio unleashed on the system. 'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious -- makes you so sick at heart -- that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!'
¶
It is time for students to put their bodies upon the gears of the broken machine that lets people get their hands so easily on weapons of mass destruction.
¶
The nation is at an important crossroads after Parkland and much of what happens next will depend on students. They must remain the heart of this campaign. Their words are the strongest antidote to the money and lobbyists of the NRA. The NRA's resistance will be immense, but it is not insurmountable.
¶
Young Americans have shown in other moments of history that their voice can matter. Indeed, it can change the course of the nation. Now we will see if America's young people can do so again with the crisis of guns that afflicts our nation."
2/23/2018, The Daily Californian, Free speech lawsuit against UC Berkeley is justified, Jack Foley
'The so-called 'Free Speech Movement' was never truly about free speech -- it was always about the causes of those involved. To be sure, the goals for which the Free Speechers fought were largely worthy and good."
2/22/2018, California Monthly, Berkeley to the Core: Memories of the Free Speech Movement, Courtney Cheng
"Gabriela [Taylor] sat in Sproul Hall with her peers for hours and was among the protesters who were arrested. She remembers being the last to be 'dragged down the hall to the booking room, by my collar,' where a reporter asked her, 'Since you are the last of 801 students arrested, what would you like to say?'
¶
'This is only the beginning. The fight for freedom will continue,' was Gabriela's immediate response. Her quote ran in newspapers all across the country-prompting her husband's wealthy grandmother to disinherit him when she caught wind of it. Her husband, Kit Sims Taylor '64, felt this blow 'wasn't a big deal. We couldn't care less. We lived simply and envisioned a bright future ahead.'"
2/14/2018, The Intercept, While the Media Panicked About Campus Leftists, the Far Right Surged, Natasha Lennard
"'ALT RIGHT' AND neo-Nazi organizers -- where there is significant overlap -- make no secret of the rhetorical Trojan horse they use to infiltrate campus discourse. When white supremacist groups like the white nationalists of the National Policy Institute, along with Identity Evropa, began targeting college campuses in the spring of 2016, they were explicit in their cooption of the liberal lexicon of 'safe spaces' and free speech protections.
¶
'Here it is, the birth of the free speech movement,' pronounced far-right group Red Ice in May 2016, at a small rally at the University of Berkeley, California. It was a potent combination: a cynical adoption of traditional liberal and leftist speech mixed with a genuine desire to be able spread ideologies of hate in public without interference. Liberal centrists swallowed it whole.
¶
Wittingly or not, it was a devilish sleight of hand: neo-fascists relying on American liberalism's unmatched fetishization of protected speech in order to claim that the real fascists are in fact the ones who would see them silenced."
2/5/2018, The Undefeated, State of the Black Athlete, Lonnae O'Neal and Marc J. Spears
"Outside his DOPE ERA clothing shop (During Oppression People Evolve, Everyone Rises Above) in North Oakland, Mistah F.A.B. (aka Stanley Cox) muses about whether the Warriors are, in fact, the most politically progressive team ever. He's a rap artist and community activist who once did a freestyle rap about the Warriors that foreclosed that option to anyone who has thought about trying it since. Now he recalls Smith and Carlos and cites the Clippers wearing their warm-up jerseys reversed to protest racist remarks by then-team owner Donald Sterling in 2014. But 'I can't even think of a team in contention for social relevance,' he says, 'in the way the Warriors are demonstrating now.'
¶
Some of that stems from Oakland itself. For more than half a century, Oakland and the Bay Area have been synonymous with the black consciousness movement, Angela Davis and the Black Panthers. They've welcomed the Free Speech Movement, anti-war protests and the Haight-Ashbury counterculture. The cities by the bay have been an incubator for gay rights, anti-fascism and Black Lives Matter."
1/20/2018, Linn County Leader, Dr. Peter Mandel Hall, 83,
"He obtained his BSW/MSW (1957/1959) in social work from University of California-Berkeley, participating in the Free Speech Movement, a precursor to the national anti-war movement. He earned his PhD in sociology from the University of Minnesota in 1963."
1/19/2018, Time, Behind the Anti-War Protests That Swept America in 1968, Daniel S. Levy
"As America's military presence grew, so did the parallel battle for peace. It had been growing since the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and Johnson's subsequent call for the Operation Rolling Thunder bombing campaign. Civil rights groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Free Speech Movement had held teach-ins and marched in Washington and elsewhere. Young men publicly burned their draft cards. The New Left dubbed the United States 'Amerika,' and the underground press disseminated antiwar information through their own news services." [Ed note: UCB Teach-Ins were post-FSM, although many who had participated in the FSM were involved.]
1/18/2018, Times Higher Education, One year of Donald Trump: how are US universities faring?, John Morgan
"'Sometimes your brand is your curse,' says political scientist Henry Brady, dean of Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, noting that the university is 'the home of the Free Speech Movement'. Originating on the left during the 1960s civil rights era and continuing during protests against the Vietnam War, the movement pressured university administrators to lift the ban on on-campus political activity." [Ed note: the Berkeley FSM was resoved in December 1964 with a vote of the Faculty Senate. The FSM itself was dissolved in April 1965, and lasted seven months.]
1/18/2018, California Magazine, Is Free Speech Smart?, Krissy Eliot
"There appears to be a consensus among UC Berkeley law professors that despite his offensive views, alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulous had a legal right to speak on campus last September. And the UC administration has taken a hard and fast stance when it comes to speech, saying that any suppression of it would go against the university's official mission-to be a center for higher learning and advancing that higher learning.
¶
'We would be providing students with a less valuable education, preparing them less well for the world after graduation, if we tried to shelter them from ideas that many find wrong, even dangerous,' writes Chancellor Carol Christ in a letter to the campus community. 'Berkeley, as you know, is the home of the Free Speech Movement, where students on the right and students on the left united to fight for the right to advocate political views on campus. Particularly now, it is critical that the Berkeley community come together once again to protect this right. It is who we are.'"
1/18/2018, Berkeleyside, Remembering John Oliver Simon, distinguished poet, teacher, translator, J.D. Moyer
"While at Cal and after, Simon was active in the Free Speech Movement and in the famous struggle to liberate Berkeley's People's Park. Of this time, he wrote 'I was a newcomer to the Bay Area, having arrived in Berkeley in September 1964 in time to sit down in the crowd on Sproul Plaza surrounding the police car which was holding Jack Weinberg prisoner in the back seat in the first act of what would become the Free Speech Movement.'"
1/13/2018, The Telegraph, Power of pen, Manohla Dargis
"The Pentagon Papers -- officially titled Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force -- is an encyclopedia of outrageous decisions and acts, what Ellsberg once described as 'evidence of lying, by four presidents and their administrations over 23 years, to conceal plans and actions of mass murder.' Ellsberg didn't stop the war, but he did assert our right, and obligation, to challenge absolute power. That may be why the filmmakers -- the script is by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer -- slip in a bit from a speech that Mario Savio delivered two years before The Post opens and which memorably asserts: 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part!'"
1/9/2018, Alameda Sun, Paying Tribute to Two Great Alamedans, Jane Peal
As [Ashley] Jones tells it, the pivotal point came in 1964. "When I first saw Mario Savio standing on top of a cop car with a megaphone in Berkeley, that was it! It opened me up. I realized I'd been living too comfortably."
1/8/2018, UC News, UC celebrates 150 years of pioneering a better future, Carolyn McMillan
"That rich history is captured in a new digital timeline, created in honor of UC’s 150th anniversary. It shows how far the university has come since its earliest days, and details its role in pivotal moments like World War II, the Free Speech Movement and the birth of the biotech industry"
1/6/2018, Lincoln Journal Star, Local View: NU must defend political advocacy, Frank Edler
"More recently in 2014, the chancellor at Berkeley, Nicholas Dirks, sent an email message to the university community in which he attempted to combine the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement with a request for civility.
¶
In his message, Dirks stated that 'we can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility. Simply put, courteousness and respect in words and deeds are basic preconditions to any meaningful exchange of ideas.'
¶
In response, the Board of Directors of the Free Speech Movement Archives and the 50th Anniversary Organizing Committee sent a letter to Dirks stating that he seemed to have missed the point of the Free Speech Movement and reminded the chancellor: 'The struggle of the FSM was all about the right to political advocacy on campus.'"
1/3/2018, Socialist Worker, 1968: The year that changed everything, Alan Maass
"The first activities of a new campus left were often taken in solidarity with the civil rights struggle, and later against the Vietnam War. But these connected with a deeper sense of alienation and discontent--something Mario Savio, a leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, gave expression to in a 1964 speech:
¶
There's a time when the operations of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to indicate to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machines will be prevented from working at all.
¶
Savio crystallized a sentiment that existed in the newly expanding university systems of countries around the world. But as the 1960s continued, it was opposition to the expanding U.S. war on Vietnam that galvanized the student radicalization--especially in the U.S., but also in other countries."
12/31/2017, Huffington Post, Fifty Years After Renouncing History, The Counterculture Made History in 'The Post', 'Detroit', 'The Deuce' & 'The Vietnam War', G. Roger Denson
"Fast-forwarding to 2017, in The Post, Spielberg could be accused of co-opting the activism and words of several sources. For instance, in the scene in which a group of demonstrators are assembled outside a park, a male voice heard over a megaphone recites a famous speech, nicknamed the 'put your bodies upon the gears' speech delivered by the late activist Mario Savio, an early member of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. In the film, the demonstration takes place in 1971, in Washington, DC. Savio, however, gave the speech at Berkeley University in December, 1964. It’s the kind of co-option that Marcuse and the students were fearful about, though it can be argued that Spielberg is essentially on the same side as Savio, and after the same ends."
Winter 2017, California Magazine, Roots Music: The Beginnings of Rolling Stone, Peter Richardson
"But if Rolling Stone was a creature of the San Francisco counterculture, its success can also be traced to its Berkeley roots. According to Hagan, Wenner's years at Cal had a profound effect on the magazine's origins and development. Early contributors and editors-including Greil Marcus, Charles Perry, and Jon Carroll-were Cal alumni, and their stances on politics, drugs, and music were staples in the magazine's unique editorial formula.
¶
'The Berkeley network was central to the development of Rolling Stone,' Hagan said.
¶
That network began to take shape after Wenner enrolled at Cal in 1963. An English major and political science minor, he was also an editor for SLATE, the student political party that helped launch the Free Speech Movement (FSM). In his spare time, Wenner worked at the NBC radio affiliate KNBR, where he eventually covered the Berkeley campus. He was reporting from the Greek Theatre in December 1964 when police hauled off FSM leader Mario Savio after he tried to respond to UC President Clark Kerr's address. An AP photograph shows Wenner in a trench coat, microphone in hand, only yards behind the apprehended Savio."
¶....¶
"Berkeley's influence on Marcus, who grew up on the peninsula, ran even deeper. An American Studies seminar taught by Michael Rogin and Larzer Ziff fired his imagination. Rogin was open, charismatic, and not much older than the students; Ziff was more rigorous but was equally inspiring. The class met in a library seminar room, which Marcus described as 'the most marvelous place imaginable.' He and his classmates completed their homework there, often staying past midnight to discuss American history, politics, and culture. Afterward, they used a rope to rappel down from the third floor of the closed library. It was 'an atmosphere of great intellectual intensity,' Marcus recalled. 'The questions were real, part of everyday life.'
¶
Marcus saw strong and direct links between that course and the Free Speech Movement. 'Everything we were doing in that seminar was playing out in public,' he said. After one class, he and his fellow students wandered down to Sproul Plaza, where they saw a police car surrounded by hundreds of students. Jack Weinberg, arrested for violating campus restrictions on political activism, sat handcuffed in the back seat. Beginning with Savio, speakers mounted the car and argued the merits of those policies. The entire experience, Marcus said, 'made knowledge concrete, real, open, and open-ended.' It also shaped his life and his work.
¶
'The Free Speech Movement had an enormous effect on everyone and in many ways,' Marcus said. 'We measured ourselves against it and its values. Rolling Stone wouldn't have happened without the Free Speech Movement. Everything that I had learned at Berkeley, that I had learned to care about, there was room for that at Rolling Stone.'"
12/27/2017, The Village Voice, How a Counterculture Memoir by Alice Waters Spoke to 2017, Teri Tsang Barrett
"Coming to My Senses follows Waters's path from her childhood in New Jersey and Michigan to Southern California to the epicenter of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the Sixties. Though Waters describes her thinking back then as 'romantic and simplistic' and found herself easily intimidated by threats of arrest from the police, the movement left its mark and awakened a revolutionary spirit within her, as she found herself moved by Mario Savio and the impact of nonviolent courses of action. She writes, 'When the dominant culture behaves immorally, the way the United States was about the war, civil rights, and freedom of public expression, you begin to feel betrayed.'"
12/26/2017, The Kaplan Herald, The Ugly Enterprise Of Defending Free Speech In 2017, Kaplan Contributor
"Campuses have a long history of playing focal point to freedom of expression debates of all kinds. In December 1964, students at the University of California, Berkeley, began protesting political speech restrictions on campus. The demonstrations continued for months, solidifying UC Berkeley's symbolic status as the nucleus of the free speech movement. In the years since, the campus's Sproul Plaza and Mario Savio Steps have been marched on, sat upon and otherwise occupied by an assortment of protests."
12/21/2017, Online Focus Aachen, Seite 3,
"Von den Beatniks über die Situationisten zu Beuys Begonnen hatte alles im September 1964 mit dem Free Speech Movement auf dem Campus der University of California in Berkeley. Dort wurden studentische Aktionen wie die erstmals praktizierten gewaltlosen Aktionsformen des Teach-in, Sit-in und Go-in von der Beat Generation um Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac und Lawrence Ferlinghetti mit seinem legendären City Lights Bookstore in San Francsico unterstützt. Sie kamen 1957 nach Paris, wo das Beat Hotel in der rue Gît-le-Coeur 9 zu ihrem Hauptquartier wurde. In Paris trafen sie den Happeningkünstler und Aktivisten Jean-Jacques Lebel, der ihre Texte ins Französische übersetzte und von dem auch der Haupttitel für die Ausstellung als Zitat übernommen wurde. In Europa war es zunächst die Independent Group um Lawrence Alloway, Richard Hamilton und Eduardo Paolozzi, die Mitte der 1950er-Jahre am Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London einen Ausstellungs- und Debattenraum für moderne Kunst fand, in dem KünstlerInnen, SchriftstellerInnen und WissenschaftlerInnen neue Konzepte zur interdisziplinären Recherche und Analyse der Gesellschaft entwickelten. Sie bildeten den Nukleus der englischen Pop Art. Ihr Pendant auf dem Kontinent waren die AktivistInnen, KünstlerInnen und Intellektuellen der Situationistischen Internationale, die seit 1957 an der praktischen Aufhebung der Trennung zwischen Kunst und Leben arbeiteten. In der Bundesrepublik Deutschland begannen Joseph Beuys, Bazon Brock und Wolf Vostell das traditionelle Kunstwerk durch ein performatives Programm, halb Theater, halb Teach-in zu ersetzen. Sie planten ihre Aktionen im Bewusstsein, dass Kunst die Realität nicht direkt, sondern nur auf dem Umweg über das Denken und die Wahrnehmung des Betrachters verändern und erweitern kann."
12/21/2017, New York Times, Review: In 'The Post,' Democracy Survives the Darkness, Manohla Dargis
"The Pentagon Papers -- officially titled 'Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force' -- is an encyclopedia of outrageous decisions and acts, what Mr. Ellsberg once described as 'evidence of lying, by four presidents and their administrations over twenty-three years, to conceal plans and actions of mass murder.' Mr. Ellsberg didn't stop the war, but he did assert our right, and obligation, to challenge absolute power. That may be why the filmmakers -- the script is by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer -- slip in a bit from a speech that Mario Savio delivered two years before 'The Post' opens and which memorably asserts: 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part!'"
12/16/2017, The Washington Examiner, UC Berkeley and free speech in 2017: A year in review, Andrea Fabián-Checkai
"These incidents have marred UC Berkeley's former reputation for being a bastion of free speech. The same campus that once stood witness to the birth of the Free Speech Movement 50 years ago is now under the microscope for restricting speech. The university claims 'free speech is who we are,' but it appears that the 'we' has become more selective."
12/13/2017, Mondoweiss, Trump nominee Kenneth Marcus has a career of trying to criminalize campus free speech Activism, Ariel Gold
"As Jews, we generally take great pride in the support we have shown for civil rights and free speech. The 1964 sit-in of thousands of students in UC Berkeley's Sproul Hall, which catapulted the free speech movement into the headlines, included a Hanukkah service*. We still talk about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel praying with his legs in 1965 as he marched with Dr. King in Selma. Even as recently as 1995, the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) proudly announced its position in defense of the first Amendment, 'we cherish these protections, not only because they are the hallmark of true freedom, but because we also know that the vibrant political discussion they foster strengthens our nation.' We like to think of ourselves as long time champions for justice and equality. And so, we should be appalled at the nomination of Kenneth Marcus for Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education."
* https://www.thenation.com/article/free-speech-movement/
12/10/2017, The Washington Examiner, I go to UC Berkeley and I'm watching free speech slip away, Max Keating
"My own experience at Berkeley is not only fraught with examples of free speech suppression but utterly inconsistent with what I thought college in general, and Berkeley in particular, should be all about. Berkeley captured my interest during the college admissions process because a particular moment in the school's history resonated with me: the image of Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement speaking up courageously for First Amendment rights on campuses. The struggle and eventual success of this movement is, in my mind, everything college should be about. Students both on the right and left sacrificed for one another's right to be heard; they sacrificed for an enriched campus discourse, even if they completely disagreed with some of the messages they fought for."
12/10/2017, The Daily Californian, On their golden anniversary, finding Berkeley in 'The Graduate', Anna Ho
"But 'The Graduate' is also the story of Berkeley, of the city whose university Elaine attends and of the place where Benjamin, fueled by a moment of startling clarity, flings himself down Telegraph Avenue and past Moe's Books in pursuit of the bus she rides.
¶
That Berkeley -- which three years before rose to national prominence for the free speech protests -- was chosen as a setting simply re-reflects the dogged, determined effort on the part of the film to remain contemporary.
¶
In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in January 1967 -- nearly a year before the film's release -- Nichols, reportedly underwhelmed by the stereotypical facade of sunny Californian settings, commented on his resolve to 'show the place as it really is.'
¶
That place, according to historian W. J. Rorabaugh, was undergoing a period of strident instability as political and cultural vanguards were supplanted by insurgency and the city itself struggled to define what it wanted to be.
¶
The conservative factions that had governed administrations from city hall to the state assembly were besieged and, in some instances, successfully succeeded by leftist powers of various radical persuasions. Around the university and the Bay Area, the Beat Generation boomed their disdain for conventional living. Activists like Jack Weinberg -- locked inside a police car for hours after his arrest while students surged forward to stand on its roof -- found their voices.
¶
So in many ways, Berkeley shared in Benjamin's struggles and bereftness, where the grating divide between generations and values yawned wide and gaping. 'You're not one of those agitators?' asks Benjamin's landlord in Berkeley, squinting at the young protagonist suspiciously when he attempts to rent a room. 'Those outside agitators? I hate that. I won't stand for it.'"
12/8/2017, Broadway World, Country Joe & The Fish Summer of Love Deluxe Box Set Out 1/26 Via Craft Recordings, Music News Desk
"Country Joe & the Fish came about as part political device, part necessity and part entertainment. Formed as a duo in 1965 by 'Country' Joe McDonald and guitarist Barry 'The Fish' Melton, the two became regulars on the Bay Area coffeehouse circuit, often performing with local jug band musicians. Both McDonald and Melton were heavily involved in anti-war protests and the Free Speech Movement, particularly McDonald, who published an underground journal, Rag Baby."
12/2/2017, World Socialist Web Site, IYSSE mounts campaign against university police censorship at University of California, Berkeley, Evan Blake
"The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at the University of California, Berkeley, is mounting a campaign against the university's efforts to establish police censorship over student groups. UC Berkeley's new policy, known as the Major Events Policy, subjects all student group meetings on campus to an eight-week process of police review and requires that clubs pay for any police presence required by the administration.¶
....¶
The Berkeley IYSSE officially launched its campaign against police censorship with a meeting on Thursday November 30, attended by 25 people including representatives of several student clubs. Joseph Santolan spoke for the IYSSE, detailing the anti-democratic impact of the new policy. He outlined the history of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the 1960s and how students fought the university and police for the right to campaign on campus against the oppression of African Americans."
December 2017, The Atlantic, The Two Clashing Meanings of 'Free Speech', Teresa M. Bejan
"The danger intrinsic in parrhesia's offensiveness to the powers-that-be-be they monarchs like Alexander or the democratic majority-fascinated Michel Foucault, who made it the subject of a series of lectures at Berkeley (home of the original campus Free Speech Movement) in the 1980s. Foucault noticed that the practice of parrhesia necessarily entailed an asymmetry of power, hence a 'contract' between the audience (whether one or many), who pledged to tolerate any offense, and the speaker, who agreed to tell them the truth and risk the consequences.¶
....¶
Recognizing the ancient ideas at work in these modern arguments puts those of us committed to America's parrhesiastic tradition of speaking truth to power in a better position to defend it. It suggests that to defeat the modern proponents of isegoria-and remind the modern parrhesiastes what they are fighting for-one must go beyond the First Amendment to the other, orienting principle of American democracy behind it, namely equality. After all, the genius of the First Amendment lies in bringing isegoria and parrhesia together, by securing the equal right and liberty of citizens not simply to 'exercise their reason' but to speak their minds. It does so because the alternative is to allow the powers-that-happen-to-be to grant that liberty as a license to some individuals while denying it to others."
11/19/2017, San Francisco Chronicle, How we deal with hate speech, Erwin Chemerinsky
"What, though, can we say to students and faculty who are not convinced by all of this? I point to the dangers of censorship, such as during the McCarthy era when faculty were fired and students expelled just for being suspected of supporting communism. I simply don't trust campus officials to have the power to decide what speech should be allowed and what should be prohibited. The only way that our speech will be protected is to safeguard the speech that we detest."
11/18/2017, Times Higher Education, Free speech 'adopted' by hostile right to 'discredit universities', John Morgan
"'Free speech has been adopted by the alt-right as one of its strategies to construct a narrative about universities that is extremely useful for their political goals,' Professor Christ said of US developments in her speech to the conference, hosted by Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), marking its 60th anniversary.
¶
Mr Yiannopoulos' Free Speech Week 'was meant to really provoke the university into cancelling it' and thus to 'support the narrative that he's trying to create', Professor Christ said. She added: 'Well, we called his bluff and finally…Milo's free speech movement collapsed with its own weight.'
¶
Professor Christ said it was 'extraordinarily important for universities' to 'support free speech'. She added: 'Not supporting free speech plays into a narrative of the far-right to discredit universities. So it's just extraordinarily important that we not play that part in that narrative.'
¶
The 'best answer to hateful speech is more speech,' she said."
11/14/2017, East Bay Times, 'Civil Rights of the Homeless' to be topic of talk,
"Civil rights attorney Ann Fagan Ginger will discuss 'The Civil Rights of the Homeless' at The Berkeley-East Bay Gray Panthers meeting at 1:30 p.m. Nov. 22 at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave.
¶
The talk will be followed by music and a holiday party.
¶
Ginger is a lawyer, teacher, writer, and political activist, and the founder and executive director emerita of the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute and was legal counsel for students at UC Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s.
¶
'She is an expert in human rights law and peace law under the regulations of the Unites Nations, and has argued an won before the U.S. Supreme Court,' according to an event announcement."
11/9/2017, Il Post, Ascesa e declino di "Rolling Stone",
"Wenner era originario di New York, ma si era trasferito a San Francisco per studiare all'università di Berkeley, che lasciò prima di laurearsi. Aveva fatto parte del Free Speech Movement, conoscendo da vicino la cultura hippy, e aveva seguito dall'inizio la nascita del rock. Si era convinto che band come i Beatles, i Rolling Stones e i Grateful Dead meritassero una stampa specializzata, con una sua dignità e soprattutto una sua professionalità, diversa da quella dietro ai molti giornali dilettanteschi della controcultura che aprivano e chiudevano con grande rapidità nella San Francisco di quegli anni. Wenner ebbe la fortuna di conoscere Ralph J. Gleason, il critico di jazz del San Francisco Chronicle, che nonostante avesse quasi trent'anni in più aveva una grande apertura mentale e gusti musicali molto eclettici. Wenner aveva attaccato bottone con lui durante un concerto un paio di anni prima, e i due erano diventati amici."
11/8/2017, The Conversation, The magazine that inspired Rolling Stone, Peter Richardson
"But Rolling Stone's identity can also be traced to two other sources: Berkeley's culture of dissent and Ramparts magazine, the legendary San Francisco muckraker.
¶
The Berkeley influence was strong and direct. The magazine's early staff writers were steeped in Berkeley's ardent campus activism, and their views on politics, drugs and music informed the magazine's coverage. Wenner wrote a music column for the student newspaper and covered the free speech movement for a local radio station. Even more significant for Wenner, perhaps, was the example of Gleason, who combined an impressive body of music criticism with public support for student activists. Wenner spent hours at Gleason's Berkeley home, soaking up his insights on music and journalism."
11/5/2017, The Daily Californian, At the hub of modern college activism, Cal student-athletes are afraid to speak out. Why?, Nicky Shapiro
"No such excuse exists, of course, at UC Berkeley, where, as your admissions tour guide was surely eager to tell you, the 1964-65 Free Speech Movement -- a widespread series of protests aimed at the administration's decision to ban on-campus political activities -- began. It's where the Third World Liberation Front organized a strike in 1969 leading to the creation of the campus's ethnic studies department, where thousands of students gathered over the course of the many anti-Vietnam War rallies held in Sproul Plaza. It's where just last month the eyes of America turned as the looming specter of the politically charged Free Speech Week hung over campus in the wake of the 2016 campus riots related to Yiannopoulos and Trump."
11/3/2017, FIRE, So to Speak podcast: Berkeley then and now, Nico Perrino
"On this episode of So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast, we revisit the events surrounding the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement to see if the university's storied past can teach us anything about today's debates." [Ed note: BIG Jack Weinberg interview. Minutes 13 to 45 are about FSM.]
11/2/2017, The Village Voice, Cool Story, Bro: A new book and two-part documentary litigate the legacy of Jann Wenner and "Rolling Stone" magazine, Lara Zarum
"Stories From the Edge, which touches only briefly on [Jann] Wenner's own background, tells a much different story than Sticky Fingers. Gibney and Foster make a meal of his involvement in the Berkeley student protests of 1964 -- a Berkeley student himself, Wenner was a stringer for NBC and can be seen in the background of an iconic photo of Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio being yanked off the steps of the university's Greek Theater. But, echoing Savio's famed 'bodies upon the gears' speech, Hagan writes that Wenner's 'true convictions lay with the 'apparatus' of NBC News' and reports that when police started to beat and arrest protesters at a sit-in at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel, Wenner ran away."
10/30/2017, Universitetsavisa, Universitet etablerer eget senter for ytringsfrihet, Tore Oksholen
"'Etter som campuser landet rundt har slitt med utfordringene som følger med ytringsfrihet og sivilt engasjement, har mange opplevd et nivå av aktivisme, kontroverser og tilbakeslag (backlash) vi ikke har sett hittil i denne generasjonen. Som resultat av dette har mange, fra studenter til universitetsledere, til juridiske spesialister til USAs president, stilt spørsmålstegn ved hvilken betydning og rolle ytringsfrihet skal ha på campusene våre. Disse spørsmålene har satt i gang en nasjonal debatt om intensjon, omfang og anvendelse av First Amendment, og utfordret etablerte oppfatninger av ytringsfrihet som oppsto i kjølvannet av den såkalte 'Free Speech Movement' fra Berkeley,' sier Napolitano.
¶
Her viser hun til en skjellsettende studentaksjonen fra skoleåret 1964-65, hvor studenter gjennom sivil ulydighetsaksjoner fikk fjernet forbudet mot politiske aktiviteter på campus, og slik sikret akademisk ytringsfrihet for studenter og akademisk frihet for vitenskapelig ansatte." [Ed note: Norwegian language]
10/28/2017, Reader Supported News, Academic Freedom in the Age of Trump, Bill Moyers
"[Joan Wallach] Scott: Yes, and there's actually a wonderful quote from Stanley Fish, who is sometimes very polemical and with whom I don't always agree. He writes, 'Freedom of speech is not an academic value. Accuracy of speech is an academic value; completeness of speech is an academic value; relevance of speech is an academic value. Each of these is directly related to the goal of academic inquiry: getting a matter of fact right.' Freedom of speech is not about that. Freedom of speech is about expressing your opinion, however bad or good, however right or wrong, and being able to defend it and argue it and be argued with about it in public forums. But that's not what academic freedom is about. That's not what the classroom is about. I would have a hard time banning even Richard Spencer [founder of the white nationalist movement] from speaking on a university campus, however hateful and dangerous I find his ideas."
10/27/2017, Truthdig, Erwin Chemerinsky: What Students Don't Understand About Free Speech, Robert Scheer and Erwin Chemerinsky
[Erwin Chemerinsky] "I don't want to overgeneralize, but we saw in our students, I see already on this campus, is this is the first generation from a young age to be taught that bullying is wrong. They've internalized the message. It's laudable; they want to create an inclusive learning environment for all students. They have remarkable trust in campus authorities to punish the speech that they don't like, but allow the speech that they do like. And for them, the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam War protests, were as long ago as World War I was for you or me."
10/27/2017, San Francisco Chronicle, UC center to put focus on free speech, Nanette Asimov
"'We need to research, educate, listen to and understand each other,' [Erwin] Chemerinsky said in a statement. 'It is hard to imagine social progress that wasn't dependent on freedom of speech.'"
10/26/2017, San Francisco Chronicle, Faces of Bay Area resistance, Jonah Raskin
"Born in 1942 in Hamburg, [photographer Ilka] Hartmann grew up and came of age when the country was divided between East and West and a wall ran through Berlin. As a young woman, she studied theology and wanted to become a minister in the Lutheran Church. But then she came to New York in 1964, saw a picture in the New York Times of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley and moved to California. From then on she attended dozens of demonstrations and rallies, many of them in San Francisco, always with her camera and sometimes with her son, Ole."
10/26/2017, Los Angeles Times, UC, roiled by 1st Amendment controversies, to launch national free speech center, Teresa Watanabe
"The University of California, where the free speech movement started and students now argue over how far unrestricted expression should go, announced plans Thursday to launch a national center to study 1st Amendment issues and step up education about them.
¶
'There have been more serious issues about the 1st Amendment on campuses today than perhaps at any time since the free speech movement,' UC President Janet Napolitano said in an interview. 'The students themselves are raising questions about free speech and does it apply to homophobic speech, does it apply to racist speech? We have to consider the student concerns but return to basic principles about what free speech means and how do we better educate students about the extent of the 1st Amendment.'"
10/25/2017, Vox, Hate speech is protected free speech, even on college campuses, Erwin Chemerinsky
"But I know that Berkeley, especially because of its history with the free speech movement of the 1960s, is a unique place for expression. This is why it is so important that the campus did all it could to ensure freedom of speech. It is also why this campus has the chance to be a model for other schools in upholding the principle that all ideas and views can be expressed at colleges and universities."
10/25/2017, KQED Arts, Even Walker Evans Can't Capture the Complete Essence of America, Sarah Hotchkiss
"This focus on things - often already antiquated things -- weirdly disconnects Evans' photography from the time in which which it was made. His career spanned the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the free speech movement, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the women's liberation movement and the gay liberation movement. Yet of those pivotal social and political moments in American history, only the Great Depression is pictured within Walker Evans."
10/23/2017, The Inquirer, Controversial speakers spark debate about college administrations and free speech, Trevor Cheitlin
"UC Berkeley has been a battleground for this debate since the mid-1960s, when the Free Speech Movement led to the campus softening its strict regulations on on-campus political discourse, and causing a fundamental shift in how political discourse was conducted on campuses throughout the United States.
¶
'The Free Speech Movement of the 1960s was crucial in advancing the speech rights of students across the country,' wrote Berkeley Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky in an editorial for the Daily Californian."
10/23/2017, Rare, Joe Biden says liberals who want to suppress free speech have "very short memories", Grayson Quay
"'You should be able to listen to another point of view, as virulent as it may be,' Biden said, when asked what could be done to 'encourage people to be more accepting of opposing viewpoints.'
¶
The event, part of a speaker series organized by the University's Center for Political Communication and centered on the theme 'As We Stand, Divided,' aimed to 'explore the many divides that exist in the United States,' according to the CPC's website.
¶
The former VP reminded the crowd that he 'got in trouble' for denouncing the left-wing protests that forced Milo Yiannopoulos from the lectern at U.C. Berkeley in January and then reached even further back, alluding to the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s: 'When I was coming up through college and graduate school, free speech was the big issue, but it was the opposite. It was liberals who were shouted down when they spoke.'
¶
Then he dropped his bombshell: '[L]iberals have very short memories. I mean that sincerely.'"
10/20/2017, RealClear Politics, Janet Napolitano: We Must Educate Students Restricting Free Speech What First Amendment Means, Ian Schwartz./Jeremy Peters
"JANET NAPOLITANO, PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SYSTEM: Yeah, I think it is. And I think we have to do a much better job of educating our young people about what the First Amendment protects, what it means, and how -- once you start restricting speech, you are on a slippery slope. And so we are educators and that should be part of our mission. Because you're absolutely right, we see an increasing number of young people believe that, you know, we should restrict people like, you know, Richard Spencer, or Milo Yiannopoulos, or Ben Shapiro, from speaking at campuses. And we must remind them that in the past it was speakers favoring, say, the civil rights movement, who were sought to be restricted. So, again, education is key."
10/19/2017, UCLA Newsroom, Even among experts, consensus on campus free speech remains elusive, Mike Fricano
"[Safiya] Noble added powerful details to the origins of the Free Speech movement at Berkeley in the '60s. 'The free speech movement was not just about giving more voice to people in an abstract flattened plain way. It was in fact about raising the visibility of civil rights, of black liberation, of feminism, of anti-war Vietnam movements, of pacifists or making a space and a place for people to speak back to the kinds of values that we wanted in our society because we didn't want to see the kind of violence that stems from white supremacy. The kind of violence that stems from patriarchy. They very things we're talking about right now today in the media.'"
10/17/2017, New York Times, The Moral Case for Draft Resistance, Michael Stewart Foley
"A loose coalition of 'Resistance' organizers planned the national draft card turn-in. They were inspired by the civil rights movement, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (during which one of its leaders, Mario Savio, described having to 'put your bodies upon the gears, and upon the wheels, and upon the levers' in order to stop the operation of an odious 'machine') and the precedent of resisters such as Muhammad Ali. By risking indictment, they thought that they could put the Johnson administration -- and the war itself -- on trial in court proceedings all over the country."
10/15/2017, Daily Californian, UC Berkeley professor emeritus of sociology, peacemaker during Free Speech Movement, dies at 87, Adrianna Buenviaje
"After earned a doctorate in sociology from Harvard University in 1958, [Neil Joseph] Smelser began his career that same year as an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, where he stayed until his retirement in 1994. He became a full professor in 1962, and during the Free Speech Movement of the mid-1960s, Smelser served as a liaison between students and campus administration -- for which he was appointed special assistant for student political activity in 1965.
¶
'He was a very impressive leader,' said UC Berkeley professor of sociology Claude Fischer on working with Smelser. 'I was taken with his ability to work together with people to find common ground and work over conflicts or disagreement - the constant diplomat.'"
10/13/2017, The Guardian, How Alice Waters changed the landscape of food, Elissa Altman
"As Savio famously implored the rioting students of Berkeley in 1964, Alice has 'put her body upon the gears and upon the wheels' of an odious machine. And if she has not entirely stopped it, she has certainly slowed and altered its course. In every city in America and far beyond, farmers' markets abound; organics are widely available; small organic vegetable gardens thrive from inner cities to suburban front lawns to the White House; the Edible Schoolyard Project, founded by Alice and the Chez Panisse Foundation in 1995 as a way 'to create and sustain an organic garden and landscape that is wholly integrated into the school's curriculum, culture, and food program' now exists in 33 countries."
10/13/2017, The Berkeley Daily Planet, Free speech! Hold firm! We must affirm and protect the First and 14th amendments to the Constitution with everything we have, Bettina Aptheker
"Hold firm to the First and 14th. With warmth and strength." [Ed note: reprinted from UC Santa Cruz Newscenter]
10/12/2017, The Economist, Free speech at American universities is under threat,
"University administrators, whose job it is to promote harmony and diversity on campus, often find the easiest way to do so is to placate the intolerant fifth. The two groups form an odd alliance. Contentious campus politics have been a constant feature of American life for more than 50 years. But during the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, students at Berkeley demonstrated to win the right to determine who could say what from administrators. Now the opposite is true. Student activists are demanding that administrators interfere with teaching, asking for mandatory ethnic-studies classes, the hiring of non-white or gay faculty and the ability to lodge complaints against professors for biased conduct in the classroom. This hands more power to administrators."
10/12/2017, The Daily Californian, Berkeley College Republicans president impeached by secretary amid power struggle, Chantelle Lee, Harini Shyamsundar and Ashley Wong
"'Essentially, he brought in a large group of people who, because they signed papers, claimed that they could vote in the election … and then declared the results that I was impeached,' Worden alleged. 'We will not allow the ego of one individual board member to distract the club (from) its overarching goals (of) supporting the Republican Party (and) supporting the Free Speech Movement.'" [Ed note: what Free Speech Movement is that?]
10/10/2017, UC Santa Cruz Newscenter, Free speech! Hold firm!, Bettina Aptheker
"I have carefully rehearsed this sequence of events, and placed them in the context of the legacy of the Free Speech Movement in order to demonstrate as clearly as possible that the alt-right hijacked the issue of free speech, about which they know nothing, and could care less, as a huge distraction. Their aim seemed to be to attack the university itself, embarrass progressives, and garner as much publicity as they could while essentially engaging in a provocative, hate-filled, racist bluff. As in Boston, when they tried a similar tactic in early summer, their non-events were dwarfed by the hundreds and thousands of people, of all hues, ethnicities, genders and political persuasions, who came out to affirm an anti-racist, pro-immigration, pro-gay free speech agenda.
¶
In my view this is how to deal with the alt-right and their ilk. Dwarf their events with non-violent mass movements of unprecedented size and inspired coalition.
¶
I believe we must affirm and protect the First and 14th amendments to the Constitution with everything we have. Under these amendments all the rights we have won, however contested they may be now, from the civil rights laws, to voting rights, to affirmative action, to gay rights, to reproductive rights and many more are under the aegis of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment."
10/10/2017, National Post, How Alice Waters launched her 'delicious revolution' and became a culinary icon, Laura Brehaut
"Waters dedicates the book to the memory of Mario Savio, a leading member of the Free Speech Movement of 1964-65. She delves into that era of Berkeley protest in the book, as well as her early involvement in politics. By opening her own restaurant, Waters writes, she thought she was turning her back on politics. But food became political.
¶
'I really went back into that place and remembered how important (Savio) was to me at that time,' she says. 'The mentors you have when you're young can really shape your thinking. And I was very lucky to be exposed to that world and particularly to the cooking mentors I learned from.'"
10/9/2017, The New Yorker, Flip-Flopping on Free Speech, Jill Lepore
"The Free Speech Movement is the taproot of a tree with many branches. In 1964, Mario Savio, a twenty-one-year-old Berkeley philosophy major, spent the summer registering black voters in Mississippi. When he got back to Berkeley that fall, he led a fight against a policy that prohibited political speech on campus, arguing that a public university should be as open for political debate and assembly as a public square. The same right was at stake in both Mississippi and Berkeley, Savio said: 'the right to participate as citizens in a democratic society.' After the police arrested nearly eight hundred protesters at a sit-in, the university acceded to the students' demands. The principle of allowing political speech was afterward extended to private universities. Without it, students wouldn't have been able to rally on campus for civil rights or against the war in Vietnam, or for or against anything else then or since." [Ed note: Jill Lepore posits 1964 Berkeley FSM as initial episode in a larger FSM. There were earlier FSMs.]
10/7/2017, The Washington Examiner, Backlash spreads against Black Lives Matter shutting down ACLU free speech event, Steven Nelson
"The disruption of the ACLU event in Virginia follows the February cancellation of a speech by then-Breitbart columnist Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California at Berkeley after violence and property damage by his opponents and the shouting down in March of political scientist Charles Murray at Middlebury College -- each incident attracting significant national debate, with older left-wing scholars such as Noam Chomsky and some members of Berkeley's pioneering 1960s Free Speech Movement arguing it's wrong to censor others."
10/5/2017, The Daily Californian, 'Engage the issue': UC Berkeley marks 53rd anniversary of Free Speech Movement in all-day event, Mary Kelly Ford
"The solutions to these problems, Reich said, include reaching out to those with dissenting opinions on social media, continuing to invest in protecting events such as the now-canceled 'Free Speech Week' and creating a right-to-privatize-information act in order to prevent personal ideas from being distorted.
¶
Lynne Hollander Savio, a member of UC Berkeley's 1964 Free Speech Movement and the widow of Mario Savio, said the limitations of talking and arguing with 'real people' are gone due to social media.
¶
'Many groups no longer consider it necessary to speak responsibly,' Hollander Savio said. 'I agree with Reich. … We need to expand the laws that can keep the government or anyone from accessing our information.'"
10/5/2017, Real Clear Politics, Camille Paglia vs. Identity Politics: Return To Authentic 1960s Vision Where Consciousness Transcends Divisions Of Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Jordan B Peterson
"But the universities themselves, are all of a sudden, in the United States, much more attentive to issues of political correctness, because of the riots at Berkeley, which was the capital of free speech. The free speech movement happened in the spring before I entered college in 1964, one of the great principles and inspirational stories of my life, Mario Savio's assertion of the supremacy of free thought and free speech. I think that perhaps we might just have turned a corner, but it is going to take a very, very long time for the universities to be reformed." [Ed note: the FSM happened in the fall of 1964.]
10/5/2017, ABC News Channel 7 San Francisco, Berkeley Center for New Media hosts free speech discussion at UC Berkeley, Laura Anthony
"Lynne Hollander Savio was also on the agenda. She is the widow of Mario Savio, a primary architect of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, which began in 1964.
¶
Savio expressed concern over recent protests at 'free speech' events at Berkeley that devolved into violence.
¶
'Despite the provocations, I think students should not rise to the bait,' said Hollander Savio. 'When you attack and try to limit the speech of anyone, even if its very valueless speech, then you run into a wall of opposition that unites everybody against you.'" [ed note: contains brief clip of Lynne speaking]
10/3/2017, The Sacramento Bee, Why UC Berkeley was right not to ban Milo, and other lessons from Free Speech Week, Erwin Chemerinsky
"The issues of free speech on campus today are very different than at earlier times. The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley more than 50 years ago is remembered as the quintessential example of freedom of speech on a campus. It involved students protesting and an administration trying to stop them. But now it is about outside speakers coming onto campus, like Shapiro and Yiannopoulos and Coulter, and outside agitators, like antifa, threatening violence. The campus is the place where this all is happening."
10/3/2017, East Bay Times, UC Berkeley all-day symposium to mark Free Speech Movement anniversary, Tom Lochner
"BERKELEY - Chancellor Carol Christ and Professor of Public Policy and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich are among the luminaries who will speak at 'Free Speech in the Age of Social Media,' an all-day symposium at UC Berkeley on Thursday marking the 53rd anniversary of the birth of the Free Speech Movement.
¶
'In the past year, the internet has turned its attention to Berkeley's campus debates, and our own community has taken up new media and modes of digital expression to extend and challenge the discussion of free speech,' reads an event description by sponsor Berkeley Center for New Media. 'This is a critical moment; both to the consideration of the intersection of speech, media and digital technologies on the Berkeley Campus and to the Nation as a whole.'"
9/29/2017, The Takeaway, Modern Lessons From a Veteran of the Free Speech Movement, Todd Zwillich
"This Sunday is the official Free Speech Day in California, to mark the anniversary of the protest that became the genesis of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964.
¶
Lynne Hollander Savio was part of the Free Speech Movement when she was a student at Cal. She’s also the widow of Mario Savio, one of the leaders of the movement, and she reflects on the state of free speech on colleges campuses today." [Ed note: 10-minute audio program]
9/28/2017, Wired, MILO, ANN COULTER, AND "FREE SPEECH WEEK" ADD UP TO THE RIGHT'S BEST TROLL YET, Emma Grey Ellis
"Berkeley (the school and the city) has been the archetypal hippy-dippy liberal paradise for half a century-and crucially, was home to the original, left-wing Free Speech Movement in the 1960s. All of that has made it the perfect symbol for both antifascist and 'alt-right' political movements, though those groups disagree on whether Berkeley is a bastion of enlightenment or Satan's preferred stomping ground. And now that these groups are taking their grievances offline and onto the mainstream streets of Berkeley, dismissing their activities as simply IRL stagings of Twitter fights trivializes what's really going on. It's a PR war-and one that right-wing provocateurs like Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter, who staged her own costly feint of appearing at Free Speech Week are winning. Handily."
9/26/2017, Daily Californian, Campus must be defended against hostile private interests, Berkeley Faculty Association Board
"Freedom of speech is one foundational principle of the public university. Academic freedom is another. Since 1964, when the UC Berkeley administration was successfully challenged by the Free Speech Movement to extend First Amendment protections to campus space, the university has had to balance the obligation to allow citizens' speech against the commitment to academic freedom. As a public entity, UC Berkeley must respect the airing of diverse viewpoints; as a higher learning institution, UC Berkeley must protect its autonomy from political interference and harassment. Increasingly, the threat to the campus' autonomy, on which academic freedom depends, derives not from government legislators-as in the era of the FSM, when former UC President Clark Kerr and former UC Berkeley chancellor Edward Strong were faced with adjudicating competing obligations to free speech and academic freedom. Rather, the threat increasingly derives from private interests hostile to the university's mission of research and teaching."
9/25/2017, Vice News, How NFL protests mirror Berkeley's 1960s Free Speech Movement,
"The battle over free speech in the NFL may be new. But it has uncanny echoes of a 1960s fight at UC-Berkeley waged by a coalition of students from across the political spectrum known as the Free Speech Movement. The F.S.M. started in the fall of 1964 after the Berkeley administration banned all political activity on campus with the goal of repealing the ban. But the energy that drove the movement came from deeper grievances."
9/25/2017, San Francisco Chronicle, And the point of all this was what exactly?, Nanette Asimov and Kurtis Alexander
"He [Michael Heaney] said Yiannopoulos has more in common with Abbie Hoffman, founder of the short-lived, 1960s-era street-theater group called the Yippies, than with King, Chavez, Parks -- or Mario Savio, whose name today is a symbol of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.
¶
The Sproul Hall steps where Yiannopoulos stood Sunday are named for Savio, who spoke eloquently from those steps against a ban on students' political activities imposed by the UC regents."
9/23/2017, Associated Press, Right-wing firebrand plans to hold rally at UC Berkeley,
"'We are going to be hosting an event come hell or high water tomorrow,' Yiannopoulos said in a live video on Facebook. He made his comments from a hotel room after cancelling a news conference on San Francisco's Treasure Island.
¶
'We will be expressing our constitutional rights to free speech, free expression, on Sproul Plaza, the home of the Free Speech Movement, tomorrow as planned, with or without student help, with or without the cooperation of UC Berkeley itself.'"
9/22/2017, Washington Examiner, Sadly, the students planning Free Speech Week at Berkeley are incompetent, Casey Given
"For this reason, I stood up for Milo after the February riot in a piece for the Washington Examiner, vowing to not donate until the home of the Free Speech Movement lives up to its reputation. The fact of the matter is, when it comes to free speech, standing up for deplorable opinions comes with the territory.
¶
Standing up for incompetence, however, is a different matter.
¶
For the past several weeks, the student group hosting Milo's event, Berkeley Patriot, has continually mishandled the paperwork and public relations required to successfully execute an event of the size they're aspiring to hold. First, they released an outlandish speaker list confirming speakers they apparently had not even contacted, including Charles Murray and 'Google memo' author James Damore. Then, they missed three deadlines from the university to secure the venues they desired."
9/22/2017, New York Times, Let Right-Wing Speakers Come to Berkeley? Faculty Is Divided, Thomas Fuller
"Watching this debate attentively but warily are the veterans of the Free Speech Movement, most of whom are now in their 70s.
¶
Barbara Garson, an author, called Free Speech Week a 'grotesque parody' of the movement she helped lead.
¶
Kathleen Piper, an artist, said she and other veterans of the movement disagreed with the positions of the right-wing speakers coming to campus. But she said there was a consensus among them that they should be allowed to speak.
¶
'I think a person needs to hear stuff that they don't agree with,' Ms. Piper said. 'They need the opportunity of discovering that they are not going to melt and go down the nearest drain as a puddle if somebody says something ugly to them. I don't think we should be protected from those experiences.'"
9/22/2017, Los Angeles Times, Op-Ed Free speech is a virtue. Spending millions to enable hatred isn't, Rigel Robinson
"The 1st Amendment protects the rights of everyone to be heard. But there is a distinction between 'could' and 'should,' between the legal right to do something and doing the right thing. That distinction wasn't lost on Mario Savio, as it seems to be on today's supposed champions of free speech."
9/22/2017, Berkeley Daily Planet, New: Is Berkeley Yiannopoulos Speech Event On or Off? Who Knows?, Jeff Shuttleworth
"UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof said in an email that, 'The university is aware of numerous media reports that the Berkeley Patriot student organization has cancelled events scheduled for next week.'
¶
But Mogulof said, 'The campus has not heard directly from the students and must, for the time being, proceed with plans to provide for the safety and security of the campus community and any speakers who may still be planning to come to Berkeley.'"
9/21/2017, Vox, The far right's "Free Speech Week" at UC Berkeley, explained, German Lopez
"Free Speech Week has even attempted to draw parallels to Berkeley's Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, with Yiannopoulos slated to give the 'Mario Savio Award' -- named after a key figure in the '60s movement -- at the end of the week.
¶
This isn't completely baseless. Robert Cohen, a historian whose many books include The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s, explained in the Nation: 'Savio would almost certainly have disagreed with the faculty and students who urged the administration to ban Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking on campus, and been heartened by the chancellor's refusal to ban a speaker.'
¶
But as Cohen suggests, this is a very different Berkeley. The administration rejected calls to ban Yiannopoulos. And the fact that Free Speech Week is happening at all -- and that people are expected to be able to freely protest it -- exemplifies the kind of free speech that Savio supported."
9/20/2017, The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley creates website devoted to free speech ahead of 'Free Speech Week', Hannah Piette
"UC Berkeley's Office of Communications and Public Affairs recently launched a website dedicated to free speech as part of Chancellor Carol Christ's promise that UC Berkeley will have a 'free speech year.'
¶
The site includes links to articles about free speech, campus policies on hosting speakers and protesting safely, a list of upcoming free speech events and a timeline of the Free Speech Movement. There is also a Q&A page, as well as a moderated public discussion forum."
9/19/2017, The Daily Californian, Wealthy donors puppeteer campus administration's decisions on free speech, Jolene Sweitzer
"The university's current position on free speech is ironic when we delve deeper into the true nature of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s and the political forces that opposed it. Amid the context of both the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, the Free Speech Movement consisted of mass student mobilizations to gain the right to on-campus political activity opposed to segregation and the war. These acts of protest resulted in intense repression from the conservative administration and law enforcement, culminating in the largest mass arrest of students in U.S. history when close to 800 students were detained while occupying Sproul Hall in December of 1964. Predictably, the current UC Berkeley administration has discarded the true spirit of the Free Speech Movement to hide behind a commodified version, allowing them to sanitize the retelling of social movements for their own interests."
9/17/2017, San Francisco Chronicle, Napolitano pledges to uphold free speech, Bob Egelko
"'That means we defend the rights of provocateurs to share their objectionable thoughts at our university campuses.... That does not mean we have to allow rhetoric that personally intimidates or harasses others.'
¶
She acknowledged that the line is difficult to define, but said UC officials should cut off any speaker who is 'personally going after a member of the audience.'"
9/15/2017, San Jose Mercury News, Berkeley-Con includes Bannon, Coulter, Milo -- but will they show?, Patrick May and Emily DeRuy
"The fourth day, if it takes place as advertised, is likely to generate the most controversy. Entitled 'Mario Savio is dead,' a reference to the one-time leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the Sixties. Supposedly confirmed speakers include Yiannopoulos, Bannon and Coulter addressing higher education and free speech."
9/15/2017, San Francisco Chronicle, Rhetoric fails to match reality on UC Berkeley campus, Otis R. Taylor Jr.
"The Free Speech Movement of the 1960s was led by UC Berkeley students who protested the administration's ban on campus political activities.
¶
Berkeley is once again a battleground, but five decades later two things are glaringly different: This isn't a student movement, and it's not about free speech."
9/14/2017, Los Angeles Times, Q&A UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol T. Christ: 'Free speech has itself become controversial', Teresa Watanabe
"And so they don't understand the difference between how we say it's right to act in a community, whether it's a classroom or a dormitory, and what a public speaker is allowed to say in a public square. So there is a kind of disagreement right now about free speech. I sometimes say ironically that in 1964 it was the students for free speech and the administration was against it; now you've got this weird reversal.
¶
What are other changes?
¶
Political polarization. We obviously have a situation in the United States of the left and right finding it harder and harder to talk to each other. And there's a willingness on both the far left and the far right to engage in violence. It's a moment that reminds me of the '60s where you had things like the Symbionese Liberation Army or the Weathermen. There are groups - now I'm just talking about the left but it's equally true on the right - who have just given up on the political process and feel their important weapon is platform denial, and a willingness to engage violently. And that's very new.
¶
The third thing in this very combustible mix is, universities are seen as the most important symbolic stage for this confrontation, and Berkeley is No. 1 among all of the symbolic stages in part because of its history with the free speech movement and in part because of its history as a very liberal campus."
9/14/2017, Fox News, Berkeley must defend Ben Shapiro's right to speak, Alan Dershowitz
"I vividly recall the famous 'free speech' movement at Berkeley several decades ago. The hard left demanded the right to express radical, often obnoxious, views on campus. Some on the hard right sought to ban these hard left expressions. Free speech prevailed.
¶
Now it is the hard right that is demanding the right to make provocative speeches on campus and it is elements of the hard left that are trying to censor them.
¶
But there is no symmetry in the means used to silence opponents. Today's hard left, led by Antifa and other radical and anarchistic gangs, do not shrink from the threat or use of violence to silence speakers with whom they disagree. These unlawful tactics have prevailed and several right wing speakers were forced to cancel their scheduled appearances on the Berkeley campus. This time free speech is losing.
¶
Protesters must not be allowed to block access to the speech, to threaten violence against the speaker or his audience, to shout down the speaker or to take any other action that prevents the speaker from completing his talk."
9/11/2017, The Daily Texan, Former UT presidents share turning points, Meara Isenberg
"[UT President Bill] Powers said there is no better way to improve than to take risks and learn from them.
¶
Powers said he has done this in his own life by going to Berkeley during the free speech movement, traveling the world and going to law school."
9/11/2017, The Daily Californian, Alice Waters meditates on beautiful, political, Sannidhi Shukla
"Waters sat in conversation with publisher Steve Wasserman, her lifelong friend and a fellow activist from the time of the Free Speech Movement. Given this connection and free speech's recent reincarnation as a national political buzzword, it's no surprise that a large portion of the evening was dedicated to discussing Waters' experience with the movement.
¶
Wasserman opened the conversation by asking Waters about the memoir's dedication to Mario Savio. Waters' voice glowed with reverence as she answered. Her first encounter with Savio, she said, came on her very first day at UC Berkeley as she was standing in the margins of a throng of students gathered on Sproul Plaza.
¶
'I just heard Mario speak, and there was something about his ideal big vision which said we could change the world,' Waters said.
¶
Unlike the majority of contemporary allusions to the Free Speech Movement, Waters' invocation of it made no attempt to depoliticize the movement to render it a lifeless rhetorical tool that can be recontextualized at will. She spoke proudly of her lived experience with the movement and of its role in awakening her to become a self-proclaimed counterculture cook -- a title she continues to occupy through her persistent advocacy for edible education and sustainable agriculture."
9/8/2017, Townhall, A Return to the Roots of the Free Speech Movement, Nicholas DeSimone
"As conservative speakers make plans to exercise their free speech at UC Berkeley in September, those present at the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement have sadly witnessed its change over time.
¶
Manhattan Institute's Senior Fellow Sol Stern was there during the original Free Speech Movement in the 1960s. During a recent exclusive interview with Stern, reminiscing of a time when opposing ideas were welcomed at Berkeley, Stern states, 'We [The New Left] believed we had the best ideas…we welcomed the challenges in debating our ideas with conservative professors on campus. You wouldn't have dreamed of excluding them.'"
9/7/2017, The Washington Post, Chef Alice Waters' memoir tells tales of her youth and loves, Jocelyn Gecker
"Waters attended the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-1960s at the height of the Free Speech Movement and campus uprisings against the Vietnam War. The counterculture spirit electrified her, she writes, and instilled her with idealism and the feeling she could change the world. Her book is dedicated to the 'memory of Mario Savio' the movement's late leader."
9/6/2017, Berkeleyside, Alice Waters on free speech, acid and the making of a counterculture cook, Tor Haugan
"It wasn't long until Waters joined the Free Speech Movement, which gained considerable traction under the leadership of activist Mario Savio. (Waters' new book is dedicated to his memory - and the Free Speech Movement Café was funded by a gift in honor of Savio.)
¶
'(Savio) always seemed to see the big picture,' she said. 'It wasn't just about stopping the war in Vietnam. He was speaking about coming together and sharing values. … It was very, very important that we stood together and created this world together."
9/4/2017, Senior Woman Web, What Berkeley Needs is a Non-Violent Containment Squad, Jo Freeman
"As an alumnus of the 1964 Free Speech Movement and a veteran of the civil rights movement, I was appalled to read about the recent violent confrontations in Berkeley.
¶
Those reports took me back to the 1960s when I was doing voter registration for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and marching against segregation in Birmingham and Mississippi.
¶
Then we were the equivalent of the 'fascists' that Antifa and the black bloc are beating up in Berkeley. They called us Communists, not fascists, but like Antifa, they believed we were invaders who held them and their Southern values in contempt. The local whites whose towns we marched in burned us with their hate stares, blistered our ears with their curses, threw bottles and firecrackers at us, drove cars into our march lines, and sometimes used fists and bats. Guns were visible. Occasionally someone was shot.
¶
Sometimes law enforcement stood between us and our detractors, their faces and rifles always pointed at us, and sometimes they took a vacation, leaving us to the will of the crowd.
¶
Sound familiar?
¶
What we learn from these comparisons is that when a group or a person significantly dissents from deeply held community-wide views it will be attacked when it publicly challenges those views, and the attackers will feel justified without any concern for 'free speech' as a more important value.
¶
That is dangerous. As UC Berkeley's Chancellor Carol Christ put it 'Once you embark on the path to censorship, you make your own speech vulnerable to it.'"
8/29/2017, FrontPage Mag, THE LEFT TURNS ON ANTIFA, Daniel Greenfield
"Political scientist Jo Freeman, part of the radical student movement that forced UC Berkeley to permit political speech five decades ago, said she was dismayed at the effort that went into silencing opposition. She drew similarities between those who threatened her and other freedom marchers in the South in the 1960s, and those who bully the far right now.
¶
'It is not uncommon for societies to produce a hate squad,' Freeman said. 'People who want to suppress the right to speak -- they are everywhere.'"
8/27/2017, Associated Press, Birthplace of free speech movement braces for possible fight, Paul Elias
"Student activism was born during the 1960s free-speech movement at Berkeley, when thousands of students at the university mobilized to demand that the school drop its ban on political activism." [Ed note: student activism was born the day after students were invented.]
8/24/2017, San Jose Mercury News, UC Berkeley tries to reclaim its free speech legacy, Emily DeRuy
"That's not how the school approached the free-speech issue as recently as last year and it's certainly not how the school addressed it in the 1960s. In 1964, Dean of Students Katherine Towle prohibited students from taking positions on off-campus political issues because the university was hoping to minimize student involvement in political demonstrations off campus.
¶
But the announcement backfired spectacularly. Faculty and students, led by a young Mario Savio, protested for months and ultimately won the right to speak openly. In response, most other colleges in the U.S. loosened regulations around political activity by students."
8/17/2017, CNBC, Royal Caribbean CEO: College taught me the right way to protest, Jessica Dickler
"His undergraduate experience outside the classroom was affected by the California sun and sea and the free speech movement in the 1960s.
¶
Of the student activism on campus at the time, [Richard] Fain says he learned an important lesson about how to work together to accomplish great things. 'I really saw the value of working with other people.' he said. 'If people really do work toward a common goal, nothing stops them.'"
8/16/2017, EdSource, A summer rich in history for students who looked, listened and questioned, John Fensterwald
"For Adrianne Aron, an insecure girl from St. Louis who broke off from her parents when they wouldn't pay for her to go to college -- 'they said girls could get a husband as easily by staying home' -- her activism began when she heard Mario Savio, a charismatic leader of the Free Speech Movement, at UC Berkeley. 'I was terrified,' she told a trio of students, recalling her early days at Berkeley. 'I was afraid to open my mouth. I sat and admired students with the ability to ask intelligent questions. They had something I didn't have: self-confidence, for they came from families with love and support.'
¶
But she said Savio 'was really speaking to the marginalized. He was a leader with the ability and desire to speak meaningfully, to connect us to a movement.' She participated in the student strike in 1962 and the anti-Vietnam war movement, and went to Cuba with other young Americans to cut sugar cane for Fidel Castro in defiance of the U.S. boycott. She became a psychologist who worked with survivors of torture in Central America.
¶
Her words resonated with Alina Aceves, who'll be a senior at James Logan High this year. 'She was sheltered; she was a follower. Her eyes opened up; I connected with that.'"
8/15/2017, Los Angeles Times, UC Berkeley chancellor unveils 'Free Speech Year' as right-wing speakers plan campus events, Teresa Watanabe
"The free speech issue drew the biggest spotlight in the new chancellor's daylong media interviews and welcoming remarks to 9,500 new students. Christ, dressed in blue ceremonial robes, told the new arrivals that Berkeley's free speech movement was launched by liberals and conservatives working together to win the right to advocate political views on campus.
¶
'Particularly now, it is critical for the Berkeley community to protect this right; it is who we are,' she said. 'That protection involves not just defending your right to speak, or the right of those you agree with, but also defending the right to speak by those you disagree with, even of those whose views you find abhorrent.'
¶
She drew loud applause when she asserted that the best response to hate speech is 'more speech' rather than trying to shut down others, and when she said that shielding students from uncomfortable views would not serve them well."
8/15/2017, Berkeleyside, New UC Berkeley Chancellor takes reins at turbulent time, Natalie Orenstein
"In July, Berkeleyside sat down with the new chancellor, the first woman to hold the position. The Victorian literature scholar was still settling into her new office in California Hall, so shelves were empty and walls were bare - save for the photographs of the Free Speech Movement that came with the place. Christ, who served as UC Berkeley's executive vice chancellor and provost both before and after her stint at Smith, didn't travel far to take up her new post, and she had quickly gotten down to business."
8/14/2017, The Daily Californian, Alumnus welcomes new UC Berkeley students with stern warning, Shounak Bagchi
"What makes your time at UC Berkeley more difficult than that of prior generations is that the campus's reputation of being the gold standard for free speech is under attack. It is up to you preserve this great tradition that started when Mario Savio and others in the Free Speech Movement fought to ensure that your campus be an open avenue to passionately discuss issues without violence, legal repercussion or censorship.
¶
Don't ever forget the profound impact of this movement. The bravery of these men and women was instrumental in creating the blueprint for helping future generations combat racial injustices, empower the disenfranchised and speak truth to power."
8/14/2017, New York Times, The 'Free Speech' Hypocrisy of Right-Wing Media, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
"Progressives deserve the same speech protection as conservatives. The American Civil Liberties Union and the PEN organization have gone out of their way to defend the rights of provocative speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter to speak on campuses, but have been virtually silent on cases involving leftist or progressive faculty members who face suspension for provocative comments."
8/9/2017, The Washington Post, The real issue in the campus speech debate: The university is under assault, Nicholas B. Dirks
"We have serious work ahead to ensure that college campuses not only understand the full set of legal issues around free speech but also embrace the need for robust representation and debate across the political spectrum. Those on the left who have sought to close down offensive or dissenting views have provided an easy target for the right. By rejecting the procedural commitment to free speech, they have also undermined the substantive value of free speech, which will come back to haunt them as a precedent to censor expressions of their own views. Those on the right who have used invitations to controversial speakers to create headlines rather than foster intellectual exchange have in turn used the thinnest of procedural reeds to undermine the real substance of free speech as well."
8/8/2017, CNSNews, Why the Left Defends Islamists: They Share a Common Enemy - The West, Bill Donohue
"In other words, the Free Speech Movement activists hated liberalism, properly understood: they had no use for free speech-their sponsorship of it was nothing but a useful tool to advance their radical politics." [Ed note: that would be the FSM support of the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution.]
8/4/2017, New York Times, Behind Berkeley's Semester of Hate, Andrew Beale and Sonner Kehrt
"Mr. Lawrence is graduating this summer, nearly a year early, a decision reinforced by how Berkeley has dealt with the turmoil. 'I don't want to be on a campus where I'm looking over my shoulder all the time, but the people I'm constantly looking over my shoulder for can stand on the steps of Sproul' -- where the Free Speech Movement was born, in 1964 -- 'and give a press conference.'
¶
'Everyone just kind of wants to keep their head down, and the administration is really hypocritical about what's going on, for all their talk about wellness and campus climate. A pretty big part of me feeling safe on my campus, it doesn't seem crazy to say, is that there not be any Nazis here.'
¶
'People need to understand this whole thing, this whole conflict isn't about free speech.'"
8/3/2017, Ulyces, Comment les hippies ont inventé la Silicon Valley, Mathilde Obert
"Mercredi 2 décembre 1964, baie de San Francisco. Posté à l'aplomb des grandes colonnes de Sproul Hall, sur le campus californien de Berkeley, Mario Savio prend le micro. Trois ans avant la venue du pasteur Martin Luther King, cet homme de 22 ans qui rêvait de devenir prêtre harangue 4 000 étudiants. Il a les cheveux en bataille mais des idées claires. Coupable de lui refuser toute activité politique en lien avec les mouvement des Droits civiques, la faculté, éructe-t-il, 'se résume à un groupe d'employés'. Les sourcils froncés, le militant du Free Speech Movement se lance dans une longue diatribe : 'Nous ne sommes que de la matière première qui refuse cette condition. […] Il arrive un moment où l'activité de la machine est si détestable, vous répugne tant, que vous ne pouvez pas y participer. Et vous devez mettre vos corps sur les engrenages et les rouages pour la faire cesser.'
¶
Les secousses du Free Speech Movement engendrent la vague hippie qui déferle sur le pays. Elle rassemble, sous une même esthétique psychédélique, différentes critiques de la société de consommation et de l'autorité. Surtout, son opposition à la guerre du Vietnam ne souffre aucune réserve. 'Le slogan 'Peace and Love' n'était pas encore prononcé avec ironie', rappelle Danny Goldberg, auteur d'un ouvrage sur l'année 1967 et l'idée hippie, In Search of The Lost Chord."
7/31/2017, Conatus News, The Dawkins Debacle: Free Speech, Islam, and Berkeley, Tom Adamson
"To realise what a lamentable travesty this is, remember that Berkeley was famous for its pro-free speech movement in the 1960's. The student body of the University of California was instrumental in breaking the shackles of cold war conformity. Mario Savio, a leading figure of the movement, gave his famous speech on the Berkeley campus. It warrants quotation here:
¶
'We're human beings! … There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious - makes you so sick at heart - that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.'
¶
The fundamental tenet that Savio and his compatriots espoused was freedom: freedom to criticise the government, freedom to discuss controversial political ideologies, freedom to think outside established norms. It is distressing as a free speech advocate for KPFA to take essentially the same stance as the establishment did 50 years ago. Henry Norr, a former board member of the station, wrote in an email that Dawkins was 'an outspoken Islamophobe.' This may not be surprising to anyone familiar with the state of public debate on university campuses in the US and abroad, but it is an insidious indictment on the institutions that seem so happy to play the role of censor."
7/25/2017, NOS Nieuwsurr, Fifty years after the Summer of Love: "Our ideals have been destroyed",
Dutch television program interviews includes FSM items in SF Summer of Love exhibit, FSM clips, substantial Lynne Hollander Savio interview.
7/9/2017, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Flower power's hothouse, Philip Martin
"In 1964, a student protest -- what would become known as the 'Free Speech Movement' -- sprang up at the University of California at Berkeley. Students insisted the administration lift a ban of on-campus political activities and acknowledge the students' right to free speech. A series of demonstrations that saw students arrested and jailed eventually led to a new chancellor acceding to student demands. In 1965, Jerry Rubin and others established the Vietnam Day Committee -- a cornerstone of the nascent anti-war movement -- in Berkeley. The same year, the owner of Berkeley's Steppenwolf bar started an alternative newspaper called the Berkeley Barb."
7/4/2017, Daily Californian, A History of UC Berkeley's Chancellors, Christine Lee
"The Free Speech Movement took place under [Edward W.] Strong's chancellorship. Thousands of students gathered on Sproul Plaza to protest the ban on campus political activities. Nearly 800 students were arrested for occupying Sproul Hall on Dec. 2, 1964, the largest mass arrest on a national university campus at the time.¶
After months of protests as a part of the Free Speech Movement, Strong resigned amid controversy over his handling of free speech activities on campus."
June 2017, Wired UK, Who built Silicon Valley? Blame the hippies, James Temperton
"From the Black Panthers to the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, 60s political movements are also an influence on modern Californian design."
6/1/2017, Splice Today, Cheap Rebellion: Kathy Griffin and the Wonder Woman Troll, Mark Judge
"There was a time when rebellion meant hard work. Rebellion was the blood and sweat of the civil rights movement. It was the long, grueling arguments during Free Speech Movement at Berkeley."
5/31/2017, The Davis Vanguard, Why Free Speech Protects the Weak Even When the Powerful Benefit At Times, David M. Greenwald
"If you understand the subtext of the ACLU – I think that is precisely what the piece is getting at. But their target audience is not conservatives already convinced that college campuses are the problem, but rather liberal ones who unfortunately seem to need to be convinced that free speech protects them rather than exposes vulnerable populations.¶
....¶
This is a key message that I try to get across in my lectures. I tell it through a recitation of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and the shooting at Kent State. It was not long ago that college campuses were clamping down on the free speech of the left – the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement, rather than what they are doing now in fighting the Milos of the world.
¶
The test of civil liberties is during the trying times. The point I make in my lectures is that any tyrannical government will allow you the 'freedom' to sing their praises. The test is whether they will permit dissent."
5/30/2017, The Forward, Israeli Police Broke My Arm, But They Can't Stop Me From Resisting -- Or Speaking Out, Sarah Brammer-Shlay
"Mario Salvio -- leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement -- famously said, 'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop!'
¶
That was what we attempted to do last week: put our bodies upon the gears, wheels, levers and entire apparatus of the occupation Machine, which has been functioning at top speeds for 50 years. Our sit-in aimed to stop the Israeli police from entering the Muslim Quarter and closing Palestinian businesses, therefore forcing the March of the Flags to be rerouted and enter through another gate."
5/24/2017, CNN, Highlights from 'California: Designing Freedom',
Free Speech Movement Punch Card, 1964--'The origin of the picture is unknown. it's an artifact of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) which is one of the earliest civil rights movements that originated at the University of California, Berkeley. The movement used punch cards, an artifact of early computing, to make the point that the use of computers is turning people into data and turning universities into machines. They were using the materials of technology to make an argument against technology.'" [ed note: the photo is by Howard Harawitz. The FSM was not arguing against technology, but against the University of California. In another context the FSM complained that punchcards were to be treated better than students. Members of the FSM made great use of technological tools, including various forms of printing, public address systems, audio recording, and photography. FSM arrestee Lee Felsenstein went on to design the first portable computer, the Osborne 1.]
5/24/2017, California Magazine, Dan Siegel on Free Speech and People's Park 48 Years Later, Michael Taylor
"What, if anything, did this have to do with free speech and the Free Speech Movement?
¶
It had to do with the issue of student self-determination, with expressive behavior, not political speech. We wanted to express ourselves by creating a park, for a practical purpose. The student movement in the 1960s was a political movement that had a strong cultural basis to it. In the Bay Area, it was joined to the youth movement that stressed sex, drugs and rock and roll, the kind of hippie culture that flourished in the Bay Area. This was a precursor to today's issues of urban farming and community gardens. People looked at it in that way. Free speech in a broader sense means the right of the community to make decisions on how land is to be used going forward."
5/21/2017, Philippine News, Berkeley Fil-Ams defend free speech, Cherie M. Querol Moreno
"22-year-old media studies junior Robin Cid Calleja, who was raised in Las Piñas in Manila, sees the same picture.
¶
'Sproul continues to be a bustling plaza where students can engage in social, cultural, and political activities. It continues to be the heart of student activities, where various student groups -- including racial minorities, like Filipino students who make up barely 2% of the student population -- can have their identities represented and where political minorities on campus, such as the Berkeley College Republicans, can express their ideas and opinions. I think that shows that the Free Speech Movement's legacy lives on,' he said.
¶
For Calleja, those lamenting the death of free speech in Berkeley are unaware of the spirit of the movement.
¶
'They need to understand that while free speech protects people from state- or university-sanctioned censorship or retaliation, it does not protect them from being ridiculed by their peers. Peaceful protests and harsh criticisms from liberal students are not indications that the Free Speech Movement is dead. Rather, these are (acts of) free speech at work,' Calleja said."
5/19/2017, Long Beach Press Telegram, In work and life, he stood for free speech, Rich Archbold
"Jim Smith never forgot the day he got arrested as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, 53 years ago.
¶
Smith, who died at 72 on Mother's Day, wasn't alone. Almost 800 others were arrested in 1964 at a sit-in in Sproul Hall. Students were protesting university restrictions on campus political activities and their free speech. It was the start of the historic Free Speech Movement led by Mario Savo.
¶
I met Smith years later when I was managing editor of the Press-Telegram, and he was a manager in our circulation department.
¶
He would talk about his experience and how proud he was that he got involved. He called it his 'awakening' on social and political issues.
¶
He was 'a dyed-in-the-wool liberal,' according to his wife, Wendy. He was against the war in Vietnam, the war in Iraq and anything that he thought would inhibit free speech. He was for women's rights and tolerance for all people."
5/18/2017, North Coast Journal, How our lives shape the way we see the Lawson killing, Thadeus Greenson
"I was born and raised in Oakland, the child of solidly upper-middle class parents with a devotion to social justice. My father marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and helped start the free speech movement in Berkeley, and my mother moved across the country to learn to care for people with mental illness and fight for women's right to educational and professional advancement. For years, beginning at the age of 6, I was the only white kid -- or one of only a couple -- on my West Oakland baseball teams. I fell in love with -- and eventually married -- a woman who is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant and a second-generation Mexican American. I followed her to Mexico, where we lived for a year in an idyllic town that counted me among its few white residents."
5/17/2017, truthout, The Home of Free Speech™: A Critical Perspective on UC Berkeley's Coalition With the Far-Right, Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and Beezer de Martelly
"In order to dismantle this romanticized version of events, we take a deeper, more critical examination of this supposed "Home of Free Speech™" and argue that the very framework of free speech rights developed during the FSM -- a time nostalgically remembered by the American public as the apex of leftist countercultural student movements -- was, in fact, a mechanism to build coalition between liberals and conservatives. We trace these developments through one character in particular, John Searle, who played a key role in bridging this particular campus divide through the promotion of a sanitized, depoliticized free speech framework in the early sixties. Finally, we demonstrate how this legacy bears on the contemporary resurgence of free speech as a tool to advance conservative white nationalist, anti-immigrant agendas."
5/16/2017, Rolling Stone, Hear Rancid Honor Berkeley Activism on Electrifying 'Telegraph Avenue', Jon Blistein
"Like the video for their first Trouble Maker offering, 'Ghost of a Chance,' Rancid tear through 'Telegraph Avenue' in a simple basement setting. Singer/guitarist Tim Armstrong opens the song with recollections of his teenage years hanging out and playing music on the titular street, which runs from Downtown Oakland to the edge of the University of California, Berkeley campus. In the second and third verses, Armstrong sings about the Free Speech Movement and anti-Vietnam War protests that gripped the school and city in the Sixties, referencing activist Mario Savio and then-California Governor Ronald Reagan."
5/15/2017, UC Berkeley News, Alum Dick Beahrs recalls MLK's visit to Berkeley 50 years ago, Melanie Hurley
"Dick Beahrs: The Free Speech Movement had occurred and that shook me up. I came from a conservative home in Palo Alto. And one of the things I was taken aback by was that public figures wouldn't come to Berkeley to speak. They absolutely would not do it. So I took that upon myself as an objective. I got Robert Kennedy to come, and I got King to come."
5/13/2017, KQED.org, 'Road to the Summer of Love' a Snapshot of Sweet '60s Madness, Richie Unterberger
"Although more modest in scale than the de Young's current Summer of Love extravaganza, the California Historical Society's current exhibition On the Road to the Summer of Love, running through Sept. 10, offers important context through photos, memorabilia, and audiovisuals. (And at $5, the price is right.) Rooms on the Beats and the Free Speech Movement trace the Bay Area's proudly rebellious bohemianism back to the late 1950s and early 1960s. The folk revival (check the pictures of a pre-rock Janis Joplin and short-haired Jerry Garcia and Jorma Kaukonen), the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and the experimental music of the San Francisco Tape Music Center all get their due as vital forces in the city's simmering volcano.¶
...¶
The Free Speech section features not just the expected shot of Joan Baez, but also a couple shots of folkie Barbara Dane, who was probably even further to the left of Baez." [Ed note: the photos of Barbara Dane by Erik Weber were made after the end of the Free Speech Movement, during the anti-war movement.]
5/12/2017, The Hill, Universities are battlegrounds, Berkeley faculty forgot how to fight, Alemayehu G. Mariam
"In 1964, Mario Savio, Jack Weinberg and others defiantly mobilized Berkeley students in the cause of campus activism, free speech and academic freedom. They were joined by a thousand strong faculty, making Berkeley a national symbol of campus free speech and protest. By contrast, the stony silence of Berkeley's faculty majority in 2017 is deafening."
5/12/2017, Rutland Herald, Some claim free speech is fading at nation's colleges, Collin Binkley
"The events at Berkeley and Middlebury have drawn scorn from observers across the political spectrum, including some founders of the free speech movement that took root at Berkeley in the 1960s. Jack Weinberg, who was arrested on campus in 1964 for violating school codes on activism and sparked a wave of protests to change them, said he found 'the whole thing despicable.'
¶
'When you suppress ideas, you also increase interest in those ideas,' Weinberg said. 'It's understandable that people want to stop it, but it doesn't work.'"
5/12/2017, Los Angeles Times, A reminder: Anti-communist hysteria almost destroyed the University of California, Michael Hiltzik
"At Berkeley, the loyalty oath experience continued to resonate through the 1960s and the birth of the free speech movement, which militated against Vietnam- and civil rights-era restrictions on political speech on the campus. And the issues continue to resonate today -- not least as a reminder that the loyalty oath affair was fueled at least partially by UCLA's speaking invitation to Laski.
¶
Free-speech challenges still erupt at Berkeley and other UC campuses, but wholesale disqualifications for one's political beliefs or even political statements haven't been tried since. That doesn't mean they won't recur -- political attacks on university faculty members are common, generally as right-wing attacks on supposed liberal leanings of university professors." [ed note: the FSM was over before anti-Vietnam organizing began.]
5/10/2017, cleveland.com, Suppression 301 - silencing opposing voices on campus, Ted Diadiun
"The late Mario Savio likely would have loathed the ideas of all three. I'm thinking, though, that he would have been more distressed at the way the protest culture he helped spawn has tried to silence those ideas, rather than to defeat them with better ideas."
5/6/2017, The Intelligencer, Berkeley Birthed Right, Patrick Buchanan
"In 1964, neither Nixon nor Reagan appeared to have a bright future. But after Berkeley, both captured the presidency twice. And both benefited mightily from denouncing rioting students, even as liberalism suffered from its perceived association with them."
5/6/2017, San Francisco Chronicle, Free speech is a joke when laughing is a crime, Caille Millner
"While Baby Boomers are lecturing them about 'tolerance' for hateful speech and misrepresenting the history of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, young people are thinking about the Occupy protesters who were pepper-sprayed by police at UC Davis.
¶
They're thinking about the hundreds of Black Lives Matter protesters tossed in jail for demonstrating against police brutality.
¶
Now, they'll be thinking of Desiree Fairooz.
¶
If 'free speech' applies only to some Americans, it's hardly free."
5/6/2017, California Magazine, Ann Coulter at Berkeley: Untangling the Truth, Krissy Eliot
"It's been about a week since Ann Coulter tried but failed to speak on the Berkeley campus, and the outrage continues unabated. Outrage that once again a conservative was silenced on a liberal campus. Outrage that the university cancelled her appearance and refused to provide appropriate protection for her. Once again, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement is depicted as a place where free speech--at least for conservatives--went home to die. But what actually happened between the university, Coulter and the three student groups that wanted to host her? Here's our attempt to set the record straight on several misconceptions about the Coulter incident.
¶
Misconception 1: UC Berkeley cancelled the Ann Coulter event.
¶
Among the most popular rumors is one of Berkeley cancelling Coulter's event--a claim reported by the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and The Washington Post, among other mainstream publications, with Chancellor Nicholas Dirks even referring to the event as 'now-cancelled' in an op-ed the day before the event.
¶
But in actuality, the university never agreed to host Ann Coulter in the first place."
5/5/2017, hoodline, On The Road To The Summer Of Love Opens May 12th With Event-Filled Weekend In San Francisco,
"Visitors to the exhibition are taken down an amazing road, beginning in the late 1950s with the Beatniks in North Beach and ending in late 1967 with the Diggers' Death of the Hippie ceremony. The exhibition explores iconic moments-such as Jack Weinberg in a police car at UC Berkeley at the birth of the Free Speech Movement-as well as less well-known, but none-the-less formative, events."
5/2/2017, The Socialist Worker, Organizing for an alt-right delete at Berkeley, Sarah Wheels
"As Mukund Rathi, a law student at UC Berkeley and member of the ISO [International Socialist Org], explained at the demonstration:
¶
'The Berkeley Free Speech Movement arose out of the struggles of civil rights activists and socialists against segregation and anti-Black racism in California. These activists, many of them students, were engaging in militant demonstrations and sit-ins to win equal rights for Black people...
¶
It is absurd for the far-right provocateurs, white supremacists and the College Republicans to claim this legacy...
¶
The greatest threat to free speech, on college campuses and elsewhere, comes from these right-wing forces. They will use violence against those who wish to speak and assemble freely. And this should not surprise us--we can't possibly believe that white supremacists and neo Nazis have anything but violent hostility towards their opponents.'"
5/2/2017, PR Newswire, California Historical Society Hits the Road to the Summer of Love with New Exhibition that Tells the Story of the Countercultural Movement in San Francisco through Photographs, The California Historical Society
"Visitors to the exhibition are taken down an amazing road, beginning in the late 1950s with the Beatniks in North Beach and ending in late 1967 with the Diggers' Death of the Hippie ceremony. The exhibition explores iconic moments-such as Jack Weinberg in a police car at UC Berkeley at the birth of the Free Speech Movement-as well as less well-known, but none-the-less formative, events.
Listening stations with audio clips provide a unique way to be a part of these moments in history. They include a reading of the famed poem "Howl" by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in 1959; poems from all of the poets at the famed Six Gallery reading that introduced 'Howl,'; Mario Savio's legendary speech at the Free Speech Movement sit-in at UC Berkeley in December 1964; and the Grateful Dead on stage at the 1967 Human Be-In. Musician Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane and actor Peter Coyote, once a member of the artist-anarchist collective The Diggers, reflect on the era as well. "
5/2/2017, History News Network, Free Speech Is Not Dying in Berkeley, Andrea S. Johnson
"The FSM was not an isolated product of Berkeley liberalism. It was partially a product of students who grew up hearing about and had sometimes themselves participated in the nonviolent civil rights movement of the South. A freshman on campus in the Fall of 1964 would have been in elementary school during the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and just about to begin their senior year of high school when the March on Washington occurred. A junior or senior on campus might have been to Mississippi to organize voter education programs the summer before. The FSM's relatively peaceful reaction to heavy-handed restrictions on their traditional free speech zone were the result of nearly a decade of non-violent direct action modeled by the civil rights movement. This of course is easily lost if all one has are the campus protest photographs; most of the participants are white, and the pictures are of events on campus, meaning that the modern viewer can easily miss the broader connections to nonviolent protest which was key to Cold War social change. Those who value the FSM now, may not value nonviolence as a form of protest in the same way."
5/1/2017, Washington Examiner, Joan Baez protested for free speech at Berkeley in 1964 - now she's standing up for Ann Coulter, Emily Jashinsky
"Legendary folk musician Joan Baez, a veteran of the original free speech movement, is standing up for conservative author Ann Coulter.
¶
After a dramatic series of events unfolded last week culminating in the cancellation of Coulter's scheduled lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, Baez, often associated with her work in the Civil Rights movement, posted a statement condemning the censorship
¶
'Let the Ann Coulters of the world have their say,' the 76-year-old musician wrote. 'Trying to stop Ann Coulter or Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking or any group from marching will not stop the advance of fascism, but rather might strengthen it.'
¶
In her statement, Baez referred to censorship as 'one of the 14 characteristics of fascism' and argued it is not a 'pathway to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'"
5/1/2017, The Daily, Counter-Coulter?, Gabriel Epstein
"It doesn't matter whether or not you agree with what's being said. It doesn't particularly matter if you're offended by it, either. What matters is that the principle of free speech remains uncompromised, and that everyone is allowed to say their piece. It doesn't mean that you have to listen to the people you disagree with (though you should). It means that it simply isn't acceptable to respond to them with anything other than speech. That means no violence, no threats, and no censorship.
¶
Berkeley was a center of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s and it should be one now more than ever. The country is highly polarized, and it's imperative that all lines of communication remain open, even if what's being said is inflammatory. Words never killed anyone, but silence very well could.
¶
The university should allow Coulter to speak, it should provide any security necessary to ensure that her rights are protected, and it should live up to its commitments all those years ago to safeguard the rights of students. All universities should be places where all ideas are subjected to the same scrutiny, not isolated and homogeneous oases.
¶
Arthur Goldberg, one of the organizers of the Free Speech Movement, once asked 'How can I go to class and learn of our country's democratic processes when I'm not allowed to practice them on campus?' For both students' and the nation's success, speech must be met with speech. Otherwise we let the Coulters and Yiannopouloses of the world martyr themselves without ever having their ideology challenged.
¶
America is a constant conversation, one that universities should be active and unbiased participants in. That means, above all, that the freedom of speech must be protected."
4/28/2017, Vanity Fair, Milo Yiannopoulos Is Starting A New, Ugly, For-Profit Troll Circus, Tina Nguyen
"Milo Inc.'s first event will be a return to the town that erupted in riots when he was invited to speak earlier this year. In fact, Yiannopoulos said that he is planning a 'week-long celebration of free speech' near U.C. Berkeley, where a speech by his fellow campus agitator, Ann Coulter, was recently canceled after threats of violence. It will culminate in his bestowing something called the Mario Savio Award for Free Speech. (The son of Savio, one of the leaders of Berkeley's Free Speech movement during the mid-1960s, called the award 'some kind of sick joke'.)"
4/28/2017, The National Review, Berkeley Didn't Birth 'Free Speech,' but It Seems Intent to Bury It, Jonah Goldberg
"Anyone not loyal to a certain ideology must be resisted, rejected, and renounced.
¶
Demosthenes, the Athenian rhetorician and champion of liberty, pointed out around 355 B.C. that residents of Athens were free to praise Sparta's regime, but Spartans were banned from praising Athens.
¶
In 1689, the British passed a law guaranteeing freedom of speech in Parliament. A century later, French revolutionaries incorporated into law the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which established free speech as a universal right. Two years later, the Americans ratified the First Amendment, which guarantees that the state shall not infringe on the right to free speech. Roughly a century and half later, in 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which says, 'Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression. . . . '
¶
I mention all of this because every time I read or hear about the pathetic state of affairs at the University of California, Berkeley -- where conservative speakers and rabble-rousers alike are banned from speaking lest they be assaulted by a mob -- journalists and other commentators insist on pointing out the irony that this is all happening 'where the Free Speech Movement was born.'
¶
Yes, I know there was a thing called the Free Speech Movement. And, yes, its members and leaders talked a good deal about free speech.
¶
But the movement for free speech is thousands of years old and runs like a deep river across the landscape of Western Civilization."
4/26/2017, U.S. News & World Report, A Free Speech Tug of War: Original members of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement support Ann Coulter's right to speak., Lauren Camera
"Across the board, leaders of the Free Speech Movement denounce the violence that's occurred, and blame the current atmosphere on a hyper-partisan political climate -- one in which people tune out ideas they don't share, talk over each other instead of to each other, and, notably, one that runs counter to the ideals upon which the Free Speech Movement was created.
¶
Indeed, the original movement in the 1960s included thousands of students from all political and philosophical leanings.
¶
'You had in a room people representing 20 to 30 different groups, from far left to far right and everything in between,' says [Jackie] Goldberg. 'Pro-Goldwater forces and anti-Goldwater forces, you had the Jewish and Christian organizations, all the religious groups, even dormitories.'
¶
Goldberg and others joke that the incredible breadth of ideologies often meant meetings ran upwards of 15 hours.
¶
Another pillar of the movement was its commitment to nonviolence.
'We were at no time violent,' says [Anita] Medal. 'Even when they sent 400 motorcycle police on campus to threaten us, even during our arrests in December of '64, even when we were kicked in the head by police, stomped on, dragged down the stairs. We were nonviolent.'"
4/26/2017, The New York Times, Berkeley Is Under Attack From Both Sides, Nicholas Dirks
"BERKELEY, Calif. - The University of California, Berkeley, and the community around it have been symbols of free speech for more than 50 years. We still celebrate the legacy of Mario Savio and others who fought in the 1960s to ensure that the First Amendment be honored on campus."
4/26/2017, The Los Angeles Times, Editorial Let Ann Coulter speak, The Times Editorial Board
"No one who has observed recent violence in Berkeley would dismiss the university's safety concerns. But it's important that a campus that was the birthplace of the free speech movement not succumb to what lawyers call the 'heckler's veto' -- the idea that a fear of disruptive or violent protest justifies canceling a speech by a controversial figure or shunting it to a time or place where it will have a significantly smaller audience."
4/26/2017, The Guardian, Ann Coulter cancels speech (again) - but battle for Berkeley's political soul rages on, Julia Carrie Wong and Sam Levin
"Robert Cohen, a history professor at New York University who has written several books about the free speech movement, said that he saw the current contretemps as a 'free speech hustle'.
¶
'The free speech tradition that people made sacrifices to win is really in tatters,' Cohen said. He blamed the devolution on the 'short-sighted' reactions of the left and the 'opportunistic and cynical game that these rightwingers are playing'.
¶
When the university voted to allow political speech on campus in 1964, he said, they also insisted that the administration be allowed to regulate the 'time, space and manner' of such activity so as not to interfere with the normal functioning of the university.
¶
'If I want to have a rally, I can't do it in your English class,' Cohen said. 'If having an evening talk by a rightwing bigot is going to do $100,000 in property damage and disrupt the university, they have always had the right to say, no, do it during the daytime.'" [Ed Note: Daniel Savio is also quoted.]
4/26/2017, History News Network, Berkeley Has NOT Violated Ann Coulter's Free Speech Rights, Robert Cohen
"No, this is not a real free speech movement at Berkeley today, and that is because there has been no free speech violation by the UC administration. What the Coulter affair really amounts to is a 'time, place, and manner' quibble. The settlement of the 1964 Free Speech Movement, as embodied in the December 8 resolutions, included a provision authorizing the university to impose reasonable regulations on the 'time, place, and manner of political activity' on campus so that such activity does not interfere with 'the normal functions of the university.' The administration has used this 'time place and manner' authority in the face of the threats it received, acting on the belief that the time and place for the Coulter talk that would not end in violence and disrupt the normal functions of the university was in early May at a more secure location."
4/24/2017, Newsweek, Ann Coulter Doesn't Scare These Student Protest Leaders From Berkeley, Julia Glum
"'The primary danger is coming from the kind of ideas that Yiannopoulos and Coulter are spreading, but the other danger is a small group of people wearing bandanas coming out and breaking windows,' [Jack] Radey tells Newsweek. 'What they are doing is potentially making it impossible for nonviolent demonstrations to take place. They are giving the right-wing and neofascist types all the copy they need.'
¶
Anita Medal, who also participated in the Free Speech Movement, says she and her friends fought for Berkeley to be a forum for discussion during the civil rights movement. If the school thinks it needs additional security for Coulter's event, then the organizers should foot the bill-not scrap the speech entirely, she said.
¶
As for the protesters, 74-year-old Medal suggests teach-ins, lectures or Q-and-A sessions. She remains focused on peaceful, respectful debate, just like she did while facing off with the police at Berkeley five decades ago.
¶
'The ground was rumbling and we were terrified and we did nothing, even when we were arrested and they were beating us with sticks and kicking our heads in and dragging us down stairs,' Medal adds. 'We didn't get violent.'"
4/24/2017, Euronews, The American left's free speech reversal, Peter Van Voorhis
"In the 1960s, activists at the University of California, Berkeley started the American free speech movement, where millions of students across the country fought for free speech rights, largely in opposition to American intervention in Vietnam.
¶
In the United States of America, our rights to free speech are protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution, which protects freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, and more. It has been an important part of our political tradition since our founding, and is one of our most important rights as citizens.
¶
While the vast majority of Americans support robust free speech protections, today's college students have committed themselves to shutting down all speech they disagree with, in the name of 'tolerance.'"
4/23/2017, The Inquisitr, Ann Coulter's Free Speech Ban Could Cost University of California, Berkeley, Pieter Howes
"A representative for Berkeley College Republicans, Harmeet Dhillon, wrote to Berkeley's interim Vice Chancellor, Stephen Sutton, to threaten a lawsuit if Coulter is not allowed to speak as planned on April 27. Dhillon declared the college's decision as a violation of their constitutional right to free speech.
¶
"It is a sad day indeed when the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, is morphing before our eyes into the cemetery of free speech on college campuses."
¶
The Free Speech Movement (FSM) took place during 1964 to 1965 on the Berkeley campus. It was led by students Mario Savio, Jack Weinberg, Michael Rossman, George Barton, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Michael Teal, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, among others."
4/23/2017, San Francisco Chronicle, Berkeley betrays its free speech legacy, Willie Brown
"The battle over free speech in Berkeley has flipped the two sides in the old generation gap."
4/21/2017, The New York Times, Berkeley Is Being Tested on 2 Fronts: Free Speech and Safety, Thomas Fuller and Stephanie Saul
"Veterans of the Free Speech Movement of the '60s, a seminal moment in the university's history, are disheartened that Berkeley is now associated with violence and blocking speech instead of promoting it.
¶
'I don't think Ann Coulter has anything useful to say, but it was unconstitutional for the university to bar her from speaking,' said Lynne Hollander Savio, who took part in the movement and is the widow of Mario Savio, its leading spokesman.
¶
Ms. Savio sees a clear generational divide. Free speech, she said, was more of an absolute for her husband, who is commemorated outside Sproul Hall at the heart of the campus by the officially designated Mario Savio Steps.
¶
'Mario took a principled position -- it was free speech for all,' she said. 'I think free speech has slipped as a value.'"
4/21/2017, The Berkeley Daily Planet, Defending Free Speech in Berkeley Against Violence, Raymond Barglow
"The way to confront and resist right-wing speech is not by violently attacking those who voice it, but by advocating on behalf of free speech, social justice, and non-violence. As FSM veteran Paul Coopersmith writes, 'We must not be remiss in confronting those on the far right, whose visions of how things ought to be lie so beyond the pale. But neither should we stoop to their level.' We can win over many Trump supporters with a progressive agenda that includes good jobs, good schools, restoration of the nation's decaying infrastructure, and medical care for all."
4/21/2017, Los Angeles Times, Opinion: Berkeley has become the place where political extremists come to throw punches, Mariel Garza
"There will be another clash because the provocateurs on the right know that if you want to start a public fight with the reactionaries on the left, you come to Berkeley to do it -- the campus or the city, it doesn't matter as they are one and the same in the eyes of the world. This is the way it has been forever, or at least in the half a century since the violent free speech movement of the 1960s birthed the liberal, supposedly tolerant haven Berkeley is now." [Editor's note: The 1964 FSM was a short-lived, non-violent movement. What violence they experienced issued from hecklers and police. The combatants in Berkeley are not the descendants of the Free Speech Movement. They serve some other ideal.]
4/21/2017, Chicago Tribune, Column: Ann Coulter and the un-free speech movement at Berkeley, Steve Chapman
"Berkeley is an exceptional institution whose history includes the 1964-1965 protests that gained fame as the Free Speech Movement. Long known as a hotbed of left-wing activism, it has lately gained attention as a place where right-wingers venture at their peril."
4/20/2017, The Washington Post, Berkeley gave birth to the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s. Now, conservatives are demanding it include them, John Woodrow Cox
"On a December evening in 1964, 1,000 students marched into the Berkley's Sproul Hall and sat down. The protesters were inspired by the Free Speech Movement, a group demanding, among other things, that the university stop restricting political activity on campus.
¶
The students slept, sang, studied and talked until after 3 a.m., when the chancellor showed up and demanded that they leave, according to news accounts. A few did, but most stayed. Then things turned violent.
¶
'An Army of law officers broke up a massive sit-in occupation,' reported the Associated Press, which described 'limply defiant' protesters being dragged down the stairs on their backs and shoved into police vans. 'Cries of police brutality rose from demonstration supporters watching outside.'
¶
But university President Clark Kerr had lost his patience with the activists, declaring in a statement that the Free Speech Movement had 'become an instrument of anarchy.'
¶
By morning, police had arrested 796 students.
¶
The school would later relent to the pressure, loosening its rules against political activity on campus and making Sproul Hall a place for open discussion."
04/20/2017, Politico, How Berkeley became a hotbed of violence in the Trump era, David Siders
"But the history of conflict in Berkeley is also fraught with political peril. Amid sit-ins at the campus during the Free Speech Movement, Ronald Reagan defeated then-Gov. Pat Brown in part by harnessing middle-class anger over protests at what Reagan called a 'hotbed of communism and homosexuality.'
¶
Decades later, some longtime observers of Berkeley's protest culture fear escalating violence could now undercut the left's cause.
¶
'They have this incredible ideology which somehow conflates smashing windows with bringing down the state,' said Lynne Hollander Savio, the widow of Mario Savio, one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement. 'The protests in the early '60s were never like this, and even the anti-Vietnam War marches, where you had more physical interaction, were not, I don't think, as mindless … There's something very creepy about these people, the black-masked people.'"
4/20/2017, MercatorNet, The war on intellectual freedom, Denyse O'Leary
"Fifty years is a long time. In 1964 University of California students were barred from distributing flyers about major issues of the day, including the civil rights struggle. The resulting protests kicked off the Free Speech movement, whose anniversary was duly commemorated by National Public Radio in 2014:"
4/20/2017, Los Angeles Times, UC Berkeley reverses decision to cancel Ann Coulter visit, Veronica Rocha and Jeff Landa
"The UC Berkeley campus is known as the home of the Free Speech Movement. That's one reason conservative activists have used it as a setting for several recent rallies."
4/17/2017, The Los Angeles Times, How Berkeley Became Epicenter of Violent Trump Clashes, Paige St. John and Shelby Grad
"Berkeley is also a potent symbol because of its role as the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in 1964:
¶
Before fall 1964, students' politicking had been limited to a small sidewalk strip thought to be off-campus and immune from university restrictions. Students such as Mario Savio returned from searing experiences as civil rights workers in the South and sought to expand campaigns in California, upsetting some state legislators.
¶
After learning that the property was owned by UC, school authorities moved to shut down the area and ban the tables and pamphleting there. Activists challenged the rules by resuming their activities. Three months of confrontations, demonstrations and negotiations followed and became international news. Eventually, the restrictions were lifted with some limitations -- a victory that paved the way for later protests supporting women's' rights and environmentalism and opposing the Vietnam War."
4/14/2017, The Inquisitr, THE SUMMER OF LOVE: NOT EXACTLY HIPPIE PARADISE, Kaanii Powell Cleaver
"Such was the story revealed by rock journalist and respected author, Ben Fong Torres, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the now-legendary San Francisco Summer of Love. In the Cal Alumni Association publication, California, Torres noted how an eclectic mix of more than 20,000 relatively apolitical Haight Ashbury hippies and Berkeley Free Speech Movement veterans from across the bay collided in a 'two-headed' scene culminated in the Summer of Love."
4/14/2017, Berkeleyside, Berkeley braces for more protests, Frances Dinkelspiel
"The Liberty Revival Alliance, formed by Rich Black, selected to hold a rally in Berkeley because he and others believe the city is not tolerant of differing perspectives, as evidenced by the fact that black bloc and Antifa protesters forced the cancellation of Milo Yiannapolous' speech at Cal on Feb. 1. Coming and talking here is a way to uphold free speech, a fundamental American right, they say. They also play up what they see as the irony that the Free Speech Movement happened in Berkeley.
¶
But some on the far left who oppose the alt-right believe free speech only goes so far. Espousing racist and homophobic ideas encourages violence and should be stopped, they say."
4/12/2017, Los Angeles Review of Books, Music in the Air: A Tribute to Music Critic Ralph J. Gleason, Jon Friedman
"In the foreword, Jann Wenner writes, ¶
I was a student at UC Berkeley when I started reading Ralph Gleason's column 'On the Town' in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was the only place I knew to find a certain social, cultural, and political mix that was coming to define my world. He understood rock and roll and became a singular voice that stood out among other music and jazz writers. He got the Beatles and Bob Dylan and what was making them so special to a generation. The Free Speech Movement, the first of numerous student uprisings in the sixties, had overwhelmed the Berkeley campus. He was the only journalist in the Bay Area who gave the FSM a fair shake."
4/9/2017, The Daily Californian, Looking into UC Berkeley's history of activism, Lillian Holmes
"UC Berkeley has a long history of student activism, from the Free Speech Movement to the campaign for divestment from apartheid South Africa. The Free Speech Movement, when students organized for the right to campaign for political causes on campus, is now lauded by the student guides on campus tours. Less mentioned is the period of protest against the Vietnam War."
4/6/2017, The Nation, Teach-Ins Helped Galvanize Student Activism in the 1960s. They Can Do So Again Today, Marshall Sahlins
"The counter-culture was musical, sartorial, pharmacological, sexual, and scatological-but it was not yet fully political. Thinking that by changing the self they could change the world, the anti-establishment rebels remained committed in this respect to the individualism of the established cultural order. There were a few anti-authority student movements, primarily the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ((SNCC), the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley (FSM). In the months and years following the first teach-ins, mounting student anxieties about military conscription gave an impetus to draft-card burnings and other student political action, but not so much as in the early days of the Johnson escalation, when the university resistance, at the instigation of the left-liberal faculty, broke out en masse. It was the teach-ins that largely politicized the counter-cultural generation and effectively nationalized the anti-war protest."
4/3/2017, SocialistWorker.org, The ISO and the soul of international socialism, Alan Maass and Todd Chretien
"In the U.S., socialists of the IS tradition played an unheralded role building support in the North for the civil rights movement. During the 1960s, the Independent Socialist Club was formed literally in the midst of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement by leaders of that struggle, which served as a launching pad for the anti-Vietnam War movement." [Ed note: see: http://www.fsm-a.org/FSM%20Documents/Independent%20Socialist%20Club/Webpages/gallery-01.html]
4/1/2017, Jacobin, Free Speech as Battleground, Christian Parenti & James Davis
"The extension of free speech to universities was famously championed by the UC Berkeley Free Speech movement, which emerged to defend left-wing students who wanted to distribute radical literature and make radical speeches on campus. Winning that fight came at the price of students being beaten and jailed." [Ed note: Actually, the FSM was formed by a left-right coalition to win right to speak and distribute literature of any political nature.]
3/31/2017, Newsweek, CALIFORNIA AGAINST TRUMP: BERKELEY PASSES IMPEACHMENT RESOLUTION, JOINING OTHER GOLDEN STATE CITIES, Tim Marcin
"Berkeley has a rich history of political activism-the town's university calls itself the home of the free speech movement-and that self-image is part of what motivated the city council to take action.
¶
'We were one of the first cities to standup against apartheid--that's a movement that took off and spread and that's very important,' Councilmember Sophie Hahn told KPIX 5."
3/31/2017, Berkeleyside, Ken Stein's Berkeley Buttons, Tom Dalzell
"The Free Speech Movement rocked the campus, California, the United States,and the world in 1964." [Ed note: good photo of FSM button]
3/30/2017, Quartz, As American universities fight over free speech, the UK is seeking a law to end "safe spaces", Amy X. Wang
"No small irony rings through the fact that the last half-century has seen college students go from protesting hate speech in the 1960s Free Speech Movement to, however unconsciously, now propagating it themselves by shouting down controversial individuals who come to campus."
3/29/2017, Capital & Main, California Dreaming: Lynnae and David Evans, Native and Immigrant, Sasha Abramsky
"[Lynnae Evans:] I was at Berkeley in 1964. When the Free Speech Movement occurred, there were pickets placed around all of the classes. We were told we shouldn't cross those lines. I called my father, who was a Republican, and I said, 'You'll never guess what's going on at Berkeley, but there's a Free Speech Movement and we're being encouraged not to go to class.' He said, 'You need to go to class.' I called my grandfather, and he said: 'You never cross a picket line, you find out what the issues are and you support them.' My grandfather had supported the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] and the Teamsters' union and he always felt he couldn't vote for FDR because FDR was too conservative. He voted for the socialist candidate." [Ed note: The strike happened just after the 800 were arrested and led to the faculty voting to stand with the students and the strking of free speech restrictions. The strike lines would not have prevented Linnae Evans from attending class. She clearly had a choice.]
3/28/2017, Splice Today, Wellesley College Profs Pretend to Champion Free Speech, Chris Beck
"Campus politics have flipped since the Free Speech Movement protests during the 1964-65 academic year at the University of California, Berkeley. Students then aimed at forcing the university administration to acknowledge their right to free speech and academic freedom. Now that the regressive left has come to dominate politics on the American campus, academic freedom is limited and free speech often repressed when it involves conservative views."
3/21/2017, Time Magazine, Women Aren't Free Until Speech Is, Camille Paglia
"The Free Speech Movement, led by a fiery Italian-American, Mario Savio, erupted at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, the year I entered college. It was a cardinal moment for my generation. The anti-establishment stance of the Free Speech Movement represented the authentic populist revolution of the 1960s, which resisted encroachments of authority by a repressive elite. How is it possible that today's academic Left has supported rather than protested campus speech codes as well as the grotesque surveillance and over-regulation of student life? American colleges have abandoned their educational mission and become government colonies, ruled by officious bureaucrats enforcing federal dictates. This despotic imperialism has no place in a modern democracy. An enlightened feminism, animated by a courageous code of personal responsibility, can only be built upon a wary alliance of strong women and strong men."
Spring 2017, California., Our House: Chaos and Creation in the Berkeley Student Cooperative, By Alastair Boone and Sarah Elizabeth Adler
"The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was partly a reaction against in loco parentis, and although this framework has largely disappeared from higher education, it is still a useful way to understand the unique responsibilities that the BSC, a landlord in name but a steward in spirit, owes its members. It can also help explain some of the tensions that arise when these members bristle at the policies of their parent organization."
3/17/2017, Jacobin, Between Students and Workers, Joe Allen
"The ISC emerged out of a split in the right wing of the Socialist Party. The political inspiration for the ISC was Hal Draper, a veteran revolutionary socialist and author of the popular pamphlet 'The Mind of Clark Kerr."'It was an examination of the president of the University of California system and his ideas for the modern university. It became the bible of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley."
3/10/2017, The New York Jewish Week, A History of Ideas: The Reason for the Liberal Attitudes on Campus, Shmuly Yanklowitz
"In our contemporary understanding of what a university atmosphere can foment, activists on campuses have often been catalysts for seismic societal change. In February 1960, college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, began a campaign of lunch counter sit-ins with the goal to promote desegregation in community facilities. In doing so, they acted on the precepts of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: 'The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.' It was these humble but brave actions that provided the spark that eventually led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.This, in turn, spurred other college protests. When authorities at the University of California at Berkeley prevented students from distributing civil rights leaflets on campus in 1964, students responded with the Free Speech movement. This movement moved universities out of the grip of Cold War politics and ushered in a decade of student protest involving opposition to the Vietnam War and other issues such as minority rights, anti-Apartheid action, and more inclusivity for vulnerable populations outside the mainstream."
3/10/2017, Study Breaks, The Lost Art of Agreeing to Disagree, Timothy K. DesJarlais,
"In 1964, University of California Berkeley students fiercely protested against restrictive campus rules prohibiting non-approved political groups from operating on campus.
¶
These restrictive policies spawned the famous Free Speech Movement, engraving UC Berkley's legacy as the battleground for free-speech rights. The students led the fight and faced persecution from school administration were remembered as heroes." [Actually the rules also restricted approved student groups from political advocacy.]
3/9/2017, KALX, 'Free Speech for Me, Free Speech for Thee', Reis Thebault
"On Feb. 1, UC Berkeley police canceled a scheduled speech by Breitbart editor and alt-right supporter Milo Yiannopolous because of protests. School officials say the violence was caused by black-clad rioters unaffiliated with the university. But hundreds of students and staff signed petitions and called for the event's cancellation. Reporter Reis Thebault looks at the questions this incident raises about free speech on campus." [Ed note: Thebault interviews FSM arrestee Anita Medal]
3/7/2017, Inside Higher Ed, Bodies on the Gears at Middlebury, John Patrick Leary
"But what if black or Latino Middlebury students don't want to have a conversation about their human dignity? What if they prefer to assert it? If they did so, they'd be participating in a long tradition of campus free-speech defense that many critics overlook. They'd only be doing what Mario Savio, leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, famously advised in 1964: putting their 'bodies on the gears' of an apparatus they call unjust.
'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious -- makes you so sick at heart -- that you can't take part,' Savio said. 'And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.'"
3/6/2017, Bloomberg, Attention, Student Protesters: Use Your Words, Megan McArdle
"That's basically the logic of the editorials that the Berkeley student newspaper published in defense of the rioters. 'A peaceful protest was not going to cancel that event,' wrote student Juan Prieto, 'just like numerous letters from faculty, staff, Free Speech Movement veterans and even donors did not cancel the event. Only the destruction of glass and shooting of fireworks did that. The so-called 'violence' against private property that the media seems so concerned with stopped white supremacy from organizing itself against my community.'" [Ed note: Prieto is wrong. The Free Speech Movement Archives Board, ie veterans, are on public record supporting the right of Yiannopoulos to speak and be heard.]
2/28/2017, The New York Times, The Isolation of College Libertarians, Tom Ciccotta
"Political intolerance is hardly confined to one side of the aisle. If conservatives represented the majority of students on campus, I am sure they would be silencing liberals. Universities must push back against the narrowing of ideology generally to guarantee an open intellectual space for all students.
¶
At a time of increased political tension in the country, it is also important for colleges to push students to learn how to grapple with different views. It was Mario Savio, the socialist leader of Berkeley's free speech movement in the 1960s, who argued that the university should be an intellectual realm where the 'hard light of free inquiry' can be brought upon any and all ideas -- be they liberal or conservative."
2/26/2017, Santa Barbara Independent, How Free Is Free Speech?, Fred Hofmann
"In a class on the First Amendment, Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the UC Irvine Law School. and an ACLU liberal in the best tradition, is addressing this declining understanding in academia of what free speech means. He notes that the views of students on this subject evolve during the course as they are exposed to the history of speech and repression. They learn that the same arguments currently being used to rationalize suppression of speech have been used for centuries, often to repress movements on the left. They learn that whenever a group has asserted itself as an arbiter of permissible speech, it has abused that power.
¶
The Free Speech Movement that emerged on the Berkeley campus in 1964 rejected the notion that college administrators had the right to restrict political advocacy. The irony now is that it is administrators who are resisting calls by students and faculty to restrict speech. Recent UC presidents are to be lauded for a full- throated defense of all types of advocacy, whether by a Farrakhan or a Yiannopolous. Preserving the free marketplace of ideas is an existential priority for academia. Sadly, survival of that free marketplace may require that students and faculty consider taking Remedial Voltaire."
2/25/2017, The Australian, Cancer of political correctness corrodes society's very fabric, Peter Baldwin
"In former times leftists, with the admittedly important exception of apologists for communist totalitarianism, used to champion free speech and campaign against censorship. The seminal moment in the emergence of the American New Left was the free speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley in the early sixties.
¶
What an awful contrast to the events at this same institution a few weeks ago where masked, black-clad thugs attacked a scheduled event with Molotov cocktails, fireworks and metal poles, bashing attendees in some cases to the point of unconsciousness as police stood by passively.
¶
These thugs style themselves as anti-fascists while employing classic fascist tactics from 1930s Europe. Scenes like this: peaceful, lawful assemblies being violently attacked, are an increasingly frequent occurrence all over the Western world, including here in Melbourne, and the perpetrators are overwhelmingly from the Left.
¶
So if political correctness is not just about being nice and polite, what is it?
¶
I think it is best described as an attempt to impose a comprehensive set of constraints on what can be said or debated, publicly or even privately, whenever such speech conflicts with the current version of the ever-changing identity politics ideology. It is the compliance and enforcement arm of this ideology.
¶
John Stuart Mill's dictum that 'he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that' is out the window. Instead of responding to disagreeable views with counter-arguments, the characteristic PC response is to say 'I am offended by what you said, and you should not be allowed to say it and furthermore the fact you even say such things marks you as a bad person'."
2/23/2017, Inside Higher Ed, Yiannopoulos and the Moral Crisis of Campus Conservatism, Robert Cohen
"So Yiannopoulos's Republican campus hosts are at miscast as the Free Speech Movement's political descendants. If there is any free speech dispute from Berkeley in the 1960s that the Yiannopoulos affair resembles (and even here the resemblance is limited) it is the obscenity controversy that erupted in spring 1965, a semester after the Free Speech Movement. That controversy concerned the right to use the obscene word 'Fuck' in public campus discourse. Some Free Speech Movement veterans supported this right, and others (like Savio) objected to the punishment of obscenity protesters on due process grounds. But most movement veterans and much of the Berkeley student body refused to rally to this cause because they felt that this use of obscenity was irresponsible and distracted from more serious issues facing the civil rights and antiwar movements.
¶
That's why journalists who labeled this obscenity affair 'the Filthy Speech Movement' erred, as it was impossible to build a mass movement at Berkeley in defense of obscene speech, impossible to re-assemble the old Free Speech Movement coalition for such a cause. Most of the Berkeley student body in 1965 was too wedded to the ideal of responsible political discourse to wave the 'Fuck' banner. In this sense they were more genuinely conservative than today's Berkeley College Republicans who not only wink at Yiannopoulos's obscenity, but also at its use to defame minority students."
2/23/2017, Indybay, Berkeley Chased Milo Out of Town, Shining National Spotlight on "Alt-Right" Hero,
"White nationalist Milo Yiannopoulos was scheduled to speak at UC Berkeley on the first day of Black history month in a building named after MLK. The event on February 1 was cancelled after a large protest erupted outside the Student Union where he was set to speak. Previously, a speaking event at UC Davis was shut down by anti-fascist protesters. Yiannopoulos and his supporters claimed that the protests and cancellations were counter to the values of Free Speech. The so-called Alt-Right have tried to identify their movement as an extension, or modern incarnation, of the Free Speech movement. Milo's supporters have invoked Mario Savio's name to support their interpretation of the Free Speech Movement." [Ed note: Recently Milo revealed that his guiding principle was not free speech but what the market will bear.]
2/22/2017, San Francisco Weekly, A Retrospective of One's Own, for Lynn Hershman Leeson, Jonathan Curiel
"Besides the exhibit at YBCA exhibit, which is also screening Leeson's films in March and featuring her in a March 15 talk with Eleanor Coppola, Leeson's work is currently on view at her longtime San Francisco gallery, Anglim Gilbert, and in New York at Bridget Donahue Gallery. She'll be at New York's MoMA with Tania Bruguera on Feb. 27 for a screening of Tania Libre. Leeson's schedule is as packed as it ever was. Being recognized at YBCA, she says, is special.
'It's a glorious ending to those three decades of real pain and invisibility, and there was nothing I could even do about it,' she says. 'Coming out of the free-speech movement, and the silencing, I just feel so grateful to Lucia, who took the chance to do this show, to all the people who supported me all those years. It's great. People say, 'Why didn't it happen earlier?'
I don't know. But it happened. And maybe it will happen for the next generation -- that's also important -- who don't have to be silenced in a way that my generation was.'"
2/21/2017, The Point News, Campus Intolerance: The Berkeley Protests, Angela Cruz
"But ultimately what occurred at U.C. Berkeley is symbolic of the way in which free speech has been under siege on college campuses despite the fact that U.C. Berkeley was the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in 1964, when over 3,000 students rallied for their full constitutional rights on campus."
2/21/2017, Sonoma State Star, Sonoma State rooted in free speech: Remembering activist and professor Mario Savio, Konrad Schoffer
"'[Savio] was a student activist and protester at Berkeley. There was a time when students were not allowed any canvassing or any tables on campus, he thought it was a violation of the first amendment,' said Jonah Raskin, Sonoma State professor emeritus and longtime friend of Savio.
¶
'He and a few other students protested and won the right to able to be active in politics. He also went to the South to register voters, that was a pivotal time in his life.'"
2/17/2017, The Telegraph, The student Left's culture of intolerance is creating a new generation of conservatives, Charlie Peters
"Students were once in favour of free speech. In the mid-1960s, students of the University of California, Berkeley undertook a mass-movement for free speech. Under the leadership of Leftist heroes like Jack Weinberg, Bettina Aptheker and Jackie Goldberg, students demanded that the university administration retracted their on-campus ban of political activities. They demanded their freedom of speech. Mario Savio delivered what is generally recognised as the iconic speech of the University of California, Berkeley's (UCB) free speech movement. Here is the speech's most powerful section:
¶
'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it - that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!'
¶
Savio's speech helped push the movement towards success. Berkeley students won their full rights. Students, now liberated from the 'machine' of university censorship, were able to create the anti-Vietnam student movement, another famous campus protest.
¶
Nowadays, the student Left are unwilling to honour Savio's legacy. On the 2nd of February, violent protests at Berkeley shut down a talk by popular conservative speaker Milo Yiannopoulos. Instead of maintaining a liberal and free atmosphere for speech and argument, Berkeley students have become the gears, wheels and levers of the machine that Savio wanted to stop."
2/17/2017, Berkeley Daily Planet, Bring back Yiannopoulos to Berkeley? Yes, but this time..., Becky O'Malley
"I stand with my peers from the Free Speech Movement: I believe that we need to hear all ideas, no matter how hateful, so that we can combat them the best way, with Justice Brandeis' classic antidote to speech we dislike, more speech."
2/17/2017, American Thinker, The Left Silences Debate, Ben Voth
"As California continues upon a path of ideological ricochet that in many quarters seeks complete separation from the nation, the prospects for freedom of speech have declined to incomprehensible limits. America's college campuses -- especially those in California -- are not simply victims of this trend, they are also important agitators for this breach of our most important civil rights. The free speech movement that began at Berkeley has come full circle. Violence against free speech is now argued by the university to be a moral end. Ironically, it was 50 years ago, that a great debater spoke on that campus urging for greater free speech in order to overcome the nation's scourge of racism. James Farmer Jr. was a prelude to the free speech movement of 1964."
2/12/2017, San Francisco Chronicle, UC Berkeley police shift to safety over force at protests, Nanette Asimov
"Jack Radey, a military historian in Oregon, is nearly 70 and remembers being dragged by two officers down the steps of Sproul Hall as a 17-year-old UC Berkeley student in the Free Speech Movement of 1964.
¶
Today, as he reflects on the black bloc anarchists who turned what might have been a peaceful student protest against Yiannopoulos into a fiery, destructive encounter, Radey doesn't see how officers could have dealt with the demonstration any better.
¶
'This black bloc business is really bad news,' he said of the anarchists who have showed up at protests in the Bay Area and across the country, presenting challenges to police trying to de-escalate their responses.
¶
'To identify the police as the enemy in all these cases is a mistake,' Radey said. 'Sometimes they're just trying to actually uphold the law.'"
2/10/2017, The Sacramento Bee, California college campuses should renew commitment to free speech, Kevin Kiley
"In the wake of the riots at Berkeley, California has an opportunity to take a leading role in restoring the primacy of free speech in higher education. To that end, I have introduced a resolution in the state Assembly for California's public universities to adopt the University of Chicago Statement on Free Expression.
¶
Adoption of the statement would reflect a bipartisan consensus. UC President Janet Napolitano, formerly in President Barack Obama's Cabinet, has called for 'more speech' at universities after raising concerns that freedom of speech has given way to freedom from speech. Obama himself has warned that on college campuses 'the unwillingness to hear other points of view can be as unhealthy on the left as on the right.'
¶
Freedom of speech is at the foundation of our democracy, and universities, of all places, should be lively environments where First Amendment freedoms flourish. Berkeley was the birthplace of the free speech movement in the 1960s, whose principles are now enshrined in the University of Chicago Statement on Free Expression."
2/10/2017, The Daily Californian, UC police's approach to handling protests evolved over recent years, Chantelle Lee
"UC Berkeley is deeply rooted in a history of student protests. The Free Speech Movement in 1964, sparked by the administration's ban of on-campus political activities, was the first high-profile campus protest. Nearly 800 students were arrested for occupying Sproul Hall on Dec. 2, resulting in the largest mass arrest on an American university campus at the time."
2/10/2017, Bloomberg, What the Anti-Trump Movement Can Learn From the 1960s, Sam Tanenhaus
"But it was the more practical approach that yielded results.
¶
An example came in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964-1965, a pivotal episode in the decade’s protest politics. When administrators would not allow students to hand out leaflets and fliers on a busy campus plaza, conservative students joined with leftist ones in the call for free speech.
¶
But then the stand-off became confrontational, and 'the right-wingers could not go along,' wrote the sociologist Nathan Glazer, who was teaching at Berkeley at the time. 'They stood aside from further escalations,' Glazer noted, such as when protesters surrounded a police car and staged a sit-in that sealed off a campus building." [Ed note: Goldwater supporters were among those arrested in December, 1964.]
2/9/2017, The Daily Californian, Pole appears on, disappears from Free Speech monument on Sproul Plaza, Harini Shyamsundar
"According to campus real estate spokesperson Christine Shaff, campus administration authorized neither the erection of the pole nor its removal.
¶
Shaff confirmed, however, that the pole was not an official monument. The official Free Speech Movement memorial, which was designed by artist Mark Brest van Kempen and constructed in 1991, is the 6-inch column of land and airspace on Sproul Plaza encircled within a granite ring, upon which the pole was originally erected. The 6-inch plot of soil and the airspace extending above it are defined as not belonging to any singular nation -- and as such, no laws can be acknowledged within the small space."
2/8/2017, San Francisco Chronicle, Allow Yiannopoulus to speak, Paul Coopersmith
"As one of the 796 people to have been arrested in the early morning of Dec. 4, 1964, at the height of the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement, I agree with members of the FSM Archive Board of Directors, that however bigoted and objectionable Milo Yiannopoulos and 'Breitbart News' may be, he should have been allowed to speak on campus.
¶
To prevent him from doing so was not only antithetical to those American values that we hold so dear, but, perhaps more to the point, only serves to energize and provide a bigger platform to the very people and organizations whom so many of us -- progressives, independents, Democrats and yes, Republicans -- find so reprehensible.
¶
We must not be remiss in confronting those on the far right, whose visions of how things ought to be lie so beyond the pale. But neither should we stoop to their level. We need to counter their offensive words and acts with truth, the strength of our convictions, and, when necessary, a willingness to put our bodies on the line, and say, 'Enough.'"
2/8/2017, History News Network, Donald Trump's Appalling Hypocrisy about Free Speech, Robert Cohen
"Appalling as Trump's hypocrisy on free speech is, his Berkeley tweet and Savio masquerade demonstrate that when the Left advocates the banning of a speaker or disrupts a campus speech it not only tramples the legacy of the Free Speech Movement, but surrenders the moral high ground so completely that it puts itself in a position to be lectured on free speech by its nemesis in the oval office."
2/7/2017, The Nation, What Might Mario Savio Have Said About the Milo Protest at Berkeley?, Robert Cohen
"What Mario Savio did in his FSM victory speech in 1964 was in its own way reminiscent of what Martin Luther King Jr. did in his March on Washington speech a year earlier. Both were seeing beyond their time, with King sharing his dream of an America freed from the shackles of racism and Savio envisioning a campus as it was being reborn, liberated from its history of binding restrictions on political expression."
2/6/2017, San Francisco Examiner, Collective internet gave Berkeley protests a real-time trial and execution, Seung Y. Lee
"By the time I ducked out of Sproul Plaza after 8 p.m., Reddit's top article was about the Berkeley protests with more than 10,000 comments. Before I could have my journalistic say, the internet collectively decided the Berkeley student mob -- overcome with emotion and left-wing hysteria -- destroyed their own campus and killed the Free Speech Movement on its birthplace as Yiannopoulos became the martyr."
2/6/2017, NYU News, "The Death of Free Speech on Campus?" NYU Historian Cohen Takes "Then and Now" Look in Feb. 15 Lecture, NYU News
"This lecture, which will be followed by a question-and-answer session, will explore the state of free speech on campus as the media and critics report and distort it, as students experience it, and how it looks from a historical perspective. It will also consider ways that colleges and universities can enhance freedom of speech.
¶
[Robert] Cohen is a professor of history and social studies in the Department of Teaching and Learning at NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Cohen, who has an affiliated appointment in NYU's Department of History, has authored or edited several works on the history of free speech on campus, including: Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s; The Essential Mario Savio: Speeches and Writings That Changed America; The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s (co-edited with Reginald E. Zelnik); When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America's First Mass Student Movement, 1929-1941; Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s (co-edited with David Snyder); and Howard Zinn and the Spelman College Student Movement, 1963 (in press)."
2/6/2017, Los Angeles Times, Opinion UC Berkeley should be ashamed after Milo Yiannopoulos' canceled speech, Janet Weaver
"History is not an arc. It's a pendulum. The political ideology of those kept silent has changed, but the evil of oppression has once again become the same.
¶
I was a sophomore at UC Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement. I was proud to be a member of a community that insisted all voices be heard. I held my head high as I argued with my conservative father about the principles that made our country great."
2/4/2017, The National Review, The 'Reasonabilists' of Berkeley, Jonah Goldberg
"Anyway, where was I? Oh right: the Reasonabilists. I bring them up because I have been in a twitchy, quick-tempered, fugue state of dyspepsia and crankery for the last couple days ('Days?' -- The Couch) about the riot at Berkeley. I don't mean the violence or the fact that this couldn't have gone better for Milo, a click-baiting huckster and alt-right apologist.
¶
I don't even mean the fact that the authorities only arrested one person. Though that does vex me considerably. If you think free speech is assault but assault is free speech, you're a moron of world-historical proportions. And if you think rioting is some charming rite of passage, you deserve to have your campus destroyed."
2/3/2017, The Guardian, How do you solve a problem like Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley?, David Kaye
"Savio's perspective drew from the reality of a university administration that treated students to a narrow version of education, forbidding on-campus political activity. Cal students objected, and it was from this desire for political expression on campus that the Free Speech Movement was born. Throughout the fall of 1964, Cal convulsed with peaceful protest, grinding the university 'machine' to a halt. Savio famously addressed thousands from atop a police car on Sproul, calling for peaceful protest -- 'That doesn't mean that you have to break anything!' [Ed note: these words are from December 2, not Oct. 1]-- and civil disobedience.
¶
The students' perspective, which Savio articulated so well, was that the university should encourage free speech and free thought, that debate and dispute should be part of higher education. Rather than arrest students for protesting, as the university was doing, it should provide wide-open space for political debate, allowing students to develop the tools to be engaged citizens."
2/3/2017, The American Conservative, The Leadership and Decency Gap at UC-Berkeley, Sean Kennedy
"The unrest that roiled campus is not new. In the early 1960s, Berkeley launched the Free Speech Movement to throw off the shackles of stifling university bureaucrats. A motley crew of leftists, anarchists, and, yes, arch-conservative Barry Goldwater supporters banded together to stand up for the rights of students to protest, speak out, and actively participate in their campus discourse.
¶
The famous leader of that movement, Mario Savio, who is almost beatified in Berkeley lore, referred to the university officials and their government allies as a "machine" that required active resistance, saying: 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus-and you've got to make it stop!'
¶
But his so-called successors often forget how Savio continued, 'That doesn't mean-I know it will be interpreted to mean … that doesn't mean that you have to break anything.' He explicitly opposed violence as a means of resistance.
¶
That sentiment, and the movement's ties to Goldwater, is lost on the agitators and enforcers of groupthink that predominate on campus. Instead, they are hell-bent on shutting down dissent."
2/2/2017, The Wrap, UC Berkeley Professor, Free Speech Leader Slams Trump's Funding Threat as 'Ridiculous, Crazy', Meriah Doty
"'I don't think there's any way you can cut federal funds to the university because a few students acted up. That's crazy,' [John] Searle told TheWrap on Thursday."
2/2/2017, The New York Times, A Free Speech Battle at the Birthplace of a Movement at Berkeley, Thomas Fuller
"In a letter to The Daily Californian, Berkeley's student newspaper, Mr. [Jack] Radey and other members of the Free Speech Movement Archive board of directors, a grouping of some of the movement's activists, said Mr. Yiannopoulos was 'a bigot who comes to campus spouting vitriol so as to attract attention to himself.'
¶
But they said free speech was paramount.
¶
'Berkeley's free speech tradition, won through struggle - suspension, arrest, fines, jail time -- by Free Speech Movement activists is far more important than Yiannopoulos, and it is that tradition's endurance that concerns us,' they wrote."
2/2/2017, The Daily Mail, 'Not a bad way of showing them that violence will not win': Milo Yiannopoulis boasts about his rising book sales after violent protests cancel his talk at Berkeley, Hannah Parry and Abigail Miller
"Yiannopoulos rejects accusations he is racist or white supremacist, saying his boyfriend is black and his humor is taken too literally in today's politically correct culture.
¶
A group of veterans from Berkeley's 1960s Free Speech Movement praised administrators for allowing the event.
¶
'Even the worst kind of bigot, including Yiannopoulos, must be allowed to speak on campus,' they wrote in In an op-ed published by Berkeley's The Daily Californian."
2/2/2017, Spiked, The Free Speech Movement in flames, Tom Slater
"This is a symbolic moment. The sight of students and radicals rioting out of fear of letting people listen and decide for themselves represents the unravelling of Enlightenment values in the academy. While Trump voters are often smeared as a prejudiced blob, this is what real, unthinking intolerance looks like. And it's a betrayal not only of the high-minded, liberal ideals on which the academy is founded, but also of the once radical left. The students of '64 knew that freedom was paramount. That's why, as FSMer Bettina Aptheker told me in 2014, they fought for free speech alongside right-wing students, some of them supporters of Barry Goldwater, the Trump of his day: 'The only requirement was that they believed in freedom of speech.'
¶
That when faced with a president so authoritarian young radicals can only respond in kind is a grim reminder of where self-willed censorship leads: to stupidity and blind rage. The casual presentation of right-wing wind-up merchants like Milo as the first act of a new fascism, and these students' inability to do anything other than wail when confronted with ideas they dislike, speaks to a new endarkenment. To paraphrase John Stuart Mill, if you refuse to let your views be challenged they become like prejudices that you are incapable of defending or articulating. When you reject free speech you lose the opportunity to defeat ideas you dislike and propound your own. You trade changing the world for throwing things at it. That's what we saw playing out at Berkeley last night."
2/2/2017, San Francisco Chronicle, UC Berkeley cancels right-wing provocateur's talk amid violent protest, Michael Bodley and Nanette Asimov
"Hours after the event was canceled, the College Republicans issued a statement declaring the Free Speech Movement dead. 'It is tragic that the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement is also its final resting place,' the statement said."
2/2/2017, California Golden Blogs, Anarchists, NOT Cal students, responsible for violence in UC Berkeley protests, Avinash Kunnath
"Violence is not what Cal stands for. Violence is not what the Golden Bears should be known for. Our Cal family stands for peaceful expression and the Free Speech Movement. That is a right that was expressed early on this Wednesday night before it was hijacked by agitators who do not represent the viewpoints of our university's student body and our alumni base at large."
2/1/2017, UC Berkeley News, Yiannopoulos event canceled, Public Affairs, UC Berkeley
"Officials added that they regret that the threats and unlawful actions of a few have interfered with the exercise of First Amendment rights on a campus that is proud of its history and legacy as home of the Free Speech Movement. In an earlier message to the Berkeley campus community, Chancellor Nicholas Dirks made clear that while Yiannopoulos' views, tactics and rhetoric are profoundly contrary to those of the campus, UC Berkeley is bound by the Constitution, the law, the university's values and its Principles of Community that include the enabling of free expression across the full spectrum of opinion and perspective."
2/1/2017, The Sacramento Bee, Don't let Milo Yiannopoulos taint message of free speech, Editors
"'We deeply regret that the violence unleashed by this group undermined the First Amendment rights of the speaker as well as those who came to lawfully assemble and protest his presence,' Dirks wrote.
¶
Yet, in this cowardly new world of alternative facts, the narrative that UC Berkeley is full of intolerant leftists who shut down speech they don't like with rocks and commercial-grade fireworks has taken off. Yiannopoulos got what he wanted. And Trump, who has no problem with false narratives, went a step further by threatening to withhold federal funding from the UC system if 'innocent people with a different point of view' aren't allowed to speak.
¶
Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a UC Regent, called Trump's tweet 'asinine.' Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, called it an empty threat that's an abuse of power by a man who is 'president, not a dictator.'
¶
Far be it from us to dissuade condemnations or peaceful protests against Trump or Yiannopoulos. But there is a larger game afoot here. Don't play into it."
2/1/2017, The Daily Californian, Milo Yiannopoulos event canceled as violent protests erupt at UC Berkeley, The Daily Californian News Staff
"'It's sad that these people consider themselves the intellectual descendants of Mario Savio,' [Berkeley College Republicans treasurer David] Craig said. 'The founder of the Free Speech Movement would be rolling in his grave to know that people in his name are shutting down speech they don't agree with and attacking people.'"
1/31/2017, UC Berkeley News, Free speech? Hate speech? Or both?, Public Affairs, UC Berkeley
"In an op-ed in the Daily Cal, a dozen Free Speech Movement veterans -- including Lynne Hollander Savio, Mario's widow -- labeled Yiannopoulos 'a bigot,' but urged students opposed to his views to express their opposition 'nonviolently, in ways that do not prevent such speakers from making or completing their remarks.'
¶
'His modus operandi,' they wrote, 'is to bait students of color, transgender students and anyone to the left of Donald Trump in the hopes of sparking a speaking ban or physical altercation so he can pose as a free speech martyr. His campus events are one long publicity stunt designed to present himself as a kind of hip, far right, youth folk hero -- sort of Hitler Youth with cool sunglasses.'"
1/31/2017, The Daily Californian, Berkeley students should organize protest against Milo Yiannopoulos, Mukund Rathi
"As FSM participant Joel Geier describes:
¶
'This connection to the civil rights movement is necessary to understanding the Free Speech Movement. It wasn't just about the right of unrestricted free speech. It was about the university response to the political pressures from the capitalist establishment of California, which was trying to crack down and stop the mobilization of campus activists taking on the racist hiring practices of California corporations. It was an attempt to shut down the civil rights movement on campus that was engaging in off-campus activity that was 'illegal' by holding sit-ins against the 'legal' right of the employers not to hire Blacks.'"
1/31/2017, Breitbart, 'Anti-Fascists' Plan to 'Shut Down' MILO's Event at UC Berkeley, Charlie Nash
"Following a demand by dozens of UC Berkeley professors to have MILO banned from the campus based on his political views, a group of Berkeley Free Speech Movement veterans defended the Breitbart senior editor, criticizing those professors and students who sought to use fascist tactics in an attempt to block his speech.
¶
'Under the terms of [the free speech] resolution, even the worst kind of bigot, including Yiannopoulos, must be allowed to speak on campus. So the UC administration was acting in accord with those principles when it refused to ban Yiannopoulos,' the group of veterans declared. 'We were thus disappointed that so many Berkeley faculty signed an open letter supporting such a ban and criticizing the UC administration for refusing to ban Yiannopoulos.'"
1/30/2017, San Francisco Chronicle, Right-wing agitator to stir pot as UC Berkeley allows lecture, Nanette Asimov
"Veterans of the 1960s-era Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley published an opinion piece in the Daily Californian calling Yiannopoulos a vitriol-spouting bigot who has every right to speak on campus.
¶
'Berkeley's free speech tradition, won through struggle -- suspension, arrest, fines, jail time -- by Free Speech Movement activists is far more important than Yiannopoulos,' Robert Cohen, author of 'The Essential Mario Savio: Speeches and Writings that Changed America,' wrote Jan. 17 in the student paper.
¶
He cited the Berkeley faculty's Academic Senate resolution on free speech from 1964: 'The content of speech or advocacy should not be restricted by the university.'
¶
'The best way to battle (Yiannopoulos') bigoted discourse is to critique and refute it,' Cohen wrote. That way, critics can 'avoid casting him in the role of free speech martyr and prove that the best cure for ignorant and hateful speech is speech that unmasks its illogic, cruelty and stupidity.'"
January 2017, Spiked, The Analysed Self, Tim Black
"'We all read Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man, which was drenched in Freudian thought. And Norman O Brown was at Berkeley and Santa Cruz at this point, too… Everything was political in those days', he says, chuckling. 'It was in Marcuse, in Brown, in the Frankfurt School in general, which I was intellectually very close to. At Berkeley, remember, the head of the sociology department was Leo Lowenthal, a friend and colleague of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. There was a great linking together of psychoanalytic ideas and political ideas, and this was happening against the background of the anti-war movement, People's Park, the Free Speech Movement. It was an incredibly exciting time to be a 17, 18-year-old.'"
1/26/2017, The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley chancellor affirms Milo Yiannopoulos' right to speak on campus, Cassandra Vogel
"Despite numerous cancellations of talks by Milo Yiannopoulos at other UC campuses and widespread opposition at UC Berkeley, Chancellor Nicholas Dirks has affirmed Yiannopoulos' right to speak on campus at a Wednesday event organized by the Berkeley College Republicans.
¶
In a letter released Thursday, Dirks stressed that while UC Berkeley does not endorse Yiannopoulos' controversial views or tactics, the campus would continue to uphold the values of the Free Speech Movement by sanctioning Yiannopoulos' presence and protecting his freedom of expression.
¶
'Our student groups enjoy the right to invite whomever they wish to speak on campus, but we urge them to consider whether exercising that right in a manner that might unleash harmful attacks on fellow students and other members of the community is consistent with their own and with our community's values,' Dirks said in the letter."
1/26/2017, The College Fix, Liberal professor slams campus echo chambers, academic ideologues, and the 'intolerant left', Peter Van Voorhis
"There is a certain irony here, as the New Left began with the Free Speech movement, which opposed the common notion that the university function in loco parentis and was responsible for keeping students safe from radical ideas. There is nothing wrong with students seeking places among the like-minded--this is the purpose of fraternities and clubs. In addition, there are institutions that in my mind are appropriate, for example a Veterans center, which is certain respects can be seen as a 'safe space.' There are inherent problems, however, which should lead to such spaces being minimized. There is truth to the argument that although students need to feel physically safe, one ought not feel intellectually safe, and there is a danger that creating these spaces does inhibit the student's understanding of the 'real world.'"
1/26/2017, Rare, Why violent anti-Trump protesters will never accomplish anything, Casey Given
"The Trump opposition should look to the Free Speech Movement (FSM) for inspiration. As one of the few successful student movements in the 1960s, FSM successfully overturned the draconian speech policies of my alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley. At the time, almost all political speech was banned on campus - an incredibly strict policy for a generation that loved to speak its mind.
¶
To oppose the anti-liberal rules, FSM students engaged in civil disobedience, deliberately breaking the rules by tabling, handing out leaflets, and occupying administrative buildings. These acts were illegal but, instead of engaging in violence or fighting with the police, the Berkeley radicals accepted whatever punishment from the police came their way.
¶
Herein lies their brilliance. Because of their non-violent resistance, FSM was able to generate public sympathy because the video footage being broadcast across the nation was not of anarchy anarchists smashing windows and rioting, but rather of innocent looking youths being dragged into paddy wagons.
¶
In fact, one tactic that the FSM protesters brilliantly mastered was going limp, forcing police officers to physically drag them without putting up a fight. As a result of the striking footage, many sympathetic citizens and politicians began to condemn the administration.
¶
As California Assemblyman Willy Brown said in a speech at the time, '[T]he people in the state of California need to know that there's something seriously wrong with this university when 801 people are dragged bodily down stairs from the administration building of this university and arrested.'"
1/24/2017, Lodi News-Sentinel, Those who suppress free speech will end up victims, Steve Hansen
"The fact that many millennials don't understand the value of a free-speech society is most concerning. When asked, too many college students see no point in debating different points of view from a singular position taught to them in class. Those who have a need for suppression, however, only demonstrate their fears of fallibility for one side of an argument.
¶
More than 50 years ago, The college Free Speech Movement began with Mario Savio on the UC Berkeley campus. Yet it's ironic that today's school "speech codes" are designed to do just the opposite and amazingly, are accompanied by little student opposition.
¶
But reality will always win in the end and leave those who believe in oppression of free speech as victims, themselves."
1/23/2017, The Islands' Sounder, Mary Davenport Benarroch, Tim Ransom
"Mary graduated from Santa Barbara High School and then from the University of California at Berkeley in 1966, where she was one of the 800 students arrested in the 1964 sit-in of the Free Speech Movement. While getting a master's degree in English at San Francisco State, she joined demonstrations against the Vietnam War."
1/20/2017, The Berkeley Daily Planet, Letter to the Daily Californian re: Milo Yiannopoulos free speech controversy, Board of Directors, Free Speech Movement Archives
"We were thus disappointed that so many Berkeley faculty signed an open letter supporting such a ban and criticizing the UC administration for refusing to ban Yiannopoulos. The best way to battle his bigoted discourse is to critique and refute it."
1/20/2017, The Australian Financial Review, Donald Trump owes victory to self-styled social justice warriors, Philipp Oehmke
"Bettina Aptheker was one of the leaders of the free speech movement at the time, some 52 years ago. On the morning of Octobter 2, 1964, she climbed on top of a police car in front of UC Berkeley's Sproul Hall and gave a speech. Aptheker was 20 at the time. In her speech, she quoted former slave Frederick Douglass, who said: 'Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.'
¶
It was one of the events that launched a movement -- initially in the West, and then worldwide - for social transformation, for women's rights, civil rights, then for gay rights and later for transgender rights, a movement that is directly connected to today's students at Oberlin College."
1/19/2017, The New York Times, California Today: Campuses Brace for Breitbart Provocateur, Mike McPhate
"So it was that his scheduled speech at U.C. Davis last week devolved into a tense standoff between protesters and the police. It was called off before it could begin over security concerns.
¶
Later, Mr. Yiannopoulos addressed a group of supporters on the campus quad. He denounced a university culture of so-called safe spaces that he said shielded students from diverse viewpoints.
¶
'They cannot shut you up because you have the wrong political opinions,' he said.
¶
More skirmishes are expected to play out in coming appearances at the other California campuses, including a crucible of the 1960s free speech movement, U.C. Berkeley.
¶
Mr. Yiannopoulos was invited by the Berkeley College Republicans, a student group that portrayed the event, on Feb. 1, as a way to jolt the liberal campus with a different perspective.
¶
More than 100 faculty members called for blocking the event in a letter to Chancellor Nicholas Dirks. It cited a speech Mr. Yiannopoulos delivered at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he belittled a transgender student by name.
¶
'We support robust debate,' the letter said, 'but we cannot abide by harassment, slander, defamation, and hate speech.'"
1/17/2017, The Daily Californian, Free Speech Movement veterans and historians comment on Milo Yiannopoulos free speech controversy, By Robert Cohen & FSM Archives Board
"Berkeley's free speech tradition, won through struggle -- suspension, arrest, fines, jail time -- by Free Speech Movement activists is far more important than Yiannopoulos, and it is that tradition's endurance that concerns us. 'The content of speech or advocacy should not be restricted by the university': That's what the pivotal Dec. 8 resolution says, as adopted by the Berkeley faculty's Academic Senate when it finally backed the FSM's free speech demand in 1964. Under the terms of that resolution, even the worst kind of bigot, including Yiannopoulos, must be allowed to speak on campus. So the UC administration was acting in accord with those principles when it refused to ban Yiannopoulos."
1/17/2017, Breitbart, Berkeley Free Speech Movement Veterans Defend MILO's Right to Speak, Charlie Nash
"A group of Berkeley Free Speech Movement veterans have written an open letter defending Breitbart Senior Editor MILO's right to speak while criticizing professors who have sought to have him banned from campuses around the state.
¶
Despite proclaiming a great distaste for the self-proclaimed Dangerous Faggot and describing him as a 'bigot' and 'Hitler Youth with cool sunglasses,' the group brought up their struggle and fight during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, expressing disappointment that professors at the Berkeley campus would ever want to censor a speaker based on their views."
1/17/2017, BeyondChron, RICHMOND SHOWS HOW PROGRESSIVES CAN WIN, Randy Shaw
"But RPA (Richmond Progressive Alliance) is different. It has a nucleus of seasoned activists who understand that progressive groups must reflect progressive values. For example, Mike Parker who moved to Richmond in 2008 after activist experience from the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964 to decades on the shop floor of Detroit. Parker knew from his long experience that winning elections did not mean that the racial dynamics of the RPA volunteer base did not have to change. The group then openly addressed the problem."
1/15/2017, The Boston Globe, Has pot lost its cool?, David Scharfenberg
"Years later, in a classified missive, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would urge his field offices to arrest 'members of the New Left' on marijuana and other drug charges.
¶
Marijuana -- so disdained by officialdom -- had become a major symbol of protest. Legalization was not a standalone issue as it is now, said Lee, in a recent interview. It was intimately tied to antiwar protest, gay liberation, and the fight against censorship.
¶
'When a young person took his first puff of psychoactive smoke, he also drew in the psychoactive culture as a whole, the entire matrix of law and association surrounding the drug, its induction and transaction,' said Michael Rossman of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. 'One inhaled a certain way of dressing, talking, acting, certain attitudes. One became a youth criminal against the state.'"
1/12/2017, Breitbart, UC Berkeley Administration Won't Budge On Security Fees For MILO Event, Lucas Nolan
"When asked for comment, Troy Worden of Berkeley College Republicans stated, 'The University of California, Berkeley makes a mockery of the the ideals of the Free Speech Movement by responding to the Berkeley College Republicans in so self-righteous and self-serving a letter. They belittle our efforts to work with them to provide the security they demand for our event, and then bewail the extra hours they have to put in to systematically snuff out our right to free speech. Let this much be clear: the university is imposing a comically large financial burden on our club for security that we did not request in the first place.'"
1/11/2017, The Dallas News, Students want universities to act as parents, but they won't like the results, Mark Yudof
"But now there is a nascent, however subconscious or inadvertent, effort to reinstate in loco parentis. The celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement was met with heckling and disruption at the University of California, Berkeley.¶
....¶
But universities are not homes, administrators are not parents. University students are not children. Students should not be protected from ideas and communications that they find disturbing. Robust speech, protected by the First Amendment, often may offend or chill or disrupt the conventional wisdom. That is good. Universities should work to protect students from sexual and physical assaults and other harms. They should not be safe havens from disturbing ideas and discourses. It is one thing to condemn and quite another to censor or punish."
1/11/2017, ACLU of Northern California, Dissent is Patriotic. It's also a Powerful Antidote to Propaganda - #ACLUTimeMachine, Bethany Woolman
"Historians credit HUAC's 'Operation Abolition' with backfiring spectacularly. Young people across the country were shown the film at school, saw right through it, and decided they should make their way to Berkeley - after all, that's where all the action was. Four years later, the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement began.
¶
Let's remember this moment in history as a lesson in the power of free speech and free thought. And let's remember it as proof that if we remain vigilant, lies can wither in the face of truth.
¶
In the wake of an election season marked by fake news, open distaste for journalism, and a president-elect who lied about his own self-documented views during a nationally televised debate, let's not shy away from reflecting on our government's willingness to engage in cynical propaganda."
1/7/2017, San Francisco Chronicle, When Washington's Red-baiting congressional committee came to SF, Gary Kamiya
"On May 13, 1960, 300 protesters, most of them students from UC Berkeley, gathered at San Francisco City Hall to protest hearings that HUAC had decided to hold here. Many of the protesters gathered outside the hearing room on the second floor were clean-cut youths, and their most confrontational action was singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" and staging a sit-down protest. None of them could have imagined that their peaceful sit-in would end with San Francisco police blasting them with fire hoses and clubbing them - or that their protest would be one of the seminal events of what would come to be called the '60s.¶
....¶
An activist UC student organization called SLATE, formed in 1958, urged students to picket the three-day HUAC hearings, in part because the committee had subpoenaed [UC student Douglas] Wachter. On the morning of May 12, scores of students filed into City Hall and lined up to enter the hearing chamber.¶
....¶
[HUAC staff director Richard] Arens then called Wachter. The 18-year-old Berkeley High School graduate, wearing a gray suit and red tie, was a member of SLATE who had picketed with the civil rights group Congress of Racial Equality and marched against capital punishment. His parents were longtime members of the Communist Party; he was part of the party's youth group. Wachter refused to answer Arens' questions, citing his First and Fifth amendment rights.¶
After the lunch break, more students arrived from a rally at Union Square, where Assemblyman Phil Burton had told them, 'People should be tried in a legal court of law on the basis of their actions. … No legislative committee has the right to tell a man what he thinks and what he doesn't!'"
1/6/2017, Breitbart, Berkeley's 'New Free Speech Movement' Embraces Milo's Visit, Adelle Nazarian
"October 1, 2014 marked the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, which was born out of a protest in front of the school's Sproul Hall. That year, the College Fix reported, UC Berkeley's College Republicans 'illustrated how the university has actually turned its back on the First Amendment,' discarding its ideals and replacing it with a stifling culture of political correctness and intolerance."
1/3/2017, The Los Angeles Times, These are the classes you get when you give college students control, Teresa Watanabe
"The courses in DeCal - short for Democratic Education at Cal - aren't graded, so there is little stress. But they count for one or two credits. And they have their roots in Berkeley's landmark free speech movement from five decades ago, when students pressed for and won greater academic rights." [Ed note: the first program was called Free University of Berkeley (1965-72?)]
12/29/2016, San Francisco Chronicle, Tape Music Festival surrounds audience with sound, Jesse Hamlin
"He's [Matt Ingalls is] also going to project an unexpected excerpt from [Pauline] Oliveros' 1965 'Rock Symphony,' a collage of pop music (the Beatles and Rolling Stones) and the voice of Mario Savio of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, tweaked with time-delay and other effects."
12/24/2016, Expresso, Camille Paglia: "I'm a very dangerous woman", Alexandra Carita
"Exactly. I am in favor of the values of the 1960 revolution, which began with the cry for freedom of expression at the University of Berkeley, California, then headed by the Italian Mario Savio."
12/18/2016, The Davis Enterprise, Bob Dunning: Principles matter most when they're uncomfortable, Bob Dunning
"And to think, when I was an undergraduate in Aggieland we looked in awe at our brothers and sisters in Berkeley who founded the Free Speech Movement, even if we had no idea what it was they were being prevented from saying.
¶
I wonder what Mario Savio would have to say about not allowing Yiannopolous to speak at one of Cal's sister campuses.
¶
Yiannopolous' lecture is free, but already it's been declared 'sold out.' I'm not sure how you can sell out something that doesn't cost anything in the first place, but I think it means all the tickets are gone.
¶
Which seems to indicate that at least someone on campus wants to hear what Yiannopoulos has to say.
¶
Interim Chancellor Ralph Hexter, proving once again that the word 'interim' should be removed from his title, addressed the controversy head on when he said, 'As a public university, we remain true to our obligation to uphold everyone's First Amendment freedoms. This commitment includes fostering an environment that avoids censorship and allows space for differing points of view. Therefore, we will not ask the Davis College Republicans to cancel their event.'"
12/15/2016, The Republic, Letter: Obamacare ruling came with questionable tactics, Sherry Grimes
"Mr. Vanderbur said, 'You have freedom of speech and you may express yourself within the confines of civility and law.' There is nothing in the First Amendment about civility. In 2014 on the 50th anniversary of the free speech movement, University of California Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks stated that the right to free speech 'requires that people treat each other with civility.' He had to backtrack on that when scholars became concerned that 'civility would be used as an excuse to repress legitimate political debate.'"
12/12/2016, The Bold Italic, An Elegy for Caffe Med, One of the Last Outposts of 1960s Counterculture, Cirrus Wood
"It's where Allen Ginsberg loitered with Jack Kerouac while the Black Panthers had their meetings upstairs. It's where the architects of the free-speech movement argued over coffee. It's where the Telegraph Avenue streetkids in the photographs of Richard Misrach hung out. It was one of the great good places."
12/8/2016, San Francisco Chronicle, William Mandel, KPFA broadcaster, political activist, dies, Carl Nolte
"Mr. Mandel was a committed activist. He walked picket lines, wrote and broadcast his views, and was an active supporter of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the 1960s. In his late 40s, he was the oldest member of the Free Speech Movement's steering committee. [actually, Executive Committee]"
12/7/2016, The Lumberjack, Editorial: Collegiate voices finding activism, Lumberjack Editorial Board
"The Lumberjack believes that when students here on campus assemble and protest, it must be done so with a clear message and solidarity. Too often the theme of a protest is muddied by differing messages and a lack of continuity among its participants. We don't want to give the opposition the chance to reduce a strong show of activism to a petty list of complaints or simply nullify it as irrelevant.
¶
The 1964 Berkeley Free Speech movement students formed the United Front and protested to express political views on campus even before protesting on campus was permissible. Although 773 students were arrested for occupying the administration building, the movement resulted in the right to use the University campus for political activity and debate."
12/4/2016, San Francisco Chronicle, Chronicle Covers: Free Speech Movement's arresting origins, Tim O'Rourke
"Their voices were heard.
¶
The Chronicle's front page from Dec. 4, 1964, covers the arrests of around 800 free-speech protesters on the UC Berkeley campus.
¶
'The University of California went through a day of crisis yesterday with mass arrests, faculty protests and massive student demonstrations,' the story read.
¶
'In all, 801 demonstrators were removed from Sproul Hall on the Berkeley campus -- many of them by force -- and taken to jail,' read The Chronicle report by Michael Harris and Don Wegars. 'By late last night several hundred had been released on bail.'"
12/3/2016, Manning Live, Today in History, Robert Joseph Baker
"1964 - Free Speech Movement: Police arrest over 800 students at the University of California, Berkeley, following their takeover and sit-in at the administration building in protest of the UC Regents' decision to forbid protests on UC property."
11/27/2016, The Daily Bruin, Lecturer shares experience as civil rights activist with students, Daniel Maraccini
"Von Blum remained politically active after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by participating in anti-Vietnam demonstrations and the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley.
¶
When Von Blum was teaching at UC Berkeley in the late 1960s, he was involved in protests that helped create ethnic studies departments at UC campuses. Once these departments were created, he moved to UCLA to teach classes on the African-American arts and culture he had become interested in during his time in the South."
11/21/2016, Olean Times Herald, Home Again: Guess I'm one of the 'old people', Deb Wuethrich
"In 1964, he [Jack Weinberg] was sitting at a table on campus when a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed him about the movement, which was a struggle by students over the right to engage in political speech on campus. Weinburg said he was annoyed with the reporter for insinuating that the Communists or some other 'sinister' group must direct the students behind the scenes.
¶
What he actually said was, 'We have a saying in the movement that we don't trust anybody over 30.' He wanted the reporter to know that no one was pulling the group's strings. Weinburg, who remained an activist and has worked in such areas as Greenpeace, said he does not believe it is even the most important thing he's ever said or done, but he's known for it now. The phrase was repeated throughout the press and became a sort of mantra for a generation. Today, we would say it 'went viral,' and it would have been tweeted and retweeted and spread elsewhere on social media."
11/20/2016, The Arts Desk, Sunday Book: The New Yorker Book of the 60s, Liz Thomson
"As citizens in the US and elsewhere once again take to the streets in large numbers, reports in this book remind us of the importance of people power with articles such as Calvin Trillin's on the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and Joseph Wechsberg on the Prague Spring, which of course did not end so well -- at least not until 1989. There are reflections on feminism and abortion, the Second Vatican Council, the Six-Day War and Paris 1968."
11/18/2016, The Daily Californian, Daily Cal launches digital archive, Michelle Pitcher
"'During Sproul Showdown Students Ready for Arrest'
¶
These are a few of the headlines published in The Daily Californian's pages in 1964, the year of the Free Speech Movement. You can now view every newspaper printed that year in our newly launched digital archive: newsprint.dailycal.org.
¶
We plan to digitize every Daily Cal issue, from the newspaper's conception in 1871 to the present day. Every week, students are scanning page after page from microfilm reels at the campus library -- a monotonous yet marvelous march through Berkeley's past."
11/18/2016, The Berkeley Daily Planet, New: Hundreds gather for Berkeley "Together We Rise" event, Steven Finacom
"[Berkeley Mayor-Elect Jesse Arreguin:] 'Berkeley is a little city with a big voice, and we will continue to use it. We are a city of progressive ideals and values that resonate across different cultures. We celebrate diversity and individuality. There is a place for everyone here.
¶
From the free speech movement in the 1960s to the Black Lives Matter movement today, Berkeley has been at the epicenter of social reform. And under my Mayorship, this legacy will continue. No one is going to keep us from that path.
¶
On the contrary, this is our time to rededicate ourselves to peace, justice, equity, inclusiveness and kindness.'"
11/13/2016, The Daily Californian, Berkeley's historic Caffe Mediterraneum changing ownership, Semira Sherief
"After 60 years of service to the Berkeley community, Caffe Mediterraneum -- a historic center of counterculture movements -- will be changing ownership.
¶
In the 1950s and '60s, Caffe Mediterraneum, often referred to as The Med, was popular among members of the Beat generation, the Black Panthers and those involved in the Free Speech Movement. As first reported by Berkeleyside, the property is set to be leased to new owners who plan on remodeling the business and reopening in 2017."
11/10/2016, Montreal Gazette, Anti-Trump protests continue across the U.S. for second day, The Washington Post
"At a student rally Thursday at the University of California at Berkeley, several hundred students watched as faculty members took turns speaking.
¶
'People make choices, and choices make history. We can be bystanders, or we can be upstanders,' said Rucker Johnson, an associate professor of public policy. 'We at UC-Berkeley are a beacon of light. We are the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement. We can't allow stereotyping and scapegoating to fetter us. We will uphold our traditions of speaking truth to power.'"
11/1/2016, Real Independent News & Film, From Berkeley To Kent State, Gary North
"On September 10, 1964, the Free Speech Movement began at Berkeley. Almost no one remembers why.
¶
The University's Board of Regents had long imposed restrictions on what kinds of recruiting were possible on school property. Everyone involved in student government knew the rules. Every group had to be approved: fraternities, sororities, religious groups, and political activists. The underlying motivation, more than anything, was to restrict religious proselytizing: the church/state separation issue."
10/31/2016, Forbes, The University Of California's Censor In Sheep's Clothing, Tom Lindsay
"Her [Janet Napolitano's] observations are spot-on. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of her prescription for what we should 'do about it.' Her prescription flies in the face of the ethos she claims to praise through quoting Thomas Jefferson, who, among his other accomplishments, founded the University of Virginia. Napolitano cites Jefferson's declaration that the University of Virginia 'will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.'
¶
Jefferson's maxim, she tells us, was not realized until the 'Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the mid-60s,' which 'established that the only limits on free speech should be those defined in the Constitution, at least as far as our nation's public universities were concerned.' She then asks, "Has this concept now been turned on its head?'"
10/27/2016, Fabius Maximus, See free speech crushed at Tufts today. Remember when we were wild & untamed…,
"To see the magnitude of this change since 1964, imagine how Berkeley's students of 1964 would react to regulation of their Halloween costumes. They would see the Orwellian nature of this intrusion of the Administration's heavy hand -- backed by police -- into their personal lives. They might respond with mass disobedience, an orgy of incorrect costumes. They might riot."
10/24/2016, Jacobin, Tom Hayden (1939-2016), Christopher Phelps
"The process of the document's [the Port Huron Statement] adoption also manifested the ideal, for without the contributions of other SDS members, Hayden would never have gotten it right. It was they -- Haber, Bob Ross, and others -- who told him to move the 'Values' section to the top of the document, not bury it in the middle. If they had not done so, the Port Huron Statement might have gone into the dustbin of radical pamphlets rather than inspiring a generation, for its declaration of 'Values' expressed in words what the Berkeley Free Speech Movement would manifest in action two years later, and what students the nation over would identify with avidly even in the moment of opposition to the Vietnam War."
10/21/2016, The Daily Aztec, The Black Panther Party speaks to students about equality, Jocelyn Moran
"[Roberta] Alexander said her grandfather was a slave and her father worked for the Civil Rights Congress in Oakland where he dealt with police brutality and unfair eviction of families from their homes.
¶
She said she grew up watching the Civil Rights Movement and going to demonstrations by herself in Los Angeles to support the Civil Rights Movement in the South.
¶
'It made me believe we can make a change in the world,' Alexander said.
¶
Alexander was a part of the Free Speech Movement when she attended University of California, Berkeley, then decided to join the Black Panther movement."
10/20/2016, Times Higher Education, How US universities became IP-based capitalists, Henry Heller
"The upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s may be seen in retrospect as an extension of the success of the 1950s, as university enrolments and funding continued to expand, and as the social and political role of universities assumed new importance. Universities became important sites of conflict over foreign policy, racism, gender equality and democracy, both within and beyond the campus. A new ideological cosmopolitanism emerged on campus as a result of the emergence of the first serious Marxist scholarship in the US, especially through the renewal of a historical perspective in anthropology, sociology, literature and history proper. Feminists opened up new opportunities for women in academe and began to create new theory around the question of gender. Most importantly, the very purpose of academic knowledge and research was questioned, especially in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. "
10/19/2016, Slate, The Marvelous Order of the City, Laura Miller
"The ’60s didn’t begin in 1960—or so the conventional history of the counterculture would have it. It wasn’t until 1964 and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, the story goes, that authority was seriously questioned. But tear your gaze away from those photogenic kids and consider these three books published in 1961, 1962, and 1963: The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Silent Spring, and The Feminine Mystique. All three books were written by women who were well beyond their college years, and all three transformed the world more lastingly than any protest. The third, by Betty Friedan, kicked off second-wave feminism. The second, by Rachel Carson, launched the environmental movement. And as for the first: If you have chosen an American city for your home, Jane Jacobs made the world you live in—although it might be more accurate to say that she saved it."
10/16/2016, Hungarian Free Press, Willie Brown is the keynote speaker at the 1956 Hungarian Revolution Commemoration in San Francisco, György Lázár
"In the 1960s, as a lawyer, Brown defended Mario Savio who was the leader of the Berkeley Free Speech movement. Willie knows the importance of the freedom of the press and he is the perfect choice to speak on the 1956 Commemoration in San Francisco." [Ed note: In March, 1964, a half year before the FSM, Brown represented some of those arrested in the SF Sheraton Palace demonstrations. Following the FSM, Brown contributed as a speaker and to fundraising efforts.]
10/11/2016, The Daily Californian, Students must work together with faculty for future of campus, Harry Le Grande
"I have a philosophy that one should leave a place better then one found it. The relationship between the university administration and students historically has certainly evolved, just as the university itself has evolved from its foundations to present. If one goes back several decades, there have been times when students have felt in direct opposition to the administration. This uneasy relationship indirectly led to the birth of the Free Speech Movement on our campus and the heritage of vibrant activism that continues to define the Berkeley experience."
10/10/2016, Spiked, WHAT WOULD SIXTIES REBELS MAKE OF CONSENT CLASSES?, Tom Slater
"The modern student movement was born out of students' desire to be treated as adults. When the Free Speech Movement began at the University of Berkeley in 1964, the demand to lift the Red-scare restrictions on political activism was bound up with the demand to lift in loco parentis itself - to have total autonomy over their social as well as intellectual lives. That then California governor Ronald Reagan would later lambast revolting Berkeley students as 'communist sympathisers, protesters and sex deviants' was no accident. Political dissidence and sexual depravity were seen as intimately related."
10/7/2016, The Eye of Photography, Stephen Shames and Bobby Seale, Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers, Jonas Cuénin
"In his introduction, Stephen Shames remembers his engagement with the movement: 'In 1966, I was a student at the University of California at Berkeley. One of my roommates, Marty Roysher, had been on the steering committee of the Free Speech Movement the year before. With his guidance I became active in student government and the anti-Vietnam War movement. In August 1967, after a summer job at a plastics factory, I hitchhiked to the East Village of New York City. I bought my first camera during the Summer of Love. When I returned to Berkeley in September, I realized I was not suited for the endless meetings and bickering of politics. My contribution to the movement would be as a photographer. Documenting the Black Panthers became my first long-term project.'"
10/04/2016, Countercurrents, WikiLeaks, 10 Years Of Pushing The Boundaries Of Free Speech, Nozomi Hayase
"'To me, freedom of speech is something that represents the very dignity of what a human being is... that's what marks us off from the stones and stars.' These are words spoken by Mario Savio, the spokesperson for the Free Speech Movement in the 60's. Decades later, the power of free speech has surged onto the global stage and began reclaiming the dignity of humanity.
¶
We are now entering WikiLeaks 10 year anniversary. The organization registered their domain on October 4, 2006 and blazed into the public limelight in the spring of 2010 with the publication of Collateral Murder. This video footage depicted the cruel scenery of modern war seen from an Apache helicopter gun-sight. It became an international sensation, with the website temporarily crashing with the massive influx of visitors."
10/3/2016, Reason, Janet Napolitano Defends Free Speech on University of California Campus, Anthony L. Fisher
"While creating a stampede for no good reason isn't protected speech, the Supreme Court decision which birthed that cliched analogy was actually about restricting the free speech of anti-war socialists during World War I-which is the kind of speech Napolitano seemingly would support the protection of, especially considering she evokes the anti-Vietnam War Free Speech Movement of the 1960s in this op-ed." [Ed note: and this is how untruths are propagated. Napolitano should know that the 1964 Free Speech Movement was formed to counter campus restriction on organizing for the Civil Rights Movement. The Vietnam War issue came later.]
10/2/2016, The Boston Globe, It's time to free speech on campus again, Janet Napolitano
"In the 1960s, as exemplified by the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, students on campuses demanded and received the ability to protest the Vietnam War. [Ed note: FSM was supporting the civil rights movement, not opposing the Vietnam War.] This was free speech, loud and angry and in your face. Today many of the loudest voices condemning speech and demanding protection are students on those same campuses. Listening to offensive, or merely opposing, views is subject to frequent criticism. What has happened, and what are we to do about it?
¶....¶
Wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1820, a year after founding the University of Virginia, 'This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.'
¶
But freedom of speech has had a bumpy ride at American universities, echoing our country's uneven interpretation of the First Amendment. In 1900, for example, Jane Stanford, the benefactor of Stanford University, forced the firing of a faculty member in large part because he supported labor unions. Not until the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the mid-60s was the principle established that the only limits on free speech should be those defined in the Constitution, at least as far as our nation's public universities were concerned. Has this concept now been turned on its head?"
10/2/2016, Pioneer Log, Physics professor Hershel Snodgrass retires after 30 years, Camille Pierson
"Snodgrass's undergraduate education began at Reed College.
¶
'All I can say is I was a mediocre student grade-wise,' Snodgrass said. He went on to graduate school, first at the University of Maryland and then at UC Berkeley. Yet it wasn't his science that got him a teaching position at Berkeley.
¶
'I ended up being invited back to Berkeley to teach, not because I was a good scientist but because I was politically active and so was the department. I was one of the 'student leaders' of the free-speech movement,' Snodgrass said. He even spent some time in jail after occupying the administration building.
¶
'I'm actually very proud of that,' Snodgrass said."
10/1/2016, Youngstown Vindicator, YEARS AGO, Associated Press
"On this date in:1964: The Free Speech Movement begins at the University of California, Berkeley."
10/1/2016, The Nation, Past in Perspective,
"It is October 1964, Berkley. A student protest has just been launched on the campus of University of California.
¶
The protest comes in response to the sudden termination of any venue for on-campus political advocacy by the university officials. During a time when awareness and passion for civil rights flew high among the student body, the move was taken as a direct threat to freedom. Initiated by left leaning [Ed note: left to right coalition] students, the Free Speech Movement would have long-lasting effects on Berkley as well as other places where students had now come to realise the potential of demonstration. As the movement grew further, and involved a massive sit-in, speeches made by students, the arrest of almost 800; the university finally conceded to the students' demands, and the ban"
9/26/2016, Mondoweiss, Palestine, 'safety' and the UC Berkeley affair, Juliana Farha
"You needn't dig deep to uncover the stinking heap of ironies infesting this deplorable episode. Of course, UC Berkeley is the famed birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, a series of protests in 1964-65 aimed at securing students' right to undertake political activity on campus.
¶....¶
Aside from the rest, it's a reminder that it was Berkeley students who drove the Free Speech Movement, earning the school widespread esteem for its embrace of that liberty, in the face of fierce opposition from its administration. Their contribution was to call the cops."
9/25/2016, The Daily Californian, Freedom of Speech: A Legacy or a Trap?, Elaina Provencio
"Our legacy as UC Berkeley students is to carry on this emblem of the movement, our responsibility to enact the freedoms that students before us fought to protect. The conservative versus liberal clash has always existed in the microcosm of Berkeley, reflecting the larger division in this nation. Republican Ronald Reagan was largely able to guarantee his successful election as California governor by promising to quell the future uprising of liberal student activism.
¶....¶
'On one hand, administration will take down flyers that are deemed offensive, and on the other hand, administration turns a blind eye to repeated, targeted attacks on a particular group,' said [Berkeley College Republicans' External Vice President Claire] Chiara. 'The absolute hypocrisy of condemnation of free expression at the very home of the Free Speech Movement is frightening.'
¶....¶
The students before us fought for our freedom of speech, so let's use it to create productive discourses that will aid us as the next generation of UC Berkeley students who strive for social reformation. Let's take the story back."
9/22/2016, The Garden Island, 1964: The 'Great Humanitarian Blossoming of America', Gabriela Taylor
"Inspired by Martin Luther King, blacks and whites protested segregation and racism with marches, sit ins, and other forms of non-violent actions that birthed the Civil Rights Movement. In the summer of '64, called 'Freedom Summer,' some students from UCB traveled to the south to assist with voter registration for Blacks who had been denied the right to vote. Three young Civil Rights workers, men from the north, were killed there. That fall, the Chancellor of the UCB campus clamped down on students' rights to set up informational tables about Civil Rights, as well as the Vietnam War, on the campus.
¶
Thus the rise of FSM, where 800 students sat down in Sproul Hall, Administration Building, in a peaceful protest. Because of my location on the hallway floor, I was the last person dragged by my collar to the booking room on Dec. 4.
¶
Before boarding a bus that would take us to Santa Rita Prison, the press stopped me for comment. I responded, 'This is just the beginning. We will not give up until we win'
¶
That statement was circulated in newspapers all over the county; my husband's grandmother in Rancho Santa Fe, California, read it and disinherited him. The important thing for both of us was that I did the right thing, not the loss of an inheritance. Neither I, nor any of my friends who were arrested, were ever communists. Rather, we were idealists who felt the call to help our fellow humans. And we did win. Due to overwhelming faculty support, the ban on political tables was overturned."
9/22/2016, London Review of Books, What are we allowed to say?, David Bromwich
"In 1964 the aim of the protests had been to remove the last barriers on 'unrestricted' free speech. Savio was always explicit about this. Fifty years later, the chancellor of UC Berkeley, Nicholas Dirks, sent a public letter to faculty, students and staff advising how best to honour the spirit of the Free Speech Movement. They should always remember that they live in a diversely constituted 'community' where a standard of 'respect' was a precondition of 'safe' use of the privilege of free speech. Above all, they must take care not to speak with unseemly passion:
¶
When issues are inherently divisive, controversial and capable of arousing strong feelings, the commitment to free speech and expression can lead to division and divisiveness that undermine a community's foundation … We can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility. Simply put, courteousness and respect in words and deeds are basic preconditions to any meaningful exchange of ideas. In this sense, free speech and civility are two sides of a single coin - the coin of open, democratic society.
¶
Reduced to a practical directive, the first sentence says: 'Indulge in free speech if you must; but please avoid issues that are controversial; and if you do address such issues, don't sound as if you care about them intensely.' This is what Mill meant by 'quiet suppression'."
9/20/2016, ACLU of Northern California, UC Berkeley Just Reinstated A Course on Palestine. It Should Have Protected Free Speech From the Start, Christine P. Sun
"Student-led courses at Cal come from a long tradition of student-led academic inquiry hailing back to Berkeley's Free Speech Movement itself. By reinstating the course, Cal is ultimately moving to protect the right of students to speak and study freely."
9/16/2016, The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley political activists must not promote hatred, Senior Editorial Board
"Countless reminders of the Free Speech Movement mark our campus -- from the Mario Savio steps to the FSM Cafe -- forcing us to reflect on the principles of a movement driven by students from both ends of the political spectrum. Although often remembered as a liberal push, the Free Speech Movement was an attempt to provide all students a chance to politically engage on campus."
9/10/2016, The Huffington Post, What Was It Like to Attend Berkeley in the '60s?, Richard Muller
"Attending UC Berkeley in the 1960s was unbelievably educational. I arrived at Berkeley in September 1964, just in time for the Free Speech Movement. For several weeks I was a passive observer, although I sided with the students who had been (unfairly and unwisely, in my opinion) suspended. Then a friend, Richard Shavitz, called me and told me he was joining the sit-in at Sproul Hall. I went there too, and decided to be part of the sit-in. I expected to be arrested, and I was. The next morning the police 'invaded' the building. I was arrested, dragged down the steps of Sproul (I vividly recall my main worry: that I would lose a shoe!), taken to the Oakland jail, and released on bail the next morning. I was ultimately convicted of trespassing, failure to disperse, and resisting arrest. This was the first of the large number of sit-ins that took place at major universities over the subsequent years.
¶
The details comprise a rather long story. I learned a tremendous amount that I could never have learned academically (such as seeing the courage and leadership exercised by the leaders, many of whom had been on freedom-rides in the South, and had witnessed police brutality firsthand). Afterwards, I met a young woman who considered me to be a hero, and on September 3rd of this year we celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary. (Yes, we got married young!)
¶
If you've seen the black and white photos taken inside Sproul during the sit-in, odds are that they were taken by me; very few taken by others ever became public. I attach one that shows the police charging up to the second floor in a (successful) attempt to take control of the window that was being used to supply food and information to those of us inside. For more photos, see my web page: Muller's Free Speech Photos."
9/10/2016, Der Standard, Berkeley: Gespannte Ruhe an der Unruhe-Uni, Michael Freund
"Eine Tafel ist Mario Savio (1943-1996) gewidmet, der mit seinen Reden die Studentenbewegung entfachte und in Amerika so bekannt wurde wie später Dany Cohn-Bendit in Frankreich oder Rudi Dutschke in Deutschland und eigentlich beide in ganz Europa."
9/9/2016, UC Berkeley News, Berkeley's '60s radical roots show in major UK exhibit, Yasmin Anwar
"Though Berkeley's 1964 Free Speech Movement came before the 1966-70 period highlighted in the exhibit, it's well known for sparking many of the U.S. movements featured in the show, says exhibit co-curator Victoria Broackes, who stopped at UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement Café in July as part of a press tour of the San Francisco Bay Area's counterculture landmarks.
¶
'Through the activities of its young people, Berkeley became the epicenter of various protest movements, including the anti-Vietnam-War movement, which unified nearly all protest groups of the time,' she adds. 'So much of the '60s change in the USA stemmed from Berkeley.'"
8/21/2016, The Guardian, Acid trips, black power and computers: how San Francisco's hippy explosion shaped the modern world, Alex Needham
"We go to the steps of the University of California at Berkeley's Sproul Hall, where Mario Savio, spokesman for the free speech movement, made his astoundingly passionate speech inspiring his fellow students to stage a sit-in and stop 'the operation of the machine'. The free speech protests marked a direct link from the civil rights movement, in which Savio had participated, to the anti-war protests that would convulse Berkeley at the end of the 60s; just as the Beatniks of the previous decade, such as Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, had profoundly influenced the hippies."
8/15/2016, Beyond Chron, REMEMBERING RALPH GLEASON, LEGENDARY SF JAZZ WRITER, Peter Richardson
"Gleason split with Ramparts in 1967, the same year he cofounded the Monterey Pop Festival. Later that year, he also cofounded Rolling Stone magazine and gave it early credibility within the music industry. If that's all he ever did, Ralph J. Gleason would be a notable figure. But he was also a leading jazz critic, cofounded the Monterey Jazz Festival, wrote the liner notes for Lenny Bruce's comedy albums, testified for the defense at Bruce's San Francisco obscenity trial, and became the only music journalist to land on President Nixon's Enemy List. When Gleason died in 1975, Greil Marcus wrote his obituary for the Village Voice. 'Ralph was always open to anything new," Marcus wrote, "not merely open to it but eager to fight for it, as he fought for Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan, Joseph Heller, Lenny Bruce, the Free Speech Movement, Rock 'n' Roll, the San Francisco Sound, the Fillmore Auditorium when San Francisco was ready to close it down.'"
8/15/2016, Berkeleyside, How Quirky is Berkeley? Mark Bulwinkle's sculpture inside the new Mad Monk, Tom Dalzell
"Mario Savio became one of the primary faces of the Free Speech Movement in 1964 after a summer with SNCC in Mississippi. His oratory and love of ideas and dignity were of another time."
8/12/2016, The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley biochemist dies at 97, Cassandra Vogel
"During the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, he acted as an advocate for students on campus and served on a faculty committee supporting the cause. He also fought to remove a mandatory retirement rule requiring university faculty members to retire by a certain age, allowing faculty members to continue working and conducting research at the university."
8/11/2016, The Pride L.A., VIDEO: California Legislative Caucus Honors LGBT Pioneers, Karen Ocamb
"Still, the troglodytes came after her. And though she had stood up to police and political pressure as a leader of the Berkley Free Speech Movement in the 1960s and she defeated Religious Right nutcase Lou Sheldon and his Traditional Values Coalition as President of the L. A. Unified School District, defending science teacher Dr. Virginia Uribe's dropout prevention program Project 10--Jackie [Goldberg] cried as anti-gay legislators hurled slurs at her and her beloved partner, poet Sharon Stricker. Their capacity for snickering cruelty was beyond understanding."
8/10/2016, Berkeley News, Biochemist Howard Schachman, an advocate for research ethics, dies at 97, Robert Sanders
"He became increasingly active during the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, and was a major faculty supporter of students protesting university policies that limited political activism on campus."
8/8/2016, The Daily Californian, The dark underbelly of Berkeley clichés, Natalie Silver
"This defiance of image and societal expectations bleeds into the local culture, crystallizing on Telegraph Avenue, while our defiance of administrative silencing in the 1964 Free Speech Movement is now something that is institutionally celebrated."
8/5/2016, Out & About Nashville, Marisa Richmond at the DNC, Marisa Richmond
"After I found my seat on the stage, my friend, Mara Keisling, managed to get this photo of me from her seat. I was sitting right in front of the California delegation, which included one of the loudest group of Sanders' supporters. While I do appreciate their enthusiasm, I have to admit that I found them to be very disrespectful of many speakers. One of the key lessons of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley (1964-1965) is that while you have the right to free speech, you should exercise it responsibly."
8/3/2016, Los Angeles Times, This terminally ill man says California's aid-in-dying law means he can end his life 'fully, thankfully and joyfully', Soumya Karlamangla
"He [Robert Stone] recounted attending UC Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement, working in the Peace Corps in the Philippines and enjoying a career dedicated to helping the homeless."
7/25/2016, Albany Times Union, Some notes on Anne and warm weather, Warren Roberts
"Anne [Roberts] organized another program in 1984, a 20th-year celebration of the Free Speech movement at Berkeley, which began the year after we came to Albany [NY] from UC Berkeley. She attracted one of her former professors from Berkeley to participate, a Chaucer specialist, Charles Muscatine, who had been active in the Free Speech Movement and revision of the new curriculum at Berkeley. She also invited Sheldon Wolin, a prominent UC Berkeley political scientist, who was now teaching on the east coast. Anne also included several faculty members at Albany who had been at Berkeley for the panel discussions on the Free Speech Movement which she called 'Berkeley Revisited: The Impact of the 1964 Movement.' Our eldest son, James, had just graduated from UC Berkeley, and he was also part of the panel on what Berkeley was like in 1984. It was a well-attended and most stimulating event."
7/20/2016, KQED Arts, Oakland on the Precipice: A Video Postcard with Fantastic Negrito, Kelly Whalen
"The East Bay has a long history of inspiring musicians like Too Short, Tupac Shakur, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Metallica, along with birthing the Black Panthers, the Free Speech Movement, and the East Bay Dragons Motorcycle Club."
7/18/2016, New Paltz Times, Jason West: National hero to local activist, Rich Corozine
"...and to top it all off, was awarded the Mario Savio [Young Activist] Award in San Francisco [Berkeley] -- named for the philosopher/firebrand who led the 1964 Free Speech Movement at Berkeley."
7/11/2016, VTDigger, AG Candidate Deb Bucknam Says TJ Donovan Is Wrong On The First Amendment, Friends of Deb Bucknam
"Walden, VT - Over a half a century ago Americans of all political persuasions were in the forefront of defending and expanding First Amendment protections for all citizens. In Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement overturned a campus ban on political speech. In the courts, lawyers were successful in persuading judges to strike down numerous statutes for violating the First Amendment, including prohibitions against flag burning and wearing black arm bands, and laws which punished people, like members of the Communist Party, who held dissenting views."
7/11/2016, Jacobin, Students Are the Raw Material, Wes Bishop & Jaime Hough
"Even as the Morrill Acts created a higher education system for that purpose, Morrill and other state legislatures stressed the importance of maintaining the liberal arts and humanities. This mandate for a hybrid student -- both an industrious worker and developed thinker -- continued well past the 1860s and has defined much of the conflict over higher education's governance.
¶
Nowhere was this duality clearer than in the radical student movements of the 1960s. At the University of California Berkeley, President Clark Kerr gained notoriety for his declaration that education should serve the needs of future employers:
¶
The university is being called upon to educate previously unimaginable numbers of students; to respond to the expanding claims of national service; to merge its activities with industry as never before . . . What the railroads did for the second half of the last century and the automobile did for the first half of this century may be done for the second half of this century by the knowledge industry: that is, to serve as the focal point for national growth.
¶
Student activists took issue with Kerr's instrumentalism and launched the Free Speech Movement. Angered over the focus on profit and business, student leaders like Mario Savio argued that the university must transform itself into a more humane body that better reflected the ideals of free speech and political freedom:
¶
[If] this [university] is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the board of directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I'll tell you something: the faculty are a bunch of employees, and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw material[s] that don't mean to have any process upon us, don't mean to be made into any product, don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!
¶
Savio's sentiments -- and the broader historical tension over the role of American public higher education -- remind us that schemes like Bet on a Boiler, while new and insidious, don't represent a fundamental break from some halcyon past. The prerogatives of capital have always been integral to the public academy."
July 2016, Spiked, The Eve of Youthful Destruction, Todd Gitlin
"It was during the early 1960s that the generational idea first began to crystalise. And you can see that in the development of the self-conscious proclamations of student groups. You see it in SNCC in the South, you can see it in SDS, which itself was originally a branch of an adult organisation until it became clear there were generational cleavages, which weren't just arguments about Communism, but about matters of style and culture - matters, that is, which were more important to us than to them. And, by 1964, you can see it in the emergence of the mass student uprising known as the Free Speech Movement.
¶
Admittedly, the generational nature of FSM was partly exaggerated, thanks, in the main, to a journalist's decision to present 'we don't trust anyone over 30' as the FSM's core sentiment. This was an almost wilful misunderstanding of what one of the FSM leaders had said when responding to a question about whether there were any Communists in the FSM. It was something like 'Communists are old, and we're new - we don't trust anyone over 30'. But, even so, there was semi-truth inside the misunderstanding. That is, the revolt within the university was a revolt against old institutions and old assumptions about the ability and the right of the powerful to make fundamental decisions about what constituted acceptable university life."
6/21/2016, Huffington Post, New York State's Assault on Students Fighting for Peace, Vincent Intondi
"In the Fall of 1964, administration officials at UC Berkeley banned students from participating in political activities on campus. In response, students from across the political spectrum protested, sat-in, risked arrest and their academic careers, in what is now known as the Free Speech Movement (FSM). The victories won by Jack Weinberg, Brian Turner, Michael Rossman, Bettina Aptheker, Mario Savio, and others in the FSM are in large part, why college campuses remain a place where students can engage in rigorous debate of any topic. Now however, much of what these activists worked for may be at risk."
Summer, 2016, Vanity Fair, HOW TO BE A STUDENT PROTESTER: 1968 VS. 2016, Bruce Feirstein
"Berkeley Sit-In
¶
Police removed a student from Sproul Hall where students were holding an all-night sit-in at U.C. Berkeley in 1964. The demonstration was the culmination of one of the most seminal protests of the Free Speech Movement, after a student was arrested for handing out information on civil rights on campus. Nearly 800 students were arrested as part of the sit-in, but the university ultimately voted to end all restrictions on political activity."
6/10/2016, PR Newswire, Ever Seen a Campaign Button Worth $25K? The July 6-10 American Political Items Collectors National Convention Is a Likely Place to Find It,
"Seminars for registered conventioneers will be held on the mornings of Wednesday and Thursday, July 6 and 7. Topics include suffrage memorabilia, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and its consequences, the origins and legacy of the SDS, and more."
6/8/2016, The Hollywood Reporter, 'Political Animals': LAFF Review, Stephen Farber
"Two other openly gay women -- Christine Kehoe and Jackie Goldberg (a veteran of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s) -- joined them in the fight for domestic partnership laws that would benefit gay men and women. The doc suggests aptly that their victories helped to pave the way for the 2015 Supreme Court decision validating same-sex marriage."
06/02/2016, The Point Reyes Light, The architect and the goat: A history in politics, Charles Schultz
"Sim [Van der Ryn]: Yeah, and I was involved in the Free Speech Movement in 1964. Then in '65 to '66 I was appointed to an advisory committee on student housing. That's when the People's Park property came up. The University had leveled the old structures and said, you know, we want to build an extension to the medical school on that site. I looked at the regents' minutes; there were no plans to build anything there."
5/24/2016, Breitbart, Protests Planned for Milo Event at DePaul University, Breitbart Tech
"'What is behind the right's appeals to 'free speech', what do socialists say about the right to free speech, and how do we best confront the Right wing, today?' reads a flyer which has been posted around DePaul campus along with a picture of Yiannopoulos and 2016 GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump at the top. 'Join the DePaul Socialists for a discussion following a presentation by longtime revolutionary socialist Joel Geier. A founding member of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964 and a lifelong revolutionary, Joel is currently an editor of the International Socialist Review.'"
5/19/2016, The Architect's Newspaper, Denise Scott Brown on the unknown history of architecture and planning at the University of Pennsylvania, William Menking, Matt Shaw
"Bill Wheaton invited me to be a visiting professor at Berkeley, so I taught there during the Foul Speech movement, one semester after the Free Speech movement, at Berkeley."
5/17/2016, The New Yorker, RALPH GLEASON'S ARTISTIC ACTIVISM, Richard Brody
"Born in New York in 1917, Gleason moved to San Francisco in 1947, and his adopted home proved crucial to forming his sensibility and to his attunement to the times. He wrote of experiencing the 'San Francisco Renaissance,' calling the city 'the Liverpool of the United States.' He was also present for the outburst of a new political culture, with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, in late 1964, with its famous sit-in, the climactic speech by Mario Savio, and what Gleason called its Black Thursday, when the police stormed in-'the adult tragedy whose most macabre moment came when the policeman slammed his arm against Mario Savio's throat, not only to remove him from the stage but to keep him from speaking.'
¶
In the prescient essay 'The Times They Are A-Changin',' from 1965, Gleason says that 'the revision of morality and the priorities of society that are evolving-and which the Berkeley FSM movement represents-first broke through the surface of social apathy in the form of folk singers like Joan Baez.' He adds that Baez and Bob Dylan 'are the two leading figures in this crusade for a New Morality.'"
5/9/2016, The Smart Set, FREE SPEECH & THE MODERN CAMPUS, Camille Paglia
"The uprising at Berkeley climaxed in Savio's fiery speech from the steps of Sproul Hall, where he denounced the university administration. Of the 4000 protestors in Sproul Plaza, 800 were arrested. That demonstration embodied the essence of 1960s activism: it challenged, rebuked, and curtailed authority in the pursuit of freedom and equality; it did not demand, as happens too often today, that authority be expanded to create special protections for groups reductively defined as weak or vulnerable or to create buffers to spare sensitive young feelings from offense. The progressive 1960s, predicated on assertive individualism and the liberation of natural energy from social controls, wanted less surveillance and paternalism, not more."
5/9/2016, Reader Supported News, Bernie Sanders Wins the Trust of America's Muslims While Jeremy Corbyn Stumbles Over Jew-Bashing in Britain, Steve Weissman
"These incidents, and there are many more, show how Red Ken has long gone out of his way to provoke and offend Jews. But, in the present case, he claims to be defending historical truth, which - he says - he has taken from a book by a Trotskyist author called Lenni Brenner, who happens to have been brought up as an orthodox Jew.
¶
When I heard Ken cite Brenner, I did not know whether to laugh or cry. Berkeley had known him as Lenny Glaser -- he was using his stepfather's name -- and he had been a mind-opening and mind-blowing precursor to the Free Speech Movement."
5/2/2016, Hong Kong Free Press, The role of global solidarity in the fight for democracy in Hong Kong, Mark C. Eades
"Civil disobedience was likewise the tactic of choice for University of California students in the Free Speech Movement of 1964. Outside 10 Downing Street in 1984 as Thatcher met with Botha, civil disobedience in the form of a sit-down strike in defiance of British police was the method we used. Ultimately, in its own small way, it appears to have worked rather well."
4/28/2016, The Federalist, Silence Is Death: The Generational Case For Free Speech, Mark Hemingway
"Two years ago, the University of California Berkeley was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Berkeley free speech movement, often credited with kicking off the modern era of campus activism. Romanticizing the Berkeley free speech movement too much is a mistake, but by the standards of contemporary campus activism even the use of the term 'free speech' is laudable. However, I have my doubts that twenty-first-century Berkeley agrees.
¶
To mark the anniversary, U.C. Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks sent out a memo that read, 'As we honor this turning point in our history, it is important that we recognize the broader social context required in order for free speech to thrive.' You can probably tell where this is heading. Dirks went on to say, 'Specifically, we can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so.'"
¶
[Ed note: The FSM Archives rebutted Dirks: http://www.dailycal.org/2014/09/16/boundary-free-speech-political-advocacy/
"It is precisely the right to speech on subjects that are divisive, controversial and capable of arousing strong feelings that we fought for in 1964."]
4/27/2016, The Republican-American, A liberal's lament over stifled speech, Andrew Wells, M.D.
"In the days of Mario Savio (check out his speech on YouTube) and the Free Speech Movement, hundreds of students became involved because the president of the university, Clark Kerr -- backed by Gov. Edmund G. 'Pat' Brown and California conservatives -- announced they no longer were allowed to use speech to advocate for any political cause, position, religion or any other point of view on the campus."
4/26/2016, Columbia Daily Spectator, Don't use your discomfort to discredit student activism, Nikita Singareddy
"These came to a head in March 1968 when rambunctious Mark Rudd threw a lemon meringue pie at a Selective Service official, challenging the American war machine and draft rules. Next month, SDS and the Student Afro-American Society led the occupation of campus buildings in protest of Harlem expansion. Hundreds participated in the protests spearheaded by Rudd, Harvey Blume, and other activist leaders. Meanwhile, students debated and eventually agreed upon a specific set of demands, knowing that salient policy change had come from past student demonstrations like UC Berkeley's 1964 Free Speech Movement."
4/26/2016, Boston Review, The Privatization of Hope, Ronald Aronson
"The early New Left-as exemplified by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Free Speech Movement, Students for a Democratic Society, and the women's movement-was in many ways a response to the situation Ginsburg and Marcuse described. Convinced that the personal was political, many in the New Left placed individual needs and experience at the center of their activism and emphasized participatory democracy. These projects-along with casual dress, drug experimentation, long hair, sexual freedom, and an explosion of new music-militated against the dominant culture. Even as the wave of the '60s separated into two currents-one more political and the other more countercultural-it never stopped pushing individual liberation. This feature of the New Left has led otherwise astute observers such as Mark Lilla and the late Tony Judt to ignore the movement's organized and disciplined commitment to social justice and to reduce the '60s to an era of do-your-own-thing individualism."
4/23/2016, Daily Camera, Boulder history: Free School was one of country's most successful, Carol Taylor
"The Free School movement evolved from the Free Speech movement at the University of California at Berkeley in the mid-1960s. By the mid-1970s dozens of free schools and universities were operating in the United States."
4/22/2016, The News & Advance, No Longer Bastions of Free Speech, The Editorial Board
"The Free Speech Movement began during the 1964-65 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley and spread like wildfire throughout higher education.
¶
The Free Speech Movement led to an explosion of dialogue and intellectual give-and-take on campuses and academic freedom for faculty reigned supreme."
4/22/2016, The Daily Californian, Letter: Carla Hesse unfit to head sexual harassment committee, Zachary Levenson
"Her odd conflation of the Free Speech Movement with the 'freedom' to harass others points to a fundamental misdiagnosis. It is not 'respect' as opposed to 'freedom' that has finally brought to light sexual harassment on our campus, but the courageous, persistent struggles of survivors and their allies despite obstacles at every turn. Hesse should demonstrate real commitment to these survivors, not undermine them by urging us all to be 'respectful.'"
4/22/2016, The Daily Californian, Letter: Close reading of Hesse op-ed introduces slew of questions, William Stafford Jr.
"Was it 'respect' that kept the Free Speech Movement from becoming the Filthy Speech Movement? Did that 'respect' take the form of adhering to administrative honor codes? What exactly is the freedom she is talking about, and how does it relate to the many formulations, experiments and calls for freedom which exist on and around the campus? There is a complete stifling and immobilization of the very difficult active engagements with questions of transgression, and dismissal of the kinds of care and caution which a developing sensitivity to these engagement can engender. Where will the meaning of those words in the honor code - honesty, integrity, respect - be discussed, explored, weighed and put into practice? How do we come to recognize injustices that did not appear as such to us before?"
4/21/2016, New Boston Post, Amherst, Harvard, Williams cited for 'muzzling' speech, Derrick Perkins
"'It's been frustrating, watching the sort of speech [suppression] shift over from administrators to students,' [Greg] Lukianoff told U.S. News & World Report.
¶
The magazine also quoted Bettina Aptheker, one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley in the mid-1960s, which argued for students' rights to engage in political activity on campus and for academic freedom. The movement helped propel both civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests on campuses nationwide. Aptheker said she also worries about recent trends."
4/19/2016, The Daily Californian, Campus tours should retell more accurate history of Free Speech Movement, Free Speech Movement Board of Directors
"Although, as veterans of the Free Speech Movement, we are gratified that at least one UC Berkeley ambassador sees its importance as a defining moment in campus history, we are writing to correct the errors that this ambassador makes in describing the Free Speech Movement on campus tours. The Free Speech Movement was a nonviolent protest against the campus's closing down of the one place on campus (the Bancroft Way-Telegraph Avenue strip) where students were allowed to advocate for political causes, pass out literature, recruit members and raise money for political and social action. It was motivated largely by concerns about civil rights, not about the Vietnam War, which was still not on the radar of most Americans. There was no chaining of doors to any building - that was an event that happened years later - and no keeping the chancellor from his office. After a semester of fruitless negotiations, the struggle culminated in a massive sit-in at Sproul Hall, the arrests of almost 800 students and a faculty vote supporting the student demands. The resulting rules still prevail on campus: The campus shall make no regulations restricting the content of speech or advocacy, and the time, place and manner of political activities shall be regulated only so far as to prevent interference with the normal functioning of the campus.Our hope is that both those who train campus tour guides - and the guides themselves - will prepare by studying the history of the Free Speech Movement so as to give those who tour the campus an accurate account of this event and its importance in the struggle for a freer campus and a society free of racism. We would be happy to meet with UC Berkeley ambassadors to help them better understand this history."
4/15/2016, The Daily Californian, Tour de force: The life of a UC Berkeley campus ambassador, Brenna Smith
"'DC: What is your favorite part of giving a tour?
¶
BB [Becca Berelson]: I love talking about the Free Speech Movement. I think it's just one of the most defining aspects of Cal history that's shaped who we are as a current campus and our current campus climate. So I get super passionate when I talk about it just because I think it's beautiful.
¶
DC: Could you elaborate on the Free Speech Movement a little more?
¶
BB: Yeah, so in 1964 there was a lot going on in politics with the Vietnam War, etc. - and the students really wanted to be able to talk about free speech and have free speech on campus: demonstrations, protests - that sort of thing. And the administration wasn't really having it, so what the students did was one night, they chained together the doors of California Hall. And this was a big problem because this was the office of the chancellor at the time and at that time they didn't have Google Drive or anything, so he really needed his office to be able to run the school. So, it was a really big deal. The university retaliated, there was a police force - all this crazy stuff going on. There are really famous pictures of Mario Savio, the leader of the Free Speech Movement, standing atop this police car talking about free speech. It's just totally affected who we are. Cal students tend to be pretty passionate and activists and really driven. We're just committed to social issues, aware of politics and current events - which I think is a really beautiful thing. I think that without the Free Speech Movement, we might not be like that or have that reputation as much."
¶
[Ed note: it was civil rights, not ant-war activism, which precipitated the FSM. 10/1/1964 police drove car onto Sproul Plaza to arrest former student Jack Weinberg. 12/2/1964 over 1000 students occupied Sproul Hall. 12/3/1964 almost 800 are arrested. The basic issue: the content of speech or advocacy should not be restricted by the University. 12/8/1964 The Faculty Senate agreed. The FSM prevailed.]
4/14/2016, Times Higher Education, Free speech on campus advocates urge people to say the unsayable, Matthew Reisz
"In his introduction to Unsafe Space: The Crisis of Free Speech on Campus, Tom Slater -- deputy editor of online magazine spiked and coordinator of its Free Speech University Rankings -- looks back to the 1960s Free Speech Movement at the University of California, when 'students demanded to be taken seriously as autonomous beings, capable of negotiating their academic, political and social lives away from the tutelage of their tweeded minders'."
4/12/2016, The Daily Californian, Mutual respect must inform any solution, Carla Hesse
"Let's be honest. Freedom is great, but we have a very hard time talking about any other public values at UC Berkeley -- like respect. But if we are going to succeed in producing a campus environment in which every one of our members can enjoy the personal safety and social dignity that are preconditions for freedom, we are going to have to learn how to embrace the virtue of respect for those who are different and of those with whom we disagree.
¶
Without respect, the Free Speech Movement becomes the Filthy Speech Movement. Free love becomes harassment and even assault. UC Berkeley needs to find a way to stand up more firmly and more forcefully for the virtue of putting limits on our own behavior so that the opportunities that freedom affords are a privilege of every member of our community, and not just those of the most privileged members of our community."
4/6/2016, Santa Cruz Sentinel, Life on the Island: Latest on Bette, breweries, backyards, Janet Levaux
"Alameda Island Brewing Company, 1716 Park St., is hosting an opening reception from 6 to 9 p.m. Friday for photographer Howard Harawitz. 'The '60s: Through the Lens of Howard Harawitz' is on display this month and next at the brewery.
¶
Harawitz' images were recently featured in the film 'The Black Panthers Vanguard of the Revolution,' which aired on PBS. He photographed and participated in the Bay Area's civil rights, peace and the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s."
4/6/2016, San Francisco Chronicle, Henry Elson 1926 - 2016,
"Henry went back to college, this time to the University of Wisconsin, where he discovered left-wing politics and changed his major from journalism to political science. Upon completion of his undergraduate studies, he moved to Berkeley for graduate work. There he met and married Evelyn Gins, and recognized that a proper career was the appropriate next step. He graduated from UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law in 1952. After a few years as a solo practitioner, he joined Fred Howell in a thriving practice serving the Berkeley community. Henry and his partners set up small business corporations, represented individuals in personal injury cases, appealed death penalty decisions, wrote wills and trusts, and litigated divorces. Henry spent many pro bono hours representing student protesters during the Free Speech Movement."
4/6/2016, East Bay Times, Alameda: Iconic 1960s Bay Area photos subject of exhibit, David Boitano
"ALAMEDA -- The date was Oct. 1, 1964, and change was about to erupt on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley.
¶
Graduate student and civil rights activist Jack Weinberg was arrested by campus police for refusing to show his identification. Students surrounded the patrol car where Weinberg was being held and remained in place for hours as a show of defiance.
¶
Charges against Weinberg were dropped and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement was born.
¶
Weinberg's friend, Howard Harawitz, was in the crowd that day and began taking photos to document the event. Harawitz went on to photograph many of the protests that were so much a part of the Bay Area's activist climate 50 years ago."
4/5/2016, People's World, A desire to change the world: Author Gary Murrell on Herbert Aptheker, Tony Pecinovsky
"At the height of the student free speech movement Aptheker had been invited to speak at Ohio State University. To demonstrate the absurdity of the school's crackdown on free expression, Aptheker sat on stage silently while students challenged campus-based censorship by reading excerpts from his many books - all found in the school's library.
However, it wasn't only Aptheker's passion that endeared him to sixties-era young radicals or to African Americans looking to challenge the then-dominant narrative about Blacks in U.S. history."
3/29/2016, Power Line, Emory Doubles Down on Beclowning Itself, Steven Hayward
"By coincidence, tonight I'm up at Berkeley, staying a short walk away from Sather Gate, the scene of the beginning of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964. That famous eruption began because of . . . university restrictions on the places where students could put up card tables and engage in political messaging. Now students and weak-minded administrators like [Ajay] Nair want to crack down on political speech, but only when it is politically unacceptable speech. It would be one thing if 'chalking' were prohibited campus wide, but this is clearly just a bureaucratic hedge to clamp down on speech the left doesn't like. Would Nair make this same statement if campus Republicans objected to someone chalking 'Sanders 2016'? Don't make me laugh."
3/28/2016, the Wesleyan Argus, Since When Were Free Speech & Equality Enemies?, Joseph Nucci
"Perhaps unsurprisingly, the opponents of free speech have historically been on the right side of the ideological spectrum. Whether it was the suppression of slavery abolitionists prior to the Civil War, the Palmer Raids of 1920, the arrests of union organizers, McCarthyism, or the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM) in the 1960s, free speech has historically been something that liberals have stood for, fought for and died for."
3/25/2016, Reading Eagle, At UC Berkeley, promises of a crackdown on sexual misconduct met with skepticism by students, Teresa Watanabe
"Nicoletta Commings and Sofie Karasek were drawn to UC Berkeley for its social justice traditions. Karasek read about the free-speech movement in history class at her high school in Massachusetts and wrote her college application essay about her desire to pursue environmental activism there. She arrived on campus for the fall term in 2011, just in time to join hundreds of protesters in Sproul Plaza who were supporting the Occupy movement for economic equality.
¶
'It was everything I wanted,"' she said.
¶
But after being sexually assaulted by fellow students, Karasek and Commings said, they were shocked that administrators seemed disinterested in their complaints, failed to keep them informed about their investigations and levied what they view as inadequate sanctions. They and a third woman are suing the university over the handling of their cases.
¶
The university has denied the allegations."
3/24/2016, The Phoenix, Swarthmore as a nation-state, Sarah Dobbs
"Read or watch Mario Savio's speech at Sproul Hall in 1964 during the Berkley Free Speech Movement. Ask yourself what has changed. Savio asks us to consider that if the educational institution is a capitalist operation, then the faculty are the employees and the students are the raw material to be commodified and translated into capital for the institution. He courageously asserts, 'We're human beings!' Savio continues to galvanize the crowd, 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! … And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus-and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it-that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!'"
3/22/2016, The Washington Times, When universities become day care centers, Clifford D. May
"'The claim that the FSM was fighting for free speech for all (i.e., the First Amendment) was always a charade,' according to journalist Sol Stern, a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute who, back in the day, was a member of the FSM at Berkeley, where it was born. 'Within weeks of FSM's founding, it became clear to the leadership that the struggle was really about clearing barriers to using the campus as a base for radical political activity.'"
3/13/2016, The Asian Age, It's high time to change India's sedition laws, Meenakshi Ganguly
"The Berkeley Free Speech Movement served as a crucial milestone in the US struggle for civil liberties. Although the din around the Kumar arrest is dying down, this could well be the start of India's own movement. Will those who label critics 'anti-national' prevail, or will free speech advocates who contend it is patriotic to try to make the country better through peaceful criticism of state policies, win the day?"
3/6/2016, Hoodline, Waller Street Blues: An Interview With Denise Kaufman Of The Ace Of Cups,
"She was born in the city, raised in Palo Alto along with early members of the Grateful Dead, attended Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement, rode the bus with the Merry Pranksters, and much more.
¶
....
¶
Then I got to Berkeley and all the tables were set up in the Plaza and everyone was handing out their political information. I was seventeen, a freshmen and took every ier. In a few weeks the campus police came and con scated the tables. That started the Free Speech Movement. I was active in that from the very get go. I got arrested at Sproull Hall. I got beaten up by the police and taken to the Oakland City Jail. That whole fall semester was pretty luminous because of the Free Speech Movement."
3/3/2016, OneDublin.org, Life in UC Berkeley: Joshua Price's Cal Eng Journey Part I, Joshua Price
"I thought all the excitement about Berkeley during Welcome Week would die off after the first few weeks of class, but it really didn't. Throughout Fall 2014 the campus was socially aflame with two big events: the Black Lives Matter movement and the 50th anniversary of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement. These generated an excitement at Berkeley like I've never seen before and affected my experience as a student daily."
2/27/2016, San Francisco Chronicle, The university divide in the region grows,
"Two prestigious universities dominate higher education in the Bay Area and possibly the rest of the nation and beyond. Both UC Berkeley and Stanford are ultra-selective powerhouses, churning out graduates, fresh ideas and social revolutions. Think of Silicon Valley and the Free Speech Movement, for starters."
2/25/2016, The Berkeley Daily Planet, An Evening With Bruce Barthol and a Work in Progress, Conn Hallinan
"Barthol, the original bass player for 'The Fish,' and long-time music director for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, takes the audience on an odyssey both political and physical. As the child of academics his family bounced around from Berkeley to Pennsylvania, Los Angeles, Spain, and finally landing him in Berkeley on the eve of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) in 1964."
2/22/2016, Catch News, counter-culture movement or existential angst of India's millennials?, Wajahat Qazi
"In 1960, student activism hit the campus of the famed University of California, Berkeley. The motivation behind the Berkeley protests were civil rights for African-Americans, the free speech movement and anti-war (Vietnam) protests. All in all, the protests were in the nature of a counter-cultural movement.
¶
The Berkeley protests find an eerie echo in the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) saga. The apparent catalysts have been the demonstrations on the anniversary of Afzal Guru's hanging, and then these devolved into other ancillary protest themes."
2/15/2016, Los Angeles Times, Review: 'The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution' on PBS, Robert Lloyd
"It doesn't completely place the Panthers in the context of the times, and of antiwar, anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-establishment militancy that flourished in the Bay Area, Free Speech Movement and various other countercultural movements in the Bay Area. It was an time when some hoped and others feared that revolution -- a word as inflammatory as it was inexact -- was coming to America. Both sides were readying for actual war."
2/12/2016, Interview Magazine, DISCOVERY: SWMRS, Emily McDermott
"ACTIVISTS: We try to be as active as possible in things like the Black Lives Matter movement. I think we're all pretty into Bernie Sanders. We try to make our shows and music an inclusive and safe space for everyone, because I think a lot of times when you don't overtly state that, it can become unsafe and uncomfortable for marginalized people. We don't want anybody to feel excluded from our music because, in the end, it's something that helps people and makes them happy. Why exclude people from that? I think that [mindset] comes from growing up in the East Bay and the Berkeley punk scene. We were pretty influenced by the 'pre-hippie' ideology and free speech movement. We've always just known you pick your friend up if they fall down in the mosh pit. You have all-ages shows and you don't spread hate."
2/12/2016, Countercurrents, The People Make The Peace: Vietnam's Lessons For Today, Steve Thornton
"The writers in The People Make the Peace represent different political trends. Alex Hing, for example, was a self-described revolutionary nationalist. He recalls his development from Chinatown poverty, to San Francisco's Free Speech Movement and SCLC Poor People's Campaign, to the Red Guard Party (formed by the Black Panthers), and finally his union activism with the Hotel workers. He traveled through Vietnam and Korea, and as part of the first U.S. delegation to visit China since the 1949 revolution led by Mao Zedong."
2/10/2016, East Bay Express, Inkworks Press, 1974-2016, Lincoln Cushing
"Learning to print was a political act. Other such pioneers of the New Left included David Lance Goines' small shop for Berkeley's Free Speech Movement in 1964; Glad Day Press in Ithaca, New York and Peace Press in Los Angeles (1967); and Chicago's Salsedo Press and Red Sun in the Boston area (1973). Of those, only Salsedo and Red Sun remain. But other shops, such as Brooklyn's Radix Media, continue this noble trade. And the graphic design department of Inkworks, which spun off in 2002, is now the Design Action Collective, a very successful visual communications business in Oakland."
2/6/2016, CBS News, The Dish: Chef Alice Waters,
"Waters said even farmers thought she was crazy, but her conviction was unyielding. It came from the free speech movement in Berkeley.
¶
'I thought that I could do anything I wanted to do. I just had to be determined enough to do it,' Waters said.
¶
With that willpower she learned how to cook, all from a cookbook."
2/5/2016, Europa Newswire, From the Garden to the Glass House by Abdelkader K Abbadi,
"This is a true story of a young boy who lived in a cave with his grand parents in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and who later finds himself on a path of exciting discovery and learning. Traveling from New York to the mid western city of Lawrence, Kansas, then Fresno and Berkeley in California, he actually witnesses the turbulence on this campus and offers his reflections on the significance of the free speech movement. After he completes his higher education, he travels back east to begin an extraordinary professional career at the United Nations. In the course of his long journey, the young man learns about the values that make America great, and about the inner working of the international organization."
2/4/2016, Workers' Liberty, The world economy since 2008, Martin Thomas
"[Economist Hyman] Minsky came from a Menshevik émigré family background. As a school student in the late 1930s he was a member of the American Socialist Party youth group, where he probably came across Trotskyists. He studied with Oskar Lange, Henry Simons, Frank Knight, and Josef Schumpeter, and became an economics lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1957 to 1965. He supported the 1964-5 Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, a big starting-point for late-1960s student radicalism; or, at least, he was one of only two lecturers who tried to intervene to stop a mass arrest of the protesting students (Columbia Daily Spectator, 18 December 1964). He was active in the left-liberal Americans for Democratic Action. In 1965 he moved from Berkeley to a smaller, quieter university, and remained in a quiet academic world until his death in 1996."
2/4/2016, truthdig, Credit Occupy in Bernie Sanders' Surge, Bill Boyarsky
"One day, I listened to a small meeting at which a dozen or more people were discussing how and how often to serve food. They argued over serving hours, menus (one person was a vegan, another loved protein), and who would cook and serve.
¶
'Interesting, isn't it,' said a friend, Art Goldberg. He's a lawyer who was one of the most famous leaders of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the mid-1960s and has been protesting ever since. He stopped by the encampment every day during breaks in trial at the nearby courthouse.
¶
'If you're interested in food service,' I replied sarcastically. He said I didn't understand what I was seeing. They weren't just arguing about food. If I had listened carefully, I would have understood they were talking about the essentials of political organizing-communicating, assigning tasks, scheduling, motivating, and making everyone feel they are part of an important effort.
¶
After the meeting, a young woman came over to talk to Goldberg. He talked to her about the need to work out the differences. She said she was trying to mediate between two strong women, one who cooked and the other who served. I could see what was really involved at the meeting I had observed: leadership and bringing people together, the essentials of both serving dinner and running a campaign."
2/3/2016, Yale Daily News, Activist highlights importance of "slow food", Veena McCoole
"[Alice] Waters drew parallels between the racial issues behind the protests on campus last semester and the free speech movement of the 1960s, which served as her initial source of inspiration for becoming an activist. In order to make dramatic change, she added, people must articulate themselves and say things out loud."
2/3/2016, The Seattle Times, Thank you, Signe Toly Anderson & Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane, Paul de Barros
"In the fall of 1965, when the music scene in the Haight Ashbury was heating up and the campus of the University of California was boiling over with rebellion, I had the privilege of reviewing the Jefferson Airplane's first concert on campus for the Daily Cal, UC Berkeley's student newspaper. I was 18 years old, a veteran of the Free Speech Movement and, like so many of my contemporaries, convinced that our activism and its soundtrack were going to change the world."
2/2/2016, Apollo Magazine, Art of Protest: Student Unrest at Berkeley, Peter Watts
"When Robert F. Kennedy visited California in October 1967, he made a point of praising the most radical university in America. 'You are the first college to become a political issue since George III attacked Harvard for being a centre of political rebellion and subversion,' he told the students of Berkeley. 'I welcome the passionate concern with the condition and future of the American nation which can be found on this campus.'
¶
Modern student protest - that's direct action, mass participation and slogans that stung like adverts - was invented at Berkeley. It began with the Free Speech Movement of 1964, which saw Berkeley students rise up for their right to have a political voice, and they were still at it in May 1970, marching against America's bombing of Cambodia and the murder of four fellow students during a protest at Kent State by Ohio National Guardsmen. Berkeley sympathised - a student had died in the previous year's People's Park riot - and students carried posters hastily created by the Political Poster Workshop at the College of Environmental Design. Around 50 of these, previously in the collection of the late publisher Felix Dennis, are going on display in London for 'America In Revolt: The Art Of Protest' at Shapero Modern."
1/25/2016, Coyote Chronicle, Looking to the past, focusing on the future, Chris Cauhape
"As the free speech movement began at University of California, Berkeley in 1964, college students all over the country rallied against the war in Vietnam.
¶
The student unrest was blamed on a so-called 'generation gap,' which morphed into a political issue.
¶
Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California in 1966, and he largely owed his political career to the student uprising and backlash of the UC Berkeley movement."
1/24/2016, Santa Barbara Independent, The Burning Bank Legacy, Sam Goldman
"In the years leading up to the riots, UCSB students - as well as their counterparts all around the country - witnessed a virtually unprecedented rights movement and faced a wide array of struggles and injustices. The 1964-1965 free speech movement at Berkeley helped illuminate the walls enclosing students' freedom of expression, while the previous decade and a half's Civil Rights Movement helped foster a sense of justice in university students. In October 1968, the occupation of North Hall by members of the Black Student Union brought about, among other reforms, the creation of the Black Studies Department. UCSB students marched in Sacramento in protest of Reagan's regressive education policies and waged their own free-speech battles on campus."
1/19/2016, The Temple News, Free speech: all or nothing, Austin Nolen
"First Amendment constitutional rights and academic freedom for students are not mere abstractions. Instead, both were first recognized as a result of student protests. Participants in the free speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s were diverse enough to include the College Republicans, but most wanted to exercise their free speech rights to advocate for civil rights and anti-war causes."
1/19/2016, The Irish Times, Free speech should reign on campus, Robert Dunne
"The students who took part in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965 (sic) recognised this when they protested so that political groups that offended common orthodoxies would be able to campaign openly in the university."
1/10/2016, Quirky Berkeley, OMG - 2233 McKinley, Tom Dalzell
"The house on McKinley was part of a commune. Michael Rossman and Karen McClellan were the - what do we say? -- anchors of the commune. Rossman was a Very Central Figure in the Free Speech Movement."
1/6/2016, The Telegraph, Why I'm finding it harder to call myself a liberal student', Hallam Roffey
"This absurdity is not confined to the UK; across the Atlantic the US has experienced an even greater proliferation of safe spaces and more ardent attacks on free speech. How sad it is to consider that just 50 years ago students in California fought hard and passionately during the Free Speech Movement.
Now we have Manchester's union blocking Julie Bindel and Milo Yiannopooulos from participating in a debate on, ironically, free speech, and London Southbank taking down posters of the 'Flying Spaghetti Monster' because it may cause religious offence."
12/31/2015, The College Fix, Bill proposes fines for universities that infringe on students' free speech rights, Kate Hardiman
" [Republican Washington state lawmaker Matt] Manweller describes his bill as 'an academic bill of rights' with three key components.
¶
First, the bill reads that free speech may not be restricted to specified zones on campus. Second, it prohibits disciplining or dismissing a faculty member or student on the basis of a trigger warning or microaggression allegation. Third, it builds in due process rights for students.
¶
If a court determines that a university has violated any part of the bill, they are subject to fines of at least $500 plus $50 a day for each day that the violation remains.
¶
Manweller told The Fix that he has not faced any opposition from administrators or students so far. Planning to introduce the bill on Jan. 11, Manweller said he believes it will garner bipartisan support.
¶
'The free speech movement started at Berkeley in the 60's and was pushed by hard core liberals, and it was a long-standing liberal idea that free speech should exist in the face of hostile government repression,' Manweller said."
12/25/2015, Counterpunch, Generation Safe Space, Jonathan Taylor
"Watching authoritarianism on the right grow simultaneously with authoritarianism from the campus liberal-left produces anxiety, but anxiety itself fuels these attacks on free speech. Is it time for another Free Speech movement ala Berkeley 1964-6? Or would that potentially hurt somebody's feelings?"
12/23/2015, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Revisiting Radical Democracy in (Post) Colonial Okinawa: An Interview with C. Douglas Lummis, Maki Sunagawa and Daniel Broudy
"A lot of other things happened after that, but now the University of California has free speech on campus. It changed. But it was so interesting to sit in that group of 5,000 people, people around you whom you'd never met. Food was being passed around and everybody was friendly, and if you look at the photographs, you'll notice the faces of the protesters and the faces of their opponents are completely different.
¶
The opponents have, sort of, cynical grins. You can pick them out from the crowd, the people who wanted to use hate speech against us. For those few days, there was something like a new form, a different form of society, presaging a different way of people relating to each other. And, it was such a powerful experience that a lot of people who participated could never quite go back, could never quite forget that. We were changed by that experience.
¶
I think the same thing happened in the Philippines during the anti-Marcos movement of 1983-86, and in Poland on a far larger scale during the Solidarity Movement of the 1980s. When this change of state takes place, it's not just that it is effective and you get what you want, but it itself is a different way of being, a different way in which humans relate to each other. That is exhilarating."
12/21/2015, Politico Magazine, Campus Protesters Aren't Reliving the 1960s, Josh Zeitz
"One such Freedom Summer veteran was Mario Savio, the unofficial leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, who told his fellow collegians, 'Last summer I went to Mississippi to join the struggle there for civil rights. This fall I am engaged in another phase of the same struggle, this time in Berkeley. In Mississippi an autocratic and powerful minority rules, through organized violence, to suppress the vast majority. In California, the privileged minority manipulates the university bureaucracy to suppress the students' political expression.'
¶
On one level, Savio encouraged his peers to perceive a real parallel between political repression in the South-the familiar images of police dogs, water hoses and tobacco-chewing sheriffs-and the university administration's restrictive policies governing political advocacy on campus grounds. More viscerally, he tapped into an undercurrent of resentment about the everyday realities of student life."
12/17/2015, The Daily Caller, Camille Paglia EVISCERATES 'Drearily Puritanical, Hopelessly Authoritarian' Modern Feminism, Eric Owens
"'The problem with too much current feminism, in my opinion, is that even when it strikes progressive poses, it emanates from an entitled, upper-middle-class point of view. It demands the intrusion and protection of paternalistic authority figures to project a hypothetical utopia that will be magically free from offense and hurt. Its rampant policing of thought and speech is completely reactionary, a gross betrayal of the radical principles of 1960s counterculture, which was inaugurated in the U.S. by the incendiary Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley.'"
12/17/2015, Rolling Stone, There's No College P.C. Crisis: In Defense of Student Protesters, Angus Johnston
"Sometimes, as Frederick Douglass once wrote, 'it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder.' Some occasions call for rational debate, he said, but others demand nothing less than 'a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.' To acknowledge that is not to express hostility to discourse, but to embrace it - to embrace the power of speech in its full scope and capacity.
¶
Student activists have always understood the power of thunder. And they understand as well that sometimes thunder, on its own, isn't enough. Sometimes you have to do more than just speak. Sometimes you have to organize - to, as the First Amendment says, assemble and pursue a redress of grievances. Sometimes, as Mario Savio declared in the greatest and most famous speech to emerge from the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley half a century ago, 'the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that … you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.' Because sometimes putting your body upon the wheels is the only influence you have."
12/15/2015, KQED News, Berkeley High Students Get Real About Race on Campus, Adizah Eghan
"'I'm so tired and I'm so burned out from trying to learn and be an activist, and just be black - in daily life - in a city that has not dealt with these racial issues since the Free Speech Movement,' says Alecia Harger, who is co-president of the Black Student Union. 'We use this Berkeley bubble as an excuse or a mask or something to hide from these issues so we don't have to address them.'"
12/9/2015, italiani, Una rivoluzione tradita/A Revolution Betrayed, Riccardo Liberati
"Il 2 dicembre 1964 all'Università di Berkley in California, un giovane studente di origine siciliana, Mario Savio, durante un'assemblea degli universitari che protestavano per chiedere il diritto al voto dei neri americani, prende la parola.
¶
Il suo discorso, breve, conciso, ma perfetto, viene considerato ancora oggi uno dei più bei discorsi di tutti i tempi insieme a quello del presidente Lincoln al campo di Gettysburg.
¶
Mario Savio rivendica il diritto degli studenti ad essere trattati come esseri umani pensanti e non come il semplice prodotto di una società che vuole plasmarli per i suoi scopi. Inizia quel giorno la rivolta dei giovani americani che in Europa diventerà famosa come 'il 68'. In quei tempi i ragazzi statunitensi morivano in un luogo oscuro della terra chiamato Vietnam e l'America iniziava a porsi una domanda terribile: perché?"
12/8/2015, The Daily Star, Student movement is now eroding free speech, Cary Brunswick
"Mario Savio was a student at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964 when he became a leader in the Free Speech Movement in response to a university policy that barred any political activity on campus. That ban included lobbying on behalf of political parties or issues and also activities in support of the civil rights movement that was sweeping the nation.
¶
Today, it is difficult to believe that just 50 years ago on a large college campus that you could not hand out leaflets, hold a political meeting or hear a civil rights leader speak.
¶
Savio [ed note: the FSM, not Savio] was credited with launching the practice of the campus 'sit-in' to protest the administration's policy, and his group eventually succeeded. But, nationwide, the seed was sown for campus politics, especially concerning the Vietnam War, and also for student power to win curriculum reforms to make subjects more relevant in the contemporary world. "
12/7/2015, The Architect's Newspaper, A revived Sproul Plaza complex supports student life and activities, Mimi Zeiger
"Five decades after Mario Savio stood on the steps of UC Berkeley's Sproul Hall and addressed student activists gathered in the plaza, the echoes of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement still linger on campus-not in any monument but in the strength of today's student groups and organizations. It was these voices that the architects of Moore Ruble Yudell heard as they approached the Lower Sproul Revitalization Project, a $223-million initiative that opened this fall."
12/7/2015, Claridad, La adoctrinación no es educación, Oscar López Rivera
"El sistema se ha perpetuado pero no por falta de críticas, luchas y grandes esfuerzas para cambiarlo. En la década de los 60 se dieron muchas luchas, se levantaron grandes críticas y se presentaron alternativas viables. En 1963 la organización el Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) (Comité Nacional No Violento de Estudiantes) comenzó a organizar las 'Escuelas Libertadoras' (Freedom Schools) en el estado de Mississippi. Su meta era cambiar un sistema injusto y decadente, dónde no existía la libertad académica, se destruía la curiosidad intelectual y se deshumanizaba a los y las estudiantes tratándolos(as) como objetos. Treinta escuelas fueron fundadas para ofrecerles a sus estudiantes una educación libertadora, que les ayudara a transformarse en pensadores(as) críticos(as), para que fueran conscientes de su historia y su identidad y su cultura y para ser ciudadanos(as) activos(as) en sus comunidades. Y aunque sólo pudieron existir por dos años, muchas de sus ideas y filosofía existen en diferentes proyectos relacionados con la educación.
¶
Otro movimiento que fomentó mucho interés y entusiasmo en la lucha para transformar el sistema fue el Free Speech Movemenf. Mario Savio, un estudiante en la Universidad de California en Berkeley, comenzó un discurso incesante exigiendo que se cambiara el sistema y exhortando a los y las estudiantes a actuar. Hay un momento cuando la operación de la máquina se convierte tan odiosa, que te enferma el corazón y no puedes tomar parte, no puedes ni siquiera fácilmente tomar parte. Y tienes que poner tu cuerpo sobre el engranaje, las palancas, encima de todo el aparato y tienes que indicarle a la gente que la maneja, a la gente que es dueña, que a menos que no seas libre la máquina será impedida de funcionar.
¶
Los burócratas de la Universidad de California en Berkeley decidieron expulsarlo para callarlo. Pero ya su discurso había llegado a oídos fértiles y en muchas universidades los y las estudiantes comenzaron a protestar, exigiendo que el sistema de educación superior pusiera fin a la práctica de reducir al estudiante en un diente más de la dentada. Los y las estudiantes exigían libertad de expresión y para decidir la educación sin las trabas de la burocracia académica.
¶
El movimiento Estudiantes para una Sociedad Democrática -Students for a Democratic Society- también comenzó a exigir cambios en todo el sistema para democratizarlo. Ocupaban universidades y las transformaban en espacios libres. Había todo un despertar de alegría, de consciencia y de espíritu de lucha. La mayoría era de estudiantes de clase media que veían la necesidad de cambiar un sistema burocratizado, conservador y enajenante."
12/6/2015, The Union, Is the free exchange of ideas being sacrificed for political correctness?, George Boardman
"Do we want our colleges and universities to be forums for the free exchange of ideas, or shelters for students who are easily offended by ideas they don't agree with and actions they find personally hurtful?
¶
That's the question posed by a series of student disruptions at some of America's leading institutions of higher learning, a question my generation thought was answered when the Free Speech Movement swept through campuses in the '60s and '70s.
¶
Back then, you could get arrested by UC Berkeley police for trying to raise funds on campus for civil rights causes. That's what happened to occasional grad student Jack Weinberg on Oct. 1, 1964, triggering a massive student protest demanding that administrators lift the ban of on-campus political activity and acknowledge the students' right to free speech and academic freedom.
¶
Free and open discourse became the order of the day, even if some of it was offensive, repulsive or just downright stupid. Students were expected to absorb the blows and respond with strong arguments of their own; you know, the free and open exchange of ideas.
¶
Everybody in the academy was on board with this concept.
¶
'Education should not be intended to make people comfortable,' said Hanna Gray, a former president of the University of Chicago. 'It is meant to make people think.'"
12/3/2015, The Nation, December 3, 1964: Mass Arrests of Students at the University of California, Berkeley, Richard Kreitner
"Months of civil rights demonstrations have taught metropolitan police officers everywhere to handle 'limp' demonstrators; it requires two officers per demonstrator, and it can be efficient and painless. In Sproul Hall, however, police chose to drag the students, male and female, by twisting their arms into hammer locks, bending their wrists cruelly backward, and hauling them so that the pressure was on their sockets. One girl was pushed into the elevator on her face from several feet away. It should be stressed that there were reporters on the scene-but the police didn't always know it. Downstairs, they were letting no reporters go up.
¶
After about forty arrests had been made, the police saw that the process was taking too long. They withdrew temporarily (the students now call this 'the coffee break'), and when they returned had apparently decided to get rough. The new plan was to bring women down in the elevator, and men by the narrow marble stairs, although a few unfortunate women also made it down the stairs. Some were brought down by arms or shoulders, but reporters present say that most were hauled by their feet. One conscientious reporter counted the marble steps as he followed a girl whose head jarred sickeningly as she was dragged down. There were ninety….
¶
On Thursday afternoon, I watched the end of The Day of the Cops. There was no civilian authority anywhere on the campus. President Kerr was still in Los Angeles. Chancellor Edward Strong, chief Berkeley administrator (Kerr runs all nine university campuses), had disappeared. The University of California was completely in the hands of police. In every window of Sproul Hall a police guard was visible. There were guards on every door. Police patrolled the campus."
12/2/2015, The New York Times, Letters, Ellen D. Murphy
"To the Editor:
¶
Once upon a time in America (in Berkeley, to be precise) a Free Speech Movement brought students together to protest restrictions on political activities on the campus. Now, however, students at Amherst College demand that their classmates who advocate free speech should be remanded to 'extensive training for racial and cultural competency.'
¶
When did this core constitutional principle become not only divisive, but also identified with invidious discrimination? How is 'free speech' now the enemy?"
11/30/2015, Summit Daily, American universities now First Amendment-free zones (column), Morgan Liddick
"They are joined by UC-Berkeley's Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, who remarked on the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement: '(W)e can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so.' Somewhere, Mario Savio is spinning in his grave. Irreverence, aggressive challenge and, sometimes, brutal honesty are the very stuff of academic discourse that undergirds intellectual growth. And it is being driven from the campus in favor of approved thought and emotional airbags."
11/25/2015, U.S. News & World Report, From Megaphones to Muzzles, Susan Milligan
"It was students in California who birthed a new era on college campuses, one in which collegians would demand to be included, to be treated like adults and to have a very public say on such hotbed issues as civil rights and the Vietnam War. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964 became a defining moment in a nationwide trend, with students insisting they would not be silenced on some of the most controversial issues of the day.
¶
A half-century later, campuses are again the site of unrest and tension, but it's not about making speech more free - it's about curtailing hurtful speech and expression, whether displayed in a dormitory name, a Halloween costume or the would-be reporting by journalists barred from covering a protest for fear they won't parrot the demonstrators' views. Instead of warring, united, against the campus administration and government officials, students are facing each other down, demanding both diversity and a separate place to express their differentness. Professors worry about offending students in class with provocative texts or topics, while college administrators - far from being asked to let the young adults fight their own battles -- have been asked to step in as arbiters in the conflicts among the students themselves.
¶
...
¶
Regardless, muzzles have replaced megaphones on campus in many cases. And Bettina Aptheker, one of the leaders of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, is concerned at the trend.
¶
'As abhorrent as some speech is, and I certainly think [some] is, the administration of a university should not be in the position of policing it, because it's a very slippery slope,' says Aptheker, who is now a feminist studies professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz. 'A lot of us liberal types or radical types could say racism is on the upswing, and I agree with that. But I don't think the solution to that is restricting freedom of speech,' she adds."
¶
[ed note: Bettina Aptheker, 11/25/2015, personal communication: "And the quote from me is not in context since I spoke at considerable length about the seriousness and gravity of racism on the campuses (and sexual violence) and what needs to be done about it."]
11/23/2015, The Conversation, Here's how history is shaping the #studentblackout movement, Marshall Ganz
"But the civil rights movement inspired other currents of change that did target colleges. For example, the free speech movement that started in the fall of 1964 was sparked by University of California's attempts to curb student fund-raising for civil rights groups."
11/23/2015, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Salem comes to campus, Bradley R. Gitz
"Crazy things are happening at Missouri, Yale, and other colleges these days. And at the heart of the madness is a shocking rejection, even a condemnation, of the once-hallowed principle of free speech; the kind of speech that liberals used to at least pretend to believe in.
¶
The Berkeley 'free speech' movement of the 1960s thus comes full circle; now inverted to mean freedom not for, but from, speech, or at least speech that doesn't follow the ever-fluctuating party line. Once you conclude that speech you don't agree with is not just wrong but hurtful, perhaps even criminal, the next step is put those who have uttered it in the stocks, to be pelted by the frenzied mob.
¶
But our campus social-justice warriors don't just want to restrict speech; they also want to restrict any speech criticizing their efforts to restrict speech. People shouldn't be free to believe in the wrong ideas, defined as any that makes the left look bad, including such heretical concepts as 'truth,' 'facts' and 'logic.'"
11/20/2015, sfist, After Five-Day Sit-In, Stanford Students Protesting School's Fossil Fuel Investments Leave Quad, Caleb Pershan
"The San Jose Mercury News writes that every day more than a dozen professors have led teach ins' for the assembled protestors including a lecture on 'The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley,' a task undertaken in solidarity with students. Other students, alumni, faculty members, and university employees have delivered food and supplies to the protestors."
11/20/2015, San Jose Mercury News, Stanford warns students of possible sanctions while protest expands, Lisa M. Krieger
"Each day, more than a dozen professors lead 'teach ins' on topics ranging from carbon accounting to Bible-based civil disobedience. Professor [Eric] Roberts taught a class on 'The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley.' Rush Rehm, a professor of drama and of classics, spoke on 'Antigone and Social Dissent.'"
11/18/2015, Los Angeles Times, Aided by social media, college students find new power in campus protests, Thomas Curwen, Jason Song and Larry Gordon
"Echoes of the 1960s in today's actions are clear, said Robert Cohen, a history professor at New York University and author of 'Freedom's Orator,' a biography of Mario Savio, who led the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s.
¶
'The tactical dynamism of these nonviolent protests and the public criticism of them are in important ways reminiscent of the 1960s,' Cohen said. 'Today's protests, like those in the '60s, are memorable because they have been effective in pushing for change and sparking dialogue as well as polarization.'
¶
...
¶
Institutions often valued for their support of free speech find themselves wrestling with the prospect of limiting free speech, but to focus on what is or isn't politically correct avoids the more important issue, Cohen said: whether campuses are diverse enough or how to reduce racism."
11/18/2015, History News Network, What the Media Missed: The Missouri Student Revolt in Historical Perspective, Robert Cohen
"The mass media have never been very good at covering student protest. Back in early December 1964, for example, the press totally missed the significance of Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio's historic speech calling for mass civil disobedience, which helped inspire the largest campus sit-in in American history. Though Savio's 'bodies upon the gears' speech would eventually end up quoted in most US history textbooks and in narrative histories of the 1960s, even leading newspapers, such as the New York Times, garbled Savio's words and ran articles that gave no hint that his speech was one of the most memorable dissident orations ever made on a university campus. It was not until a week after the sit-in that Jazz columnist Ralph Gleason, who heard the music in Savio's words, became the first print journalist to quote Savio's speech extensively and accurately, and alerted the world that Savio's 'classic words' of resistance to unjust authority would be long remembered.
¶
This media tendency to miss the historical significance of a student protest was again on display this past week in the coverage of the revolt led by African American students at the University of Missouri. Though reporters did cover the story few set it into historical context, and none seemed to realize that Missouri's student movement against racism has with lightning speed emerged as arguably the most effective on-campus student revolt in American history. In less than a week the Missouri movement was able to win its central - and not easily attainable - demand, the removal of Timothy Wolfe, the University of Missouri's racially insensitive president, and also brought down the chancellor as well. Wolfe has been replaced by Michael Middleton, a veteran African American academic leader, with a strong civil rights record, including a history of anti-racist activism in his own student days at the University of Missouri in the late 1960s."
11/14/2015, Daily Journal, OUR VIEW: Free speech under fire on college campuses, editorial
"At the Ivy League campus in New Haven, Conn., the Christakises are facing heated calls for their ouster simply for questioning the conventional Yale wisdom that students should avoid ethnic costumes like sombreros, headdresses and turbans. While some may find those articles of clothing insensitive, Erika Christakis said discouraging the dress could deprive students of intellectual discourse on the subject.
¶
"Nicholas says, if you don't like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended," she wrote in a reply to an administrator's mass email denouncing offensive garb. 'Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offence are the hallmarks of a free and open society.'
¶
We applaud and echo that statement. Yale students, however, responded by surrounding Nicholas Christakis and unleashing a vulgar tirade, then demanding his and his wife's resignation.
¶
Progressives spawned the 1964 free-speech movement at the University of California-Berkeley when administrators there sought to suppress their political views. Today's campus liberals, however, are quick to deny others the same freedom.
¶
Modern undergrads want to live in 'safe spaces,' collegiate cocoons where PC values are sacrosanct, dissent is silenced and offensive speech protected by the First Amendment is quashed. They believe administrators should control student expression - even their dress - like overbearing parents.
¶
If young adults can't read classic literature without trigger warnings or endure a controversial opinion without throwing temper tantrums, our universities, our workforce and our society will ultimately suffer."
11/13/2015, Townhall, The Closing of the American Mouth, Suzanne Fields
"Once upon a time panty raids and swallowing goldfish were the rites of passage for sophomores, challenging authority on campus with innocence and high spirits. Student rebellion darkened with the free speech movement at the University of California in the 1960s. Today free speech on campus is under attack from the students themselves."
11/13/2015, The Daily Californian, Korean textbook nationalization will harm Korean students, Hong Suk Oh, Bo Hyun Paenng, Hongjik Yang and Sangbin Lee
"We lament that although the Free Speech Movement Cafe is one of the favorite on-campus gathering places for Korean students, many are apathetic - even opposed - to this critical issue regarding freedom of speech while a number of their non-Korean counterparts supported our cause. Mario Savio urged us to 'indicate to the people who run it' that without freedom, 'the machine will be prevented from working at all.' Our protest was a clear message to the operators of the machine that many of us at UC Berkeley demand that Korean citizens retain their freedom and that we refuse to be mere bystanders as democracy sinks, yet again, in South Korea."
11/13/2015, Providence Journal, Editorial: Illiberal education, Editors
"What happens in college matters. The intellectual habits that students pick up during these formative years go on to shape their behavior through the rest of their adult lives. And with college no longer the exclusive province of a tiny elite - some 40 percent of working-age Americans have now graduated from it - the hostility to free speech portends a dark future for American society.
¶
There's an irony here. During the last period of widespread campus activism, the late 1960s, the student agitators were fighting for freedom of expression; UC-Berkeley's famed 'free speech movement' is a case in point. American universities today could use a little more of the spirit of '68 [sic], and little less of the spirit of censoriousness that seems to motivate them in 2015."
November, 2015, Potrero View, Hill Resident Judy Baston Expert at Tracing Family History, Jim Van Buskirk
"Longtime Potrero Hill resident Judy Baston's passionate commitment to Jewish genealogy earned her the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, awarded at the Association's annual conference in Jerusalem last summer.
¶
Baston was born in Oakland to parents who encouraged her to pursue a professional career. Her father suggested that she become a doctor. Her mother disagreed, 'No, she'll be a writer.' Mom was right: in 1965 Baston was awarded a degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was arrested during the Free Speech Movement.
¶
'When I left college I went to work for the People's World, a surprisingly independent left wing newspaper. Amazingly, in the seven years I was on that staff, no one ever told me what to write!' Baston quit the paper in 1973, after former editor Al Richmond was expelled because of his memoir, A Long View from the Left. 'I left because I didn't want to be part of an organization that didn't allow for the kind of questions that Al was raising.'"
11/12/2015, Daily Nexus, Jewish Community Urges Regents to Clarify a System-wide Definition of Anti-Semitism, Juliet Bachtel and Josh Ortiz
" [David] Goines, hearkening back to his days in the Free Speech Movement, argues students should not allow the UC to create any sort of policy regulating the content of their speech. This, he says, is surrendering the rights which he and his fellow activists fought for decades ago.
¶
'These rights that I fought for - you want to give them away. You just want to hand them over. You don't even want to put up a fight,' Goines said. 'Well, I think that's disgusting.'
¶
Santa Barbara Hillel executive director Rabbi Evan Goodman said free speech is not 'unlimited' and the Regents need to instate a policy that protects Jewish students from anti-Semitic "hate speech."
¶
According to Goodman, a line should be drawn - an argument he presented to the Regents at the working group's forum in October at UCLA. Rabbi Goodman spoke and advocated for the Regents to adopt a policy on anti-Semitism similar to that of the United States Department of State, which states that denying Israel's right to exist is an action considered anti-Semitic.¶
...¶
Former UC Berkeley student Goines argues that all advocates on the issue need to be well-versed on the First Amendment.
¶
'The First Amendment is not there to protect the government from you,' Goines said. 'The First Amendment is there to protect you from the government.'
11/10/2015, Breitbart, THE FERGUSON EFFECT AND THE SELF-DESTRUCTION OF THE ACADEMY, Joel B. Pollak
"The issues that triggered the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 were real. The civil rights movement was raging, and students wanted to advocate for the cause inside the campus gates. Later, they moved on to protest the Vietnam War-a conflict that implicated students directly because of the draft.
¶
Today, students are motivated by a myth about racist police in Ferguson, Missouri, and are trying to suppress free speech on campus, not expand it.
¶
In 1964, students sat down around a police car on campus Berkeley to protest the arrest of one of their classmates. They proceeded to hold a 'teach-in' where everyone could speak-even those who disagreed with the them.
¶
Last month, students surrounded Wolfe's car in an off-campus parade to force him to acknowledge their demands. He still blames himself for not stepping out to talk to them-as if they had any intention of having a real conversation.
¶
And yesterday, the students forced journalists out of their 'safe space' on campus, in defiance of the Constitution, the law, and the principle of academic freedom. Students and professors assaulted photojournalist Tim Tai, and one activist even called for 'muscle' to remove a student photographer from the protest, where he clearly had a right to be."
11/9/2015, GOOD Magazine, Yale University Subject of Two Racially Charged Incidents, Katie Felber
"The video harkens back to fundamental sentiments first fought for in Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, but its context is vastly different considering the series of events on the Yale campus over the past week. According to a Business Insider article outlining the timeline of events, the tension began with alleged racism from members of the fraternity SAE, who were accused of turning away students on Halloween based on race and ethnicity."
11/8/2015, The Daily Californian, ACLU executive director gives Mario Savio Memorial Lecture on campus, Cassandra Vogel
"Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, delivered a speech Thursday evening to commemorate late activist Mario Savio and recognize young people for their work in accordance with Savio's legacy.
¶
In his speech, given at the 19th annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture in the campus's Pauley Ballroom, Romero - the first Latino and openly gay man to serve as the executive director of the ACLU - discussed how mass incarceration places limits on freedom of speech. The ACLU is a body that defends the rights of incarcerated individuals through legal representation.
¶
The event also recognized the winners of the Mario Savio Lecture Fund's Young Activist Award, a distinction given annually to young people who demonstrate a commitment to human rights and a proven history of activism.
¶
The three honorees of the evening included Eli Garcia for her advocacy of undocumented students' rights, Johnnie Turnage for his role as a voting-rights campaign organizer and Quentin Savage, who mobilized a campaign for racial justice in Kentucky."
11/6/2015, Counterpunch, Defending Socialism: Foner and Sanders v. Eugene Debs, Paul Street
"There's something to be said for working with and through the American radical lineage. But Foner's rendering of that tradition is disturbing. He mentions some very good names in the U.S. radical pantheon: Tom Paine, Frederick Douglass, Abby Kelley, the early 1890s Populists, and Sanders' own supposed inspiration, Eugene Debs. Many are left out, of course, particularly those of more radical hue, like the Haymarket Martyrs (including the revolutionary socialist-anarchists Albert Parsons and Adolph Fischer), Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman, the radical syndicalist (Industrial Workers of the World - IWW) leaders Bill Haywood, Mother Jones, and Tom Mooney, IWW trubador Joe Hill, Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio, the heroic Communists and Trotskyists who sparked the emergence of mass production unionism during the 1930s and 1940s, Malcolm X, Leonard Peltier and the American Indian Movement, Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers, the aforementioned anarchist-identifying linguist and anti-imperialist Noam Chomsky, and…I could go on."
11/6/2015, abc Eyewitness News Chicago, PRINCIPAL: BERKELEY HIGH STUDENT CONFESSED TO RACIST POST THAT LED TO WALKOUT, Lyanne Melendez
"Outraged, the Black Student Union at Berkeley High called for a rally, and on Thursday morning, close to 1,000 students this morning. First they marched around the school, then to city hall, and finally they took their voices to UC Berkeley, the cradle of the free speech movement."
11/5/2015, Times Union, When Berkeley visited Albany, Warren Roberts
"Anne and I had been at UCBerkeley between 1958 and 1963; we left the year before the Free Speech Movement began at Berkeley in October 1964. It unleashed forces that passed through college campuses across America in following years and along with the Civil Rights movement fed into a Counter Culture that changed America forever.
¶
Anne thought having an event at UAlbany in 1984 to look back on what happened in Berkeley in 1964 would be of interest to the college community and to Albanians who would be invited to attend the program she organized in the Campus Assembly Room. She had taken a Chaucer course from Charles Muscatine, one of the leading figures in the Free Speech movement; she would invite him to participate in a panel discussion. Bruce Miroff in the Political Science department suggested that she also invite Sheldon Wolin, who had been active in the Free Speech Movement."
11/4/2015, Los Angeles Loyolan, Freedom under assault on college campuses, Michael Busse
"American universities have long been a haven for freedom of expression. Since the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the 1960s, college campuses have been a safe place for wild ideas to take root, grow and flourish.
¶
However, the tides are changing across the country when it comes to free expression on campus.
¶
For the last few months, the regents of the University of California system have been debating over whether or not to adopt a revised policy defining intolerance. The new policy, which emerged after complaints over pro-Palestine groups, would enforce limits on 'unwelcome conduct,' including the broad use of 'language reflecting stereotypes or prejudice.'
¶
On the other coast, a recent poll at Yale University revealed over half of its student population favors restricting free speech on campus. While many students expressed a desire for a code against hate speech, even more said professors should be required to warn students before discussing discomforting topics.
¶
The assault on free speech on nationwide campuses has even crept into the presidential race. Retired surgeon Ben Carson, who is competing for the Republican presidential nomination, has said he would use the Department of Education to make sure no 'extreme' political views could be expressed by professors."
11/2/2015, Xindex, Newsnight: David Aaronovitch debates free speech and universities, Ryan , RyanMcChrystal
"One of the truly great things about being a student used to be the exposure university life gave you to all sorts of views - absurd and otherwise - and being able to decide for yourself what to make of them. Students were once known for their dedication to free speech and academic freedom, epitomised by the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, 1964-65.
¶
In 2015, students are more renowned for the practice of trying to ban anyone they believe to have dangerous views in order to protect fellow tutees, whether it's removing the Sun from the shelves or refusing airplay to Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines. We witnessed this tendency most recently with the petition to ban Germaine Greer from speaking at Cardiff University because of her 'misogynistic views towards trans women'."
11/2/2015, The Weekly Standard, Student Standouts, The Scrapbook
"No. There was a chance there to stand for something, for the hard-fought gains of the free speech movement that are now threatened everywhere from Michigan to California, rather than kowtowing."
11/2/2015, The Stanford Daily, Activism, Jack Herrera
"But while we are indeed deeply divided politically, the goal of the Free Speech Movement was never for students to agree on everything: The goal of the Movement was to get students to stand up for what they believe in, and to face the adversity that threatens our nation with ardor and hope. While we should continue to debate politics and argue about ideas, we should never endeavor to stifle the passion of the people with whom we disagree: When we get annoyed at bad activists, we ought to criticize bad methods, but not activism in general.
¶
Caring is apolitical, and apathy is equally dangerous to us all. Our generation faces unprecedented adversity, and we handicap ourselves when we spend our time trying to silence opposition rather than encouraging everyone to fight for what they think is right.
¶
The legacy of the Free Speech Movement survives in our sustained ability to speak out. Let us use it to declare what young people have declared for decades: We are this country's next generation, and things must change. We may be divided by ideas, but we will strive to remain united in our yearning to do what is necessary, and what is right."
11/2/2015, Boston Review, In Memory of Sheldon Wolin (1922-2015), Anne Norton
"The political theorist Sheldon Wolin, who died October 21, lived in the presence of time past, time present, and time future. Perhaps because he understood time well, he lived fully in his own. He was an airman in World War Two and a pilot, navigator, and bombardier thereafter. He spoke for the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley. In his revolutionary text Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (1960), he made a way through the Western canon and beyond it, transforming political theory from a European inheritance into a terrain of labor open to Americans, indeed to all."
11/1/2015, The Daily Californian, Former UC Berkeley political science professor Sheldon Wolin dies at 93, Amelia Mineiro
"Wolin's influence reached beyond the theoretical scope of his studies. According to [Jack] Citrin, Wolin was a generous and wise counselor to students during the Free Speech Movement. Wendy Brown recalled that Wolin was one of the earliest faculty supporters of the movement.
'It's not like he went out and stood on the car with Mario Savio - he worked on the level of organizing the faculty and leading the faculty to affirm the Free Speech Movement,' Wendy Brown said. 'The faculty Senate supporting the Free Speech Movement was precisely what eventually got the administration to back down, and the Free Speech Movement won.'"
10/29/2015, The New York Times, Sheldon S. Wolin, Theorist Who Shifted Political Science Back to Politics, Dies at 93, William Grimes
"Interested in reaching a nonacademic audience, Professor Wolin, in collaboration with his Berkeley colleague John H. Schaar, wrote frequently for The New York Review of Books in the 1960s on the Free Speech Movement and campus unrest at Berkeley.
¶
The essays were included in their book 'The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond: Essays on Politics and Education in the Technological Society' (1970). Professor Wolin later wrote for the review on Watergate, Henry Kissinger, the presidency of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and American conservatism."
10/29/2015, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Spider's Web of Worrisome Words, Allan Metcalf
"Half a century ago - on the first of March 1965, to be exact - there emerged from the midst of the increasingly excited and politicized student body at the University of California at Berkeley a new twice-a-month publication with the ominous title Spider. It reported and commented on the turmoil among student activists, including the affray nicknamed the 'filthy speech movement' in parody of the earnest Free Speech Movement of the previous fall. But everyone was in a good mood, because the FSM had been a great success, achieved entirely by nonviolent means, so students could feel virtuous as well as successful."
10/28/2015, The Jewish Week, Oslo And The Politics Of Meaning, Jonathan Mark
"Before there was J Street, before Peter Beinart, back in the days before there was any serious Jewish 'pro-peace' lobby, at a time when Jewish peace groups rose and fell like colts finding their legs, there was Tikkun, founded in 1986, critical of the right and what Lerner calls 'the religio-phobic' secular left. In 1988, then-Gov. Bill Clinton wrote a complimentary letter to Lerner about Tikkun. In 1993, the Washington Post described Lerner as Hillary Clinton's 'guru.' The first lady gave a speech invoking the 'politics of meaning,' Lerner's creed that statecraft had to be soulcraft, addressing 'ethical and spiritual needs.'
¶
That Lerner, a grizzled Berkeley-San Francisco veteran of the radical SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, should find himself sitting on the White House lawn … well, what wasn't possible on a day when Rabin and Arafat were shaking hands as if the previous 50 years were a game of tennis?"
10/27/2015, The Washington Post, Speech code backers at UC, including its president, want tough criticism of Israel labeled 'anti-Semitism', Sarah Kaplan
But opponents of the new speech policy say that linking anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel sets a worrying precedent that could be used to censor free speech.
¶
'I am part of a community of Jews and scholars who are critical of Israel,' Mandy Cohen, a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at UC Berkeley, told the AP on Monday. 'They are, in fact, seeking to silence me.'
¶
This is not the first time that the University of California - the university system that gave birth to the free speech movement - has run afoul of free speech advocates. Earlier this year, UC Santa Barbara sent a letter to students asking them to report to the administration 'acts of intolerance, disrespect, bullying, or violence, especially regarding sexual orientation, race, gender, ethnicity or religion.'
¶
FIRE, a college free speech group, highlighted the speech code as having a 'powerful chilling effect.'
¶
'It's as if administrators believe that if only they can stop students from saying hurtful things, the underlying conflicts will go away. In reality, nothing could be farther from the truth,' wrote Samantha Harris, the organization's director of speech code research. 'By discouraging debate among new students out of the gate, UCSB is doing its students a terrible disservice in the name of tolerance and civility.'"
10/27/2015, The California Aggie, Tolerating Free Speech, The Editorial Board
"It's a disappointing reality that many students would now give up free speech for the reason that it might offend or marginalize certain communities. Campus communities should remember Mario Savio and the 1964 Free Speech Movement he led at UC Berkeley. Those demonstrations were instrumental in establishing and expanding how students and faculty can express their politics."
10/26/2015, The Washington Post, National coalition in favor of campus censorship, Eugene Volokh
"Yet another example of today's Anti-Free Speech Movement for American universities - unfortunately, one that fits well into the Education Department's attitudes. Fortunately, courts have firmly rejected these kinds of calls to restrict college student speech, though the OCR [Office of Civil Rights] and the college administrations it pressures can get away with a lot of restrictions until the lawsuits are actually brought."
10/24/2015, Food World News, Anti- Free Speech Clash At UCLA Heats Up, Darlene Tverdohleb
"According to The Atlantic, student activists at the UCLA already had clashes since 50 years ago with administrators during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, which is a series of events that could expand people's free-speech rights at public universities and colleges.
¶
Recently, the activists at UCLA demand that administrators should punish some of their fellow students for expressive behavior that is apparently protected by the First Amendment.
¶
In the past, clashes regarding free speech rights have turned on whether American people have the right to criticize their own government during the time of war to march as neo- Nazis past the Holocaust survivors' homes, to submerge in urine the crucifix, or to burn the American flag- in which all of these things have been ruled by courts and are said to be protected speech."
10/20/2015, Reason.com, How Hate Speech Laws Work In Practice, Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"Meanwhile, colleges and universities (even the public ones that are supposedly beholden to free speech on campus) have been using the spectre of hate speech to justify banning controversial speakers from campus, instituting prior review of student newspapers, and other forms of censorhip and intolerane. At the University of California, Berkeley-erstwhile home of the student Free Speech Movement-students now repeatedly pushing for more administration censorship of everything from student editorials to fraternity party themes."
10/15/2015, The Atlantic, The Anti-Free-Speech Movement at UCLA, Conor Friedersdorf
"A half-century ago, student activists at the University of California clashed with administrators during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, a series of events that would greatly expand free-speech rights of people at public colleges and universities.
¶
Today, activists at UCLA are demanding that administrators punish some of their fellow students for expressive behavior that is clearly protected by the First Amendment.
¶
In the past, free-speech clashes have turned on whether Americans have the right to criticize their own government during wartime, to march as neo-Nazis past the homes of Holocaust survivors, to submerge a crucifix in urine, or to burn the United States flag.
¶
All of those things, the courts have ruled, are protected speech.
¶
What did UCLA students find so outrageous as to warrant the violation of the fundamental right to free expression? A "Kanye Western" theme party where students wore costumes that parodied rap superstar Kanye West and his celebrity wife, Kim Kardashian. For this, UC student activists would squander their inheritance.
¶
Perhaps 18-to-22-year-olds can be forgiven for failing to appreciate what's at stake in their activism. But UCLA administrators cannot be forgiven for complying with student demands to punish this free expression-a glaring illustration of their low-regard for the First Amendment, California law, and liberal ideals."
10/5/2015, The Daily Utah Chronicle, The Tale of Charlie Brown: Utah's First Hippie, Justin Adams
"A series of 1965 articles by Harris Vincent in The Daily Utah Chronicle tell the story of 'Charlie Brown,' a traveling hippie who is credited for introducing Utah to the counter-culture movement.
¶
Charlie 'Brown' Artman was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa to a Methodist minister. He attended Cal Berkeley, where he was part of the 1964 Free Speech Movement, during which he and more than 700 other students were arrested. He would later drop out of school 'so that he could study.'" [ed note: photos]
10/4/2015, Broadway World, Political Series by Chor Boogie to Exhibit at UC Berkeley Monday Oct. 5th, Visual Arts News Desk
"UC Berkeley and the Savio Steps were chosen to launch the 2016 US college tour of the exhibit because of their historical significance and symbolism with regard to the Free Speech Movement that began there in 1964. The steps are named after Mario Savio, one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement, who gave his now famous speech from the steps. The protests surrounding the movement were unprecedented in scope at the time and centered around the insistence by students that the university administration lift the ban of on campus political activities and acknowledge the students' right to free speech and academic freedom. After UC Berkeley the exhibit will be traveling to UCSC and other college campuses across the United States and will continue throughout the 2016 Presidential Campaign season right up until next year's election in November with stops in Cleveland and Philadelphia next July, 2016, during the Republican and Democratic conventions."
10/3/2015, The Huffington Post, Richard Dawkins: College Students Are Betraying The Free Speech Movement, Tyler Kingkade
"Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, a famously outspoken atheist, said Friday the trend of students pushing to disinvite speakers on college campuses is a 'betrayal' of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.
¶
Dawkins, speaking with Bill Maher on HBO's 'Real Time,' discussed the idea of 'regressive leftism' and how typically liberal crowds -- like college students -- have acted in non-liberal ways. Dawkins drew on the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, a famous protest by students demanding academic freedom and for the school to lift restrictions on political activity on campus.
¶
'What a betrayal we're seeing now with campuses all over the Western world over -- America and Britain -- are denying people the right to come and speak on campuses. If you can't speak your mind on a university campus, where can you? I mean, that's what universities are about,' Dawkins declared."
10/2/2015, Berkeleyside, The It List: Five things to do in Berkeley this weekend, Tracey Taylor
"INSIDE THE FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT, PART 3 On Sunday at 3 p.m. the Berkeley History Center presents 'Inside the Free Speech Movement, Part 3.' Inside the Free Speech Movement, a film series by Linda Rosen and Jai Jai Noire, features oral history interviews that grew out of the BHS exhibit on the Free Speech Movement. It covers the civil liberties and civil rights issues that led up to and were launched by the FSM. Students of differing points of view came to consensus and successfully convinced the faculty, and eventually the administration and the Regents, to support First Amendment rights. Free, but must call 510-848-0181 for a reservation. Berkeley History Center is at 1931 Center St."
10/1/2015, The Telegraph, Oxford University Student Union bans free speech magazine because it is 'offensive', Helena Horton
"Jacob Williams told VERSA [University of Oxford student publication]: 'There is nothing offensive about healthy debate. To ban us from promoting it on the grounds that people might be offended proves everything the free speech movement has been saying. No offence OUSU [Oxford University Student Union], but you just shot yourself in the foot.'"
10/1/2015, The Daily Californian, An interview with the owner of the Free Speech Movement Café, Sareen Habeshian
"When talking about his entrepreneurial success, Ross maintains he has a very specific vision for each of his cafés. Combining creativity and practicality, he tries to tell a story with a combination of food and ambiance. In the case of the Free Speech Movement Café, Ross has been trying to figure out what kind of food matches that historic movement.
¶
'Studying the free speech movement, it was more than just about free speech,' Ross explained. He sees this movement as a symbolic, more progressive time. Thus, he tries to get the food to relate to his vision.
¶
With the new menu, Ross tries to take this initiative a step further, sourcing his food from even more local vendors than he did before. He sees it as an introduction to a new way of eating, without as much of a reliance on carbon and water intensive products such as meat. Whereas, previously, the menu centered around traditional landmark foods such as turkey sandwiches and tuna melts. But they have now moved toward a more seasoned, organic and sustainable menu with the help of Alice Waters, chef at Chez Panisse and pioneer of the seasonal menu. However, he also recognizes that the majority of his clients are students, so he keeps his food affordable to people on a budget."
10/1/2015, The Colby Echo, Acclaimed activist speaks to campus, Peg Schreiner
"In addition to her work with DPN and #BlackLivesMatter, Cullors has recently completed a fellowship at the Acrus Center for Social Justice Leadership. The fellow ship focused on state and vigilante violence for the 2014 Without Borders Conference, according to a statement from the Pugh Center. Cullors is also a Fullbright Scholar, the 2007 Mario Savio Activist of the Year, and received the Sidney Goldfarb award. She graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a dual degree in religion and philosophy."
10/1/2015, The Boston Globe, This day in history,
"In 1964, the Free Speech Movement began at the University of California Berkeley. Japan's first high-speed 'bullet train,' the Tokaido Shinkansen, went into operation."
9/30/2015, Salon, Free speech for all on campus! Unless you're criticizing Israel, that is, David Palumbo-Liu
"Logically, there should be absolutely no contradiction between advocating for free speech in general and supporting the free speech rights of critics of Israel. An abstract principle for freedom usually does not come accompanied by 'except in the case of.' And yet that has been the case when it comes to discussions of Israel-Palestine.
¶
Indeed, Gary Tobin, Aryeh Weinberg and Jenna Ferer begin their 2005 book, 'The Uncivil University: Intolerance on College Campuses,' by evoking the Free Speech Movement, only to immediately limit it. They note the inscription at Sproul Plaza commemorating the FSM, which reads, 'This soil and the air space extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity's jurisdiction,' but then they negate that: 'Despite the myth surrounding the seal and its ring of soil, it is not - it cannot be - an absolute sanctuary for those who wish to abuse the right of free speech, because no such place exists … Both the rules of the larger society and the social norms of the campus require reasonable boundaries on what can be said. Perhaps the campus has fewer constraints, but safety and civility necessitate that some limits are imposed.'"
9/28/2015, UC Santa Cruz Newsletter, Founders Celebration Fiat Fifty: Spectacular night highlights proud past, bold future, Dan White
"'I don't think it can be overemphasized that UC Santa Cruz and Chez Panisse were born in the free speech movement,' she [Alice Waters] said. Those currents fed both the intellectual community on campus as well as the menu at her groundbreaking restaurant."
9/28/2015, The New Yorker, The Schorske Century, Alex Ross
"Furthermore, Schorske made no pretense of producing a comprehensive history. Rather, he framed his book as the perspective of an interested American onlooker, one who saw parallels between late-imperial Vienna and Cold War America, where the defeat of New Deal values brought about an analogous radicalization and depoliticization of the artistic sphere. The presence of Austrian and German émigrés on American soil-Schoenberg in Los Angeles, teaching John Cage and cheering on the U.C.L.A. football team-made the link all the more obvious. When Schorske spoke of the failures of liberalism, he was thinking not only of German-speaking lands; as a professor at Berkeley, in the nineteen-sixties, he had defended the Free Speech Movement while Governor Pat Brown ordered mass arrests. Now, in the year of his death, the bigoted mass politics of Schönerer and Lueger hardly seem a distant prospect. A glance at the morning paper confirms that a semblance of democracy is no guarantee of a just society."
9/28/2015, Berkeleyside, Berkeley: The 50th anniversary of 50 years ago, Tom Dalzell
"Their photos include several of demonstrations - the Free Speech Movement, civil rights, and early protests against the Vietnam War." [ed note: photos at link]
9/26/2015, The Huffington Post, Reclaiming the Master Plan for Higher Education in California, Joseph A. Palermo
"Sometimes the corporate-friendly CSU Trustees and Chancellor's Office have behaved less like stewards entrusted with a precious public resource, and more like 19th Century robber barons, beating up the faculty union, demanding 'take-backs' that crimp shared governance, and placing new burdens on students and their families.
¶
Mario Savio's famous analogy of the University as a factory where the administrators are the bosses, the faculty the workers, and the students the raw material has nearly been realized at the CSU.
¶
We need to re-invigorate the wider promise of these public institutions that took decades to build and have given a leg up to countless thousands of Californians who, like myself, had doors opened for them they never even knew existed.
¶
I do not believe it was the intention of the authors of the Master Plan to create a vehicle for administrators and managers to enrich themselves.
¶
I believe the intention was to provide the highest quality education to California's young people at the lowest cost.
¶
Trustees and Chancellors in recent decades have drifted far afield from this original intent."
9/25/2015, The Intercept, The Greatest Threat to Campus Free Speech is Coming From Dianne Feinstein and her Military-Contractor Husband, Glenn Greenwald
"The obvious goal with this UC battle is to institutionalize the notion on American college campuses that activism against the Israeli government is not merely wrong but is actually "hate speech" that should subject its student advocates (or professors) to severe punishment. If this menacing censorship is allowed to take hold in an academic system as large and influential as the University of California, then it's much easier for the censors to point to it in the future as a model, in order to infect other academic institutions in the U.S. and around the world. That's all the more reason to vehemently oppose it in this instance. If defenders of Israel are determined to defeat the boycott movement, they'll have to find other ways to do it besides rendering its advocacy illegal and, in the process, destroying the long-cherished precept of free speech in academia."
9/22/2015, The Emory Wheel, Free Speech, No Exceptions, Elana Cates
"If the phenomenon of limiting free speech should be happening anywhere, the last place is at universities. College campuses were once the epitome of liberalism and the right to express oneself. Student activism has been a staple of this country's history and culture. Some of our parents possibly championed the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley from 1964-1965. And in 1969, the Supreme Court specified in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District that students don't 'shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.' But recently, American universities have become a hotbed not for freedom of speech, but rather freedom from speech."
9/21/2015, Washington Square News, Proposed policy undermines free speech at UC, Elizabeth Moore
"Just over 50 years ago, University of California, Berkeley was the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement that brought the principle of freedom of expression to campuses across America. On Thursday, the University of California regents went back to the drawing board after discussing their proposed policy, a Statement of Principles Against Intolerance, to protect students from intolerant speech. The policy statement was met with criticism from Jewish groups who found its language to be too weak, as well as First Amendment scholars who see it as a threat to free discourse at a campus that championed it half a century ago.
¶
The policy as it was initially presented was vague in its wording, making it unclear just what is being protected and what is being condemned. It also asserts that it 'shall not be used as the basis to discipline students, faculty, or staff,' however, the universities will not hesitate to 'respond promptly and effectively' to any report of intolerance on campus. If left unaddressed, the statement's lack of clarity could have a chilling effect on free speech on campuses, as students may be unclear about what may result in punishment from their university."
9/21/2015, The Daily Californian, History professor at UC Berkeley, Princeton University dies at 100, Anderson Lanham
"Schorske went on to receive the MacArthur 'Genius Grant' in 1981, the year of its inception, and a Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction in the same year for his most well-recognized work, 'Fin-de-Siecle: Politics and Culture.'
¶
At UC Berkeley, Schorske was regarded by colleagues as a liberal thinker and a reputed supporter of the aims of the Free Speech Movement, identifying with students' demands for free speech and respect.
¶
'You have to convert the poison of social discord into the sap of intellectual vitality,' Schorske said in an interview in 2000, reflecting on his time at UC Berkeley."
9/21/2015, San Diego Union-Tribune, Obama offers wise words on campus speech, San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board
"Fifty-one years after the Free Speech Movement began at UC Berkeley, a perversely opposite movement holds sway at too many colleges in California and across America. It's built on the notion that some ideas are so painful to contemplate that they should be kept from mentally fragile college students, who need ample 'trigger warnings' before they are confronted with uncomfortable content.
¶
Thankfully, President Barack Obama used an education town hall last week in Des Moines, Iowa, to rebuke this bizarre status quo: 'I've heard of some college campuses where they don't want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative, or they don't want to read a book if it had language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal toward women,' Obama said. "I don't agree ... that when you become students at colleges, you have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. Anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with them, but you shouldn't silence them by saying you can't come because I'm too sensitive to hear what you have to say.'"
9/20/2015, attn.com, "South Park" Has a Hilarious Take on PC Culture, Laura Donovan
"Late last year, HBO's Bill Maher condemned the PC nature of college campuses after UC Berkeley students petitioned to remove him as the December graduation speaker because of comments he'd made about Islam.
¶
'They invited me because it was the 50th anniversary of something that is legendary on that campus-- the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. I guess they don't teach irony in college anymore,' Maher said. 'And then a few weeks ago, Ben Affleck was on our show and we had a discussion about Islam that I've had a thousands and one nights with a lot of other people, but he's an A-list movie star, so now our very deep media started to care about it... Whoever told you you only had to hear what didn't upset you? The University has come down on my side saying what I hope they would say all along, which is 'we're liberals, we're supposed to like free speech!''
¶
Former NYC Michael Bloomberg made similar remarks during his 2013 speech at Harvard University, saying it's a shame that many commencement speakers have been pushed away because of political correctness and that this is damaging to those who want to learn and grow.
'This spring, it has been disturbing to see a number of college commencement speakers withdraw -- or have their invitations rescinded -- after protests,' Bloomberg said. 'In each case, liberals silenced a voice -- and denied an honorary degree -- to individuals they deemed politically objectionable. This is an outrage. If you want the freedom to worship as you wish, to speak as you wish, and to marry whom you wish, you must tolerate my freedom to do so -- or not do so -- too. What I do may offend you. You may find my actions immoral or unjust. But attempting to restrict my freedoms in ways that you would not restrict your own leads only to injustice.'"
9/19/2015, Los Angeles Times, Carl E. Schorske dies at 100; Pulitzer-winning historian taught at Berkeley and Princeton, Associated Press
"By 1966, Schorske himself was famous enough to be featured in a Time magazine article about the country's most prominent academics. Although known for his work about the distant past, he had participated in the Free Speech movement at UC Berkeley in 1964 and explained to Time that he wanted his classroom discussions to be 'relevant to where the action is.'"
9/18/2015, San Francisco Chronicle, UC regents blast bland intolerance statement as insulting to Jews, Nanette Asimov
"State Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, also a regent, said it will be challenging to knit together a statement that embraces free speech while condemning anti-Semitism. But, she said, 'We can rise to the opportunity.'"
9/17/2015, Los Angeles Times, UC goes back to the drawing board on controversial revamp of free-speech policy, Larry Gordon
"It's been a half-century since the Free Speech Movement was born on the steps of Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley, inspiring nationwide protests and creating the principle of unfettered expression on campus.
¶
On Thursday, UC regents debated a modern-day sequel: how to allow for free speech while protecting students against prejudice.
¶
A proposed new policy against intolerance was criticized by some regents and Jewish groups as too weak in dealing with what they contend are rising numbers of anti-Semitic incidents on campuses. Others complained that it went too far and would stifle dissent.
¶
The UC regents on Thursday withdrew the controversial policy statement and launched a new effort to rewrite it over the next few months."
9/17/2015, California Magazine, Righto: Conservatives Triggered by UC's Trigger Warning and Micro-Aggression Policies, Glen Martin with Marica Petrey
"UC Berkeley has been a burr under the Right's saddle ever since Mario Savio declaimed freely on free speech in Sproul Plaza back in 1964. Cal, in fact, remains the default example for conservatives fulminating about the deficiencies of American higher education. Most recently, they've railed against Cal policies on microaggression and trigger warnings."
9/17/2015, ABC7 News, UC REGENTS DECIDE TO REDRAFT TOLERANCE POLICY, Carolyn Tyler
"UC Berkeley is considered the home of the free speech movement. Now, more than half a century after student protesters lifted a ban on campus political activities, the UC Regents, concerned that free speech has become hate speech, considered a formal policy.
¶
The draft they debated Thursday condemned intolerance, including violence, harassment, hate speech and derogatory language. Students on the Cal campus told ABC7 News they don't feel there's a problem here.
¶
'Walking through Sproul Plaza, people are expressing themselves,' said one student.
¶
'I'm a Sikh and I feel very welcome here in campus,' another student said.
¶
The regents heard complaints Friday that their proposed principles don't adequately address anti-Semitism. For example, a Jewish fraternity at UC Davis was defaced with swastikas earlier this year.
¶
Hatem Bazian is a professor of near eastern and ethnic studies at UC Berkeley. He says he gets anti-Muslim reactions. For example, hate mail after posting about the Muslim boy arrested in Texas this week after his clock was mistaken for a bomb. He says the university should not be a place where any topic is off limits.
¶
'What defines tolerance and intolerance on a college campus? What defines acceptable and unacceptable speech on a college campus? How can we make sure that tolerance is not conflated with unpopular positions?' Bazian said."
9/15/2015, SF State News, SF State graduates are turning the world "Inside Out", Steve Hockensmith
"Melba Beals was a civil rights legend even before coming to SF State. She was one of the famous 'Little Rock Nine' -- African American students who put their lives in danger by attending an until-then all-white Arkansas high school. Once the subject of news stories across the nation, Beals came to SF State to study journalism herself. Other Gator crusaders include Cleve Jones, founder of the AIDS Memorial Quilt; American Indian activist (and first female chief of the Cherokee Nation) Wilma Mankiller; Free Speech Movement icon Mario Savio; and Mu Sochua, who was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 for her fight against international sex trafficking."
9/13/2015, History News Network, Did You Know California Requires Professors to Sign a Loyalty Oath?, Marc Stein
"In the end, I signed California's loyalty oath. For those who are curious about how I came to do so, let's just say that the Fifth Amendment promises me that I cannot be compelled, in any criminal case, to be a witness against myself. Last year, during my first months of teaching at SF State, I enjoyed my proximity to the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. This year, it's time for a new free speech movement, one that will liberate California's public college and university professors from the state's loyalty oath."
9/12/2015, TakePart, Obama Honors Alice Waters With National Humanities Medal, Willy Blackmore
"Before Alice Waters became famous for her cooking at Chez Panisse, she was part of the free-speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a student in the 1960s. So while salad would become her most renowned medium after she opened her restaurant near the campus in 1971, politics has always been important to Waters.
¶
It should be no surprise, then, that as a restaurateur famous enough that she is often referred to simply as 'Alice,' Waters would have a long-running relationship with American politicians. Though she turned down an offer to cook at the inauguration of a fellow Californian, Ronald Reagan, in 1980-she claimed not to know the way to Washington-Waters gladly accepted an invitation from President Barack Obama to come to the capital on Thursday to be honored with a National Humanities Medal."
9/11/2015, San Francisco Chronicle, President honors Alice Waters' vision of ethical food with medal, Carolyn Lochhead
"A New Jersey native whose family seldom dined out, Waters traces her activism to her days as a student of French cultural studies at UC Berkeley, where she was deeply influenced by the Free Speech Movement, and where her junior year abroad took her to France."
9/10/2015, San Francisco Chronicle, Places to find revolution and cool T-shirts, Jon Carroll
"We walked around the campus last weekend. We had a little bath in nostalgia. It was lovely.
¶
Along the way, we happened on the Free Speech Cafe. It features blown-up black-and-white photos of the FSM demonstrations, along with a plaque reminding us of a time when Americans were not allowed to speak freely. Which, if you were there, is a little much. Berkeley was never like North Korea.
¶
I walked up to the counter guy and said, 'You know, I was in the Free Speech Movement.' I regretted saying it even before I said it; it is my experience that younger people are not interested in the tales of older people, no matter how colorful they may be.
¶
Oh Lord, Jon, why did you have to blurt that out?
¶
To my surprise, the barista sheen disappeared from his eyes. He looked interested. 'Really? So who was that?' He pointed at a figure, wild-eyed, surrounded by cops.
¶
'That's Mario Savio,' I said.
¶
'Oh, really. And who's that?'
¶
So I told him the whole story: surrounding the police car, Savio's speech, the confrontation at the Greek Theatre, the arrests at Sproul Hall.
¶
'Really?' he said. He looked at the photos again. 'Really?' he said, with more wonder. I pointed to a plaque above his head. 'I was there when Savio said that. It was the only great speech I ever heard in person.'
¶
So we shook hands and I bought a latte.
¶
Here are the most-quoted lines from that speech. Just a reminder, is all, that there are things you can do in case complaining doesn't seem to cut it. 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop!'"
9/7/2015, Reader Supported News, Will Berkeley Ban Anti-Semitism?, Steve Weissman
"None of the regents have asked me, but I would urge them not to make the same mistake that the university made 51 years ago this month, when its assault on free speech triggered the Free Speech Movement (FSM). Back then, the university was trying to stop us from using the Berleley campus to organize against racial segregation and discrimination by businesses in the San Francisco Bay area. Now, they are trying to stop a new generation of activists throughout the university system from creating a new reality in the Middle East and in US foreign policy. Have the regents and administrators learned nothing over all these years? Don't they realize that they are risking a massive defeat, either in the courts or from the steps of Sproul Hall?"
9/7/2015, First Things, IN LOCO POLITICUS, Molly Oshatz
"And yet, compared to college students in the past, millennials are in some ways woefully under-parented. Before the 1960s, college authorities existed in loco parentis, which meant that when you sent your children away to college, the college assumed parental authority over them. Adults supervised dorm life and carefully monitored social visits between young men and women, making sure that visits remained chaste and that all young women had safely returned to their rooms by a respectable hour. Students could be expelled at will, without due process, for immoral behavior. This changed in the 1960s, mainly because of lawsuits brought by students disciplined for joining in civil rights protests and because of the Free Speech Movement. College students became full adults whose constitutional rights the courts began to protect."
9/3/2015, Swarajya, The Illiberal Indian Left: An Anatomy Of The Petition, Aseem Shukla
"Rather than entertain, let alone respect, an opposing view, leftists today conjure up the concept of 'microagressions' to justify physically assaulting an anti-abortion protestor, or, as Arondekar's colleague repented in a recent retrospective of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, liberals for too long argued for freedom of thought and expression without considering who wields 'power.' These freedoms of expression and thought should be controlled, abrogated and contested everywhere the contemporary leftist holds."
8/31/2015, The Daily Beast, Who Decides What You're Allowed to Learn? Our Knowledge Economy Sellout, Benjamin Hollander
"Activists in the free-speech movement were suspicious. They thought the argument for the multiversity as a critique of the elitist university was a sham meant to pacify democratic desires 'to educate previously unimaginable numbers of students'-or what today we might call 'a diverse student body.' Critics argued the multiversity was actually meant to suppress intellectual inquiry under the cover of serving 'diverse' interests and over-determinedly linking students' objectives with 'the workplace' or service to the nation. Kerr's multiversity was seen by some as a clever, coded educational design appearing to expose students to multiple fields of inquiry, where 'knowledge production' was taking place, but, in reality, was channeling uses of knowledge into discrete frames representing particular outside interests. As such, the purposes of the multiversity betrayed any kind of independent thinking that could be used for political, cultural, and social liberation and imagination."
8/31/2015, Dissident Voice, An Open Letter to Stanley Cohen, Anthony Tarrant
"And I've developed a habit of corresponding with a handful of political prisoners like you whenever the quality of writing for my own account has degraded to a prosaic shitbroth barely rising to the level of travelogue. And for that, I get to write to inspirational souls who have thrown themselves into the gears of the machine Mario Savio exhorted us all to do and you, well, you get me at my absolute worst, my most self indulgent. And I feel badly about that. I do. I sabotage relationships constantly like this on the left as well as the right."
8/27/2015, Huffington Post, America Needs a Bottom/Up Trajectory, Byron Williams
"It's time for the largest and most diverse segment of Americans to change the axis that the nation currently operates. Instead of operating on a left/right axis, why not go in a bottom/up direction?
¶
This is the only way to combat the unhealthy methodical direction that America has been on since the end of the Civil Rights Movement. That majestic movement forced America to come closer to the values that it committed to paper in 1787.
¶
It was the decade of the 60s when the Civil Rights Movement begat the Free Speech movement, which begat the Vietnam protest, which begat environmental legislation. Each movement began at the bottom treading the arduous path upward.
¶
The Occupy Wall Street and tea party efforts offered glimpses of this bottom/up effort but ultimately fell short. The occupy movement didn't have the messaging to hold the nation's attention; and the tea party has been coopted by moneyed interests and now sits comfortably on the left/right alignment.
¶
A bottom/up trajectory can create new alliances; some that may be initially philosophically opposed. Whether one is liberal or conservative, income inequality is real."
8/25/2015, Berkeley News, Coming this fall: Berkeley RADICAL, Ira Glass, Twyla Tharp and issues of global significance, Avi Martin
"Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, will address crime and punishment in America at the annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture (Thursday, Nov. 5, 8 p.m., Pauley Ballroom)." http://events.berkeley.edu/?event_ID=91477
8/21/2015, San Francisco Chronicle, Unique life as bail bondsman to the left - and artist, Walter Addiego
"With the eruption of the Free Speech Movement and many other '60s-era Bay Area protests, Barrish established an ongoing relationship with the counterculture - he became their go-to bondsman."
8/20/2015, PR Newswire, Reflections on The Legacy of John Howard, 1921-2015: American Hero, Conservative Champion, and Faithful Servant,
"In addition, John became a prominent, principled foe of the student radicalism and 'counter-culturalism' sweeping American campuses in the late 1960's and early 1970s. His public debates with Stanford University's 'Maoist' Professor H. Bruce Franklin appeared as the book Who Should Run the University? He also debated leaders of the Berkeley 'free speech' movement. In 1969, President Nixon invited him to join the White House Task Force on Priorities in Higher Education, to suggest ways in which the federal government might help calm the turmoil on American campuses. In 1971, he accepted another Presidential appointment, this time to the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse; he long continued to argue against marijuana legalization."
8/20/2015, Los Angeles Times, Amid an era rife with rebellion, the Watts riots were a wake-up call, George Skelton
"Meanwhile, leftist activists were rebelling against the rapidly expanding Vietnam War. Young men were being drafted to go off and die for a questionable cause.
¶
The UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement and antiwar protests soon spread to other university campuses, triggering mass student violence and angering voters, especially those not having been privileged to attend college themselves. Reagan was their voice."
8/17/2015, The Union, The only thing micro at UC is the thinking of its administrators, George Boardman
"The usual conservative suspects have bashed the notion of microaggression, and they've been joined by the liberal Los Angeles Times, which wrote in a recent editorial:
¶
'It's troubling when an institution tries to squelch debate or discourage controversial ideas, but it's downright alarming when this occurs at a university - and even worse when it's the University of California, whose Berkeley campus was at the center of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s.'
¶
'…colleges have always been bastions of free expression because the learning process requires students to debate controversial and occasionally disturbing ideas. UC has done a disservice to that noble academic goal.'
¶
But don't expect the UC mandarins to deviate from their course."
8/17/2015, The Daily Californian, Bearing the burden of our activist past, Senior Editorial Board
"More recent protests, such as Occupy Wheeler, have not adapted to this change, allowing the methods of iconic and successful movements to shape their protest without taking into consideration the changes implemented in more recent history. Though many expected Occupy Wheeler to cause clashes with the police and administration as they did during the Free Speech Movement and 2011's Occupy Cal, as a result of new campus policy, no such confrontations ever occurred, and the Wheeler protest lasted only a week."
8/11/2015, San Francisco Chronicle, Mom captures a precious moment with Sinatra, Leah Garchik
"Bulletins from the NAACP's Journey to Justice march, from Selma to Washington, D.C., from former Free Speech Movement activist Jack Radey, whose wife, Kathleen Piper [Ed note: Piper was also an FSM participant], is walking:
¶
Radey cites his wife's description of an Alabama sheriff coming to the march with her horse, so that marching kids could meet it. Most Alabama state troopers they've encountered have been African American. 'The march's plan is to walk every step of the way, but sometimes they have been asked to not tie up traffic in small towns, so they have a 'spring team,' a small group who walks through such points while the others ride the bus. No friction or opposition, smooth sailing.'
¶
It took some time to get singing started, but at last, following the example of one older woman, the marchers began lifting their voices. Piper was asked whether she knew the words to 'Oh, Freedom.' Her philosophy: 'When you're making up verses and you are stuck and can't think of one, go back and repeat the first verse until you can think one up.' This advice is useful for just about everything."
8/10/2015, The New Yorker, The Hell You Say, Kelefa Sanneh
"Half a century ago, the defense of free speech was closely identified with groups like the Free Speech Movement, a confederation of activists who came together at the University of California, Berkeley, after a student was arrested for setting up a table of civil-rights literature, in defiance of anti-solicitation rules. Defending free speech meant defending Lenny Bruce and Abbie Hoffman, and, later, Larry Flynt, Robert Mapplethorpe, and the 2 Live Crew. In a 1990 public-service announcement, Madonna, wearing red lingerie and an American flag, delivered a civics lesson, in verse: 'Dr. King, Malcolm X / Freedom of speech is as good as sex.' She was urging young people to vote, in partnership with Rock the Vote, whose slogan was 'Censorship is Un-American.'"
8/10/2015, Reader Supported News, Free Speech: What Difference?, Steve Weissman
"We started by simply refusing to leave the protection of free speech, press, and assembly to lawyers, judges, and a Constitution whose meaning the Supreme Court rewrites at will. Civil liberties is a birthright we best defend with public education and massive civil disobedience. When in the 1960s students at Berkeley and other universities demanded almost complete free speech on campus, and were willing to fight to get, we got it. When we dramatically insisted that free speech be extended to suspected Communists or anyone else, we severely shredded the non-stop effort by supposedly liberal university and government officials to redbait us. When mostly black civil right activists took to the streets and highways, we won the beginning of a campaign we must now continue to ensure that black lives matter. When enough young people burned their draft cards in public, we held a war-making government in check. But when protesters willingly allowed themselves to be herded into wire-enclosed 'free speech zones,' the right to protest lost most of its punch."
08/10/2015, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, 28 California colleges, universities have 'restrictive' protest, demonstration policies, Beau Yarbrough
"Sonoma State does not have a free speech zone policy, according to spokeswoman Susan Kashack, but it does have something else: Math instructor Mario Savio gained worldwide prominence in 1964 and 1965 as part of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, which demanded that UC Berkeley administrators lift the ban on on-campus political action and speech.
¶
'Because of who he was (an excellent teacher), what he stood for in the '60s, and the strives that were made in that movement, a group of students, faculty, staff and administrators chose to honor Mario by creating a 'Mario Savio Speakers Corner' on campus,' Kashack said. 'It is used by some groups and not by others, but free speech is not limited to that area.'"
8/8/2015, The San Francisco Chronicle, How a Mime Troupe arrest sparked Bill Graham's promoting career, Gary Kamiya
"Several months later, [Ronald] Davis was found guilty after the judge at the trial disallowed any testimony about free speech. But the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit claiming that the commissioners' actions amounted to censorship. In 1966, a San Francisco judge ruled that the parks commission could not censor the content of performances and that the Mime Troupe must be permitted the use of public parks.
¶
It was another victory in the long battle over free speech in the Bay Area, which included such milestones as a beat cop's casual censorship of Beat poetry, the 1960 City Hall protests against the House Un-American Activities Committee, Lenny Bruce's 1961 obscenity bust at the Jazz Workshop and, of course, the epic Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964.
¶
'It was one of the things that opened the door of artistic freedom in San Francisco,' [Herb] Gold said. 'You could see the Mime Troupe's action that day as a hyphen between the Beats and the hippies.'"
8/8/2015, The Berkeley Daily Planet, Another Troop Train Memoir (First Person), Lee Felsenstein
"I just read that the Planet was interested in first-hand stories of the Troop Train protest of 50 years ago. Gar Smith mentioned that I had been "on the tracks" and wondered what I had to report. Well, here it is.
¶
I had been attracted to Berkeley by the beatnik/political scene and quickly became involved in the small group of general-purpose campus radicals upon my arrival in 1963 - I had the honor of picketing Madame Nhu in October of that year with Allen Ginsburg. After service in the Free Speech Movement I was naturally attracted to the Vietnam Day Committee' efforts to protest the growing war. I hung around the VDC house on Fulton Street and did what I could to help."
8/7/2015, The Berkeley Daily Planet, The Day the Troop Trains Came to Berkeley, Gar Smith
"City officials had been advised that the Pentagon planned to send a train loaded with young soldiers through Berkeley on their way to the Oakland Army Terminal, to board ships to Vietnam where they would ordered to kill the 'Viet Cong.' It was clear that many of them would not be coming back.
¶
Many of us walked to that intersection filled with memories of the day in 1964 when, as students, we spontaneously sat down around a police car driven onto the Berkeley campus to arrest an activist named Jack Weinberg. That nonviolent sit-in not only immobilized the squad car, it stopped the arrest and kicked off a little ruckus called the Free Speech Movement (FSM).
¶
'What if?' we thought. 'What if a group of nonviolent protesters occupied those railroad tracks and brought a Pentagon's war machine to a halt?'"
8/2/2015, San Francisco Chronicle, Pamela Krasney Obituary,
"Pamela was an extraordinary woman, abounding in compassion, courage, humor, integrity, intelligence, wisdom and beauty. It was our good fortune to have her in our midst for more than 71 years. Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1943, she moved with her family to Northern California in 1951 and graduated from Santa Catalina School for Girls in 1961. Pamela was an innovative, catalytic and deeply authentic social activist for more than half a century, starting with her participation in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was an art history major in the mid-nineteen-sixties."
7/31/2015, California Magazine, Sex, Drugs, Revolution: 50 Years On, Barbarians Gather to Recall The Berkeley Barb, Pat Joseph
"There were other underground papers in the Bay Area at the time as well, but they tended to be more narrowly targeted; The Oracle to 'the heads,' the Express Times to the political activists. The Barb was unique, says former contributor and Free Speech Movement alum Kate Coleman, in being 'the only one that brought the whole counterculture together-drugs, rock 'n' roll, free speech, free love, politics-all of it.'"
7/30/2015, The Point Reyes Light, Tom D'Onofrio, wood carver and baby blesser, dies at 73, Samantha Kimmey
"Tom studied theology at West Virginia Wesleyan University for two years. There, he met and married his first wife, Barbara. He spent another three years in Ohio studying theology before the couple moved to Berkeley in the mid-1960s, where Tom planned to complete a doctoral degree at the Graduate Theological Seminary.
¶
But living in Berkeley during the tumult of that decade changed Tom profoundly, leading him away from a life as a Methodist minister and, ultimately, to his life in Bolinas.
¶
According to his friend Jim Pelkey, Tom liked to recount his first day of classes at Berkeley. Walking around campus with a pipe in his mouth, he ran into a bare-chested woman and heard a speech by Mario Savio, a founder of the free-speech movement. He gravitated toward Mr. Savio's call to avoid becoming a 'cog' in the machine.
¶
Unburdened by the structures of home and church, he started to open up spiritually and philosophically. 'His whole life was structured,' said Tim, including his early family life, work and studies. But in the environment of Berkeley, Tim went on, 'His free spirit bore through and came out.'"
7/29/2015, San Francisco Chronicle, Musician's life brings more than passing interest in passing, Leah Garchik
"Sculptor and filmmaker Jerry Barrish was founder-proprietor of Barrish Bail Bonds, which 50 years ago bailed hundreds of Free Speech Movement protesters out of jail, and 35 years ago was the first business donor to the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. 'Plastic Man,' a portrait of Barrish and his post-bail-bondsman life as an artist, directed by well-known local documentarian William Farley and produced by longtime Festival director Janis Plotkin, showed at the festival on Saturday afternoon."
7/22/2015, Berkeleyside, A visit with David Goines: Berkeley's legendary letterpress printer and lithographer, Melati Citrawireja
"When the 1960s rolled around, Goines was very active in the Free Speech Movement. He became the head leaflet printer for the activists which led to his expulsion from UC Berkeley. His dislocation from the academic life was actually a blessing in disguise, he says, launching him into a career as a printer." [Ed note: It was occupying Sproul Hall that got Goines arrested.]
7/20/2015, The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley International House enters its 85 year of providing community, refuge, Suhauna Hussain
"I-House Berkeley was initially met with considerable resistance. Many protested the construction because it would allow not only white people and underrepresented minorities to live together, but also men and women.
¶
'I-House broke the color barrier for students of all different nationalities,' said I-House Executive Director Hans Giesecke.
¶
[Kwei] U noted that the Free Speech Movement exposed him, for the first time, to the 'anti-establishment thoughts Berkeley has become famous for.' He said this movement was initially shocking to him, as he grew up in Hong Kong, where citizens were taught to respect the establishment.
¶
'It was a very exciting, tumultuous time, but as a foreign student, you had to be careful not do anything to endanger your visa status,' U said."
7/9/2015, The College Fix, UC-Berkeley protesters crash the chancellor's office with disco and cake, Greg Piper
"But the school that birthed the Free Speech Movement (imperfectly practiced today) can still occasionally provoke a protest that's both entertaining and informative.
¶
Students that oppose UC-Berkeley's increasing reliance on contract workers came up with a novel jamboree on Tuesday, The Daily Californian reports:
¶
At about noon, a group of about a dozen students and workers combined gathered before the doors of Chancellor Nicholas Dirks' office, carrying a letter and a cake decorated with the phrase: 'I don't always pay fair wages, but when I do it's in Berkeley and Richmond.' They sang an original song, based on the song 'Super Freak,' with lyrics criticizing the administrators for treating workers unfairly."
7/8/2015, Daily Sabah, University of California students protest use of "Anti-Semitism" term to silence Israel criticism,
"'If implemented, this definition would restrict free speech and academic freedom with regards to criticism of the policies of the State of Israel,' warned UC Santa Cruz Professor Nancy Stoller. 'In the same year that the University of California celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, it is distressing that the current president of the University of California is asking the Regents to adopt this definition that would threaten speech more than it would protect students.'"
7/7/2015, Berkeleyside, Op-ed: Berkeley should be the first city in the US to host the 'Anything to Say?' public art project, Tom Miller
"[American journalist Charles] Glass and [Italian sculptor Davide] Dormino would also like the statues located near where Mario Savio spoke and through the local sponsoring organization, Green Cities Fund, have approached the University asking to place the statues near the corner of Telegraph and Bancroft only a few feet from where Mario Savio delivered his fiery speech in 1964. Then, the University, under pressure from Governor Reagan in collaboration with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, fought the Free Speech Movement [1]. Hopefully it will make a wiser choice today and allow Snowden, Manning and Assange to stand on this hallowed ground."
7/6/2015, Broadway World, REMEMBER ROSE is Released, Books News Desk
"Her family put down roots in a Mountain View prune orchard when that small agricultural community was beginning its transition to becoming the heart of Silicon Valley. She arrived in Berkeley right after the Free Speech Movement, and describes her interactions with students who had participated in the historic sit-in at the University of California's Sproul Hall where they demanded their constitutional right of freedom of speech on the campus."
7/2/2015, People's World, On 4th of July, remember CPUSA's commitment to patriotism, Tony Pecinovsky
"[Gus] Hall's successful speaking tour wasn't an aberration. In the 1960's, Communists were speaking on college and university campuses in front of large audiences all across the country, thereby challenging HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee and its assault on the Bill of Rights, and spurring what would soon become the campus free speech movement, led by young Communists like Alva Buxenbaum, Bettina Aptheker, and Jarvis Tyner - just to name a few. Thousands of students would soon join the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs, the Young Workers' Liberation League, and the Communist Party.
¶
That the Communist Party USA was in the vanguard in the defense of democracy, the Bill of Rights, and the campus free speech movement serves to exemplify its long-standing commitment to radical patriotism - this July 4, and every July 4." [ed note: Scholars knowledgeable about the matters recounted in this article consider it to be flawed in many respects, including the account of the FSM. Bettina Aptheker wrote: "Jarvis Tyner and Alva Buxenbaum had nothing to do with the Free Speech Movement. Both lived in the New York area at the time; however, both were involved with the Du Bois Clubs, which was a national organization.]
7/1/2015, Berkeleyside, Council upholds decision not to landmark Campanile Way, Eden Teller
"'We need to invoke the spirit of Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement that helped put Berkeley on the map in the first place,' [Max] Anderson said. He called for the public to 'throw your body on it [the political process] and stop it from grinding you up,' paraphrasing Savio's famous speech on the steps of Sproul Hall."
6/25/2015, The Guardian, Gone With the Wind tweeter says she is being shunned by US arts institutions, Edward Helmore
"Earlier this year, Place was dropped from the Berkeley poetry conference celebrating the 50th year of the free speech movement on campus." [ed note: this was not the 9/30/2014 political poetry event held on the UCB campus by the FSM Archives. see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcO9M-2wJU0&feature=youtu.be]
6/22/2015, The Daily Beast, The University of California's Insane Speech Police, Robby Soave
"During the '60s, students at Berkeley understood that a campus climate of absolute tolerance for free speech was a precondition to successfully combating injustice in the UC system and elsewhere. Liberal and libertarian students and professors fought the administration for the right to hold political rallies, opt out of loyalty oaths, and advocate against the Vietnam War. They trusted that their ideas would win out in the court of public opinion, and only needed to establish that they had the legal right to utter such ideas.
¶
Today's UC campus body would be well served to recall these lessons. There is in fact no better place for unfettered free speech than a university campus, and students who spend their four-plus years in college without encountering provocation or offense won't be adequately prepared for life in the real world. Students should recognize a censorship-lite approach like Napolitano's for what it is: an attack on the idea of the university as a safe haven for all kinds of speech."
6/19/2015, The San Diego Union-Tribune, From Free Speech Movement to this: Anything you say may create hostile environment, Steven Greenhut
"SACRAMENTO - The University of California has been the subject of derision lately for its recent faculty seminars designed to wipe out so-called 'microaggressions,' which the university describes as 'everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs or insults' that 'communicate hostile messages' to members of 'marginalized' groups. These can be unintentional and even 'preconscious' or 'unconscious' slights.
¶
Some of the media barbs have been focused on a fact sheet, distributed by the UC president's office, that gives examples of such behaviors that create a hostile environment -- e.g., asking a person of Asian or Latino descent where they are from, saying that 'America is the land of opportunity,' or criticizing affirmative action as 'racist.' UC identifies other microaggressions as mistaking a female doctor for a nurse or 'being forced to choose male or female on a form.'"
6/14/2015, San Francisco Chronicle, Historic, action-packed City Hall turns 100, Heather Knight
"Another dark day was May 13, 1960, when City Hall hosted a hearing by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was traveling the country trying to root out communism.
¶
College students protested the hearings, and police turned fire hoses on them, literally washing them down the huge marble staircase inside the building and hitting them with clubs. The protest made national news and is credited with starting the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley.
¶
'Today, you and I can't imagine something like that happening in San Francisco, much less in City Hall,' said Jim Yager, a former producer at KQED who is making a documentary of City Hall's 100 years. It is set to debut at City Hall on Nov. 18 and air on KQED afterward."
11 giugno 2015, L'Opinione, Hollywood e l'Italia: no more stereotypes?, Umberto Mucci
"E vorrei aggiungere un documentario come "Berkeley in the 1960s", che mostra un grande italoamericano, una persona realmente vissuta: Mario Savio, che guidò il movimento studentesco dell'epoca. Incredibilmente Savio, un americano di origine siciliana, era cresciuto balbuziente ma divenne uno dei più grandi oratori della sua generazione. Più Hollywood si concentra sui veri personaggi italoamericani realmente vissuti, come Zamperini e Savio, meno spazio ha per falsificare la nostra comunità." [And I would add a documentary as "Berkeley in the 1960s," which shows a large Italian-American, a person actually lived: Mario Savio, who led the student movement of the time. Incredibly Savio, an American of Sicilian origin, grew up stuttering but became one of the greatest orators of his generation. More Hollywood focuses on real Italian-American characters actually lived like Zamperini and Savio, less space has to falsify our community.]
6/7/2015, truthout, Why Did The New York Times Ask Everybody but Grad Students About Grad Student Unions?, Anna Waltman, Natasha Raheja and Shannon Ikebe
"These efforts date back to the 1960s. Graduate student-workers at UC Berkeley unionized during the Free Speech Movement in 1964; in 1969, graduate student-workers joined the faculty bargaining units at CUNY and Rutgers, followed closely by University of Wisconsin-Madison's Teaching Assistants Association, who gained recognition independently of faculty in the same year." [Ed Note: Per NYU Professor Robert Cohen, TA unionization efforts date back at least to the 1930s.]
6/6/2015, The Daily Caller, Pam Geller: Left 'Wants To Crush All Dissent', Kerry Picket
"GELLER: From the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, it has been a long descent - or perhaps a long revelation of the left's authoritarianism and hypocrisy. The left is not interested in free speech or free discourse. It wants to crush all dissent."
6/3/2015, Monterey County Weekly, A baby boomer jokes and sings odes to his generation. Will an elderly Carmel audience dig it?, Walter Ryce
"My situation was more extreme. My biological mother got sick and I was raised by a black women those first years in Bakersfield. When Civil Rights came along, on the front page of the national papers, the four girls walking out of their church in Alabama-those girls were my age. That could be any one of us. By the time the Civil Rights Movement hit, oh man. Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Mario Salvio. I wanted to be Mario Salvio. He led the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley."
6/3/2015, ARTnews, 'ALL ART SHOULD BE FOR FUN': DAN GRAHAM ON HIS PUPPET ROCK 'N' ROLL PERFORMANCE AT THE KITCHEN, Alex Greenberger
"Graham went on to explain the show's story, which takes place during the '60s and involves a 35-year-old presidential candidate named Neil Sky. Modeled after Neil Young, Sky represents everything a '60s kid could want. (The title of the performance is borrowed from Jack Weinberg, an activist at UC Berkeley during the '60s and a member of the Free Speech Movement.) Notably, Sky will put everyone over 30 in a rehab facility where they'll get LSD in their drinking water. The plot is loopy and absurd, and Graham said it was inspired by Billy Wilder's comedies. Mostly, however, 'I did it just for fun,' Graham said. 'All art should be for fun.'"
5/30/2015, Salon, Charles Manson, the counterculture and the rise of the Sunbelt political right: What "Aquarius" nails about California in the '60s, Scott Timberg
"Sunbelt millionaires and suburban moralists appalled by the Free Speech movement, student radicalism, youth culture, 'creeping socialism,' black militancy and other developments made up the support not just these two men but generations of conservative power brokers. Radical right-wing groups like the John Birch Society have strong bases of power in and around L.A., but especially in adjacent, conservative Orange County."
5/29/2015, The Daily Californian, 50 years after Free Speech Movement, students continue to protest for new causes, Melissa Wen
"The marching feet and righteous cries of protest have long been widely regarded as a distinguishing feature of UC Berkeley and its surrounding city. But about five decades after the Free Speech Movement, the issues inciting dissent among students and residents have moved far beyond the campus's most iconic days of demonstration.
¶
In the past year, protests have erupted in Berkeley because of issues ranging from the national reaction to police killings of unarmed black men to the matter of public-private partnerships conducted by the campus. The way the city and campus respond to protests, too, has evolved. Most recently, an investigation into Berkeley police's use of tear gas and other less-than-lethal weapons on demonstrators in December was launched.
¶
See the following guide to the causes of and responses to some of the UC Berkeley-related protests in recent history."
5/29/2015, ABC30 Action News, WEBSITE ACCUSED OF TARGETING POLITICALLY ACTIVE COLLEGE STUDENTS, INFRINGING FREE SPEECH, Lyanne Melendez
"The cradle of the free speech movement is being tested in a big way.
¶
A website called Canary Mission is targeting University of California Berkeley and other college students for expressing their political views. One of their goals is to prevent these students from getting jobs.
¶
In the past, coal miners took canaries into coal mines to detect dangerous gases. If there were toxins, the canary would die before killing the miners. It was their warning system. This website Canary Mission warns employers of who are protesting, particularly against Israel.
¶
Having a political position may cost you a job, that's what those behind the website are telling all students, especially those with what they claim support anti-American and anti-Israeli messages.
¶
Among those targeted is the current UC student regent Sadia Saifuddin. The website has a complete profile on her, including what they call infamous quotes."
5/22/2015, National Catholic Reporter, Different visions of church collide in San Francisco archdiocese, Dan Morris-Young
"'I have lived in the Bay Area most of my life,' she said. She grew up amid the student Free Speech Movement at the University of California in the 1960s; lived in San Francisco in the time of the Haight-Ashbury hippie movement; ministered in an urban parish 'at the height of the Black Panther Party developments'; and has had 'ties with the nascent and now flourishing LBGT community through friends and associates,' she explained.
¶
'I do not believe that these seemingly disparate historical movements and aspects of a regional culture have faded into the dim past, but in fact they give substance and roots to the reality of a vibrant multi-layered Bay Area culture,' she said."
5/21/2015, Huffington Post, Tolerance and Totalitarianism, Michael Shermer and Frank Turek
"Banning speakers includes the recent wave of 'disinvitations' of controversial figures after waves of protest from students and faculty. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), 257 such incidents have occurred since 2000, 111 of which were successful in preventing the invited speakers from delivering their speeches. In this theater of the absurd students from U.C. Berkeley -- birthplace of the 1960's free speech movement -- attempted to disinvite the comedian and social commentator Bill Maher, who delivered his commencement speech nonetheless, pointing out that apparently irony isn't taught in college any longer.
¶
What may have started out as well-intentioned actions at curbing prejudices and changing thoughts with the goal of making people more tolerant has now morphed into campus thought police attempting to impose totalitarian measures that result in silencing dissent of any kind. The result is the very opposite of what free speech and a college education is all about."
5/20/2015, Houston Chronicle, Student sues Blinn College, says 'free speech zone' violates First Amendment, Benjamin Wermund
"That free speech zone, the lawsuit says, is unconstitutional, because it 'quarantines free expression to a tiny fraction of the Blinn College campus, despite the fact that the college has many open areas and sidewalks that are suitable for expressive activities.'
¶
The zones are common at colleges. The foundation estimates that rougly one in six schools in the nation have free speech zones. [Attorney Catherine] Sevcenko said the zones' roots are in the free speech movement of the 1960s, when universities set about establishing speakers' corners, areas where students could always go to speak their mind.
¶
'At some point the principal got turned on its head and they started using these areas to quarantine speech instead of a go-to spot where you could always express yourself,' Sevcenko said.
¶
[Nicole] Sanders, who is studying political science and wants to go into constitutional law, said she hopes her case will expand free speech on the campus.
¶
'I hope this will make all of Blinn College a free speech area and maybe that more students will be interested in starting clubs without having to jump through hoops just to talk to students they go to school with,' Sanders said."
5/17/2015, Time, Baltimore's Refusal to Be Silent Was an American Triumph, Tracy K. Smith
"But if what happened in April 2015 in Baltimore was indeed rioting, then I would wager that so were the uprisings in Paris, Mexico City, and Prague in 1968-tumultuous unrest that cemented for citizens the world over the absolute value of democracy. If citizens who took to the streets of Baltimore in April 2015 were rioters, then so was UC Berkeley undergraduate Mario Savio, who helped galvanize upper-middle-class, white, educated American youth around the Free Speech movement in 1964 with this admonition:
¶
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop!
¶
The visceral quality of that machine metaphor conjures the physical nature of conflict, of vulnerability, in such moments of all-out commitment. It invokes our sense of Civil Rights activists 'going limp,' the lynched bodies hanging from the branches of American trees, the bodies made to march under the weight of guns, made to take aim at other bodies in the name of war. And the relevance of those terms to the events happening only days ago in Baltimore makes me feel foolish-outright delusional-for having once thought the many decades separating us in our 21st-century now from that awful then might keep us-and not just those of us who are black, but all of us-safe."
05/15/2015, Huffington Post, Purdue Takes A Stand For Free Speech, No Matter How Offensive Or Unwise, Tyler Kingkade
"Then in November, students at the University of California, Berkeley, attempted to block Bill Maher from speaking at their winter commencement over his past comments about Muslims. Such an irony, the TV host couldn't help but note. Exactly 50 years earlier, Berkeley had been the home of the Free Speech Movement.
¶
The Purdue policy states, 'It is for the individual members of the University community, not for the University as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose.' Nearly identical language appears in the Chicago version."
5/11/2015, Los Angeles Times, California woman receives Mother's Day greeting from Hillary Clinton, Seema Mehta
"Frank grew up in New Jersey and attended graduate school at UC Berkeley during the 'Free Speech Movement,' a milestone in her political development.
¶
'That's where I was coming from. We thought we had the answers. We always saw a bright future,' Frank said. 'We were so naïve but we were committed. At 73, one is no longer so naïve.'"
5/11/2015, AZ Central, Cacophonous liberty is neither gentle nor kind, Robert Leger
"Freedom is messy. It jostles, it elbows, it pushes and shoves. It is contentious. It has to make room for Pamela Geller and Mr. Rogers, for the Klan and the Quakers, for angry protests and quiet vigils.
¶
That is liberty. Oh, that it could be as kind and gentle as some of our readers wish. But then, it would no longer be freedom."
5/8/2015, USA Today College Contributor network, Mario Savio honored on Free Speech Movement 50th anniversary, Kayla E. Galloway
"'It was hard to be Mario Savio because he didn't want to be famous,' said Jonah Raskin, professor emeritus of communication studies at Sonoma State and a former colleague and friend. 'People read about him or saw him or heard him on TV and had an idea of who he was and, in a lot of ways, he just wanted to be an ordinary person.'
¶
He recounted how Savio, who served as a professor of mathematics and philosophy at Sonoma State from 1990 until his untimely death in 1996, believed that college campuses should be used as a platform to inform, and not a place where students were restricted in their ideas and forced to silence their speech. '(The 1960s), though not that long ago, were like the dark ages for free speech,' he said.
¶
Elaine Sundberg, associate vice president of academic programs at Sonoma State, said people would often approach Savio and ask if he was 'the' Mario Savio. His response, she said: ''Well, somebody has to be him.''
¶
Joshua Gutierrez, a student at the college interested in a career in journalism, said he sees Savio's ideals as principles to live by. 'Savio's ideas should extend to any individuals who feel an obligation to defend their own condition or that of another,' said Gutierrez.
¶
Raskin added that Savio was a 'moral crusader' because of the influence of his rhetoric, whether in the 1960s or at Sanoma State. He 'would get in front of an audience and start to speak and it wasn't only what he said, it was how he said it. He had a sort of electrical force,' said Raskin. 'He seemed fearless.'"
5/7/2015, Pasadena Weekly, Birth of a Movement, André Coleman
"Cullors earned a degree in religion and philosophy from UCLA. She is also a Fulbright Scholarship recipient and in 2007 she was named the Mario Savio Activist of the Year.
¶
Cullors and others demanding accountability won a major victory in December when the LA County Board of Supervisors voted to create a civilian oversight panel to oversee the county Sheriff's Department.
¶
"We live in a county that is the biggest jailer in the world, housing anywhere from 17,000 to 20,000 people inside its eight facilities. This is not just a national problem; it's a local problem."
¶
Cullors regularly sets five- and 10-year goals for herself and told the Weekly that in five years she expects to see 'authentic' black leadership in all branches of government and more political power in black communities. In 10 years, Cullors hopes to see the prison population cut in half and some law enforcement agencies abolished.
¶
She has recently started Black Spring, which is designed to help African Americans realize that the fight is not only for equality, but for human rights."
5/7/2015, American Thinker, It's Time for a New Free Speech Movement on Campus, Bonnie K. Snyder
"He [Mario Savio] descended the steps a legendary hero of the left and the modern politicized university environment was born.
¶
Since then, we've seen five continuous decades of increasing and unrelenting progressive policies taking root and reaching full flower in academia. The result, unfortunately, is anything but 'free speech.' Instead, we have achieved the absolute antithesis of what Savio once championed: the enforcement of political correctness, speech codes, trigger warnings, free speech zones, safe zones, and the suppression of arbitrarily-labeled 'hate speech' or anything that supposedly offends someone or deviates from the current hegemonic political orthodoxy.
¶
In half a century, astonishingly, we've come full circle and achieved the exact inverse of what the Free Speech Movement claimed it intended. What began as lawless civil disobedience now exploits campus regulations to rescind from others the same rights these erstwhile campus radicals once demanded for themselves. In other words: the oppressed have become the oppressors. Talk about Freudian reaction formation!
¶
Today, at college campuses across the country, we regularly read of bullying, intimidation, shouting down opposing points of view, and dis-invitations delivered to accomplished speakers representing unpopular views. Examples of free speech outrages in academia are legion. Here are but a mere smattering from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's legal case website: Marquette University Faculty Member Facing Loss of Tenure for Opinions on his Blog; Pro-Palestinian Group Fined for 'Offensive' Political Expression; Unconstitutional Punishment of Sorority Over 'Inappropriate' Theme Party; Citrus College student threatened with removal from campus by an administrator for asking a fellow student to sign a petition protesting NSA surveillance of American citizens.
¶
Without delving into the details of these individual cases, the overriding principle is clear and sacrosanct: free speech rights exist precisely to defend unpopular speech. Popular speech, after all, needs no defending. On campuses across the country today, the freedom to speak one's mind has been redefined as the freedom to repeat the tired, worn, passionless, approved slogans of the powers-that-be, or else."
5/5/2015, San Francisco Chronicle, Richard Alan Raznikov,
"After graduating from San Rafael High School, where he served as SB President, Richard matriculated to U.C. Berkeley in 1964, where much to the consternation of his parents, he became actively involved in the Free Speech Movement."
5/4/2015, Laist, Werner Herzog's Thoughts On Los Angeles Are Pretty Great, Emma G. Gallegos
"There is a great deal of industry in the city and a real working class; I also appreciate the vibrant presence of the Mexicans. In the last half century every significant cultural and technical trend has emerged from California, including the Free Speech Movement and the acceptance of gays and lesbians as an integral part of a dignified society, computers and the Internet, and-thanks to Hollywood-the collective dreams of the entire world. A fascinating density of things exists there like nowhere else in the world."
5/1/2015, UC Santa Cruz NewsCenter, Bettina Aptheker featured in NBC's 'Rebels & Revolutions' documentary, Scott Rappaport
"An interview with UC Santa Cruz professor of feminist studies Bettina Aptheker will be featured in Rebels & Revolutions--the second installment of NBC Bay Area's year-long documentary series Bay Area Revelations--premiering Saturday May 9, at 9 p.m.
¶
Narrated by Emmy Award-winning actor Peter Coyote, the one-hour film examines the San Francisco Bay Area's history in leading political and social movements, beginning with the Free Speech Movement and covering gay liberation, black power, drug culture, AIDS, assassinations, cults, and same-sex marriage.
¶
The program is told primarily through personal interviews with individuals who played a major role in these pivotal points in history-also including Senator Dianne Feinstein, Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor Willie Brown, State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, UC Santa Cruz alumnus and author David Talbot, and San Francisco District Attorney and civil rights lawyer Terence Hallinan."
5/1/2015, Counterpunch, The Forgotten Power of the Vietnam Protest, 1965-1975, Tom Hayden
"The roots of the Vietnam peace movement were in the civil rights, student, and women's movements of the early Sixties. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Students for a Democratic Society, the Free Speech Movement and the National Organization for Women all were asserting domestic demands just as the US draft and troop escalation took place in 1965. SNCC's Mississippi Summer Project and Freedom Democrats' convention challenge occurred at the time of the August 1964 Tonkin Gulf 'incident' and war authorization. SDS supported "part of the way" with LBJ in late 1964 while planning the first peace march in April 1965 in case Johnson broke his pledge of no ground troops. The Free Speech Movement of September 1964 set the stage for the Vietnam Day Committee and Berkeley's first teach-in. The civil rights movement and also Women's Strike inspired the National Organization of Women for Peace, which opposed Strontium-90 and pushed for President Kennedy's 1963 arms treaty with the Soviet Union. Together these movements were demanding a shift from Cold War priorities to "jobs and justice", the banner of the 1963 March on Washington, and were deeply shocked by the assassination of Kennedy and subsequent escalation in Vietnam."
4/27/2015, UC Berkeley NewsCenter, Chinese students test the waters of free speech, Yasmin Anwar
"Among other things, international students are intrigued by Berkeley's free speech history, which was sparked in 1964 when the university banned political activities at the Telegraph Avenue entrance of the campus. The protests culminated in a student takeover of Sproul Hall, boosted by philosophy major Mario Savio's 'bodies upon the gears' speech on the administration building's steps.
¶
The protests led to negotiations between students and administrators and eventually opened the campus to student activism. Last September marked the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, whose legacy clearly lives on.
¶
"I'm drawn to Berkeley because I feel it's more free," says Haojun Li, 20, a sophomore double-majoring in statistics and computer science who has leaped at every opportunity for expressing dissent since coming to Berkeley from Shanghai in 2013."
4/25/2015, Los Angeles Review of Books, Reflections on the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM) 50 Years Later, Richard Hertzberg
"What was consistently clear from statements, discussions, and conversations is that for those in attendance, FSM was a deeply transformational experience, one with enduring impacts that still reverberate today -- although not always the same impacts, and not necessarily fully understood either. As one person put it during a group session, 'I've spent 50 years trying to figure out what happened here, and to me, in the last months of 1964.'"
4/21/2015, Sonoma State Star, Student recipient of activist award, Joshua Gutierrez
"Sonoma State University student Sandy Espino Valenciano will be recognized with the Mario Savio Award for student activism by the American Civil Liberties Union northern California chapter of Sonoma County on May 3 in Santa Rosa.
¶
As Northern California Coordinator of the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance, Valenciano has devoted herself to the fair treatment of undocumented persons."
04/17/2015, San Jose Mercury News, Nancy Pelosi to give SJSU commencement speech, Josh Richman
"She gave the commencement address last year at UC Berkeley, where she highlighted the Free Speech Movement's 50th anniversary and spoke about challenging the status quo. An estimated 22,000 people attended that speech.
¶
'Opportunity for all has always been a defining feature of our economic system. Yet, we have challenges. So let's be disruptors,' she said, as reported by the Daily Cal. 'Let's build ladders of opportunity ... Education is a critical rung in that ladder.'"
4/15/2015, The Nation, The New Thought Police, Joan W. Scott
"Since [Phyllis] Wise's letter, a number of university leaders have echoed her invocation of civility. In September, Nicholas Dirks-once a postcolonial historian and anthropologist who wrote critically of British rule in India, and now chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley-released a statement to his campus community. Reminding his constituents that 2014 was the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, he called for civility in terms that should surprise anyone who has studied the First Amendment or the long history of academic freedom: "We can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility. Simply put, courteousness and respect in words and deeds are basic preconditions to any meaningful exchange of ideas. In this sense, free speech and civility are two sides of a single coin-the coin of open, democratic society." Dirks seems to have forgotten that the Free Speech Movement was not an event characterized by civility either in its expression or in its suppression."
4/15/2015, The Daily Californian, What if Sproul Plaza didn’t exist?, Ismael Farooqui
"And the signs! We'll certainly miss the signs, the flyers, the papers, the hastily stapled advertisements, the free poems, sonnets, haikus, limericks - you name it! What about the invasion of elderly activists on Friday afternoons? There must be a progressive geriatric clinic somewhere close by. Or maybe their grandkids just don't visit them enough.
¶
Alas, the loss of such hallowed ground would make us pine for its return! Sproul Plaza is UC Berkeley. It conjures up memories of the Free Speech Movement, of sexual and mental liberation and of guided tours! Oh, how we miss those! It was the place of Occupy and many other movements. Even professor Robert Reich has stood at the feet of the great Sproul Hall to deliver an address to the student body. The plaza has the power to connect us with our past better than the history offices in Dwinelle Hall. How could we forget it? Losing Sproul Plaza would be like losing the thumping heart of a campus that has a reputation for inciting high blood pressure in its student body."
4/15/2015, Huffington Post, Lincoln, Lynching, and the Long Way Home, Byron Williams
"But even after the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which helped overturn 58 years of legalized segregation, there remained a tension between the law and its practice. So we needed Rosa Parks to keep her bus seat in Montgomery. We needed four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University to ask for a cup of coffee at the Woolworth diner in Greensboro in 1960. We needed a letter from Birmingham Jail, a march on Washington, and the valiant efforts of others before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed.
¶
(That inspired students at the University of California at Berkeley and the free-speech movement. Along that same line rose the protesters who questioned the morality of the Vietnam conflict.)"
4/14/2015, The Star Ledger, Political correctness at Princeton: When it comes to free speech, they're no Tigers, Paul Mulshine
"[Professor Alan] Kors noted that the movement for free speech began with left-wing students at Berkeley in 1964, but it's now the left-wingers who are calling for speech codes and howling in outrage at perceived offenses, he said.
¶
'Somehow we have gone from the Free Speech Movement to the you-can't-offend-anyone movement,' he said. 'That to me is the infantilization of students.'"
4/10/2015, The Daily Californian, Discourse on free speech, civility gives us lessons to take forward, Nicholas Dirks
"I began this academic year at convocation and in my first Daily Californian column talking about the importance of community for this university. I observed that a community that is diverse and yet strong, passionately engaged but also respectful of difference, is what makes it possible for us to take risks: 'It is our safety net as we explore new ideas, engage with new people and perspectives, and seek to translate our beliefs and commitments into tangible form.' I also noted, echoing the sentiments of Mario Savio himself, that as a university that became identified with the principle of free speech during a campuswide movement 50 years ago, we must remember that our campus commitment to the constitutional protections on all speech, political or otherwise, comes with enormous responsibility. I anticipated that we would be tested anew, that the balance between civil discourse and free expression in a university community is sometimes difficult to negotiate and that our intellectual obligation to offer and debate divergent views risks creating divisions and even divisiveness. In short order, a national debate erupted about the relationship between free speech and civility.
¶
As I later wrote, that debate missed the point. For one thing, I was assuredly not abridging long-held commitments to academic freedom, a principle that is at the core of what we represent and how we operate as a university committed to truth and freedom. Nor was I in any way seeking to redefine our fundamental adherence to free speech. And yet I was attempting to suggest that as a community, we also have a common belief in the importance of sustaining the social conditions of dialogue, exchange and meaningful engagement -- conditions that are part of what a university community aspires to do and to be."
3/31/2015, San Francisco Chronicle, Say, kids, please don't try this at home, Jon Carroll
"The latest issue of California magazine ('Ideas from the leading edge') landed on my kitchen table recently. I was immediately struck by the cover line: 'The Dropout Issue: Straying From the School.' I eagerly turned to the lead article. It was titled: 'The Myth of the Berkeley Dropout.'
¶
So, that's it. I'm a myth. I always knew I was. You may tell the ancient story of how I chased the sun and fell out of the sky.
¶
I did indeed drop out of Berkeley - or out of the school, more precisely. I stayed around the campus, infected with the heady brew of politics (Free Speech Movement), writing (the newspaper, the humor magazine) and sex (none of your business). I've always regretted dropping out, sort of."
Spring 2015, California Magazine, Myth of the Dropout: "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" Never Really Described Berkeley Ethos, Pat Joseph
Dropping out may not be part of the Berkeley tradition, but political activism most certainly is. A 1966 report entitled Education at Berkeley found that 'The uncommitted student who has no meaningful goal for his life and who leaves college to find himself, has been less conspicuous than the student who finds meaning in championing the downtrodden.' Even before the Free Speech Movement, students at Berkeley rallied behind civil rights and in support of faculty resistance to the Loyalty Oath. As evidenced by numerous campus demonstrations in recent years, including the Occupy Cal protests of 2011 and the post-Ferguson marches last winter, the tradition continues.
Spring 2015, California Magazine, Silicon Valley's Merry Prankster Put His Degree on Hold and Reshaped the World, Jon Zilber
"The Woz first attended Cal in 1971, after a year at the University of Colorado at Boulder. 'I fell in love with snow,' he said of his out-of-state flirtation. Two things lured the San Jose native back from the Front Range. First, The Graduate had just hit movie theaters and its portrayal of Berkeley made an impression on the young Woz. Second, and more important, Berkeley was famous as the home of the Free Speech Movement.
¶
'It made up a huge part of my life [and continues] until this day … especially speaking out against the [Vietnam] war. They were standing up for different kinds of human rights…. Maybe because I'd been a geek and I'd been shunned … I always cared about people that cared about other people.'"
3/26/2015, Berkeleyside, How Quirky was Berkeley? Politics as Theater, Tom Dalzell
"In 1967, two products of Telegraph Avenue ran for mayor of Berkeley, Jerry Rubin and Bill Miller. With their campaigns came theatrical aspects of the counterculture that had not been present in the Scheer campaign.
¶
Bill Miller ran the General Store on Telegraph, a head shop. Miller had been active in the Free Speech Movement and early protests against the Vietnam war. His ethos was on the hip end of the uniquely Berkeley blend of counterculture and New Left."
3/25/2015, San Francisco Chronicle, FBI ordered to disclose documents on monitoring of Muslims, Bob Egelko
"U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of San Francisco rejected that argument Monday. He said the FBI can't claim the law enforcement exemption because it has failed to specify any particular law it was trying to enforce.
¶
'Generalized monitoring and information-gathering are not sufficient justifications' to withhold information, Seeborg said. He cited a 1995 ruling by a federal appeals court that denied a Justice Department's attempt to withhold information from journalist Seth Rosenfeld, a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter, about FBI surveillance of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s.
¶
'This decision upholds the public's right to know about FBI activities that are not sensitive crime-fighting activities,' said ACLU attorney Julia Harumi Mass. 'Communities in Northern California have a right to understand how they're being spied upon by the government.'
¶
The FBI declined to comment. The agency can ask a federal appeals court to overturn Seeborg's ruling and to block disclosures while it considers the appeal."
3/20/2015, The Berkeley Daily Planet, The Upside of the New Anti-Poor Laws, Carol Denney
"1. At least we can finally dismantle the peculiar façade Berkeley likes to wave around that it's the 'home of free speech' or whatever it is people fooled by Berkeley's skin-deep liberalism like to say. The Free Speech Movement happened in 1964 because of the repression of free speech information tables and fliers, not because the University of California or the City of Berkeley embraced free speech principles. The university has a vice chancellor sitting on the board of the Downtown Berkeley Association that wrote and promoted these new laws. Nothing has changed."
3/19/2015, Times Union, A protest over music?, Warren Roberts
"These two episodes bring to my mind an episode at UC Berkeley a short time before I left Berkeley for Albany in 1963. A request was filed to hold a Nazi march at the University of Berkeley campus.
¶
The request was approved and the rally was held with much gnashing of teeth at a university that was the very citadel of democratic liberalism. It turned out that a far-left political group at UCB filed the request to test the limits of free speech at California's flagship campus, the finest public university in America at the time.
¶
The Free Speech Movement erupted on the Berkeley campus in 1964, two years after the Nazi march was held that was sanctioned by university authorities. At issue was the distribution of political pamphlets just inside an entrance to the university. At one level, the issue was about funding of the university by the state legislature; at another level it was about politicization of the University. Should the university be dedicated to disinterested learning or should it give itself over to ideological conflict? I have leaned in the direction of disinterested learning, what I would call commitment to academic learning.
¶
This makes me a relic of the past, as I understand full well. Yet, when I read about radical or reactionary campus groups pushing their agendas on college and university campuses today it makes me uneasy. When this morphs into advocating violence I feel that something is desperately wrong. My previous blog addresses this issue in a particular context, the fomenting of Islamic terrorism in English universities."
3/19/2015, The Daily Bruin, Upholding freedom of speech includes protecting unpopular ideas, Kunal Patel
"Last summer during the 50th anniversary of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks asked students in an email to express 'civility' in their free speech. While civility is important for everyday speech, Dirks imposing his definition of 'civility' onto students is akin to requesting that students censor themselves when speaking under the protections of the First Amendment. This is all quite ironic since the purpose of the celebration of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement was to recognize former Berkeley students who protested against the UC administration's ban of on-campus political discussions."
3/18/2015, The Houston Chronicle, SXSW Live Shot: East Cameron Folkcore, Doug Freeman
"East Cameron Folkcore plays every show as if their lives depended on it. The Austin eightpiece unleashes a galvanizing force that's part social protest, part cathartic release, part celebratory anthem. All wrangled through the vital voice of a restless and wanting generation.
¶
The local outfit led off its opening SXSW showcase slot with a blistering statement of intent, Mario Savio's 1964 'put your bodies upon the gears' speech broadcasting into the explosive 'Robin Hoods Rise' from standout 2013 sophomore outing For Sale. Likewise, frontman Jesse Moore pulls no punches in railing against predatory loans through 'Sallie-Mae,' cast as a bitter lovers ballad."
3/18/2015, The Berkeley Voice, Berkeley briefs, Andrew McGall and Chris Treadway
"Free Speech Movement video screening event
¶
The Berkeley Historical Society will present a showing of the video 'Inside the Free Speech Movement' at a program from 3 to 5:30 March 29 at the Berkeley History Center, 1931 Center St.
¶
The video by Linda Rosen and Jai Jai Noire features oral history interviews with major participants in the movement.
¶
'It covers civil liberties and civil rights issues that led up to and were launched by the FSM and how it became so successful. The Student Rights Movement, which began in Berkeley, spread throughout the United States and the world, influencing the 1968 Paris student uprising and Prague Spring. Berkeley's anti-Vietnam War protests, which followed on the heels of the FSM, demonstrated how youth could successfully challenge the status quo and emboldened others to follow suit.'
¶
Featured are Bettina Aptheker, Jack Weinberg, David Lance Goines, Kathleen Piper, Jack Radey, Anita Medal, Prof. Leon Wofsy, Prof. Peter Dale Scott, among others.
¶
A question-and-answer period will follow.
¶
Admission to the screening is free, but donations are welcome. Seating is limited, so call 510-848-0181 for reservations."
3/12/2015, The Daily Iowan, Guest Opinion: Free speech still matters, Tom Rocklin
"During the 1964-1965 school year, what came to be known as the Free Speech Movement began at the University of California, my alma mater. Students protested a variety of restrictions on their ability to express opinions, particularly political opinions, on the campus. I'm not quite old enough to have been there for the beginning of the movement, but when I arrived on the Berkeley campus 10 years later, the spirit of the movement was alive and the changes the movement had achieved were manifest. I often ate my lunch or took a break between classes on Sproul Plaza, which was at the center of the Free Speech Movement's protests and remained a daily bazaar of political speech. I learned a lot from listening to speakers and participating in rallies on Sproul Plaza and count those experiences as some of the most important of my college career.
¶
Some people have questioned the University of Iowa's commitment to free speech, and ironically, at least to me, it's because of an action I took. I was the guy on Dec. 5 who asked the artist to remove the statue he had placed on the Pentacrest. Here's why I did it: It's my job to enforce a policy that places modest and reasonable restrictions on the time, place, and manner of some forms of free expression on campus. More on the restrictions in a moment."
3/12/2015, The Daily Californian, The dangers of comfort, Brendan Pinder
"Yet where else, too, do we see so much discontent? So much righteous anger, so much vitriol and venom professing just how miserably we have it here. Whether it be our utter outrage over a controversial commencement speaker or a culturally appropriative party theme, we lurch into action to not only condemn but eliminate the things that offend us from the sanctity of our ivory prison, seeking to liberate the home of the Free Speech Movement from the vice of the uncomfortable.
¶
Constipated in righteous anger, many students seem to see evil in all directions while bearing a perpetual scowl. With so much hate needing to be silenced on this campus, fellow students, how do we sleep at night?
¶
Blowing up social media this week has been a veritable avalanche of praise for the University of Oklahoma's swift and retributive action against a fraternity that was caught singing a racist chant so blatantly insensitive that I won't repeat it here. Among the university's admirers are several of our own student leaders and perhaps even you as well.
¶
Upon learning of how this fraternity had 'misused their free speech,' as the university put it, the chapter was disaffiliated, the house forcibly emptied of its occupants and two of its members were quickly expelled with the chief charge of 'creat[ing] a hostile educational environment.'
¶
Reprehensible as these students' choices were, the resulting actions should upset you."
3/9/2015, Highlander, Investigative journalist cautions students against complacency, Amy Zahn
"Rosenfeld sees parallels between the students of the 1960s and the students of today in their fight for more affordable education. 'Once again, you see students taking a lead role to promote access to higher education, to reform the university,' he said. 'Part of what the free speech movement was about was student rights to engage in free speech, but it was also a protest against university bureaucracy and a kind of indifference to student needs.'
¶
One student from the audience drew a comparison between the government's manipulation of the UC in 'Subversives' and the current 'tug of war' between the state and UC that is occurring in the wake of proposed tuition hikes. Rosenfeld believes that by its very nature, the university will always be engaged in this kind of conflict. '(The UC) is engaged in exploring reality and debating and trying to arrive at truth,' he said. 'This is very necessary for what it's doing, but at the same time it makes it very vulnerable to people who want to take issue with these debates.' He also expressed his approval of the UC's autonomy. 'I think it was very wise of the university and the legislators to make its autonomy part of its constitution,' he said. 'I think they anticipated these kinds of conflicts.'"
3/4/2015, lohud, My kid is 30, but I still trust him, Phil Reisman
"Brando's retort was a harbinger of rebellion that arrived in force during the 1960s when turning 30 became synonymous with perfidious old-fogeydom. The provocative rallying cry of the generation gap was 'Don't trust anyone over 30.'
¶
Quick, who coined that?
¶
If you said Bob Dylan or, as I guessed, Abbie Hoffman, you are incorrect.
¶
The phrase is generally attributed to an activist at Berkeley College by the name of Jack Weinberg. A Google search reveals a story reported some years ago by The Berkeley Daily Planet that says Weinberg, who organized a campus free-speech movement, came up with the line to brush off an annoying reporter.
¶
Weinberg said the reporter kept asking who was influencing the students, fully implying that it was the Communists 'or some other sinister group.' Improvising, he said his group wasn't being manipulated by anyone because they didn't trust anyone over 30.
¶
That gem of a quote got picked up by newspapers and then repeated by people who were adept at getting under the skin of the establishment. That many of the lead radicals of the time were themselves over the age of 30 was an overlooked irony. Anyway, Jack Weinberg today is 74."
3/3/2015, truthout, Higher Education and the Promise of Insurgent Public Memory, Henry A. Giroux
"Throughout the 20th century, there have been flashpoints in which the struggle to shape the university in the interest of a more substantive democracy was highly visible. Those of us who lived through the 1960s remember a different image of the university. Rather than attempt to train MBAs, define education through the lens of mathematical utility, indoctrinate young people into the culture of capitalism, decimate the power of faculty and turn students into mindless consumers, the university presented itself as a site of struggle. That is, it served, in part, as a crucial public sphere that held power accountable, produced a vast array of critical intellectuals, joined hands with the antiwar and civil rights movements and robustly challenged what Mario Savio once called 'the machine'--an operating structure infused by the rising strength of the financial elite that posed a threat to the principles of critique, dissent, critical exchange and a never-ending struggle for inclusivity. The once vibrant spirit of resistance that refused to turn the university over to corporate and military interests is captured in Savio's moving and impassioned speech on December 2, 1964, on the steps of Sproul Hall at the University of California, Berkeley:"
3/1/2015, San Francisco Chronicle, Wayback Machine, Johnny Miller
"1965
¶
March 5: A four-letter word and
¶
D. H. Lawrence's 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' played the leading roles yesterday in the University of California's latest free-speech demonstration. The action began at noon with a rally on the steps of Sproul Hall to protest the arrest outside the Student Union on Wednesday of John Joseph Thompson for displaying a placard bearing the word in question. While Thompson sat awaiting sentence in a jail cell, more than a 1,000 students turned out to hear Art Goldberg, a Free Speech Movement leader, protest: 'It's hypocrisy not to use it when you can use words like 'lay' with relative impunity!' Goldberg proceeded to show how easily the word fit into the language. But his audience was not completely sympathetic. Standing near a group of pretty coeds, Lieutenant Merrill Candler, Campus Police, scowled and mumbled: 'You wouldn't hear my kids saying that - not more than once anyway. I'd smash their teeth in.' After the rally, Goldberg tacked a sign up on a post urging students to contribute to the '---- Defense Fund.'
¶
'It's in here too,' shouted Michael Klein, 25, a graduate student in English. He held up a copy D. H. Lawrence's book. 'I'm going to read it aloud.'
¶
'You do and I'll arrest you,' said Chandler.
¶
Klein read the passage in which the word appeared and kept reading and re-reading the passage while six officers milled about him looking glum. Finally Chief Frank Woodward motioned to Klein: 'My friend, you too are under arrest.' ... By then dozens of signs had appeared in the crowd, complete with impromptu definitions. A spokesman for the University said there would be no comment, not even a one-word comment.
- Don Wegars"
2/28/2015, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Remembering Leonard Nimoy with 'The Voyage Home', Alyssa Rosenberg
"Their arrival in San Francisco is fraught with all sorts of cultural miscommunications, many of them surprisingly sophisticated and funny for an action movie [The Voyage Home]. At one point, trying to explain away Spock’s clothes, Kirk (William Shatner) tells an incredulous observer that Spock was 'part of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley' and is still working off the effects of his drug consumption from the period."
2/28/2015, Cineblog, Un'odissea senza kolossal, la parodia di Dino De Laurentiis, storia di Mario Prosperi, geniale, cinesta e soprattutto teatrante, Italo Moscati
"L'Europa era incazzata e con i ragazzi del Maggio parigino inseguiva che aveva cominciato e Mario andò nella patria di Mario Savio, italo migrante che a Berkley aveva guidato la sommossa degli studenti, vedi "Fragole e sangue", film di protesta e di amori sex, nella California mito degli scapestrati dal cuore pieno di desideri."
2/22/2015, Asheville Citizen-Times, A new wave of activism: Young people fight for justice, Beth Walton
"[Angus] Johnston recently created a map to show the magnitude of student movements, revealing a few broad trends.
¶
Young people have rallied against the August shooting of black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson in an unexpectedly relentless and passionate way, and they are seeing some results, he said.
¶
People around the country are still talking about whether police are targeting young, black men.
¶
Young people, too, have been instrumental in the fight to keep steep costs for higher education down and for marriage equality.
¶
They are finding that their demonstrations matter and are refusing to be quiet, Johnston said.
¶
Social media also makes it easier for people to connect, mobilize and share stories of injustice, he added, pointing to the recent shootings in Chapel Hill.
'There is not so much an unanimity of agenda or tactics, but an unanimity of feeling that the path we are on is not the right path and that students and youth are not going to sit by and allow things to continue,' he said, quoting from the 1964 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, California. 'They are going to stand up and put their 'bodies upon the gears' to try and change things.'"
2/19/2015, Tulsa World, Let's put a student-member on the school board, Nathan Levit & Micah Cash
"To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, the youngest elected president in the history of our nation, we should never consider youth as a barrier to leadership. Examples of the capability of youth are numerous and well-documented. Mario Savio, the college student who united the free speech movement. The Little Rock Nine, a group of brave, African-American high school students who chose to break the barrier of segregation. Most recently, Malala Yousafzai, a 13-year-old Pakistani who stood up to the Taliban on female education, was targeted for assassination and won the Nobel Peace Prize. Let's make Tulsa the next great example."
2/18/2015, The Rampage, Find a Cause and Change Your Life, Angela Tuttle
"The issue is passion works but, there are no longer people who are truly passionate about large causes. Studies show that only 6 percent of students are interested in activism, a good portion of the activism community consists of these students. This means that our activism community has drastically shrunk since the '60s when many more students were involved in activism.
¶
When activism first swept through University of California Berkeley, students took advantage of this opportunity and made a huge impact with the Berkeley riots for the civil rights movement, free speech movement, and against the Vietnam War." [Ed note: What happened in Berkeley in 1964 was not a riot; it was deeply planned and carefully enacted. Nor was it the beginning of activism in Berkeley. Records show a student mvement in the 1930s, and that probably wasn't the beginning, either.]
02/18/2015, Huffington Post, 50 Years Later, Berkeley Still An Oasis, Nancy Graham Holm
"'Berserk-ley' is what some of us called our city in the 60s when we were young and living the carefree life of protracted adolescence. We smoked weed, protested against the Vietnam War, experimented with New Age belief systems, supported the Civil Rights Movement and later the Anti-Apartheid Movement's Divestiture Campaign.
¶
We pitted ourselves against 'the machine' as Mario Savio called it.
¶
A visit to the campus Free Speech Café reminds us of the poetic power in this 1964 speech since the entire text is hanging on the wall, available to anyone waiting to pick up a latte or cappuccino.
¶
The Free Speech Movement is celebrating its 50th anniversary and apparently not much has changed. Not everybody who lives in Berkeley is a liberal but the majority is. The current classification as used by Business Insider is determined by one's allegiance to the Democratic Party and a preference for secularism.
¶
Other liberal attitudes include a relentless concern for social justice that is reflected in one's personal politics about gun policy, climate-change, abortion, minority rights - be they racial, cultural or gender related - and lastly but arguably most important, 'the government' and its role in collecting and re-distributing taxes. Ever since the Free Speech Movement of the 60's, Berkeley has attracted freethinkers who want to challenge the status quo."
2/17/2015, The Jewish Journal, The case against academic boycotts of Israel, Kenneth Stern
"2014 marked the 50th anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and Freedom Summer. Those who are old enough remember well the social activism of students in 1968 globally, and the role students have had in supporting movements to defeat South African Apartheid, to protect abortion rights, to oppose exploitive labor practices and corporate pollution. Social action for social justice is not the problem here, nor is the problem that some social action is linked to discussion in the classroom, or that some occurs on the quad or in the street. Students are better prepared to be contributing citizens if they also have a passion to right wrongs. The problem is that too many of the anti-boycott activists (like too many pro-boycott activists) evidently want to suppress rather than expose those with whom they disagree. Likewise, some boycott opponents suffer from the same myopia they accuse boycott supporters of exhibiting, but in reverse (BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement] promoters are too often defense lawyers for Palestinians, arguing away the importance of things like antisemitism written in to the Hamas charter, so as to paint Israel as wrong all the time; many anti-BDS activists are too often defense lawyers for Israel, not even pausing to consider why the condition of the Palestinians might warrant a caring young person to exhibit some sympathy, or that actions of the Israeli government increasing settlement activity have real consequences, not only for the prospects of peace, but also for ordinary Palestinians)."
2/14/2015, The Daily Californian, A brief history of sexual liberation, orgies at UC Berkeley, Michelle Pitcher
"They weren't attacking authority,' [John] Searle said. "They were just attacking a tradition of sexual repression.'
¶
Searle also noted that the conversation surrounding sexual behavior on campus has shifted from complete freedom to widespread fears of sexual harassment and assault.
¶
'The sources of ideological passion in Berkeley during the 1960s and the current ones are indicative of a complete transformation of the way students are thinking,' Searle said.
¶
One female Free Speech Movement activist and Sexual Freedom League member, who asked to remain anonymous because of concerns about her job, said that liberal ideas about sex were particularly pervasive on campus during this time and that the league was one particularly organized form of this branch of counterculture. She called the sexual revolution a series of acts of "moral disobedience" on the part of students, accepting and embracing things such as homosexuality and multiple sex partners.
¶
Jackie Goldberg, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 1965 and was a member of the steering committee for the Free Speech Movement, said she did not attend any Sexual Freedom League events. But Goldberg said she also remembers the changing attitudes toward sex on campus.
¶
'The notion of not having sex until marriage was the notion girls were raised with, but that was changing,' Goldberg said. 'The boys at Berkeley were very happy about that change.'"
2/13/2015, Haaretz, The rising tide of BDS on California's campuses, Omer Shubert
"The Free Speech Movement marked its 50th anniversary in October. Back in the '60s, what began as a spontaneous demonstration of Berkeley students against a ban on political activity spawned one of the most revolutionary movements of the decade. Berkeley has remained activist to this day.
¶
A stroll around campus confirms the main subject on the political agenda. The Middle Eastern studies department boasts posters in Hebrew against the occupation and leaflets calling for the support of BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement].
¶
At an improvised stand at the campus entrance, people pass out anti-Israel literature. Every Friday at noon, members of the Women in Black organization hold an hour-long demonstration against the occupation. The routine includes a pro-Israel counterprotest.
¶
At the Free Speech Movement cafe on campus sits Kumars Salehi, a German-studies doctoral student of Iranian origin. Last month he led the divestment campaign among lecturer union members. He says he senses that sentiment is gravitating toward the Palestinians and that the BDS movement is going mainstream, similar to events during apartheid in South Africa.
¶
When I ask him about BDS' real goal and a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he says, after thinking for a moment, that he's all right with Israel's existence, but it needs to stop infringing on the rights of others."
2/12/2015, CALIFORNIA MAGAZINE, One Fewer Radical at Berkeley: Emma Goldman Papers Forced to Go Elsewhere, Glen Martin
"'I understand that the Twain archives are primary source material, while ours rely heavily on secondary sources,' she says. 'In terms of real dollar value, that makes a difference. But I also can't help but feel it's also a matter of who Goldman was-a deported anarchist, a vocal woman. She made people uncomfortable. I find it ironic that the university is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement while it simultaneously disassociates itself from a foremost champion of free speech.'"
2/9/2015, TELOSscope, Legitimation Crisis in the 'Hood: Will 2015 be like 1968?, Kenneth D. Johnson
"In 1968, there occurred what French Marxist Henri Lefebvre described as an 'irruption,' during which French students, later in combination with intellectuals and labor activists, sought to overturn what they thought were unjust structures of their society. Meanwhile, in the United States, the protests in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which had built on earlier protest and reform efforts such as the student-based Free Speech Movement, illuminated what Herbert Marcuse called 'The Great Refusal,' in which increasing numbers of people were beginning to disbelieve in the fundamental institutions of society and their continued efficacy. Jürgen Habermas described this as a 'legitimation crisis,' in his book of the same name. This accounted, in part, for the rise of the New Left."
2/4/2015, Chicago Tribune, College kids can't take a joke, Clarence Page
"For example, the issue came up when Rock was asked about a protest that tried to cancel HBO host Bill Maher's December commencement speech at the University of California at Berkeley.
¶
More than 4,000 people signed an online petition to cancel as a protest against his views on Islam, which, among other indignities, he has called 'the only religion that acts like the mafia that will (expletive) kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture or write the wrong book.'
¶
I strongly disagree with Maher's smearing of an entire religion for the crimes of its radical fringes. But I also disagree with those who think silencing him would be a sensible response.
¶
As Maher put it, 'Whoever told you you only had to hear what didn't upset you?'
¶
Plus, the location of this attempt at pre-emptive censorship is particularly ironic: Berkeley is where 1960s campus activism was launched with its student-led Free Speech Movement."
2/2/2015, San Francisco Chronicle, 'She's Beautiful When She's Angry' salutes women's liberation, Jessica Zack
"Susan Griffin: There wasn't just one click, there were many. I was active in the civil rights and antiwar movements and had experienced discrimination within them. Here we were in these radical organizations like Slate, which laid the groundwork for the Free Speech Movement, and men ridiculed us."
2/1/2015, San Francisco Chronicle, Wayback Machine, Johnny Miller
"1965
¶
Feb. 2: A doughty little feminist from freedom-loving University of California held her ground yesterday against the Establishment on the steps of a Powell Street cable car. Mona Hutchin, 19, boarded the car at the Market Street turntable peacefully enough at 2:30 p.m. taking a position squarely on the steps outside. The gripman and the conductor asked the coed to step inside, it being Municipal Railway policy to bar the outside steps to female passengers. Miss Hutchin, of 3031 Colby Street, Berkeley, simply took a firmer grip on the handrail. A crowd formed. Other cable cars clanged angrily up to the turntable. The gripman and conductor pleaded. Miss Hutchin refused to budge.
¶
'This isn't funny, young lady!' a more conventional, if no less aggressive woman shouted. Miss Hutchin's reply was to the point. 'This is an outmoded, asinine law.' Finally, with six cable cars backed up at the turntable and numerous side arguments raging among the crowd of 100, patrolmen Charles Bates and Homer Hudelson and police sergeant Robert McKee appeared. They too urged Miss Hutchin to step inside with the rest of the ladies. 'There is no reason,' she replied, 'why the Muni should take more interest in my safety than his.' And she gestured at her red-faced male companion, who shrank into the crowd. Recognizing a steadfast opponent, the three officers began gently peeling Miss Hutchin's fingers from the handrail. Protesting vigorously, she was taken to the Hall of Justice, remonstrated with and released. Wesley Mason, the Muni's transportation superintendent, explained that the cable car policy is simply an 'accident prevention measure.' Another Muni man said at the scene that men simply 'know how to fall better.' Besides, he added, 'It wouldn't do to injure a potential mother.'
¶
Miss Hutchin, who had this explained to her, was unconvinced. 'The law,' she insisted, 'should apply to men as well as women.' Officers noted that she wore, with considerable pride, a button reading; 'I'm a Right-Wing Extremist.'"
¶
[Ed note: Mona Hutchin was arrested in the Free Speech Movement and was a member of the FSM Executive Committee.]
1/30/2015, Time, 'There Was All This Chaos': Vietnam-Era Antiwar Activists Reflect, Daniel S. Levy
"[Vivian] Rothstein: When I went away to college that first fall, Kennedy got shot. There was a sense that it was a chaotic political environment. We weren't being told what was going on. That engagement in the civil rights movement and the free speech movement gave the feeling that you could actually make a difference, that you needed to take a stand. I think we felt a sense that we could actually help end the war."
1/29/2015, The Gonzaga Bulletin, Academic Machine: The Gonzaga Multiversity, Tyler LaFerriere
"Over 50 years ago, the Free Speech Movement raged at UC Berkeley as students demanded a university atmosphere in which political and social dialogue could be had without the fetters of administration correctness. Nowadays we face a different tyranny: political correctness.
¶
For many of you this admonition might be a shock. Certainly there are political debates, politically conscious and oriented clubs, and social justice lectures. If you doubt these words, I urge you to look into your classes where controversial subjects might be discussed. These subjects may include, but are not limited to, the taboo triad --the things we do not discuss during first dates: sex, politics and religion. If you look hard enough, you will find we at Gonzaga give too much of a clinical and accommodating approach to these and other issues.
¶
I have written about this before, but going through my last semester I see this more than ever. We at Gonzaga are too worried about not offending people, whether these people are students, professors, administration, visitors or trustees. Frankly, this oppression by way of political correctness is a symptom of a greater disease: the triumph of the multiversity."
1/29/2015, Berkeleyside, How Quirky was Berkeley: The social justice posters of the Red Sun Rising collective, Tom Dalzell
"The Red Sun Rising collective disbanded in 1972. The women in the collective were drawn to second-wave feminism, and there are persistent rumors about the role that counterfeit tickets to the June 1, 1972 Rolling Stones concert in San Francisco may have played in the collective's demise. The collective is gone, but the posters remain. They both informed and reflected the values of an element of young, radical Berkeley in the early 1970s. The Free Speech Movement, as a marker, had produced no posters. A few years later, the floodgates of graphic expression opened."
1/27/2015, UC Berkeley NewsCenter, Coming this spring: Campanile turns 100, national parks and privacy in the spotlight, Andy Murdock
"The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium continues its program celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement with Art, Activism, and Technology [http://atc.berkeley.edu/]. An array of international activist artists and curators will consider contemporary issues at the intersection of aesthetic expression, emerging technologies and cultural history from a critical perspective. (Mondays, 7:30 p.m., David Brower Center)"
1/26/2015, New York Magazine, Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say, Jonathan Chait
"Liberals believe (or ought to believe) that social progress can continue while we maintain our traditional ideal of a free political marketplace where we can reason together as individuals. Political correctness challenges that bedrock liberal ideal. While politically less threatening than conservatism (the far right still commands far more power in American life), the p.c. left is actually more philosophically threatening. It is an undemocratic creed.
¶
Bettina Aptheker, a professor of feminist studies at the University of California-Santa Cruz, recently wrote an essay commemorating the Berkeley Free Speech movement, in which she participated as a student in 1964. She now expressed a newfound skepticism in the merits of free speech. 'Freedom of speech is a constitutional guarantee, but who gets to exercise it without the chilling restraints of censure depends very much on one's location in the political and social cartography,' she wrote. 'We [Free Speech movement] veterans … were too young and inexperienced in 1964 to know this, but we do now, and we speak with a new awareness, a new consciousness, and a new urgency that the wisdom of a true freedom is inexorably tied to who exercises power and for what ends.'" ¶ [1/28/2015 note from Bettina Aptheker: "The point of my comment was not to abrogate anyone's right to speak or to free speech, it was to point out that depending on class, race, gender, sexuality and so on folks have different access to freedom of speech. The author either deliberately or innocently misunderstood and therefore misquoted. Those with more power have more access to freedom of speech. For example, as I wrote at length in another essay on FSM and women I pointed out with many historical examples the ways in which women's speech is subject to censure and disbelief because she is female; therefore, the point being, women in general don't have the same privileges associated with freedom of speech as do men, especially white men in positions of power and authority. My comments had nothing to do with suppressing freedom of speech; they had to do with who has access to truly unfettered freedom of speech."]
1/21/2015, The Huffington Post, UC Berkeley Chancellor Explains Why He Wouldn't Let Students Stop Bill Maher's Speech, Tyler Kingkade
"UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks explained to The Huffington Post at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday why he 'disallowed' his students from stopping [Bill] Maher from speaking on campus.
¶
'I didn't like actually what he said about Islam, but on Free Speech campus, you don't disinvite somebody to come and speak,' Dirks told HuffPost. 'So we used it as a kind of teaching moment.'
¶
'Education is not about making people feel comfortable,' Dirks added. 'It's often, in fact, about confronting people about things they don't like, but teaching them as well how to engage, how to make arguments that ultimately will prevail in the court of public opinion.'"
1/20/2015, The Daily Californian, An anecdotal history of Berkeley, Christina Fossum
"Current Redwood Gardens resident, Miriam, has lived in Berkeley for 62 years. Although more recently regarded as an esteemed local folk dance instructor, Miriam originally set root here, as so many others have, seeking a degree at the University of California.
¶
Before earning her Masters in sanitary engineering in 1963, Miriam busied herself playing tuba in the Cal Band, playing string bass and bassoon for the orchestra and even dabbling in theatre, landing roles in Winter Wedding and Othello. She also was an active member of SLATE, the premier activist campus political party. Among other valiant displays of free speech, Miriam recounted for us with pride that amidst her return to Cal in '64 to obtain her teachers' certificate, she found herself drawn to the breakthrough of the Free Speech Movement and passionate eloquence of Mario Savio.
¶
She later adds with a chuckle a memory of Savio running up the stage to grab the mic at the Greek Theatre in the middle of the university's attempt to soft-pedal protests. Not only did Miriam work in close proximity to Savio and other leading figures of the Free Speech Movement, she also personally testified on behalf of students' grievances at a faculty hearing following the commotion of the police car blockade, with which she was involved.
¶
'I climbed on top of the police car and lead the crowd singing 'Blowing in the Wind,'' Miriam recounted."
1/18/2015, The Sacramento Bee, A trip to the Bay Area's 'Great Eight' independent bookstores, Sam McManis
"Chapter 4: Moe's Books, Berkeley
¶
Four blocks from UC Berkeley and only a Molotov cocktail's throw from People's Park, Moe Moskowitz opened his eponymous bookstore in the late '50s. But Moe's hit its stride on Telegraph Avenue in the 1960s, when he built his stock up to 200,000 volumes and built his shtick up by being part P.T. Barnum, part V.I. Lenin. (Quick aside: Moe was kicked out of the Young Communist League for 'having too many opinions.')
¶
Moskowitz, who died in 1997, might have been a quasi-anarchist who supported the Free Speech Movement and protested against the Vietnam War, but he also was a businessman who built the store from a paperback hovel in downtown Berkeley to a four-story emporium on Telegraph. He was one of the first independent book sellers to embrace the Internet, selling books online in the early 1990s. He staged wacky events, for which he dressed in top hat and tails. He once hosted a midnight release party not for Harry Potter books but the latest Thomas Pynchon novel.
¶
Moe's spirit lives on, not just in the array of titles and appearances by current best-selling authors such as Dave Eggers and Jonathan Lethem, but in the store's communitarian spirit. That's because his daughter, Doris, now owns the place.
¶
'One thing Moe taught is that bookstores want to give back,' she said. 'He really wanted to make (the store) a cultural place. But you still need to have the books. We buy hundreds of books, thousands, every day.'"
1/17/2015, Santa Cruz Sentinel, A grand venture is born: UC Santa Cruz marks milestone, Peggy Townsend
"By the time construction began at Santa Cruz, the Free Speech Movement's Mario Savio had famously called upon the 800 protesters occupying UC Berkeley's Sproul Hall to throw their bodies onto the gears and wheels of the university 'machine' and grind it to a halt.
¶
That idea of starting an intimate university free of the heavy bonds of bureaucracy and entrenched thought, along with the beauty of the campus, attracted an impressive list of early faculty who had trained at universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford and Cambridge."
1/17/2015, Los Angeles Times, Al Bendich, lawyer who defended Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl,' dies at 85, Elaine Woo
"He taught rhetoric at UC Berkeley in the 1960s as the free speech movement heated up. 'I remember Mario Savio coming to the house for dinner,' [daughter, Nora] Oldwin said of the movement's fiery leader."
1/16/2015, KQED Arts, Pacific Film Archive's Steve Seid on Digital vs. Film and the Erotica Series That Got Away, Jon Brooks
"BAM/PFA shows about 400 films a year, and over his career, Seid estimates, he's gotten to pick and choose several thousand individual movies for over 1,000 different programs. A search on the PFA site reveals the ultra-eclectic nature of his interests: There are Seid series on the Free Speech Movement, punk rock, the early films of Milos Forman, Sergio Leone, pirates and piracy, video art, genetics, ecological sci-fi disaster movies, the appreciation of water, Robert Aldrich, Hollywood and the New Deal, and one simply called Eccentric Cinema: Overlooked Oddities and Ecstasies."
1/14/2015, San Francisco Chronicle, Albert Bendich, attorney and defender of free speech, dies, Sam Whiting
"Mr. Bendich's gift for oration got him hired to teach in the speech department at UC Berkeley, where his class was an incubator for the ideas that became the Free Speech Movement in 1964.
¶
'My father was steeped in the Socratic tradition, so he attracted the intellectuals who were interested in issues of civil liberties and freedom of speech in the 1960s,' said Jonathan Bendich, an adjunct professor of music history at San Francisco State, and the second of Mr. Bendich's three children. 'When I was a kid, Mario Savio came to dinner at our house. I remember Lenny Bruce pushing me around on my tricycle.'"
1/13/2015, Napa Valley Register, When will the insanity end?, Al Cardwell
"As someone who took part in the Free Speech Movement at U.C. Berkeley in 1964 and who has supported and fought for the right to press political expression in the city and county of Napa for many decades, I want to voice my horror and outrage at the cowardly, monstrous act of Muslim extremists in Paris who shot and killed a dozen unarmed people, including eight journalists and the editor of the weekly French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
¶
If Hell exists, they have truly won themselves a place there.
¶
When will the insanity end? When we will all recognize that we are all part of one infinite source of spiritual energy? That what we do to others, we do to ourselves?"
Jan/Feb 2015, Yale Alumni Magazine, Challenging the unchallengeable (sort of), Nathaniel Zelinsky
"The following year, students at the University of California at Berkeley formed the Free Speech Movement, grafting the tactics perfected in the civil rights movement onto the political causes of the New Left. Questions quickly arose over the boundaries of free expression at American colleges. Did direct action-heckling a lecturer or orchestrating a sit-in-constitute a form of protected speech? Did everyone have a right to speak, including bigots whom some students wanted to bar from campus? How should universities treat those students who occupied a building to agitate for political demands?"
1/9/2015, Albany Times Union, Charlie Hebdo in historical perspective, Warren Roberts
"Founded in 1970 in the wake of the 1968 Paris revolt against the heavy-handed government of Charles De Gaulle, Charlie Hedbo was unsparing in its pointed and barbed satire directed against accepted norms and conventions of the time. It was fueled by similar protests in America that were at a boiling point after student revolts shut down universities after the American invasion of Cambodia and the killing of students at Kent State in May 1970. The cultural revolution in America and France changed both nations profoundly. The cultural revolution in America drew from the Free Speech movement at UC Berkeley; inflamed youth at Berkeley and across all of America rose up in rebellion against 'fascist pigs,' to use a phrase that was thrown about easily at the time. Similar catch-phrases were commonplace in Paris during and after the May 1968 Paris revolt." [ed note: the term "fascist pigs" did not originate with the FSM]
01/07/2015, The Berkeley Voice, Berkeley briefs, Chris Treadway
"Free program on role of Mario Savio
¶
Historian Charles Wollenberg will give a free talk on 'Mario Savio as Orator-in-Chief of the Free Speech Movement' at a free event from 3 to 5 p.m. Jan. 11 at the Berkeley History Center, 1931 Center St.
¶
Wollenberg, a Berkeley City College history teacher and author of several books and articles, 'will discuss how Mario Savio defined much of the spirit and ideology and many of the ideas of the national campus-based student New Left launched in Berkeley in 1964.'
¶
Wollenberg is the author of 'Berkeley, a City in History' (UC Press).
¶
A book-signing follows the presentation. Details: 510-818-0181 or www.BerkeleyHistoricalSociety.org."
1/7/2015, San Jose Mercury News, Berkeley: Small-but-busy group works on behalf of historic neighborhood, Sarah Rohrs
"The group [McGee-Spaulding-Hardy Historic Interest Group] may be small, currently at just four members, but it has tackled and accomplished much. Members all live in the neighborhood and know something about each house and its architecture and history through a sidewalk inventory.
¶
They can talk for hours about former corner stores, buildings that were once horse stables and carriage houses, houses that were moved from other parts of town, and places where Mario Savio and others from the Free Speech Movement lived."
1/6/2015, The Hayride, KENNEDY: Let People Pray At LSU, John Neely Kennedy
"Fifty years ago, administrators at the University of California at Berkeley tried to curtail free speech on campus. They quickly had a situation on their hands: Hundreds of protesters materialized, a priest clambered onto the top of a police car to quiet the crowd and students swarmed the Administration Building. Eventually, the governor intervened, telling the university's president to broker a truce. The Free Speech Movement was born." [ed note: that was the end of the Berkeley FSM]
1/5/2015, UCR Today, Seth Rosenfeld will discuss his book "Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power", Bettye Miller
"The book 'painstakingly re-creates the dramatic-and unsettling-history of how J. Edgar Hoover worked closely with then California governor Ronald Reagan to undermine student dissent, arrest and expel members of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, and fire the University of California's liberal president, Clark Kerr,' Publishers Weekly noted in a review.
¶
'Much of the focus of Seth Rosenfeld's masterfully researched history 'Subversives' is the UC, its students, and the course it charted through the pivotal decades of the '60s and '70s,' said Steve Mitchell, distinguished science librarian at UCR. 'Many of the events he chronicles were occurring throughout the UC. This is important today because a significant portion of the ongoing and current trajectory of UC remains shaped by the events and their aftermath, which Rosenfeld details.'"
1/2/2015, Santa Cruz Sentinel, What happened to city on a hill, Stephen Kessler
"Conspiracy theorists of the left at the time speculated that the UCSC campus, modeled on the English college system, was designed to divide both the physical campus and the student body so there would be no central gathering place - like Berkeley's Sproul Plaza, site of the 1964 Free Speech Movement - where students might act out any insurgent scenarios. According to this theory, UCSC was meant by its founders not as a haven for progressive thought (or action) but a setting where any mass student protests would be fragmented out of existence."
1/2/2015, San Francisco Bay View, Cops vs. the First Amendment, Keith Cook
"You all here know something about free speech because the Free Speech Movement was started here during the 1964-65 academic year on the campus of UC at Berkeley. It was a student protest that was unprecedented in scope. This is the 50th anniversary of the protest."
1/2/2015, Great Falls Tribune, Montana Album: Students select green, gold for CMR,
"50 years ago
¶
...
¶
BERKELEY, Calif. - The University of California's more than 37,000 students return to their strife-torn Berkeley campus Monday. Their embattled chancellor, Dr. Edward W. Strong, was released from duties over the weekend. For three months, Dr. Strong, 63, was the storm center of a controversy that has generated four huge campus demonstrations and disrupted classes. They were instigated by the campus Free Speech Movement which has demanded freedom on campus to espouse off-campus causes such as civil rights."
12/31/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, 5 free things to do in Berkeley and Oakland, Michelle Locke, Associated Press
"Set close to downtown, the UC Berkeley campus is easily accessible. Here you can stroll along redwood-lined creeks or stretch out on the grass and watch the world go by.
¶
Check out the landmark bell tower (Campanile). It costs $3 to take the elevator and stairs to the top, but you can enjoy the sound of the tower's 61 bells anywhere on campus. Music plays at various times with longer concerts on Sundays at 2 p.m. Don't miss Sproul Plaza, which is near the Telegraph Avenue entrance to campus. A granite circle set into the paving stones commemorates the 1964 Free Speech Movement. The protest is also memorialized at the Free Speech Movement Café at the entrance to the Moffitt Library. Here you will find four wall-mounted cases with rotating exhibits as well as occasional forums, panels and other exhibits. If you do have cash in your pocket, this would be a good place to get a cup of organic, fair trade coffee.
¶
Sure, the best things in life are free. But caffeine is pretty good, too."
Winter 2014, California Magazine, Margot Adler '68, Michael Kershner
"At Berkeley, she became a political science major and an active member of the Free Speech Movement. In her 1997 memoir, Heretic's Heart: A Journey Through Spirit and Revolution, Adler chronicles how her time at Berkeley shaped her life as an activist. 'Here politics was seen as a life-and-death struggle,' she wrote, 'and argument was ecstasy. Caring intensely was not only good, but would surely change the world for the better.' Adler went on to receive a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and was a Neiman Fellow at Harvard University in 1982."
12/25/2014, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, A culture of clickers defines dictionary's words of 2014, Leanne Italie, Associated Press
"NEW YORK -- A nation, a workplace, an ethnicity, a passion, an outsized personality. The people who make up these things, who fawn or rail against them, are behind Merriam-Webster's 2014 word of the year: culture.
¶
The word joins Oxford Dictionaries' "vape," a darling of the e-cigarette movement, and 'exposure,' declared the year's winner at Dictionary.com during a time of tragedy and fear due to Ebola.
¶
Merriam-Webster based its pick and nine runners-up on significant increases in lookups this year over last on Merriam-Webster.com, along with notable, often culture-driven -- if you will -- spikes of concentrated interest.
¶
In the No. 2 spot is 'nostalgia,' during a year of big 50th anniversaries pegged to 1964: the start of the free speech movement, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the birth of the Ford Mustang and the British Invasion heralded by the landing of the Beatles on U.S. soil for the first time."
12/24/2014, Huffington Post, The 2014 Best and Worst in Higher Education, Alan Kadish
"On the Negative Side:
¶
Muffled Commencement Speakers ¶
One of the more distressing trends in higher education this year was the decision of some major colleges to disinvite controversial commencement speakers due to student or faculty protests. Ironically, this nearly occurred at the University of California Berkeley, where the Free Speech movement began in the 1960s. Shying away from controversy chills the free flow of ideas, a basic tenet of higher education and the academic dialogue. Schools should follow an open process of selecting a commencement speaker, allow input for students and faculty, make a decision and then stick to it. We must welcome ideas of all types, even if we disagree."
12/22/2014, Uprising Radio, How The Slogan "Black Lives Matter" Has Changed the Conversation on Race in the US, Sonali
"GUESTS: Patrisse Cullors, founder of the group #BlackLivesMatter, with fellow organizers Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi. She is also the founder of the organization Dignity and Power Now. She is an artist and activist, and a Fulbright Scholarship recipient, was named the 2007 Mario Savio Activist of the Year, and received the Sidney Goldfarb award. She earned a degree in religion and philosophy from UCLA. Patrisse Cullors has been on the ground in both Ferguson and St. Louis providing support to activists, and helped to organize hundreds of people in a Freedom Ride from St. Louis to Ferguson. And, Jasmine Richards, born and raised in Pasadena, CA., where she is an active member of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, and is currently working on building a chapter in Pasadena."
12/22/2014, UPI, Amidst protests, Bill Maher delivers commencement speech at UC Berkeley, Matt Bradwell
"Although he did not directly address the protestors or his remarks about Isalm, Maher seemingly alluded to the controversy by framing Berkeley's decision to have him as commencement speaker around the University's history as a bastion of civil rights and the first amendment.
¶
'I recognize that this university, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Berkeley free speech movement, made a statement by choosing me for this speech, and I would like to say I appreciate that, and I'd also like to say I think you made the right statement... Come on, it's Berkeley. I think I can speak freely here. I mean, I hope I can.'"
12/22/2014, Sacramento Bee, A lull in Berkeley and Oakland, where protests are steeped in tradition, David Siders
"Protesters have expressed any number of goals for that movement since the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York. There are calls for justice, but also more specific, and seemingly achievable, policy appeals -- body cameras for police, changes to the grand jury system.
¶
'That's good, because that's something that authorities can respond to, and those are things that campaigns can be built around because they're concrete,' said Lynne Hollander Savio, the widow of Mario Savio, one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement.
¶
But protests then were accompanied by long periods of negotiation with authorities, Hollander Savio said. She feared the current protesters might damage their cause with their 'very quick rush to civil disobedience.'
¶
'Now it's time for people to think really strategically,' she said. 'Is it good strategy to sit in the middle of highways and alienate people who might otherwise be on your side?'"
12/21/2014, The Berkshire Eagle, Comedian Bill Maher speaks amid handful of protesters at UC Berkeley commencement, Chris De Benedetti
"[Bill] Maher delivered the keynote speech at the winter commencement ceremony, where about 500 students were honored. During his 15-minute address, Maher mentioned Cal's tradition of dissent, noting it was the 50th anniversary of the campus' free speech movement.
¶
'C'mon, it's Berkeley. I think I can speak freely here,' he said. 'I mean, I hope I can.'
¶
The audience responded with cheers."
12/21/2014, Raw Story, Watch: Maher tells UC Berkeley grads to fight 'the devastation that pollution is causing', Scott Kaufman
"Comedian Bill Maher spoke at the University of California, Berkeley's winter commencement on Saturday, despite calls for the school to cancel his appearance over his perceived Islamaphobia, the San Jose Mercury-News reports.
¶
Maher was greeted by loud cheers before his 15-minute address, in which he briefly mentioned the student-led protests against his appearance by ironically noting that it was the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement started at Berkeley.
¶
'I recognize that this university, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Berkeley free speech movement, made a statement by choosing me for this speech, and I would like to say I appreciate that, and I'd also like to say: I think you made the right statement,' he said."
12/21/2014, Breitbart, MAHER TO BERKELEY GRADS: AVOID GROUPTHINK! FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE!, Joel B. Pollak
"[Bill] Maher's speech was self-consciously liberal, taking the occasional jab at Republicans and describing his own upbringing in a liberal home during the 1960s. 'In my house, the only thing we did not have tolerance for was intolerance. You don't have to be a liberal, but if you call yourself a liberal, you have to fight oppression, from wherever oppression comes from, especially of women, gays, minorities and free thinkers,' Maher said, interrupted by applause. 'That's what makes you a liberal.'
¶
However, Maher did acknowledge that liberals had become less liberal than they perhaps once had been. He referred to his own reputation as an iconoclast, and thanked the university for inviting him to address the commencement on the 50th anniversary of Berkeley's iconic Free Speech Movement."
12/21/2014, Breitbart, BERKELEY GRADUATION: 'DEAR ADMIN, DON'T MAHER OUR COMMENCEMENT', Adelle Nazarian
"BERKELEY, California - A group of student protesters at Berkeley managed to get their message of disapproval for Bill Maher in plain sight of the comedian during the winter class of 2014's Saturday commencement.
¶
Six protesters, each holding up one piece of cardboard with big, bright hand-written lettering, together presented the following message: 'Dear Admin, don't Maher our commencement.' The group had purchased tickets to the graduation.
¶
...
¶
One of the police officers securing the graduation ceremony told Breitbart News that the protesters holding up the signs for Maher to see would have been removed and possibly arrested for their actions, 'in the real world.' He said that student protesters at Berkeley are often unaware that their behavior at the university is not accepted once they enter the realm of life outside the confines of tolerance that are characteristic of Berkeley's free speech environment."
12/20/2014, The Daily Californian, Bill Maher delivers keynote address at UC Berkeley commencement, Melissa Wen
"Although he did not directly address this controversy during his speech, Maher praised the campus for inviting him in what he described as a statement in line with the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement.
¶
'Never forget that we are lucky to live in a country that has a First Amendment,' Maher said. 'Liberals should want to own it the way conservatives own the Second.'"
DECEMBER 19-21, 2014 , Counterpunch, Big Oil Lobbyist Heroically Defends the First Amendment, Dan Bacher
"[Catherine] Reheis-Boyd courageously invokes the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement to stand up for the First Amendment rights of the downtrodden oil companies and gas station owners.
¶
'It is, of course, ironic that the city of Berkeley - birthplace of the Free Speech Movement 50 years ago -- would even consider an ordinance that so clearly treads upon the free speech rights of the men and women who own and operate service stations within its borders. Even some members of Berkeley's own City Council criticize this proposal as a 'feel-good solution looking for a problem' and really being about 'making people feel bad,' ' wrote Reheis-Boyd."
12/19/2014, Breitbart, BLUE STATE BLUES: IT KILLS ME, BUT BILL MAHER IS OUR ONLY HOPE, Joel B. Pollak
"In his speech, Maher has a unique opportunity to stand up for free speech-not just on Berkeley's campus, but in America itself, where freedom of expression has had a terrible week.
¶
Consider the events of the past few days.
¶
Last Wednesday, students and community activists protesting against police shut down a speech at the Berkeley Forum by gay libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel. They burst through the doors of Wheeler Hall, where the university had just observed the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, and stormed the stage. Thiel-who likely agrees with many of the protestors' political views-was forced to flee from the ignorant, brutish horde."
12/17/2014, Los Angeles Times, Op-Ed The era known as 'the Sixties' really began in 1965, James T. Patterson
"The Sixties didn't start in 1960. Rather -- as the comments by LBJ, Reston, and others indicate -- the years before 1965 were fairly stable. Most Americans in 1964 dressed as they had in the 1950s. Few young people sported beards or long hair. Colleges rigorously enforced parietal rules. Though the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley revealed rising restiveness among the young, the Students for a Democratic Society had only 1,365 paid-up members in December 1964. (The total rose to an estimated 80,000 by 1968.) Though white violence against civil rights advocates during Mississippi's Freedom Summer had angered many people, supporters of racial justice hailed passage of the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act -- and of the War on Poverty -- and remained committed to nonviolence and interracial cooperation."
12/15/2014, The Daily Caller, UC Berkeley Still Doesn't Understand Free Speech, Casey Given
"Last Wednesday night, a group of approximately 50 protesters interrupted a student event with famed venture capitalist Peter Thiel, prompting it to end early before its question and answer session. As a UC Berkeley graduate and the founder of the university's libertarian club Students for Liberty, I could not be more ashamed of my alma mater. Despite being hailed as the home of the Free Speech Movement, it's clear that Berkeley still needs to learn what free speech is.
¶
At first blush, this statement may seem perplexing since protesters have just as much right to speak their mind as Peter Thiel. The issue at hand, however, is one of time and place. The protesters had every right to peacefully assemble and exercise their free speech in a public space. They do not, however, have the right to exercise their freedom of expression to silence Peter Thiel's freedom of expression. This is known in First Amendment law as a 'heckler's veto' and is legally prohibited by university policy.
¶
Just as professor has the right to evict a student who interrupts his or her lecture, so too could the Berkeley Forum have requested UCPD remove the protesters from the event without violating their free speech. Unfortunately, the heckler's veto was so overwhelming on Wednesday that Thiel fled the building before the Berkeley Forum could take such action. This so-called protest was not meant to promote free speech; it was meant to destroy it.
¶
If the protesters truly had intellectual ammunition to challenge Thiel, they could have raised their concerns in the forum's question and answer session and hear his response. Or, if they believed that such an opportunity was not sufficient enough to convey their message, they could have continued to peacefully protested outside during the event - as they did for a few minutes before barging in."
12/15/2014, The Daily Californian, Chancellor Dirks on student activism, Rachel Feder
"Now, nearly four months after celebrations in honor of the Free Speech Movement began, the campus finds itself at the end of a semester that has been most recently marked by protests against tuition increases and nonindictments in the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases. In both instances, students have vocally exercised their collective right to free speech.
¶
'Of course, there's an interesting connection,' UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said. 'The Free Speech Movement developed out of the civil rights movement, and now there is a resurgence of that.' Dirks expressed his belief that the resurgence of the Free Speech Movement serves as a bookend for the semester. While most people tend to separate the two movements in their minds, he suggests that they are not quite as different as many believe.
¶
'Maybe we have not come as far as we've thought as a country. There's a lot of justifiable anger and concern around the continuing racial divide and relationship between these two decisions,' Dirks said."
12/14/2014, USA Today, Berkeley again at forefront of anti-racism protests, Jessica Guynn
"'In a lot of ways, I learned how to protest from UC Berkeley students,' said [Kadijah] Means, lead organizer of the Black Student Union at Berkeley High School. 'I felt really connected to them.'
¶
Students are following a tradition of protests against racial injustice that began in the 1960s when a generation demonstrated in the streets, held sit-ins and got themselves arrested, said Robert Cohen, a New York University professor who is spending the semester at UC Berkeley as a visiting lecturer.
¶
'People sometimes forget that the Free Speech Movement grew out of the civil rights movement...and that Berkeley students had played a very important role in the Bay Area civil rights movement,' said Cohen, who is teaching a course on the 1960s and the Free Speech Movement.
¶
In 1963, Mario Savio and other students picketed businesses that refused to hire blacks. Savio was arrested for trespassing during a sit-in at San Francisco's Sheraton Palace Hotel. While in jail, someone asked if he was going to Mississippi to register black voters.
¶
The Free Speech Movement grew out of the UC administration's attempts to suppress the organizing efforts of those returning from Mississippi's Freedom Summer, says anti-racism activist Mickey Ellinger.
¶
'Students and others were outraged at the university making it more difficult to organize against discrimination,' Ellinger said. 'Like today, the protests mushroomed to other issues, but opposition to racism was at the core.'"
12/14/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, Wayback Machine, Johnny Miller
"1964
¶
Dec. 17: State Senator Hugh M. Burns (Dem-Fresno) chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Un-American Activities, announced yesterday there would be no hearings at this time on the University turmoil over student political activity.
¶
A Senate investigation at this time 'would create a climate which would make it difficult for the University of California Board of Regents to solve the problem.'
¶
Burns said his committee is 'fully aware of the events leading up to the recent fiasco.'
¶
'The Board of Regents,' he said, "must decide whether to run the University or turn it over to a group of malcontents, silly kids, addle-headed teachers egged on by Communist stooges, or do as suggested by one of this group: 'Just keep the sidewalks clean.''
¶
His remark was reference to a statement by Mario Savio, 22-year-old leader of the student Free Speech, that the proper function of the University administration is merely 'to keep the sidewalks clean.'
¶
'From the volume and nature of the mail being received by the Legislature, the taxpayers of the State are very unhappy over the recent disturbances at the University,' Burns said. 'The Un-American Activities Committee will have further information on this subject in its next report.'
¶
The student revolt for removal of campus restrictions on soliciting funds and recruits for off-campus political activity was climaxed by the arrest of 784 sit-in demonstrators on Dec. 3 at Sproul Hall, administration center for the Berkeley campus.
¶
- Charles Raudebaugh and Don Wegars"
12/14/2014, Breitbart, BERKELEY HECKLERS EXPOSE FRAUD OF FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT, Daniel J. Flynn
"Affluent students weren't the equivalent of oppressed blacks, Sproul Hall wasn't the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and Berkeley police officers weren't Ku Klux Klan Kleagles, or, as Savio maintained, American versions of Adolf Eichmann. The sanctimony unleashed by the conflation of every campus controversy into a life-and-death struggle for justice predictably resulted in a complete disregard for the rights of others."
12/12/2014, Dezeen Magazine, Opinion: why have architects and designers been so quiet about America's recent clashes over race and police violence?, Mimi Zeiger
"My father, a UC Berkeley grad who was arrested in the Free Speech Movement protests of the 1960s, pushed back his chair and went to the window. Later, he would report he counted some 30 white vans each holding six to eight officers in riot gear. (The San Francisco Chronicle the next day reported 150 protesters, but not the number of officers.) My Bronx-raised mother unlocked the door and walked out to take photos with her phone.
¶
And I sat frozen over our uncleared plates. Dumb. Furious at the overabundant force and shaken by a mirror held to my own privilege and comfort. My everyday is not framed by an intimidating relationship with the police and security structures."
12/11/2014, Insight @ Berkeley, Full Circle: David Hollinger's Journey from Berkeley and Back Again, Elizabeth Kurata
"Even as an ardent supporter and champion for commemoration of the Free Speech Movement, Hollinger acknowledges the certain romance that surrounds the Free Speech Movement and the political nature of the '60s. He remembers some detractors of the time saying that the idea of a free speech movement was the result of 'bourgeois conceit.' He also recalls the people engaging for the opportunity to showcase their intelligence and not with genuine fervor for the cause. With time, he learned how to distinguish the 'sanctimonious blowhards' from those who were real supporters.
¶
Ultimately, the Free Speech Movement was an embodiment of a certain aspect of liberalism. Hollinger says that the time was consistent with classical academic values, not just the intention of them. He recalls a space in which the sharing of all sorts of ideas was welcomed, when debate was anticipated, and minority voices were not shut down.
¶
'It gave me sense of what it meant to be an academic, what it meant to be an intellectual, what it mean to be a citizen, what it meant to be a more complete person. All of these things came to me as a graduate student in my six years here at Berkeley,' he says of the time. He emphasizes the fact that what he got most out of his time at Berkley came from the already established culture, the culture of intellectual openness and dialogue.
¶
In light of the 50th Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement and the brewing political tension here at Berkley, Hollinger offers this advice: 'Don't try to copy what we did. Go your own way.' The spirit of the FSM and the spirit of what is happening now are wildly different, and the same sentiment can't really be captured."
12/11/2014, Breitbart, BERKELEY PROTESTS SHUT DOWN PETER THIEL SPEECH, Joel B. Pollak
"On Wednesday evening, in the very hall where the University of California at Berkeley had just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, demonstrators shut down a speech by billionaire tech guru--and noted libertarian--Peter Thiel.
¶
The activists who broke into Wheeler Hall were protesting the non-indictment of police officers in the deaths of black suspects Michael Brown and Eric Garner in Ferguson, MO and Staten Island, NY for the fifth straight evening.
¶
Shouting 'No police state--no NSA,' the demonstrators broke into Wheeler Hall as Thiel was fielding questions from the student audience, according to Adrienne Shih of the Daily Californian. Evidently the demonstrators were unaware of Thiel's opposition to intrusive government and his strong support for Ron Paul, who ran for president twice on a platform of upholding civil liberties against the security policies of the federal government."
12/10/2014, The New York Times, It's Not the Old Days, but Berkeley Sees a New Spark of Protest, Adam Nagourney, Carol Pogash and Tamar Lewin
"BERKELEY, Calif. - This is the college town where the Free Speech Movement was born 50 years ago, spreading across the nation with sit-ins, marches, demonstrations and arrests. So at first glance, the demonstrations against police conduct in Ferguson, Mo., and on Staten Island that gripped Berkeley over the past few days should be no surprise.
But the University of California campus here today is nothing like the one that became the symbol of student activism in the 1960s, with its demonstrations for civil rights and protests against the Vietnam War."
12/10/2014, The Nation, Remembering Mario Savio, 'Freedom's Orator', Tom Hayden
"Mario was an original thinker, not a stylist. He attacked the premises of the Cold War before others did. He went on to challenge the neoconservative assumptions about the 'end of history' after the Cold War was over. Perhaps his most interesting and still-relevant speculations were about Marxism and liberation theology, leading him to identify with what he called 'secularized liberation theology.' How did he arrive there? First, Mario and the New Left could not abide the traditional liberalism of many in the Democratic Party. Liberalism had reached a compromise with corporate capitalism that delivered a welfare state, but within the context of a Cold War corporate state dominated by distant elites. Liberals, at least as we knew them, were late to join the civil-rights movement, had rejected the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964, opposed the Cuban Revolution and supported the Vietnam War."
12/10/2014, Reuters, Demonstrations aside, it's not 1960s Berkeley any more, Sharon Bernstein
"Berkeley burst onto the national consciousness in 1964 when students took over administration buildings in a protest against a campus ban on political activity that became known as the Free Speech Movement.
¶
The movement, inspired by students' desire to participate in civil rights activities in the segregated U.S. south, gave voice to many who would become political leaders, including Jackie Goldberg, a former state assembly and Los Angeles City Council member. It also spurred firebrands like Mario Savio, who famously climbed onto a police car to urge students to 'put your bodies upon the gears' and actively work to effect change." [Ed note: the referenced speech was delivered 12/2/1964, a month after the police car speeches.]
12/10/2014, Los Angeles Times, UC's Muslim student regent tackles Bill Maher, tuition and more, Patt Morrison
"UC Berkeley is known for the Free Speech Movement, and not all opinions are going to be comfortable. I'm very opinionated so I know mine are not always the most comfortable, but commencement is different from a sponsored event people can choose not to come to."
12/10/2014, Insight @ Berkeley, Steined, Sealed, Delivered: A Conversation with David Stein, Coordinator of the FSM Trial, Lucy Brennan
"After he changed his focus two and a half years into his education, he spent a total of eight more years in Berkeley. During this time, he explored myriad classes in disciplines such as French, History, and Sociology, studied for a semester at Merritt College to boost his grades, graduated in Sociology, received a master's degree from the College of Environmental Design, and most notably, played a crucial role in the Free Speech Movement (FSM). The FSM was a student-led protest that took place between 1964 and 1965, during which students demanded a right to free speech and academic freedom on campus. Throughout the decade, the movement had nation-wide effects on civil liberties movements, and it is the reason students can protest, rally, and even flyer (or 'leaflet,' as Stein and his peers used to call it) on campus today.
¶
Stein worked as the only paid staff for the FSM. For seven months, he worked tirelessly, seven days a week on coordinating the trial. He was responsible for organizing the fifty lawyers and 800 defendants involved. Stein describes the experience as 'exhausting' but also incredibly important and worthwhile. He was surrounded by people who asked crucial questions about the state of American society and from them developed his own critical view of the world.
¶
He summarizes the movement in two sentences: 'We were fighting to receive an education in spite of the system that was designed to spew out perfect GM employees. By giving ourselves the freedom to talk and think essentially 24-hours per day, we were able to outthink the university administrators who went home at 5 p.m.'"
12/10/2014, Insight @ Berkeley, Barbara Garson: Finding the Voice of Free Speech, JS Wu
"Garson entered Berkeley with what she called 'antiestablishment tendencies.' After all, she had honeymooned in Cuba right after the Cuban Revolutions. It was in the FSM that she really began to take an active role, though. Although Garson stated that she was not at the center of the 'steering committee,' her role as the editor of the newsletter helped form the voice of the movement. She admitted that if someone else been the editor, even someone like her husband who was quicker and more literate than Garson but away at the time of the FSM, 'the newsletter probably wouldn't have been so simply written, straightforward, and humorous.'
¶
Garson was also unique to the movement in another way that she only discovered after watching FSM, a play written by John Holden to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the FSM. Garson was among the 800 students arrested during the movement, and for her, this arrest came as no surprise. When viewing the play, she realized that many of her classmates had experienced many anxieties about the arrests like 'What will happen when my parents see me?' and 'What will happen to my future career?'
¶
She said, 'None of that ever occurred to me. Of course, it was easier back then. [Students] were just out of high school. We weren't people who fought hard to get into UC Berkeley. The question was not 'Would you get a job?' but 'Could you do something meaningful with your life?' The times are so different.'
¶
While now we may take the rights to freedom of speech on campus for granted, Garson noted that not so long ago, it was a general assumption that upon enrolling in the school, these rights were severed. Of course, she and her peers fought this. Despite the opposition Berkeley once had to the movement, the FSM has now become a canonical part of its history."
12/10/2014, Insight @ Berkeley, Change Apathy: Bettina Aptheker and the Free Speech Movement, Holly Birchfield
"While [Bettia] Aptheker went on to work for other political movements and causes, eventually becoming a professor in the Women's Studies Department at UCSC, she remained close to Savio until his death in 1996. She describes his leadership as being integral to the tone of the movement, citing his transparency as the most important aspect of the FSM. She remembers his commitment to clear, open communication with respect.
¶
'He told the students everything he knew all the time,' she insists. 'In other words, if we had a meeting with Clark Kerr, like a negotiating meeting, the next day we would hold a rally, and we [would tell] the students everything that happened in that meeting. We didn't hide anything; we weren't secretly negotiating anything. There was a spirit of democracy and morality, which I think was very much a hallmark of Mario's style of leadership, and I think that mattered a lot. It certainly taught me a lot.'"
12/10/2014, Insight @ Berkeley, We Were There: Three Perspectives on the 50th Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, Brian Mason
"PH [Peter Haberfeld]: My arrest in Sproul Hall was significant for me. I was one of five law students arrested. I learned that law school was a very conservative place. Students and faculty were either not interested or hostile to what was going on in what criminal law professor, Rex Collings, sarcastically (and to the amusement of my fellow students) referred to as "Red Square."
¶
As a lawyer-to-be, it was an important lesson for me to witness the Assistant District Attorney, Ed Mease, arbitrarily directing the police to arrest our lawyer, Robert Truehaft, (who was observing the arrests) and have him locked up in a tiny cell at Santa Rita. It was good for me to see Truehaft defiant at all stages of his incarceration. It was instructive to experience the police being vindictive and physically abusive during the arrests.
¶
Finally, I learned a lot about how to correctly wage a political defense to the criminal charges of trespass, unlawful assembly and resisting arrest which, to the best of my recollection, were brought against us. The well-meaning liberal lawyers who represented us for free naively believed that Judge Crittenden would show us mercy, if we waived our right to a jury because his former partner, lawyer Stanley Gold, was our lead counsel. We should have, instead, refused to waive our right to a speedy trial, insisted on being represented by appointed counsel, not waived our right to a jury trial and not agreed to accept the results of a trial of ten defendants. In short, we should have made it as difficult and costly to the County as possible to dissuade it from continuing to do the dirty work of the University."
12/10/2014, Insight @ Berkeley, A Series of Extraordinary Stevents: The Story of a Storyteller, Mike Stevens, Anushri Kumar
"What seems at first like a peculiarly unique revelation has to do with Stevens's experience during the Free Speech Movement. The movement started out as a cause Stevens believed in: whether or not the University had control over what materials could be distributed on campus (thus the name: 'Free Speech').
¶
Stevens says, 'We knew were going to do something illegal, and we were willing to pay the price.'"
12/10/2014, Insight @ Berkeley, A Drianne Come True: Adrianne Aron on Finding Her Home In Berkeley, Azraa Ismail
"There were two events in particular that stood out to Aron during the protest. The first was when veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a group of volunteers that served in the Spanish Civil War, came to campus and spoke to the students involved in the protest.
¶
'They were telling us that we were important. That really impressed me, and I understood myself as part of a historical event. That really influenced the way I thought about the whole thing,' she says."
12/10/2014, Insight @ Berkeley, The Craft of Civil Disobedience & Creating Change: Lynne Hollander Savio, Christine Liu
"'My semester of FSM was totally different; it was non-stop politics,' said Hollander Savio. 'I worked with Michael Rossman on compiling a grand opus called, 'Administrative Pressures and Student Political Activity at the University of California.''
¶
The publication gathered articles, written both by graduates and undergraduates, on repressive measures by the University, such as compulsory ROTC, loyalty oaths, and rules against political speech on campus.
¶
It was during this time that Hollander Savio met Mario Savio, the man she would later marry, and other FSM activists with whom she still remains friends. Together, Hollander Savio and her peers created a movement with an influence that remains on campus even today.
¶
'The rules we established are still the rules the campus operates under, and it created a space for campus protest,' said Hollander Savio. 'The FSM was an issue that really touched all political groups, engaged a great many kinds of people, and there was strength in the diversity.'
Yet in the present day, Hollander Savio identifies issues with the way campus protests have changed, in cases when fervor of student activism and beliefs conflicts with the legacy of an open forum.
¶
'I think that some of the things we established as principles are not really honored anymore,' said Hollander Savio. 'We were pretty strict free speech people. We allowed people who opposed our position to speak -- even at the big sit-in before Mario's speech, we allowed other voices to talk. [Many] students today have gotten to a point of not listening to people they don't agree with, and it's a concern of mine and some other people of the FSM.'
¶
Besides Mario Savio's famous speech before the FSM sit-in, the form of protest itself has been a large takeaway from the movement. However, the memory of the event and its success often overshadows the complexities and careful planning of the FSM leaders.
¶
'We did have a sit-in on September 30 near the beginning, but only after a month of negotiations. And we spent a lot of time organizing before the big sit-in in December,' said Hollander Savio. 'Now, it seems like [it's] sit-in first and then organize - that's not the way to create a big movement. I think some people act out of emotions, and it's understandable that they feel hurt, angry, or frustrated, but it doesn't seem like people think strategically -- and I think that's too bad.'"
12/9/2014, Sonoma State Star, Campus defines free speech, Marisa Oliveira
"Last week was the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. Sonoma State University's very own late Mario Savio, a philosophy, physics and mathematics professor, was remembered as one of the main spokesman with the Free Speech Movement during the UC Berkeley protests."
12/9/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, Berkeley protest swells to more than 1,000, closes I-80, Vivian Ho, Evan Sernoffsky and Kale Williams
"Navid Shaghaghi, 30, of Berkeley said blocking a locomotive perhaps had even wider reach than blocking a freeway.
¶
'By shutting down this train, it will delay the rest of the trains in the Bay Area," he said. 'Now everyone will be asking, 'Why are the trains delayed?' Because of the protesters. Unless we're free, we will prevent the system from operating.'"
12/8/2014, Dissent Magazine, Mario Savio, New Leftist? An Exchange, Lynne Hollander Savio
"It is puzzling that Jonah Raskin's "review" of The Essential Mario Savio and follow-up comments should seek to separate Mario from the anti-Vietnam war movement and from the New Left, with which his name is always, and, in my view, quite rightly associated.
¶
No one would-and no one does-dispute the fact that Mario Savio was more emotionally and more actively involved in the Civil Rights Movement than he was in the movement against the war. He had seen for himself the discrimination against AfricanAmericans in the north and the even worse oppression in Mississippi; he had worked, lived with, and been beaten up with AfricanAmericans. Perhaps most importantly, the moral purity of the cause and the morality of the tactics being used resonated with his character."
12/8/2014, Breitbart News, AS PROTESTORS, COPS GATHER OUTSIDE, BERKELEY REMEMBERS FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT, Joel B. Pollak
"BERKELEY, California -- As demonstrators gathered just outside the campus a short distance away, witnesses to the 1964 Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley discussed the 50th anniversary of the Faculty Senate's vote to back the students' demands. That lopsided vote marked the success of a campaign by student leaders to roll back university rules on the content of political speech, and inaugurated the student activism of the 1960s."
12/7/2014, Salon, What Chris Rock got wrong: "Nice" white people perpetuate white supremacy, Tim Wise
"Nice people do not protest, angry people do; and right now, I'd trade every nice white person about whom Chris Rock was speaking for 100,000 angry ones. But not those who are angry at black folks or brown immigrants or taxes-we have more than enough of them. I mean 100,000 who are angry enough at a system of racial injustice to throw ourselves upon the gears of the machine, as Mario Savio once insisted. A hundred thousand angry enough to join with our brothers and sisters of color and say enough. A hundred thousand who are tired of silence, tired of collaboration, tired of nice, and ready for justice."
12/5/2014, The Daily Californian, The changing same: What Ferguson, Jay-Z and Abraham Lincoln have in common, Anya Schultz
"Dec. 2
¶
It was summer 1964, and something had to change. Whites had always found a way to block the black vote, and the continuing harassment, violence, threats and intimidation instilled a deep fear in black southerners attempting to register.
¶
But the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, had a plan. They organized the Mississippi Summer Project, setting up freedom schools in the south to teach children about civil rights and advocate blacks' voter registration.
¶
Mario Savio, a student from UC Berkeley, was one of the hundreds of college students SNCC recruited from the north to volunteer. After experiencing first hand the terror and violence at the heart of the oppression in the south, Savio returned to Berkeley with the intent of raising funds for SNCC. But the university had put a ban on all political activism and fundraising.
¶
On Dec. 2, 1964, Savio spoke out to a crowd of thousands on the UC Berkeley campus. To fight for civil rights, he needed to fight for a voice.
¶
Dec. 3
¶
The following day, thousands of students packed into Sproul Hall to protest the free speech restrictions the university had in place. That night, 800 protesters were arrested. It was the largest mass arrest in the state's history.
¶
Exactly 50 years later, a different case caught the nation's eye, calling to question once again the origins of our Constitution and our concept of law and order."
12/4/2014, Time Magazine, Start a Real Revolution, Landon Jones
"And the same questions that were asked about the Free Speech Movement are being raised again. Where is the movement going? What are the objectives? Who are the leaders? Is it helping or hurting black people?"
12/4/2014, Dissent Magazine, Mario Savio, New Leftist? An Exchange, Robert Cohen and Jonah Raskin
"Raskin's argument that Savio did not support the antiwar movement is absurd. Savio spoke at Berkeley's massive teach-in against the Vietnam war in May 1965; he was arrested at a sit-in against the Naval ROTC at Cal in 1966; and he ran as an antiwar candidate for the California state legislature on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket."
12/3/2014, Socialist Worker, Interview: Joel Geier: The 1960s generation turns left, Dan Russell
"THE FREE Speech Movement came out of the civil rights movement, which had created a small but significant layer of leftists on the campuses. It showed that, at different points in time, it's possible for radicals to win over their generation. That's the significance of what took place."
12/3/2014, RealClearPolitics, Rubio's Choice; Will Economy Hurt or Help HRC in 2016? The Future of Oil; Free Speech Movement, Carl M. Cannon
"But the young radicals grew up. Some of them even got old.
¶
Mario Savio married, divorced, remarried, helped raise a couple of kids, and ended up teaching at Sonoma State University. He died from heart issues in 1996. Richard A. Muller, an unknown grad student arrested with Savio, got out of jail, resumed his studies at Cal, earned his doctorate degree, was awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant, and was eventually a tenured professor at Berkeley.
¶
To my knowledge, and to Muller's, he's the only one of the students arrested 50 years ago today who became a member of the university's faculty. He went on to a distinguished career, in fact, becoming one of the school's most popular professors and making a name for himself in climate science.
¶
Muller was one of the few prominent academics with the courage to call out the global warming dogmatists for their excess in seizing upon the now-infamous 'hockey stick' graph that supposedly shows the rapid heating up of the Earth. When he examined its flaws, he wrote:
¶
'That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen?'
¶
In 2009, he co-founded with his daughter Elizabeth a think tank called The Berkeley Earth Temperature Project. Climate change skeptics rejoiced, but not for long. Three years later, after doing his own research, he announced his conclusions in testimony to Congress and in a New York Times op-ed:
¶
'Our results show that the average temperature of the earth's land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years,' he wrote. 'Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.'"
12/3/2014, Indybay, UC Berkeley police raid protest on 50th Anniversary of Mario Savio's speech, Berkeley NewsWire
"At 2AM, Dec 2nd - the morning of the 50th anniversary of a historic Berkeley free speech protest, a protester was removed from Wheeler Hall on UC campus. Wolfie, a houseless protester who has been assisting OccupyWheeler, was asleep inside Wheeler Hall with the supplies (art material, pamphlets, snacks). Wolfie chose to sleep indoors because of the rain and to maintain the continuity of Wheeler as an open space. At 2AM, UC Berkeley police came, and removed Wolfie from the building, without sleeping bag and rain gear. Wolfie was taken in a police car, and escorted off campus, to sleep out in the rain without protection, on the morning of the 50th anniversary of Mario Savio's famous 'bodies upon the gears' speech."
12/2/2014, The Daily Californian, Students rally, commemorate Free Speech Movement on Tuesday, Frances Fitzgerald
"'Some student protesters from the rally who attended the commemoration criticized the event, calling for people to concentrate less on the past and instead join them in fighting current issues. They said that people should 'stop commodifying the movement' and that freedom of speech is still limited on campus.
¶
Cohen disagreed, saying that the past and the present are not in opposition.
¶
'This is public history, and these are hard-won struggles that brought this campus the right to free speech,' Cohen said.
¶
At the commemoration, students from Cohen's class read excerpts from letters written by UC Berkeley students during the Free Speech Movement about their participation in the sit-in and their resulting arrests.
¶
'Will you sit by idly as tuition increases for students?' said UC Berkeley junior Julian Marenco, after reading a letter. 'How will you leave a mark on this campus?'"
12/2/2014, Socialist Worker, Interview: Joel Geier: The spark that lit the 1960s campus revolt, Dan Russell
"This connection to the civil rights movement is necessary to understanding the Free Speech Movement. It wasn't just about the right of unrestricted free speech. It was about the university response to the political pressures from the capitalist establishment of California, which was trying to crack down and stop the mobilization of campus activists taking on the racist hiring practices of California corporations. It was an attempt to shut down the civil rights movement on campus that was engaging in off-campus activity that was 'illegal' by holding sit-ins against the 'legal' right of the employers not to hire Blacks.
¶
So the Free Speech Movement began in reaction to the university's attempt to say that students could no longer organize around these issues on campus. Basically, the university said: You can't even raise any money to support the civil rights movement in the South. You can't do anything that supports any 'illegal activity,' like sit-ins or opposition to segregation in Alabama.
That's the content of 'free speech' that the Free Speech Movement was about, to begin with. Plus, the right of the university to carry out what we called 'double jeopardy'--that is, to impose university discipline on students who had already been arrested and sentenced by police for participating in the Bay Area civil rights actions."
12/2/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, Berkeley students hold small anti-tuition rally,
"BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) - A rally protesting a series of tuition increases planned for the University of California drew a small crowd at UC Berkeley on the 50th anniversary of a pivotal event in the school's storied campus activism.
¶
About 75 people crowded into the lobby of a classroom building to listen to speakers on Tuesday after rain persuaded organizers to move the rally away from Sproul Plaza.
¶
That is where an earlier generation of Berkeley students held a massive demonstration on Dec. 2, 1964 and occupied an administration building to protest a campus ban on political advocacy. More than 800 people were arrested in what is considered the climax of the Free Speech Movement.
¶
UC officials blocked off the entrances to Sproul Hall on Tuesday to prevent students fighting the tuition hikes from staging an anniversary sit-in."
12/2/2014, Los Angeles Times, UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement at 50: Tuition protest planned, Joseph Serna
"A group calling itself the Open University will host a rally at Sproul Plaza on Tuesday afternoon, 50 years after student leader Mario Savio gave an impassioned speech protesting a ban on political activity.
¶
'We will continue to speak out against tuition hikes that have continued to deny Californians the right to an affordable education and against privatization of our public education,' the group said in a press release.
¶
Berkeley student activists have in the past occupied campus buildings to protest tuition increases. Coincidentally, the university is hosting its own event to commemorate the 1964 Free Speech Movement.
¶
History students will read excerpts from statements made by movement activists during their mass trial. More than 700 students were arrested during the two-day sit-in, the largest mass arrest ever on an American university campus, according to the school."
12/2/2014, Common Dreams, A Half Century After Mario Savio's Berkeley Speech and Today's Warming Planet, Jon Hinck
"On December 2, 1964, a little known college student gave a stirring speech on the steps of Sproul Hall at the University of California Berkeley. A few of those memorable words from the since deceased Mario Savio convey a vital message for us a half a century later:
¶
'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop.'
¶
These three sentences reflect the power of non-violent civil disobedience, which in turn is a force that can help sustain democracy. Savio's words-brief, cogent and passionately conveyed-express how purposeful non-cooperation and peaceful resistance can redirect a misguided society. His causes, racial justice and free speech, are still important for us today. Yet I see another cause that calls for the same commitment.
¶
We are confronted today with a great challenge that was largely unrecognized in 1964: serious climate disruption. Again, the power elite are failing to muster an adequate response. Facing unacceptable consequences, the rest of us must take action."
12/2/2014, Breitbart, 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF BERKELEY FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT, William Bigelow
"At a campus reunion this fall, [Jackie] Goldberg pontificated, 'Every morning, get up and look in the mirror as you are brushing those dentures and say to yourself, 'I will not be cynical today. I will not believe the crap that everyone is in it for themselves. I will not believe that everyone is corrupt. I will not believe the propaganda that tells me it is all hopeless. It is never hopeless.''"
12/2/2014, BBC World Service, Witness, Irene Chang
"California students staged a sit-in which became the model for student activism across the USA in the 1960s. It all started over who could, or could not, use a small strip of land outside Berkeley's front gates. Lynne Hollander Savio, who took part in the sit-in, remembers the mood of the time." [audio]
12/2/2014, Associated Press, Berkeley's Campus Free Speech Movement at 50,
"Lynne Hollander Savio, a former student activist and wife of the late Mario Savio, remembers the 1964 Free Speech Movement that launched a wave of student activism at the University of California, Berkeley and college campuses across the country." [video]
12/1/2014, The Socialist Worker, Putting their "bodies on the gears", Dan Riazanov and Nicole Colson
"Joel Geier explained in an interview for SocialistWorker.org:
¶
[A] minority of Berkeley's 25,000 students had already become engaged in political activity through the civil rights movement, and also in organizing opposition to Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunts...
¶
This helped to instill a radical political culture on the campus, so that when the Free Speech Movement began in 1964, there were eight or nine radical political clubs on campus that defined themselves as socialist in some form or another. They had a membership between them of 200 to 300 people and a periphery of another 200 people."
12/1/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement,
"This week marks the 50th anniversary of the arrest of over 800 UC Berkeley students, including Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio, who were protesting the campus ban on political advocacy. Over 1,000 students occupied the Sproul Hall administrative building until they were rounded up and arrested - the largest mass arrest in state history - in the wee small hours of Dec. 4, 1964." [photo slide show]
12/1/2014, Dissent Magazine, The Passion of Mario Savio, Jonah Raskin
"Savio's July 3 letter and a dozen more he wrote to Stevenson in the summer of 1964 appear in The Essential Mario Savio, a new collection edited by NYU professor of history and social studies Robert Cohen, who knew Savio and reveres him. Featuring a foreword by SDS cofounder Tom Hayden, an afterword by Robert Reich, and an epilogue by Savio's widow Lynn Hollander, the book casts a warm glow on the Free Speech Movement (FSM) and its charismatic spokesman."
12/1/2014, Detroit Metro Times, Mario Savio's 'bodies upon the gears' speech - 50 years later, Michael Jackman
"Fifty years ago tomorrow (you always have to get the jump on these things), free speech observers and radicals everywhere should mark the 50th anniversary of Mario Savio's famous speech on the steps of Sproul Hall at the University of California, Berkeley. Savio found himself at the center of the Free Speech Movement, which had begun protesting the university's ban on political activity on campus that fall. It is remarkable in this day to consider that a university could institute such a ban (especially in light of the ongoing protests at UC-Berkeley this weekend against tuition hikes, or, more locally, the walkout planned at WSU today). In a way, the widespread political activity on college campuses shows just how successful the Free Speech Movement was in fighting such bans.
¶
But back to the speech: It represents a sort of turning point for what used to be called the counterculture (the very culture that would go on to give birth to such alternative newsweeklies as Metro Times, for instance). It's a short but bold and defiant oration that says free human beings aren't going to be pushed around by anybody, from lawmakers and police to liberals and labor leaders. Standing in front of a crowd of 4,000 people, Savio described his meeting with university officials, who compared the president of the university to the president of a corporation. In a clever way, Savio followed this line of comparison to its logical conclusion: Universities were factories turning the 'raw materials' - that is to say, the students - into finished products to be bought by corporations, government, or organized labor. It's a fine little speech, made especially memorable by Savio's passion, the way he seems to be pulling together his speech on the fly, and especially by the closing paragraph, from with the address takes its name as the 'bodies upon the gears' speech."
12/1/2014, Breitbart, BERKELEY KIDS OCCUPYING ADMINISTRATION BUILDING TOOK THANKSGIVING BREAK, William Bigelow
"The ostensible reason the 'Open UC' movement gave for breaking off its courageous effort was to join the California Progressive Coalition to organize and plan a giant rally for Tuesday, December 2, the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement (FSM), and the day that 800 students were arrested at Sproul Hall by police at the behest of Governor Jerry Brown's father, former Governor Pat Brown. FSM leader Mario Savio told the students inside the hall and the 6ooo students outside that day that they could bring the University to a 'grinding halt.' While Joan Baez sang 'We Shall Overcome,' the students at the sit-in inside Sproul Hall established the 'Free University of California.'"
12/1/2014, AP News, Q&A: Berkeley's campus Free Speech Movement at 50, Lisa Leff
"'I think about the Free Speech Movement as helping to end the McCarthy era and paving the way for the anti-war protests that came later,' said New York University historian Robert Cohen, the author of several books about Savio and a visiting professor at Berkeley this term."
11/30/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, Wayback Machine, Johnny Miller
"1964 Dec. 4: Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh urged yesterday that the legislature investigate 'who really is agitating these students and promoting this activity.' The Inglewood Democrat said he endorsed the action of Governor Brown in ordering mass arrests of sit-in demonstrators at the University of California's Berkeley campus. In San Francisco, State Senator Eugene McAteer, also a Democrat, said the demonstrators should be required to pay their share of this week's extra police costs on campus. McAteer, a former star football player at the University, said of the demonstrators: 'They are obtaining a free education at taxpayers expense and at the same time placing additional burdens on the taxpayer. If there were more responsibility on the students to provide financing for their education, perhaps they would not have as much time to spend in wasting taxpayers money for the enforcement of the law.'"
11/27/2014, American Thinker, Snow and cold quiet Ferguson demonstrators, but vandals in sunny California once again rampage, Thomas Lifson
"Lee Cary has demonstrated on these pages, yesterday and today, that hard left groups are behind many of the demonstrations nationwide, and that Ferguson is merely a pretext for advertising themselves to disaffected people, while venting their anger and destructive impulses.
¶
Oakland and Berkeley have been meccas for the hard left ever since the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, exactly half a century ago, managed to shut down that institution. In response, thousands of leftist malcontents came here and stayed. They and their successors enjoy the same climate, scenery and food that attract so many others who are bent on productive activity. Many have found nominal jobs in government entities that enable them to make a living while remaining available for demonstrations, taking 'personal days' and 'sick days' as needed. Others get by on SSI, causal work in the underground economy, and some by family money."
11/26/2014, The Tribune, Berkeley students suspend tuition hike protest, The Associated Press
"They [students] are planning to hold a rally on Tuesday, which is the 50th anniversary of a historic sit-in at Berkeley that was part of the campus' Free Speech Movement."
11/26/2014, The Nation, The CIA's Student-Activism Phase, Tom Hayden
"My personal involvement in this story begins in the late 1950s, when I was a student editor at the The Michigan Daily, the University of Michigan's student paper. In those fallow years, I was a developing idealist who did not know that the CIA had begun recruiting students for its secret war against the Soviet Union. In 1960, I hitch-hiked to the University of California, Berkeley to write about the new student movement there. In the Bay Area, students protesting the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) were beaten, hosed, and washed down the steps of City Hall. They were developing the first campus political party at Berkeley, known as SLATE. They were fighting for the right of student governments to take stands on "off-campus" issues like racial segregation everywhere from San Francisco's downtown hotels to Mississippi. They were in the process of becoming the Free Speech Movement and the Vietnam Day Committee of 1964 and 1965."
11/26/2014, The Daily Californian, Tuition hike protesters vote not to occupy Wheeler Hall during break, Amy Jiang
"The group voted at a previous general assembly meeting to rally Dec. 2, the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement and in particular the day that 800 students moved into Sproul Hall after a rally. At Tuesday's meeting, the group decided to collaborate with the Cal Progressive Coalition to plan the rally and organized groups to plan over the break."
11/25/2014, The Daily Caller, Occupy-Style Protests Hit California Universities … Sort Of, Blake Neff
"However, at the college which gave rise to the 60s Free Speech Movement, activists are finding it harder to keep students outraged long-term. Ultimately, their greatest enemy may not be The Man in the form of the University of California regents, but rather their fellow students' inclination to prioritize their academics and personal lives over radical action."
11/23/2014, The Athens News, Free speech, increasingly, just applies to one side, Dennis E. Powell
"Students at the University of California at Berkeley - home of the 'Berkeley Free Speech Movement,' in one of the greatest ironies ever recorded - are trying to disinvite liberal icon Bill Maher, scheduled to be this year's commencement speaker, again for insufficient cultural 'sensitivity.' Maher says he'll be there anyway."
11/21/2014, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Three Months of Crisis at Berkeley, Allan Metcalf
"Instead, I want to focus on the potency of that little blue pin. A vital part of the protestors' strategy was to choose free speech as the designation for the movement. Who living under the U.S. Constitution would dare argue against the First Amendment: 'Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech'? You could wear that pin in the serene confidence of being a 100-percent good guy, on the side of the angels, in the company of a host of others, advocating nonviolently for American ideals. And you were not alone, but sharing those ideals and feelings with thousands of others wearing the little blue badge.
What was it Wordsworth said? 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.' Well, his French Revolution didn't turn out very well, but the F.S.M. did, and I haven't seen anything like it since."
11/20/2014, Times Higher Education, Fifty years of free speech at Berkeley, Massimo Mazzotti
"One thing I find admirable of campus protest at Berkeley is the way it tends to focus on concrete issues, without losing sight of the fundamental political questions that these issues embody. Even before the Free Speech Movement, early militant students praised what they called 'consequential speech': talking about key issues in ways that make a difference to people's lives. One example would be the simple and effective practice of attaching "Fair Bear" badges to the windows of those Berkeley businesses that treated student workers fairly.
¶
Typically, student protests have been triggered by real concerns with social justice. The Free Speech Movement itself did not emerge as the defence of an abstract principle. Savio and other future leaders of the movement had participated in the civil rights battle that the black-led student movement had waged in the early 1960s."
11/15/2014, The Guardian, Berkeley: a history of disobedience - in pictures, Greg Whitmore
"The city of Berkeley has always been a hotbed of civil unrest. As it takes on 'Big Soda', we look back at its history of protest against war, racism, oppression, injustice and long skirts"[Ed. note: terrific images]
11/14/2014, The Daily Californian, Disinviting a speaker on Free Speech Movement's 50th anniversary, Robert Cohen
"In 1964, the UC Berkeley campus was roiled in a dispute over a fundamental free speech right: the right to politically advocate within the college gates. That dispute did not involve a comedian or a commencement speaker, so some may object to the historical analogies I have made here. Fair enough. But consider this. The semester after the FSM, Savio did in fact speak up on behalf of the free speech rights of controversial comedian Lenny Bruce. In March 1965, Savio sought unsuccessfully to convince the UC administration to allow Lenny Bruce to speak on campus after Bruce's arrest for using obscene language. So it would likely surprise Savio that the UC Berkeley administration today, unlike its predecessors that had sparked the FSM by repressing free speech in 1964, is taking a free speech stance by refusing to disinvite Maher while students have advocated disinviting the controversial comedian. In this sense one can say that on its 50th anniversary the FSM - or at least its free speech idealism - is occupying UC's administration building without a sit-in."
11/11/2014, University of California, Riverside Highlander, Maher commencement invitation sparks Islamophobia debate, Honeiah Karimi
"If a commencement speaker is meant to bestow knowledge upon university graduates, then it's unsurprising that some students don't want Maher to be the voice on stage. Making bigoted comments, not surprisingly, invalidates one's ethos. Does Maher have the right to speak at the commencement? Absolutely. But whether or not he's someone who promotes the tenets of higher institutional learning remains controversial.
¶
Above all, this day is about the students, not Maher. This is the students' commencement, and subjecting Muslim students to this is profoundly unfair on Berkeley's part.
¶
UC Berkeley issued a statement that their decision to not revoke the invitation 'does not constitute an endorsement of any of Mr. Maher's prior statements.' Universities may not endorse the views of all their commencement speakers, sure, but this goes beyond a simple disagreement with Maher on the students' part. Maher is denouncing the existence of 1.5 billion people based on the actions of a fraction of them.
¶
'Real Time' racks in about 4.1 million viewers per episode. Maher's pernicious statements have evident consequences. If the argument for Maher's freedom of speech still stands, then it's no doubt that the UC Berkeley students are exercising their freedom of speech too by speaking up. These students are carrying on a tradition of free speech by voicing their concerns, perfectly in line with the anniversary of the Berkeley Freedom of Speech movement."
11/11/2014, Orange County Register, Dave Berg: Bill Maher's lesson on free speech, Dave Berg
"Ever the satirist, Maher had a few barbs for the students. He pointed out that his invitation to speak at the commencement was part of the university's celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement.
¶
"I guess they don't teach irony in college anymore," Maher said. He also expressed concern that the students didn't seem to understand that universities are supposed to encourage and promote the free flow of ideas: "That's how it's done, kids. Whoever told you, you only had to hear what didn't upset you?"
¶
Maher intends to go ahead with his speaking date at UC Berkeley, despite the controversy. And that's as it should be at the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement."
11/10/2014, The Guardian, Alice Waters: supermarkets steal our language, but not our links with food, Cara Waters
"Waters is the proprietor of Chez Panisse in California, a restaurant regularly listed among the top 50 in the world. But it is the philosophy underpinning Chez Panisse - and Waters' revolutionary approach to food - that led to Time magazine naming her as one of the world's 100 most influential people.
¶
Her political awakening began as a student at Berkeley when she attended a Free Speech Movement rally. Mario Savio, one of the movement's leaders, made a speech warning America was 'becoming ever more the utopia of sterilised, automated contentment'.
¶
Waters wanted to challenge that automation. A year studying abroad in France provided the inspiration for her activism - and a lifelong love of food. She opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971, adopting a very different approach to the traditional French fine dining that was popular at the time.
¶
'When I started the restaurant I was definitely part of a counter culture,' Waters says who was discouraged by the political system of that time. 'I thought: 'I will just open a restaurant and we will bring people around a table and discuss the politics of the day'. I really thought of it as a sort of delicious forum for encouraging people to do the right thing.'"
11/10/2014, Minnesota Daily, The damage of progressive groupthink, Ronald Dixon
"Shortly after these efforts began, Maher openly defended himself, saying that even his most critical guest, Reza Aslan - who is a Muslim - believes that he is not a bigot. Furthermore, he said the Berkeley protests are ironic because the university is about to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its own Free Speech Movement.
¶
While some progressives, including myself, agree with Maher's critiques of religion and support his right to free speech without obstructionism caused by political correctness, there are many left-wing news and blog websites that have openly criticized Maher for his arguments against the Islamic religion.
¶
It's curious, though, that these same websites glorify Maher whenever he makes a claim that neatly aligns with the current progressive zeitgeist. In fact, they will run pieces, not too far from each other, that both raise him onto a high pedestal and attack him for being bigoted, narrow-minded, sexist and Islamophobic."
11/9/2014, Milford Daily News, Berkeley students make mockery of Free Speech Movement, Marjorie Arons-Barron
"Maher observed 'I guess they don't teach irony in college any more.' But this is no laughing matter. What prompted the move to disinvite Maher were his comments about Islam and the argument he had with Ben Affleck on the subject. The controversy recalls the brouhaha when Brandeis University cancelled writer and women's rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali's commencement address last spring in response to student protests about her criticism of Muslim fundamentalism. The difference is that Brandeis caved to protest, while the current administration at U.C. Berkeley (craven 50 years ago in the face of outside political pressure) is standing by its invitation.
¶
The coalition seeking to disinvite Maher, calling him 'a blatant bigot and racist.' But religious scholar Reza Aslan, who vehemently disagrees with Maher about Islam, defends him nonetheless, saying Maher is most assuredly not a bigot. And wisely the Berkeley administration stood up for Constitutionally protected free speech."
11/8/2014, Quad Cities Online, Maher will bring 'what I think is the truth' to the Q-C, Jonathan Turner
"'It's a byproduct of saying things other people are too afraid to say,' he said in a recent phone interview. 'I will say what I think is the truth. If it hurts your feelings, steps on toes, befouls the sensibilities of my own audience, I think they respect that. I tell the students at Berkeley, this country needs less conformity, not more. This should be a given, especially on a college campus.'
¶
Mr. Maher -- who will perform at Davenport's Adler Theatre on Nov. 23 -- has drawn protests over his planned December commencement speech at University of California-Berkeley because of his criticisms of Islam last month on an episode of HBO's 'Real Time With Bill Maher.'"
11/4/2014, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Free speech struggle goes back 50 years, David Cochran
"Over the next few months, as the administration responded in a clumsy and often heavy-handed fashion - with police in full riot gear manhandling nonviolently protesting students - the Free Speech Movement took shape. As one of its leaders, Mario Savio, pointed out, the students drew a direct connection between the Free Speech Movement and the civil rights struggle.
¶
'Last summer I went to Mississippi to join the struggle there for civil rights,' Savio said. 'This fall I am engaged in another phase of the same struggle, this time in Berkeley. The two battlefields may seem quite different, but this is not the case. The same rights are at stake in both places - the right to participate as citizens in democratic society and the right to due process of law.'"
11/4/2014, Spiked, BERKELEY VS BILL: FSM TURNS IN ITS GRAVE, Sean Collins
"The slogan used by the UC Berkeley campaign against Maher is 'Free Speech, Not Hate Speech'. This formulation is a contradiction in terms: if you seek to prevent certain speech - say on the grounds of being 'hateful' - then you do not support free speech. Alongside Nineteen Eighty-Four's 'Freedom is Slavery', we can now add 'Censorship is Free Speech'.
¶
Marium Navid, co-author of the petition against Maher, claims: 'It's not a matter of freedom of speech, it's a matter of campus climate.' Her petition presents Maher as a threat to safety: 'We cannot invite an individual who himself perpetuates a dangerous learning environment… his dangerous rhetoric has found its way into campus communities.' In other words, safety trumps freedom of expression. But it is not like Maher is calling for violence; he brings no real 'danger' to Berkeley.
¶
The safety Navid and others seek is to avoid being exposed to different or challenging ideas. The underlying assumption is that students are fragile and easily harmed by a speaker's words. The recent academic trend of slapping 'trigger warnings' on course materials, so that students might avoid the 'trauma' that is expected to follow from reading them, shows that the university is being reorganised around the belief that the typical student is a pathetic basketcase."
11/3/2014, The Huffington Post, Muslims Students Say Bill Maher's Comments Promote Islamophobia On UC Berkeley Campus, Antonia Blumberg
"[Dena] Takruri told HuffPost that she was struck by the dilemma the students' petition poses for Berkeley, given the university's free speech history, so she zeroed in on an important distinction during the interview that not many have discussed in the debate.
¶
'To them,' Takruri said, "'t's clearly a matter of silencing hate speech, not free speech.'"
11/3/2014, The Atlantic, The Campus Free-Speech Debates Are About Power, Not Sensitivity, David Frum
"In Maher’s case as in Hirsi Ali’s, the grounds of complaint was the invitee’s attitude toward Islam. Maher criticizes all religion, but he has said especially harsh things about Islam. The Berkeley Muslim-students group, backed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, condemned Maher as a bigot and racist. On his Friday Real Time program, Bill Maher delivered a scathing reply to the campus protesters. He noted the seeming irony that all this was occurring at Berkeley during the 50th anniversary year of the famed Berkeley Free Speech Movement."
11/2/2014, The Berkeley Daily Planet, New: Free Speech on the Berkeley Campus?, Eleanor Walden
"The absurdity of trying to silence a commencement speech by Bill Maher on campus, in the aftermath of the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, is a throwback to the HUAC and McCarthy era of the 1950's. The reaction against a differing opinion is a screaming fit that overlooks evidence within recent history.
¶
Why is it that American students, whose parents spend copious amounts of money to have them educated, or who take out astronomical debts for their own education, cannot remember the history of their parents or their century? While they may pontificate on American history for the past 250 years they cannot seem to fit together the evidence of the last 100 years."
11/1/2014, Los Angeles Times, Bill Maher will keep his speaking date at UC Berkeley despite furor, Larry Gordon
"'They invited me because it was the 50th anniversary of something that is legendary on that campus, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement,' he said, referring to influential student protests against rules that limited on-campus activism. 'I guess they don't teach irony in college anymore.'"
10/31/2014, The Daily Californian, The Society for the Advancement of Ghosts convenes, Erica Hendry
"MINUTES OF THE 146th ANNUAL HALLOWEEN BOARD MEETING OF THE UC BERKELEY CHAPTER OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF GHOSTS (SAG) (WE CAME FIRST, YOU CHANGE IT, POMPOUS ACTORS)
¶
- FRIDAY, OCT. 31, 2014 -
¶
LOCATION: NORMAL MEETING SITE IN BASEMENT OF BOWLES HALL HAS BEEN CHANGED TO HEARST ANNEX THIS YEAR DUE TO CONSTRUCTION/SOLIDARITY WITH THE WOMEN'S FIELD HOCKEY TEAM.
¶
Council convened at 11:30 AM, board President Mario Savio presiding. Present were board members John Paul (J.P.) Dwinelle; Paul John (P.J.) Dwinelle; Pappy Waldorf; Suzie Sullivan (Panhellenic president 1948); Tom, founder of MySpace; and newly elected board member ghost of Cloyne Court Hotel (CCH)."
10/30/2014, The New York Times, Don't Muzzle the Clown, Timothy Egan
"The 'values of U.C. Berkeley,' as championed by the Free Speech Movement, mean you can say things that are not approved by the authorities, be they administrators or a clique of humor-curdled censors. Those nearly 800 people who were arrested outside Sproul Hall in 1964 didn't get cuffed so that a few Berkeley students could muzzle a comedian in 2014."
10/30/2014, The Huffington Post, UC Berkeley Stands By Bill Maher Amid Commencement Speech Controversy, Lydia O'Connor
"UC Berkeley officials defended their decision and alluded to the campus' famous history as the home of the free speech movement in 1964.
¶
'It should be noted that this decision does not constitute an endorsement of any of Mr. Maher's prior statements: indeed, the administration's position on Mr. Maher's opinions and perspectives is irrelevant in this context, since we fully respect and support his right to express them. More broadly, this university has not in the past and will not in the future shy away from hosting speakers who some deem provocative.'"
10/30/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, Petition seeks to silence Bill Maher at UC Berkeley speech, Debra J. Saunders
"I never thought I would see the day when college administrators - at UC Berkeley, no less -- showed more respect for free expression than university students, who should need no protection from opposing views. Dirks did academia proud. As for those students who tried to muzzle Maher and the gutless ones who caved into their tactics, I don't know what they learned in the course of their expensive education."
10/30/2014, Sacramento State University News, Communication Professor is Livingston Honoree,
"Stoner grew up in the Pennsylvania coal-mining town of Altoona and was 12 years old during the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley - truly a world away. He was a kid fascinated by college students' idealism and their lively protests over the university's decision that political activities must be kept off the campus. Stoner later would write his dissertation on the seminal student uprising and 'the innovation of new rhetorical visions.'"
10/30/2014, Inside Higher Ed, Berkeley Chancellor Blocks Bill Maher From Being Blocked, Scott Jaschik
"A counter-petition, signed by 74 people as of early this morning, urged Berkeley to stand by the invitation.
¶
'We believe that the most effective response to offensive or misguided speech is not forced silence, but rather the response that Berkeley has always embraced: vigorous, critical engagement by opposing ideas,' says the counter-petition. 'We further believe that the entire academy suffers when unpopular or inflammatory ideas are denied a voice simply because their expression may cause offense or emotional pain to others. We therefore call upon our colleagues to respond to Mr. Maher's visit not with a call to forced silence, but as an opportunity to raise awareness across campus and beyond as to their own opposing views.'
¶
The counter-petition is illustrated by an image of the cafe at Berkeley that honors the university's Free Speech Movement."
10/28/2014, St. Paul's Review, Young and dumb, Ronnie McBrayer
"See, you have to live a while, get kicked in the head a few times, fall on your face more than once, get caught in a self-manufactured disaster or two, and then wisdom - mercifully - begins to take root. Thus, the older you are, the smarter you should be, and the younger you are, the dumber you are! That too, it appears, is a scientific fact (It was Jack Weinberg in the 1960s who said, 'Don't trust anyone over 30' -- a marvelous anti-establishment statement. But Jack is now closer to 80 than 30, and I bet he would no longer stand by that statement).
¶
Yes, youth gives us much of what we need: Audacity, vision, zeal, holy rebellion, and a good, healthy dose of revolutionary chaos from time to time. But like a fine wine, only time gives us wisdom."
10/25/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, The judge with City College of S.F.'s future in his hands, Nanette Asimov
"[Curtis] Karnow's father, a foreign service officer named Jack Andrew, was class president at UC Berkeley in 1948. He led the first campus sit-in to protest treatment of employees suspected of being Communists, laying the groundwork for the Free Speech Movement 16 years later. Andrew died of hepatitis in Vietnam in 1955, the year the war began. Karnow was just 2 years old."
10/24/2014, International Business Times, Bill Maher At UC Berkeley? 'No Way' Say Some Students Following Radical Islam Debate, Christopher Zara
"The University of California, Berkeley, celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement this fall, but some students aren't happy having an outspoken free-speech advocate on campus. Following news Tuesday that Bill Maher has been tapped to deliver the keynote address at UC Berkeley's graduation in December, critics of the liberal, antireligious rabble-rouser launched a petition this week demanding that the school reconsider."
10/24/2014, Berkeley Daily Planet, Exclusive to The Planet: Edward Snowden's Message to Berkeley On the 50th Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, Gar Smith
"On October 1, Free Speech day in California, former National Security Agency subcontractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden sent the following message to veterans of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement. It was read aloud on the Savio Steps by FSM vet Jack Radey during a rally marking the 50th anniversary of the day students surrounded a police car to prevent the arrest of a political activist who had been tabling for the Congress of Racial Equality."
10/22/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, How the Giants are preserving their good eyes, Leah Garchik
"Gar Smith reports on hitherto unknown aspects of the Free Speech Movement 50th anniversary ceremonies at UC Berkeley:
¶
The rally on Oct. 1, which was Free Speech Day in California, included a message from Edward Snowden, read aloud. His message included reference to Mario Savio's 1964 statement: 'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part.'
¶
In other notes from the campus, Smith says he was talking with a fellow veteran of the movement when she cut short the conversation, rushing away and saying, 'Excuse me! I just spotted someone I used to sleep with.'
¶
P.S.: As to the confluence of political principle and personal impulse, let's turn to the University of California Press' new book, 'The Essential Mario Savio: Speeches and Writings That Changed America.' In an August 1964 letter to fellow civil rights crusader Cheryl Stevenson, written from Jackson, Miss., where Savio was staying with a family while waiting to testify in the trial of some Klansmen: 'This week has been one of steadily increasing loneliness. ... I play a little game with myself of trying to bring before my mind images of your appearance and gestures, the way you laugh, the way you hold a cigarette. It's a comfort to know you're alive.' (His next letter to her, full of commentary about the trial, ends, 'Looking forward to seeing you - hope your hair has grown!')"
10/22/2014, Indybay, The Home of the Free Speech Movement Suppresses Freedom of Speech, Dan Bacher
"In the home of the Free Speech Movement at the U.C. Berkeley campus, students got a rude awakening when what they describe as an administrator [Steve Lindow, the first researcher to do field trials of a Genetically Modified Organism (GMOs), who is now the Executive Associate Dean in the College of Natural Resources.] 'with clear political motivations' shut down the Beehive Collective's art project on drought and Proposition 1, Governor Jerry Brown's $7.5 billion water bond."
10/20/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, LEAH GARCHIK: Baseball, music and art, Leah Garchik
"It's not only the Free Speech Movement anniversary that has been capturing the attention of the UC Berkeley community. On the same day as the commemorative rally for that occasion, Steve Finacom attended the opening of the library's 'Birds Do It, Bees Do It' exhibition, about sex education. The first speaker was Robin Mills, who is the campus' sexual health educator and was introduced as the "sex goddess." Then Professor of Public Health Malcolm Potts came to the podium, proclaiming, 'It's a pleasure to follow the 'sex goddess.' I'm the professor with the condom tie.'"
10/19/2014, Communities Digital News, UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement's 50th anniversary, Allan C. Brownfeld
"Fifty years later, some former radical students have become disillusioned with the FSM. Sol Stern, writing in City Journal, reports that the cultural worldview of the New Left, which organized the FSM, is now the reigning orthodoxy at Berkeley."
10/18/2014, The Daily Signal, Berkeley, Home of Free Speech Movement, Allows Free Speech in Just 2 Places, Kim Holmes
"To advance the cause of absolute equality based on gender, race and class, the New Left boldly restricts freedom. It’s all about power — or as Bettina Aptheker, a professor at UC Santa Cruz and a former FSM leader, says, '[T]he wisdom of true freedom is inexorably tied to who exercises power and for what ends.'"
10/16/2014, PBS NEWSHOUR, Free speech, and what came after, Spencer Michels
"'Prior to the Free Speech Movement,' Weinberg said, 'there was a massive civil rights movement that had already polarized American society. And when the FSM started, it was just another manifestation of the civil rights movement on campus….The students were mobilizing in support of civil rights but ended up becoming empowered beyond civil rights. So it was a turning point.'
10/16/2014, PBS NEWSHOUR, Free speech, and what came after, Judy Woodruff
"In 1964, the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, became the first large-scale campus student movement in the country. The demonstrations set the stage for the anti-Vietnam War movement, the campaign for women's equality and others. Special correspondent Spencer Michaels looks at the evolution of student protest at Berkeley and beyond." [video and transcript]
10/16/2014, Jweekly, Emma Goldman: Still too hot to handle? U.C. Berkeley set to pull plug on anarchist's archive, Rebecca Spence
"As U.C. Berkeley celebrates the 50th anniversary of the free speech movement this month, a long-simmering feud over funding for the Emma Goldman Papers - an archival project dedicated to the life and work of the iconic Jewish radical and free speech advocate - is coming to a head.
¶
After 34 years of U.C. Berkeley affiliation, and more than $1.2 million of funding spread across the decades, the project could be reaching the end of the line.
¶
The university has informed the project's editor and director, Candace Falk, that her employment will terminate at the end of October due to lack of funding. That decision, which the university's chancellor has deemed final, could effectively shut down the Emma Goldman Papers Project, which has been housed on or near the U.C. Berkeley campus since its inception."
10/14/2014, USA Today, Free speech threat 50 years later: Column, Don Campbell
"I didn't agree with Savio on many issues 50 years ago, but on the most important issue - the sanctity of free speech - he was right and I was wrong. My interpretation of what that means is simple: Short of inciting panic or violence, there are no words that should be prohibited on college campuses or anywhere else in this country."
10/10/2014, The Daily Californian, The Free Speech Movement lives on, Meg Elison
"By successfully demolishing the wall of separation that President Clark Kerr insisted should exist between academia and direct action for social justice, the participants in the FSM recreated from scratch the image of the university-educated citizen of the United States. Berkeley might have been the most radical example, but every college student was affected. No education is possible without an elevation of conscience, but it has taken the last half century for that truth to take hold."
10/10/2014, The Daily Californian, Fifty years of struggle: alumni celebrate the victory and legacy of the the Free Speech Movement, Zoe Kleinfeld
"'I was surprised when I was looking at the tables on Sproul (during a recent visit),' said Jo Freeman, the author of 'At Berkeley in the Sixties' and an FSM veteran. 'All those tables are a result of what we did.'"
10/10/2014, The Daily Californian, Students reflect on the meaning of free speech, Holly Secon
"Students largely agree that Free Speech is still an issue today, though the nature of the issue has changed. Efforts to suppress free speech are now couched in polite, euphemistic terms. When Occupy encampments were forcibly torn down in 2011, reasons of 'public health and safety' were cited as justifications. Chancellor Dirks' call for civility recently aroused controversy because it raised the question: Is free speech protected insofar as it is 'civil'? Who is responsible for determining what constitutes 'civil' free speech?"
10/10/2014, The Daily Californian, Cohen's "The Essential Mario Savio" reflects on nature of the movement, Alex Berryhill
"Cohen's book - his ninth on the era - contextualizes Savio's letters and speeches to chronicle the history of two key moments of 1960s: the Mississippi Freedom Summer and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. In doing so, Cohen illustrates Savio in a manner that contrasts the image that the media - both that of the 1960s and of today - often portrays Savio. The 21-year-old philosophy major and new transfer student at UC Berkeley in the fall of 1964 was neither the singular leader, god-like figure or communist brainwasher of the FSM that some may have been led to believe."
10/10/2014, The Daily Californian, For women in the movement, a dual struggle, Katy Abbott
"While many male activists gained experience from joining groups such as the Freedom Riders, who challenged Jim Crow laws by riding segregated buses in the South, the culture was less permissive about letting females set off alone, according to Oregon State University professor emeritus Jean Moule, a veteran of the movement. As a result, many came into FSM and other activist movements lacking the organizing skills gained from such participation, leaving them less prepared from the start and making it harder for their voices to be heard at meetings.
¶
'It was a reflection of the times that there were mostly men doing the talking,' Moule said. 'A single male had an advantage to make those kinds of decisions and get that kind of experience.'"
10/10/2014, The Daily Californian, Former Daily Cal cartoonist [John Jekabson] shares experiences from the sixties, Alex Berryhill
"Often, we see the Free Speech movement as if it was a honey jar … shoved in the back of the pantry until we need it. We never need to bring it out, and we never appreciate that it came from bees. So, too, we as Berkeley students often shove the FSM to the back of the cupboard. We pull it out as a signature of Berkeley's history and greatness. However, in reality, it was a time of struggle and discord within the community, highlighted by the Latvian, German, English and Spanish-speaking artist, and fellow Bear. The Free Speech Movement affected more than just Berkeley students; it changed the lives of Alameda county blue collar workers, Berkeley city residents, students and faculty. And as history would show, the FSM changed the country."
10/10/2014, The Daily Californian, Reflecting on the legacy of the Free Speech Movement, Nicholas Dirks
"This was not a moment that requires personal nostalgia or resists critical historical scrutiny for contemporary significance and meaning. It was a time when students exercised an important moral imperative and yet in the end joined with faculty and eventually with the administration to find collective ways to recommit to the extraordinary value, and values, of the university. Why would we not wish to embrace this history and continue to learn from it?"
10/10/2014, The Daily Californian, The university commodified the Free Speech Movement, Margaret Mary Downey
"Members of the Cal Progressive Coalition come from many perspectives, but our overarching goal as a coalition is not to merely counter the university's FSM perspective. This would limit us to reactionary politics. Rather, we seek to use the FSM anniversary as an opportunity to amplify the struggles to directly change the material conditions of our constituents.
¶
As a member of the coalition, I look forward to envisioning what our university can be with current and yet-to-be-embraced collaborators."
10/9/2014, Elko Daily Free Press, Commentary: My journey to the dark side and back, Ron Knecht
"Meantime, the left-wing PC statist Boomers had taken over higher education, many state and local governments and the federal government. So UCB's official observance of the FSM has been a travesty of Political Correctness that is antithetical to true free speech, intellectual diversity and rigor, and any real principle. Sadly, that cancer has spread to the majority of our colleges and universities and much of government and politics."
10/8/2014, Technician, Remember the Berkeley protests of 1964, Staff Editorial
"The idea that students such as those at Berkeley can start a movement shouldn't seem like such a foreign idea.
¶
It's possible on our campus to influence change and advocate for things we care about. College students have had an important voice in society in the past, but we shouldn't relegate that power to history books. If students today can shelve their apathy and overcome fear of failure, they can make big changes in the world around them."
10/8/2014, Spiked, The Moral McCarthyism of the War on Lads, Brendan O'Neill
"Last week marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, the uprising of students at the University of California in Berkeley against the McCarthyite clampdown on the speech rights of radical students. As one history of the movement says, university management's 'capitulation to McCarthyism' led to the enforcement of 'rigid rules' whereby certain forms of speech - mainly the allegedly dangerous, morality-warping speech of Communist sympathisers - were outlawed.
¶
Today, 50 years on, we could do with another free speech movement on campuses. For once again, one particular form of speech is being attacked, cleansed, censored and punished in universities. Only this time it isn't Bolsheviks who are being silenced - it's blokes. The new McCarthyism aims its fire not at Communism, but at laddism.
¶
The refusal to tolerate jokey, blokey, laddish speech on campus has reached epic proportions. This week something truly shocking happened at the London School of Economics, that supposedly liberal school that allows all sorts of ideas to be aired and discussed: a student rugby club was banned, physically disbanded, after distributing what some considered to be an offensive leaflet at the freshers' fair."
10/8/2014, Los Angeles Times, What the Free Speech Movement wrought -- it may surprise you, Robin Abcarian
"Thankfully, this was not a 21st-century sellout. Social Slice, a student group working with the UC Berkeley public affairs office, was trying to generate social media attention for the noon rally last week. "It was our team's idea," 20-year-old Cal junior Megha Mehdiratta assured me. In real time, Social Slice printed out tweets with the hashtag #FSM50 and pinned them to a clothesline for easy reading.
¶
The old-meets-new tech mashup was actually kind of nice; you didn't have to bury your head in your iPhone to see what folks were saying about the wildly successful protests that altered the balance of power between universities and students, and ushered in a whole new way of, you know, like, being.
¶
To step onto the Berkeley campus is always, just a little bit, to step back in time. All these years later, the political and social upheavals of the '60s hang over the place like a fine Bay mist that never fully burns away.
¶
I don't mean that in a negative way at all. The Free Speech Movement midwifed some remarkable American moments." [ed note: nice photos]
10/7/2014, The Daily Californian, Working toward sustainable activism, Kathleen Piper
"Given this shift in context, what lessons might activists of today draw from the experience of the FSM?
¶
Organize in person. Using social media has its cost. It's far easier to talk to only your 'friends,' but your group will isolate itself that way and develop a set of unrealistic attitudes. It is precisely the person who is not your "friend" who is important for you to reach and learn from. The people who organize in person on the campus today are mostly Christians. If those of us interested in saving the planet would use all of our techniques to reach out to and persuade people - marching through Sproul Plaza, shaking hands, handing out leaflets, establishing welcome centers where people could find ongoing community, holding innumerable small education and discussion meetings and continually reaching out - we would have an amazingly effective movement.
¶
Build alliances. That doesn't mean you send representatives to another group and ask for support for your cause - it means your members go to another group and help with its cause. This will build trust for your cause and interest in what you are doing.
Connect to the big picture. Lots of people care about saving the planet, but most of them do not see how what you want to do fits into that. Don't just tell them that it does - show them how. Express it in simple, bumper-sticker terms, and follow up in detail with credible evidence and arguments. If you can't express it simply, or if you can't articulate the details, you are not convincing. "Trust me, I'm a good guy" is not an argument.
¶
Fight smart. Have an overall strategy, utilizing multiple means to reach the goal, such as fighting fracking through public support, legal efforts and direct action. Pick your battles, and don't waste your energy. What are you trying to do with a given action? Is it likely you will succeed? How important is it? How much of an opportunity does it give you to gain support? What effect will this have on your network of alliances, on other strategies you are using or on your overall chances of success?
¶
Keep your eyes on the prize. OK, we know what happens: you get burned out and frustrated. You can't attack the distant bad guys, so you attack the ally standing next to you. You want to quit and can't admit it, so you create impossible situations for yourself or your group. You blow it all in drama because you are tired of the grind of struggle. Guess what? This kind of self-indulgence doesn't help. Take a break. The struggle will still be there when you get back. Ask yourself, "What is our primary purpose here?" Examine your motives and your actions with a consciousness of their overall purpose."
10/7/2014, Orange County Register, Editorial: Free speech alone can't guard freedom, Editor
"There's a big anniversary coming up at UC Berkeley. This fall marks 50 years since the Free Speech Movement arose, lighting a First Amendment fire that spread around the country and changed America's political culture.
¶
That's the good news. But there's bad news, too. As onetime FSM activist Sol Stern explained at the Wall Street Journal, the era of free speech on campus has somehow been eclipsed by the era of collegiate speech codes. Today's administrators and activists, obsessed with the way words can hurt, care much more about limiting open debate than nurturing it.
¶
Unfortunately, America's current challenges with freedom go far beyond language policing. Even in realms of life where outspoken individuals and groups have relatively free rein, they're often earning the poorest of returns on their investment of time, energy and vitriol."
10/7/2014, Care2, It's the Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, s.e. smith
"Groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) have represented students and instructors in a variety of cases involving campus free speech and the suspected suppression of same. Their work highlights the fact that while the FSM may have opened the doors to campus free speech, the issue is far from resolved, and that some students along with faculty continue to experience suppression of their right to express themselves."
10/6/2014, KALW Radio, City Visions: Red Diapers, Brown Berets, and Green for All: Growing Up on the Picket Line, City Visions
"With the past weeks marking the Free Speech Movement's 50th Reunion & Celebration, we want to know what's become of their kids?-the red diaper babies, and families of black panthers, queers, feminists, and brown berets? Host David Onek and guests engage in some intergenerational dialogue on who's on the picket line or possibly in the boardroom." [Ed note: guests include Art Goldberg and Susan Goldberg]
10/6/2014, International Policy Digest, Free Speech Movement: The Musical, Conn M. Hallinan
"FSM is not just nostalgia or, in the end, a play about a specific historical event. It is about how people come to commit themselves to something, despite the pressures of everyday life. It is not about activists, but how people become activists. The song 'Workin' in the Movement' picks up the excitement of that commitment, but also the strain it puts on people's personal lives. But the decision to come together and resist is a formula for how to build a better world. That particular message is bound by neither time nor geography.
¶
As the director notes in her introduction to the play, 'The promise of 1964 remains to be fulfilled 50 years later. Indeed, it does. Free speech is still under attack. Racism, inequality, sexism, homophobia, and war plague the nation. But FSM presents a hopeful solution: convince people to commit themselves, pack the plazas, and take the bastards on."
10/5/2014, Reader Supported News, Berkeley 101: Breaking the Limits of Free Speech, Steve Weissman
"In the meantime, one quick caveat. Free speech is an end in itself, for which progressives everywhere should fight. But it can never be a sufficient strategy for radical social change. Telling truth to power, petitioning for redress of grievances, and protesting injustice will not significantly change the balance of power between the 99% and the fraction of 1% that increasingly rules the roost. Changing that will take something more and different, and it will never be done by those who keep telling us how impossible a job it would be."
10/5/2014, NPR, Berkeley's Fight For Free Speech Fired Up Student Protest Movement, Richard Gonzales
"Back in Sproul Plaza, Hollander Savio reflects on what was accomplished 50 years ago.
¶
'We gave youth in America a sense that political and social action is something that you can and should be involved in and you have power,' she says.
¶
Students burdened by debt may have less time to be politically active today, Hollander Savio says, but their freedom to protest remains."
10/5/2014, Il Post, Il discorso di Mario Savio a Berkeley, nel 1964, Henry Deaglio
"Si chiamava Mario Savio e il primo ottobre 1964 all'università di Berkeley - cinquant'anni fa - diventò il simbolo genuino e quasi involontario di un movimento degli studenti che sarebbe poi esploso in tutto il mondo quattro anni dopo, nello storico 1968. Ed ecco come andò la storia."
10/5/2014, Il blog di Giacomo Salerno, Il Ragazzo Sulla Macchina, Giacomo Salerno
"Il 2 dicembre quattromila studenti si ritrovano di nuovo nella Sproul Plaza e di nuovo quello studente, Mario Savio, prende il microfono. Questa volta pronuncia il breve discorso che resterà nella storia della grande oratoria americana. Non proprio Lincoln a Gettysburg, ma quasi: 'Il rettore ci ha detto che l'università è una macchina; se è così, allora noi ne saremo solo il prodotto finale, su cui non abbiamo diritto di parola. Saremo clienti - dell'industria, del governo, del sindacato… Ma noi siamo esseri umani! Se tutto è una macchina, ebbene… arriva un momento in cui il funzionamento della macchina diventa così odioso, ti fa stare così male dentro, che non puoi più parteciparvi, neppure passivamente. Non resta che mettere i nostri corpi tra le ruote e gli ingranaggi, sulle leve, sull'apparato, fermare tutto. E far capire a chi sta guidando la macchina, a quelli che ne sono i padroni, che finché non saremo liberi non potremo permettere alla macchina di funzionare'."
10/4/2014, The Daily Californian, Christians hold 12-hour prayer rally Saturday on Sproul, Alexander Barreira and G. Haley Massar
"Michael Griffiths, director of public affairs for TheCall, said it was a solemn assembly inspired by a passage from the Bible in the book of Luke. He said the event aimed to promote unity between generations and change an attitude of rebellion that characterized the Free Speech Movement."
10/4/2014, San Jose Mercury News, UC Berkeley's free speech movement interviews released to the public, Katy Murphy
"BERKELEY -- While many commemorations of UC Berkeley's free speech movement focus on central players in the monthslong clash with the administration, a new project tells the story from different perspectives -- including female activists who dealt with sexism and a student who, after a Mario Savio speech, needed a breather from all the fervent discourse.'I had to get away from it,' UC Berkeley alumna Dutch Key told a historian. "'t was too intense. I went shopping at Macy's.'
¶
Interviews with dozens of people who experienced the free speech movement in 1964 and 1965 are being released to the public, just in time for its 50th anniversary."
10/4/2014, California Magazine, The FSM at 50: Old Activists Never Say Die, James Lerager and Gar Smith
"Maggie Downing, a UC Berkeley graduate student, spoke for the Cal Progressive Coalition (CPC). The CPC issued a statement advising the UC administration not to 'congratulate' itself on the FSM's legacy because, in fact, 'each of the major student struggles over the past fifty years made gains in spite of repression by the University.'" [ed note: photos]
10/3/2014, UC NewsCenter, Savio lecturer: Speak up for workers 'behind the kitchen door', Barry Bergman
"Thursday night, as the featured speaker at this year's Mario Savio Memorial Lecture, Jayaraman - now the director of UC Berkeley's Food Labor Research Center - urged her audience also to 'speak up, in the same way that you spoke up 50 years ago,' at the birth of the Free Speech Movement. And, reflecting at least one way activism has changed since the 1960s, now there's an app for that, courtesy of the workers'-rights organization Jayaraman founded post-9/11, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United.
¶
The evening, coming toward the end of a weeklong 50th-anniversary celebration of the FSM, began on a technological note, as Lynne Hollander Savio, Mario's widow, read a message from Edward Snowden, whose release of thousands of classified documents in 2013 blew the whistle on widespread U.S. government surveillance.
¶
'Berkeley's unparalleled traditions of student activism and community engagement have been both a challenge and an inspiration to human-rights movements worldwide,' wrote Snowden, now in exile in Russia. 'They compel us to imagine the world that we want to live in and to stand up for it - and they show us that with vision and persistence, we can change the world.'
¶
That was a message shared by Jayaraman, who agreed that 'surveillance is the issue of our generation,' together with 'corporate control of our democracy.'"
10/3/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, Chairman Meow honored by rebels, Leah Garchik
"Trespassing on my neighbor's cat territory:
¶
In the play 'FSM,' which Joan Holden wrote about the Free Speech Movement and which played last weekend at Berkeley Rep, there's a scene where 'protesters have barricaded themselves in Sproul Hall,' writes Kurt Huget, 'and are about to be arrested and dragged away by police.' The students' song about what's going on includes a specific plaint, 'My poor cat is going to be hungry.'
¶
Aw, so those freethinkers had hearts, too. And they still do."
10/3/2014, OpEdNews, The Free Speech Movement turns 50, Bob Patterson
"An assortment of journalists was on hand to record the new event for posterity. Local newspaper and radio news reporters were there as well as a platoon of photographers and at least two TV news crews.
¶
One of the reporters was representing the Paris publication Le Monde newspaper and the reporter, Cerine Lesnes, mentioned that she was new to the area. She had been reassigned to the Bay Area because that paper had just opened up a news bureau in San Francisco."
10/2/2014, The Daily Californian, Students occupy campus building during 50th anniversary of Free Speech Movement, Sophie Ho
"The occupation followed a rally that began at 12 p.m. on Sproul Plaza that celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. The day's events were organized in part by the Cal Progressive Coalition, which includes individuals from Fossil Free UC, the ASUC and Students for Engaged and Active Learning.
¶
About 3:15 p.m., Associate Dean of Students David Surratt and Christine Shaff, director of communications at the campus real estate division, were planning on speaking with the protesters.
¶
In particular, the individuals occupying the building demanded the halt of commercial development at the Gill Tract, the release of all documents relating to the tract be released and a meeting with Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, according to Maggie Downey, a UC Berkeley graduate student and spokesperson for the Cal Progressive Coalition.
¶
In addition, protesters are demanding that the development of the Lawrence Berkeley Lab National Laboratory's Richmond Bay campus include more student and community voices and that the work currently done there become unionized and meet fair labor standards, Downey said.
¶
Update: By 7 p.m., some of the occupiers' demands were met, including the release of Gill Tract documents and a meeting with Chancellor Nicholas Dirks."
10/2/2014, The Daily Californian, Upholding the FSM legacy: a how-to guide, Kelsi Krandel
"Maybe you caught a bit of yesterday's commemorative rally and student protest and feel inspired, or maybe you just want to be more involved in UC Berkeley's campus life but don't know how. It's not hard to honor that legacy today. The Free Speech Movement is such a crucial part of our campus history and atmosphere that it's important that we do our best to pay what respects we can to it. There are a lot of things you can do in your everyday life to thank those who took part in this incredibly important movement and to make yourself a part of their lasting legacy."
10/2/2014, San Jose Mercury News, Activists at UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement rally call for effort to continue today, Judith Scherr
"Hollander Savio welcomed them and introduced ASUC Vice President of External Affairs Caitlin Quinn, who said the movement shouldn't be seen as 'ancient history.'
¶
'Fifty years may have gone by, but our administration continues to dismiss many of our concerns,' she said, pointing to the opposition of university officials to the student occupy movement on campus. She said now is the time for students to fight for their free speech rights.
¶
Farmworker organizer Delores Huerta, 84, took up the question of high university tuition in her remarks, pointing out that university education in Cuba is free. "If Cuba can do it, why can't we have the same thing," she asked, going on to call for representation of the community and labor on the UC Board of Regents.
¶
An addition to the speakers list drew cheers from the crowd -- a message from federal whistle-blower Edward Snowden, read by FSM activist Jack Radey
¶
'Berkeley's unparalleled tradition of student activism and community engagement have been both a challenge and an inspiration to the human rights movements worldwide,' the message read. 'The extraordinary mass surveillance capabilities and unprecedented government secrecy require us once again to take urgent action to preserve our free society.'" [ed note: good photo spread]
10/2/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, Hundreds gather in Berkeley for free-speech anniversary, Libby Rainey
"'The metaphor of the machine indicates that the gears grind on,' said UC Berkeley graduate student Amanda Armstrong. 'It was encounters with police lines three years ago that led to mass Occupy strikes. We still have the power to shut this place down.'" [ed note: photos]
10/2/2014, New York Times, At Berkeley, Free (Though Subdued) Speech, 50 Years Later, Carol Pogash
"Lynne Hollander Savio, the widow of the movement's main orator, Mario Savio, addressed the crowd. Another speaker [Jack Radey] read a message from Edward J. Snowden, who leaked voluminous amounts of classified documents from the National Security Agency, which said, 'Together we will restore the public seat at the table of government.'"
10/2/2014, Fox&Hounds, Everyone Was For The Free Speech Movement-For Awhile, Robert Naylor
"It was autumn 1964 in Berkeley, in a small apartment just a few blocks from Sproul Hall, when I found myself interviewing Mario Savio, the embattled leader of the Free Speech Movement. I was editor in chief of the Stanford Daily and sent staff reporters to Berkeley almost every day for months. This was one of my days."
10/2/2014, Berkeleyside, Photos: Rally on UC Berkeley campus marks 50th anniversary of the birth of the Free Speech Movement,
"Oct. 1 marked the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, a protest that lasted for three months but set the stage for the turbulent 1960s."
10/1/2014, Truthout, On Its 50th Anniversary, It's a New Beginning for the Free Speech Movement, Jim Block
"Once the university intervened, in other words, the political dynamic shifted. What had begun as an effort to support other movements for social equity and integration quickly shifted before everyone's eyes to a demand for the liberation of students and youth and the democratization of the institutions shaping their lives as a prelude to broader social transformation. This is the F.S.M. whose message spread throughout the U.S. and beyond, catalyzing and exposing generational tensions and revealing the compliance-oriented program of American socialization. I came to Berkeley as a neophyte, a completely apolitical and uninformed undergraduate, just days before the campus controversies began. And because the events of the next couple of years became the defining experience of my life about which I have written and taught ever since (trying to make sense of it), this reunion gave me an unparalleled opportunity to reflect on and rethink that experience in conversation with this unique community of participants in this defining moment."
10/1/2014, The Wichita Eagle, TODAY IN HISTORY: Highlights from Oct. 1 in history, Associated Press
"Today's highlight in history
¶
On Oct. 1, 1964, the Free Speech Movement began at the University of California, Berkeley, as students spontaneously protested the arrest of Berkeley alumnus Jack Weinberg, who'd refused to identify himself to campus police as he sat behind a table promoting the Congress of Racial Equality."
10/1/2014, The Daily Californian, 50 years of free speech, Chloe Hunt
"In 1964, the Daily Cal documented the student push to lift the ban on campus political activities, acknowledging the students' rights to free speech and academic freedom. From September to November, we documented almost daily the events that transpired on campus - from negotiations to sit-ins to the effect the FSM had on Greek life and campus culture. Unlike many other local and national newspapers at the time, we did not engage in red-baiting in our articles and are often regarded as providing the most complete and accurate coverage of the movement.
¶
Thirteen years after the Free Speech Movement, the Daily Cal filed a massive Freedom of Information Act request that uncovered the covert role the FBI played in spying on and undermining the FSM. Seth Rosenfeld, then a Daily Cal staffer and author of the articles in question, followed this work with decades more of FBI document research, exposing the range of influence that the bureau played on the Berkeley student movement."
10/1/2014, The Berkeley Graduate, One Struggle: Berkeley Marks 50th Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement with a Message of Solidarity, Lilith Claire
"In remembrance, FSM veterans re-converged on Sproul Plaza, with movement luminaries such as Dolores Huerta, Jackie Goldberg, Bettina Aptheker, and Weinberg, giving speeches on the Mario Savio steps, named for one of the charismatic FSM leaders. Even Edward Snowden addressed the rally, albeit through a letter read aloud.
¶
The Cal Progressive Coalition organized graduate students and undergrads to create posters in front of California Hall, and then march through Sather Gate to join the rally. The CPC's organizing brought into conversation issues as wide ranging as civility, class size, deportation, the environment, food insecurity, fossil fuel dependence, the gender binary, incarceration, labor rights, Janet Napolitano, Palestine, police violence, privatization, rising rents, sexual assault, student debt, tuition, and the current actions in Hong Kong. Pushing back against the silencing these injustices perpetrate, they emphasized the need for free speech.
¶
The speakers, including Rhetoric PhD candidate Amanda Armstrong, emphasized the interconnections between and the need for solidarity across these movements.
¶
A quotation from Mario Savio, repeated in several of the speeches then broadcast in Savio's own voice at the close of the rally, brought the resonances between the movements into focus:"
10/1/2014, Los Angeles Times, Readers React The legacy of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement,
"To the editor: The author of a book on Savio compared the reunion of some of the Free Speech Movement protesters to Thomas Jefferson coming back to explain the Declaration of Independence."
David Goodwin, Los Angeles
10/1/2014, Indybay, Sit-in Held Following UCB Rally for 50th Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, Cal Progressive Coalition
"Uniting students, workers, community members, and veterans of the Free Speech Movement, CPC led a surprise sit-in at Capital Projects following the rally for the 50th Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. Capital Projects is the real estate arm of the University of California Berkeley that is actively privatizing public resources, such as in their proposed commercial development of the historic Gill Tract Farm. The CPC action sparked dialogue across campus on how the UC continues to silence students through the privatization of the public university and increasingly militarized police violence.
¶
The sit-in lasted through 6 hours of negotiation amidst speeches and chants that could be heard across central campus. Students, community members, and FSM veterans emerged from Capital Projects around 7pm calling victory on their first two short-term demands: a meeting with Chancellor Dirks and a signed commitment for documents that Capital Projects promised to share in May. The coalition came forward to the cheers of supporters who had gathered outside in solidarity. However, the UC continued to stonewall on any of the main demands, which include a halt to the development of the Gill Tract and a community process for an alternative design for a Food Initiative on all 20 acres of this historic farmland (more about the demands and the Gill Tract, below).
¶
As one student said, as she was emerging from Capital Projects: 'This struggle is far from over. This is just the beginning.'"
10/1/2014, Breitbart, 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT AND ITS DEVOLVEMENT, Robert Wilde
"Nevertheless, Carla Hesse, Dean of Social Sciences and a member of the campus coordinating committee for the 50th anniversary, wants the University to continue the annual lecture series dedicated to the historic event. Up until now, the lectures have been sponsored by the friends and admirers of Mario Savio, since he passed away in 1996. Hesse stated that the University will now be sponsoring an annual remembrance of the man who most influenced the FSM.
¶
'The timing seemed right to both its organizers and campus leaders to ensure it would continue in perpetuity as a part of our academic landscape and as a commemoration of a very important part of campus history,' Hesse stated."
9/30/2014, UC NewsCenter, Then-dean looks back on 1964: policy 'was wrong', Gretchen Kell
"Q: In September 1964, when the Office of the Dean of Students was asked to enforce new rules prohibiting students from on-campus political organization and activity, what was your job?
¶
A: I [Peter Van Houten] was one of several male members of the Dean of Students' staff assigned to approach individuals at tables who were in violation of campus rules and take their names if they refused to end the tabling. George Murphy and I were the two deans who approached protester Jack Weinberg just in front of the Sproul Hall steps; this set off the police car incident when Weinberg refused to move and was arrested by the UCPD and placed in the police car. As I recall, only the male deans did this confrontational work in those days. Our normal duties - seeing students to help them resolve personal, academic and financial problems - had to give way to our rule enforcement work. This was not what we wanted to do, as this police-type work put us in opposition to the people we were there to help.
¶
Q: Did you support the ban?
¶
A: I am frank to admit that, at the start of the FSM, I felt the university policy was proper and wise. I was convinced that it was vital to keep out religious or political activity that might undermine the institution's autonomy and make it subject to influences that could make the UC, like public universities in some other states, a political football. I was an "Old Blue" fighting for my university's well-being. But as the months went on, the Dean of Students' staff grew to feel we were caught in the middle of a major disagreement between UC President Clark Kerr and UC Berkeley Chancellor Edward Strong, and when the events on campus became more serious, our confusion increased. I didn't know what to think of the inner workings of the upper levels of the university. I now realize I was wrong about the policy, that it was impossible to support in modern times."
9/30/2014, UC NewsCenter, For poster-contest winner, FSM's legacy lives on, Cathy Cockrell
"'Protest movements are very new to me,' said Berkeley senior Grant Lin, as he paused from autographing copies of his graphic red, black and gray poster on the Free Speech Movement of 1964. In Taiwan, where he grew up, 'people were a lot more careful.'
¶
Lin, who moved to the United States six years ago, designed the prize-winning poster for UC Berkeley's 50th anniversary commemoration of the FSM - a student revolt he first learned about at the campus's Free Speech Movement Café."
09/30/2014, The Park Record, Jay Meehan: Honoring the "Free Speech Movement", Jay Meehan
"Now, if you were to find yourself on Sproul Plaza today, you would be wading knee deep in the irony of the University commemorating the leaders of a movement they fought so hard against back in the day as they welcome back Weinberg and the other leaders to a rally where it all began 50-years ago.
¶
Mario Savio, who passed from a heart attack at age 53 back in 1996, will no doubt be quoted and honored by both those who were there in the trenches of the movement during the '60s and also by those powers-that-be who now run the University. Mario wouldn't be a bit surprised. He never doubted for a moment that, over time, his beloved school would do the work necessary to arrive at this point."
9/30/2014, San Jose Mercury News, UC Berkeley celebrates free speech movement's 50th anniversary, Katy Murphy
"'One of the things the free speech movement teaches us is that first of all, people can be educated,' Aptheker said. 'When that movement started, a lot of people didn't know a lot about freedom of speech or why it mattered, or how it was connected to effective political advocacy.'"
9/29/2014, UC NewsCenter, Busted: Three Free Speech Movement myths, Gretchen Kell
"Myth No. 3: The FSM wasn't about liberty, but about hippies challenging decency with their speech, dress and drugs.
[Robert] Cohen: This conflating of what was happening in Berkeley in 1964 with everything conservatives disliked about the mid-1960s (and, since then, with all that the right loathed about the late '60s) was first popularized by Ronald Reagan. When he ran and won the California gubernatorial election in 1966, he did so, in part, by pledging to 'clean up the mess in Berkeley.'
¶
One still hears echoes of this from the right. Just recently, a letter sent to the Wall Street Journal claimed that 'Mr. Savio's free-speech issue was his desire to lace his comments with the F-word whenever he felt moved.'
¶
Having just published a book of Mario Savio's FSM speeches (The Essential Mario Savio: Speeches and Writings That Changed America), I assure you that none of Savio's speeches contained the 'F' word or any other obscenity. There was controversy over the use of indecent words at Berkeley, but it occurred in 1965, the semester after the FSM. While obscenity issues do have free speech implications - as when books such as Allen Ginsberg's Howl was banned as offensive, or the comedian Lenny Bruce was arrested for obscene expression - the issue of obscene speech never came up and was not a focus of the FSM in fall 1964."
9/29/2014, San Jose Mercury News, Photos: 50 year anniversary of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley,
"Fifty years ago, UC Berkeley students barred from promoting civil rights and other causes on campus staged a peaceful and relentless protest, demanding - and months later, gaining - their constitutional rights to free expression and assembly. Today, Sproul plaza is lined with tables of information for an array of political movements, clubs, religions, and causes for the hundreds of students and visitors who pass through the historical plaza."
9/29/2014, San Diego Free Press, Fifty Years Later: Who Really Won the Battle of Berkeley?, Barbara Garson
"It will feel a bit surreal. The university that had 801 of us arrested is welcoming us back by hanging Free Speech banners on the building we occupied. Home like a victorious football team! But it's not a real victory because the people that tried to shut us up in the 1960s have a more chilling control over U.S. college students today than they ever had over us. Today it's not police control, its economic control."
9/28/2014, The Daily Trojan, The University needs to revive student activism, Juve J. Cortes and Cameron Espinoza
"This 1st of October marks the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement that began at the University of California, Berkeley. On that day, thousands of Berkeley students surrounded a police car on Sproul Plaza and held it captive for 33 hours in protest of university bans against political activities on campus. The Free Speech Movement was an arm of the larger Civil Rights Movement, and it marked the nonviolent beginning of a decade of rebellion. The students and their movement reshaped national politics and planted universities as battlegrounds for public policy.
¶
On this 50th anniversary, it is important to reflect on student activism at USC over the last few years. Why? Having experienced student cultures at different universities, it seems to us that USC students suffer from a moral and intellectual crisis with unorthodox politics. While classes consistently emphasize politics outside formal institutions, the day-to-day campus is disappointedly empty of any substantive political activity. Challenges and protests do occur, yet they seem to be passive, temporary and even isolated in nature."
9/28/2014, Der Tagesspiegel, Studenten-Proteste von 1964, Susanne Kippenberger
"Setzen! Setzen? Was für eine Form der Revolution ist das denn, die im stattfindet? Eine ziemlich erfolgreiche und mit Abstand die erste ihrer Art. Berlins Studenten wachten erst Jahre später richtig auf." [Susanne Kippenberger translation: "Sit down! Sit down? What kind of revolution is that which takes place while sitting? A very successful one and by far the first of its kind. Berlin's students only woke up years later."]
9/27/2014, Los Angeles Times, Graying activists return to Berkeley to mark '64 free speech protests, Larry Gordon
"Fifty years ago, Jack Weinberg was the first to be arrested in an unprecedented student protest over free speech restrictions on the UC Berkeley campus. Thousands of demonstrators surrounded the police car in which Weinberg was detained for 32 hours. Subsequent protests went on for months.
¶
While UC authorities had hoped for a quick return to order, a seminal youth rebellion - the Free Speech Movement - was born on Sproul Plaza instead. Historians say its national influence persists through decades of political activism, on and off college campuses.
¶
This week, the university that once sought to censor Weinberg and other leaders of that movement is welcoming them back as heroes and historical figures.
¶
Berkeley is commemorating the half-century anniversary of that tumultuous fall 1964 semester with lectures, classes, concerts, exhibits and other activities that will culminate with a rally Wednesday at Sproul Plaza.
¶
'Fifty years have passed, and it's pretty safe to be a supporter of the Free Speech Movement now,' said Weinberg, 74, who is a consultant to groups seeking to clean up environmental pollution. As in many disputes, the losing side now embraces the cause it had fought, he said."
9/26/2014, Daily Californian, Robert Cohen commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, Mira Nguyen
"On Tuesday Sept. 23, Robert Cohen, NYU professor and author of "Freedom's Orator", discussed Mario Savio's role in promoting free speech and social justice during the Free Speech Movement. Both students and FSM veterans gathered to listen and celebrate the movement's 50th anniversary. [video]"
09/26/2014, Contra Costa Times, Berkeley councilman says center attempted to restrict free speech, Judith Scherr
"BERKELEY -- The free speech movement turned 50 this month, but Councilman Jesse Arreguin, 30, is asking if lessons were learned.
¶
In his capacity as a private citizen and sponsor of Measure R, the downtown initiative, Arreguin was invited by the Berkeley Gray Panthers to speak briefly on the ballot proposition at the organization's Wednesday afternoon meeting at the North Berkeley Senior Center.
¶
But, as Arreguin tells it, when he arrived to give his five-minute presentation, Gray Panther co-convener Edith Hallberg informed him that the senior center manager said he should not speak, due to the political content of his presentation.
¶
Arreguin said he ignored the cautions and made the presentation.
¶
'Political speech is a fundamental part of the right to free speech,' he told this newspaper."
9/26/2014, ABC7 News, BERKELEY'S FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT MARKS 50 YEARS, Lyanne Melendez
"BERKELEY, Calif. (KGO) -- From Friday night through next week, UC Berkeley will celebrate 50 years since the birth of the Free Speech Movement.
¶
On Oct. 1, 1964, students sat down at Sproul Plaza demanding the university lift its ban on political activism.
¶
Students attending UC Berkeley today know they are being raised in the cradle of the free speech movement. For most though, the details are sketchy.
¶
It was October 1, 1964, when Jack Weinberg, a student activist was trying to push for racial equality. He did so on the steps of Sproul Hall, knowing he could be arrested.
¶
'I had the good fortune of being the one they selected and when I wouldn't cooperate, they called in a police care to haul me away,' said Weinberg.
¶
Students who had gathered at the plaza, quickly surrounded the police car.
¶
'When the police car was brought on campus and people sat down on it somebody yelled 'sit down' and everybody sat down because we were used to sitting in. We had action at the Sheraton Plaza and other places,' said Lynn Hollander former student activist.
¶
The car became the speaker's podium and no one delivered the message more effectively than Mario Savio."
9/25/2014, KQED News, Berkeley Celebrates 50th Anniversary of Free Speech Movement, Jeanne Carstensen
"Three veterans of the Free Speech Movement spoke with Michael Krasny on Forum Tuesday about their participation in this formative era: Jack Weinberg, now an environmental activist; Lynnd Hollander Savio, Mario Savio's widow; and Jackie Goldberg, a former California assemblywoman who spoke to the crowd from atop a police car on Oct. 1."
9/25/2014, Berkeleyside, Berkeley concert marks free speech movement's birthday, Andrew Gilbert
"'Songs have a way of revealing as well as healing, and of reminding us that we are part of the whole human condition,' Dane writes in an email. 'Many new songs and new renditions of old songs have been fired by the spirit of the FSM, so it is only fitting that we celebrate this 50th anniversary by singing together again.'"
9/24/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, How UC Berkeley went from free speech to costly tuition, Barbara Garson
"I'm looking forward to seeing old friends at the reunion. I suspect we'll spend a lot of time wondering if there was something we should have done then, or could have been doing more of since then, to make things come out differently. Maybe the indebted generation will figure it out and take our old adversaries by surprise, as we once did."
9/24/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, A good day to sit around a police car, Jon Carroll
"So I wasn't exactly unprepared. On the other hand, this protest had been entirely spontaneous. There seemed to be no leaders; the only example of leadership I heard about was when some guy said, 'Sit down' and the people around the car did.
¶
Of course, there were people who had prepared for this moment, people who saw some sort of clash as inevitable. They were prepared for something; the police car was an opportunity. So nice when Authority hands you a stick to beat it with.
¶
And then the speeches. Who were these people, the ones standing on the police car and talking? They were the people who got to make the speeches. But the rhetoric, or at least some of the rhetoric, was effective. We believed we were adding our voices to a nationwide upheaval; we were supporting our brothers and sisters in wherever.
¶
(And we were, of course; we were not delusional. The FSM was a big deal; it inspired many other student movements. And student movements were a good thing; they blew a lot of soot out of the pipes. They made people confront larger truths. I wish I'd done more, actually.)
¶
And then Mario Savio spoke. Ah. I said to myself, here's the leader. The offhand eloquence, the clarity of vision, the gentleness of his manner - he was charismatic. It was the first and last time I ever saw charisma developing right before my eyes. Suddenly we knew we could outlast the police cars."
09/24/2014, Contra Costa Times, Snapp Shots: Berkeley Free Speech Movement vets to return for anniversary, Martin Snapp
"'FSM was not a hate-filled movement, and so much of what came after was,' says journalist Kate Coleman, who was an undergrad at Cal in 1964. 'And a lot of it has to be credited to Mario. A lot of guys in the movement were arrogant jerks, but not him. He was so humble. I don't think I really appreciated that until later, as the left got ugly and started to eat its own.'"
9/23/2014, Wall Street Journal, The Unfree Speech Movement, Sol Stern
"Writing in the Berkeley alumni magazine about the anniversary, Ms. Aptheker noted that the First Amendment was 'written by white, propertied men in the 18th century, who never likely imagined that it might apply to women, and/or people of color, and/or all those who were not propertied, and even, perhaps, not citizens, and/or undocumented immigrants. . . . In other words, freedom of speech is a Constitutional guarantee, but who gets to exercise it without the chilling restraints of censure depends very much on one's location in the political and social cartography. We [Free Speech Movement] veterans were too young and inexperienced in 1964 to know this, but we do now, and we speak with a new awareness, a new consciousness, and a new urgency that the wisdom of a true freedom is inexorably tied to who exercises power and for what ends.'
¶
Read it and weep-for the Free Speech Movement anniversary, for the ideal of an intellectually open university, and for America."
9/22/2014, UC Berkeley News, 1964 to the present - a personal perspective, Robert Birgeneau
"During the historic Free Speech Movement period at Berkeley, beginning in the autumn of 1964, I was a graduate student in physics at Yale University. There was no doubt that Berkeley students were playing a leadership role for us all across the country.
¶
At Yale, the focus was primarily on civil rights. Racism and its destructive consequences were all around us. If you walked a few blocks from the Yale campus down Dixwell Avenue, the world changed from all White to all Black. I was deeply offended by this and, accordingly, started working as a volunteer, leading a group of teenage boys at the Dixwell Community Center in the heart of the projects. People said that it was too dangerous for White people to go into the projects but they were simply wrong.
¶
At the same time, we organized at Yale a non-profit called Southern Teaching Program Inc., which recruited graduate students from universities across the country to teach in the South in historically black colleges and universities. This was an entirely student based and led organization; we expected little, if anything, from the generation before us.
¶
As part of this, in the summer of 1965, I went to South Carolina and Georgia to teach and do civil-rights work. In South Carolina several of us from the Northeast joined up with two graduate students from Berkeley who had played a leadership role in the FSM. These were heady but also dangerous times. Indeed, just before I arrived, one of our group was murdered by an outraged local person in Columbia, S.C.
¶
I remember being very taken by the passion of the Berkeley students and also by their political sophistication. For them, the FSM was the single most important experience of their lives. It was psychologically liberating for them."
9/22/2014, The Weekly Standard, Berkeley and Free Speech, The Scrapbook
"The 50th anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement is upon us, and we're willing to concede that the founders of the movement had a good slogan-even if it pains The Scrapbook to contemplate the damage done by 'campus activists' since then. Whether the social and political change it foments is good or bad, free speech is obviously preferable to any censorious alternative."
9/22/2014, The Berkeley Blog, The Free Speech Movement's passionate readers, Thomas C. Leonard
"Margot Adler, a familiar voice on National Public Radio until her death this summer, read Thucydides while sitting in at Sproul Hall in 1964. The four hundred pages that she was expected to read for class over an earlier weekend would scare Freshmen this fall. As Adler looked back at Cal, readers had as much stature as the orators:
¶
While politics bid for my soul, another model, totally at war with the active political life, also beckoned. . . . He would sit in his home, surrounded by walls of books, contentedly poring over ancient Greek texts, while his wife sat at her desk quietly studying Anglo-Saxon. I wondered if they were outside the main energy of our era or if they were investigating the only questions anyone would find interesting a hundred or a thousand years from now."
9/22/2014, The Berkeley Blog, Remembering Bob ("Mario") Savio, Nancy Scheper-Hughes
"We were directed to the small room behind the parish church that Bob Savio shared with the lone remaining Queens College volunteer in Taxco, Kevin Donnalan. Kevin told us that Bob and the bishop didn't get along and that the bishop had ordered him to leave the diocese.
¶
Kevin was in awe of Savio and told us of Bob's transformation as he emerged, like a butterfly from its chrysalis, into a powerful speaker and organizer who had led a demonstration of local indigenous Catholics to protest their maltreatment by landowners and to bring their complaints to the bishop. The bishop was not amused. He was so flummoxed by Savio that he had threated to send the rest of the Queens College volunteers packing, as well.
¶
We were amazed: the young man we knew had been almost incapable of carrying on a polite conversation, but somehow was managing to reach strangers across culture, class and language. We knew Savio to be a modest and somewhat solitary fellow. He didn't much mix with the rest of the Queens College volunteers. He didn't join us on the one R&R weekend break in Acapulco. Instead, he came and went to Mexico like the Lone Stranger.
¶
We couldn't fathom how Bob had managed to stir up so much trouble in so short a period of time and what he could have possibly conveyed to the indigenous Nahuatl speakers. That he was "inspired" was all that Kevin could tell us."
9/22/2014, Berkeleyside, Events mark 50th anniversary of Free Speech Movement, Frances Dinkelspiel
"The Free Speech Movement affected national events as well. UC Regents fired President Kerr because they did not think he took a strong enough stance against the students. FBI Director Edgar Hoover used the movement as an excuse to bump up the agency's spying on students and leftist protest groups. A Hollywood actor named Ronald Reagan used the student unrest as a wedge issue to defeat Gov. Pat Brown in 1967, thereby launching a political career that would carry him to the Presidency. And the Free Speech protests would radicalize thousands of students, many of whom went on to fight other important battles, including protesting the Vietnam War."
9/21/2014, Seattlepi, Book Review: 'War Babies: The Generation that Changed America' by Richard Pells, Irene S. Roth
"Thus, war babies renovated the cultural and political landscapes. Their art and activities transfigured modern America. This book is a tribute to war babies. And it is definitely a tribute worth making, given the fact that so many talented musicians and singers such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Joanie Mitchell, Judy Collins, Simon and Garfunkle, actors such as Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, journalists such as Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, athlete/activists such as Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, civil rights activists such as Mario Savio, Tom Hayden, John Lewis, Barney Frank, and politicians such as John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Dick Cheney who were born in these years. They became adults in the early 1960's."
9/21/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, Free Speech Movement at UC sparked change across U.S. beyond, Robert Hurwitt
"'We changed the image of students from panty raiders to political activists,' says FSM veteran Lynne Hollander, the widow of FSM leader Mario Savio and chair of the 50th anniversary reunion. 'We were the first big movement on a white college campus. There'd been lots of stuff with black colleges in the South, but we spread that to the Northern campuses.
¶
'We didn't succeed in transforming the society to make it just and equitable. We still have a long way to go on that. But I think we contributed a lot to the sense that young people have that they have a right to have a say in the decisions that control and impact their lives.'"
9/21/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, FSM activists reflect on the movement's achievements, Sam Whiting
"Q: What does it all mean now?
¶
A [Jack Weinberg]: 'Rights that were won on the Berkeley campus spread to other parts of the country and free speech in America and on university campuses was deepened. There are still attacks on it, but the Free Speech Movement commemorates a victory and is a symbol that encourages people to keep defending that idea.'"
9/20/2014, The Los Angeles Times, Op-Ed: Free Speech and free tuition on campus, Barbara Garson
"I'm going back to the Berkeley campus next week for the 50th reunion of the Free Speech Movement. You may have heard in some history class about Mario Savio and the first student sit-in of the '60s. That was us FSMers at Berkeley. [ed note: per Robert Cohen, personal communication, "The first student sit in of the '60s was not in Berkeley '64, but in Greensboro, NC, 1960."]
¶
It will be a little surreal. A university that had nearly 800 of us arrested in December 1964 is welcoming us back by hanging Free Speech banners on the building we occupied. We're coming home like a victorious football team! But it's not a real victory because the same forces that tried to shut us up in the 1960s have a more chilling control over U.S. college students today than they ever had over us. Today, it's not police control; its economic control."
9/19/2014, The Daily Californian, Everything you need to know about Mario Savio, Ismael Farooqui
"Our story begins in Queens, New York, in 1942. Mario Savio was born during World War II and would later grow up in the conformist postwar decade in America. Savio was, however, every bit the counterculture youth. Think of him as John Travolta in Grease - except way smarter and without the grease.
¶
Savio spent the summer of 1963 helping the poor in Taxco, Mexico, and the summer of 1964 in Mississippi campaigning for civil rights. (So what were you saying about how many seasons of Breaking Bad you got through last summer?) Savio transferred to UC Berkeley in the fall of '64 and majored in philosophy - and yes, he did find a job after college."
9/19/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, Perks for a job that includes patting down, Leah Garchik
"As part of UC Berkeley events commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, there was a showing of Mark Kitchell's movie, 'Berkeley in the Sixties.' Afterward, a speaker described other events planned for the occasion.
¶
Someone in the audience shouted, 'How can we get a list of all of these events?' 'We'll have a leaflet,' said the speaker. 'What's a leaflet?' an older person who seemed to be joking shouted.
¶
To which someone else shouted, 'Where are you going to put it?' 'We'll have a table,' said the organizer.
¶
Gar Smith assures the technologically savvy that the information is online, too, at www.fsm-a.org."
9/19/2014, Leon's OpEd, ONE PROF'S MEMORY OF THE FSM YEARS, Leon Wofsy
"FSM took us, the faculty, on a very bumpy ride. A few got on board when students surrounded the police car in Sproul Plaza. Most were unresponsive, a few annoyed and hostile, most assuming the disturbance would soon blow over. The mass arrests at Sproul Hall on December 2nd changed the mood, a majority shocked by the use of such force at the behest of campus administrators.
¶
I remember standing with Professor Howard Schachman at Sproul Hall right after the students were dragged out and arrested. We decided to enlist our colleagues to convene an ad hoc meeting of faculty that evening. That meeting in the old Life Sciences Building formed the Committee of 200, which rallied a large majority of the faculty to the side of free speech, culminating in the historic Academic Senate vote of December 8th. Of course that landslide vote marking the FSM's victory was guaranteed in advance when campus police tried (and failed) forcibly to keep Mario Savio from speaking at the Greek Theater convocation.
¶
We listen in awe today to the remarkably thoughtful, poetic and inspired speeches of Mario Savio, but I'm reminded that some administrators were so blinded by rage that they could say, as one did to me: 'he speaks the language of the gutter'. I've told the story elsewhere (a chapter in the Zelnik and Coh[e]n book about FSM) of my being asked for advice at high levels of the UC administration, advice that was rejected because it was supportive of the students. Moreover, adding injury to insult, a record of that 'confidential' encounter was passed on to the FBI and appeared in my FBI file obtained under the Freedom of Information Act."
09/19/2014, Contra Costa Times, Berkeley: Free talk opens exhibit on 50th anniversary of Free Speech Movement, Chris Treadway
"BERKELEY -- A new exhibit on the Free Speech Movement that emerged here 50 years ago will open with a free talk UC Santa Cruz Professor of Feminist and Ethnic Studies Bettina Aptheker from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. Sept. 28 at the Veterans Memorial Building, 1931 Center St.
¶
'From COINTELPRO to the Patriot Act, From Selma to Ferguson" will be the topic of the talk by Aptheker, who "will consider the legacy of FSM and its meaning for today's struggles for social justice,' according to the Berkeley Historical Society, which is hosting the event. Aptheker was one of the leaders of the 1964 movement in Berkeley that spawned campus activism across the United States.
¶
The talk is part of the society's Free Speech Movement at 50 exhibit and program series, which runs through April 11, 2015.
¶
Admission to the program is free, but donations are accepted. A reception will follow the talk,
¶
For more details call 510-848-0181."
9/19/2014, Berkeleyside, The It List: Five things to do this weekend in Berkeley, Tracey Taylor
"FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT PLAY Stagebridge's production FSM, an original play with music, written by Joan Holden, commemorates the 50thanniversary of the 1964 Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley with performances at Brava Theater in San Francisco and Berkeley Rep. Previews start on Saturday Sept. 20 The widow and son of Mario Savio, student leader of the movement, are members of the Stagebridge community and were heavily involved in the creative process and production of the play. Here's what Stagebridge says about it: "FSM takes 60's politics seriously. It celebrates the joy, moral purpose, newborn freedom and occasional absurdity of being young, part of a movement and passionately political, from a distance that takes account of the consequences." The play only runs two weekends. Find details and buy tickets at www.stagebridge.org"
9/19/2014, Berkeley Daily Planet, Free Speech in Berkeley Redux, Becky O'Malley
"So where does all this leave us? I guess I'm still going to hang with old Uncle Ralph [Waldo Emerson].
¶
Sometimes things come up that are so deeply immoral that ordinary notions of civility just don't apply. Slavery was one such thing, little dispute about that these days. My genteel slave-holding Virginia ancestors would have disagreed, but they would have been wrong, as was Mr. Jefferson on this question.
¶
Another immorality, it seems to me, is the continued injustice in what the government of Israel is doing to the people of Palestine. Professor Salaita's infamous tweets were highly uncivil, but he was responding appropriately to the deep immorality we all witnessed in the last months--soccer-playing boys gunned down on a beach, U.N. schools demolished, empty apartment buildings destroyed in the most crowded territory perhaps on the surface of the earth, hundreds of innocent children killed. I myself, seeing one of the reports of what was going on in the last Gaza war, swore loudly and long in a way startling to my daughter who had never heard me do such a thing-she was surprised that I even knew the words.
¶
Someone, sometime, even on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, might have a similar reaction to this or a similar outrage, and it should be their right-no, their duty-to express their opinion in suitably angry words. In fact, I believe someone on that campus once, now a while ago, made a statement about this duty that's lasted for a few years and is still relevant.
¶
[video of Mario Savio, on the operation of the machine]
¶
Just saying… "
9/18/2014, Muscatine Journal, Colleges must teach free speech by example, Nat Hentoff
"A particularly startling example of the cult of censorship among many college administrators is a Sept. 5 email message to University of California-Berkeley students, faculty and staff from Chancellor Nicholas Dirks.
¶
He began by noting that it is the 50th anniversary of the extraordinary Free Speech Movement by University of California students, which would have gladdened the hearts of James Madison, Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson.
¶
But then listen to how this university's commander-in-chief defined free speech:
¶
"We can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility ...
¶
In other words: Be polite, or shut up."
9/18/2014, KQED Arts, 'FSM', Cyrus Musiker and Gabe Meline
"The acronym (in this case) stands for 'Free Speech Movement.' Fifty years ago this fall, students at UC Berkeley began a series of massive protests and strikes against limits to free speech and political organizing on campus, led by Mario Savio. Those events and their consequences are the subject of a play opening this weekend called FSM. Stagebridge, a small company, offers this unique musical event at San Francisco's Brava Theater with an encore performance the following weekend at Berkeley Rep."
9/17/2014, East Bay Express, Relive the Famous Youth Rebellion of the 1960s, Sam Levin
"In an upcoming theatrical production commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, [Lynne] Hollander will revisit the events of 1964 in a way she never has before - through the eyes of a UC Berkeley official whom students were up against decades earlier. Hollander will inhabit the role of then-Vice Chancellor Alex Sherriffs. Stagebridge, an Oakland-based nonprofit arts organization, is producing the musical production, called FSM, with performances at the Brava Theater Center in San Francisco this weekend and at Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Thrust Stage the following weekend.
¶
'If we do it well, it brings it all to life again,' said Hollander, an associate producer and historical consultant for the musical, and the widow of Mario Savio, a central leader in the protests. Even in the first workshops of the production, she said, 'You had that same sense of standing up for this cause that you deeply believed in and feeling very triumphant.'"
9/16/2014, UC Berkeley Newscenter, Media Advisory: UC Berkeley commemorates Free Speech Movement's 50th, Gretchen Kell
"This fall, the University of California, Berkeley, is marking the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement with several dozen special classes, an experiential program for students built around the biography of movement leader Mario Savio, sing-ins and a political poetry reading, a film series, panel discussions and lectures, a reunion of activists, an Oct. 1 rally on Sproul Plaza, concerts and more.
¶
The movement began in 1964 when UC Berkeley students protested a ban on on-campus political advocacy and demanded their right to free speech and academic freedom. The non-violent civil disobedience tactics at UC Berkeley, pioneered by the civil rights movement, led to the introduction of reforms on many other university campuses that made freedom of speech more consistent with how it is guaranteed by the First Amendment."
9/16/2014, The Daily Californian, No boundary between free speech, political advocacy, Board of Directors of the Free Speech Movement Archives and the 50th Anniversary Organizing Committee
"Therefore, we welcome your Sept. 12 message that you do not intend to limit or regulate speech on campus, and we ask that you take every opportunity, during this 50th-anniversary semester, to reaffirm the policy that - as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution's First and 14th Amendments - the content of speech or advocacy shall not be restricted by the university. We thank you for your email clarifying that you are fully committed to uphold and affirm the proud traditions established on campus 50 years ago."
9/16/2014, The Daily Californian, Not on the same page, Celeste Langan
"There's a reason we describe protests against perceived injustice and the defense of ideas as 'raising one's voice': intensity of expression is often the best or only way to call to the attention of the public issues that have been excluded, willfully or unwittingly, from civil discussion. I think the freedom of speech defended by the movement must be understood precisely as including the freedom to say what prevailing conventions of civility have made 'unspeakable.'"
9/16/2014, The Daily Californian, Freedom and its limits, The Berkeley Faculty Association
"This fall, the campus celebrates the achievements of the 1964 student movement that made Berkeley famous for extending the First Amendment's definition of free speech to the University of California. In those days, in what was known as the 'political neutrality' doctrine, the UC administration sought to preserve the university's autonomy from external political interference, but did so through a Faustian bargain: The university was kept as free as possible of political interference from Sacramento, but it sacrificed free speech on campus to a degree that was almost certainly unconstitutional.
¶
In the decades before the Free Speech Movement, students were allowed to engage in political advocacy close to campus, but not on it. Faculty members were prohibited from identifying themselves as UC professors when endorsing a political cause. When the FSM challenged this doctrine of 'political neutrality,' UC President Clark Kerr was faced with the task of enforcing an untenable set of campus regulations that sought to distinguish between 'informing,' which was permissible, and 'advocating,' which was not."
9/16/2014, The Daily Californian, Who should define civility?, Senior Editorial Staff
"As students, we have witnessed or participated in political action on campus, ranging from flyering to sit-ins. The Free Speech Movement of 1964 involved a range of political discourse, from negotiations with administrators to more iconic moments of campus activism. Leaving the requirement of civility hanging above students' heads without a clear definition takes away from students' ability to continue the activism that now defines a large part of UC Berkeley's history and legacy."
9/16/2014, The Daily Californian, On civility and divisions, Caitlin Quinn and Baltazar Dasalla
"We are opposed to hate speech and violence against other students, whether it is physical, emotional or mental. But free speech isn't what hurts students - the administration is. Student protests have largely been nonviolent, yet whether it was the movement to divest from South African apartheid, the Third World Liberation Front or Occupy Cal, the administration has been the one to commit violence against students. Furthermore, it is this argument of 'civility' that administrators have used to undermine student and faculty free speech, either by denying tenure to qualified faculty or by denouncing democratic, student-government resolutions. The burden of the 'civility' that Dirks calls for is on the administration that has beaten students bloody, not on students who come to our ASUC Senate and raise their voice."
9/15/2014, Law and Disorder Radio, 50 Year Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, Barbara Garson
"I was at the University of California at Berkeley and when we got back to campus in 1964 some people from the Freedom Summer in Mississippi, myself working with the farm workers in California . . . we come on to campus and we discover that the area in front of the school that we (all the groups) traditionally used to hand out leaflets about their events and so on, suddenly you couldn't hand out leaflets there.
¶
The reason we were given was trash. That is to say litter.
¶
Pretty soon all the groups, I mean all the groups, the Republicans, the Young Republicans, the Democrats and the Anarchists, we all went to the administration and . . . . they dropped that flimsy excuse.
¶
They said no, the only thing is you can't pass out leaflets on campus that advocate action off campus.
¶
It was obvious not only to the radicals but all the students that some . . powerful people in Berkeley had become annoyed by the farmworkers boycott and the equal employment picket lines in Oakland and had put pressure on the president of the university.
¶
All the groups realized this wasn't an issue about litter, it was an issue of free speech.
Throughout that year of expulsions, arrests, all the groups stood together."
9/15/2014, Daily Californian, FSM celebrated in world premiere of local play, Anne Ferguson
"'Students do have power, and people getting together do have power,' said Lynne Hollander of the Oakland-based production for the new play 'FSM.' 'I hope that showing people their history will help people to see this, to empower them.'
¶
This fall marks the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement - the 1964-65 student-lead protests on the UC Berkeley campus that radically altered the relationship between the school's administration and its students and blasted open new channels of expression for young people across the country. 'FSM' the play aims to begin a new chapter in the movement by commemorating and sharing the value of this moment in UC Berkeley's history."
Fall, 2014, California Magazine, Free Speech Rhetoric and Reality: Why Savio, Kerr and Reagan Were All "Radicals", Seth Rosenfeld
"The FSM established that students have the fundamental right to free speech necessary for participation as full-fledged individuals, and helped inspire the antiwar, ethnic studies, women's, gay rights, and environmental movements. A half-century later, the FSM stands as a model for nonviolent mass organizations built on transparency and consensus."
9/15/2014, Calgary Herald, Fifty years later, free speech isn't so free anymore, Kevin Brooker
"It wasn't long before the issues multiplied, due largely to the paternalistic university administration, who addressed the students as if they were children and openly reminded them of their duty to conform to the university's plans to churn out obedient technocrats.
¶
Absent that, perhaps the FSM would not have progressed to where their firebrands spoke about 'smashing the machine.' Nevertheless, events that followed gave us much of what soon became common: sit-ins, nonviolent civil disobedience like going limp while being arrested, and even the odious concept of approved 'free speech zones' - which, to their credit, the students derailed."
9/14/2014, Rocky Mountain Collegian, Rebels with a cause, Haleigh McGill
"The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley is a perfect example of purposeful, impactful rebellion. Yes, the students misbehaved. They broke the rules, they acted out. But their rebellious ways inspired ground-breaking change and they liberated themselves from unfair administrative control. It's all about intention, and their intentions were admirable. That was 50 years ago, but we have more in common with those students than we realize. College is the time to start figuring out exactly what you stand for, and what you are willing to take a stand against. One of the most important lessons that these collegiate glory days will teach you is how to be fearless in your own rebellion and to stand your ground, whether you are standing among hundreds or all on your own."
9/12/2014, The Daily Californian, ASUC executives deliver State of the Association speeches, Heyun Jeong
"At the meeting, External Affairs Vice President Caitlin Quinn also emphasized that the ASUC's unique autonomy should not be taken for granted. In honor of the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, Quinn reminded senators to exercise free speech and 'have hard conversations' for the communities that voted for them."
9/12/2014, Berkeleyside, Uncharted speakers just keep doing extraordinary things, Tracey Taylor
"And Saru Jayaraman‘s battle to raise restaurant workers’ wages is gaining traction, with profiles of the fight in The New Yorker and Saru giving this year’s Mario Savio Memorial Lecture next month, on the 50th Anniversary of the founding of the Free Speech Movement."
9/11/2014, Spiked, Universities need less civility and more 'shit-kicking', Dennis Hayes
"The University of California at Berkeley was the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement (FSM), a coalition of students and staff who came together in 1964 to hold sit-ins and protests to demand unrestricted freedom of speech on campus. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, Berkeley's current chancellor, Nicholas Dirks, has sent an email to all faculty, staff and students. Unfortunately, the email seems to suggest that Dirks has learned nothing from that great victory for free speech.
¶
In his email, Dirks argued that free speech is only legitimate when it is 'civil' and 'courteous': 'Free speech and civility are two sides of a single coin - the coin of open, democratic society.' It's a sign of the times that such patronising statements can be made by powerful individuals without students and staff taking to the streets."
9/11/2014, Berkeley Daily Planet, New: Chancellor Dirks Upholds a Berkeley Free Speech Tradition, Becky O'Malley
"U.C. Berkeley’s Chancellor Nicholas Dirks has been kind enough to spice up the imminent Free Speech Movement reunion which starts next week."
9/10/2014, The Daily Californian, Email from Dirks asking for 'civility' in free speech sparks controversy, Zoe Kleinfeld
"Colleen Lye, a campus associate professor of English and co-chair of the UC Berkeley Faculty Association, said there has been a recent tendency for chancellors nationwide to use the term 'civility' to justify restricting academic freedom.
¶
'Enough faculty … would very much like to hear from the Chancellor as to his views on free speech, since it is his understanding of it as conveyed in the message that has caused some puzzlement locally and has become a news item nationally,' Lye said in an email."
9/10/2014, Salon, Civility is for suckers: Campus hypocrisy and the "polite behavior" lie, David Palumbo-Liu
"Savio obviously deplores the analogy the "liberal" makes between the Chancellor and the Board of Regents-but note too that he deplores the way that relation is depicted, as the manager shuddering at the thought of uncivilly criticizing his bosses in public. The Free Speech Movement was all about non-conformity, about not being "processed" into a product. It was about freedom to be uncivil, not as a goal in itself, but as a necessary freedom toward a greater kind of liberation of the human spirit. That is how we should remember and honor it."
9/9/2014, Los Angeles Times, What freshmen are reading,
"UC Berkeley: 'Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s,' by Robert Cohen."
9/9/2014, Los Angeles Times, Free speech, 'civility,' and how universities are getting them mixed up, Michael Hiltzik
"When someone in power praises the principle of free speech, it's wise to be on the lookout for weasel words. The phrase 'I favor constructive criticism,' is weaseling. So is, 'You can express your views as long as they're respectful.' In those examples, 'constructive' and 'respectful' are modifiers concealing that the speaker really doesn't favor free speech at all.
¶
The targets of free speech never think it's constructive or respectful. Quite the contrary.
¶
So now here's Nicholas Dirks, chancellor of UC Berkeley, on Friday, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, which he says 'made the right to free expression of ideas a signature issue for our campus.'"
9/9/2014, Inside Higher Ed, The Problem With Civility, Colleen Flaherty
"Anity Levy, associate secretary at the American Association of University Professors, said the chancellor's position was 'astonishing.'
¶
She continued: 'That the university which gave rise to the free speech movement should celebrate it by embracing the notion of civility is patently absurd.'
¶
Will Creeley, director of legal and public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, expressed similar sentiments. 'Instead of celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement with a ringing endorsement of the right to speak one's mind, Dirks offered Berkeley a tepid, compromised vision of free speech that would, in practice, render it a hollow right,' he said via email. 'If Dirks doesn't support freedom of expression when speech isn't 'civil,' he doesn't support freedom of expression.'"
9/9/2014, Global Research, "Civility": Israel Lobby's New Weapon Against Free Speech on US Campuses, Ali Abunimah
"While the strategy has so far failed at the legal level, it is succeeding with university administrations, who are rushing to issue 'civility' statements explicitly or implicitly targeting utterers of speech critical of Israel.
¶
It cannot be mere coincidence that Nicholas Dirks, chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, sent an email to the entire campus community last week also calling for 'civility.'
¶
Ostensibly marking the 50th anniversary of Berkeley's famed Free Speech Movement, Dirks said, 'we can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility.'
¶
What does 'civility' mean in this context? Does it mean saying 'please,' 'thank you,' 'sir' and 'ma'am' to war criminals? Or does it mean electing a sheriff instead of a professor to run a university to make everyone feel 'safe' and secure?
¶
(A similar statement has also just been issued from Penn State University. No particular cause is mentioned as prompting the statement and it does not mention Palestine, but I expect to see more of these.)
¶
Dirks, as I recount in The Battle for Justice in Palestine, was the vice president at Columbia University who, prior to taking his new job at Berkeley, boasted about his role in the witch-hunt against Professor Joseph Massad."
9/9/2014, College Fix, What Free Speech Movement At Berkeley? Institution Turns Its Back On Greatness, Kevin Reyes
"The University of California-Berkeley is commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement this fall, and our chancellor has made an unusual contribution to its legacy: arguing that free speech can 'undermine a community's foundation.'
¶
Nicholas Dirks, himself an historian, said in a campus-wide email last week that it was important to recognize 'the broader social context required in order for free speech to thrive.' He argued for the campus community to determine when free speech goes too far: 'Specifically, we can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility.'
¶
Needless to say, this is a curious interpretation of the animating principle of the movement that cemented Berkeley's place in the history books. Berkeley is the university remembered for its student dissent, civility be damned."
9/9/2014, American Thinker, University of California Students Had Better Wise Up and Learn Their Constitutional Rights, Velma Montoya
"Constitution Day on September 17, commemorating the 1787 signing of the United States Constitution, provides an opportune vehicle for UC students, faculty and staff to learn their Constitutional rights and obligations as citizens in a free society. Public Law 108-477 requires each educational institution receiving Federal funds to commemorate this Day with an annual educational program informing students of their Constitutional rights. In 2010, UC Berkeley invited students to attend a seminar on 'The Free Speech Movement and the Constitution.' With only UC Berkeley and UC Merced holding classes on Constitution Day, other campuses could incorporate programs about the Constitution in their annual orientation programs."
9/8/2014, The Wall Street Journal, Free Speech at Berkeley-So Long as It's 'Civil', Greg Lukianoff
"This fall the University of California at Berkeley is marking the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement that famously roiled the campus during the 1964-65 school year. What a difference a half-century makes. On Friday Chancellor Nicholas Dirks sent a message to Berkeley faculty, staff and students titled 'Civility and Free Speech' that was at best a lukewarm defense of the First Amendment rights that those long-ago students passionately sought with protests and sit-ins because political speech was restricted on campus."
9/8/2014, The Berkeley Graduate, Chancellor Dirks' Utopian Bromide on "Civility" and Free Speech, Richard Grijalva
"For those following reports surrounding the University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana's revocation of Professor Stephen Salaita's pending appointment, Chancellor Dirks' e-mail to the Berkeley community last Friday afternoon struck an awkward tone.
¶
A reflection on the relationship of free speech and civility sought to invoke the fiftieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement (whose legacy the University has absorbed and transmogrified for marketing purposes), the Chancellor's missive came at a peculiar time. The pairing of 'civility' with free speech clearly refers to the goings-on in Illinois, where Chancellor Phyllis Wise invoked 'civility' to defend her questionable decision to withdraw Salaita's tenured position in the Department of American Indian Studies. The subsequent stream of university presidents joining her in extolling civility underscores the backdrop against which concerned observers read our Chancellor's discourse. Our University measures conduct and appropriateness of speech in terms of Time, Place, and Manner; the Chancellor's letter failed the test on all three counts."
9/8/2014, Counterpunch, Berkeley's Faux Free Speech, Vijay Prashad
"It, therefore, amused me to read Chancellor Dirks' email to the UC campus community. 'Free speech and civility,' wrote the current Chancellor, 'are two sides of a single coin - the coin of open, democratic society.' What is the relationship between free speech and civility? The Chancellor does not make this clear. He affirms the importance of free speech, for after all this is a guarantee of the US Constitution not a product of the Free Speech Movement. That Movement was not about the right to speak as such. Even the conservative student leaders, such as David Levy 1964 editor of the campus magazine Man and State, agreed that free speech is inviolable. Free speech itself was not the issue. The FSM was about the right to express and propagate political opinions on campus property (which is also state property)."
9/6/2014, The College Fix, FREE SPEECH CAN 'UNDERMINE A COMMUNITY'S FOUNDATION,' UC-BERKELEY CHANCELLOR SAYS, Greg Piper
"Sounding more like a kindergarten teacher than the chancellor of the university that birthed the Free Speech Movement 50 years ago this fall, the University of California-Berkeley's Nicholas Dirks sent a jaw-droppingly ignorant email to students, faculty and staff Friday that essentially turns free speech into an endless relativist exercise.
¶
Popehat has a very good point-by-point analysis that serves as the main course, but here's an appetizer from Dirks' email:
¶
As a consequence, when issues are inherently divisive, controversial and capable of arousing strong feelings, the commitment to free speech and expression can lead to division and divisiveness that undermine a community's foundation. [emphasis added]
¶
Popehat says:
¶
In today's competitive publishing environment it is astonishingly difficult to distinguish yourself as an academic by being wrong about free speech, but Chancellor Dirks is equal to the challenge. His email is so very bad on every level - legally, logically, rhetorically, and philosophically - that it deserves scrutiny.
¶
Read the full Popehat analysis here.
http://www.popehat.com/2014/09/06/u-c-berkeley-chancellor-nicholas-dirks-gets-free-speech-very-wrong/"
9/4/2014, The Huffington Post, 11 Things You Didn't Know About The F-Word, Rufus Lodge
"The 1960s wouldn't have been the same without it
Take your pick from the Free Speech Movement demonstration in Berkeley, which began when someone on campus tried wearing a shirt on which he'd pinned a card carrying four famous letters; the underground magazine launched by beat poet Ed Sanders, which he called F*** You; the expletive-littered hit novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn; Andy Warhol's notorious movie, F***; or the famous political slogan from a militant decade, 'Up against the wall, motherf***ers!'" [ed note: the referenced action at UC Berkeley took place after the Free Speech Movement and was not a part of it, though likely a result of it.]
9/3/2014, MarinScope, Joe Tate: Sausalito's renaissance man, Steefenie Wicks
"Tate recalled his disillusionment with society and government at that time. He drove to Pasadena and on to San Francisco and Sausalito in his mail truck. Then he drove to the East Bay, where he got a job as a TV repairman. After a while, he decided to register at U.C. Berkeley.
¶
When he started walking toward the registrar's office, which was blocked off by police, he realized he had walked into the first Freedom of Speech demonstration under the leadership of a young civil rights worker named Mario Savio.
¶
'Savio was brilliant,' Tate said. 'He spoke with compassion, moral clarity; he was a source of inspiration.'"
9/2/2014, UC Berkeley NewsCenter, Coming this fall: FSM, early America, vaudeville, sounds of the human condition, Avi Martin
"This fall marks the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, a struggle between students and university administrators over students' right to advocate for political issues on campus. The conflict spanned the course of the 1964 fall semester, focused national attention on the Berkeley campus and set the stage for anti-war demonstrations at colleges across the country.
¶
UC Berkeley will celebrate this milestone anniversary with a wide array of events and programs exploring the legacy of the FSM. A noon rally including speeches by Robert Reich [ed note: Reich canceled] and labor activist Dolores Huerta will look back, and ahead, at the meaning and impact of free speech and activism. (Wednesday, Oct. 1, noon., Spoul Plaza.) Saru Jayaraman, activist and director of UC Berkeley's food labor research center will deliver the 18th annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture, which highlights the spirit of moral courage that Savio embodied. (Thursday, Oct. 2, 8 p.m, Wheeler Auditorium.)
¶
Cal Performances will present a concert by jazz legend Mavis Staples, who will bring to life gospel standards and civil rights anthems. (Thursday, Oct. 30, 8 p.m., Zellerbach Hall.) Staples will also join a panel discussion on the role of music in protest movements. (Thursday, Oct. 30, 12:30 p.m., Banatao Auditorium.) A campus "sing-in" will be open to all and will feature the University Choruses and Gospel Chorus. (Tuesday, Sep. 23, 5 p.m., Sproul Plaza.)
¶
Mario Savio biographer Robert Cohen will examine the impact of student activism on free speech from the 1960s to the present. (Tuesday, Sept. 23, 6 p.m., 105 Stanley Hall.) A panel of legal scholars will discuss Free Speech on the Berkeley campus, from the 1960s to the Occupy Movement. (Wednesday, Sept. 17, 4 p.m., Boalt Hall.) Members of the Academic Senate will reflect on the historic vote that effectively ended the 1964 protests around the FSM, and the implications for political speech and action. (Monday, Dec. 8, 3 p.m., Wheeler Auditorium.)
¶
A full list of campus events related to the FSM anniversary can be found here.
http://events.berkeley.edu/index.php/calendar/sn/fsm.html"
9/2/2014, The New York Times, Berkeley Pushes a Boundary on Medical Marijuana, Ian Lovett
"Since the birth of the Free Speech Movement half a century ago, this city has prided itself on its liberal values and policies, be they generous benefits for the needy or a look-the-other-way attitude toward marijuana use.
¶
Now, the city is bringing those policies together with a new amenity for the poor here: The marijuana will be free."
9/2/2014, The Daily Californian, Berkeley offers plenty of pathways to activism and service, Mike Bishop
"Despite differences of race, age, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation and class, students and alumni have managed to sustain close relationships with community members. As a result, a deeper understanding of select privilege is highlighted by student activism. Striking patterns across pressing social issues highlight privileges only certain social identities enjoy. Some view the work done to combat issues of wealth inequality, rates of poverty, food insecurity, education achievement and incarceration as the Third Reconstruction, a follow up to the Second Reconstruction: the southern freedom movement of the 1960s.
¶
Reflecting on the history of the many powerful lessons of the Free Speech Movement can help calibrate one's personal ethical compass. But with no direct experience against which to weigh such a heavily intellectual and perhaps even solipsistic perspective, our well intentioned acts can have an adverse impact, especially when collaborating with off-campus communities."
9/1/2014, KQED Arts, Stay in the East Bay for Art and Music this Fall, Kristin Farr
"Mavis Staples
Oct. 30
Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley
Tickets and Information
¶
Mavis Staples was the youngest member of the Staple Singers, who were famous for 'Respect Yourself' and lending their talents to the Free Speech movement. Mavis funny as hell and she'll be performing, as she has been her entire life, with her whole heart and soul, at Cal Performances. And listen to some great storytelling by Mavis on a recent episode of Wait, wait… Don't Tell Me." [ed note: while the Staple Singers were definitely political, there is no evidence that they contributed to the FSM.]
Fall, 2014, California, Radical Roots: Finding Environmentalism Amid the Schisms of mid-'60s Berkeley, Kenneth Brower
"The 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement this year is also the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act. In the turbulent river of radicalism that reached flood stage in mid-'60s Berkeley, radical environmentalism was just one branch. That is the tributary I want to navigate here. But it is good to sit down at the typewriter-excuse me, the computer-and try to remember that frenzied era in a disciplined way. Ah, the piquancy of the air back then! The smell of tear gas on campus! There were so many flavors of radicalism available that one was forced to focus. You had to pick just one or two."
8/31/2014, Truthout, Truthout Interviews Featuring Adam Bessie and Dan Carino on Bill Gates, Graphic Journalism, and the Education Reform Hype Machine, Ted Asregadoo
"In the 1960s, Mario Savio at UC Berkeley spoke passionately against that culture by highlighting to his fellow students that they were the raw materials of the university machine; a machine so 'odious' that he urged them to put their bodies 'upon the gears and upon the wheels...to make it stop.'"
8/31/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, Barry Silverman July 31, 1940 - August 18, 2014,
"Barry had a keen intellect, terrific sense of humor, and a commitment to truth and justice. He was actively engaged in the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. He attended many rallies and protests over three decades (and even spent a little time behind bars for it)."
8/29/2014, The Daily Californian, Chancellor's corner: Reimagining the future, not just for ourselves, but for all, Nicholas Dirks
"Indeed, this fall we mark the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, and as we do so, we must use this commemorative moment to reflect on the complicated legacies of our past, to remember that our commitment to the constitutional protections of free speech, and our own history of extending the boundaries of academic freedom, come with enormous responsibility. While we believe in the unimpeded yet civil exchange of viewpoints, we must acknowledge how difficult this is in practice. For free speech to have meaning, it must not just be tolerated - it must also be heard, engaged and debated. Yet this is easier said than done. As a consequence, when issues are inherently controversial, free speech can lead to division and divisiveness that undermine a community's foundation. This fall, like every fall, there will be no shortage of issues to animate and engage us all. Our capacity to maintain that delicate balance between communal interests and free expression will be tested anew. As befits UC Berkeley, the stakes will be as high as ever. As Clark Kerr, Berkeley's first chancellor, noted, we do not make ideas safe for students, but rather seek to make students safe for ideas. The most effective and appropriate way to do this is through careful attention to and maintenance of our unique -- and uniquely engaged -- academic community."
8/28/2014, Times Higher Education, Earl Cheit, 1926-2014, Matthew Reisz
"The upheavals around the Free Speech Movement in 1964 saw Professor Cheit elected on to the Emergency Executive Committee of the Academic Senate. He went on to become executive vice-chancellor of UC Berkeley (1965-69) and would eventually serve twice as dean of the business school (1976-82 and 1990-91), as well as vice-president of financial and business management for the whole University of California system (1981-82)."
8/23/2014, The Provincetown Banner, Multi-media artist visits 'Planet Snowvio' in Provincetown, Susan Rand Brown
"'Planet Snowvio' was launched on the West Coast, when Critchley was invited for an artists' residency by the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum. 'They probably expected a performance ritual,' he says over salad at a crowded in-town restaurant, 'like the January First Re-Rooters Ceremony on the beach, where we purge ourselves of the old year. But being at Berkeley, I thought of Savio, and was already following the news on Snowden,' he says, 'so it evolved into the theater piece.'"
8/21/2014, The Washington Post, Books that college freshmen should have read over the summer, Valerie Strauss
"UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY
¶
The school compiles a summer reading list for freshmen (and anybody else) around a particular theme every year. Though no book on the list is required, it is suggested that at least one or two of the books are read. This year's theme is the Free Speech Movement.
¶
From the school Web site:
¶
You'll find books here that treat the people and events of Berkeley in fall 1964 and soon after. You'll also find books, both fiction and nonfiction (and some other media), that deal with other issues, places, and people that touch on the theme: freedom of the press, the women's movement, Malala Yousafzai, Nelson Mandela, and so much more.
¶
Books on the list include:
¶
Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s, by Robert Cohen
Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power, by Seth Rosenfeld
Loose Change: Three Women of the Sixties, by Sara Davidson
I am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, by Malala Yousafzai
Long Walk To Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela"
8/20/2014, The Pacific Northwest Inlander, Teaching To The Evaluation, Robert Herold
"Student evaluations emerged from the '60s and '70s as part of the student demand menu of 'reforms.' Perhaps it was the Berkeley free speech movement; no doubt Vietnam (which politicized a generation) had a lot to do with it. Whatever the reasons, students back then demanded 'relevancy,' 'transparency' and 'accountability.' Some even demanded more - control over curriculum, and representation at department meetings."
8/19/2014, Lexology, Campus free speech - a review of policies can avoid litigation, David Urban
"It has been 50 years since the Free Speech Movement began at UC Berkeley in 1964, and approximately 40-50 years since near-riotous conditions overwhelmed college campuses in the late 1960's and early 1970's. In our own time, it is about three years since the 2011 Occupy events and large-scale tuition protests erupted on college campuses. This year, in contrast, may be a quiet Fall of 2014 on college campuses (although one never knows).
¶
There is one exception though, and it is a significant one - lawsuits. There is a fair chance colleges will see an increase in expensive lawsuits brought by students or outsiders to challenge campus policies in the name of free speech."
8/18/2014, Circleville Herald, VIEWPOINT: "Christine" (and Mario Savio), Brad Cotton
"Thirty-four years of right-wing Reaganomics has done this to Christine. Thirty-four years of government-bashing, regulation-trashing right-wing Republican economics that promises us that allowing corporations and the wealthy to do just as they please, at half the taxes the rest of us pay by the way, that allowing the powerful to dump on the weak, to pay them nothing, to fire them at will, to deny them health care, 34 years of this self-serving, un-Christian, un-American nonsense slickly sold as 'freedom, family values and Jesus,' that promises that this ugly selfishness is somehow good for the millions of Christines. It’s enough to make one sick. Or take action. Effective political action.
¶
I quote 1960s activist Mario Savio: 'There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious---makes you so sick at heart---that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.'"
8/15/2014, The Barnstable Patriot, Focusing on free speech, then and now, Lee Roscoe
"Jay Critchley may just be the hippest guy on the Cape. A multi-media artist whose work has been seen internationally, whose last local happening was the captivatingly inventive one at the Herring Cove bathhouse in Provincetown, he was asked by U. Cal. Berkeley to present a piece for a show called 'The Possible,' as one of a collection of artists engaging the public and interacting with it. 'Instead of the ritual they may have expected me to do, I did a more formal piece,' he said, creating Planet Snowvio, a one-act musical. 'I recruited people on craigslist, like my musical director, who used a nine-piece orchestra for the Berkeley version.'"
8/14/2014, Idaho State Journal, What's with these Millennials?,
"Jack Weinberg, a free-speech movement activist and graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley, once told a TV reporter, 'Never trust anyone over 30.'
¶
That was in 1965.
¶
Weinberg is 74 today and still working for environmental causes. Chances are he trusts himself."
8/13/2014, San Diego Free Press, Less Than Meets the Camera's Eye: Part I, Bob Dorn
"The double doors swung open and 6 or 8 security people with wires in their ears swept in, taking up positions at the front, sides and rear of the faculty center before Reagan entered. University cops were there too. It was a year or so after the riots in Goleta, and a few more than that after the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, so it was no surprise to see gunmen flanking a California Governor."
8/8/2014, Truthout, From "The New Economy" to the Cooperative Commonwealth, John de Graaf
"This impatience with history is not new. Although the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the 1962 Port Huron Statement, acknowledged its antecedents, much of the New Left was dismissive of the past. This October, I'll attend the 50th anniversary of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, where, as a college freshman, I got a baptism in politics that helped make me an activist for all of my days. Much of the New Left that grew from that movement was openly antagonistic to tradition."
8/8/2014, Calaveras Enterprise, History makes socialists, not schools, Tyler Williams
"The essayist appears concerned that young people, particularly those with an education, do not harbor a rabid fear of socialism. We should perhaps recall that many of those who fought for civil rights in the 1960s (Martin Luther King Jr.), who fought for the right to free speech (Mario Savio), who fought for workers' rights (Cesar Chavez), and who fought for freedom from imperialism (Mahatma Gandhi), were not afraid of socialist policies, but rather embraced the very types of policies now deemed socialist. Prominent American activists, like Woodie Guthrie (author of 'This Land is Your Land') and Pete Seeger, have supported socialist policies and guess what? Norway, the country at the very top of the aforementioned Human Development Index, follows health and education policies that American conservatives regularly call socialist. (There is too little space here to mention all of the American heroes of the 19th- and 20th-century labor movements who were affiliated with socialist organizations.)"
8/7/2014, UC Berkeley NewsCenter, Earl 'Budd' Cheit, longtime campus leader and Haas School luminary, dies at 87,
"In 1964 at UC Berkeley, during the Free Speech Movement, Cheit was elected to the Emergency Executive Committee of the Academic Senate. The following year, he was appointed executive vice chancellor of the campus. In 1965, he also chaired the Wage Board of the California Industrial Welfare Commission."
08/06/2014, Santa Cruz Sentinel, Maria Gitin looks back at civil rights struggle in 'This Bright Light of Ours', Wallace Baine
"When she came to San Francisco State University in the fall of 1964, she was immersed in a caldron of progressive political action. The Free Speech Movement taking place at UC Berkeley had a deep influence on what was happening at S.F. State."
8/5/2014, The Daily Californian Blog, Can your private school do this?, Nitisha Baronia
"9. Free speech championed by an iconic movement
¶
Without UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, 8-year-olds across the nation wouldn't be able to dramatically end arguments with, 'It's a free country - I can say whatever I want!'"
8/5/2014, Outtake, Provincetown Theater Benefit Event, Charlotte Robinson
"Edward Snowden, NSA Whistleblower meets Mario Savio of the historic Free Speech Movement (UC Berkeley, CA 1964) in PLANET SNOWVIO. Multi-media artist Jay Critchley will present a staged reading of his new experimental musical PLANET SNOWVIO on Saturday, August 23rd at 7:30P to benefit the Provincetown Theater. The one-act play is based on the meeting of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden & Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) which transformed political & anti-war protests nation-wide and beyond. On their journey to PLANET SNOWVIO they encounter Russian President Vladimir Putin & US President Barack Obama. This political satire is sprinkled with humorous interpretations of classic pop songs. Critchley stated, 'Recalling the significance of 1964 I read the biography of Mario Savio while closely following the dramatic revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden. This inspired the creation of PLANET SNOWVIO - where these two historic, radical & patriotic figures meet!' The cast includes: Gabrielle Calixte as Mario Savio, Solomon Peck as Edward Snowden, Solomon Peck, Bragan Thomas as President Vladimir Putin & & Kevin Doherty as President Barack Obama. PLANET SNOWVIO mixes historic speeches with musical pop parody including: Savio & Snowden singing, "I Got You Babe" & a Putin-Snowden duet, 'YMCA'. This mash up leads to 'You Don't Own Me' by Leslie Gore. PLANET SNOWVIO includes a poignant reminder of the radical change that is happening in the 1960s with the seminal civil rights ballad, 'A Change is Gonna Come' by Sam Cook & more. Musical Director is John Thomas. PLANET SNOWVIO was first presented at the University of California Art Museum in Berkeley, California last April to rave reviews."
8/4/2014, truthdig, Abbot Kinney, Pacific Ocean Park, and the California Dreamers, Bill Boyarsky
"California's restlessness also influenced the culture and politics of the state. The ferment of the San Francisco Bay Area, home years before of socialist writer Jack London, produced a bitter general strike in the 1930s, the radical, reformist International Longshoremen's and Warehouse Union, the powerful protests against the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in 1960, protests against racial discrimination and the Vietnam War later in the decade, and the Free Speech Movement."
8/4/2014, RP Online, Haldern Pop 2014,
"East Cameron Folklore - For Sale: 'Wutorchester' wird die Band East Cameron Folklore aus Austin/Texas auch genannt. Wer sich das Intro ihres Albums "For Sale" anhört, diese dringliche Rede für die Freiheit des Studentenführers Mario Savio aus den 60ern, wer dann den Beginn des Liedes 'Robin Hood Rising' hört, diese orchestrale Wucht, der entwickelt Verständnis. Elf Köpfe ist diese Band stark, sie spielen eine mitunter brachiale Version von Folk mit politischer Message - immer gegen die Herrschenden, gegen die Maschinen, für das Miteinander. Das ist Musik von der Straße, und jeder, der vorbeiläuft, darf mitspielen. In seiner Simplizität klingt das manchmal naiv - entfaltet aber Wirkung.
¶
Musik für: Anti-Typen. Klingt nach: Kaizers Orchestra, Bruce Springsteen (Punkte: 3,5/5)."
8/3/2014, The Boston Globe, When domestic upheaval erupts, listen to it, James Carroll
"IF THE 1960s can be said to have ended with the resignation of Richard Nixon in August of 1974, then that defining American epoch essentially began a decade earlier, almost to the day, with the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Throughout 1964, elements of a distinctive culture of "youth" had been falling into place. The Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Berkeley-based Free Speech Movement, the music-transforming invention of the cassette tape, the Civil Rights Act, the Beatles' world tour, the War on Poverty, the Warren Commission Report, the Second Vatican Council, the pill-based rise of feminism, a 'riot' in Philadelphia's inner city -- such were the trend-setting events that gave rise just then to a new counter-establishment that stamps American style, ideology, and politics to this day. But no echo of the '60s still resounds more than Tonkin, because of what it eventually came to justify: the nation's soul-destroying skepticism toward its own government."
07/31/2014, The Oakland Tribune, Berkeley: Change underway on block of Telegraph Avenue, Sarah Rohrs
"The two-floor Café Med, with its familiar blue-and-white awning, has witnessed much over the decades, such as the Free Speech Movement, Beat Generation poets, and the creation of People's Park just around the corner on Dwight.
¶
Open daily until midnight, it draws scores of students, artists and others.
¶
On hand recently was street poet and city poet laureate Julia Vinograd selling her latest Zeitgeist Press book called 'Night.'"
7/31/2014, The North Coast Journal Weekly, Our Sound of Silence, Marcy Burstiner
"This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement - - massive demonstrations at UC Berkeley sparked by the university's ban on political activity on campus and its attempt to clamp down on students trying to raise money and awareness for the civil rights movement. It galvanized what became the anti-war movement.
¶
But 50 years later, at universities across the country, we have gone backwards in our protection of free speech.
¶
A group called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), formed in 1999 by a University of Pennsylvania professor and a Boston civil rights attorney, rates universities on First Amendment compliance. FIRE has HSU at 'red light,' which is its most alarming level. To get a red light, a university has to have at least one policy 'that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech. ... In other words, the threat to free speech at a red light institution is obvious on the face of the policy and does not depend on how the policy is applied.'"
7/31/2014, North Country Public Radio, Me and Margot, Brian Mann
"When the work was done and our stories filed, Margot thought out loud-in an email to me from New York City-about her own political awakening.
¶
'When I was 18, I was in the free speech movement at Berkeley, and we won,' she wrote. 'And it made me a totally glass half full person, forever, although I have been sorely tried in the last 25 years.'
¶
That sensibility informed her reporting, I think, and her absolutely brilliant style of storytelling-optimistic, curious, but also skeptical."
7/30/2014, The New York Times, Margot Adler, 68, Journalist and Priestess, Margalit Fox
"The daughter of Kurt Alfred Adler and the former Freyda Nacque, Margot Susanna Adler was born on April 16, 1946, in Little Rock, Ark., and reared on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
¶
Her father was a psychiatrist who helped continue the work of his father, the distinguished Viennese psychiatrist Alfred Adler, who was first an ally and later an ideological adversary of Freud.
¶
Ms. Adler graduated from the High School of Music and Art and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was active in the free speech, civil rights and antiwar movements.
¶
After earning a bachelor's degree in political science from Berkeley, she received a master's from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In 1982, she was a Nieman fellow at Harvard.
¶
Before joining NPR, Ms. Adler was affiliated with WBAI in New York, serving as the original host of 'Hour of the Wolf,' a show exploring the work of noted science fiction writers. The show has been hosted by Jim Freund since 1974."
7/30/2014, The Jewish Daily Forward, Margot Adler, Witty NPR Correspondent, Put the Witch in Jewish, Jon Kalish
"In my eyes, Adler was one of the many prominent Jews in the 1960's counter-culture who, like Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman, rebelled against the established order. She participated in the free speech protests in Berkeley and was one of many New York Jews who went south to join organizing efforts as part of the civil rights movement. Her activist roots included traveling to Cuba to cut sugar cane as part of the Venceremos Brigade. While at WBAI she shared an office in the National Press Building with investigative reporter Seymour Hersh at the time he broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam."
7/28/2014, Daily Sparks Tribune, Commentary: Beach Boys perform live at Silver Legacy, Connie DeAngelis
"Mike: I wrote Don't Go Near the Water. It's clearly a song about environmental issues and this still holds true today. Student Demonstration Time is about Civil Riots and Anti War demonstrations, of the 1960's, The Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Rioting at People's Park, Isla Vista Calif., The Jackson State Killings and The Kent State University shootings. A whole lot was going on in The USA at that time."
7/27/2014, History News Network, This Generation Changed America - And We Don't Think It too Made a Great Contribution?, Ron Briley
"Upon returning to their institutions of higher learning following participation in the Civil Rights Movement, many college students were no longer willing to quietly accept the university's participation in institutional racism and research to serve the military-industrial complex. Mario Savio returned from his time in the South to assume a leadership role in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. And increasingly college students, despite their draft exempt status, were drawn to protest the Vietnam War. While much of the antiwar activity was directed at the draft, whose primary victims were minority groups and working-class youth, it should be noted that protesters were also concerned about their responsibility as American citizens for a government which was dropping napalm and cluster bombs upon the Vietnamese people."
7/27/2014, EL PAÍS, Rubem Alves, el teólogo que escapó del gueto de las iglesias, JUAN JOSÉ TAMAYO
"La editorial Sígueme la publicó en 1973 bajo el título Cristianismo, ¿opio o liberación? con una presentación del teólogo Harvey Cox, autor de La ciudad secular, que empezaba de esta guisa: '¡Ojo con este libro, vosotros, los ideólogos, teólogos y teóricos del mundo opulento, del mundo denominado 'desarrollado'! El tercer mundo de forzada pobreza, hambre, impotencia y creciente enojo ha encontrado una resonante voz teológica. Rubem Alves, protestante brasileño y brillante intelectual, habla con autoridad…'. A continuación Cox definía a Alves como un intelectual que sabía "combinar el corazón apasionado y comprometido del Tercer Mundo con una inteligencia refinada' y cuya mente 'puede agrupar, como herencia, bajo un solo enfoque, las opiniones de Franz Fanon, Karl Marx, Jürgen Moltmann, Mario Savio, Karl Barth y Paul Lehmann, y enriquecerlos con las ideas de Esdras Costra y Paulo Freire'."
7/25/2014, The San Francisco Chronicle, Sketch in silence: The San Francisco Mime Troupe, Sean Elder
"Beginning in 1959, the Troupe performed silent shows-if not exactly mime-but their style quickly evolved into a form or commedia dell'arte, featuring stock characters in masks, the better to lampoon figures of the establishment while tackling the major issues of the 1960s (the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement). The concept of 'guerilla theater,' a term coined by Troupe director Peter Berg was part of the group's political DNA (Berg and his partner Judy Goldhaft were arrested performing at Free Speech Movement demonstrations in Berkeley). It became synonymous with the Mime Troupe, and vice versa. Berg later went on to co-found, the Diggers with Emmett Grogan, a collective that brought a sense of theater to their charity work with the hippies and the poor, hanging a sign in the 'Free Store' that declared, 'It's free because it's yours.' (The concept confounded many a visitor.)
¶
Often the group was too hip for the room, which happens when the 'room' is whoever wanders by on the street. Their 1965 Minstrel Show, Or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel, was performed in black face and offended some-both black and white. In another piece, written by Berg, an actor playing a military policeman paraded prisoners into Berkeley's Sproul Plaza and began to abuse them. 'An ROTC officer in the audience actually congratulated the MP for the way he was handling his men,' Berg later recalled."
7/25/2014, The Daily Pennsylvanian, Occupying the past, Jonathan Iwry
"Occupy lacked the intellectual backbone of our parents' revolution. At least SDS had Harvard - this was just a hodgepodge of hipsters failing even to heed Lenin's warning, bent more on rebellion for rebellion's sake than on real collaboration. Without a Mario Savio to represent it maturely and with poise, Occupy was difficult to take seriously as a legitimate attempt at social upheaval."
7/24/2014, The Socialist Worker, Roots of a rank-and-file revolt, Joe Allen
"The ISC [Independent Socialist Club] had been founded two years earlier among leading socialists and activists at the University of California Berkeley, where the Free Speech Movement took place in the fall of 1964. The political inspiration for the ISC was the veteran revolutionary Hal Draper, author of 'The Mind of Clark Kerr,' an article about the president of the UC system that became the bible of the Free Speech movement."
7/21/2014, Jewish Journal, Searching for utopia in Orange County, Deborah Aschheim
"How did the Vietnam War transform this brand-new utopian campus? Inspired by my interviews at the park, I decided to investigate in the UC Irvine Archives and Special Collections at the Langston Library.
A sleeve of 35mm slides from October 4, 1965, opening day of the University of California, Irvine reveals many buildings still under construction, and bare ground dotted with fragile saplings staked to posts. Smiling girls with bouffant hairdos and boys with crewcuts carry armloads of books through William Pereira's vision of the perfect future-all space age cement curves and expressionistic patterned facades.
¶
Just a year and a half later, the students don't look as happy. In a fat folder of slides from January 23, 1967, I find young people assembled with unmistakable seriousness on the steps of the Gateway Plaza to protest the firing of UC President Kerr for his lenient treatment of Free Speech Movement activists (at the urging of recently elected Governor Ronald Reagan). The students are holding hand-lettered signs that say: 'In Memoriam Clark Kerr' and 'R-E-A-G-A-N Doesn't Spell FREEDOM.'"
7/16/2014, Coachella Valley Independent, Know Your Neighbors: Comparisons to 1964 and 2014 Show History Does Indeed Repeat Itself, Anita Rufus
"That pivotal year also saw the beginning of the Student Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley, which led to the May 2nd Movement, when more than 1,000 student demonstrators gathered in New York, along with others in San Francisco, Boston, Seattle and other cities, to protest the Vietnam War, ultimately contributing to the end of Johnson's presidency. Fifty years later, the role of students was instrumental in the election and re-election of President Obama, and, not unlike with the protesters of the 1960s, questions persist as to whether young people will stay involved when they face the reality of the difficulty involved in changing national policy."
7/13/2014, Commonweal Magazine, FSM at Fifty, Student Activism at Catholic Colleges, Robert Geroux
"This fall will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement on the campus of U Cal-Berkeley. One can expect a number of reflections and retrospective studies, and indeed I'm working on another piece that examines student activism then and now. I want here to ask some questions, focusing especially on the experience of students at Catholic colleges and universities."
7/9/2014, San Jose Mercury News, Ira Ruskin remembered as a man of integrity at Redwood City funeral service, Bonnie Eslinger
"Born in New York City in 1943, Ruskin moved to the West Coast in the 1960s to study at UC-Berkeley and got involved in the free speech movement and other progressive causes. Although he received his bachelor's degree in history, Ruskin spent much of his time on the university campus 'philosophizing,' said his former classmate and friend of 50 years, Frank Kotlier. And while he didn't run for elected office until several decades later, 'Ira loved politics, he thrived on it,' Kotlier said in his eulogy."
7/7/2014, The Modesto Bee, Pond could work wonders to help Tuolumne County through drought, Jeff Jardine
"And last week, Modesto Junior College got a mention in a Times story about lawsuits filed by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to combat the suppression of free speech on college campuses across the country.
¶
This, from that:
¶
'The group previously filed two similar lawsuits, including one last year against Modesto Junior College in California, after staff members told a student that he could not pass out copies of the United States Constitution outside the college's 'free-speech zone.' The college settled the lawsuit for $50,000 and dismantled the zone.'
¶
That describes perfectly the difference between the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s and the apathy of today: In the 1960s, thousands of people protested on the college campuses to demand free speech.
¶
Now, we sue for it."
7/6/2014, San Jose Mercury News, Redwood City: Former Assemblymember Ira Ruskin dies at 70, Dana Hull
"Ruskin was born Nov. 12, 1943, in New York City and moved to Miami when he was 13. He headed West to study at UC Berkeley, where he was involved in the Free Speech Movement and became an advocate for civil rights, women's rights and environmental causes.
¶
He graduated from UC Berkeley in 1968 and went on to earn a master's degree in communications from Stanford in 1983. He worked as a marketing and communications consultant before entering politics. His death before the holiday weekend saddened many.
¶
'As a UC Berkeley undergrad, Ira took part in the Free Speech Movement and responded when Cesar Chavez asked students to give the Delano grape strikers their lunch money in October 1966 during a rally at Sproul Plaza,' wrote the United Farm Workers on their Facebook page. 'His commitment to good causes never wavered.'"
7/3/2014, The American Spectator, RETURN TO MISSISSIPPI SUMMER, 1964, William Tucker
"No question about it, Freedom Summer, then and now, had a decidedly left-wing tinge. At one point the Holly Springs newspaper carried a banner headline announcing that that the brother of one of our project leaders was a member of the Community Party. This was hardly surprising, since half the people in our group were members of one of the left-wing organizations that were beginning to appear on campus at the time. Mario Savio, who led the Berkeley Free Speech rebellion a few months later, was a Mississippi volunteer. So was Abbie Hoffman. Fifty years later, several panelists and one documentary movie were still plugging Fair Play for Cuba."
7/3/2014, OpEdNews, Let us now praise patriotic content providers, Bob Patterson
"If Berkeley does anything to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Mario Savio's speech on top of a police car (he took off his shoes so as not to scuff the paintjob), the World's Laziest Journalist will probably take some photos and write a column about the symbolism of the event."
7/2/2014, UC Berkeley iNews, UC Berkeley Research Computing (BRC) celebrates a new chapter in collaboration,
"In her remarks at the launch event, LBNL CIO Rosio Alvarez pointed to the 'synergistic collaboration' inherent in the BRC Program. The Lab's High Performance Computing Group has partnered with Research IT to build and operate the Savio Condo/Institutional HPC cluster that supports some of the first BRC services. Alvarez pointed to her team's decade of experience building and operating HPC clusters, as well as benefits of the Lab's engaging with 'the scale of the campus, and different kinds of technology discovery that is going on here, such as at the D-Lab and the AMPLab.'"
7/2/2014, The Daily Californian, Berkeley voted the most liberal city in California, Lucy Tate
"Second-year student Kai-Sern Lim agreed with this point of view. 'Berkeley has a long and impactful history of being liberal, especially in the '60s with student activism for the Free Speech Movement,' he said. 'Even individuals who aren't up to date with how Berkeley currently is will have some sense of the activism in Berkeley because of its roots.'"
7/1/2014, Fast Company, The Man Who Branded Berkeley, Elizabeth Segran
"In 1966, shortly after his 20th birthday, Goines took an apprenticeship with a printer who had just moved into this store. As I sit in his studio, surrounded by timeworn machines methodically thumping away, he explains that his introduction to the art of printmaking was not particularly romantic: after being unceremoniously expelled from the University of California, Berkeley, for his role in the Free Speech Movement, he needed a job and this one fit the bill. Half a century on, Goines--a distinguished if somewhat eccentric-looking gentleman with a curlicue mustache and dark-rimmed glasses, who works in a black Japanese robe--is still cranking out posters on these same printing presses. Meanwhile, right outside his front door, the Bay Area has been completely transformed by the technology industry. When I ask why he chooses to use such old-fashioned equipment in what is arguably the most technologically advanced corner of the world, he says, with a twinkle in his eye, 'These machines are very heavy, and once they are moved in, they don't get moved out.'"
6/30/2014, 7x7, Berkeley's Oldest Cafe, Caffe Mediterraneum, For Sale, Sarah Medina
"Even for a cafe that has stood in the same spot since 1957--a witness to the Beat Generation, the Free Speech Movement, and the creation of People's Park--[Craig] Becker had a hard time turning a profit, and dealt with numerous attempted robberies from the people who loitered outside his cafe. "
6/29/2014, The New York Times, When Civil-Rights Unity Fractured, Peniel E. Joseph
"White veterans of Freedom Summer recall the time as a life-changing event in their personal involvement in the movement, the apotheosis of their vision for biracial, harmonious activism. And the experience did inspire many students to stay in the state afterward and work for groups like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (also known as the S.N.C.C.). Others, most notably the free-speech activist and Berkeley student Mario Savio, took lessons learned that summer back to their own campuses, seeding the fledgling student movements that would grow to a revolutionary fervor by the end of the decade."
6/25/2014, GQ Italia, Berkeley Riots: le rivolte che infiammarono l’America,
"Un film: Fragole e sangue, premio della giuria a Cannes nel 1970.
Una canzone: We shall overcome, Joan Baez che presta la sua voce - e il suo inno pacifista - alla causa.
Una location: la University of California Berkeley, o semplicemente Cal, come la chiamano loro.
¶
Sono queste le coordinate per avvicinarsi agli eventi che a metà degli Anni 60 infiammano il campus universitario dove nasce il Free Speech Movement. Il suo leader? Un ragazzo di origini italiane di nome Mario Savio, le cui idee ispirano quei Berkeley riots che costringono l'appena eletto governatore della California a prendere una posizione radicale: 'We're gonna clean up the mess in Berkeley, firmato Ronald Reagan. Anticipando di ben quattro anni il Maggio francese, la realtà del Free Speech Movement - e quella delle Pantere Nere, fondate a Oakland solo qualche anno più tardi - fanno della Bay Area il centro 'caldo' della liberale California."
6/23/2014, Oakland Local, Oakland marks the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Nilo Gardezi
"According to [Angela] Davis, Freedom Summer was 'one of the most electrifying moments in our history" and crucial to the progress of civil rights. "How slowly news traveled then," she asserted, "but how quickly students traveled in order to change the world!' Davis reminded us that Freedom Summer inspired the Free Speech Movement at nearby UC Berkeley, as Berkeley students Bettina Aptheker and Mario Savio tried to organize students to go down to Mississippi."
6/23/2014, National Public Radio, 50 Years Ago, Students Fought For Black Rights During 'Freedom Summer',
"I think attitudes were changed in Mississippi. People saw that it was possible, in a wider sense, to struggle against white supremacy - and it changed the attitudes of those students who participated in that. Mario Savio, who would shortly lead the free speech movement at Berkeley in California, was a volunteer in Mississippi; so was [former Massachusetts Rep.] Barney Frank. I think it changed the attitude of these young people who came south."
6/22/2014, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Censorship & tyranny, Ralph R. Reiland
"There appear to be a sameness and caution within American higher education - a sector where one would expect to find an appreciation of intellectual diversity, unconventional paradigms and free thinking, where innovative features would be celebrated, not reprimanded.
¶
The Free Speech Movement in the U.S., for instance, began at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, a time when novel and cutting-edge ideas about war, race, gender, class, liberation, oppression, freedom, marriage, sexuality, economics, writing, education, religion, morality, art and music were producing fundamental transformations throughout American society and throughout the world.
¶
Students at Berkeley were seeking to overturn the school's ban on on-campus political activities. Here are the words of Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio, delivered during a sit-in on the Berkeley campus in December 1964: 'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.'
¶
Today, America's politicized students are more likely to be putting their bodies upon the gears in order to resuscitate gag rules or to impose restrictions on who may be allowed to speak at graduation ceremonies."
06/20/2014, The New York Review of Books, John Searle: The Philosopher in the World, Tim Crane
"[TC:] Have you ever been interested in getting involved with politics yourself?
¶
[JS:] It's funny you should ask that. There was a period when I first went back to California when I was fairly active in the Democratic Party, and then was very active in the Free Speech Movement, but it's not as intellectually satisfying as an academic career. You do have the satisfaction that you get involved in decisions that make a difference in a way that most philosophical arguments don't. And in fact, during the Vietnam War, a friend of mine who was a high official with the State Department invited me to come and serve on the State Department policy planning staff where they plan American policy. And I said, 'Not during the war.' I was so opposed to the war that I absolutely refused to do anything that would even seem to be lending tacit support to the war. So I didn't do it and I have seldom been active in public affairs since.
¶
It's a choice you have to make, especially in the United States. I think it's possible to combine a political career with an academic, philosophical career. But the cases of people who've done it have not been very inspiring to me."
06/20/2014, San Jose Mercury News, Back to the future with education, Larry Magid
"In 1967 I had the privilege of being one of the student coordinators of Berkeley's Center for Participant Education, a student-initiated course program that was born out of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement. CPE, like other 'free universities' and 'alternative schools' that popped up around the world in the '60s and '70s, promoted student-centered learning by giving students the power to initiate and help direct their own learning, using resources from local faculty, the community and subject matter experts, including some without traditional academic credentials. By getting faculty sponsors, we were able to offer academic credit for non-traditional learning."
6/19/2014, The Daily Californian, Activists stage 'die-in' to protest animal testing in UC Berkeley labs, Katy Abbott
"While Richard Hunter, a UC Berkeley alumnus who participated in the Free Speech Movement in 1964, applauded the idea of student protests, his daughter, Eve Hunter, said the die-in lacked information."
Summer, 2014, California Magazine, Radicals Revisited: Eyewitnesses to Berkeley's Free Speech Movement Mark 50th Anniversary, Martin Snapp
"After decades of ambivalence, UC Berkeley is finally embracing this important part of its history. 'Though I cannot presume to speak for our current administration, I think it is fair to say that the attitude of campus leaders to the Free Speech Movement has evolved over the past 50 years, from fear to pride in what the students at that time stood up for and what they accomplished,' says Dean [Carla] Hesse."
06/18/2014, Contra Costa Times, Berkeley Historical Society seeks public help with Free Speech Movement exhibit, Chris Treadway
"The Berkeley Historical Society has begun preparing for its 50th anniversary celebration of the Free Speech Movement, including an exhibit that will open with a reception at 4:30 p.m. Sept. 28 at the Berkeley History Center, 1931 Center St.
¶
The society is now looking for people who were around at the time to share their memories and artifacts of a defining time in city history.
¶
Linda Rosen, who is curating the exhibit, writes, 'Were you around during 1964? Do you have any recollections to share? What were the local store owners' and the community's reactions to the events and to the 1964 election?
¶
Were you involved in local civil rights or anti-war issues both before or after the Free Speech Movement? What were your feelings about the connection between civil rights, free speech, and the Multiversity? Does anyone have an FSM strike sign or banner, newsletter, or pin?'
¶
The group is seeking stories, pictures and artifacts it can use in the exhibit, as well as pins, artifacts and pictures of other causes from the decade.
¶
Anyone willing to share stories or materials can contact Rosen at linda44@sonic.net."
6/16/2014, The Hindu, The Selfie and I, Anuj Srivas
"In the 1960s, at the University of California, Berkely, which was the centre of the Free Speech Movement in America, punched cards became a symbol of what was wrong with the system. Used as they were for class registration, and as a more ominous symbol of uniformity, they were torn up during protests.
¶
To tear up a punch card, as student leader Mario Savio famously put it, was to liberate one's self 'from the machine.'"
6/15/2014, Valley News, In 1964, White Students From the North Went South and Helped Change a Nation, Allen G. Breed and Sharon Cohen
"Others' lives, too, were transformed by that summer:
¶
[Marshall] Ganz, now at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, spent 16 years as an organizer for the United Farm Workers. Mario Savio, another volunteer, became a fiery student leader of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California-Berkeley. Barney Frank served more than 30 years as a representative from Massachusetts in the U.S. House.
¶
Changes also came to Mississippi."
6/11/2014, Socialistworker.org, When the whole world was watching Mississippi, Marlene Martin
"Mario Savio had traveled to Mississippi as a civil rights volunteer in the summer of 1964. A few months later, he put the lessons he learned to use in the Free Speech Movement that erupted in Berkeley, Calif.--a forerunner of the movements for justice and democracy that would grip college campuses later in the 1960s.
¶
Years later, he explained the impact Freedom Summer had on him, referring to one particular encounter with a Black man trying to register to vote:
¶
Until then, I was sort of an observer in a certain way...but here was somebody who, because of something I had done, was maybe risking his family and facing that kind of humiliation. [The registrar] made him eat shit before finally giving him that form. He was afraid, but he stood his ground.
¶
That man's courage changed my life. You know, we used to sing about how we'll never turn back, ain't gonna turn around. [Freedom Summer] was the point at which it became real for me. That is, I'd chosen sides for the rest of my life."
6/10/2014, Contra Costa Times, Free lecture on Mario Savio and the New Politics of Town and Gown,
Berkeley and the Great State U. Berkeley Public Library concludes its series "Berkeley and the Great State U: Episodes in town/gown history" with the lecture "Mario Savio and the New Politics of Town and Gown, 1964-1988." [Speaker Charles Wollenberg] 2 to 3:30 p.m. June 14. Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. Free. 510-981-6148, www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org
6/9/2014, The Daily Californian, Remembering Ronald Reagan 30 years later, Kevin D. Reyes
"I am aware that as Berkeley gets ready to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, the name Reagan can become more controversial. Indeed, he did begin his term as California governor at the time the FSM ended and ordered the National Guard to suppress the People's Park rebellion in 1969. Nonetheless, this article is about the foreign policy during his presidency."
6/9/2014, Philly.com, Mississippi still burning, Will Bunch
"But "Freedom Summer" is also a feel-good story, right? The courage both of civil rights activists and local blacks -- as well as the murders -- motivated Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, which gave the right to vote for millions of African-Americans across the Deep South. What's more, that summer spawned a cadre of activists committed to social change, like Mario Savio, who returned to the University of California at Berkeley and launched the Free Speech movement on that campus. It's a story about overcoming, about the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice..."
6/4/2014, Studio International, Lower East Side: The Real Estate Show Redux, Natasha Kurchanova
"As an artist, Bobby G is trying to educate the public about the forthcoming changes and provide them with a platform - literally - to express their views. Because the formation of his socially conscious outlook on art has been shaped by the Free Speech Movement, he made available for browsing a copy of Michael Rossman's landmark book The Wedding within the War, which documents its history."
5/29/2014, Epoch Times, The Spirit of Freedom: From Tiananmen to Iran to the Berlin Wall, Robin Kemker
"A Spirit of Tiananmen Award was given to Ross Altman, a folksinger and activist, who recounted the days of the Free Speech Movement at University of California, Berkeley, in the sixties. He sang some of his songs of stories from the movement, and told of Jack Weinberg, a student leader of the Free Speech Movement, who clashed with the university authorities in their attempt to silence the movement during the Vietnam War because it was not consistent with the U.S. position on communism. UC Berkeley then became a hotbed for the movement."
5/28/2014, Theater Mania, Director/puppet designer Theodora Skipitares responds to an absurdist classic, Zachary Stewart
"Like the people they're meant to depict, every chair is beautiful and unique. Skipitares has identified a defining trait for each of her subjects and accentuated that in the design: hidden compartments for ex-CIA spy Valerie Plame, a head constantly shaking with rage for rabble-rouser Mario Savio, a gilded puppet theater/cage for Pussy Riot. Ionesco himself makes an appearance as a red plastic chair covered in many tiny chairs. Quite unexpectedly, these animated seats exude humanity."
5/27/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, Descendant edits, promotes bio of early California historian, Tim Holt
"A quick tour of the library gives some indication of the richness and variety of the collection: on one shelf, the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, from 1888; in a display case, Mario Savio's civil rights memoir, 'Letters From Mississippi,' in a rare letterpress edition; and in a public gallery off the library's main hall, samples from the illustrated archives of Phil Frank, creator of The Chronicle's 'Farley' comic strip."
5/26/2014, Truthdig, California Gold Rush: The Race for the Hottest Job in Congress, Bill Boyarsky
"That history meshed with Los Angeles and the rest of Southern California, still a place of immigrants and children of immigrants, with the fears and insecurities such a status brings with it. These people embrace leaders who preach populism and protest. Like the region's earthquakes, protests unexpectedly emerge with a bang. Some of them come from the right, notably those that produced anti-tax Proposition 13. Others are from the left, such as the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and the Free Speech Movement. Protests have come from the old with the Depression-era pension movement; from the docks led by Harry Bridges' longshoremen's union; and from Central Valley by farmworkers under Cesar Chavez's banner."
5/24/2014, The Huffington Post, Music and Movements: The Tradition Continues, Peter Dreier and Dick Flacks
"Baez joined Martin Luther King on his 1965 march in Alabama, from Selma to Montgomery. She later joined Cesar Chavez during his twenty-four-day fast to draw attention to the farmworkers' union struggle, and she participated in a Christmas vigil outside San Quentin State Prison, California, to oppose capital punishment. In 1964, as the campus New Left was burgeoning, she sang at a Free Speech Movement rally in Sproul Plaza, leading hundreds of students to occupy the administration building at the University of California, Berkeley."
5/21/2014, Manteca Bulletin, Bullying free zones & being a victim today in America, Dennis Wyatt
"Winget authored, 'Grow a Pair: How to Stop Being a Victim and Take Back Your Life, Your Business and Your Sanity.' The title alone would get his book banned at the supposed cradle of the free speech movement, the University of California at Berkeley. If there is one thing universities worship today it's victims. Once open-minded institutions of higher learning are now on the vanguard of political correctness squelching any idea or discussion that may offend the views or sensibilities of the 'protected' groups du jour."
5/20/2014, Demos, What's the Difference Between Universities and Corporations? It's Getting Hard to Say, David Callahan
"Do you remember what Mario Savio argued at UC Berkeley when he famously led the Free Speech Movement in 1964? He said the university had become an 'autocracy' and a 'machine' -- an institution at odds with democracy."
5/19/2014, UC Berkeley NewsCenter, Commencement throngs celebrate with Class of 2014, Cathy Cockrell,
"U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi referred to the spirit of the American Revolution and Berkeley's Free Speech Movement of 1964 - citing their 'disruption' of the status quo as something to be emulated today on a planet under siege' and in 'an economic system with growing inequality.'"
5/19/2014, Desoto Times Tribune, America has some budding tyrants, Walter Williams
"Back in 1964, it was Mario Savio, a campus leftist, who led the free speech movement at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, a movement that played a vital role in placing American universities center stage in the flow of political ideas, no matter how controversial, unpatriotic and vulgar. The free speech movement gave birth to the hippie movement of the '60s and '70s. The longhair, unkempt hippies of that era have grown up and now often find themselves being college professors, deans, provosts and presidents. Their intolerance of free speech and other ideas has become policy and practice on many college campuses."
5/17/2014, The Hill, Pelosi's message to grads: Be disruptors, Timothy Cama
"'Being called a disruptor is a high compliment,' Pelosi said in prepared remarks Saturday. 'You here at Berkeley are already disruptors in many ways.'
¶
Pelosi's speech came nearly 50 years after students led by Mario Savio occupied a Berkeley building and launched the 'free speech movement,' which sought to lift university bans on political activities.
¶
'Now, it's all about you - what you can do with your freedom to speak out, with the tools of our time: Instagram and YouTube, Facebook and Twitter,' Pelosi said."
5/17/2014, PJ Media, From the Free Speech Movement to the No Speech Movement, Ron Radosh
"How times have changed. The very New Left students of that era - so many of whom now run the universities against which they once protested - have moved from support of free speech to what might be termed the 'No Speech Movement.' Or, perhaps more accurately, speech for which only those whom they approve should be allowed. Nowhere has this been clearer than in the various incidents surrounding invited graduation speakers at some of the most well-known private liberal arts colleges as well as one state university."
5/17/2014, New Politics, Steve Kindred (1944-2013) and University of Chicago Students for a Democratic Society, Jesse Lemisch
"For several days in the spring of 1966 we occupied the [University of Chicago] Administration Building: During the sit-in, Staughton Lynd and I taught "history from the bottom up"; Naomi Weisstein and Heather Tobis Booth taught Women's Liberation. It was a memorable and ecstatic time, with volunteer elevator operators crying out, "Second floor-sleeping, Third floor-studying." The entire sit-in debated strategies and directions in long meetings of the hundreds present, brilliantly chaired by Jackie Goldberg (just out of Berkeley and the Free Speech Movement, and later a state legislator in California)."
5/17/2014, American Thinker, Liberals Must Refute the Leftist Bigots on Campus, Michael Curtis
"The impetus to leftist politicization occurred in 1964 when the radicals in the University of California Free Speech Movement occupied the administration building in Berkeley, the first such "conquest" in the country. It led to the reshaping of curriculum in an overtly radical direction, and hiring of faculty who leaned towards those changes. It has also led to incredible ignorance, stupidity, and bigotry."
5/16/2014, UC Berkeley NewsCenter, Chancellor's Community Partnership Fund announces new awards, Public Affairs
"Making Local History: Student Collected Oral Histories of the Free Speech Movement will pilot curricular materials in CAL Prep's ethnic-studies class on the Free Speech Movement to be developed by UC Berkeley's History Social Science Project."
5/16/2014, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Never trust anyone over 30? A second thought, Chuck Raasch
"WASHINGTON - In the spring of 1965, when I was turning 11 years old, Jack Weinberg, a free-speech-movement activist and graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley, told a reporter that young people should not trust anyone over 30.
¶
I'm turning 30 times two tomorrow, smack dab in the middle of the Baby Boomer generation. How ironic that seminal line of the Boomer/60's generation looks from this vantage point.
¶
Had Weinberg uttered those lines today, it would fire up what we now call a viral event, going global with the Speed of Tweet. Something new to argue about. The generational experts would come out swinging, Xers vs. Boomers, Millenials proclaiming their independence from it all. Partisans would look for a quip or attack line to win the moment. The phrase would be hash-tagged into infinity, hashed over into exhaustion on the cable talk shows."
5/15/2014, Huffington Post, Cyberphysical Democracy: Online Platforms and Offline Action, Camille Crittenden
"At UC Berkeley we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the birth of the Free Speech Movement this year. Consider how new media might have amplified the protest on Sproul Plaza: announcements posted on Facebook, live micro-blogging on Twitter, ample cellphone footage uploaded to YouTube or synchronized and displayed on the Rashomon platform. Mario Savio and his fellow activists would likely have embraced these new tools to convey their outrage at measures taken by the university administration to curb free expression. Yet Savio's call for students to put their 'bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels' -- and their willingness to be arrested -- reminds us that speeches often must be matched by physical commitment to achieve real change."
5/14/2014, SF Weekly, Ruth Reichl on Foodie Fiction and Her Favorite Bay Area Eats, Anna Roth
"It's changed some, just because the money has changed it. When I moved to the Bay Area in 1973, we were food-obsessed. A group of us were starting restaurants, and juice bars, and Alice [Waters] was starting Chez Panisse, and Victoria Wise was doing Pig By the Tail [both instrumental in starting Berkeley's 'Gourmet Ghetto'], and we were a group of people who were very food-obsessed but we were a small group. It wasn't a big movement. And it was a very political movement, in fact. It all came out of this sense that we wanted to control the food and do honorable work, it came out of the free-speech movement and the antiwar movement, and now there's kind of rampant foodieism. It's still probably the best place to be a cook of any place in America. The food products are extraordinary. It's just now I feel like so many people spend their money going out to eat, I wander through the Ferry Building and I'm kind of stunned by people eating everywhere. It's still a very vibrant, exciting place to eat. But the money has changed it."
5/14/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, Martin Luther King Jr.'s '67 speech left mark on UC Berkeley, Peter Hartlaub
"UC Berkeley hosted many memorable rallies around that time, including a 1966 Robert F. Kennedy speech at the Greek Theatre. Sproul Plaza had been the site of contentious free speech movement demonstrations. But the scene at King's address was remarkable even by 1960s Berkeley standards.
¶
The speech came a month after King had shifted his focus to an antiwar stance. In addition to conservatives, King also received heavy criticism from the left-leaning side of his base. The NAACP released a statement a month before the Berkeley speech, calling King's attempts to merge the civil rights and peace movements a 'serious tactical mistake.'"
5/13/2014, The New York Times, Finder of New Worlds, Dennis Overbye
"One of his [Geoffrey W. Marcy's] students was Mario Savio, formerly the firebrand leader of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the '60s. In his office, Dr. Marcy keeps a picture of Mr. Savio, who went on to teach physics at Sonoma State and died in 1996, at 53. He was brilliant, Dr. Marcy recalled, but 'he hated writing computer code.'"
5/12/2014, Spiked, Student Censors, Your Time Is Up, Tom Slater
"If anything, student politicos today are retreating from the radical gains of the past. In the 1960s, students were fighting for free speech, not insisting it be clamped down on. They were fighting against university management, who actively restricted free speech for fear that impressionable young students would be turned into Communist sleeper-agents. At the University of California, Berkeley, students marched under the banner of the Free Speech Movement to topple the censorship of their university. For them, free speech was the bedrock liberty from which they could begin to enact real social change.
¶
It's a far cry from today, when student unions, and the so-called radicals who lean on them, have prized conservatism over radicalism. Shrinking in relevance and broadly alienated from the student body, they, like the commie-bashing professors of old, are clamping down on everything from extremist nutters to topless women in order to protect their supposedly vulnerable, impressionable peers.
¶
Rather than marshalling their free speech in order to change the world, students today are encouraged to seal themselves off from the world."
5/12/2014, Berkeleyside, There ain't no one Berkeley: 'Daylighting' a city on stage, Risa Nye
"One of the first creative decisions they made in the Berkeley stories project had to do with placing the play's action before and after the Free Speech Movement and taking the focus off the iconic moments many people think about when they think about Berkeley. Instead, the central characters bookend those turbulent times. While it's a story closely associated with Berkeley, the history of the FSM it isn't the story they wanted to tell."
5/6/2014, Nantucket Daily News, Golden State of mind at the Peabody Essex, Chris Bergeron
"Bailly observed the heyday of California's inspired design ended around 1965 about the time events like the Watts riots and the Free Speech Movement protests at the University of California, Berkley, tarnished the state's golden image and signaled the era's coming end."
5/5/2014, The Press Democrat, Lopez family attorney thinks D.A. will not prosecute Erick Gelhaus, Lori A. Carter
"At the meeting, the ACLU presented two civil rights awards. Richard Coshnear, a Santa Rosa immigrants rights attorney and activist, received the Jack Green Civil Liberties Award. And Sonoma State University junior Jesús Guzmán, 24, won the Mario Savio Student Activist Award for his work with young immigrants and with day laborers."
5/4/2014, Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier, Free speech also protects odious ideas, Gary Kroeger
"I made a pilgrimage recently to Berkeley where the Free Speech Movement began, and I imagined the conviction of those who came before. What struck me is that it hasn't changed much. The trees have grown, but the students' tables, inviting passersby to join rallies for candidates, equal rights, environmental issues and First Amendment freedoms, still line the path.
¶
I was encouraged."
5/2/2014, The Daily Californian, Letter: It is time for a respectful speech movement, Josh Cohen and Simon Rhee
"Furthermore, as politically involved students, we understand how emotional certain political issues can be - especially when they directly involve us, our families or our friends. It takes considerable effort to be the person who looks beyond one's own opinions and makes an attempt to work with those who do not share one's own beliefs, or at the very least, a person who respectfully discusses why they feel a certain way. We all slip up from time to time. Yet the difficult path toward progress requires cooperation and dialogue, and without a conscious decision to listen to and learn from others, everyone is left worse off.
¶
Fifty years ago, our campus needed a movement for free speech. Now is the time for a movement for respectful speech. Hopefully, like the Free Speech Movement, it can begin here, at a campus known for leadership, and spread across the nation."
4/28/2014, Variety, Tom Brokaw On NBC News' 'Brokaw News Center' And New Projects, Brian Steinberg
"For Brokaw, who joined NBC News in California in the 1960s the honor brings back a lot of memories. "I just turned 26 years of age," he recalled in a short interview. 'It was a life-changer for me.'
¶
He would go on to cover the free-speech movement Berkeley, the Charles Manson murders, unrest in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts and more. 'It was a very strong team,' he remembered. 'It was very exciting. It was very hard to get me to leave. In 1972 [NBC News anchor John Chancellor] came to me and said, 'It's time come East and be a grown up,' and I said, 'I am a grown up in California.' I liked it. And then a year later: 'You've got come go to the White House.' I was ready to go then.'"
4/28/2014, UC Berkeley News Center, Visual history, poster contest to mark FSM's 50th anniversary, Amy Hamaoui
"BERKELEY -Gearing up for the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement during the fall 2014 semester, UC Berkeley has launched a new, interactive website [http://fsm.berkeley.edu/] with a visual history of the momentous events of 1964."
4/28/2014, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Soul of the Research University, Nicholas Lemann
"Kerr's historic achievement began unraveling almost immediately. In the short run, the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, which came the year after the Godkin Lectures, unpleasantly surprised him. The election of Ronald Reagan as governor of California in 1966, partly because Reagan had tapped into the public's resentment of the student protests, was another surprise. And shortly after taking office, Reagan arranged for Kerr to be fired. In the longer run, both of the key elements of the master plan were abrogated. The California state-college system is now the California State University system, and public higher education in California has not been tuition-free for decades. It is still an outstanding system, but not quite so paradisiacal or conceptually neat as Kerr believed it could be."
4/28/2014, Metropolitan News-Enterprise, JUDICIAL ELECTIONS: Los Angeles Superior Court Office No. 107, Roger M. Grace
"[Emma] Castro graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara, then obtained her law degree at UCLA in 1977. She was admitted to practice on Nov. 29, 1978.
While at UCLA, she was impressed by a speaker at a recruitment event, Arthur L. Goldberg, a campus activist in the 1960s who was dismissed from UC Berkeley where he was a founder of the Free Speech movement, and later dismissed from Howard Law School in the District of Columbia. Castro went to work in 1978 for his Echo Park firm, Goldberg, Fuchs, Working Peoples Law Center, becoming a partner in 1983."
4/24/2014, The National, 50 years on, the 1960s changed the US and beyond, James Langton
"In September, Katherine Towle, the dean of the University of California at Berkeley and a former director of the women's US Marine Corps, instituted a ban on all political activity on a popular stretch of campus road.
¶
The following month, a young civil-rights activist manning a stand on the street was arrested for refusing to show his identity card to university police. Within minutes, hundreds and then thousands of angry students surrounded the car, preventing it from moving.
¶
The stand-off lasted 32 hours, with students occupying the university's administration block, where they were led by the folk singer Joan Baez in a rousing chorus of We Shall Overcome.
¶
On the orders of the governor of California, hundreds were arrested, but the sit-in and the demonstration were established as the tactics of radical politics in the 60s, and Berkeley the spiritual heart of the free-speech movement."
4/24/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, 3 Bay Area visual arts events to check out, April 24-27, Kenneth Baker
"Planet Snowvio: With what he describes as an 'experimental musical,' Bay Area multimedia artist Jay Critchley will mark the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, envisioning an encounter between Mario Savio and NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden. (The performance is part of the exhibition, 'The Possible.') 2 p.m. Sunday. Free with museum admission ($7-$10). UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2626 Bancroft Way, Berkeley. (510) 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu."
4/23/2014, UC Berkeley News Center, Nelson Mandela to be honored at special campus event, Gretchen Kell
"In September, the campus will continue to commemorate Mandela with a panel discussion during the 50th anniversary celebration of the Free Speech Movement. 'Divestment Revised: UC Berkeley, The Free Speech Movement and the South Africa Divestment Movement,' will revisit UC Berkeley and the South Africa divestment movement, and how members of the campus community created a movement that led to change so remarkable that Mandela cited it in a speech at the Oakland Coliseum after his release from prison in 1990."
4/23/2014, The Daily Californian, CalSLAM brings down barriers with original material, Nick Cotter
"At UC Berkeley, the terms 'free speech,' 'equality' and 'expression' are seemingly ubiquitous ideals in light of the campus and city's history. In the spirit of the Free Speech Movement of 1964, the campus environment integrates its legacy into everyday life. The symbols are everywhere, from the the Free Speech Movement Cafe to the Mario Savio Steps.
¶
But for a core group of students on the UC Berkeley campus, the legacy of free speech at Berkeley is achieved through poetry. For them, poetry is an art, a sport and a personal outlet all in one. It's a way to let their creative juices flow. Writing poems on a variety of subjects, titles range from serious and political topics like 'Samson,' 'Cathedral,' 'Oakland,' to more humorous ones, such as 'Bird brain.'"
4/23/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, Savio, Snowden brought together for musical number, Robert Hurwitt
"'It was really serendipitous. The first thing I thought of was Mario Savio. And wait a minute! I checked the date on the FSM and it was 50 years. I'd been closely following Snowden's revelations, so I thought I'd do something about the two of them meeting, maybe a puppet thing or a music video. But then I started reading Mario's biography and this is what came out.'"
4/23/2014, East Bay Express, If Edward Snowden Met Mario Savio..., Zaineb Mohammed
"Upon further researching Savio, Critchley discovered more similarities between the two activists. 'They both committed acts of civil disobedience based on strong personal beliefs that there were wrongs they needed to stand up [against],' he said. 'The two have so much in common, yet the world has changed dramatically. What can we say about what's happening now and what they were both about?' The best way to explore this topic, Critchley decided, was to imagine what might happen if the two met. (Savio died in 1996.)
¶
In Critchley's resulting musical - a staged reading of which will happen at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2626 Bancroft Way, Berkeley) on Sunday, April 27, as part of the experimental exhibit The Possible - Snowden meets Savio, who is in heaven, via Skype. The two learn about each other's backgrounds and encounter Obama and Putin, who both want to exert control over Snowden. Ultimately, Snowden and Savio decide that the only way to escape the political maneuverings of the world leaders is to find their own planet to live on - hence the play's title, Planet Snowvio."
4/18/2014, UC Berkeley NewsCenter, Student 'hackers' design new ways to research the Free Speech Movement, Cathy Cockrell
"In the half-century since Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, the rousing oratory of Mario Savio and iconic images of mass demonstrations have come to stand in for the 1964 movement and its legacy. But all that makes for a very blurry snapshot,' historian Felicia Viator, a Cal grad and visiting lecturer, told a gathering of students in Doe Library recently.
¶
To really understand the FSM and the whole period one has to go deeper, she suggested. 'Broad brush strokes are not enough.'
¶
Her remarks were intended as words of inspiration to kick off HackFSM, a 12-day 'hackathon' that, she said, shared the FSM's aim 'to create a free marketplace of ideas.'"
4/18/2014, Earth Island Journal, Film Review: A Fierce Green Fire, Ed Rampell
"Mark Kitchell's 1990 Oscar nominated documentary Berkeley in the Sixties covered the campus activism that disrupted the House Un-American Activities Committee's hearings, launched the Free Speech Movement, fought the police at People's Park, and inspired student spokesman Mario Savio to declare: 'There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part … You've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.' Now Kitchell is back with another stand up and cheer nonfiction film about a different movement: Environmentalism and its eco-warriors who, as Savio put it, 'indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.'
¶
Like a classical Greek drama, Kitchell's well-crafted and briskly paced A Fierce Green Fire has a five-act structure, as each segment focuses on different aspects and leaders of the environmental movement over the past half a century, with narration by a prominent artist or activist. The title is derived from a section in environmental philosopher Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac in which he describes his ecological awakening after shooting a wolf while working as a US Forest Service Ranger: 'We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.'"
4/18/2014, Beyond Chron, Carl Bloice remembered, 1939-2014, by A Group of his Friends
"In 1962, Bloice with others founded the first chapter of the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs, a multi-racial, national youth organization, named for the legendary NAACP co-founder, journalist, author and educator. In San Francisco, the DuBois Clubs gained quick notice for leading desegregation fights targeting drive-in restaurant chains, the San Francisco hotel industry and automobile sales rooms that systematically discriminated against African-Americans in hiring. Bloice was also the group's publications editor.
¶
During that time, the Los Angeles Times cited Bloice as a leader of the University of California Berkeley's Free Student Union and Vietnam Day Committee, successors to the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement, along with other prominent free speech and anti-Vietnam war activists, including later Yippee prankster Jerry Rubin, Conn Hallinan, Robert Scheer, who went on to become a well known journalist, and many others."
4/16/2014, Counterpunch, Getting From Here to There: The Sixties Turn Fifty, Joe Paff
"The Sixties was a Big Mountain and there were many peaks. One such was the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964. It would wildly strain the metaphor to ask 'which was the highest peak'. The mountain was built with actions in Paris, London, Berkeley, Mississippi, Prague, Chicago, Madison, Kent State, Such mountain tops are not reached with thought. Only through action. Move your ass and your brains will follow. Build the mountain and many will see clearly.
¶
For those of us lucky to have been there the FSM was a long year of enchantment, passion, argument, and high speed learning-of Real Education. It pervaded every department, every classroom, every encounter, every day. I was teaching political science that year and what an easy job it was. Every class was packed, eager anticipation, students bursting with things to say and projects to promote. Books came alive and were carried like flags and eyes were flashing with excitement."
4/14/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, Prince of posters David Lance Goines keeps his hand in, Edward Guthmann
"At 68, Goines still lives in Berkeley and designs, illustrates and prints posters on the American Type Foundry offset press that he's used since 1966.
¶
He also designs and prints wine labels and in the early '90s completed a history, 'The Free Speech Movement: Coming of Age in the 1960s.' It was that event that led indirectly to his career, when in 1964 UC Berkeley expelled him for political activism and he found work as an apprentice printer."
4/14/2014, PopMatters, Rock the Cashbox: The Great Rock 'n' Roll Sellout, Jim Yoakum
"These kids read Kerouac in coffee shops, they listened to Dylan and Baez, discussed the Vietnam War, civil rights, talked openly about sex and injustice and, most of all, saw straight through the white picket fence and blue sky bullshit being fostered on them by the older generation. It was the early beginnings of the Protest Movement, which officially began on October 1st, 1964, when a University of California student named Jack Weinberg was arrested for distributing leaflets promoting civil rights on the Berkeley campus. Before a police car could take him away, 2,000 of Weinberg's fellow students surrounded the cruiser, sat down, and refused to move.
¶
The stand-off (actually the first recorded sit-in) lasted for 32 hours and marked the beginning of the Free Speech Movement which shaped the '60s Generation, and frightened authorities. Some time later, when officials appointed a young man to negotiate with the FSM, Weinberg famously remarked, 'We don't trust anyone over 30.' Although he admitted later that he'd said in jest, it became the unofficial slogan of the coming counter-culture."
4/13/2014, The Voice of Russia, US client states lock step on fascist coup in Ukraine: Putin forced to seek resolution, John Robles
"Finally I leave you with a plea to all stand up for peace and justice and with the words of Mario Savio: 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!'"
4/13/2014, The Daily Californian, Campus's 1st humanities-based hackathon pays tribute to Free Speech Movement, Lydia Tuan
"'I like that young students are trying to discover what the FSM is like, and they're doing it through modern lenses,' said environmental activist Gar Smith, who was arrested for his participation in the Free Speech Movement in 1964 and who presented awards to the winners. 'We were limited to mimeograph machines and fliers, so this is a completely different approach to accessing information and organizing social change.'"
4/12/2014, PJ Media, Barry Eat World, Ed Driscoll
"And as Gelernter wrote elsewhere in America-Lite, the antiwar movement actually preceded Johnson's escalation; it was a creation of the nascent new left, about to devour the staid old left, which birthed the New Deal and Great Society:
¶
What caused the American mood to crumble [in the period between the mid 1960s through the 1970s]? The civil rights struggle couldn't be the answer; for one thing, it united rather than divided the country, except for the segregationist Old South. Maybe the bitter split over the war in Vietnam explains it. But that can't be right; can't be the whole truth. Antiwar protests were powered by the New Left and "the Movement," which originated in Tom Hayden's 'Port Huron Statement' of 1962, before the nation had ever heard of Vietnam. And the New Left picked up speed at Berkeley in the Free Speech Movement of 1964 and early '65, before the explosion of Vietnam. Bitterness toward America was an evil spirit shopping for a body when Vietnam started to throb during 1965."
4/11/2014, The Daily Californian, My personal ode to Berkeley, Max Rosen
"Of course, Berkeley and the university are supported by a long and fruitful history of social justice, advocacy and activism. That's one thing that initially drew me to this place, and it is comforting to know that when I leave, even if things change - and they will - there will always be a culture here that fosters and maintains inquiry and activism. Things are constantly changing at UC Berkeley because people ask questions - and the right ones, at that. Even if the Free Speech Movement has become a token of commercialism - some might even say a tool to market to prospective students - we would not have the kind of involvement from our campus's students today without it. Our past allows us to be where we are today and to think progressively into the future."
4/10/2014, Sacramento Bee, Change the tradition of the Missions report, Joe Mathews
"A young student who gets assigned UC Berkeley for her report would learn about the post-Gold Rush years that produced the university, about discoveries from vitamin E to the flu virus, about the 1960s Free Speech Movement, and about how California's 20th century success flowed in no small part from the fact that Berkeley was the world's largest public university as early as 1912."
4/10/2014, msnbc, O'Reilly is more like Colbert than you think, Timothy Noah
"Colbert had played clips from an earlier O'Reilly tirade against equality, then mocked O'Reilly for saying 'The truth is there will never be equality in this world' because different people have different (i.e. unequal) abilities. O'Reilly, Colbert agreed, will 'never be as emotionally mature as a toddler or understand how ties work as well as a middle schooler.' Pretty funny and a little bit mean. Colbert also had fun with O'Reilly's claim that hooliganism by fans at college sporting events is a manifestation of the anti-authority ethic bequeathed by the 1960s. In fact, college students were misbehaving well before that. A new biography of John Updike, for instance, relates (according to a New York Times review) that when he was at Harvard the budding littérateur performed 'elaborate pranks that required great mounds of elephant dung and the destruction of cars.' That was back in the conformist 1950s, a full decade before Berkeley's Mario Savio ushered in a decade of student protest."
4/9/2014, The Daily Californian, PSA: New fall 2014 classes, Holly Secon
"Music 128 is a class called "Music of the 60?s" taught by visiting professor Benjamin Piekut. According to him, 'This course will survey the music of the 1960s in the United States, paying particular attention to different styles of popular music. We will also study electronic and experimental music of the decade, as well as jazz big bands and small ensembles. We will listen to and read about this music in relation to the major events of this tumultuous era, including the civil rights movement, the cold war, the Vietnam War, the counterculture, Black Power, the Free Speech Movement, the New Left, and psychedelia.'"
4/7/2014, Portland Press Herald, Faculty cutbacks mobilize USM student movement, Noel K. Gallagher
"Protests on a university campus are to be expected, when the energy of youth and new ideas and political awakening collide. Student protests in the United States have given birth to the Free Speech Movement in the mid-1960s, played a key role in divesting from companies doing business with apartheid South Africa, railed against overseas wars and agitated for the establishment of ethnic studies and women's studies programs. Overseas, student protests have toppled governments."
4/7/2014, Oakland Tribune, Berkeley's Albatross Pub celebrates 50 years, Laura Casey
"The Albatross opened when the free speech movement was bursting at UC Berkeley and college students gathered here to debate -- and sometimes argue -- its finer points. Bartenders were slipping drinks across the bar when The Beatles were sweeping the nation and when people were fighting for civil rights shortly after hearing Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech."
4/1/2014, Huffington Post, Rand Paul Eats Obama and Clinton for Lunch on Government Spying, Miles Mogulescu
"Most recently, in a speech sponsored by campus Republicans, Sen. Paul took his campaign against the unbridled national security state to the University of California at Berkeley (which despite the press and the Paul campaign making too much of it, is no longer the left-wing bastion it was in the '60s when it spawned the Free Speech Movement.)"
4/1/2014, ACLU of Northern California, ACLU of Northern California Sues Berkeley: Ban on Roosters Should be a Wake-Up Call to Other Cities, ACLU of Northern California
"'The Supreme Court has long held that foul speech is protected by the First Amendment, so long as it is not legally obscene,' said ACLU-NC Staff Attorney Michael Risher. 'And it is particularly ironic that we are seeing this ban here in Berkeley: The free speech movement was hatched in Berkeley, and speakers of all types have long flocked here to express themselves.'"
3/30/2014, The Heights, COLUMN: Let's Fight For A Cause, Adriana Mariella
"If you've ever seen Mario Savio's 1964 'put your bodies upon the gears' speech-a part of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at UC Berkeley in which he fearlessly urged his fellow students to take on a university that he saw as oppressive, tyrannical, and corrupt-then you know that you've probably never seen a display of conviction as passionate and as brazen as his at Boston College."
3/28/2014, Santa Barbara Independent, A Voltaire Moment for Liberals, Fred Hofmann
"The vice chancellor's letter rightly affirms that: 'Freedom and rights are not situational … we cannot pick and choose what views are allowed to be aired.' But that message is muddied if not contradicted by Vice Chancellor Young's assertion that the campus is under siege by 'outside groups' that seek to 'create discord' and 'peddle hate and intolerance.' In essence, he asserts that outside agitators are trying to stir up trouble. Sound familiar? This argument has been used countless times to discredit liberal groups exercising free speech. In fact it was used in the mid-1960s by UC officials and by Governor Reagan to delegitimize the Free Speech Movement on the Berkeley campus."
3/25/2014, Berkeleyside, Telegraph Ave. scrubbed, cleaned in beautification effort, Natalie Orenstein
Telegraph suffers from myths and misperceptions, said [Doris] Moskowitz, who took over the bookstore when her father, Moe Moskowitz, died in 1997. She mourns the decline of the vibrant city center.
¶
'It's the heart of Berkeley,' she said. 'This is where the Free Speech Movement happened, the Women's Movement, the Black Power Movement. It's the place where the city and the university come together. But as it is, it's sort of a student ghetto-slash-wasteland.'"
3/24/2014, Kidlit, The Free Speech Movement: 50th Anniversary, Ruth Tenzer Feldman and Bettina Aptheker
"On the occasion of this 50th anniversary of the FSM, and as we recognize March as Women's History Month, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider the ways in which gender, race, class, and sexuality may effect one's access to freedom of speech. Although the First Amendment embraces a universal ideal in its wording, it was written by white, propertied men in the 18th century, who never likely imagined that it might apply to women, and/or people of color, and/or all those who were not propertied, and even, perhaps, not citizens, and/or undocumented immigrants. A woman's freedom of speech is often inhibited by fears of reprisal, for example, if she reveals sexual or domestic violence. There is almost always denial, her speech vilified, her character assassinated. Incest survivors seeking acknowledgement of their suffering and redress are viciously attacked virtually without exception, even the men who as boys were molested by their parish priests, until it became too many, the evidence too overwhelming to sustain the denial. In other words, freedom of speech is a Constitutional guarantee, but who gets to exercise it without the chilling restraints of censure depends very much on one's location in the political and social cartography."
3/20/2014, The New York Review of Books, The Free Speech Movement 50th Anniversary, Jack Weinberg and others
"Veterans and supporters of the 1964 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, California, are invited to return to campus for the fiftieth anniversary reunion and commemoration activities: September 26--October 1, 2014. If interested, please e-mail FSM50th@gmail.com for further information.
¶
Jack Weinberg, Bettina Apthecker, Jackie Goldberg, Lynne Hollander Savio, FSM Archives Board of Directors
Lee Felsenstein, Chairperson"
3/20/2014, Philadelphia Inquirer, Kantner, Jefferson Starship sail into Ardmore Music Hall, A.D. Amorosi
"It was complex psychedelic rock, bathed in folk, noise (Airplane), prog-rock (Starship), and a singular mix of voices, male (Marty Balin) and female (Signe Toly Anderson and the wild Grace Slick, who penned the psilocybin-laced 'White Rabbit' and 'Somebody to Love'). Kantner says it was all in the name of 'civil rights, gay-rights progress, the pot lobby, ecological reforms, prison reforms, sexual freedom, taking better care of the poor and the elderly, the free-speech movement, and let's go all the way back to the ban-the-bomb movement of the '50s, for a start.'"
3/20/2014, Counterpunch, The Afterlife of Mario Savio, Clancy Sigal
"Veterans of the 1964 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, California, an event that electrified young men and women world over, will return to campus for the fiftieth anniversary reunion this October. (If interested e-mail FSM50th@gmail.com.) FSM's most famous leader, Mario Savio, won't be there because he died in 1996.
¶
I'm intensely interested in the personal lives of famous people once they 'fade from the limelight'. You have this thrilling moment that defines you in popular culture…a speech, an 80-yard kickoff return…an Olympic gold medal…and then? For Savio the moment came when he gave his immortal speech on the steps of Sproul Hall:"
Spring 2014, California Magazine, The Plato and Newton of Branding: Berkeley's David Aaker, Frank Viviano
"Aaker was among a handful of faculty members on an elite planning committee that Lyons formed shortly after his appointment. The Aaker Model was its conscious blueprint; finding a way to reconcile the dissident spirit of Berkeley with the training of corporate executives was its visionary mandate.
¶
In the four slots reserved for 'core identity elements' in the model, the committee all but quoted from the Free Speech Movement that made the university an icon of change in the 1960s and 1970s. 'Question the status quo' was the first of the new Haas principles, followed by 'confidence without attitude'-without corporate arrogance, in other words-along with the intention to be 'students always,' engaged in "the lifelong pursuit of personal and intellectual growth." The fourth element was a commitment to goals 'beyond yourself' in the interest of society at large."
3/17/2014, laRepúblicaCultural.es, Le Parody, todo original o nada nuevo: la revolución más allá de la resistencia, Julio Castro
" La ironía y el rechazo se hacen evidentes en el último tema, y es que Le Parody termina con algo mucho más potente y evocador, que es un tema que nos trae a colación a un gran activista de hace justo medio siglo: Mario Savio.
¶
Y quiero centrarme en este último, porque el discurso contra el sistema desde Estados Unidos, que lanzó el año 1964, instando a la población a lanzarse contra los engranajes de la maquinaria, o bajo las ruedas que lo mueven, se resume en este pequeño gran fragmento de nuestra autora actual:"
3/14/2014, UC Berkeley News Center, UC Berkeley featured on 'Days with Zahrah' TV show Sunday, Amy Hamaoui
"Host Zahrah Farmer and her crew capture many aspects of campus life in the segment. Highlights include practice with the Cal Women's Basketball team, a behind-the-scenes look at Cal Performances with artistic director Matías Tarnopolsky, an interview and lab tour with Nobel Laureate Randy Schekman, as well as students on Sproul Plaza (the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement) and an inside peek at the Campanile, set to celebrate its 100th birthday in 2015."
3/14/2014, reason.com, Oakland vs. Government Surveillance! Defeating the Domain Awareness Center, Zach Weissmueller
"'Whether it's going back to the free speech movement, the Black Panthers, Occupy Oakland... we fight back,' says Brian Hofer, an attorney affiliated with the Oakland Privacy Working Group, an association of Oakland residents fighting against the city's proposed Domain Awareness Center (DAC)."
3/13/2014, Daily Californian, Cloyne can craft its own self-fulfilling prophecy, Alexandra Kopel
"To briefly summarize the proposal, Cloyne will be shut down temporarily and turned into an 'academic theme house'; all current members will be expelled like naughty school children and prohibited from returning; a zero-tolerance 'one-strike-you're-out' substance policy will be implemented; and the beautiful murals of Cloyne will be erased, thus destroying the last visible remnant of 1960s counterculture - the very ideals of the Civil Rights Movement, Free Speech Movement and antiwar movement that the co-ops were founded upon."
3/13/2014, Chicago Monitor, Anti-Boycott Bills Threatening Academic Freedom Spread to Illinois, Bill Chambers
"In December 2013, the American Studies Association (ASA) , the largest association of academics devoted to the interdisciplinary study of American culture and history, passed a resolution to endorse the call of Palestinian civil society for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. To quote from the resolution - 'Whereas the American Studies Association is committed to the pursuit of social justice, to the struggle against all forms of racism, including antisemitism, discrimination, and xenophobia, and to solidarity with aggrieved peoples in the United States and in the world…It is resolved that the American Studies Association (ASA) endorses and will honor the call of Palestinian civil society for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. It is also resolved that the ASA supports the protected rights of students and scholars everywhere to engage in research and public speaking about Israel-Palestine and in support of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.' In this resolution, the ASA is supporting the 2004 call from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel endorsed by the great majority of Palestinian civil society organizations. This action taken by the ASA has led to an avalanche of bills at the national and state level that threaten public universities with the loss of funds when their faculty support boycott activity of any kind. The response of faculty, students, and civil rights organizations like CAIR to this threat to academic freedom has been equally strong. In the tradition of The Free Speech Movement at UC-Berkeley from 1964-1965, faculty and students are uniting to protest laws and regulations restricting political activities and free speech."
3/12/2014, Library Journal, Kevin Gorman: Berkeley's Wikipedian-in-Residence, Ian Chant
"There are photographs of the free speech movement in the Berkeley archives that exist maybe nowhere else in the world, as well as records related to the early history of the Berkeley student co-op. It's likely there are a lot of surprises in the collections as well. I probably won't know what I want to release until I stumble across it and find it. Then, they'll go from being housed in a dusty vault at Berkeley to being hosted on Wikimedia Commons, and other sites from there."
3/11/2014, The Voice of Russia, US/NATO lawlessness, post-USSR dehumanization and the 1%, John Robles
"The international bodies that now exist are impotent in dealing with their illegality, hence new ones must be created. Ones with teeth who are unable to be influenced, subverted or bought off. But where and by whom? I may be wrong in my solution so then I ask you: what is yours?
¶
'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!' - Mario Savio"
3/10/2014, The Modesto Bee, Jeff Jardine: Ex-Ceres cop and Saddam interrogator now leading 400 FBI agents in Miami, Jeff Jardine
"LOCAL CONNECTION - My Sunday column began with a look back at the free speech movement on the UC Berkeley campus in the mid-1960s. One of the leaders of the movement was a Cal student named Mario Savio, who was among those arrested in a demonstration on campus in December 1964. Savio later earned his master's in physics from San Francisco State and, in the mid-1980s, taught at Modesto Junior College. In September, an MJC student was stopped by school employees from handing out copies of the Constitution because he wasn't in the so-called free speech area and hadn't reserved the space. The student, Robert Van Tuinen, filed a lawsuit against the school. While supported by an organization called Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Van Tuinen was the sole plaintiff. I stand corrected."
3/9/2014, The Modesto Bee, Jeff Jardine: Going in reverse down free-speech road?, Jeff Jardine
"Fifty years ago this fall, the Free Speech Movement rocked the UC Berkeley campus.
¶
The short version: It represented a clash between school/government officials who sought to stop students from promoting and raising funds for political causes on the campus by declaring rules prohibiting such activities would be strictly enforced. The administrators, in essence, had created a double standard: The military could set up recruiting stations on campus as the Vietnam War ramped up, yet students were told they couldn't set up tables at the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph avenues.
¶
What began as an orderly protest became a confrontation when the university began disciplining participating students. And when an ex-student named Jack Weinberg didn't produce a student ID card, the ground rules changed.
¶
'They did the dumbest thing they could have done,' said Jim Branson, a student at the time and a member of the Daily Cal newspaper staff. "They brought in a (patrol) car. They put Weinberg inside it with a cop. The students sat down around the car."
¶
And stayed there for 32 hours, surrounded by as many as 3,000 people who refused to leave until charges against Weinberg were dropped. The administration blinked first. Free speech and civil rights advocates won that round because they understood and believed in their cause, defying politicians and administrators who sought to stifle dissent. But free speech conflicts continue to this day."
3/9/2014, American Thinker, Dissonance, Harmony, and American Culture, Chet Richards
"After all, like myself, my friend was a product of U.C. Berkeley. There, my professor in the music history class was openly scornful of twentieth-century attempts to maintain the traditions of tonal music. Music had to break free of such straitjacket restrictions.
¶
The music composition majors did not agree. In order to survive in the music department, the students were constrained to write only atonal music - the more dissonant the better. The students hated this injunction and went on strike. This strike preceded the famous Free Speech Movement but it had its impact on that later student unrest. The music faculty caved and reluctantly allowed tonal music to be a student's thesis.
¶
Inspired by the rebellion of the music students the art students similarly went on strike -- successfully. They had been forbidden to paint representational pictures. Students who wanted to do that should take up architecture, not fine art."
3/8/2014, Le Nouvel Observateur, Berkeley ou l'angoisse des universités américaines, Patrick Fauconnier
"Berkeley est une icône de la contestation politique aux Etats-Unis : c'est là qu'éclata, en 1964, le 'Free speech movement' : des étudiants réclamant la liberté d'expression politique sur le campus se lancèrent dans un sit-in de 32 heures pour empêcher la police d'arrêter un des leurs. Il en résulta 774 arrestations, un record à ce jour pour une manif nord-américaine. Ce fut le coup d'envoi de mouvements de protestations - notamment anti guerre du Vietnam - qui firent le tour du monde et débouchèrent sur Mai-68 en France."
3/6/2014, The Voice of Russia, US, NATO, CIA supporting nazis in Ukraine project, John Robles
"I would like to leave you with parts of two speeches which I think are completely relevant and topical, although they had different reasons for writing both of these speeches they these words apply exactly to what the US/NATO are doing today, in 2014, a year when all war, hunger and poverty on earth could have been long eradicated:
¶
'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!' - Mario Savio"
3/6/2014, Dissident Voice, From Radical Resistance to Propagating Imperialism, Derek Ide
"The Chicano Movement, Carlos Muñoz explains the process by which this transition occurred: 'Student protest gave birth to student movements, which developed a counter-hegemonic process to challenge the dominant ideology and the institutions through which it permeates society. But this counter-hegemonic process was eventually undermined by the strategies of repression and cooptation on the part of those who ruled those institutions.'8 As Muñoz explains, while some of the white student organizations such as SDS and the Free Speech movement were rooted in the 'white middle-class,' this was 'not true of the Chicano and Black student movements.'9 The Chicano youth movement, for instance, reflected 'characteristics related to the nature of racial and class oppression experienced by the Mexican American working class.'10 There is no clearer example of how the 'counter-hegemonic process was eventually undermined' than by observing the LSU leadership's unwavering position on Venezuela. Over forty years of shifting campus terrain, the imposition of enormous debt on students, increasing atominization and depoliticization, and the influx of wealthy expatriates into universities has transfigured the character of cultural student organizations. Now, instead of expressing solidarity and commitment to the struggles of a government targeted by U.S. imperialism for advancing working class interests, student organizations such as the UT LSU are willful mouthpieces for the most privileged, most elite segments of societies like Venezuela."
3/4/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, Golden anniversary for Free Speech Movement, Leah Garchik
"With Free Speech Movement veterans planning to commemorate the 50th anniversary of that event, Gar Smith writes that archivists are working on appropriate plans. Wearable buttons are among the ideas.
¶
'Don't trust anyone over 30' becomes 'Don't trust anyone over 80'?" [Ed note: over 80 update conceived by FSMer Dana MacDermott]
3/3/2014, California Magazine, The Road Not Taken: A Berkeley Bard from the 60s Became Rare Breed-the Trucker Poet, Glen Martin
"Arguably, the best and the brightest of this select group was Lowell Levant, a UC Berkeley undergrad who made a splash in Bay Area poetry circles in the 1960s. He published in the University of California's literary magazine Occident, and was a featured reader in the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference. He was active in (and arrested during) the Free Speech Movement, and joined the Artists, Musicians, Poets and Sympathizers Local of the Industrial Workers of the World in San Francisco. Shortly thereafter, he abandoned academe, if not his passion for verse. Disenchanted with politics and not seeing many prospects for gainful employment in the couplet racket, he dropped out of Cal to drive long-haul rigs around the West."
3/1/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, S.F. Palace Hotel sit-in helped start revolution 50 years ago, Carl Nolte
"Mario Savio joined one of the Palace Hotel demonstrations, was arrested and went to jail. A few months later, he stood atop a police car in Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley, the leader of what he thought might be a new age."
3/1/2014, Mediapart, At Berkeley de Fred Wiseman, rencontre avec le cinéaste, Quentin Mével
"Mais Berkeley, c'est plus qu'une tradition de service public, c'est aussi une tradition de contestation. Berkeley a été l'épicentre, dans les années 60, après le free speech movement en 1964, de la contestation à la guerre du Vietnam et de la lutte pour les droits civiques. Cette tradition s'est désormais institutionnalisée : sur le campus de Berkeley, vous pouvez boire un café au 'free speech movement café', ou prendre la parole sur les 'Mario Savio stairs' (les marches où Mario Savio, leader informel du free speech movement, prit la parole pour son plus célèbre discours). De nombreux enseignants, de nombreux membres de l'administration ont vécu cet âge d'or et regardent un peu de haut les étudiants qui occupent (très provisoirement et très poliment) la bibliothèque pour réclamer la gratuité, jugeant quelque peu irréalistes leurs revendications…"
2/28/2014, Mission Local, Where New Tech Arrives, Old Tech Once Roared, Daniel Hirsch
"The underground newspaper The Berkeley Barb reported from the front lines of the counterculture and the Free Speech Movement. The newspaper of the socialist-leaning Union of Democratic Filipinos, Ang Katipunan, published essays criticizing the U.S. government for its support of dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The San Francisco Print Collective ran articles supporting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the American Indian Movement and the National Farm Workers Association. Coming Up!, which eventually became the San Francisco Bay Times, was a pioneering LGBT newspaper advocating gay rights.
¶
All of them printed at Howard Quinn at one point."
2/26/2014, The Press of Atlantic City, 50 years ago, blue and red America were born, Vince Conti
"In California, the student rebellion so characteristic of the sixties also began in 1964. Sit-ins at Berkeley and Mario Savio's speech at the height of the Free Speech Movement would usher in a youth-dominated rebellion against accepted American values and especially America's war in Asia."
2/25/2014, Truthout, America's Secret Police, Aaron Leonard
"The SDS blurb is drawn from the secret FBI file of Steven Charles Hamilton, obtained from a Freedom of Information request. Hamilton had begun the 1960s as a more or less typical American kid from a working class family in Southern California. He had initially attended divinity school, but transferred to the University of California as a history major, where he became involved in the Free Speech Movement and later a founder of the anti-war formation The Resistance - a group that figures in a number of histories about that period, including in Rosenfeld's and Medsger's books. What does not get mentioned about Hamilton is that he was an early member of the Progressive Labor Party, a Maoist formation that was active in the early anti-war movement, before becoming a founder of the Maoist, Revolutionary Union. Because of this, starting in 1966, Hamilton was put on the FBI's Security Index - a list of people to be rounded up in the case of "national emergency." From the bureau's standpoint, this made perfect sense; Hamilton was young, radical and a leader. This is the backdrop to, among other things, his being arrested during the Free Speech protest, kicked out of Berkeley, subpoenaed to appear in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee and put on trial for his draft resistance activity as part of the Oakland 7 - all of which was dutifully documented by the FBI, which was following his every move. Hamilton's larger political biography, like thousands of others, gives a deeper sense of who the bureau saw as enemies and what they did about it. "
2/21/2014, The American Conservative, Why Play Cold War Games in Ukraine?, Patrick J. Buchanan
"Under George W. Bush, our National Endowment for Democracy helped to engineer color-coded revolutions in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, but it failed in Belarus. We have a long track record of meddling.
¶
And was it not interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine for John McCain to fly to Kiev, go down to Maidan Square, and do his best imitation of Mario Savio in Sproul Plaza?
¶
If the Cold War is over, why are we playing these Cold War games?"
2/21/2014, Pacific Standard, What Does It Mean to Be Anti-Establishment at Berkeley Today?, Patrick Redford
"THERE IS A PRIVATELY owned on-campus cafe named after the Free Speech Movement, a fact which tour guides make a point of showing off. They tout it as a symbol of Berkeley students' fiery character, a "know your roots" ideal to aspire to. The titular movement began in response to administrative shutdowns of on-campus demonstrations against the Vietnam War or in support of the civil rights movement."
2/21/2014, Orange County Register, Jackson Browne concert will help a friend and a Fullerton theater, Lou Ponsi
"The Fullerton of the 1960s was oppressive, said Browne, who recalls being tossed out of a civics class for defending free-speech and civil-rights activist Mario Savio.
¶
'It was a time in which young people were just sort of expected to just follow along in the lines that were laid out for them and do what they were told,' Browne said.
¶
Noonan remembers being silenced by school administrators when playing anti-war and pro-civil rights songs in the Sunny Hills quad: '(Fullerton) was politically pretty hard-core, perfect for us to grow out of and write about.'"
2/21/2014, opednews.com, Hard times and classic Journalism, Bob Patterson
"Dorothea Lange, then a Berkeley resident, took the Thirties era photo of a farmer's wife (the image is called "Migrant Mother") that became the "go to" image for depicting America in the Depression. Mario Savio delivered the speech that some historians credit as the real start of the Sixties from on top of a police car in Spraul Plaza at UC Berkeley. Morris Dickstein wrote: "The History of the Sixties was written as much in the Berkeley Barb as in the New York Times." It seemed only natural to expect that in the Bush era journalists would be clogging both Shattuck and Telegraph Avenues to relay stories and photos of the famous variations of Main Street to the rest of the world"
2/20/2014, Swarthmore Phoenix, On free speech, Kate Aronoff
"Exploring the concept of free speech deserves a look into its history; some of its earliest defenders fought the repression of student and faculty voices on college campuses. The free speech movement came to a head on the University of California's Berkeley campus in the mid-1960s. Student activists, many from across the political spectrum, were responding to the UC Regents' systematic denial of freedom of expression on campus. The body had taken away students' ability to disseminate political literature on UC Berkeley property."
2/18/2014, The Akron Beacon Journal, UA Press publishes works of poet-truck driver, Carol Biliczky
"A Poet Drives a Truck by Lowell A. Levant. Levant, a student at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s, studied under notable poet and UC professor Gary Snyder and was among up to 800 students arrested in the Free Speech Movement. Levant drove a truck and died in 2010 at age 65 in the San Francisco area.
¶
When University of Akron psychology professor Ron Levant found his brother's moldy, mildewed poems stuffed in grocery bags in a shed, he did what anyone would do: Assembled them as best he could into a book.
¶
That became A Poet Drives a Truck, which UA Press is distributing, with a heady 50 copies already printed."
WEEKEND ED FEBRUARY 14-16, 2014 , Counterpunch, UC Berkeley and the Myth of the Activist Life, Alexandra McGee
"I am frustrated that Berkeley continues to perpetuate the myth of its activist lifestyle for economic gain. It sells an image of the rebel protester, the ideological martyr, to a generation of youth that cannot find their way four blocks north without GPS, never mind find their way past the bureaucratic labyrinth to create substantial change. With their tuition and the gradual privatization of education (see: millions of dollars from ecologically destructive corporations like BP), they perpetuate the inequality of wealth and even endorse human rights abusers, as they have by allowing Napolitano to be their system president.
¶
If Mario Savio were amongst us, he would hang his head in absolute shame. Not just at the cafe on campus toting his name as a publicity stunt, but at our failure to question the status quo. To disturb the system, you don’t occupy a building which poses no strategical advantage, you don’t chant just to make yourself feel good, and you do not boast that you are creating community when really all you’re doing is attracting people who want to update their facebooks with a new “rebel” profile picture."
2/9/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, Reich: Working class down - but not for long, Robert Reich
"Mario Savio speaks at a protest on the UC Berkeley campus in 1964 that marked the beginning of the Free Speech Movement. Today's students are so burdened with debt that they're reluctant to make a ruckus about social issues."
2/9/2014, Chicago Sun-Times, When did 'The '60s' really begin?, Ira Chernus
"The Mississippi Freedom Summer saw civil rights workers murdered and hundreds of white students going back to their campuses in the fall radicalized.
¶
Some of those students, at Berkeley, created the Free Speech Movement.
¶
African Americans "rioted" in Harlem.
¶
America began to hear of Malcolm X, and Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali.
¶
After Republicans took a sharp turn to the right and saw their presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, get 40 percent of the vote - buoyed by the rhetoric of political newcomer Ronald Reagan - right-wing politicos began planning a 'New Right' movement.
¶
TV viewers were spellbound by an immensely strong, totally independent woman on the season's biggest new hit, "Bewitched."
¶
Connect the dots, the PBS show's talking head historians all say, and you'll see a year that changed America forever. "The '60s" had begun!
¶
There's just one problem with this story: Hardly anybody in 1964 was connecting the dots. The public generally saw these events as quite separate from each other. LBJ's support for civil rights and helping the poor were clearly connected. But hardly anyone foresaw how the Gulf of Tonkin resolution would intersect with, and ultimately destroy, his liberal domestic agenda. The Beatles sparred with Clay in a fun photo-op. But who could see any link between them and the Berkeley students taking over the university administration building?"
2/6/2014, Times Higher Education, Berkeley: a radical home for Hitler's émigrés, Matthew Reisz
"Some of the latter were still alive to be interviewed for the project. In the words of lawyer Richard Buxbaum, who appears in the accompanying video, Berkeley made 'a conscious effort to rise from being a very good regional university to a global university by being much more open to the hiring of émigré scholars than other universities'.
¶
Two major factors underpinned their continuing impact, added Dr Spagnolo: 'It made Berkeley part of the wider circuit. The global outlook of the university owes a lot to those arrivals. And their first-hand knowledge of totalitarianism gave a different dimension to their political awareness. Their experience of fascism informed their reactions, even though they responded in very different ways.'
¶
Professor Lewy, who had been deprived of his 'licence to teach' at Göttingen University in 1933, reacted very badly to the loyalty oath all University of California faculty were required to sign in 1949. Sociologist Reinhard Bendix, although he had been part of a radical anti-fascist resistance movement in his youth, rejected the student activists of the 1960s as a 'mob' similar to those he had seen in Nazi Germany. Professor Buxbaum, by contrast, helped students in the Free Speech Movement (1963-64) who faced criminal charges and others in later legal disputes over protests against the Vietnam War and affirmative action."
2/2/2014, Pepperdine University Graphic, San Fran teaches justice, equality, Rachel Littauer
"Also attending, Communication professor Caitlin Lawrence said she was impressed that the students took complete ownership of their learning and took the time to really ask and invest in the experts on the trip.
¶
After their outings, students had small-group time to discuss their findings. Lawrence said this was her favorite part of the trip as "students asked questions about citizenship and social justice and the role faith plays in how you respond to social justice." Lawrence said she was excited about the genuine interest Pepperdine students had in social movements.
¶
'Some people think kids of this generation are apathetic, but students at Pepperdine really care about things, and experiences like this can serve as a catalyst for students voicing their desires for change,' Lawrence said. Even if nothing incredibly specific results from these ideas, 'its exciting that those conversations are happening.'
¶
Sophomore Elaina Duran participated in the free speech movement group. She said after the trip she felt inspired to get more deeply involved with the groups she is passionate about and promote the beliefs that are important to these organizations."
1/31/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, 'I will tell you about my songs', Jon Carroll
"Pete Seeger made the Free Speech Movement seem almost inevitable. I was there for the FSM, and there was a fair amount of folkie guitar strumming. I believe "We Shall Not Be Moved" was sung. If one followed Pete Seeger's view of the world, one would inevitably end up with a mass of people demonstrating about something."
1/29/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, Ronstadt, others honor Seeger's legacy of activism, Aidin Vaziri
"In the Bay Area, Seeger's influence and advocacy could be felt in any number of social and political moments over the years, from the Free Speech Movement and Vietnam War protests, civil rights and antiwar marches, right up to the demonstrations by the Occupy movement."
1/29/2014, Jackson Free Press, Labor Rights, Civil Rights, Joe Atkins
"We should also hold another commemoration this year. The first major student protests of the 1960s began in 1964 with the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley, which civil rights activists in the South inspired. The Berkeley event opened the door to student protests across the country against racism, the Vietnam War and other betrayals of the nation's ideals.
¶
A new generation of protesters is already in the streets today, God bless 'em."
1/28/2014, Galileu, Ao longo de mais de três décadas, jornalista investigou espionagem do FBI nas principais universidades dos Estados unidos, ANDRÉ BERNARDO
"A epopeia começou em 1981 quando Rosenfeld foi pautado para cobrir uma denúncia de que o FBI teria infiltrado agentes no Free Speech Movement ("Movimento pela Liberdade de Expressão"). Criado em 1964, defendia o direito dos estudantes de se engajarem em atividades políticas e inspirou outros movimentos, como o Maio de 1968, na França."
1/26/2014, Uncle Mike's Musings: A Yankees Blog and More, Top 10 Myths About the 1960s, Mike
"A guy getting arrested by nasty-looking cops, with a big crowd looking on. That's Mario Savio, leader of the "Free Speech Movement" at the University of California's main campus in Berkeley, in late 1964. This was around his 22nd birthday, so he certainly qualified as one of the young people that other young people were looking up to at the time. But his hair isn't especially long. (In fact, his hairline was already receding.) He's wearing a jacket and a tie. He was an activist, but he was no hippie. (Until 1966 or so, when people heard the word "hippie," they thought it meant "jazz musician," like in the 1963 hit by the Philadelphia girl group the Orlons: "Where do all the hippies meet? South Street, South Street." South Street, then as now, was Philly's "Greenwich Village.")
¶
Savio later became a professor (though not at the college where he protested, unlike a few of the Columbia University protestors later in the decade), married twice, had a son with each wife, and developed heart trouble, which killed him in 1996, only 53 years old. He is best remembered for a speech he gave that month of December 1964:
¶
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
¶
Savio sounded pretty radical -- even today, he sounds radical. But he sure didn't look radical."
1/26/2014, The Daily Californian, Author calls debt modern form of bondage in campus speech, Kate Irwin
"The fact that some agree with sentiments such as those uttered by the former president Ronald Reagan during Berkeley's Free Speech Movement that "education is a privilege, not a right" points to two equally dystopian American futures. In one, all citizens are educated but in a state of "debt bondage." In the other, Americans are uneducated but "free" of education-induced debt. In either situation, civilians are highly susceptible to government manipulation and lack control over their own lives."
1/26/2014, Huffington Post, Why There's no Outcry, Robert Reich
"Second, students don't dare rock the boat.
¶
In prior decades students were a major force for social change. They played an active role in the Civil Rights movement, the Free Speech movement, and against the Vietnam War.
¶
But today's students don't want to make a ruckus. They're laden with debt. Since 1999, student debt has increased more than 500 percent, yet the average starting salary for graduates has dropped 10 percent, adjusted for inflation. Student debts can't be cancelled in bankruptcy. A default brings penalties and ruins a credit rating.
¶
To make matters worse, the job market for new graduates remains lousy. Which is why record numbers are still living at home.
¶
Reformers and revolutionaries don't look forward to living with mom and dad or worrying about credit ratings and job recommendations."
1/25/2014, The Register-Mail, Silencing opposition not free speech, Harry Bulkeley
"Hypocrisy is delicious, especially if you need to write a column every month. Hypocrisy of left-wingers is absolutely red meat, er, free range tofu, to someone like me on the right.
¶
The 1960s was a decade of constant unrest with much of it centered on college campuses. John Podesta even led a takeover of the president's office at Knox College. The epicenter of these protests was the University of California at Berkeley. The Free Speech Movement began with Berkeley students demonstrating for the right to freely discuss political issues on campus. The demand spread across the country as students argued that, especially on a college campus, debate should be free and wide ranging with all points of view being expressed.
¶
That's why it was so glaringly hypocritical when the Berkeley student government, of all bodies, voted to ban the term 'illegal immigrant' from official discourse. Apparently the students who did this were either unaware of their institution's history or, more likely, they felt that they had the only correct idea and anyone who opposed them must be silenced. Oh, sure, they had all kinds of reasons why the term shouldn't be used. It was racist. It was insensitive. The people who wanted to keep students in the '60s from speaking used exactly the same excuses. Free speech only works if all sides are free to speak."
1/22/2014, The Riverdale Press, Lecture focuses on Lange, Maya Rajamani
"Ms. Gordon delivered the 11th annual Reginald E. Zelnik Memorial Lecture at Riverdale Country School (RCS) on Jan. 16.
¶
Mr. Zelnik, a Riverdale native, was struck and killed by a truck in 2004 on the University of California, Berkeley campus, where he taught Russian and Soviet history beginning in 1964.
¶
A freedom of speech advocate, Mr Zelnik co-edited a 2002 collection of essays titled The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s, with NYU Professor Robert Cohen.
¶
The annual event features a speaker chosen by RCS to deliver a lecture in Mr. Zelnik's honor to the school's 11th grade students in a class called "Constructing America." The lecture focuses on free speech and American public discourse as it relates to the speaker's field of study."
1/19/2014, OpEdNews, Seattle Hosts Progressive Media Gathering - Is Radio Dead?, Mark Taylor-Canfield
"Geov Parrish has been a political writer for the Seattle Weekly. Currently he is a broadcaster on KEXP's public affairs program 'Mind Over Matter'. He gave a presentation on the history of progressive media in Seattle, including a discussion about Seattle's legendary independent radio station KRAB. Parrish also talked about the influence of local public stations KUOW, KBCS and KSER. He explained how subscriber based media began in Berkeley California with the Pacifica Radio Network. The network grew as a result of the Berkeley free speech movement and Pacifica flagship stations were established New York City, Washington DC, Los Angeles and Houston. Today the network has grown to include affiliate stations across the nation. Amy Goodman's 'Democracy Now!' and Free Speech Radio News are two recent examples of the Pacifica Network's cutting-edge programming." [editor's note: the attribution of growth resulting from the 1964 FSM is dubious at best. WBAI joined Pacifica in 1960.]
1/13/2014, The Salinas Californian, 'Brooklyn Nine-Nine,' Andy Samberg win many fans, Mike Hughes
"TONIGHT'S ALTERNATIVE: 'American Experience,' 8-10 p.m., PBS. At first glance, 1964 seemed like an extension of the '50s, light-hearted and light-headed. 'Beverly Hillbillies' led the TV ratings, with Andy Griffith and 'Petticoat Junction' nearby; musicals ('My Fair Lady,' 'Mary Poppins') were big in theaters and the Beatles sang of holding hands. Still, this became a pivotal year. It brought the 'Freedom Summer' in Mississippi, with waves of violence that led to the historic civil-rights act.
¶
It brought feminism and the free-speech movement; it also brought Barry Goldwater, young conservatives and a re-alignment of the parties. This compelling film mixes historians and people whose own lives quaked, 50 years ago"
1/13/2014, The New Yorker, MAKING IT Pick up a spot welder and join the revolution, Evgeny Morozov
"One of the leaders of the Homebrew Computer Club was Lee Felsenstein. A veteran of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, he wanted to build communication infrastructure that would allow citizens to swap information in a decentralized manner, bypassing the mistrusted traditional media. In the early nineteen-seventies, he helped launch Community Memory-a handful of computer terminals installed in public spaces in Berkeley and San Francisco which allowed local residents to communicate anonymously. It was the first true "social media."¶
Felsenstein got his inspiration from reading Ivan Illich's "Tools for Conviviality," which called for devices and machines that would be easy to understand, learn, and repair, thus making experts and institutions unnecessary. "Convivial tools rule out certain levels of power, compulsion, and programming, which are precisely those features that now tend to make all governments look more or less alike," Illich wrote. He had little faith in traditional politics. Whereas Stewart Brand wanted citizens to replace politics with savvy shopping, Illich wanted to "retool" society so that traditional politics, with its penchant for endless talk, becomes unnecessary.¶
Felsenstein took Illich's advice to heart, not least because it resembled his own experience with ham radios, which were easy to understand and fiddle with. If the computer were to assist ordinary folks in their political struggles, the computer needed a ham-radio-like community of hobbyists. Such a club would help counter the power of I.B.M., then the dominant manufacturer of large and expensive computers, and make computers smaller, cheaper, and more useful in political struggles."
¶
Date: 1/12/2014
From: Lee Felsenstein
¶
Here's what I sent the New Yorker - we'll see how much they print (probably half or less):
¶
To Evgeny Morozov (A Critic at Large - "Making it", Jan. 13, 2014), who declares me to be a political failure for not having achieved "Power to the People" and all that Berkeley stuff I say - get in line. I have a question for him and his fellows - if politics is the art of the possible, who changes what is possible and through what process?"
¶
Ever since I stopped awaiting orders from my political betters (of which there was no shortage around Berkeley in the 1960's) and started examining questions like "what is a nonviolent weapon?" and "what technologies would best enable the re-definition of society along nonhierarchical lines from the bottom up?" I have found myself politically invisible and don't mind a bit. I'm an engineer through and through, and wish to be judged by my creations' performance.
¶
I must, however, request that Morozov get his facts straight - Illich had nothing to do with the form and implementation of the Community Memory social media system. I was fortuitously introduced by my father to Illich's work after the system was operational, when I confronted the problem of reliable hardware (that's what I create - stuff you can touch that gets warm).
¶
"Tools for Conviviality" enabled me to take an engineering approach that designs the user in as a potential maker. It's been successful for me - Morozov is no doubt observing the world through the personal computer video display architecture that I specified in 1974, implemented in 1975 and which was successfully copied thereafter.
¶
Creating makers out of users is a game-changing strategy and I'm sorry, but I don't consider it a failure. Besides, as long as the participants learn as they move forward it takes lots of failures to make either revolution or evolution.
1/13/2014, History News Network, Revisiting the FBI's War on the American Left, Jeremy Kuzmarov
"David Cunningham's study There's Something Happening Here shows how FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover was far more tolerant of the Klu Klux Klan, which he viewed as patriotic though prone to violence, compared to left-wing groups. Seth Rosenfeld's Subversives details the FBI's infiltration of the Berkeley Free Speech movement, its spying on university president Clark Kerr and collaboration with Ronald Reagan, whose rise to the governorship the agency assisted.
¶
The FBI was highly effective at using saboteurs to infiltrate and foment dissension within the New Left and encouraged counterproductive forms of protest, contributing to its eventual implosion. Robert Hardy, an FBI informant, testified that he led thirty antiwar activists in a raid on a Camden, New Jersey, draft board in 1971, teaching them 'how to cut glass and open windows without making a noise . . . how to open file cabinets without a key.' As this case reveals, COINTELPRO resulted in myriad constitutional violations, including illegal surveillance, blackmail, and collusion with police, as in the murder of Chicago Black Panther activists Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. The American Indian Movement and the Panthers were subjected to the greatest repression, and many of their members were imprisoned or killed. Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin's 2013 book, Blacks Against Empire, provides chilling details of how COINTELPRO infiltrated the Panther organization and fomented splits and paranoia among its members, leading in some cases to murder."
1/11/2014, San Francisco Chronicle, '1964' review: Impacts of tumultuous year still felt today, David Wiegand
"But the repercussions from Freedom Summer also included seeding the protest movement that rocked American college campuses for the rest of the decade. The young men and women who went to Mississippi - many of them white suburban college kids - came back angry from the experience of seeing racially inspired brutality and prejudice firsthand. When they left the South, they brought their anger with them, as well as impatience with the status quo.
¶
Some of them were students at UC Berkeley, which cracked down on the presence of information tables set up by organizations including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality at the edge of campus.
¶
The crackdown led to the formation of the Free Speech Movement. The subsequent on-campus arrest of activist Jack Weinberg by city police sparked a huge demonstration in Sproul Plaza."
1/10/2014, The Voice of Russia, Fracking: Champagne for the elites, death for the people, John Robles
"As long as the government is being controlled by corporations and lobbyists continue to offer mountains of lucre to politicians and regulators to 'look the other way' not much. However I would like to finish with one of my favorite quotes stated in 1964 by an activist named Mario Savio in Berkeley: 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious - makes you so sick at heart - that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.'"
1/8/2014, Marinscope Sausalito, 1967 Sausalito Houseboat Summit, Larry Clinton
"Ginsberg: Yeah...I went last night and turned on with Mario Savio. Two nights ago...After I finished and I was talking with him, and he doesn't turn on very much...This was maybe the third or fourth time. But he was describing his efforts in terms of the motive power for large mass movements. He felt one of the things that move large crowds was righteousness, moral outrage, and ANGER...Righteous anger."
1/4/2014, seattlepi, Book Review: 'Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power' by Seth Rosenfeld, Rhetta Akamatsu
"Even for those of us who already know that our government has often done bad things when they thought they had good enough reason, this book is going to be shocking and eye-opening. Rosenfeld is to be commended for his perseverance in researching this book despite all odds and for bringing the truth about Hoover's FBI, Reagan, and the war against student activism to the public.
¶
Any American citizen who really wants to know about American political history and to understand how dangerous unchecked political power can be will benefit from reading this book."
12/31/2013, FrontPage Magazine, The Inscrutable Campus and the New Left Background, Mark Bauerlein
"[David] Horowitz' memoirs demonstrate where that frisson originated, and I think it applies to many cases of malfeasance on campus that have a political tenor. Many of the outrageous acts of hard Leftists on campus have no effect except to degrade academic standards. Nobody should, in fact, take seriously an English professor denouncing Republicans except the students in the room who expected something better. But it did provide the actor a thrilling moment of participation in the old days of SDS, the Free Speech Movement, the Chicago Seven . . . The extremes of the New Left, the descent into 'days of rage,' the radical demands . . . they aren't overtly common in academia, but they carry over as lingering resentment, feats of intimidation, coercive versions of political correctness. To understand them, it isn't enough to examine local conditions. Observers need to go back to the Sixties. This collection of Horowitz' is an illuminating resource."
12/29/2013, The Republic, Column: Anniversaries offer chance to reflect on culture shifts, Barney Quick
"This past year marked the 50th anniversaries of a number of historic events: the 'I Have a Dream' speech, the assassinations of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and U.S. President John Kennedy, and subsequent events in Dallas. In a few months, more will follow: the American arrival of a wave of British musical acts, beginning with the Beatles, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Ronald Reagan's "A Time for Choosing" speech which launched his political career and the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley."
12/26/2013, Los Angeles Times, Spy wars: Americans need to know more than Snowden has revealed, Seth Rosenfeld
"The bureau went beyond surveillance to mount, in the committee's words, a 'sophisticated vigilante operation' called COINTELPRO to 'disrupt' and 'neutralize' dissent, turning counterintelligence techniques developed for use against foreign enemies on students protesting the Vietnam War, civil rights groups and nonviolent leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr.
¶
FBI officials went so far as to foment violence between the Black Panthers and a rival black power group, United Slaves, in Southern California, the committee found, and then proudly claimed credit for shootings and beatings.
¶
At the University of California, FBI files subsequently uncovered through the Freedom of Information Act show the bureau harassed Mario Savio, a leader of the 1964 Free Speech Movement; waged a concerted campaign to oust UC President Clark Kerr because FBI officials disagreed with his policies; and gave personal and political help to Ronald Reagan, who had been an FBI informer in Hollywood and as governor vowed to crack down on Berkeley protests."
12/24/2013, The American Spectator, Remember when libs defended free speech?, Bill Croke
"It was a heady time. Remember the Berkeley Free Speech movement? It was a sort of intellectual corollary to the civil rights movement, and spawned the model for the large public demonstrations prevalent in the '60s in opposition to the Vietnam War.
¶
This was also a pre-politically correct time when liberals actually cared about free speech, even defending the sort of take-no-prisoners vulgarity that Lenny [Bruce] spewed out nightly. But Lenny was a trailblazer, and liberals love trailblazers."
12/23/2013, Suna Times, Witness for Ethiopia's Semayawi (Blue) Party, Alemayehu G. Mariam
"Third, I wholeheartedly believe in youth power. Youth idealism and enthusiasm have the power to change hearts, minds and nations. Youth power is more powerful than all the guns, tanks and war planes in the world. The American civil rights movement was carried on the backs of young people. The vast majority of the leaders and activists were young people. Dr. Martin Luther King was 26 years old when he organized the nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama. By the time John Lewis was 23 years old, he had been jailed 24 times and beaten to a pulp on so many occasions that he does not remember. On May 6, 1963, over 2000 African American high school, junior high and even elementary school students were jailed for protesting discriminationinBirmingham.
¶
Young Americans stopped the war in Vietnam. The free speech movement that began at a California university transformed free speech and academic freedom in the United States for good. Barack Obama would not have been elected president without the youth vote. Youth have also played a decisive role in the peaceful struggle to bring down communist tyrannies and more recently entrenched dictatorships in North Africa and the Middle East. The tyrants in the seat of power in Ethiopia today were 'revolutionaries' in their youth fighting against imperial autocracy and military dictatorship. In their old age, they have become the very evil they fought to remove."
12/23/2013, Berkeleyside, The List: 18 books about Berkeley for Berkeley lovers, Frances Dinkelspiel
"Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the Sixties by Robert Cohen (2009). Mario Savio rose to international fame in 1964 when he fought UC Berkeley's restrictions on distributing political material on campus. His sentence, 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious… you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop,' became the clarion call for rebelling against 1950s conformism and it led directly to the civil and political unrest of that decade. Yet Savio neither sought nor enjoyed fame and spent his later years far from the limelight. Cohen draws on unpublished letters and notebooks to bring this important figure to life.
¶
Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld (2012). Rosenfeld spent 30 years working on this book. He stumbled into the subject matter by happenstance, when his editor at the Daily Cal called him up in the late 1980s and asked him to look at some files the paper had just received from the FBI. That launched Rosenfeld on a quest to uncover the FBI's secret spying endeavors against student activists, UC Berkeley professors, President Clark Kerr, Mario Savio, and others. Rosenfeld brings the 1950s and 1960s to life by intertwining narratives of Kerr, Savio, and Ronald Reagan, who, as president of the Screen Actors' Guild, was only to happy to smear those he thought held leftist political views. Reagan was encouraged and supported by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Rosenfeld also reveals that a well-known radical was an informant for the FBI."
12/22/2013, San Francisco Chronicle, Neal M. Blumenfeld, MD,
"Not defined by his medical acumen alone, Neal was an astute political observer. A passionate civil rights advocate, his fervor found expression in the Free Speech Movement, which he fully embraced among countless human rights causes. He viewed the Free Speech Movement as a moral issue, rather than an issue of a youth rebellion, writing: 'It is intriguing to speculate on why the moral issue is so frequently ignored or derided.… Perhaps it is too disturbing to recognize that there are people who can say: 'I have not given over my whole conscience to any system - I reserve the right to protest (and if necessary to break the rules of the system in that protest), when the system trespasses upon basic rights.'' As a philanthropist, he was a man committed to the betterment of those who either could not, or were not empowered, to help themselves."
12/18/2013, Berkeleyside, Neal Blumenfeld: Psychiatrist, citizen of the world, Guest contributor
"A celebration of Neil Blumenfeld's life will be held on Jan. 18, 2014, at 1 p.m at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda, Berkeley. In lieu of flowers the family requests that tax-deductible donations be made to the Free Speech Movement Archives, 1801 Fifth St., Berkeley, CA, 94710."
12/13/2013, The Daily Star, Plus one, not minus two, Mohammad Badrul Ahsan
"Our current political gloom can't give us the light at the end of the tunnel unless we can find a giant amongst us. Petty politicians have, contrarily, given us a tunnel after they snatched the light.
¶
Where do we look for such a giant? Can we find him or her in the midst of this despair? Where should we start the search?
¶
In the turbulent years of the 1960s in the United States, the Free Speech Movement at University of California, Berkeley tried to galvanise students over the right to engage in political speech on campus. Free Speech activist Jack Weinberg had urged students not to trust anyone over 30. Does that give us a cut-off line for the search? Should we look for someone young because the older generation isn't to be trusted anymore?"
12/12/2013, Aurora Magazine, Colorado Free University banks on connecting students with teachers on myriad topics at Lowry, Adam Goldstein
"But while DFU [Denver Free University] was borne of the free speech movement of the 1960s, John Hand opened the Colorado Free University with a less political purpose in mind. The school would host a mix of practical and obscure programming. Spanish and computer classes coexist with courses devoted to the art of self-hypnosis."
12/11/2013, SocialistWorker.org, You've got to meet the real socialists, Danny Katch
"SPEECHES THAT go down in history do so for different reasons.
¶
Mario Savio's call to students to throw themselves on the 'gears of the machine' during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964 conjures the best of the moral outrage of that era. Sojourner Truth's biting question 'Ain't I a woman?' conveys the impossible position that Black women still hold at the intersection of two different forms of oppression. The somber beauty of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and the loving vision of Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech are still capable of inspiring--if you forget all the crap you learned about them in school and listen to their revolutionary determination."
12/11/2013, Freie Presse, Die Alben des Jahres - Platz 16 East Cameron Folkcore: "For Sale", Matthias Zwarg
"Die Platte beginnt mit einem Zitat von Mario Savio, einem der Wortführer der US-Studentenproteste in den 1960er Jahren, und sie endet mit der Feststellung: Wir werden alle zur Hölle fahren - falls wir dort nicht schon sind."
12/9/2013, Berkeley Daily Planet, Neal M. Blumenfeld, MD 1930-2013,
"A passionate civil rights advocate, his fervor found expression in the Free Speech Movement, which he fully embraced among countless human rights causes. He viewed the Free Speech Movement as a moral issue, rather than an issue of a youth rebellion, writing: 'It is intriguing to speculate on why the moral issue is so frequently ignored or derided.… Perhaps it is too disturbing to recognize that there are people who can say: 'I have not given over my whole conscience to any system -- I reserve the right to protest (and if necessary to break the rules of the system in that protest), when the system trespasses upon basic rights.'"
12/7/2013, Los Angeles Times, Berkeley making the rounds to save its historic post office, Lee Romney
"But this is Berkeley, home of the Free Speech Movement and protracted protests over civil rights, Vietnam and more. So when the postal service announced plans to sell Berkeley's 1914 Second Renaissance Revival-style main post office, decorated in New Deal-era art and situated in the heart of the liberal city's Civic Center, the town rose up."
12/6/2013, NoHo Arts District, Design Of a Career - A Profile on President of the Art Directors Guild Mimi Gramatky, Chavonny Tillotson
"Having just been elected President of the Art Directors Guild this past February, for a three-year term, Production Designer Mimi Gramatky knows a thing or two about progress. Her ascent to the top of the 2,000-member organization is in sharp contrast to what was expected of a woman with her talents back when she first began her career. 'I remember going to the career planning office at Berkeley with my degree in environmental design, and they said, 'Great, you can be a teacher or a secretary.' In those days, even with a degree from Berkeley, that's what women were expected to do.'
¶
But having been dramatically influenced by The Free Speech Movement that took place on the UC Berkeley campus, Mimi staged her own movement, pursuing her craft with tireless devotion despite what women were expected to do. And in doing so, she has paved the way for women in Art Departments everywhere."
12/6/2013, CBS San Francisco, 1980's Movement At UC Berkeley Built Anti-Apartheid Momentum, Holly Quan
"In 1985 Pedro Noguera was student body president, a few months prior, the campus had commemorated the twenty-year anniversary of the Free Speech Movement and students were wondering what their legacy was going to be when the anti-apartheid protests took off."
12/5/2013, Daily Californian, Millennials are perpetuating DC partisanship, Brendan Pinder
"The birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, UC Berkeley seems to have taken a sharp turn in the opposite direction. Walk down our famed thoroughfare of Sproul Plaza, and you will see the most segregated place on campus, as groups representing every conceivable combination and permutation of identities exist, ever classifying and stratifying the student body to the point of obsession. Students come and go through this university year after year, many joining their one respective group, surrounded all four years by the people who are in nearly all ways similar to themselves."
12/4/2013, Georgia Straight, Economics is crucial in At Berkeley, Ken Eisner
"This should help keep the populace 'cynical, passive, and uninformed', as described by someone at the Free Speech Movement Café. In a public talk, this old-timer gives props to Mario Savio, leader of that mid-'60s bellwether moment-something reflected here in surprisingly dramatic student protests. Tuition was free, you see, until four decades ago, and now costs go up every year."
12/3/2013, Daily Californian, Pardon the interruption, Senior Editorial Board
"As Hong is an alumnus of an institution famed for the civil disobedience of the 1960s' Free Speech Movement, it makes sense that he, himself an undocumented immigrant from South Korea, felt compelled to speak out at the event. It's further fitting that Hong's disruption came less than a week before the 58th anniversary of one of American history's best remembered moments of activism: when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man. Despite what Brown might think, Hong was also illuminating the plight of a severely marginalized group within the larger undocumented community."
12/3/2013, Boston Globe, 'At Berkeley' raises class consciousness, Peter Keough
"A more pressing observation occurs when Berkeley professor (and former secretary of labor) Robert Reich emphasizes to his students the need to target specific issues if they hope to accomplish anything as political activists. Not long afterward a student makes the same point to demonstrators occupying a library; they ignore his advice, and instead go ahead and present a laundry list of demands, unrealistic and contradictory, to the administration.
¶
Receiving these, the (now former) chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau notes how, back in the '60s, they knew enough to rein in such digressions and focus their agenda. But these activists don't seem to have learned much from the past. As one apparent veteran of the Free Speech movement points out, people these days have become historically illiterate. One way for them to get up to speed would be to take a look at Wiseman's half century of films chronicling his times."
December, 2013, AARP Bulletin, 1964: 50-Year Milestones,
"Oct. 1
¶
Some 3,000 students at the University of California, Berkeley, block a police car from taking away a civil rights activist who had been arrested for not showing his identification. The protest eventually explodes into the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and fuels the 1960s civil rights movement."
11/25/2013, In TheseTimes, Occupy has left some Millennials questioning their place in social movements, Matthew Richards
"Likewise, the New Left and the anti- Vietnam War movement of the '60s had a common culture. The Boomer generation was raised in an era of McCarthyist paranoia and nurtured on rock 'n' roll. They had a need to rebel against the warlike tendencies and the mindless consumerism of their parents' generation. Largely affluent, middle- class kids went to college in the largest proportions ever, sparking a revolution of radical student organizations on the campuses. Organizations like the Students for a Democratic Society, the Free Speech Movement, and a slew of anti-war groups naturally sprung up and sustained themselves in this period."
11/24/2013, VTDigger, IN THIS STATE: A THING OR TWO YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW ABOUT JOHN MCCLAUGHRY, Dirk Van Susteren
"In the early 1960s he was at Berkeley working toward another master's degree, this in political science, when by one semester he missed the university's historic "Free Speech Movement," a touchstone of early '60s political protest.
¶
(When asked, McClaughry today blames the university administration for cravenly caving to complaints about socialist and communist influence on campus and bringing in the cops to squelch free dialogue.)"
11/23/2013, San Francisco Bay View, Richmond activist Melvin Willis wins Mario Savio Award, Edith Pastrano
"On Nov. 7, 2013, the University of California, Berkeley, held the 17th annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture at Wheeler Hall. Each year, the lecture is geared to bring up points based on different grassroots issues that hold common interest across the nation. During the lecture, the Mario Savio Young Activist Award is given to the national winner of the competition.
¶
Yearly, many young activists between the ages of 18 and 26 are nominated for this national competition; its reward includes a $6,000 prize, of which $3,000 is donated to an organization of the winner's choosing and the remainder is intended for the winner's needs. The award is granted to a young activist with tremendous dedication to human rights and social justice issues who has also demonstrated great leadership, creativity, integrity.
¶
For his courage and ability to transcend his concerns on multi-level issues and for working those concerns into effective action, this year's Mario Savio Young Activist Award winner is 23-year-old Richmond, California, native Melvin Willis. I sat down with Mr. Willis and asked him a few questions regarding his achievements."
11/21/2013, Archinect, The Deans List: David Gissen of California College of the Arts, Amelia Taylor-Hochberg
"I think something you really feel in the Bay Area, is the obvious role that technology plays as a very vanguard part of American culture, or world culture generally. But there're all kinds of other vanguard aspects to the Bay Area: For example, this is an epicenter for thinking about civil rights, whether it's the free speech movement, disability rights, Asian-American rights, LGBT rights, or the legacy of the Black Panthers in Oakland. These are all great examples of how the Bay Area is a real incubator for vanguard culture. We try to tap into all of it - not an easy task for an architecture, art and design school."
11/16/2013, Massey University News, World-leading mediator visits New Zealand,
"Virginia Goldblatt, director of Massey University's Mediation Service, says Professor Cloke's visit is a rare chance to hear the views of a mediation hero who 'changed the landscape in a fundamental way for teachers and practitioners of dispute resolution'.
¶
She says Professor Cloke is also a riveting speaker who has led a fascinating life.
'I have never forgotten hearing of his experience of being holed up in a little church in the deep South during the American civil rights period, where he spent days surrounded by members of the Klu Klux Klan screaming invective,' she says.
¶
'Or his story of being at the front of the student protest march at Berkley University in the 1960s where he was the second person to climb onto the police car after Mario Savio - they took off their shoes first so they didn't scratch the paint work! Hearing Ken speak is something you don't forget quickly.'"
11/15/2013, The New Yorker, The Paradox of a Great University, Richard Brody
"Throughout the film, there are references to political activism, past and present, as in a speech delivered at the Free Speech Movement Café in tribute to Mario Savio, the main figure in the movement and its protests at the university in the mid-sixties, and a scene in which students march to protest the presence of John Yoo (from the Bush Administration) at the law school. The subject is set up by a fifteen-minute scene, midway through the film, of university administrators-including the chancellor-meeting with an official from the city of Berkeley on the subject of what one administrator calls "crisis management and, more importantly, responding to protest"-the rules that the university will impose regarding sit-ins, the circumstances under which city police will be called in to enforce them, and policies that will help to improve coöperation between the university police and the city police."
11/14/2013, Daily Californian, New York Times reporter facing incarceration for protecting sources to speak at journalism school, Savannah Luschei
"James Risen, a New York Times reporter who is facing incarceration for refusing to reveal his sources, will be speaking on campus Thursday in a talk hosted by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism entitled "Prosecuting the Press."
¶
Risen will be speaking in Berdahl Auditorium in Stanley Hall between 7:15 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. and will discuss his refusal to comply with a subpoena issued by the Obama administration ordering him to disclose the identities of sources for his 2006 book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration."
¶
Risen has said he will go to prison before he complies with the administration's demands.
¶
He will speak alongside Lowell Bergman, director of the graduate school's Investigative Reporting Program and a 2004 recipient of Pulitzer Prize for public service.
¶
The discussion is the first in a series of events intended to commemorate the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement."
11/14/2013, Daily Californian, Panelists discuss climate crisis solutions at Mario Savio Memorial Lecture, Chloee Weiner
"The lecture, which was held at Wheeler Auditorium, also included the presentation of the Mario Savio Young Activist Award - which recognizes young people engaged in building a more humane and just society - to 23-year-old Richmond native Melvin Willis.
¶
According to Lynne Hollander Savio, chair of the board of directors that presented the award, Willis was selected for his work in tackling community issues ranging from home foreclosures to the proposal of a soda tax.
¶
'Whether it's going against the banks, going against Chevron or going against anybody trying to take advantage of the city of Richmond, I'm going to be there and fight because I don't want to see my community suffer,' Willis said upon receiving the award."
11/13/2013, St. Louis Jewish Light, Marvelous menorahs, purple gorillas and a Rick Recht lullaby, Penny Schwartz
"For young adults, award-winning writer Ruth Feldman in a coming-of-age novel spins an intricate tale of historical fiction and fantasy set in 1964 Berkeley, Calif., at the dawn of the city's free speech movement."
11/11/2013, Oregon Public Broadcastin, Author Ruth Tenzer Feldman On History And The 'Urge To Lie',
"The Ninth Day takes us first to Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement in December 1964, the pivotal student protest against limiting political activities on campus. There we meet 16-year-old Hope Friis, who dreams of winning a college scholarship for her singing despite a profound stutter. As she juggles a turbulent home life, she is visited by a mysterious woman named Serakh, who transports her to the Jewish Quarter of 11th-century Paris to solve a mystery that imperils a newborn child."
11/9/2013, Salon, At Berkeley, Krugman's warning becomes reality, Andrew O'Hehir
"Appropriately enough, it was Ronald Reagan who did away with all that. The onetime B-movie icon ran for governor of California in 1966 promising to 'clean up the mess at Berkeley,' and I can't help wondering whether Wiseman's title is a sly reference to that famous slogan. Reagan of course meant the Free Speech Movement and organized student opposition to the Vietnam War, which was still widely popular among the public. Once he took office in Sacramento (after defeating Democratic incumbent Pat Brown, a godfather of the University of California system and the father of current Gov. Jerry Brown), Reagan demanded that the UC regents start charging student fees for the first time. (The word 'tuition' was initially avoided.) He also proposed cutting the university budget by 10 percent across the board - a sequester, as we might say today - and suggested that the regents could make up the shortfall by selling off the rare books collection in Berkeley's Bancroft Library."
11/8/2013, The Christian Science Monitor, 'At Berkeley' opens the door to a kaleidoscopic learning lab, Peter Rainer
"Perhaps the most prestigious public university in America, Berkeley, at one time, offered free tuition to its students. Those days are long gone, although an extended student demonstration, complete with the requisite takeover of the campus library, has free tuition as one of its many demands. This is not, though many of the campus exhorters would wish it otherwise, the 1960s free-speech-movement era. Wiseman shows us the library occupiers as they attempt to revive the spirit of radical icons past, such as Mario Savio, but there's a slight tinniness to the harangues. The occupiers, like that black student in the sociology class, are not wrong to feel the way they do, but in a recessionary era, calling for free tuition is a pie-in-the-sky gesture that inevitably ends up going nowhere. To the befuddled amazement of the administrators, including Berkeley's chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, the sit-in rapidly disbands without incident."
11/8/2013, Slate, At Berkeley, Dana Stevens
"One of the sharper student activists, in a rabble-rousing speech in front of Sproul Hall, invokes the name of Mario Savio, a leader of the Free Speech Movement that got its start on those same steps in the early '60s and jump-started student protest around the country. How much, the speaker asks, did students in Savio's time have to pay to be part of this great public institution, one that's now struggling to remain both truly public and truly great? Answer: nothing. It's a rare Wiseman moment in which the filmmaker's own deeply held belief seems to flicker into view beneath the speaker's words: Education, like speech, should be free."
11/8/2013, New York Times, A Major University and How It Works, Stephen Holden
"That quality higher education has become so expensive is reflected by the seriousness of the student body. In the days of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, in the 1960s, college was more affordable, and it was possible to take it lightly.
¶
Because of Berkeley's history of left-wing activism, the tradition of student protest continues, though in a milder form. 'At Berkeley' culminates with a student demonstration and occupation of the library, during which the leaders spout defiant rhetoric and issue an ever-lengthening list of demands to the administration, some of whose members participated in the '60s free-speech protests. Eloquent as some of the demonstrators may be, many of their demands sound petty, and even contradictory. The administration has no choice but to take them seriously and to gird for the possibility of unrest, which doesn't materialize. What's most encouraging about the film is that everyone seems to display a spirit of flexibility, even when disagreeing."
11/7/2013, UC Berkeley NewsCenter, Bancroft Library readies its largest political archive for scholars of the late Gov. Pat Brown, Kathleen Maclay
"The archive shows that Brown's political bent began at least as early as his days campaigning for the student council at Lowell High School in San Francisco. He went on to become the state attorney general, and in 1958 won his first term as governor by a landslide. Brown won reelection in 1962 against former U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon, a loss that Nixon followed up with a winning bid for the White House in 1968. Brown's own political career wound down with his1966 defeat to actor Ronald Reagan, who campaigned to 'clean up the mess at Berkeley,' which was ground zero for protests about the Vietnam War and the Free Speech Movement."
11/6/2013, The Wall Street Journal, Alice Waters Makes the World a More Edible Place, Howie Kahn
"Waters, now 69, first moved to Berkeley as a 20-year-old transfer student in 1964. She had grown up in Chatham, New Jersey, eating tomatoes from the victory garden her parents planted after World War II. "I certainly fell in love with taste first," she says. Campus politics and protests, however, led Waters to ultimately believe that a connection could and did exist between activism and food. While attending a massive Free Speech Movement rally in Berkeley, Waters listened to words that would change her life. "America is becoming ever more the utopia of sterilized, automated contentment," said Mario Savio, one of the movement's charismatic leaders. Once Waters heard that, she felt the urgency to contest that false utopia and replace it with something far more vital."
11/6/2013, The Nation, The Ray Kelly 'Shoutdown': Free-speech Failure or Democracy in Action?, Rania Khalek, Richard Yeselson, J.A. Myerson and Katha Pollitt
Richard Yeselson: "By contrast, free speech is the friend of leftist dissent, not its enemy. It's why the very first major campus fight of the sixties, at Berkeley, was called the Free Speech Movement-the cause and the use of speech was the lever that enabled students to fight the university administration. Leftists may have wiped out Ray Kelly last week, but, over time, suppressing speech is a game that universities, with aid from the state and augmented in the private workplace, play much better than students do."
11/5/2013, Commentary Magazine, COMMENTARY's Inestimable Gift, Heather Mac Donald
"Anyone looking for a definitive exposition of a significant historical moment-whether UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, say, or the battles over 'general education' at Harvard-has at his fingertips an inestimable gift: COMMENTARY's archives, which contain countless gems of reporting and analysis. Today's generation of COMMENTARY writers is building an equally invaluable store of knowledge for future researchers and scholars."
11/3/2013, WND, THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN', Ben Kinchlow
"'There was a radical move afoot at the University of California Berkley, led by a young radical named Mario Savio. Today, few people remember this young rebel, but he changed the course of America. At the same time, a young black civil rights leader, MLK Jr., charged to the front, demanding an end to segregation and a new beginning for equal opportunity for all, not special rights for a few. Oh, how 'the times, they are a changin,' as Bob Dylan once sang.'"
11/01/2013, The Huffington Post, Heckler's Veto a Mistake, Michael Meyers
"It is at the university where the 'Free Speech Movement' took root in the 1960s, when college students captured the nation's attention and widespread support. In 1964, it was the University of California at Berkeley where students broke their silence. They protested the university's banning on-campus political activities. The blossoming of the Free Speech Movement was made possible by the courage and tenacity and example of many of the students who had joined in the Civil Rights Movement--who had joined in protests of segregation laws, and who spoke up -- on- and off-campus -- and challenged the American system to live up the guarantees of the Constitution for all persons. On campus, students held rallies and raised pickets and set up information tables -- and teach-ins -- and 'controversial' speakers were invited to campus. Significantly to the issue at hand -- students back then protested university regulations that had restricted outside political speakers. So, it is more than ironic, then -- indeed, it is unnerving and appalling -- that, in 2013, when free speech rights and principles have been so firmly embedded as critical to free inquiry and discourse at a liberal arts university, students -- in the guise of protecting minority rights and protesting racism on the part of the police -- would heckle, disrupt and effectively veto the talk of an invited, albeit controversial speaker."
10/31/2013, The Daily Texan, A historical perspective on current debates over UT's future, Travis Knoll
"If we historically contextualize last week's hearings, students will realize that ideological pressures, not economic circumstances, motivate university officials to reshape how we think about the role of a university education and our own humanity. As actors in this play, students should take a cue from Savio and question whether wrestling with tough economic times necessarily implies that we must become merely 'efficient' consumers shopping for a university product."
10/28/2013, PopMatters, 'Subversives' Tells How Academic Freedom Came Under Fire and Was Changed Forever, Jedd Beaudoin
"If you dislike Ronald Reagan 'Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power' will only help you dislike him more. The late president is the clear villain of this epic tome, a baddy that Hollywood would have killed to create. Of course, maybe it did create him. Filled with the kind of contradictions unique to hypocrites, Reagan frequently said whatever he needed to say to please those he was trying to please at the moment; he was a man who seemed to forget his own past, who betrayed friends and colleagues, and who favored either/or reasoning over nuanced discussion.
¶
Reagan is just one of three major players in an expertly written and deftly-researched work that chronicles the most fascinating and tumultuous era of the latter half of the last century. Joining him in this story are UC-Berkeley president Clark Kerr and Mario Savio, a troubled but charismatic student at Berkley who became the major voice of the university's Free Speech Movement (FSM) and the target of conservative ire during his brief but impressive moment in the spotlight.
¶
If Reagan wears the black hat, it's Savio who wears the white and Kerr who's burdened with being the story's most morally ambiguous character--a liberal but not a radical, he favored progress but not at the expense of tradition. His reluctance to embrace tyranny made him an easy target and ultimately cost him his position."
10/25/2013, Wall Street Journal, Book Review: 'Civil Disobedience' by Lewis Perry, Barton Swaim
"By the time of the student demonstrations of the 1960s, the very idea that you need a compelling reason to break the law had almost disappeared. Justifications for disobedience, civil or otherwise, would reference nebulous constructs-consumerism, injustice, poverty, the 'military-industrial complex'--as if the existence of bad things was itself sufficient reason to flout the law. Mr. Perry quotes a revealing passage from a biography of the student activist Mario Savio, in which the biographer notes that resistance became, for Savio, 'an end in itself.'"
10/25/2013, San Francisco Chronicle, Best-dressed conventioneers of them all, Leah Garchik
"At the annual Free Speech Movement reunion, at Redwood Gardens in Berkeley, there were many memories shared of colleagues who have gone on to the great demonstration in the sky, reports Gar Smith.
¶
Lee Felsenstein shared memories of Dusty Miller, and said, 'There are some people who couldn't make it here tonight because of other obligations. There are some people who couldn't be here tonight because they have passed on. This is likely to continue.'
¶
At which point, Arnie Passman shouted out, 'Not in my lifetime.'"
10/25/2013, San Francisco Chronicle, When speech wasn't free on campus, Paul Harris
"Regarding Debra J. Saunders' column about free speech at college campuses ('Speaking truth to power at Modesto Junior College,' Oct. 20), I was a law student at Boalt Hall during the free speech movement at Cal in 1964. We should remember our history: the three related issues were:
¶
-- The university did not allow any speeches on campus regarding off-campus issues; we had to speak at the corner of Bancroft Way and Telegraph (which was non-university property).
¶
-- Same rule for leaflets.
¶
-- Same rule for raising money (e.g. for the civil rights movement).
¶
As unconstitutional and archaic as those rules now sound, the university and its supporters vigorously argued that the First Amendment did not apply to college campuses and punished students who protested."
10/24/2013, The Daily Californian, A timeline of 6 campus landmarks you might have missed, Jessica Rogness
"Also dubbed 'Berkeley's invisible monument,' this 6-inch circle of dirt, along with the 6-foot granite circle that surrounds it, gets stepped on daily by students rushing across Upper Sproul Plaza. But this circle was installed in 1989 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. The engraving on the sphere assures us that 'this soil and the airspace extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity's jurisdiction.'"
10/23/2013, Politix, GOP Goes Back To The Future, Mytheos Holt
"Now, to many, this may be counter-intuitive. How could tea partiers share the same fears as 60's protesters? Easily. Let's start with this quote by Rep. Michele Bachmann, in the midst of the most recent government shutdown fight:
¶
'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!'
¶
Oh wait. Actually, that's Mario Savio speaking at Berkeley in the 60s."
10/22/2013, Bellingham Herald, Pop Picks: The hottest trends from the pop-o-sphere, Jedd Beaudoin
"READ:'Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power,' by Seth Rosenfeld
¶
'Subversives' is the result of a prolonged legal battle under the Freedom of Information Act and a strong desire to tell the story of how academic freedom came under fire and was changed forever. Equal parts history, biography and police procedural, the political drama is a tragedy of the greatest kind: men who champion American idols such as freedom of expression are squashed by men of power who attempt to limit expression and dissent. Mario Savio supported the civil rights movement and saw it as the greatest instrument of change within the country; Ronald Reagan, who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, wanted no intrusions 'on the free market, on property rights, on profit'; Rosenfeld writes that, to Reagan, 'the single biggest threat to America was communism, with socialism and liberals close behind.' - Jedd Beaudoin"
10/21/2013, The Huffington Post, What Justin Bieber Can Teach the New UC President, William G. Tierney
"Clark Kerr, a previous UC president, was a negotiator with the governor and state legislature and helped bring about the state's 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education. But the political environment during the 1960s -- the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, the Vietnam War -- forced him also to communicate to the larger public. Kerr wasn't especially liked in Sacramento, but he proved to be an effective spokesperson about the meaning and purpose of a public university."
10/20/2013, San Francisco Chronicle, Speaking truth to power at Modesto Junior College, Debra J. Saunders
"The very fact that a campus has a two-person free-speech zone troubles Robert Shibley, vice president for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which has aided Van Tuinen in the free-speech lawsuit he filed against the college.
¶
'We're seeing a lack of a sense of proportion,' quoth Shibley, 'and frankly a fundamental fear of free speech that is very disturbing to see in higher education.'
....¶
Oddly, it seems the policy's goal was to avoid controversy, not accommodate the exchange of ideas.
¶
Amazingly, college brass still hasn't figured out that they cannot win this case because their policies step on First Amendment rights. And yes, they are running a college."
10/20/2013, Marin Voice, Marin Voice: The first seven decades, Noah Griffin
"Her first and only date while attending Martin Van Buren High in Queens, was known as Bob. Later, he became known as Mario Savio, another brilliant student who was to make a name for himself at Berkeley in the early '60s."
10/14/2013, Arizona Jewish Post, New books: Marvelous menorahs, purple gorillas and back to '64 Berkeley, Penny Schwartz
"For young adults, award-winning writer Ruth Feldman in a coming-of-age novel [The Ninth Day] spins an intricate tale of historical fiction and fantasy set in 1964 Berkeley, Calif., at the dawn of the city's free speech movement."
10/13/2013, Oakland Tribune, Oakland Stagebridge offers theater training, opportunity to older people, Annalee Allen
"Stagebridge was the only California arts organization that recently received a visit from a delegation of senior Chinese retired classical musicians and Beijing Opera stars, who were traveling the United States on a cultural-exchange tour.
¶
A current project is a piece commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts -- an original musical about the 1964 free speech movement and the life of Mario Savio and other activists. The musical is slated for a 2014 premiere at UC Berkeley, on the 50th anniversary of the movement, [Marge] Betley said."
10/2/2013, The Wall Street Journal, Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE,' at the Whitney Museum, Peter Plagens
"Unlike the ethereally ironic Warhol, the deadpan faux-comic-book Lichtenstein or the facilely absurd gigantist Oldenburg, Mr. Indiana meant absolutely every word he ever stenciled onto a canvas or one of his early totemic sculptures. But when-with one all-too-famous work of art-he fatefully decided to subscribe to Warhol's dictum that 'making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art,' Mr. Indiana managed only to exacerbate his outlier status in the New York art world.
¶
The work of art in question is the 6-foot-square painting 'LOVE' (1966)-four large capital letters, in a brightly colored Clarendon Black font, set in a quadrant composition, with the 'O' in the upper right adroitly tilted clockwise. Mr. Indiana was collectively inspired by Charles Demuth's 'Love, Love, Love. Homage to Gertrude Stein' (1928), in which the word appears three times; by one of his own poems from the late 1950s with an 'L' and an 'O' stacked above an 'V' and a 'E'; and, some say, a banner hoisted during the 1964 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley with a rude anagram formed by the first letters in the motto 'Freedom Under Clark Kerr.' Mr. Indiana's first iteration of the word-image was in his commissioned Christmas card for the Museum of Modern Art. The big painting came soon after." [ed. note: The FSM was over before the obscenity debate began.]
10/2/2013, The Alcalde, President Powers Named UC Berkeley's Alumnus of the Year, Rose Cahalan
"I was there in the mid-'60s. That was the Free Speech movement at Berkeley, a very interesting time. I was a decent student in high school, but I wasn't very worldly or sophisticated. And very much like our students here, I went to my state flagship and it just opened up the world to me.
¶
It exposed me to ideas and experiences that I never dreamed about in high school, and I think that is the foundation for living a useful and meaningful life. Cal did for me what I've seen UT do for tens of thousands of students while I've been here."
10/1/2013, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Today in History for Oct. 1, The Associated Press
"1964 The Free Speech Movement was launched at the University of California at Berkeley."
10/1/2013, Palo Alto Online, At Paly, education historian lambastes testing, Chris Kenrick
"Many so-called reformers, she [Diane Ravitch] said, are 'corporate leaders who just echo what the Chamber of Commerce has told them. The more you say that schools are failing the more the public is willing to accept any 'cure' you're offering.'
¶
Quoting Mario Savio, the student leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964, Ravitch said, 'There comes a time when the machine becomes so oppressive that you have to throw your body at the machine, stop the levers and make the machine stop.
¶
'Here I am, 75 years old, and I'm throwing myself on the machine. It's actually making me younger. My body may be aging but inside there's a raging 25-year-old.'"
9/27/2013, The Daily Californian, No jobs, no hope, no cash, Editors
"UC Berkeley is an elite university with an aesthetic to match that status. When prospective students come to visit, they see the magnificent pillars of Sproul Hall and the beauty and scope of the Doe Library. They learn about the storied history of the Free Speech Movement as well as the top-tier academic research that happens on this campus. What they aren't prepared for, though, is what happens when their time at Berkeley is over."
9/27/2013, The Daily Californian, Finding free speech in the wrong places, Tanay Kothari
"Our campus maintains no shortage of pride in the Free Speech Movement - that period of glorified resistance that paired disgust for the social and political conditions of the time with unbridled optimism that students could be agents of change. At its best, the Free Speech Movement united students who shared strong convictions about the presence of injustice and exposed the hypocrisy and excesses of extant institutions. The unfortunate side of the Free Speech Movement, however, has gone largely unexplored.
¶
More than four decades later, students have achieved few political victories. Higher education remains an easy target for lawmakers looking to slash funding with few political repercussions. In its quest to economize, the state has forced the university to choose among options that thrust the idea of education as a public good into question. Students today have minimal influence in shaping these decisions. The failure of activism to defend the interests of students hints at tacit acceptance of another message that many have taken from the Free Speech Movement: the suggestion that resistance for its own sake is inherently virtuous or productive."
9/27/2013, FishDuck, Things Everyone Should Know About Berkeley, California, Kim Hastings
"This weekend the second-ranked Ducks of Oregon take on the rank California Golden Bears. As is our custom at fishduck.com/youshouldn'tbeabletoreadthisforfree, we like to go behind the scenes to give you a glimpse of the environment of the next opponent. The University of California at Berkeley is famous for being the birthplace of both the free speech movement in the 60's, as well as the place where the radioactive substance "Berkeleum" was discovered. The campus has been radioactive to talented football players ever since."
9/26/2013, Journal of the San Juans Reporter, Flair for adventure; beyond the Neslund trial, Steve Wehrly
"Betsy was born Elizabeth Ann Roberts in California in 1943, graduated from Glendale High School, and attended UC Berkeley in the '60s - until she was expelled for participating in the demonstrations and campus occupation of Sproul Hall, led by Mario Savio, Joan Baez and others. She's survived by two sisters, one brother and two former husbands." [editor's note: Elizabeth Ann Roberts was not among those arrested in the FSM; it seems improbable that she was expelled.]
9/25/2013, The Daily Californian, Reich documentary is an unforgiving look at a divided nation, Samuel Avishay
"In November 2011, when Occupy Cal was at its peak, professor Robert Reich spoke to a crowd of thousands gathered on Sproul Plaza. Tensions ran high, and passions flared. Speakers took the stage, offering insight and hope, echoing the protesters’ anger.
¶
Standing on Mario Savio Steps, Reich urged the crowd to continue the fight and to take a moral stand against the growing wealth gap in America.
¶
'We are losing the moral foundation stone on which this country and our democracy are built,' Reich said. 'The time for apathy is over.'"
9/24/2013, Sports Illustrated, Workloads may be catching up with workhorses like Sabathia, Halladay, Tom Verducci
"Jack Weinberg was helping to lead the free speech movement in the 1960s when he said, "We don't trust anyone over 30," but he may also have been foreshadowing a general manager's view of pitching in this era of banned drugs."
9/20/2013, Rolling Stone Magazine, East Cameron Folkcore For Sale, Jörn Schlüter
"Am Anfang des zweiten Albums von East Cameron Folkcore spricht Mario Savio, Wortführer der US-Studentenproteste der 60er-Jahre. Dessen berühmte Rede von den Menschen, die sich auf Maschinen werfen und die Hebel blockieren sollen, ist hier der richtige Vorspann. Denn die elfköpfige Band aus Austin, Texas ist ein wildes Protest-Ensemble, das Machtmissbrauch und Unterdrückung genauso anprangert wie den gern beklagten allgemeinen Niedergang der westlichen Kulturen. Mit einer kaum zu beschreibenden Kollektivmusik aus Springsteen-artigem Rock, Folklore, Anti-Folk und Southern-Punk. Banjo mit krachender Gitarre, Posaune mit rumpelnden Trommeln, Mandoline mit Brüllgesang - alles geht zusammen, Intensität kommt vor Studio-Akkuratesse."
9/19/2013, The Daily Californian, Quiz: Which famous person attended Cal? (Part 2), Karen Kwaning
"Jann Wenner attended UC Berkeley in the late '60s. He was actively involved in the Free Speech Movement and wrote a column called 'Something's Happening' in The Daily Californian!"
Fall 2013, Exactly Opposite, The McGee-Spaulding District Goes Radical, Hal Reynolds
"Several of the FSM's leaders lived in the McGee-Spaulding District. They included Mario Savio, Bettina Aptheker, and Michael Rossman. Savio, the best known, who called for students to shut down the machinery of the University, was engaged in regular, friendly conversations with Father Patrick Galvan at St. Joseph's Church. Aptheker, who went on to become a well-known lesbian activist, author, feminist, and professor of feminist studies at UC Santa Cruz, had inherited the apartment on Roosevelt from Myerson and Burke."
9/14/2013, The Blade, No distractions: Buckeyes go west for 'business' trip at California, David Briggs
"BERKELEY, Calif. - The last time Ohio State played at California, the team took a bus tour of San Francisco, lodged at a luxury hotel atop Nob Hill, and coach Woody Hayes whispered his instruction in the visitors' locker room.
¶
'He was just sure those liberal bastards had the place bugged,' OSU guard Jim Kregel said with a laugh." [mentions FSM later in article]
9/13/2013, The Plain Dealer, Former Cleveland Brown and Cal Bear Scott Fujita, unlike many Ohio State players, thought outside the box and outside the football lines, Bill Livingston
"Unconventional thinking -- whether reflected in the peace movement that flourished here in the 1960s, or in the Free Speech Movement that preceded it and asserted student rights to engage in political discourse, or in deeply theoretical concepts of cosmology and physics - is what [Scott] Fujita took away from college. 'Cal taught me to think critically, to think outside the box,' he said.
¶
On April 22 of this year, after signing a one-day contract with the NFL team for whom he played best, New Orleans, Fujita announced his retirement at the Inca ruins at Machu Picchu high in the Andes. 'I went out on top of the world,' he said.
¶
It was in keeping with what Fujita often said: 'Football does not define me.'
¶
But only because he didn't let it."
9/13/2013, The Daily Californian, Pack's non-neutrality hurts ASUC, Mihir Deo and Rosemary Hua
"In his note, Pack calls out EAVP Safeena Mecklai for her alleged lobbying of ASUC Senators to vote against the bill. However, Mecklai had already voted on the issue in a UCSA vote days prior. She had a right to talk about her decision to vote against the no confidence vote. To say she was lobbying the senators by relaying to the student body why she voted a particular way is naive. Says [Nolan] Pack:
¶
'I refuse to sit idly by as (the Free Speech Movement) legacy is misappropriated by a (student) politician who seems bent on advancing a pro-administration agenda.'"
9/13/2013, The Columbus Dispatch, Woody wary of hippies during trip to Berkeley, Rob Oller
"A little more than 40 years ago, as the Vietnam War wound toward its conclusion, campuses were embroiled in student protest. Places like Ann Arbor, Mich., Madison, Wis., and, tragically, Kent, Ohio, took center stage as places of pushback against U.S. military involvement overseas.
¶
But the epicenter of protest was Berkeley, Calif., home of the University of California, whose football team, the Golden Bears, will play host to Ohio State on Saturday.
¶
Berkeley - or 'Berzerkley,' as some like to call it - has a history of protest, dating to the 1930s when students objected to the U.S. ending its disarmament policy."
9/13/2013, Pravda.ru, The leader of the free world: Obama or Putin?, Philip O'Brien
"With talks of a red line being crossed, Putin compiled his own dossier accusing the rebels of carrying out the attacks, pulling a Mario Savio 'bodies upon the gears.' Full spectrum dominance appeared in the Kremlin's court, and may soon play out on the international stage."
9/11/2013, San Francisco Chronicle, Saul Landau - documentary filmmaker - dies, Sam Whiting
"In 1965, Mr. Landau got a job as a producer at KQED, and started making one-hour documentary films infused with his own social commentary. His first, 'From Pot to Psychedelics,' aired on National Education Television, now PBS, in 1965. It was followed by 'From Protest to Resistance,' about the Free Speech Movement centered in Berkeley, and 'Losing Just the Same,' about the desperate situation of people in West Oakland."
9/11/2013, Diane Ravitch's blog, What Mario Savio Said 50 Years Ago, Diane Ravitch
"We are at that moment that Mario Savio spoke about. I take heart from those who resist the machine of 'Educational reform'"
9/11/2013, CBS 42, Events of 1963 still helping shape American history, Sherri Jackson
"BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) - As part of CBS42's coverage of the events leading up to the unveiling of the statue honoring the four girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, Sherri Jackson traveled to Berkeley, California, where artist Elizabeth MacQueen has been hard at work etching a new page in Birmingham's history.
¶
However, it's not the first link between the two cities.
¶
Berkeley, California, experienced its own movement in 1963 when events in Birmingham sparked student demonstrations that birthed what is widely known as the free speech movement."
9/11/2013, BeyondChron, Bill de Blasio Sweeps Opponents in NYC Mayor's Race, Randy Shaw
"To paraphrase the late Mario Savio's legendary comments during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, there comes a time when the elitism of NYC politics becomes so odious, and makes voters so sick at heart, that they had to put their bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and make it stop."
9/10/2013, VOXXI, Chicanos movement revisited changes that helped all, Eduardo Stanley
"During those years, 1966 - 1971, several movements happened in our country, influencing the Chicano Movement, such as the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, Women's Movement, Black Power, Free Speech Movement, and more, opening doors to deep social changes seeking social justice and equality."
9/10/2013, The Nevada Sagebrush, Freedom fighting journalist will speak at UNR for Constitution Day next week, Kenny Bissett
"[Seth] Rosenfeld will be the keynote speaker at UNR's celebration of Constitution Day on Sept. 17, at the Mathewson IGT Knowledge Center in the Wells Fargo Auditorium from 6-9 p.m. Rosenfeld awill be discussing the major findings of 'Subversives' and what his research means for U.S. citizens who are concerned about government surveillance and their constitutional rights.
¶
'I'm anxious to hear him, in the person, in the flesh,' said James Richardson, director of the Grant Sawyer Center for Justice Studies and the Judicial Studies Program at UNR. 'Particularly during this time (when) there is so much controversy in our nation, in our society, about what is happening with the government doing so much snooping and data dredging about people's phone calls and emails. So this will be really fitting.'
¶
In 2004, Congress mandated that any publicly funded institution of higher learning must provide some sort of educational event or celebration on or near Constitution Day (Sept. 17) in order to continue to receive federal funds. Across the nation, these events are geared towards increasing student awareness of the U.S. constitution and its history."
9/10/2013, The Daily Californian, A new chancellor, a new era, Senior Editorial Board
"On the subject of the violent tactics used by UCPD to subdue peaceful protesters during fall 2011's Occupy Cal demonstrations, Dirks expressed optimism about the campus' response protocols made in early 2012. He also stressed that he recognizes that protests "come out of deep concerns students have." Drawing on his experiences studying civil disobedience in colonial India, he went on to acknowledge that protesting students 'are desirous of combating injustice where it exists and calling out hypocrisy.'
¶
While recognizing the actions of nonviolent student protesters as legitimate marks a step forward from the previous chancellor's unwarranted suspicions, the chancellor should act quickly to assure students that no violence will be used against nonviolent demonstrators in the event of another protest. Even with new policies in place, a more concrete strategy would go a long way to build the bridges with students that Dirks appears willing to construct."
9/10/2013, Redwood Times, Doug Green recalls life of activism and achievement, Virginia Graziani
"This led him to enter the University of California at Berkeley in 1963, but 'I didn't last long there because of the Free Speech Movement,' Green said.
¶
The Free Speech Movement (FSM) was a student protest that began on the Berkeley campus in the fall of 1964 as a response to a ban on political activity on campus. It inspired the nationwide wave of campus protests against the Vietnam War, in support of civil rights that occurred at many universities and colleges during the 1960s and 1970s.
¶
Green was among the over 800 persons arrested at a sit-in inside Sproul Hall, the administration building, on December 4 and 5, 1964.
¶
'I wasn't planning on being arrested but then I saw what the cops were doing to those who were being arrested - it was violent - and so I thought I should participate,' he said.
¶
He quoted Wes 'Scoop' Nisker, a popular news commentator on counterculture radio stations in the Bay Area, whose sign-off is, 'If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own.'"
9/7/2013, New York Times, David S. Landes, Historian and Author, Is Dead at 89, Douglas Martin
"He also pursued his studies at Columbia University and taught there from 1952 to 1958. While there, he was a member of the Society of Fellows, which supported interdisciplinary studies, and in 1957-58 he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He then joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a professor of history and economics until 1964.
¶
That year he wrote a letter to The New York Times criticizing the protests known as the free speech movement, which he called 'the most serious assault on academic freedom in America since the McCarthy era.'"
9/5/2013, The Bay Area Reporter, Motion pictures of autumn, David Lamble
"At Berkeley America's grand old doc guy Frederick Wiseman trains his camera on an institution, UC Berkeley, that's been educating and perplexing since the heady days of the 1960s Free Speech movement. Wiseman's 40th feature explores the hypothesis I mulled over as a kid when the middle-class school system that saved me failed my younger siblings. Wiseman tells the NY Times that the budget cuts destabilizing the flagship campus were no accident. 'There's a political agenda behind that, to dumb people down. Because if you don't study the humanities and you don't have technical education, you're not going to know about all the questions connected with the Enlightenment or free speech or representative government.'"
9/5/2013, San Francisco Chronicle, S.F. bus stop art takes us back in history, Sam Whiting
"The poster, titled 'Occupy,' is one of six designs using online news images that have been cut and pasted into a street show called 'Celebrating Bay Area Activism.'
¶
Commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission, each set of six posters appears in six places, one per stop at 36 bus kiosks on both sides of Market, between Eighth and Hyde streets and the Embarcadero. The series connects 50 years of uprisings - the Vietnam War, the Free Speech Movement, civil rights, gay rights and Earth Day."
9/4/2013, Indybay, UC Berkeley Declares Prohibition on Chalking, Pirate Party Responds, Piratenpartei
"On Sept 3rd (2013), a registered member of the Pirate Party was detained by UC Berkeley police for chalking slogans at the southern boundary of the UC Berkeley campus, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement."
9/4/2013, East Bay Express, A More Fitting Way to Honor Oscar Grant, Kim Tran
"As a proud Oakland resident, I have seen and participated in countless protests, including demonstrations organized by Occupy Oakland, as a result of the George Zimmerman verdict, and in solidarity with hunger strikers in state prisons. Each protest brought people to City Hall to resist the effects of crony capitalism, racial injustice, and California's failed prison system. As the historic home of the Black Panthers Movement, the Third World Liberation Front (the movement to establish the Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley), and the Free Speech Movement, the East Bay has a long, established legacy of anti-racist activism. But the unofficial renaming of Frank H. Ogawa Plaza to Oscar Grant Plaza, as some activists have done, does a disservice to this legacy and is misplaced."
9/3/2013, UC Berkeley News Center, Fall 2013 coming attractions: open data, giant frogs, Chinese painting and a new chancellor's inauguration, Sara Leavitt
"As controversy around fracking, coal and the Keystone pipeline continue, the 17th Mario Savio Memorial Lecture presents a panel discussion on New Strategies for Fighting the Climate Crisis. An annual event, the lecture this year features leaders of five national environmental organizations: the Sierra Club, Greenpeace USA, 350.org, Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project and the Ruckus Society (Tuesday, Nov. 12, 8 p.m., Martin Luther King Jr. Student Center, Pauley Ballroom)."
¶
Think globally, educate locally"
9/1/2013, The Columbus Dispatch, Berkeley offers unusual vibe for football fans, Steve Stephens
"Sproul Hall was the site of 'Free Speech Movement' protests on the Cal campus in Berkeley in the 1960s."
8/31/2013, Indian Country Today, Ronald Reagan Gassed Me, Dr. Dean Chavers
"I was in California when Reagan was getting ready to run for governor. When I came back three years later to stay for 10 years, he was governor nearly the whole time. He had won largely by claiming he would clean up the mess at Berkeley. The worst mess that had happened at Berkeley was when Mario Savio led the "Free Speech" movement starting in 1964. The impertinence of the students was enough to set Reagan off. He also promised to put welfare bums back to work. The two issues got him elected twice.
¶
He wanted all the protesting students at Berkeley thrown off the campus and disenrolled. When UC President Clark Kerr refused to do it, Reagan fired him. Kerr was fired three weeks after Reagan was sworn in as governor. The Free Speech Movement, it turned out, was a mild protest compared to the protests against the war in Vietnam that started in 1969."
8/30/2013, LifeSiteNews, How the sexual revolution, multiculturalism, and identity politics radicalized liberalism, Kevin Slack
"Mario Savio, who had worked in SNCC's Freedom Summer weeks before, started the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964 when campus police attempted to arrest an activist for setting up a display table. The state-funded universities, Savio concluded, were part of the same oppressive system that controlled the South. The universities of the liberal state were part of a manipulative machine, devoid of higher purpose and focused on power. Savio lashed out in his Sproul Hall address: 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that…you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop!'[57 ]"
8/29/2013, The Daily Californian, Campus health plan accidentally denies coverage to riot participants, Nico Correia
The clause, nestled in the plan's benefit booklet, was mistakenly included when the campus entered into a contract with a new health insurance provider, Aetna, this summer, despite the fact that the campus asked the language be removed, said Kim LaPean, communications manager at UHS's Tang Center.
¶
'It's sad that the (clause) was included,' LaPean said. 'But what would be sadder is if students thought we wanted to include the misinformation.'
¶
Within 24 hours of the inquiry, UHS confirmed the administrative error and stated that the clause would not affect those covered by the plan, LaPean said. UHS is in the process of officially removing the language from posted and printed material.
¶
'We would never enforce such a clause,' LaPean said. 'We respect our students' rights.'"
8/28/2013, The Daily Californian, 'Berkeley in the Sixties' aims to affect the present, Grace Lovio
"Sophomore Jason Fauss, the EAVP's chief deputy of the international affairs department, explained to The Daily Californian that the idea to show the documentary ties into the need to encourage responsible student lobbying on campus.
¶
'This documentary is part of a larger social movement at UC Berkeley in which we're trying to get students engaged in advocacy,' Fauss said. 'This is like the kickoff event of the whole student protest idea.'
'We want students, like Mario Savio said, to be responsible about what they're protesting,' Fauss continued. 'With the student advocacy events, we're saying to students, 'Whether or not your idea is popular, whether or not it's something that's federally endorsed, you should be able to give your view.''
¶
The legacy of the 1960s fight for civil rights and free speech still has a tangible presence on campus. From the encampments in People's Park to the Free Speech Movement Cafe and the tables on Sproul Plaza, symbols of the campus's political history have come to define the Berkeley experience. 'Berkeley in the Sixties' challenges students not only to remain conscious of the campus's past but to take an active role in determining its future."
8/28/2013, Metropoli, La canción protesta de Fundación Robo, David Saavedra
"Así, Isabel Fernández (Aries) musica un poema de Apollinaire, la debutante Carolina León adapta a Hüsker Dü, Ibon Rodríguez a Boris Vian y Experience (este último tema junto a Mursego), Mar Álvarez lleva La revolución no será televisada, de Gil Scott-Heron, al terreno de Pauline en la Playa, y Le Parody se basa en el discurso de Mario Savio en el Free Speech Movement de 1964, añadiendo música propia y samples de grupos como LCD Soundsystem." [Google trans: So, Isabel Fernandez (Aries) music a poem by Apollinaire, newcomer Fits Leon Carolina Hüsker Dü , Boris Vian Ibon Rodriguez and Experience (the latter track with Mursego), Mar Alvarez leads Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Gil Scott-Heron, the field of Pauline at the Beach, and Le Parody is based on the speech of Mario Savio Free Speech Movement in 1964, adding his own music and samples from groups such as LCD Soundsystem.]
8/27/2013, Santa Barbara Independent, Pedaling to 64, Howard Booth
"We're all getting older. Even Jack Weinberg, who uttered the phrase 'Don't trust anyone over 30' during the height of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, turned 73 this year. You have to wonder if 80 will be the new 30. Conceivable!"
8/23/2013, NUVO Newsweekly, The real cost of a cool dorm, David Hoppe
"But something else is going on here. The penchant of colleges and universities to build facilities beyond the means of most students and their parents has been unabated for such a long time, in spite of chronic complaints about high costs, that it begins to look like a kind of plan. Call it the corporatization of higher education.
¶
Higher education in America was revolutionized when the Baby Boom came of age. As Clark Kerr, president of the University of California at Berkeley put it in 1962: 'The university is being called upon to educate previously unimagined numbers of students; to respond to the expanding claims of national service; to merge its activities with industry as never before.'
¶
Things ended badly for Kerr. The Free Speech Movement took hold during his time at Berkeley, and proved to be a precursor for student protests that would roil campuses for the rest of the Sixties. Kerr was fired at the behest of then-Gov. Ronald Reagan.
¶
But Kerr's vision of the merger of university and industry would ultimately prevail. Today corporate sponsors are all over campuses, providing everything from endowed chairs to new facilities."
8/22/2013, Los Angeles Times, Joan Didion to be awarded PEN Center USA prize by Harrison Ford, Carolyn Kellogg
"PEN has announced the full list of 2013 literary prize winners, led by newcomer Ramona Ausubel, who wins in the fiction category for her novel 'Nobody Is Here Except All of Us.'
¶
Seth Rosenfeld takes the research nonfiction prize for 'Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power'; Joy Harjo in creative nonfiction for 'Crazy Brave'; Mark Boal for his screenplay for 'Zero Dark Thirty'; Danny Strong, who wins for his teleplay for HBO's 'Game Change'; Amanda Auchter in poetry for 'The Wishing Tomb'; Philip Boehm, for translation of 'An Ermine in Czernopol,' originally by Gregor von Rezzori; Michael Harmon in children's literature for 'Under the Bridge'; Ed Leibowitz for journalism for 'The Takeover Artist' in Los Angeles Magazine; and Dan O'Brien for drama with "The Body of an American.""
8/22/2013, Berkeleyside, Interview: UC Berkeley's new Chancellor, Nicholas Dirks, Berkeleyside Editors
"The truth is that in writing about Gandhi and then in teaching about Gandhi over the years I've thought a lot about civil disobedience and I've thought a lot about the need to understand, respect, and certainly evaluate in a historical way the issues that are part of the fabric of life in this campus."
8/21/2013, Berkeleyside, Zarhouie Abdalian: Elegant forms reflect on free speech, Marcia Tanner
"Although you might not guess it right away, Zarhouie Abdalian's spare, enigmatic audio-visual sculptural installation at the Berkeley Art Museum has deep roots here. The Free Speech Movement was born at UC Berkeley in the 1960s, after all, and Abdalian's elegant, cryptogrammatic forms, once they're deciphered, add up poetically to a complex meditation on suppression of free speech and its implications for democracy."
8/20/2013, Courthouse News Service, UC-Berkeley Police Chief Still on the Hook, Nick McCann
"The plaintiffs say their arrest was a violation of their Fourth Amendment rights because they had permission from the University of California to occupy a campus building as part of the protest.
¶
Open University was called for the week before final exams, and university officials decided not to prevent students from setting up the event in Wheeler Hall.
¶
Wheeler Hall was a center of the Free Speech Movement in 1964, and has frequently been occupied by student activists ever since.
¶
'The students planned to discuss the ongoing university budget cuts, tuition increases, and the impact of lack of funding on the state and education in general,' according to the 12-page civil rights complaint.
¶
'The Open University was intended to highlight the skewed priorities of the University of California system.'
¶
Students began occupying Wheeler Hall on Monday, Dec. 7, 2009, and police officers agreed to let them stay in the building overnight if they kept the area clean, let janitors enter the building, and did not disrupt study sessions."
8/19/2013, The Atlantic, 'Where Should I Go to College?', Mark Edmundson
"A 15- year- old standing up at a school meeting and saying that she's mad as heck about being slapped on an assembly line, or that she's mad at her parents for slapping here there, or that she's mad at herself-- that's not going to do very much. She's going to feel alone and lonely and sad, and anyway she may not even be able to find the words to express her feelings. She probably hasn't read about or even heard the name Mario Savio, who made a speech at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964. I understand that quite often high school history courses now don't take you all the way up through the period of the Vietnam War, but stop at the end of World War II because 'we've run out of time.'
¶
Mario Savio stood up at Sproul Plaza at Berkeley and said that as a college student, as a Berkeley student, he too often felt like a piece of raw material that was getting processed by his university and by his society. He believed that many of his contemporaries felt the same way. And then he talked back to that condition. He said, 'But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to be-- have any process upon us. Don't mean to be made into any product! Don't mean--Don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the university, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!' We're not products, Mario Savio says: We're human beings. He says it in a broken- up Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie sort of way, but he says it. Probably a young guy or girl going to high school now hasn't heard of Mario Savio or listened to his famous lines from Sproul Plaza."
8/16/2013, Aspen Public Radio, Student 'Subversives' And The FBI's 'Dirty Tricks', Editor
"'[FBI Director] Hoover instantly ordered a major investigation of the free speech movement and assigned a lot of agents to look into it and whether it was a subversive plot. And they determined that while there were a few Communists and socialists involved in the protest, it would have happened anyway, because it was really just a protest about this campus rule [a rule banning students from political engagement]. His agents repeatedly told [Hoover] that it would have happened anyway.'"
8/16/2013, AMERICAblog, Whistleblowing is the new Civil Disobedience: Why Snowden matters, Gaius Publius
"Second, there are a hundred pressure points to the authoritarian State we're growing. No one knows which one will give way, collapsing a portion of the wall that defends it. Who knew that organizing for 1960s civil rights on the Berkeley campus of the University of California would evolved into the one of the big early cracks in the big pro-war anti-progressive wall. As Mario Savio, of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, said:
¶
'One thousand people sitting down can stop any machine, including this machine.'
¶
The movement is building; not getting smaller. If you wanted a resistance, it's coming."
8/15/2013, New America Media, Echoes of '60s March: Sixties-Style Civil Disobedience Drives New Era of Activism, Raj Jayadev
"There is an undeniable genealogy of activism from the Little Rock 9 to the Dream 9; from the student organizers from the Freedom Summer to the Dream Defenders; and from Cesar Chavez when he refused food to protest violence used against his fellow union members to the hundreds of nameless prison hunger strikers in California in 2013.
¶
And while Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech still inspires many to fight for justice in 2013, it may be a 1963 [sic] Berkeley student organizer Mario Savio's speech that best embodies the escalation of intensity in this moment of activism. On the steps of Sproul Hall at the University of California, Berkeley he told the crowd, 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious - makes you so sick at heart - that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.'
¶
Those words, the honesty of the sentiment and expression of commitment, very much could have been spoken by a Florida college student at the capitol building, or an undocumented youth in a detention center, or a prison inmate who had not eaten for weeks. And the year, very easily, could have been 2013."
8/15/2013, Firstpost, From 1908 to 2013: Stories of unlikely desi activists in US, Sandip Roy
"'From 1908 to 2013 we have never remained silent,' smiles Chatterjee.
¶
Berkeley has a reputation as a hotbed of activism from the days of the Vietnam war protests and the Free Speech movement. But we don't think about South Asians as part of that. Vijay Prashad writes that South Asian immigrants post-1965 are 'double state selected.' They were the cream of the crop in India. And they were the kind of people the United States also wanted. 'The people who immigrated were skilled at not pissing off any government at all,' says Chatterjee."
8/13/2013, Huffington Post, This Is What College Parties Looked Like Back In The Day, Tyler Kingkade
"Conformity on campus was challenged not only by the sexual revolution, but also because more working-class, minority and female students were matriculating. Student activism increased with participation in the Civil Rights Movement, protests against the Vietnam war and the general growth of the counterculture.
¶
Notable examples of activism on campus included the Berkeley Free Speech movement and the Columbia University occupation (now echoed in the Occupy Cal, Cooper Union and Dartmouth protests of today). At the University of Notre Dame, one residence hall decided to secede from the university in protest of the Vietnam War."
8/3/2013, The Australian, How sweet the sound as Joan Baez starts her Australian tour, Mahir Ali
"Subsequently there were occasions when Baez announced that activism would take a backseat to her musical career, but it has never quite worked out that way. Her association with King, farmworkers union leader Cesar Chavez, the Berkeley free speech movement and draft resistance in the US was just the beginning. She stood side by side with Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Walesa and Vaclav Havel long before they became the presidents, respectively, of Brazil, Poland and Czechoslovakia, visited Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner during their internal exile in the Soviet Union, offered succour to Laotian and Cambodian refugees on the Thai border, and spent time in Sarajevo while it was besieged. She was present in London's Hyde Park five years ago for the 90th birthday tribute to Nelson Mandela. During the Bush years, her voice was often heard at anti-war rallies."
8/2/2013, Post-Tribune, From civil rights protester to environmental activist, Jeff Manes
"'I [Jack Weinberg] had already been active and was involved in demonstrations and arrested a number of times at sit-ins. The summer of '64 was called Freedom Summer. Many of the students went to the Deep South. That's when (James Earl) Chaney, (Andrew) Goodman and (Michael) Schwerner were murdered. They were there to register voters.'
¶
'Mississippi Burning.'
¶
'Correct. Our campus was very active. During the fall semester, the university announced new regulations saying that you were no longer allowed to pass out leaflets or do anything that advocated any type of activity that was social or political in nature.
¶
'Some of the businesses that we had been targeting for discrimination told the university, 'You must stop the students from attacking us.' So the university announced rules that would prohibit students from protesting and demonstrating on or off campus.'
¶
And?
¶
'The student groups got together and said, 'We're not going to obey these rules. We'll try to negotiate with you, but we have a right to free speech - we're citizens.' So, we started systematically violating those rules.'"
8/2/2013, OpEdNews, Zen and the Art of Protest, Bob Patterson
"As political protests in Berkeley go, last Saturday afternoon's rally of citizens protesting the sale of the Post Office facility in the downtown area didn't seem to be a chance to watch history in the making but then we were told that something else would happen after the speeches and music were concluded. We were provided a hint that it would be similar to an Occupy event. On a summer day, when it is cloudy and chilly the appeal of going to a political protest in Berkeley that wouldn't be something that folks would be talking about for years to come (the fiftieth anniversary of Mario Savio's speech from the top of a police car is rapidly approaching) was not exactly overwhelming but on the other hand no other choice seemed better."
7/30/2013, The Hartford Courant, Promise Of Virtual Universities Elusive, Nathaniel Zelinsky
"But video education did not revolutionize the academy 50 years ago. Television and similar technologies could not replicate the experience of sitting in a room with a professor and of exploring a topic around a seminar table. Students hated virtual instruction. When the members of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement rebelled against Kerr's educational vision in the middle of the 1960s, they in part objected to the impersonality of closed-circuit television and other methods of mass education that Kerr championed."
7/30/2013, Capitol Weekly, State archives detail battle against 'subversion', Alex Matthews
"The Free Speech Movement was not a surprising target for [Sen. Hugh] Burns' views. Throughout the archives there is an evident bias in the committee's scrutiny towards educational institutions and movements that mobilized people against the status quo. For example, the reports' indexes show extensive investigation of the NAACP and organizations like it."
7/29/2013, IEEE Spectrum, OSI: The Internet That Wasn't, Andrew L. Russell
"The story starts in the 1960s. The Berlin Wall was going up. The Free Speech movement was blossoming in Berkeley. U.S. troops were fighting in Vietnam. And digital computer-communication systems were in their infancy and the subject of intense, wide-ranging investigations, with dozens (and soon hundreds) of people in academia, industry, and government pursuing major research programs."
7/29/2013, Daily Californian, Facilitated free speech, Senior Editorial Board
"The UC Board of Regents should think about reviewing the faculty code of conduct to include all types of free speech under the First Amendment that apply to a faculty member as a private citizen and public employee. UC Berkeley started the free speech movement, and it continues to be a basic tenant of the university's culture for faculty members to participate freely in rallies and protests."
7/26/2013, USA Today, 'Brand New Beat' reveals a soundtrack of social change,
"The question is posed (on the book jacket at least): 'Can a song change a nation?' Well, yes, one supposes. But if we're to believe Kurlansky, who makes a convincing case for just about everything he writes here, the nation probably changed the meaning of Dancing in the Street more than the song changed the nation.
¶
Written by Marvin Gaye, William 'Mickey' Stevenson and Ivy Jo Hunter and recorded at Motown's Hitsville USA studios, Dancing in the Street started out as a joyously upbeat invitation to dance. Recorded by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and released in July 1964, it was, said Reeves, 'a party song.'
¶
But, as Kurlansky spends most of his book explaining, timing was everything.
¶
Against the backdrop of 1964's Freedom Summer in Mississippi, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the Civil Rights Act and the beginning of the Vietnam War, Dancing in the Street became open to interpretation."
July 26-28, 2013, Counterpunch, Understanding the Vietnam Antiwar Movement, Michael Uhl
"Initially, preoccupation with the war on campus was tangential to a rise in student involvement with civil rights, and demands for academic freedom. The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 was an act of defiance against in loco parentis that shocked college administrators who for years had expected nothing more rambunctious from their student bodies than cafeteria food fights and panty raids. Student leader Mario Savio's name became a house hold word overnight, and the actions of the Berkeley students ignited a political charge throughout a budding youth culture that spawned a collective resistance to the draft, and militant opposition to an escalating war."
7/25/2013, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 'Washington' as a foreign occupying force, Jay Bookman
"'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious-makes you so sick at heart-that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.'
¶
That's a more eloquent restatement of the 'Fighting Washington for You' thesis, entirely in line with the GOP's justification for trying to lock down the federal government and halt its operation. Yet as [Ed] Kilgore notes, it's actually part of a once-famous speech by leftist radical Mario Savio, given on the campus of Cal-Berkeley in 1964. At the time, Savio was a scruffy, 22-year-old college student well outside the hallways of power. His modern extremist counterparts are middle-aged men in tailored suits whose efforts are funded through corporate money. And unlike Savio and his friends, they have a plan."
7/24/2013, PolicyMic, One of the Most Powerful Protests in the History of Immigration Reform, Johnathen Duran
"The immigration system is broken. We know it can be fixed. We know the government has discretion over prosecution and enforcement, and we know that President Barack Obama continues to talk a good game when it comes to immigration reform while simultaneously deporting more people than any president in history. These activists have gone the route of Mario Savio and thrown their bodies into the gears and levers of this odious deportation machine. To quote Savio:
¶
'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!'"
7/23/2013, Capitol Weekly, California's "Un-Americans:" Legislature tracked thousands of citizens, Jonathan Lerner
"In the 1960s and '70s the committee turned its attention to civil rights and Vietnam War protests. Among those who earned index cards were future Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, D-San Francisco; Free Speech Movement activist Mario Savio and one of his cohorts, future Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles; beat poet Allen Ginsberg, Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton and other Black Panther Party members; and United Farm Workers' founders Cesar Chavez and Delores Huerta."
7/22/2013, The Record, UC's first-ever Muslim student regent, a local grad, cool in the face of controversy, editors
"'My capacity was to represent that specific community and the views of that community,' she said. 'My capacity as student regent is very different.'
That Saifuddin's views stir controversy should surprise no one. She is after all, one in a long line of outspoken student activists at Cal who can trace their linage to the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s and people like Mario Savio, who in 1964 urged students to 'put your bodies upon the gears' in a speech denouncing the regents and university president.
¶
Welcome to the circus, Ms. Saifuddin."
7/22/2013, NPR.com, New In Paperback: Subversives,
"Seth Rosenfeld details how the FBI employed fake reporters to plant ideas and shape public opinion about the 1964 University of California, Berkeley, student protest movement. In addition to planting stories with real reporters, the bureau managed - with the help of then-Gov. Ronald Reagan - to get the university's president fired."
7/19/2013, The Sacramento Bee, Viewpoints: What was behind Napolitano's nomination?, Bill Whalen
"And that's just the tip of the iceberg. We also don't know if Brown championed Napolitano's cause and pressed the regents - the guess here his interest is more than casual, as then-UC President Clark Kerr's inability to control the Free Speech Movement was a contributing factor to Pat Brown's defeat in 1966. Or, was this more the regents' idea than the governor's? If so, is that a window into the alpha-dog politics of the UC system?"
July 19-21, 2013, Counterpunch, Napolitano at UC Out of ICE Into the Fire, Andrew Levine
"Clark Kerr was President of the UC system too; and unlike Napolitano, he actually was a distinguished academic and a liberal Democrat, back in the day when that still meant something.
¶
Today, he is remembered mainly for leading the Forces of Order as the Free Speech Movement erupted in all its glory. Kerr was a decent and thoughtful man who had the misfortune of being caught between a nascent New Left and the virulent rightwing reaction that made Ronald Reagan Governor of California.
¶
He was also an insightful observer of university culture. Being a preeminent insider, his view of what university administrators do is especially on point. According to one of his better-known quips, they deal with 'sex for the undergraduates, athletics for the alumni and parking for the faculty.'
¶
Napolitano should take heed. If she sticks to those issues, she may just get through her next job in one piece. However if she ventures out on her own, she may just be clueless enough to get into big trouble - like America in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
¶
Sometimes, though, prudence is not enough. Clark Kerr discovered that to his dismay.
¶
The Free Speech Movement, like the anti-War movement that followed it, saw establishment liberals as the enemy; it took aim at liberalism - from the left."
7/18/2013, Payvand News, New Art on Market Street Poster Series Celebrates 50 Years of Bay Area Activism, San Francisco Art Commission
"The Bay Area's Free Speech Movement is memorialized in Freedom of Expression, which includes images of students at UC Berkeley in 1964 and photographs of recent demonstrations against government restrictions on the internet, copyright laws and censorship."
7/17/2013, Truthout, Anger and Political Culture: A Time for Outrage!, Michael A Peters
"The counterculture movement rode on the back of the civil rights movement and coalesced with the free speech movement at Berkeley, with the constellation of the New Left inspired by Herbert Marcuse and others, second generation women's rights and feminism, environmentalism and the organization for gay rights. Of my generation, who doesn't remember the 'sit-in,' the 'happening,' the slogans - 'make love not war' - and taking part in peaceful rallies? These forms of protest learned the new forms of democratic action including pacifist and nonviolence expressions of political anger from anti-colonial struggles.
¶
Only by studying their own culture and, in particular, the culture of the '50s, '60s and '70s, will students and the youth of today understand the significance of student protests and the counterculture that invented new forms of expression of political anger in discourse, music, literature, drama, dress and style that were predominantly nonviolent, consistent with its underlying values and effective as a means of public pedagogy." [originally published Sunday, 22 July 2012]
7/14/2013, Chico Enterprise-Record, Book review: How a Chico man helped Ronald Reagan become governor, Dan Bartlett
"Set against the backdrop of the Free Speech Movement (Reagan called it the 'filthy speech movement') and the Watts riots, the story of Reagan's ascension is simply fascinating, especially the central chapters detailing how [Ken] Holden and Plog helped the candidate focus on California issues and articulate clear and concise positions. For [Ken] Holden, Reagan was the real deal - well read, thoughtful, charming and charismatic. But he needed honing."
7/14/2013, American Thinker, Violence after Zimmerman verdict: why Oakland?, Thomas Lifson
"Update: Perhaps I should have added mention of Oakland's long history of left wing extremism. The organized bands of far leftists to which I referred have deep historical roots that extend well beyond the famous Black Panthers, all the way back to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters more than a century ago. The Dellums family of Oakland -- Ron Dellums was a longtime congressman and then mayor of Oakland -- played a leadership role, intellectually and organizationally, of a black left wing movement. The Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley attracted thousands of committed left wingers from aroudn the country to the San Francisco Bay Area, especially Berkeley and Oakland."
7/12/2013, WNYC, Dancing in the Street, Activist Song, Leonard Lopate Show
"Mark Kurlansky tells how the song 'Dancing in the Street' became an anthem for a changing America. It was released in the summer of 1964-the time of the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the beginning of the Vietnam War, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and the lead-up to a dramatic election. Kurlansky's book Ready for a Brand New Beat explains how 'Dancing in the Street' became an activist anthem."
7/11/2013, New York Times, A California 'State of Mind,' Circa 1970, at Bronx Museum, Holland Cotter
"California in the 1970s was one of the weirder spots on the planet, home to radical strains of politics on both the right and left. It was a hub of the nation's defense industry and a feeder for the Vietnam War, to which disproportionate numbers of Latinos and blacks were consigned. Teachers at the state's universities were required to take loyalty oaths. Dissidents and deviants of various stripes were under the gun.
¶
At the same time, the country's most powerful countercultures were born or nurtured there: from the Beats in the 1950s, to the campus Free Speech movement of the early 1960s, to the hippies and Black Panthers later in the decade. Berkeley held one of the first big antiwar protests in 1965. The Watts uprising in South Central Los Angeles happened the same year. So did the first farm labor strikes in what would become the Chicano movement."
7/10/2013, San Francisco Sentinel, Playwrights Foundation 36th Annual Bay Area Playwrights Festival,
"Joan Holden - FSM, Half a century ago, thousands of the best and brightest students in California rose up in a mass nonviolent protest that put Berkeley on the world map. They resisted weeks of divide-and-conquer tactics, performed miracles of self-organization, closed down the campus with a strike, and won. Formally, they demanded freedom for political speech; just under the surface, they were demanding it for themselves, from the grey-flannel life that was being prepared for them by authority, parents' expectations, the hypocrisy and rigidity of the 1950's."
7/8/2013, BeyondChron, Los Angeles Diversity Capital of the World, Jan Tucker
"First ever Los Angeles Jewish Mayor Eric Garcetti is descended from an Italian immigrant to Mexico on his father's side who fled the Mexican revolution to America, while on his mother's side his Jewish forebears fled persecution in Eastern Europe. The inaugural invocation was given by Rabbi Susan Goldberg, daughter of prominent attorney (and old friend of mine) Arthur Goldberg and niece of former school board member, city council member, and State Assembly member Jackie Goldberg. Art and Jackie (brother & sister) were prominent in the 60s U.C. Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM) and many other radical struggles."
7/5/2013, The National Review, Vignette: '68 Revolutionaries Revisited, M. D. Aeschliman
"Just as Mario Savio and the Berkeley protesters of a few years earlier had gone from being a 'Free Speech Movement' to being a 'Filthy Speech Movement,' so leader Mark Rudd would grow increasingly insulting in manner and speech, especially to university representatives - 'offensive vulgarity,' the Cox Report called it. Rational, judicious discussion or respect for elementary manners and legalities were taken to be a proof of cowardice and bad faith." [Ed. Note: the "Filthy Speech Movement (not really a movement at all, and largly a creation of the right-wing press) followed the Free Speech Movement and was not, properly, a part of it.]
July 5-7, 2013, The California Report, Walking Through Berkeley's South Asian History, Sindya Bhanoo
"Berkeley has long been an epicenter for leftist activism. It was home to the Free Speech Movement and central to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. Now a walking tour in downtown Berkeley explores the city's little-known South Asian radical history, from a 1908 protest by South Asian students to the community's battle against hate violence after the Sept. 11 attacks.
¶
The tour is called the Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour. Organized by Anirvan Chatterjee, a tech entrepreneur, and his wife, Barnali Ghosh, a landscape architect, the project is a part-time labor of love. Chatterjee and Ghosh are activists in the Bay Area South Asian community and amateur historians."
7/5/2013, San Francisco Chronicle, Unlocking success in a bail-bondsman career, Henry K. Lee
"Barrish became the go-to guy for protesters soon after he set up shop on Bryant Street in 1961. He was there for protests over hiring practices at Mel's Diner and at dealerships on Van Ness Avenue's Auto Row. He bailed out those supporting the Free Speech Movement and People's Park at UC Berkeley, and he was on the job again when American Indians occupied Alcatraz for more than a year and a half starting in 1969."
7/2/2013, Bill Moyers, Barbara Garson,
"Garson has a history of political activism. In her 20s, while editing the Free Speech Movement Newsletter, she was arrested with Mario Savio and 800 others at a sit-in in Berkeley, California. During the Vietnam War, she was confined to the stockade at Fort Lewis Army Base with Jane Fonda. She was also arrested at the South African Consulate in New York City with Grace Paley and others as part of protest against Apartheid.
¶
In 1992, Garson was the Socialist Party's vice presidential candidate."
6/28/2013, OpEdNews, Which is it? Is bigotry dead or not?, Bob Patterson
"Berkeley is looking to increase tourism and the fiftieth anniversary of Mario Savio's speech from on top of a police car is rapidly approaching, perhaps the city fathers should consider holding an anniversary event."
6/15/2013, The Atlantic, The NSA Leaks and the Pentagon Papers: What's the Difference Between Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg?, Garance Franke-Ruta
"But the reality is that anyone involved in a protest movement already has to assume government monitoring -- either by local police (as with protesters planning to rally against the Republican Convention in Philadelphia in 2000, who learned after being arrested their group had been infiltrated by undercover police) or the feds (as with the Free Speech Movement activists in California in the 1960s, as detailed in Seth Rosenfeld's book Subversives). Meanwhile the biggest threats against activists are physical, not observational. Martin Luther King Jr. maybe have been taunted anonymously by an FBI that was bugging his rooms, but it was an assassin's bullet that stopped him. The Occupy encampments may have been monitored by the state (we can safely assume), but it was police in riot gear with pepper spray who uprooted their movement."
6/7/2013, NTR Medios de Comunicación, La libertad de expresión Julio Scherer vs. Ealy Ortiz, José de Jesús Reyes Ruiz Bustamante
"Si se adentra uno al corazón mismo de la universidad, entre pinos ancestrales y edificios imponentes por su arquitectura victoriana que contrasta con los modernos edificios que se erigen en su periferia, no es difícil llegar al sitio donde está una hermosa cafetería que recibe este nombre, el de la libertad de expresión, y en sus paredes puede leerse, en placas conmemorativas la historia sobre lo que en este lugar pasó hace ya casi 50 años.
¶
Fueron personajes de esta universidad principalmente el Ítalo americano Mario Savio quienes a inicios de los 60 realizaron una protesta dentro del campus -donde se prohibía cualquier actividad política- por -decía el lema- "la libertad de expresión y académica" tenían una mesa donde se recibían adhesiones y donde un estudiante Jack Weinberg fue arrestado por la policía al negarse a presentar una identificación, fue subido a un vehículo oficial que no pudo moverse porque rápidamente fue rodeado por 3 mil estudiantes, quienes permanecieron ahí alrededor del vehículo durante 36 horas.
¶
Todo esto desencadenó una represión sin precedentes encabezada por el entonces gobernador de California, Ronald Reagan -a alguien le suena este nombre-. Las manifestaciones fueron encabezadas por personajes famosos de aquellos tiempos como Joan Baez, y todo ello desencadenó la ya famosa "sentada", donde miles de estudiantes se sentaron en las escalinatas del Sproul Hall (especie de rectoría) durante semanas hasta que fueron desalojados el 3 de diciembre del 64 siendo arrestados 800 estudiantes.
¶
Las protestas crecieron y llegaron a San Francisco hasta que finalmente fue aceptada como ley la libertad de expresión en todo el Estado de California y claro en la Universidad.
¶
Para nadie es un secreto que en nuestro país la libertad de expresión es algo que nació con grandes dificultades, el gobierno decidía lo que se publicaba y lo que no…
" Google translate: "If one delves into the heart of the university, among ancient pines and towering buildings for its Victorian architecture in contrast to the modern buildings that stand on the periphery, it is hard to get to where it is a lovely cafe is named, the freedom of expression, and can be read on the walls, on plaques the story about what happened in this place for almost 50 years.
¶
Characters of this university were mainly American Italo Mario Savio who in the early 60s staged a protest inside the campus-which forbade any political activity-by-saying-slogan "freedom of expression and academic" had a table where accessions received and where a student Jack Weinberg was arrested by police when he refused to provide identification, was uploaded to an official vehicle could not move because he was quickly surrounded by 3000 students, who remained there around the vehicle for 36 hours.
¶
This unleashed unprecedented repression led by the then governor of California, Ronald Reagan, someone sounds this name. The demonstrations were led by celebrities of those times as Joan Baez, and all this triggered the now famous "sitting", where thousands of students sat on the steps of Sproul Hall (sort of stewardship) for weeks until they were evicted on 3 December 64 800 students being arrested.
¶
The protests grew into San Francisco until it was finally accepted as law freedom of expression throughout the State of California and of course at the University.
¶
It is no secret that in our country the freedom of expression is something that was born with great difficulty, the government decided what was published and what does not ..."
6/2/2013, Friends of Ira Sandperl, IRA SANDPERL - March 11, 1923 - April 13, 2013, John Markoff
"In 1966, Mr. Sandperl accompanied Ms. Baez to Grenada, Mississippi, where they joined Dr. King in a campaign to help desegregate local schools. Two years later, in January 1968, Dr. King visited Mr. Sandperl and Ms. Baez in Santa Rita prison, where the two were serving 45 day sentences for sitting in at the Oakland, CA draft induction center. Dr. King said he made the visit 'because they helped me so much in the South.'
¶
Mr. Sandperl also joined Ms. Baez in the Free Speech Movement sit-ins at the University of California at Berkeley during the student occupation of the administration building in 1964."
6/2/2013, Bay Area Theatre Examiner, Review: 'By & By' at Shotgun Players, Charles Kruger
"Lynne Hollander, an exceptionally skilled actress with a fascinating history (google her name with Free Speech Movement), is quite remarkable in multiple roles, especially that of elderly Aunt Amanda."
June 2013, The Atlantic, Jerry Brown's Political Reboot, James Fallows
"Jerry Brown told me about a Look magazine cover story from the mid-1960s, which after the Watts riots in Los Angeles and Free Speech Movement upheaval at Berkeley declared California a 'failed state.' Since that time Look magazine has disappeared, California's population has doubled, and its economy has grown larger than those of Brazil and Spain."
5/29/2013, Academe Blog, INTERVIEW WITH SETH ROSENFELD, Michael Ferguson
"Seth Rosenfeld: There are several significant legacies. In response to the Free Speech Movement, the UC regents conceded that students do have the constitutional right to engage in free speech on campus. In the near term, this opened the Berkeley campus to antiwar teach-ins and other political activities. The Free Speech Movement also inspired activism at other campuses. Today university students take for granted the right to engage in political activity, that they can be actors in society at large."
5/28/2013, OC Weekly, Backwards to the Present: More New New California Writing (Part II), Andrew Tonkovich
"There more biography, autobiography. I like the way it seems to blend together easily in this collection. A hero of mine, poet Robert Hass, might have arrived with a poem but I was thrilled, not to mention affirmed, with the inclusion of the commentary he wrote for, of all places, the New York Times. It's stuck on our refrigerator, was shared with friends, photocopied by this instructor and distributed to students. The meditation he offers, on the occasion of being beat up by cops at a protest at UC Berkeley (where the former US poet laureate teaches), consider the 'contingencies' of violence against Occupy, the Free Speech Movement, Ronald Ray-gun, Prop 13. All this while he and his poet (and wife) Brenda Hillman are being brutalized he insists that the UC and public education '...belongs to the future, and to the dead who paid taxes to build one of the greatest sysems of public education in the world.' Hass tallies up the injuries, the arrests, the signs - 'Beat poets not beat poets' - and shows that he's an acknowledged legislator, indeed, at least of my world."
5/25/2013, The American, Eric Hoffer: Longshoreman Philosopher, Tom Bethell
"The True Believer was not considered a conservative book. But Hoffer soon became a conservative. He was offered an adjunct position by U.C. Berkeley, where, one afternoon a week, he talked with anyone who showed up. It was an easy task for him. It also coincided with the Free Speech Movement on campus. With his office overlooking Sproul Plaza, the center of protest, he grew to dislike the spreading rebellious mood, later summarized as 'the Sixties.' In a 1967 interview with Eric Sevareid for CBS News, he said many pro-American things and was highly critical of the Left. This outlook remained with him for the rest of his life."
5/24/2013, Wall Street Journal Online, See You in the Funny Papers, James Taranto
"And so it came to pass that the May 16, 1989, Daily Sundial, the final issue of the school year, carried a story titled 'Settlement Changes Sundial Consultation Policy.' It was illustrated by Bruce Finebaum's UC Rooster comic strip of Feb. 11, 1987.
¶
The Sundial finally got its scoop. But we managed to upstage it, as the Associated Press reported later that same day:
¶
WASHINGTON (AP)--Former Attorney General Edwin Meese III and the American Civil Liberties Union, bitter foes in the past, joined forces Tuesday to endorse freedom of expression on American college campuses.
The unlikely alliance was prompted by the settlement of a lawsuit pitting California State University at Northridge against James Taranto, a conservative former editor of the university's student newspaper....
¶
Meese once called the ACLU a 'criminals lobby' and as a deputy district attorney in 1964 had supervised the arrest of more 700 student demonstrators on the University of California's Berkeley campus during the 'Free Speech Movement.'"
5/22/2013, Good Times, Free Angela, Greg Archer
"Angela and I [Bettina Aptheker] have known each other our whole lives. We were childhood friends and that's because our parents knew each other. And we go back now 50 years. I think our first memory of each other was about 8 years old. We were active together in Brooklyn, when she was in high school during our first days of the Civil Rights movements-the sit-ins at Woolworth's and we were in a sit-in at Woolworth's in Brooklyn as a sympathetic boycott to get people not to shop there. So that's a long time. We lost touch with each other when we went to college. When she was first fired at UCLA in 1969, because of being a member of the Communist Party, I was a fairly well-known activist by then because I had co-led the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in '64 and '65. So I went down to L.A. to help her with that case, which she eventually won. She was reinstated. And then when this happened in August of 1970, I just knew that if and when she was arrested, I would drop everything."
5/22/2013, A l'encontre La breche, Etats-Unis. Un mouvement pionnier des années 1960, Samuel Farber
"Certains historiens du FSM tels que Robert Cohen [editor's note: The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s, University of California, 2002] concluent, à partir du fait, incontestable, que la majorité des membres du mouvement étudiant étaient libéraux [gauche aux Etats-Unis] - au moins lorsque le mouvement a démarré en septembre 1964 - que le FSM était un mouvement essentiellement libéral. L'analyse de Cohen est erronée pour plusieurs raisons, mais surtout parce qu'elle est statique: elle ne tient pas compte du fait que les étudiant·e·s qui étaient libéraux en septembre 1964 ont suivi les directives et l'orientation des leaders radicaux du FSM, repoussant ainsi implicitement les critiques des groupes 'modérés'. L'analyse de Cohen ne tient pas non plus compte du fait que beaucoup d'étudiants, libéraux au départ, se sont radicalisés quatre mois plus tard. Entre septembre 1964, lorsque le FSM a débuté, et janvier 1965, immédiatement après le triomphe, le nombre de militants radicaux dans 'l'enceinte académique' (campus) et dans la ville de Berkeley a été multiplié par dix, autrement dit, il avait passé de quelque 200 à quelques 2'000 participants." [It is well documented that the FSM was a broad-spectrum coalition, mostly Left-led. Note the title of a subsequent book by Cohen: "Freedom's Orator Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s." Cohen's research for the earlier book on the FSM was based substantially upon the letters that hundreds of FSM defendants wrote to Judge Crittenden at the trial in summer of 1965. Readers are invited to inspect those letters from links here: http://www.fsm-a.org/FSM_Legal.html]
Google translation: "Some historians such as Robert Cohen FSM [The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s, University of California, 2002] conclude from the fact undeniable that the majority of the student movement were liberal [left the United States] - at least when the movement began in September 1964 - the FSM was essentially a liberal movement. Cohen's analysis is flawed for several reasons, but mainly because it is static: it does not take into account the fact that the students who were liberal in September 1964 following the direction and guidance of leaders radicals WSF, pushing implicitly critical of 'moderate' groups. Cohen's analysis does not take into account the fact that many students, liberals initially became radicalized four months later. Between September 1964, when the WSF began, and in January 1965, immediately after the triumph, the number of radical activists in 'academic pregnant' (campus) and the city of Berkeley has been multiplied by ten, in other words, had spent some 200 to some 2,000 participants."
5/20/2013, Capitol Weekly, Contenders get early start on 2014 in Berkeley battleground, Nik Bonovich
"But one of those open seats already is shaping up as race to watch. It's the 15th Assembly District, where incumbent Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner is termed out. For those on the political left, this is one of the most illustrious districts in the state.
¶
The 15th Assembly District is where the Free Speech Movement began at UC Berkeley and is the home of MoveOn.org. It's the home of Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas and of one of the first Peets coffee houses. It's the home of Chez Panisse, which is owned by Alice Waters, who was part of the free speech movement and now is one of the most vocal advocates for the local organic food movement."
5/20/2013, Broadway World, The Playwrights Foundation Announces 36th Annual Bay Area Playwrights Festival, BWW News Desk
"Joan Holden - FSM; a musical celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, a producing partnership with Oakland's Stagebridge Theatre"
5/18/2013, Los Angeles Times, Reagan the Berkeley basher, Bruce Bates and Seth Rosenfeld
"Seth Rosenfeld responds:
¶
My point was not to criticize the fact that Reagan opposed the events during the 1960s on the UC campuses, where many young people were becoming more involved in political activity, both left and right. The 1964 Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley included students from across the political spectrum who affirmed their constitutional right to engage in political activity on campus - a right that students today take for granted. How the UC administration responded is a legitimate subject of debate.
¶
Rather, my point was that in criticizing the protests and the administration's handling of them, Reagan used overly broad rhetoric and unsubstantiated charges that tarnished UC as an institution, lowered the level of discourse about higher education and devalued it.
¶
The evidence of Reagan's UC-bashing is overwhelming. I provided a few examples in my article, and there are many more in my book, 'Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power,' which examines Reagan's secret alliance with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in stifling campus dissent."
5/15/2013, San Francisco Chronicle, LEAH GARCHIK, Leah Garchik
"As student editor of his college newspaper, John Antonelli sued the Fitchburg State University president over censorship and the First Amendment. Antonelli - who with Mill Valley Film Group partner Will Parrinello creates the filmed portraits of Goldman Environmental Prize awardees every year -- is getting an honorary doctorate from his alma mater. Antonelli will speak at a breakfast for 'distinguished alumni,' but he never graduated because there was such a battle over his case. He had been inspired, he says, by the Berkeley Free Speech Movement."
5/14/2013, New Voices, Ruth Tenzer Feldman on Writing, Judaism, and Why Oregon is Better Than Italy, Simi Lichtman
"I suppose I could say that the social justice component of Judaism informs nearly all of my books, as it does my perspective on life in general. Certainly Blue Thread, and the upcoming book, The Ninth Day, is steeped in Judaism. Serakh, the daughter of Asher, is a character in both books, and she comes straight from the Torah. She's listed among the 70 Jews who came to Egypt in the time of Joseph, and she's there again during the exodus about 400 years later. Nu? Such a woman deserves a midrash. She's had several over the years. Mine isn't the first. In my version, Serakh travels through time and space, which she calls the olam. As in "forever and ever" and the universe. A mind-stretching word from the liturgy.
¶
Blue Thread pairs the woman suffrage movement in 1912 Oregon with the biblical daughters of Zelophehad. The Ninth Day pairs the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964 with an attack on the Rhineland Jews during the First Crusade, and resulting self-martyrdom (kiddush ha-Shem). Yup. A bunch of Jewish themes. Judaism was the garden plot I happened to be born to tend, and so that's where I reap and sow."
5/12/2013, Los Angeles Times, McManus: Mother knows best, Doyle McManus
"Lois McManus, a moderate California Republican, is a rare species: a genuine swing voter. Her first vote for governor of California was for Earl Warren. The first president she voted for was Harry Truman, but Dwight Eisenhower coaxed her into the GOP.
¶
She voted for Ronald Reagan four times — twice for governor, twice for president. (She supported him from the outset because she thought property taxes were too high and because the Free Speech Movement had brought chaos to her beloved Berkeley.) But she also voted for Barack Obama, twice."
5/10/2013, Wonkette, In Case You Forgot Ronald Reagan Was A Dick, Rebecca Schoenkopf
"Reagan went on to charge that left-wing professors were using Berkeley's classrooms as a 'political propaganda base,' that undergraduate applications were plummeting and that professors were quitting at three times the normal rate. He offered no evidence for these charges. When Kerr countered that undergraduate applications were actually up 35% over the prior year, Reagan claimed that UC had lowered its standards to achieve those numbers. In fact, the standards had not changed since 1960."
5/10/2013, Los Angeles Times, Ronald Reagan and the fall of UC, Seth Rosenfeld
"That fall, Mario Savio and other UC Berkeley students, inspired by the civil rights movement, challenged a decades-old ban on students using the campus to advocate for off-campus causes. Kerr would later acknowledge that he should have reversed the ban quickly. As it was, thousands of students surrounded a campus police car on Sproul Plaza, held it captive for 32 hours, and then staged what became the nation's largest sit-in. By December, the Free Speech Movement, with broad campus support, had forced the university's Board of Regents to concede the ban was unconstitutional. The FSM was followed by even larger antiwar demonstrations and growing ranks of long-hairs on campus."
5/9/2013, The Peoples Voice, Guantanamo Closing-Why it's Symbolically, Spiritually and Materially Important, Don Dust
"Where is the Free Speech movement of the likes of Mario Savio, where are the campus protests at Madison and Kent State Ohio? (Think tanks were betting that as long as there was no draft there wouldn't be too many big protests.) The D.C. Mall should be flooded this summer with people demanding justice for all people."
Spring 2013, City Journal, Multiculti U., Heather Mac Donald
"Most presciently, Kerr noted that Berkeley had split into two parts: Berkeley One, an important academic institution with a continuous lineage back to the nineteenth century; and Berkeley Two, a recent political upstart centered on the antiwar, antiauthority Free Speech Movement that had occupied Sproul Plaza in 1964. Berkeley Two was as connected to the city's left-wing political class and to its growing colony of "street people" as it was to the traditional academic life of the campus. In fact, the two Berkeleys had few points of overlap.
¶
Today, echoing Kerr, we can say that there are two Universities of California: UC One, a serious university system centered on the sciences (though with representatives throughout the disciplines) and still characterized by rigorous meritocratic standards; and UC Two, a profoundly unserious institution dedicated to the all-consuming crusade against phantom racism and sexism that goes by the name of 'diversity.' Unlike Berkeley Two in Kerr's Day, UC Two reaches to the topmost echelon of the university, where it poses a real threat to the integrity of its high-achieving counterpart."
5/8/2013, The Daily Californian, Parting thoughts: intellectual self-segregation at Cal, Shawn Lewis
"How 'comfortable' was campus climate during the Free Speech Movement? During the tuition hikes protests? During Occupy Cal? During divestment from Israel? Were all of these discussions not worth having because they made some students feel uncomfortable? Or have the UC Berkeley administration and student government fallen so far out of touch with students that they believe they can discriminate which dialogues are and aren't appropriate on campus?
¶
A perennial question each generation of student leaders and campus administrators ask is, 'How can we create a real Cal community on campus?' At this point, I see more than 1,000 registered student organizations that know little to nothing about each other and rarely - if ever - interact and exchange ideas. It's no wonder that so many students tune out of campus life when their student government unanimously votes to condemn free speech and take sides on issues that students are very divided over.
¶
I will forever bleed blue and gold, but I leave Berkeley this year hoping that our new chancellor and future student leaders work harder to foster meaningful engagement between communities rather than sustain ideological isolation and protectionism."
5/7/2013, The Daily Californian, Coming together for campus justice, Alex Schmaus
"UC Berkeley has a rich history of activism - from the Free Speech Movement to the Third World Liberation Front to the divestment campaigns against South African apartheid - that we should ultimately be proud of. What many of us take for granted today - free speech, ethnic studies and the end of South African apartheid - were once deemed "controversial," publicly demonized and met with repression from authorities.
¶
Whereas the campus administration has repeatedly attempted to suppress students' activism and democracy, students and community members have nonetheless persisted in connecting many struggles in our own community to the struggle for justice in Palestine. There is a clear connection between American imperialism allied with Israel in the Middle East and the austerity, racism, militarization and violence here in the United States."
5/2/2013, Digiday, Beginnings of the Coppola Brand, Stan Adler
"American Zoetrope was located in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood three minutes from Rolling Stone's first offices and smack dab in the middle of an underground network of recording studios, music venues, bathhouses, legendary bars and empty buildings occupied by fearless winos, rats and floor-to-ceiling spider webs. The abandoned machine shops, paper factories and tire shops were turned into affordable working spaces for creative people with a cause.
¶
Steve Wax was slated to direct one of Zoetrope's first feature films and had asked me to help him research and write the script. The working title of the film was "Santa Rita," and it focused on the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the People's Park takeover, and a military/police action that was engineered to trap marching protesters and transport them to the notorious Santa Rita County Jail where they were subject to abuse."
5/1/2013, Reader Supported News, Lawrence Lessig Takes On "the Funding Fathers", Steve Weissman
"Those who fought for free speech at Berkeley in 1964 took a completely different view, which went on to prevail among non-violent anti-war activists throughout the country. We refused to uphold the state's authority. In the unforgettable words of Mario Savio, America's best-known student leader at the time, why should we be punished for breaking the law? We should all get medals for being right. His tone might seem a bit arrogant, but when Mario was right, he was right."
May-June 2013, Academe, Berkeley, the American Police State, and the Making of a Governor, Clarence Lang
"When proscriptions against oncampus advocacy for civil rights and other causes ignited the Free Speech Movement in 1964, the FBI launched a covert campaign (ultimately successful) to quarantine Savio, fire Kerr, and oust Democratic governor Edmund 'Pat' Brown. By the time Berkeley student activism transformed into protests against the deepening war in Vietnam and demands for ethnic studies, government scrutiny was firmly entrenched in the university: both the FBI and the CIA were engaged in the illegal surveillance and harassment of hundreds of students, professors, staff members, and members of the board of regents. Adding to this shameful intrusion was the fact that campus officials, including those in the upper administration, collaborated by sharing confidential information with agents and allowing them to review student records."
4/30/2013, The Huffington Post, Regretting the Region's Right Turn, John Feffer
"Joanne Landy and Tom Harrison are veterans of the Left in the United States. Active in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the 1960s, they became involved in Eastern Europe around the time of the famous manifesto of Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, two reform socialists who favored a worker’s democracy in Poland. Later, after the emergence of Solidarity, Landy and Harrison created an organization that would eventually be called Campaign for Peace and Democracy (CPD). It formed ties with peace movements in Western Europe and democracy campaigners in Eastern Europe. CPD believed that peace should not be an issue simply of the Left and support for East European dissidents should not be an issue simply of the Right.
...¶
Joanne Landy: The summer of 1981. I went to the Solidarnosc headquarters, and it reminded me instantly of our days in Berkeley and the Free Speech Movement. There was a kind of delicious chaos of people having meetings on every floor of this building that they had taken over. On one floor there were intellectuals, in another place would be steelworkers. It was just a beehive of activity of people who were disenfranchised but asserting their power through their self-organization. They were printing leaflets, having debates, and being very alive in a way that would be really alarming to the people in power. Although we didn't live in a Communist system, and we had certain democratic liberties that they didn't have, the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley struck the same kind of fear in the hearts of people who ran things in California. So that was my first impression of Poland."
4/30/2013, The Daily Californian, On graffiti and Mario Savio, Kimberly Veklerov
"I like to imagine that the graffiti I see around campus is the product of an underground, grassroots movement - one that is striving to accomplish a mysterious yet vital goal. Each time I see a piece of bathroom wall graffiti, it evokes this picture in my mind of how I think UC Berkeley might have looked fifty years ago. I like to imagine that the student body of the 1960s was wholly united, that each student threw himself "upon the gears and upon the wheel, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus," as Mario Savio declared on the steps of Sproul Hall. I like to imagine that the graffiti of today is also fighting the "odious machine."
¶
I am probably wrong on both counts.
¶
To start with the latter, not every student in 1964 was actively campaigning for free speech. While it is true that as many as 3,000 students protested together in October and November, many of them were likely fighting for different causes and many more were not involved whatsoever. Nonetheless, the idea that there could be one unified, collaborative movement is uplifting when surveying the current state of student activism, which is easily more diverse."
4/29/2013, The Spokesman-Review, Boomers haven't strayed from music that helped define generation, Rick Bonino
"The events of the boomers' formative years were particularly intense, said [Don] Adair, 66. Those years included the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr., the war in Vietnam, the free speech movement.
¶
'There was a lot for this generation to rally around,' he said. 'We took ourselves pretty seriously from a pretty early age.'"
4/29/2013, Michigan Chronicle, 'Down the Up Escalator' Author Barbara Garson On How the 99% Live in the Great Recession , AARP
"To say that Barbara Garson has led an interesting life is to sell her short, but then, the 71-year-old investigative dynamo is only 4'11".
¶
After being arrested with Mario Savio and 800 others during Berkeley's Free Speech movement in 1964, Garson spent 10 days at the Santa Rita prison farm.
¶
From 1970 to 1972, she worked at an antiwar coffee shop in Tacoma, Wash.
¶
By then, her anti-war satire MacBird! had sold more than 500,000 copies and had opened as a play in New York. Garson would go on to write four more plays. One of them, The Dinosaur Door, earned her an Obie Award in 1977. She hasn't stopped since.
¶
Every dozen years or so, she churns out another book on the plight of working Americans. Her latest, Down the Up Escalator: How the 99% Live in the Great Recession, explores how Americans are coping with the erosion of jobs, homes and savings."
4/26/2013, The Christian Science Monitor, Down the Up Escalator, David Hugh Smith
"Some may disagree with [Barbara] Garson's view that too much capital has been invested in buying out competing companies, in real estate speculation, and in other schemes that do nothing to create new businesses and jobs to replace the well-paid ones lost in manufacturing and other business sectors. Others might take issue with her statistics, which often come from sources with a strong liberal bias. But there is no arguing with what's happened to millions of people who, during an earlier era, would be thriving, not struggling to survive.
¶
And Garson is the perfect person to write a book about economic injustice. Since the '60s, she has been reporting on and advocating for populist issues. She played a key role in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and she's written three other books on work and our financial system."
4/25/2013, Richmond Times Dispatch, Editorial: Food for thought, editors
"Students recently walked out of classes to protest what they consider lower standards for admission and graduation. The protesters also complain about failures to enforce dress codes. Some attribute the profession's decline to the rise of celebrity chefs, particularly those starring on TV. The revolt of the masses has not elevated the species.
¶
This does not recall the 'free speech' movement at Berkeley - where have you gone, Mario Savio? - or the campuses that erupted during the 1960s. The Times does not reveal whether Peter, Paul and Mary entertained the demonstrators with 'If I Had a Whisk.'"
4/24/2013, The Washington Post, Inside the offbeat economics department that debunked Reinhart-Rogoff, Dylan Matthews
"That created openings, which, in 1973, the administration started to fill in an extremely unorthodox way. They decided to hire a 'radical package' of five professors: Wolff (then at the City College of New York), his frequent co-author and City College colleague Stephen Resnick, Harvard professor Samuel Bowles (who'd just been denied tenure at Harvard), Bowles's Harvard colleague and frequent co-author Herbert Gintis, and Richard Edwards, a collaborator of Bowles and Gintis's at Harvard and a newly minted PhD. All but Edwards got tenure on the spot.
¶
"One dean did mention, and whether this was a joke I'll never know, that the goal was to become the Berkeley of the east," Wolff says. "They said, 'They became famous with the free speech movement, and you five will make us famous.'"
¶
It's rare to hire five new faculty at a time. It's rarer to hire them after bargaining with them as a group. 'We actually bargained as a group of five,' Wolff recalls. 'On one side of the table, three deans, and on the other side of the table, five faculty hires. I had never experienced it before, and I have never experienced it since.'"
4/21/2013, Fellowship of Reconcilliation, The Network of Spiritual Progressives, Alan Levin
"Rabbi Lerner has been an activist leader since his days with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the '60s. He has a very long history of challenging established power elites, especially of the military-corporate empire and offering alternate strategies for a just and peaceful world. But, he also aims an often critical voice towards liberal and progressive groups for what he sees as their failure to truly embody the core values of love and caring, and for not being respectful of people's genuine spiritual and religious concerns."
4/16/2013, The Huffington Post, 'We Made A Lot of Mistakes But We Were Right' -- Robert Redford Explores Radical Questions From the 60s and Today, Rick Ayers
"Dozens of books, songs, and movies have been made about the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1965 [sic]. UC Berkeley has even opened a 'Free Speech Cafe' on campus -- cooptation of course. But several representations of the FSM convey interesting truths, from posters to photo exhibits to memoirs. And the way it is carried forward in our collective memory has its own importance."
4/15/2013, Palo Alto Online, Pacifist, Kepler's legend Ira Sandperl dies at 90,
"Sandperl became a national figure in the antiwar movement of the 1960s, according to New York Times reporter and longtime friend John Markoff. Also during that decade, Sandperl and Baez participated in efforts to desegregate schools in Mississippi and joined sit-ins during the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley, Markoff said."
4/12/2013, Jewish United Fund News, Tzivi reviews The Company You Keep, Jan Lisa Huttner
"I can accept that explanation for The Devil Wears Prada, but I don't think it's appropriate in the case of The Company You Keep. Most of the leaders of the Weather Underground and its parent organization SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) were Jewish. So I agree with activist Mark Rudd when he says: 'I do believe that the revolt of Jewish youth in the New Left of the sixties and seventies deserves to be studied and honored as an important chapter in the history of American Jews.'
¶
According to Rudd: '...two-thirds of the white Freedom Riders who traveled to Mississippi were Jewish; a majority of the steering committee of the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement were Jewish; the SDS chapters at Columbia and the University of Michigan were more than half Jewish; at Kent State in Ohio, where only 5 percent of the student body was Jewish, three of the four students shot by the National Guard in May, 1970 were Jewish... This was only twenty years after the end of World War II, and World War II and the Holocaust were our fixed reference points. We often talked about the moral imperative to not be Good Germans.'
Please note that this is definitely an asymmetrical relationship: most Jewish students were not radical activists; nevertheless, most radical activists were Jewish. If that fact is an indisputable part of the history of the Sixties, why leave it out?"
4/11/2013, Quizlet, Chapter 22: The Vietnam Years,
"Organization led by Mario Savio that focused its criticism on the nations faceless and powerful institutions
Free speech movement"
4/9/2013, The San Diego Union-Tribune, Freedom of speech? Ha! Let's tax email!, Editorial Board
"With that law set to expire next November, it's not surprising that we're hearing talk of taxing the Internet again. The irony is that it's coming from Berkeley, in the 1960s the home of the free speech movement. And what better vehicle for free speech than the Internet?"
4/9/2013, The Huffington Post, Pedagogy of the Depressed, Joseph A. Palermo
"Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement. One of the leaders of the FSM, Mario Savio, throughout his life held up an ideal for public higher education both as a Cal student and a member of the faculty of CSU, Sonoma. This push toward privatization, standardization, and automation of the university experience represents everything Savio identified as being wrong with higher education. It's as if the baby boomers, having gotten their own quality schooling for a fraction of the price students pay today, are kicking the ladder out from under their children and grandchildren and substituting it with a shoddy, privatized product to which they, in their youth, never would have succumbed."
4/8/2013, Sonoma State Star, Week-long protest fights sex trafficking, Micaelyn Richmeier
"Human trafficking rarely permeates the life of the average United States citizen, however from Wednesday, April 3 to Thursday, April 4, the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship stood a 24-hour vigil to raise awareness about this crime.
¶
According to Samantha Sassera, a SSU student and Inner Varsity member, at least one protester remained on a raised black box in the center of the Mario Savio Speaking Corner for a full 24 hours in predetermined shifts. Other students and protestors sat and stood around the Mario Savio Corner and held up signs with statistics and facts about human trafficking.
¶
Passing students were met by tablers and were invited to make their own signs and join the protest, or post them in the surrounding grass area."
4/8/2013, SF Gate Blog, 2013 Volkswagen Beetle convertible - not as retro as you might think, Michael Taylor
"Now we have the third generation of the droptop car - the 2013 Beetle convertible - and, for some reason, VW has chosen a marketing plan that capitalizes on the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies. Three different models, each corresponding to one of those decades, are offered, each its own distinctive color and upholstery scheme. I can see the Fifties (sock hops, Eisenhower, juke boxes), the Sixties (lotsa blue jeans and rock-and-roll, the Free Speech Movement, Vietnam, although I don't think the last two came into VW's marketing dream), but I'm not so sure about the Seventies."
4/8/2013, Scoop, An Evening with Joan Baez - Auckland and Wellington concerts, Elephant Publicity
"Baez is recognized as an outstanding, courageous activist whose beliefs can't be separated from her music. She sang about freedom and civil rights from the backs of flatbed trucks in Mississippi and on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at Dr Martin Luther King's march on Washington in 1963. Baez brought the Free Speech Movement into the spotlight at Berkeley; organised resistance to the war in South East Asia, travelling to Hanoi; performed at numerous benefit concerts and recently, Baez performed at Occupy Wall Street in New York and contributed to the 'Occupy This' album."
4/5/2013, The Financial Times, Second coming, Matthew Garrahan
"He [Jerry Brown] was 21 in 1960 when he came out of the seminary and his father was embarking on the first of his two terms as California governor. Brown senior built new freeways, aqueducts and expanded access to higher education: the Washington Post recently credited him with turning California into 'America's postwar industrial Eden'. He beat Richard Nixon in his 1964 gubernatorial victory - another candidate, like Reagan, who would go on to be president - yet his final term was marred by the Watts riots and growing concern about the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. The movement galvanised those protesting against the Vietnam war but horrified many voters in a state which was then moderately Republican. When the elder Brown ran for a third term he was beaten in a landslide."
4/2/2013, Daily Californian, Let freedom ring, Maura Chen
"america the brave still fears what we don't know"
4/1/2013, The Spokesman-Review, Boomers in line to change the world; someone else got there first, Mike Vlahovich
"'I contend,' he [James Curtiss] said during our phone conversation, 'that the protest movement was started by Mario Savio and people at Berkeley who were our generation. Our generation started the whole '60s movement. They (the boomers) kind of attached on afterwards.'"
4/1/2013, The Beat, On the Scene: Unpacking comics history at the Asbury Park Comicon 2013, Peter Sanderson
"[Jay] Lynch recounted how he first saw Harvey Kurtzman's original version of Mad in 1953. 'When I saw Mad, I decided to be a cartoonist.' But Lynch said he initially did one-panel gag cartoons. 'I didn't start doing comix until Zap came out,' Robert Crumb's landmark underground comic. Lynch likened underground comix to other cultural phenomena of the 1960s, including the Free Speech movement and the taboo-breaking comedy of Lenny Bruce."
4/1/2013, Sonoma County Gazette, Letters to Sonoma County Gazette - April 2013, Robert Jacob
"Occupy Sebastopol and the City jointly created the Peacetown Agreement in 2011, and OS erected a tent at the Mario Savio Free Speech Plaza to support free speech and oppose corporate personhood. The tent provided 24/7 community education around the responsibility of government to promote general health, safety, and welfare of the community, independent of financial influence.
¶
I was moved by members of the community who spoke at the council meeting and shared their stories about Occupy, the significance of its efforts, and the dedication of its volunteers who have spent years educating our community on truly American democratic values.
¶
Occupy Sebastopol will work with the city to replace the tent with a permanent fixture symbolizing free speech and continue to utilize the space as a grounds for education and information sharing. One idea several councilmembers and I favored was a circle of benches, which would serve all community members and visitors, and promote collaboration."
3/30/2013, NewsBusters, Kurtz: 32 Years Ago Today, Berkeley Students Cheered Upon Learning Reagan Was Shot, Tom Blumer
"I've already written about the famous fracas over the visit of Reagan's U.N. ambassador, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, to the Berkeley campus. It wasn't surprising that radicals tried to shout her down. What shocked was that even faculty members started arguing that 'oppressors' have no free-speech rights (this, in the birthplace of the free-speech movement). That was the beginning of campus 'political correctness,' before the phenomenon even had a name. Obviously, some terrible deformation had developed within liberalism - a rejection, in the name of freedom, of the very principles of liberty, along with a mental migration from America itself. Meanwhile, the real victims of oppression, the brave dissidents within the Soviet Union, saw Reagan and Kirkpatrick as heroes."
3/29/2013, FrontPageMagazine.com, 'Israel Lobby' Threatening Free Speech at Berkeley?, Lee Kaplan
"Announcing that, 'I come first to discuss this subject as a Palestinian and a Muslim,' Bazian launched into the usual accolades surrounding the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley during the 1960s. Far from being a free speech advocate facing censorship, Bazian is an activist who uses his academic position to advance an anti-Israel agenda. A promoter of the BDS movement and executive director of the Holy Land Foundation-linked American Muslims for Palestine, he is infamous for having called for an 'Intifada in this country!' at a San Francisco anti-war rally in 2004."
3/17/2013, The Daily Californian, Speakers at The Conscious Network advocate change, Natalie Reyes
"Sam Clayton, one of the Conscious Living Collective co-founders, was the last to speak. Here was our Mario Savio moment, The Conscious Network's attempt at a revolutionary speech. This was the time to remember that social change and improvement begins in each individual, that now is the time to develop exemplary behavioral models. We could be a city - or at least a bunch of socially conscious young people - upon a hill."
3/15/2013, The Austin Chronicle, East Cameron Folkcore, Doug Freeman
"East Cameron Folkcore's sophomore album offers a bold statement, not only for the band, but for the times. Opening with lines from Mario Savio's famous 1964 "put your bodies upon the gears" speech at UC Berkeley, the local 11-piece outfit plays voice to a new generation of disaffected youth saddled by debt, bleak job prospects, endless war, and disenfranchisement by the corporate-capitalist structure."
3/12/2013, San Francisco Chronicle, Mark Kitchell's 'Fierce Green Fire', Jonathan Kuperberg
"In 2001, San Francisco filmmaker Mark Kitchell had just sold his Oscar-nominated 1990 documentary, 'Berkeley in the Sixties,' to television for the third or fourth time. With some cash on hand, he spent a few years researching the history of the environmental movement.
¶
Soon he was running out of money, so he put aside his pet project to put his kids through school. Kitchell returned to the venture in 2008 and worked on it full time for four years, compiling 90 archival material sources into a 114-minute film, 'A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet.'"
3/11/2013, The Nation, Exchange: 'Stripping Down and Lighting Up', Seth Rosenfeld and Steve Wasserman
"I don't claim that the FBI 'significantly disrupted' the New Left or put 'the kibosh' on student protest. I do show that the FBI's dirty tricks not only failed to stop the Free Speech Movement and other protests, but backfired and strengthened the student movement. Thus, Hoover inadvertantly drew Savio to Berkeley."
3/7/2013, The California Aggie, Law students assess policies, progress since pepper spraying, Kelley Dreschler
"Cisneros presented the findings from the Robinson-Edley report, a UC system-wide review focused on free expression policies on all UC campuses.
¶
The report is concerned mostly with civil disobedience rather than protests and includes a section discussing protests that violate university regulations and are considered civil disobedience.
¶
'Fifty years after the Free Speech Movement, students continue to struggle with violence as a response to lawful protest on UC campuses,' Cisneros said."
3/7/2013, Daily Californian, Bill Walton gives lessons on life, John Wooden and Adderall in speech at Berkeley, Michael Rosen
"'If you want to find where you're going, find someone who's on their way back,' Walton said to the students, encouraging them to take advantage of the opportunity to speak to former secretary of labor Robert Reich.
¶
He offered other nuggets of wisdom to the young populace.
¶
'Learn from the master teachers; that's how you'll get to the promised land,' Walton said. 'Look in the mirror: Are you happy with the things you control? Your fitness level, your preparation?'
¶
Walton's Grateful Dead obsession and Mario Savio devotion ('Mario Savio died for your sins,' Walton said, multiple times) leads one to see how Walton would have fit right in on the Cal campus in the late '60s. In fact, Walton said himself that he routinely asked his legendary coach John Wooden if he could leave UCLA after basketball season to come study at Berkeley."
3/1/2013, The Brooklyn Rail, A Groundswell of Teachers Wants More, Ari Paul
"At present, the leadership of the UFT and the AFT do what any pragmatic union does: Fight to increase the pay and benefits inside the existing system. But what anyone interested in education as a public service needs is a collective, Mario Savio-like rejection of the idea of education as an industry, with teachers being the mere employees, and students the raw material. Any other path turns the union into a mirror image of its supposed adversary, a service-oriented entity that deals with monetary transactions for company employees-rather than a social group of like-minded thinkers participating in a democracy."
3/1/2013, Al Jazeera, Three-fifths of the American Dream, Paul Rosenberg
"And what enterprise is that? It's the one most clearly staked out by then-president of the University of California, Clark Kerr, in his 1963 book, The Uses of the University, in which he wrote:
¶
The production, distribution, and consumption of 'knowledge' in all its forms is said to account for 29 percent of gross national product... and 'knowledge production' is growing at about twice the rate of the rest of the economy... What the railroads did for the second half of the last century and the automobile for the first half of this century may be done for the second half of this century by the knowledge industry: that is, to serve as the focal point for national growth.
¶
Kerr was hardly alone in speaking like this - he was just more focused, sustained and articulate than most. But it does shed valuable light on a famous passage from a speech by Mario Savio of the Free Speech Movement in December 1964:
¶
We have an autocracy which runs this university. It's managed. We asked the following: if President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn't he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received - from a well-meaning liberal - was the following: He said, "Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his board of directors?" That's the answer! Now, I ask you to consider: if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the board of directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I'll tell you something: the faculty are a bunch of employees, and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw material that don't mean to have any process upon us, don't mean to be made into any product, don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organised labour, be they anyone! We're human beings! "
2/28/2013, SFWeekly, The Write Stuff: Julia Vinograd on Grandpa Ben's Bookcase, Evan Karp
"Poet Julia Vinograd attended the famous Iowa Writers Workshop before moving to Berkeley during the era of the Free Speech Movement and anti-war protests. Not wanting an academic career and resisting mainstream assimilation, Julia has spent 40+ years as a street poet in Berkeley, hawking poems one book at a time (she has written more than 50 of them) to passersby. Recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Berkeley City Council, she is often referred to as the unofficial Poet Laureate of Berkeley."
2/28/2013, Ashland Daily Tidings, Grizzly Peak Winery offers limited-edition wines with proceeds benefiting theaters, Janet Eastman
"Goines' artwork has been reproduced in professional publications and acquired by private collectors and museums. The Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland owns his 'Mr. Espresso,' a poster he created in 2000 that depicts a woman making her morning coffee. See the artist's website at www.goines.net.
¶
Goines started St. Hieronymus Press in Berkeley in 1968 after getting kicked out of U.C. Berkeley because of his involvement in the Free Speech Movement.
¶
Goines' mother, Wanda, is an artist who lives in Cave Junction. His late father, Warren, was an engineer and professor.
¶
"We've known David for nearly 40 years and admired his work," says Al Silbowitz. 'We were art-gallery owners for a time in Berkeley. We were subscribers to the (Berkeley) Rep and now for years to OSF.'"
2/27/2013, Daily Californian, Destination: Berkeley, Jillian Wertheim
"Capucine Riom is one of those students. A Parisian studying at King's College London, Riom was drawn to UC Berkeley for its reputation in her field, international politics, and for the school's history.
¶
'All the big movements started here, like the Free Speech Movement,' Riom said. 'It's a spirit I wanted to embrace.'
¶
Like most students studying abroad (or just plain studying), Riom struggles to find the right balance between work and leisure. Having San Francisco a mere BART ride away can be a tempting distraction, but Riom insists that she loves being on campus.
¶
'The facilities are beautiful, and I am really fascinated by my classes - people are so engaging during discussion sections.' Riom said. 'And I love the sense of pride here; everyone likes to wear the school colors, which is very unlike the students back home.'"
2/24/2013, The News-Gazette, Comic pays tribute to a major voice for equality, Melissa Merli
"Hamilton theorizes that there was a convergence at the meeting of Mr. [John Lee] Johnson and Mr. [Heinz] von Foerster, that the latter was influenced by the civil rights activist and by what happened at the meeting. The next fall, von Foerster would begin teaching at influential classes on science, art and activism.
¶
On the back cover of his comic, Hamilton tells of the paths taken by four other people who were at the meeting, among them Mike Rossman, a key planner of University of California-Berkeley's historic Free Speech Movement in 1964. He died in 2008.
¶
Mr. von Foerster died in 2002 in California; in his obituary, The New York Times called him a leader in the field of information theory, or cybernetics."
2/19/2013, UC Berkeley NewsCenter, The Oscars? Berkeley adjunct's been there, won that, Steve Hockensmith
"While not exactly a Cinderella story, [Mark] Berger's own life has had a few near-magical transformations. The San Francisco native has gone from committed campus radical to would-be scientist and academic to Oscar-winning sound man to teacher.
¶
The journey began in 1960, when Berger began his studies at Berkeley, expecting to major in physics. Arriving just as the Free Speech Movement was being born, his time was consumed by demonstrations and mathematics."
2/15/2013, Esquire, Survivalist Nation, Charles P. Pierce
"The connective tissue between these two pieces is the simple historical fact -- which Tanenhaus at least acknowledges -- that, for what it perceived to be a political advantage, and for what turned out, alas to be one, the Republican party allied itself with the detritus of American apartheid. It adopted the historic political philosophies that guided American apartheid, and it adapted them to suit its political requirements in different parts of the country at different times in history. And it was what became known as 'movement conservatism,' starting in the ashes of the Goldwater campaign in 1965, that gave the essential energy to this transformation. Tanenhaus at least admits that this was the result of a deliberate series of acts. Usually, modern conservatives deny any of this really happened at all, argue that it was really Teh Librulz who did it (Robert Byrd was in the Klan!), or treat the whole thing as a god-kissed reaction to the excesses of progressive politics and the fact that many of these folks were the only people in the 1960's who couldn't get laid. Scholars vary on that last point.
¶
(Although, honestly, you can't connect the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the Watts and Detroit riots in a 'politics of counter-cultural protest,' as Tanenhaus does, without squinting really hard through the movement conservatism lens that you are ostensibly taking apart. You can't even really connect Watts and Detroit that way, except that, you know, black people were involved in both episodes.)"
2/13/2013, Salem News, Newsic Release: Think Humanity, Tim King
"(SALEM) - The powers of art, courage, music and humanity collide in this new Newsic release by Agron Belica or 'Ace', Think Humanity. The simple concept that benefits all people is simply lost on far too many. All human beings are born with the capacity to love and aid others, yet the powers of fascism and racism and polarization are strong and determined, which is why we must meet those challenges with an equal amount of strength and inflexible dedication.
¶
The piece begins with one of my absolute all time favorite quotes, Mario Savio, an activist at Berkeley University in the mid 1960's, sets it into motion.
¶
'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!'"
2/11/2013, Ashland Daily Tidings, Serious about snakes, Janet Eastman
"Grizzly Peak Winery in Ashland commissioned artist David L. Goines, who grew up in Grants Pass, to create illustrations of all 12 Lunar Zodiac animal spirits for wine labels to raise money for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where OSF's 'White Snake' was staged in November and December.
¶
Goines' artwork has been reproduced in professional publications and acquired by private collectors and museums. The Schneider Museum of Art owns his "Mr. Espresso," a poster he created in 2000 that depicts a woman making an espresso. See the artist's website at www.goines.net.
¶
Goines, who started St. Hieronymus Press in Berkeley in 1968 after getting kicked out of U.C. Berkeley because of his involvement in the Free Speech Movement, may attend a release reception for the special-labeled wine in Ashland later this month and in Berkeley in March."
2/6/2013, San Marcos Mercury, Sanitizing Black History Every February, Lamar W. Hankins
"I don't like to read about Black history during February each year because most of what I find is so sanitized. Black history is full of the stuff of human history - courage, anger, intellect, rebellion, fear, intimidation, foolishness, agitation and a hundred other descriptors. But what I hear less about than almost anything is agitation. Dick Gregory used to say that an agitator is that thing in a washing machine that gets the dirt out. Others (notably Jim Hightower) have used that same idea to explain why agitators are needed. The earliest use of that formulation that I have found is recounted by Mike Miller, a veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, SNCC, and the Industrial Areas Foundation (Saul Alinsky's organization), in an article about working with SNCC in 1963 in Mississippi:"
1/29/2013, The Rafu Shimpo, TOMI-TALK: The Character of the Nisei Soldier, Delia Tomino Nakayama
"As a Hapa Yonsei, I can't help but be awed by their integrity and bravery. Though I am the grand-niece of Dr. Hajime Uyeyama of Berkeley (who practiced just below the racial dividing line on old Grove Street and treated African Americans and politicos like Mario Savio, in addition to fellow Nikkei), and gratefully inherited his outspoken 'no-no' ways, I cannot fathom what decision I would have made were I an 18-year-old male during those treacherous times."
1/24/2013, TrainingZone, Lance Armstrong, Mario Savio and the Odious Machine, Ian Day
"I was reminded of Mario Savio's words and the idea of interdependence last week when absorbed by the Lance Armstrong interview with Oprah Winfrey (for more details click here). Lance, stripped of his seven Tour de France cycling victories for drug-taking, made a particularly interesting comment: 'I didn't invent the culture [of drug-taking], but I didn't try to stop the culture' Lance was faced with an 'odious machine', the institutionalised use of drugs within competitive cycling. However, in contrast to Mario Savio's guidance, Lance Armstrong continued to take part and to take part very actively."
1/20/2013, Infoshop News, A (Brief) People's History of Gun Control, Kevin Carson
"Foreshadowing current groups like Copwatch and Cop Block, the Panthers in 1966 organized armed patrols of Oakland streets with rifles and shotguns, stopping to witness police interactions with local residents and provide information and offers of legal assistance when necessary.
¶
In 1967 Republican state assemblyman Don Mulford of Oakland, a vocal enemy of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the Black Panthers, responded with a bill to prohibit publicly carrying firearms in California. The BPP's Bobby Seale protested the bill by leading a Panther detachment, armed with .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns and .45-caliber pistols, up the steps of the statehouse ('All right, brothers, we're going inside'), through its doors, and into the public viewing area. There Seale read a statement denouncing Mulford's bill as an attempt "at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror and repression of black people," and warning that 'the time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.'
¶
Mulford's gun control bill was signed into law three months later by Governor Ronald Reagan."
1/18/2013, San Jose Mercury News, Magid: Facebook's 'graph search' gives users a small piece of big data, Larry Magid
I wasn't yet a UC Berkeley student during the 1964 Free Speech Movement, but I do remember one of the slogans,'Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.' It was the phrase printed on the IBM card that the university handed out to students for class registration. That phrase became a rallying call by protesters because it associated big computing with the big university. Back then, computers were only used by big institutions like universities, the government and big companies.
1/18/2013, San Francisco Chronicle, The FBI and protesters, then and now, Seth Rosenfeld
"As FBI files released to me pursuant to several lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act show, and as the courts in those cases concluded, the bureau went far beyond legitimate investigation of the 1964 Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley and sought to 'disrupt' and 'neutralize' it under Hoover's Cointelpro operation.
¶
FBI agents collected tax returns, phone data and medical information on Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio and targeted him for disruption because they deemed him 'subversive,' a term with no legal definition. Bureau officials abused their power in an effort to get UC President Clark Kerr fired because they disagreed with his politics and handling of campus matters. The FBI secretly gave Gov. Ronald Reagan (an FBI informer in his Hollywood days) intelligence reports he could use to crack down on campus dissent."
1/16/2013, Truthout, A Window Into Infiltration: The FBI Informant File of Sheila Louise O'Connor, Aaron Leonard
"The RU [Revolutionary Union] got its start in the Bay Area in 1968 and 1969, through the initiative of political activists and Berkeley Free Speech Movement veterans Steve Hamilton and Robert Avakian. Along with them, were Stanford English Professor Bruce Franklin, his wife Jane Franklin, and ex-Communist Party and ex-Progressive Labor Party member Leibel Bergman. The group navigated the 1969 collapse of Students for Democratic Society (SDS) and came out the other end poised to expand. By the early 70s, this grouping of mainly recent college and graduate students was becoming the most influential Maoist organization in the country, and its members were beginning to insert themselves into various working-class communities and industries, as well as into larger social movements."
1/15/2013, PopMatters, 'Conversations with Greil Marcus' Are Not Conversations About Greil Marcus, Greg Cwik
"In 1984 he spoke with Mark Kitchell about his time spent with the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at University of California, Berkeley, which carved a groove into his person that he has yet to fill. The conversation is oddly devoid of personal injection or feeling, yet it so subtly tells so much about Marcus. He speaks the way he writes-dryly, with wry humor and just enough a sense of distance to lend credibility and omnipresent, objective journalism to his voice:"
1/14/2013, Calgary Herald, Recalling the heyday of hippies, Kevin Brooker
"To some historians, the sudden onset of hippie style marked the death knell for authentic American dissent. Many principals of the Berkeley free speech movement, who were also politically serious opponents of the Vietnam War, were eventually convinced that their earnest campaigns were discredited by what they perceived as a clownish and hedonistic makeover."
1/13/2013, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 'Subversives': Seth Rosenfeld details the intense search for commies in 1960s California, Dan Simpson
"Even if the reader lived during that period in California, and was paying close attention to what was going on, 'Subversives' is a brilliant and eye-opening account of the era. The FBI files Mr. Rosenfeld drew on are a fascinating supplement to what may already have been known. What the FBI mounted against people in that period is still blood-chilling, particularly as Americans go through the 'terrorist' witch hunts of our time with government agencies such as the FBI, CIA and Department of Defense as untrammeled as the FBI was in the 1960s, and armed with greater technical sophistication.
¶
Dan Simpson, a retired U.S. ambassador, is a Post-Gazette associate editor "
1/12/2013, The Reality-Based Community, RIP Aaron Swartz, Michael O'Hare
"Aaron isn't the only casualty of this system, either: people are dying all over the world for want of drugs trapped in the patent system. Maybe we should think of him as channeling Mario Savio: 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! ….you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and …make it stop!'
¶
Joe Hill would say, 'Don't mourn for Aaron, organize!' We need Aaron's Law, a reform of intellectual property law that recognizes the world the way it is, more than we need anything except climate stabilization; indeed, if we don't get Aaron's Law we will not be able to do the politics (or the science) that could save the planet, or whatever your favorite piece of collective work may be. If you read, write, sing, listen, or think, you will be talking about this with your other friends who do those things and watch for a chance to get engaged. I'm looking, too, and when I find some, I'll post them here."
1/12/2013, The Charleston Gazette, Pictures can redefine W.Va., photographer says, Douglas Imbrogno
"She [Betty Rivard] pursued a degree in political science with a specialty in political theory. She became involved in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, which led to her arrest in 1964 -- along with 800 other students occupying an administration building. She pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of resisting arrest. ('What that meant is, if you went limp and allowed yourself to be carried out of the building, that was considered 'resisting arrest,'' she said.)
¶
Cameras continued their appeal in college, she remembered. 'There was a darkroom in the student union you could use for 50 cents an hour. I went in there and played with some old negatives of my family. Enough to get a taste of it.'"
12/30/2012, The Wrap, Irving Saraf, Oscar-Winning Documentarian, Dies at 80, Todd Cunningham
"He made a number of films documenting the times, including an examination of the civil rights movement and a series on American poets. In 1965, he returned to his native Poland to film a portrait of people living under a communist government at the height of the Cold War. In 1968, he traveled to Cuba to co-produce and co-direct a film about Fidel Castro. Other films from Saraf included 'Take This Hammer,' about James Baldwin; 'From Protest to Resistance,' about the political activists Mario Savio, Stokley Carmichael and David Harris; and 'Losing Just The Same,' about an African-American family in Oakland.
¶
In 1971, Zaentz asked to him to help start Fantasy Films, an offshoot of his successful music company Fantasy Records. Saraf headed the company when it produced 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest,' 'Amadeus' and the original animated 'Lord of the Rings,' directed by Ralph Bakshi. He was instrumental in the launch of the Saul Zaentz Film Center post-production facility in Berkeley."
12/28/2012, San Francisco Chronicle, Berkeley struggles to retrofit City Hall, Carolyn Jones
"Old City Hall, at Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Center Street, is among the grandest buildings in town. It was built just outside downtown, on the banks of Strawberry Creek, at a time when optimistic cities across the country were erecting ornate and expensive civic monuments to raise their visibility and morale, Thompson said.
¶
The building was designed by the same architects who built San Francisco City Hall, and shares many of the details, such as the dome, high ceilings and grand staircase.
¶
The site of countless Berkeley historic moments, such as the Vietnam War and Free Speech Movement debates, and more recently the Marine recruiting protests, it's on the National Register of Historic Places and is among the first city-designated landmarks.
¶
But its structural limitations became evident in the 1970s, and the city moved its administrative offices a block away, leasing the building to the school district. "
12/23/2012, San Francisco Chronicle, Best books of 2012: 100 recommended books, John McMurtrie
"Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power, by Seth Rosenfeld (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 734 pages; $40). Rosenfeld's deftly woven account presents a new and encompassing perspective of the UC Berkeley student revolt, including a revisionist view of Ronald Reagan and a detailed picture of FBI corruption."
12/21/2012, Berkeleyside, The best books of 2012, as chosen by Berkeleyside editors, Berkeleyside Editors
"The best non-fiction book I read this year was Seth Rosenfeld's remarkable Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power. Not only is this a fantastic book about Berkeley from the late 1940s through the 1980s, it's a stunning portrait of the nexus of political ambition, government overreach, and political resistance. Rosenfeld spent more than 30 years working on this book (he looked at his first FBI documents when he was a Cal undergrad working for The Daily Californian) and has woven the stories of Ronald Reagan, J. Edgar Hoover, Mario Savio and Clark Kerr into a readable page turner (see Berkeleyside's full review [http://www.berkeleyside.com/2012/08/29/the-fbis-secret-war-against-berkeley/])."
12/19/2012, OpEdNews, Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, Stephen Lendman
"Free expression in all forms are fundamental in democratic societies.
¶
All other freedoms are risked without free speech, a free press, freedom of thought, culture, intellectual inquiry, and right to challenge government authority peacefully.
¶
In the 1960s, anti-war and civil rights activism inspired Berkeley's Free Speech Movement (FSM). It began in 1964. UC Berkeley students protested banned on-campus political activity.
¶
They demanded free expression and academic freedom rights. Unprecedented student activism followed.
¶
FSM was a student initiative. Faculty, administration and local government officials joined. UC students earlier protested House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC: 1947 - 1975) anti-communist witch hunts.
¶
Berkeley's 1964 fall term included several dozen students returning from Mississippi's 'Freedom Summer.' Racially motivated discrimination and violence horrified them.
¶
They bonded with other student activists. Berkeley's activist SLATE (1958 - 1966) was precursor to FSM. Civil rights and International Workers of the World (IWW) leaders supported it. So did Joan Baez and Bettina Aptheker. She later became UC Santa Cruz Feminist Studies Professor."
12/17/2012, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Jim Benet, Brett Wilkison
"Jim Benet, a former San Francisco Chronicle and KQED reporter who covered higher education in a tumultuous period in California and who earlier forged his own leftist politics as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, died Sunday in Santa Rosa.
¶
He was 98. The cause was a blood infection, according to his son.
¶
Benet, who retired in Sonoma County and was active in food, wine and gardening circles, came from a prominent East Coast literary and military family.
¶
He forged his own path as a respected newspaper and TV reporter in the Bay Area, covering the Free Speech movement on the UC Berkeley campus in the early 1960s and two decades of upheaval that would follow in college and political worlds."
12/15/2012, The Huffington Post, 'Art Of The Dead': New Book Celebrates 60s Poster Art,
"The coffee table book tells the story of poster art through the Grateful Dead, which frequently partnered with artists, and offers a chronological evolution of the art from the band's beginning in 1965 through Jerry Garcia's death in 1995. The book includes interviews and profiles of the decade's biggest artists, including Rick Griffin, Stanley 'Mouse' Miller, Alton Kelley, Wes Wilson and Victor Moscoso. It also offers essays by Greil Marcus, Mickey Hart and Peter Coyote.
¶
But the real treat here is the four-color, iconic images contained in the book, which 'traces the cultural, political, and historical influences of posters as art back to Japanese wood blocks through Bell Epoque, on to the Beatniks, the Free Speech Movement, and the Acid Tests,' according to author Phil Cushway, owner of Artrock, the most extensive collection of rock posters in the world. Over the years, Cushway has published over 500 prints for bands such as The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and The Grateful Dead."
12/13/2012, American Journalism Review, A Marathon Freedom of Information Fight, Sarah Kraut
In the Sixties, an era defined by the counterculture and social revolution, the University of California, Berkeley became a center of student activism. It was home to the Free Speech Movement, one of the era's most influential student protests, and a wealth of civil rights and antiwar demonstrations. It was when Ronald Reagan, in his first public office as the state's governor, campaigned to clean up the 'mess' at Berkeley.
¶
In 1981, Seth Rosenfeld, a young journalist at UC Berkeley's campus newspaper, the Daily Californian, received a call from his editor that would immerse him in this history and come to define the next three decades of his career. The newspaper had obtained about 10,000 pages of documents on protests at the university through a Freedom of Information Act request it filed in 1977--and the editor was giving Rosenfeld first crack at them.
¶
The request had been submitted in the wake of the Watergate scandal and Church Committee Hearings in the mid-1970s, the groundbreaking congressional hearings led by Sen. Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, on domestic surveillance by the FBI, CIA and military agencies.
¶
'I knew on the one hand the FBI had been found to be involved in unlawful surveillance and harassment of people involved in First Amendment activities elsewhere, and on the other hand that the University of California had been the scene of some of the nation's earliest and biggest protests of the '50s and '60s,' Rosenfeld recalls. 'So I was wondering, what was the FBI up to behind the scenes at Berkeley?'"
12/12/2012, San Francisco Chronicle, Ancient and modern history, revisited, Jon Carroll
"It was at the Bear's Lair that I was invited to be a member of the Communist Party. This was at a time when being a 'card-carrying member of the Communist Party' was a big bad thing, a career ruiner. Not that I had a career to ruin. I didn't care about such things. We were going to bring peace and equality to all the nations of the world, starting with the UC campus.
¶
Yup, that was the beginning of the Free Speech Movement, still a benchmark of student activism. The FSM won its fight, by the way; sometimes student movements do succeed.
¶
Anyway, I was having lunch with Bettina Aptheker, who was a person of consequence in the FSM (I was a foot soldier) and the daughter of a prominent Marxist historian and his labor union organizer wife. She was sounding me out about the exact nature of my political views. My political views did not include an affection for Soviet Russia.
¶
I mentioned the Berlin Wall. That was something of a sore point.
¶
Anyway, I declined the offer to come to a meeting. The honor was to be asked, of course, but I was less curious than perhaps I should have been. I went on to become a purveyor of popular journalism; she went on to become a Marxist historian.
¶
I have always been envious of red diaper babies, though. What ferment! Oh well, I'll always have the Bear's Lair in my heart, if not actually, you know, where it used to be."
12/6/2012, Las Vegas Sun, Young, progressive Las Vegas organizer wins national award for activism, Tovin Lapan
"'We had conservative ranchers, Native tribes and progressives concerned about water conservation, a wide-ranging group,' Watts said. 'But organizing is all about coalition-building, being able to find ways to put aside differences and getting people to unify around common goals.'
¶
Lynn Hollander Savio, Mario Savio's widow and member of the lecture fund's board, said Watts was chosen for the award in part because of his strong track record of producing results at a young age.
¶
'Howard has created a really strong record for himself in terms of getting things accomplished and getting different people together,' Lynn Savio said. 'We are particularly impressed by how many new groups and people who tend to be marginalized that he has brought into the political process.'
¶
Watts may be exhibiting the signs of a promising future in organizing, but he already is thinking of the big picture and what happens beyond his work.
¶
'One thing I said in my speech at the awards ceremony was, 'If we're not passing the torch, we are dropping the ball,'' Watts said. 'We need to look outside for new leaders, and we need to spend more time training and developing the next leaders.'"
12/04/2012, The Huffington Post, Bob Costas Learns the Right Time to Talk About Guns in America: Never, Will Bunch
"So if Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were afraid to talk about guns (and they were), no wonder America was so shocked when Bob Costas spoke Sunday night, shocked that a man in his position didn't know the right time to talk about guns in this great nation.
¶
Never.
¶
Call me crazy, but I'm not sure that's how it should be. I was only 5 years old in 1964, but over the years I've read and seen one of the greatest speeches on the cause of free speech, which was delivered that year by a Berkeley college student named Mario Savio. As the years pass, I think of his words frequently. He said:
¶
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.
¶
Look, I'm a politics fanatic and a sports fanatic -- and I don't want to see stark political commentary become a regular halftime feature. But every once in while, there is something that that, in Savio's words, makes you so sick at heart that exercising your right to free speech -- in a place and at a time that will shock some people, to wake them out of their slumber -- isn't just brave, but it is absolutely necessary.
¶
Bob Costas threw himself on the gears Sunday night, even as the me-too machine of 'popular' opinion chewed him up. It was absolutely the right thing to do."
12/4/2012, Sonoma State Star, Free speech and leadership at SSU - practice what you teach, Shepard Bliss
"It remains to be seen if SSU's administration will improve its respect for free speech, even for free press. One example last year was when the Star published articles on the ShameOnSSU protest against banker Sandy Weill buying an honorary doctorate by giving $12 million to the Green Music Center. The newspaper suspiciously disappeared from newsstands, which SSU staff were seen taking away. I wrote about the protests, which I helped organize, in a local weekly and nationally."
12/3/2012, Agitano, Die Jahrestage aus Politik und Weltgeschehen: 3. Dezember,
"1964: Bei der Räumung des besetzten Verwaltungsgebäudes der Universität von Kalifornien in Berkeley werden 773 Studierende, die sich im Free Speech Movement vereinigt haben, verhaftet. Tausende Studierende solidarisieren sich daraufhin mit den Festgenommenen, ebenso wie 800 Professoren, die sich für die Zahlung der Kaution entscheiden."
11/30/2012, UC News Center, In Savio's spirit, Van Jones calls for end to 'silence from the left', Barry Bergman
"'We just won a tremendous victory because we didn't bow down, and buckle down, and hand the country over to the worst people ever born,' Jones told an appreciative crowd of several hundred in Pauley Ballroom, site of this year's Mario Savio Memorial Lecture. His 30-minute speech was fiery, funny and hyperbolic -- sometimes all at once -- and firmly in the tradition of Savio lecturers like Robert Reich, Elizabeth Warren, Robert Kennedy Jr. and Seymour Hersh.
¶
'It's our time,' he told them. 'It's our time'"
¶
Taking the lectern after brief talks by a pair of younger activists, the 44-year-old Jones contrasted the 'deeper patriotism' of their generation with the 'cheaper patriotism' of the Tea Party movement, and urged those on the left to step up the pressure on elected officials -- including Obama -- to address pressing issues like racism, poverty and climate change."
11/28/2012, The Daily Californian, Van Jones, award recipients speak at 16th annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture, Sara Khan
Hundreds crowded into Pauley Ballroom for the annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture Thursday evening, given this year by Anthony "Van" Jones, who served on President Barack Obama's Council on Environmental Quality.
¶
Jones - who is currently a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank - discussed the need for a harder push for change in Obama's second term, particularly in the realm of environmental and economic policy.
¶
'This was a tremendous victory because we didn't bow down and hand over the country to the worst people ever born,' Jones said in his speech. 'But we cannot have four more years where you cannot talk about racism, about poverty, about peace, about the environment. Four years of silence from the left are over.'
¶
The program also celebrated the two winners of the Mario Savio Young Activist Award - an annually awarded distinction that recognizes young persons for their commitment to human rights and proven record of activism.
¶
The recipients of this year's award are Howard Watts III, for his work on progressive issues in Nevada, and Molly Catchpole, for her work in petitioning against Bank of America and activism in the realm of student debt.
¶
'Funding public education until 12th grade really isn't sufficient anymore - we're $1 trillion in student debt and counting,' Catchpole said in her acceptance speech. 'Where we are now is an utter failure. I want to live in a nation where we take education as seriously as we do war.'"
11/21/2012, Sonoma State Star, Speakers' Corner debuts on campus, Michaelyn Richmeier
"When Savio's wife, Lynne Hollander Savio, took her place at the microphone, she surprised some viewers with the strength and passion in her voice, as she had been in tears moments before listening to Elaine Sundberg, associate vice president of academic programs, recount her memories of working alongside her husband at SSU. Hollander Savio told moving stories about Freedom Summer and the Free Speech Movement in 1964 and the role her late husband played. Part of Savio's speech, 'Bodies Upon the Gears' was also played, eliciting goose bumps and resounding cheers from the entire audience.
¶
'In many aspects, the passion that drove Mario's words showed me that at times of despair and struggle like today, it is not about getting caught up in hope, but showing the world what we are made of. He never said the road was going to be easy, but the progress and ability to preserve our will is something we face everyday when we decide to take action,' said Cruz.
¶
Those that knew him had nothing but admiration for the activist in Savio, and nothing but good memories of the man and teacher, and now SSU students will have the opportunity to be reminded of what one person, and what a group of people, can do when they're motivated enough to do so.
¶
'I hope that it will contribute to the students becoming actively engaged in the causes they believe in and the causes they need to struggle for,' said Hollander Savio."
11/19/2012, The Daily Californian, Memo to the next chancellor, Jason Willick
"UC Berkeley has a strong commitment to equity and inclusion. This commitment is admirable, but it also makes the campus more vulnerable to the types of trends I just described. In 2011, Birgeneau issued a statement claiming that the shooting of then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was precipitated by Arizona's controversial immigration law and an environment where 'hateful speech is tolerated.' The chancellor's statement had a chilling effect on speech by implying that opponents of progressive immigration policy were somehow complicit in an attack, which, as it turns out, was carried out by a psychotic person. It's not always the administration that threatens free speech: When the Berkeley College Republicans held an affirmative action bake sale, the student government threatened to revoke the group's funding."
11/16/2012, The Wall Street Journal, How Free Speech Died on Campus A young activist describes how universities became the most authoritarian institutions in America, Sohrab Ahmari
"In his new book, 'Unlearning Liberty,' Mr. Lukianoff notes that baby-boom Americans who remember the student protests of the 1960s tend to assume that U.S. colleges are still some of the freest places on earth. But that idealized university no longer exists. It was wiped out in the 1990s by administrators, diversity hustlers and liability-management professionals, who were often abetted by professors committed to political agendas.
¶
'What's disappointing and rightfully scorned,' Mr. Lukianoff says, 'is that in some cases the very professors who were benefiting from the free-speech movement turned around to advocate speech codes and speech zones in the 1980s and '90s.'"
11/16/2012, The Community Voice, Savio's memory honored with free speech site at SSU,
"The Mario Savio Speakers' Corner was dedicated at Sonoma State University on Thursday, Nov. 15, in a noontime ceremony on the northwest corner of Stevenson Quad, where a special memorial has been created.
¶
To commemorate the free speech activist's life and work, the memorial committee chose a circular speakers' area embraced by a berm underneath a large tree where the dedication will take place. The hope of the memorial committee is the Mario Savio Speakers' Corner will be used by SSU and the larger community to exercise their right to speak freely on issues of concern to them, and that it will inspire students, as Savio did, 'to act upon conscience in order to ensure justice.'"
11/15/2012, Wired, California Uber Uber: Why Ride-Sharing Ruckus Should Surprise No One, Marcus Wohlsen
"California's reputation as a hub of innovation isn't limited to the rise of digital technology and Silicon Valley. The counterculture movement of the 1960s and '70s disrupted social norms in lasting ways. That scene was itself catalyzed by UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, which ushered in a new era for civil liberties on college campuses. Decades earlier, the San Francisco general strike of 1934 galvanized the West Coast labor movement."
11/15/2012, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Mario Savio Speakers' Corner dedicated at SSU, Nicole R. Zimmerman
"Jason Avel DeLeon, an SSU senior philosophy major, first learned about Savio during a speech-writing assignment. A member of the student club, United by Struggles (which contributed $900 to the project), DeLeon worked with Cesar Cruz from the time they were sophomores to bring the commemorative site to fruition since the project began 16 years ago. He said the space seems like it was created 'with love-something worth walking through every day.'"
11/11/2012, The Press Democrat, Sonoma State to dedicate Savio memorial this week,
"The Mario Savio Speakers' Corner will be dedicated at Sonoma State University at noon Thursday in a ceremony on the northwest corner of Stevenson Quad, where a special memorial has been created as a site for public speaking."
11/10/2012, National Review, Free Speech on FIRE, Robert VerBruggen
"Given that FIRE often works with the ACLU, that Lukianoff is a lifelong Democrat who says he has no intention of ever voting for a Republican, and that the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 1960s was not exactly a right-wing phenomenon, many may be baffled that FIRE is typically considered a conservative group, and that Unlearning Liberty appears courtesy of the decidedly right-leaning Encounter Books. But today, many leftists have values they place higher than free speech: They'll censor a documentary in the name of campaign-finance reform, and, as Lukianoff demonstrates, they'll censor college students in the name of political correctness."
11/7/2012, The Moderate Voice, An Historic Victory for Social Liberalism, Aaron Astor
"Reagan was a more ideological figure, of course, and made the Free Speech Movement at UC-Berkeley a rallying issue for California conservatives upset with growing campus radicalism."
11/6/2012, Artist Direct, New Grateful Dead-Featured Poster Art Book Due Out in December, Maggie Pannacione
"ART OF THE DEAD is a forthcoming book that showcases the vibrant, charismatic poster art that emerged from the streets of San Francisco in 1964 and 1966, and focuses on the Grateful Dead.
¶
It traces the cultural, political, and historical influences of posters as art back to Japanese wood blocks through Bell Epoque, on to the Beatniks, the Free Speech Movement, and the Acid Tests. Featuring interviews and profiles of the key artists, including Rick Griffin, Stanley 'Mouse' Miller, Alton Kelley, Wes Wilson, and Victor Moscoso.
...¶
It also includes essays by Greil Marcus, Peter Coyote, and Victoria Binder, as well as essays on the elements of the printing process from the original art to the final poster. "
11/3/2012, New York Times, Governor, as Seen by Granddaughter, Adam Nagourney
"'It was a time when people were more optimistic,' Mr. Brown said of the older era. But as the documentary makes clear, it was not an easier time. Pat was governor during the Watts Riots in Los Angeles - some of the most riveting footage Ms. Rice discovered included the governor touring the area with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This was the era of free-speech demonstrations in Berkeley and Cesar Chavez. Pat's chief water bill passed by a single vote. He lost a bid for a third term to Ronald Reagan."
10/22/2012, San Francisco Chronicle, FBI must pay S.F. journalist $470,000, Vivian Ho
"Seth Rosenfeld, a former reporter at The Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner, won $470,459 in attorneys' fees for two lawsuits he filed - one in 1990 and another in 2007 - while researching the 1960s protest movement in Berkeley.
¶
The lawsuits were two of five he filed against the FBI and the Justice Department starting in 1985. He requested a variety of records pertaining to the FBI's covert operations at UC Berkeley and its secret relationship with former President Ronald Reagan.
¶
Rosenfeld used the information he received from the FBI in articles for The Chronicle and the Examiner, as well as in his book 'Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power,' which was released in August."
10/22/2012, Oakland Tribune, Review: 'Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power' by Seth Rosenfeld, Thomas Peele
"The reality was that communists did little to take over movie studios or dupe Mario Savio into climbing atop a police car in Sproul Plaza and igniting the Free Speech Movement. What fit Reagan's narrative, however, were frothy assertions of an ever-growing threat to liberty.
¶
Those arguments quickly drew FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who found Reagan an easy marionette -- one Hoover could use to attack his enemies.
¶
In his new book 'Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power,' journalist Seth Rosenfeld uses formerly secret FBI files to detail both Reagan's distortion of facts to advance himself and Hoover's decision to ignore detailed reports that communist manipulations of Berkeley protests were, at best, scant."
Autumn 2012, The Wilson Quarterly, Writers, Technology, and the Future, Edward Tenner
"Campus protests and countercultural lifestyles had alienated many in the middle class from the universities and what they represented. It did not help that the style of youthful rebellion had changed, with early activists such as Mario Savio, leader of the mid-1960s Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, and a serious graduate student who went on to a physics scholarship at Oxford University, giving way to the likes of the Yippie pranksters Abbie Hoffman (author of Steal This Book) and Jerry Rubin."
10/11/2012, Sacramento News & Review, A new me? What the FBI did to my self-image as a subversive, Jay Feldman
"I started my subversive career early on as a red-diaper baby, growing up in a Communist family in New York in the 1940s and '50s, when the fearmongers were conducting a frenzied search for subversives under every rock, when FBI agents made visits to our home, when people we knew went to jail for no other reason than their ideas and beliefs.
¶
In college, I carried on my family's 'subversive' tradition, marching in civil-rights demonstrations and picketing Woolworths department stores. I supported the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and participated in demonstrations against the New York City air-raid drills that required citizens to hole up like rats in civil-defense shelters.
¶
After college, I engaged in more subversion. In fall of 1964, I was beginning my second year of graduate school at UC Berkeley when all hell broke loose on campus. From the outset, I was right in the middle of it, an active participant in the Free Speech Movement and one of some 800 students arrested in the historic December 2 Sproul Hall sit-in. During my years at Berkeley, I also participated in many protests against the war in Vietnam."
10/10/2012, The Nation, Exit Stage Left: The FBI and Student Radicals, Steve Wasserman
"As for the wounds suffered by the New Left, they were largely self-inflicted. Did the FBI seek to take advantage of our weaknesses, to exploit our missteps, and to use our naivete as a noose by which to hang an entire movement? Sure it did. Rosenfeld adds nuance and appalling detail to a familiar story of suppression: police attacks on peaceful demonstrators, the secret (and often successful) efforts to encourage extremism in order to isolate dissenters, and the open campaign to crush resistance by wielding the state's powerful legal truncheon, thus draining the left's always meager treasury and depriving it of its most able leaders. Such tactics encouraged the politics of paranoia. The result, as Christopher Lasch so clearly understood, 'imprisoned the left in a politics of theater, of dramatic gestures, of style without substance-a mirror image of the politics of unreality which it should have been the purpose of the left to unmask.' But we did not need Hoover's hooligans to prompt us to embrace the terrible logic of politics as a total art form. We came all on our own to believe that only by increasingly provocative spectacle could the veil of public apathy be pierced. It is we who elevated extremism to the level of strategy. It was a dialectic of defeat."
10/8/2012, The New Yorker, Briefly Noted review of “Subversives” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by Seth Rosenfeld.,
"Armed with a panoply of interviews, court rulings, and freshly acquired F.B.I. documents, Rosenfeld shows how J. Edgar Hoover unlawfully distributed confidential intelligence to undermine the nineteen-sixties protest movement in Berkeley, while brightening the political stars of friendly informants likr Ronald Reagan."
10/5/2012, The New York Times, The Hunters and the Hunted 'Subversives,' by Seth Rosenfeld, Matt Taibbi
"America never got over the '60s. The deep social divisions that emerged during that decade remain, for the most part, the divisions that define modern American politics. The battle lines are still so painfully visible that 50 years after the beginning of the Vietnam War and the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, the presidential race this year will come down to a contest between a former community organizer pilloried for supposed ties to '60s radicals and a former Stanford student who protested against campus antiwar demonstrations."
10/5/2012, San Jose Mercury News, Books by the Bay: A Leonard Cohen biography and Michael Chabon novel are among the highlights, Georgia Rowe
"'Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power' by Seth Rosenfeld (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $40, 720 pages). Even if you lived in the Bay Area during the turbulent '60s -- the era of Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement -- the revelations from Seth Rosenfeld's research into the era may come as a shock. The award-winning San Francisco journalist reveals how Ronald Reagan and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover worked in concert to sabotage the student protest movement and suppress the teachers, students, activists and citizens who supported it. Drawing on FBI files, court records, news accounts and hundreds of interviews, the book is a troubling cautionary tale about the abuses of power."
10/5/2012, Education Week, Student Free-Speech Still Unsettled Issue, Walt Gardner
"The high court emphasized that censorship decisions needed to be reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns. In other words, unless school officials can show that language would 'materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline,' they cannot engage in censorship. Just because language creates 'discomfort and unpleasantness' is not enough. Whether the particular words in question would meet the test is open to debate. When I began teaching in 1964, the free speech movement that began in Berkeley had not yet fully manifested itself in high school. Once it did, the principal tried to suppress it, only to find himself overwhelmed by parents. He spent most of his time in a futile attempt to hold back the tide. The principal who replaced him was more realistic. Students were permitted to wear T-shirts that bore outlandish wording far beyond 'I Enjoy Vagina.' This was in Los Angeles, where the weather was conducive to T-shirts year round. Yet I never experienced any effect on my instruction or on the decorum of my students."
10/3/2012, The Daily Californian, Henry May, UC Berkeley professor emeritus of history, dies at 97, Megan Messerly
"UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Henry May, who is remembered for promoting unity on campus during the Free Speech Movement, died Saturday. He was 97.
¶
May graduated from UC Berkeley in 1937 and spent more than 25 years in the campus department of history."
10/2/2012, San Francisco Chronicle, UC by Ansel Adams, Sam Whiting
"An intriguing juxtaposition is his re-creation of the 1954 image of Wheeler Hall, taken from the same angle, in October 1966. In between, the Lawrence laboratory complex has popped up in the background, the Free Speech Movement in the foreground. Three months later Kerr was exiled back to academia where he quietly finished his career, as a labor economist."
10/1/2012, UC Berkeley Department of History, Henry May, 1915-2012 ,
"Henry F. May, one of his generation's most distinguished historians, died Saturday, September 29, at the age of 97. May was Margaret Bryne Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of California Berkeley, where he had taught from 1952 until his retirement in 1980. He was a prominent campus citizen throughout his tenure at Berkeley, and served as Chair of the Department of History during the Free Speech Movement of 1964. He was honored by the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate in 1981 as Faculty Research Lecturer."
10/1/2012, Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise, Today's Highlight in History, Associated Press
"In 1964, the Free Speech Movement was launched at the University of California at Berkeley."
9/26/2012, Boise Weekly, Prequel to a Beginning Why Occupy Wall Street still matters, Ted Rall
"It was the middle of September. An ad hoc coalition of political groups, mostly left of center, whose members were mostly young, came together to express their opinions outside the officially approved two-party paradigm.
¶
United by their anger and energy, these people held sit-ins. They marched. Throughout that fall and into part of the following year. They caught the attention of the media, inspiring activists around the country. In the end, the powers that be did what powers that be usually do: They sent in the cops.
¶
One year later, it was clear to most that the Free Speech Movement at University of California Berkeley had failed.
¶
Now we understand that the FSM was a prequel to a beginning. The FSM morphed into a movement that inspired widespread social unrest of the 1960s that centered on opposition to the Vietnam War. Everything that followed--feminists burning bras, gays rioting after the bust at the Stonewall Inn, America's withdrawal from Vietnam--had its roots in that 'failed' movement." [EDITOR'S NOTE: The FSM dissolved itself in the spring of 1965 confident that its goals had been realized. The FSM won! It had forced the University to rescind its restrictions on speech, created a public forum, and laid solid ground for students ever since. Participants were educated in critical thought, public discourse, and purposeful action and have succeeded in their subsequent endeavors all over the planet and in many arenas.]
9/22/2012, San Francisco Chronicle, 49ers' Alex Smith: free-speech pioneer, Scott Ostler
"Ginsberg was a beat poet whose 'Howl and Other Poems,' written in Berkeley, was considered obscene because it contained dirty words and references to homosexuality. Upon being published in 1956 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights bookstore in North Beach, Ferlinghetti and store manager Shig Murao were charged under obscenity-distribution laws and brought to trial.
¶
In '57, a judge ruled that "Howl" is not obscene because it has 'redeeming social importance.' A major breakthrough for free speech.
¶
Mario Savio, a Cal student in 1964, was an inspirational leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Savio raged eloquently against the machine, urging protesters to 'put your bodies upon the gears.' He was jailed for 120 days.
¶
Smith? He was fined $15,000 by the NFL for wearing a Giants cap with his street clothes after games. NFL rules say players can't wear gear with the logo of a company that isn't an NFL sponsor for 90 minutes before and after a game. The NFL considers MLB a competing corporation."
9/21/2012, The Daily Californian, Change the discourse on free speech, Joey Freeman
"My intention was to protect students and our delicate campus climate, but I now realize that my grappling of what free speech means is the whole point. It is supposed to challenge us, especially in a university setting where ideas are everything - let alone at UC Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement. We are old enough to hear all views, no matter how outlandish or how much they personally sting."
9/19/2012, Daily Trojan, University needs to amend its speech policy, Sarah Cueva
"Of course, USC doesn't need to be like Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement era in order to exemplify free speech on college campuses. (Today, FIRE deems Berkeley a 'yellow light' institution, meaning it has at least one ambiguous policy that can encourage 'administrative abuse and arbitrary application.') And it is not to say FIRE's rating indicates administrative intolerance of controversial beliefs or speech at USC. But it would be a major step forward for liberty on campus if the administration were to change such potentially stifling provisions as the 'fighting words' clause."
9/19/2012, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Seth Rosenfeld | Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power, Julie Hirano
"A conversation between Seth Rosenfeld and Lowell Bergman, Logan Distinguished Professor in Investigative Reporting at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism." [EDITOR'S NOTE: FREE EVENT. RSVP asked]
9/18/2012, Washington Times Communities, In defense of the movie "Innocence of Islam", Peter Bella
"During the 1950s Rock and Roll was attacked, deemed the Devil's music by religious and conservative critics. There was a move to censor it. Also, young guy started a magazine in his apartment in Chicago. He was almost censored. 'Playboy' became a major brand name and media-entertainment empire. Hugh Hefner is a major advocate for freedom of speech and expression. One of his competitors, Larry Flynt, fought a major criminal and legal battle over the right to distribute his magazine, "Hustler".
¶
The Civil Rights Movement was not just about the rights of Black people. It was also about the right to redress grievances through peaceful protest. People were harmed and killed over freedom of expression.
¶
During the social and political unrest of the 1960s and 70s people were spied on and targeted by government on all levels for their associations, speech, expression, beliefs, and for protesting or organizing protests. This was another stain that took years to wipe away. Even the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s was roundly assaulted and criticized."
9/17/2012, newsfix KQED's Bay Area News Blog, OccupyArt: Posters That Make the Movement Pop, Rachael Myrow
"The bright colors fairly pop off the center's plain white walls. Juxtaposed against photos and video of Occupy protests, it's pretty clear how the poster art fed into the energy of the crowd, and vice versa. 'The range of styles is incredibly fascinating,' says Hertz, noting that many artists consciously drew on the legacies of historical labor and social movements: the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley (1964), the five-month long student-led strike at San Francisco State (1968), the Native American Alcatraz Occupation (1969), and the decade-long ARC/AIDS Vigil at United Nations Plaza (1985-1995)."
9/16/2012, The Jewish Daily Forward, Rebels With a Cause Images of the Holocaust Influenced California Radicals, Sheerly Avni
"Kerr, who died in 2003, told Rosenfeld that he'd 'severely underestimated' the impact of the civil rights movement on the students of Berkeley. Kerr believed that politics should be kept out of the university environment out of principle, but many of the students who hadn't risked their lives in the South that summer had still participated in various sit-ins and civil rights actions in the Bay Area.
¶
'Savio saw the civil rights movement as a way of holding out hope,' says Rosenfeld. 'A way to respond to obvious injustice such as the Holocaust.'"
9/14/2012, The Daily Californian, Make student voices heard in the city this fall, Gordon Wozniak and Kristin Hunziker
"This year, Cal students have an unprecedented opportunity to have a voice in local Berkeley politics. Currently, Cal students make up about a quarter of Berkeley's population, but in the last half century, only one student has been elected to Berkeley City Council. The Free Speech Movement -- the apex of students' political power -- was aimed at changing university policies, but what about city policies? These are the ones that affect you every day and determine your quality of life."
9/14/2012, democraticunderground.com, Today in Peace and Justice history on September 14, 1964,
"The Free Speech Movement began at the University of California-Berkeley when its Dean Katherine Towle (pronounced toll) announced that existing University regulations prohibiting advocacy of political causes or candidates, signing of members, and collection of funds by student organizations at the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph, would henceforth be ''strictly enforced.'"
09/06/2012, Western Today, In memoriam: Pete Steffens, 1924 - 2012, Matthew Anderson
"To support his growing family, Steffens turned from producing journalism to teaching it, taking a job at the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught from 1961 to 1969.
¶
'What started as a stopgap to pay the bills turned into a lifelong passion,' says Valerie Alia, Steffens' second wife. "He discovered that he loved teaching. He loved the stimulation of classroom discussion and repartee, loved advising student publications. Most of all, he loved the students."
¶
At Berkeley, Steffens influenced and supported students who founded the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s. Mario Savio, chief among them, named one of his sons for Pete, Alia says."
9/6/2012, The Street Spirit, Busting Berkeley's Favorite Myths, Carol Denney
"Reporters routinely call Berkeley the 'home of the free speech movement,' or 'the birthplace of the free speech movement,' forgetting that it was Berkeley's 1964 repression of free speech that engendered the backlash creating the free speech movement in the first place.
¶
Those who love this mythology rarely test the parameters of free speech in Berkeley, where on a recent Sunday (on August 19), I was threatened with arrest for putting up a poster in Constitution Square. The Free Speech Movement didn't secure free speech for the world; it just underscored the problem."
9/4/2012, Sonoma State Star, Sonoma State offers a place for students to express themselves in honor of Mario Savio, Emily Bartz
"Working hard to create an equal opportunity for all to let their voices be heard, Savio is quoted saying, 'To me, freedom of speech is something that represents the very dignity of what a human being is. That's what marks us off from the stones and the stars. You can speak freely. It really is the thing that marks us as just below the angels.'
¶
On November 6, 1996, Savio passed away after slipping into a coma after years of heart problems. His memory touched the lives of many, including those fighting for freedom of speech at Sonoma State. Years after his death, plans were put into motion to create a memorial in the corner of the Stevenson quad, dubbing the small stage and viewing area as the Mario Savio Speakers' Corner.
¶
This monument will feature quotes from Savio relating to the importance of free speech, encouraging students to actively elevate their voice, and offering them an avenue to express their thoughts freely.
¶
'I'm really excited to have this Speakers' Corner put in on campus. I think it's a really different way for students to finally be able to have their voices heard without being edited or restricted, and the fact that it's honoring such a prominent leader in the Free Speech movement is pretty powerful,' says sophomore Kelly Maclean."
9/2/2012, The New York Times, Reagan's Personal Spying Machine, Seth Rosenfeld
"Days after he took office in January 1967, Governor Reagan called the F.B.I. and requested a briefing on the demonstrations at Berkeley. Hoover again obliged, confidentially providing information from the bureau's domestic surveillance files.
¶
Here was Ronald Reagan, avowed opponent of overdependence on government, again taking personal and political help from Hoover.
¶
Perhaps now and then we all need a little help from Big Brother."
9/1/2012, The Boston Globe, 'Subversives ' by Seth Rosenfeld, Michael Washburn
"All politics is a battle for the future, and during the 1960s the future seemed perilously up for grabs. Civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, women's, and Third-World liberation movements were laced through the student body, the small city that contains the campus, and the nation at large, threatening the status quo with methods that would grow increasingly disruptive and violent. By focusing on four key players, Rosenfeld manages both a granular history of the UC campus protest and a primer on the broader cultural unrest of the period.
¶
On one side we have Hoover and Reagan, a long-time FBI informant who manages to turn public disgust with the campus disturbances into a political asset. Against Hoover and Reagan, though by no means allies, Rosenfeld places Clark Kerr, president of the University of California, and Mario Savio, combative student leader of the Free Speech Movement, a radical student organization." [EDITOR'S NOTE: The FSM was a broad coalition which included Campus College Republicans, Conservatives for an Open Campus, University Society of Libertarians, Hillel Student Council, and University Church Council.]
SEPT/OCT/NOV 2012, Bookforum, Peeping Ron, Rick Perlstein
"Hoover's obsession with the university intensified in 1959, when a test for incoming freshmen included the question 'What are the dangers to democracy of a national police organization, like the FBI, which operates secretly and is unresponsive to criticism?' What followed was one of those laugh-to-keep-from-crying moments that students of FBI history know too well: The bureau acted like a fascist organization by targeting anyone accusing it of acting like a fascist organization, all in order to publicly prove it was nothing like a fascist organization. Hoover's right-hand man, Cartha 'Deke' DeLoach, 'swiftly mounted a covert public relations campaign intended to embarrass University of California officials and pressure them to retract the essay question.' The regents soon cravenly apologized, but the bureau still deployed thirty agents to discover who wrote the offending question. They settled on a UCLA English professor named Harry Jones, and they were probably responsible for the poison-pen letter later addressed to the UCLA chancellor reporting that the professor and his wife were 'fanatical adherents to communism'--all a bit disconcerting to poor Professor Jones, who was actually a fanatical conservative, and (of course) hadn't even written the question. That investigation also produced a sixty-page report on the University of California system that read, Rosenfeld writes, like 'a description of a foreign enemy.' It portrayed the schools, which Clark Kerr had by then taken over and masterfully turned into the greatest university system in the world--neither Reagan nor Hoover cared a whit about that--as containing 'a wide range of political beliefs,' but also fatefully harboring faculty members guilty of offenses such as getting Communist books in the mail, having 'immediate relatives' who subscribed or contributed to publications deemed subversive, or urging the abolition of the House Un-American Activities Committee."
8/29/2012, rabbleTV, Inheriting Resistance: Interview with Mordecai Briemberg,
"Born in 1938, Mordecai grew up in the Edmonton eastside. He was educated at the universities of Alberta, Oxford and Berkeley. In the U.K. he became active in the anti-nuclear movement and was involved in the Aldermaston March and the Committee of 100, led by Bertrand Russell. In Berkeley he was active in the student 'Free Speech Movement' and in organizing opposition to the US war against the peoples of Vietnam and Indochina. Coming to Vancouver in 1966 to teach at Simon Fraser University, he was one of the founders of the 'Committee to aid American war Objectors' and worked in the local movement opposing the US war. At SFU he contributed to the radical and democratic restructuring of the department of Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology (PSA). This student-faculty endeavour also established links with off-campus movements for social justice: against unemployment, poverty, for native rights, and workers rights."
8/29/2012, Berkeleyside, The FBI's secret war against Berkeley, Frances Dinkelspiel
"Rosenfeld will be speaking about Subversives Sept. 19 at 7 pm at Sibley Auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus in a program put on by the Graduate School of Journalism. He will also appear at Litquake, the West Coast Literary Festival, at 1 pm on Oct. 7."
8/24/2012, Democracy Now, Book Reveals Extensive Effort by Reagan, FBI to Undermine California's Student Movement in 1960s, Amy Goodman
"AMY GOODMAN: That was Ronald Reagan speaking as he ran for California governor. In that same speech, he called for hearings to investigate allegations against professors accused of being communists and for said faculty-should be required to sign a code of conduct. Talk about these files that Ronald Reagan, who then became governor, is talking about.
¶
SETH ROSENFELD: Yes, well, that speech was given in May 1966 at the Cow Palace during the Republican primary. And you can hear Reagan focusing on the University of California, the Berkeley campus, in particular. And by this time in his campaign, he has made the campus protest, the Free Speech Movement, antiwar protest and civil rights protest, a major issue. And he's not only complaining about those protests, he's using them as a way to attack the incumbent Democrat, Pat Brown. He's saying that these pose-these show that there's a leadership gap and a morality gap at the center of the state's Democratic Party."
8/23/2012, Democracy Now, "Subversives": How the FBI Fought the 1960s Student Movement and Aided Reagan's Rise to Power, Amy Goodman
"SETH ROSENFELD:Yes. Mario actually had a very debilitating stutter when speaking in small groups of people. But when he was impassioned and speaking against what he believed was injustice, he spoke with divine fire. And that speech is an example of that. And people who were in that audience in the crowd on Sproul Plaza that day have said that that speech sent shivers down their backs. He moved people to participate. And as a result of his speech and all the work that the Free Speech Movement had done, more than a thousand people streamed into Sproul Hall and staged what was the nation's largest sit-in to date, overnight, more than 800 people arrested the next day. And this was shocking that students would engage in this kind of behavior. At that time in our history, most campuses were characterized by a kind of complacency and conformity. The Free Speech Movement was a major break from that, and it was very shocking to people, particularly J. Edgar Hoover.'"
8/22/2012, The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley alum publishes book detailing FBI scrutiny on campus, Dylan Tokar
"When then-UC Berkeley student Seth Rosenfeld was asked by his editor at The Daily Californian to look through a 9,000-page file documenting FBI activities on campus in the 1960s and 1970s, he had no idea he was about to embark on a quest that would last more than three decades, involve five lawsuits and procure more than 300,000 pages of FBI records.
¶
What he did realize as he studied the records - which became his senior journalism project - was that much was missing from the original FBI report.
¶
'I realized ... that there was more to the story, that there were more records, that there were records on other subjects that had not been requested,' said Rosenfeld. 'So I filed many additional (Freedom of Information Act) requests.'"
8/22/2012, San Francisco Examiner, Hateful bus ads are free speech, Editors
"The Bay Area was home to the free-speech movement, and it is important to remember how valuable those rights are. Everyone is right to condemn these hateful ads, but local calls for their removal are wrong. Better to use the ads as a starting point to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the extremist views that people hold about the dispute. After all, merely banning a viewpoint from a Muni bus will not make it disappear entirely."
8/22/2012, East Bay Express, UC Berkeley Student Guide, Express staff
"Free Speech Movement: Believe it or not, it wasn't that long ago that UC Berkeley banned political speech on campus. But during the 1964-65 school year, that all changed because of a massive student protest, known as the Free Speech Movement, led by student leader Mario Savio."
8/22/2012, Democracy Now, Read an Excerpt from "Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power",
"With the Organic Act of 1868, the legislators placed the university under the authority of a largely autonomous Board of Regents and declared that the school should be free from political, partisan, or sectarian influence. Reverend Durant and his fellow trustees donated their college and land to the state, which absorbed it into the University of California. Opening in 1873 on the land dedicated to Bishop Berkeley, the university from the beginning embodied independence, civil liberties, and national security, fundamental values inherently in tension with one another."
8/21/2012, NPR Fresh Air, Student 'Subversives' And The FBI's 'Dirty Tricks', Terry Gross
"The FBI saw Mario Savio as a potentially dangerous person because he was a very charismatic leader; he was very effective in rallying students and even more broadly members of public to the cause of the free speech movement. Hoover tried to counteract that by taking certain steps that would discredit Savio by portraying him in news stories as an associate of Communists and socialists. At one point, the FBI designated Savio as a key activist, putting him on a list of people whom the FBI would attempt to neutralize through intensive surveillance and harassment. ...An FBI agent contacted Savio's employer, and sometime later Savio lost his job."
8/19/2012, San Francisco Chronicle, Campus Clash, Jay Feldman
"In the fall of 1964, I was beginning my second year of graduate school when all hell broke loose on the UC Berkeley campus. From the outset, I was right in the middle of it, an active participant in the Free Speech Movement, and one of some 800 students arrested in the historic Dec. 2 Sproul Hall sit-in.
¶
The FSM spawned a nationwide student movement that soon blossomed into a powerful social force during a time of intense upheaval. It was in Berkeley, in the fall of '64, that the New Left was born. The turmoil continued in Berkeley for years, through the Filthy Speech Movement, the Vietnam Day Committee and the infamous 1969 People's Park imbroglio, in which police killed one man and injured dozens more.
¶
Several books have dealt directly or tangentially with the Berkeley student revolt, but Seth Rosenfeld's "Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power" presents a new and encompassing perspective, including a revisionist view of Ronald Reagan and a detailed picture of FBI corruption. The details of the story did not come easily. It took Rosenfeld, a former reporter for The Chronicle and the Examiner, 25 years and five Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to finally get all the material he requested from the FBI.
¶
The bureau fought him every inch of the way, spending more than $1 million of taxpayers' money in an effort to withhold public records, until it finally had no choice but to release the requested files. All told, the FBI yielded a staggering 300,000 pages of documents."
8/17/2012, Wall Street Journal, When G-Men Do Research on Campus, Sol Stern
"In Berkeley, Calif., in the 1960s, my fellow student radicals and I believed with almost religious conviction that by protesting the Vietnam War and the corporate-dominated 'multiversity' we were building a far, far better world. The most surprising revelation in Seth Rosenfeld's 'Subversives' is that J. Edgar Hoover, America's most powerful law-enforcement official at the time, shared our movement's wildly utopian fantasies of Berkeley as the epicenter of a world-wide rebellion.
¶
The difference, of course, was that Hoover believed that our campus protests would lead not to a better world but to the ruin of everything that was good and proper in America. The FBI chief was certain that many of the Berkeley radicals were under communist discipline and constituted an imminent threat to the republic. Without consulting any of the attorney generals or presidents he ostensibly served, Hoover launched what Mr. Rosenfeld calls a 'secret war' against the Berkeley student movement. And the author has the documents to prove it.
¶
Hoover supervised dozens of FBI agents who broke into the homes of Berkeley protest leaders and tapped their phones. The FBI compiled dossiers with intimate details of the lives of hundreds of students, planted informers and provocateurs within the ranks of campus antiwar groups, and tried to disrupt constitutionally protected political activities.
¶
Not content with spying on the students, Hoover authorized illegal surveillance of professors and college administrators who were deemed too sympathetic to the campus radicals. The FBI's intelligence-gathering operation even extended into the heart of California's political and business establishment: the members of the university's Board of Regents. And Hoover secretly worked to get the regents to fire the university's president, Clark Kerr, for failing to crack down on the student protesters."
8/17/2012, San Francisco Chronicle, A walk back in time to a radical Berkeley, Caille Millner
"Growing up in a rough Southern California neighborhood, my dad first came to Berkeley in 1966 as an '18-year-old intellectual tourist.' He was inspired by snippets he saw as a kid on the evening news - Mario Savio and the free speech movement, Bettina Aptheker and the Communist Party USA. It took him an additional five years of community and state college, draft registration, and hard work to get to UC Berkeley for graduate school in 1971, by which point the bloom was already off the rose of the protest movement, even if he didn't know it then.
¶
'One of the things about being in your teens and your 20s, I thought Berkeley would always be the same,' he said. 'I really thought it would always be a center of youth radicalism.'
¶
It's not anymore, of course."
8/17/2012, Publishers Weekly, PW Picks: The Best New Books for the Week of August 20, 2012, Gabe Habash
"Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld (FSG) - Rosenfeld painstakingly recreates the dramatic-and unsettling-history of how J. Edgar Hoover worked closely with then California governor Ronald Reagan to undermine student dissent, arrest and expel members of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, and fire the University of California's liberal president, Clark Kerr. Rosenfeld's vivid narrative focuses on three men: Kerr, who played a key role in guaranteeing all Californians access to higher education; Mario Savio, the charismatic student activist who led the Free Speech movement; and the ambitious Reagan, who was a more active FBI informer in his Hollywood days than previously known. This is narrative nonfiction at its best. Check out our Q&A with Rosenfeld."
8/13/2012, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The FBI's Vendetta Against Berkeley, Seth Rosenfeld
"In response to my reporting on some of these records, the FBI's current director, Robert S. Mueller III, acknowledged in 2002 that the bureau's surveillance and harassment at Berkeley during the cold war was inappropriate. 'Such investigations are wrong and anti-democratic, and past examples are a stain on the FBI's greater tradition of observing and protecting the freedom of Americans to exercise their First Amendment rights,' Mueller declared.
¶
FBI documents also show that in the 1950s Hoover ran a secret operation called the 'Responsibilities Program' to get professors whose political views were deemed unacceptable fired by surreptitiously giving anonymous and unproven charges of disloyalty to Gov. Earl Warren, who then ordered investigations of the faculty. In fighting suspected radicals, Hoover also made common cause with State Sen. Hugh Burns, the head of the state senate's un-American-activities committee, instead of investigating allegations from organized crime sources in Burns's home district of Fresno that he had taken payoffs and secretly owned a brothel."
8/9/2012, Jweekly, Report calls for regulating 'hate speech' at U.C., Emma Silvers
"In a move that's poised to spark a First Amendment debate at the birthplace of the 1960s Free Speech Movement, a fact-finding team issued a report last month recommending the U.C. system adopt a policy that bans "hate speech" on its 10 campuses."
8/3/2012, my Central Jersey, First read: New books from the radical '60s to pro football 50th, Anne Bendheim
"SUBVERSIVES: THE FBI'S WAR ON STUDENT RADICALS, AND REAGAN'S RISE TO POWER by Seth Rosenfeld (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $40)
¶
Let's state up front that our name doesn't appear among the entries about student radicals, which shows how incomplete the book is. Seriously, though, the author takes on the FBI in one of its most fecund (and infamous) periods - the 1960s - and primarily follows three people: new politico Ronald Reagan, radical Mario Savio and liberal academician Clark Kerr. It's Berkeley, baby!"
8/2/2012, The Jewish Daily Forward, News U. of Calif. Weighs Banning 'Hate' Speech, Naomi Zeveloff
"The University of California, birthplace of the 1960s campus Free Speech Movement, is now considering a proposal that would ban certain forms of speech as a result of a report on Jews and the Israel debate at its schools.
¶
The July 9 report, issued by an advisory panel to UC President Mark Yudof, concluded that Jewish students sometimes face a hostile environment at UC schools in the form of anti-Israel protests. It recommends that UC 'seek opportunities to prohibit hate speech on campus.'
¶
The panel 'recognizes that changes to UC hate speech policies may result in legal challenge,' the report reads. But it encourages UC to "accept the challenge."
¶
Yudof will make the final call on the recommendations; no date has yet been established for his decision. But Alan Dershowitz, a First Amendment lawyer and author of 'The Case for Israel,' said he would challenge such a ban: 'It's a very serious mistake,' he told the Forward. 'The first victims of the policy would be pro-Israel advocates. It will backfire.'"
7/29/2012, Al Jazeera, Syria: The unassuming enemy, Binesh Hass
"The operation of the machine, to appropriate one of Mario Savio's speeches from the 1960s, has become so odious that it is time for the United Nations to put its bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and make it grind to a halt. Because that is what it means to implement the 'cardinal lesson' of Srebrenica, Rwanda, and all the other modern moments of 'never again'. The time has come for the United Nations to deliver on its 2005 promise to assume responsibility to protect and prevent mass murder."
7/25/2012, Eurasia Review, The Rise Of The Police State And The Absence Of Mass Opposition, James Petras and Robin Eastman Abaya
"By the end of the 1950's mass demonstrations were held at the sites of the public hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in San Francisco (1960) and elsewhere and major civil rights movements arose to challenge the racially segregated South, the compliant Federal government and the terrorist racist death squads of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). The Free Speech Movement in Berkeley (1964) ignited nationwide mass demonstrations against the authoritarian-style university governance.
¶
The police state incubated during the first years of the Cold War was challenged by mass movements pledged to retain or regain democratic freedoms and civil rights."
7/20/2012, The Berkeley Daily Planet, Will The World Watch Berkeley's People's Park Again?, Ted Friedman
"And Barbara Hillman, director of Berkeley's Visitor's Bureau, no stranger to Teley property owners and businessmen, with whom she frequently consults, may have innocently stumbled into a pile when she told reporter Jones, 'we get people who say…I want to see People's Park…I'm like, why would they [want to go to People's Park]?
¶
'If you're [tourists] looking for strawberry fields and a nice place to have your lunch,' Hillman said, 'as a courtesy we need to let them know it's [People's Park] probably not what they're expecting.'
¶
Hillman tells me Jones interviewed her '45 minutes for a two-minute story.' Hillman questions the story's accuracy.
¶
Hillman told me: 'People's Park is not a place for a family picnic...Codornices Park, or the Rose Garden is the place for that,' wading deeper into the pile.
¶
'We do send people to Telegraph Avenue for the Free Speech Movement...great history--Berkeley's DNA--but that's not all of Berkeley.'"
7/11/2012, Sacramento Bee, Berkeley voters to decide sidewalk-sitting ban, The Associated Press
"BERKELEY, Calif. -- Berkeley voters will soon decide whether the city that spawned the Free Speech Movement should bar people from sitting on sidewalks.
¶
The Berkeley City Council voted 6-3 early Wednesday to place the proposed ban on the Nov. 6 ballot despite rowdy protests from opponents."
7/5/2012, Sacramento Bee, Obituary: Jeff Lustig was a California studies scholar, Robert D. Davila
"A bearded and bespectacled intellectual, Mr. Lustig was devoted to understanding and promoting his native California as a community of active citizens. He was a prolific writer and advocate of big ideas for reinventing state governance, including a constitutional convention. Since his early days as an activist in the 1960s Free Speech Movement, he encouraged others to get involved in building a better form of government and society."
7/5/2012, Alaska Dispatch, "Subversives,' a history, Carlo Wolff
"In this work about unrest at the University of California Berkeley, Rosenfeld tells the stories of the frail, impassioned student leader Mario Savio; the measured but liberal Berkeley president Clark Kerr; and Ronald Reagan, the B-actor who, with the secret help of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, polished the conspiratorially based law-and-order message he formulated in the '40s as the rabidly anti-Communist head of the Screen Actors Guild to become governor of California in 1966.
¶
Reagan is a hero to today's GOP, which regards him as sunny, even moderate, but the way he handled unrest at UC Berkeley was cunning, vindictive, and excessive. Rosenfeld's interviews with participants in student uprisings at Berkeley in the '60s and with Reagan's associates depict this avuncular icon as ready and all too eager to crush dissent in the name of protecting American values."
7/4/2012, AVN Media Network, Free Speech Issue: The Industry Talks, Jeffrey J. Douglas
"With all due respect to Larry Flynt, the late Stanley Fleishman (founder of the First Amendment Lawyers Association and parent of modern obscenity defense), Lou Sirkin and many other extraordinary members of FALA, my greatest personal inspiration was a now-deceased Berkeley rhetoric professor, Fred Stripp. A minister, orator and extremely progressive activist, he made the abstraction of protecting unpopular speech come alive for me. He lived his life as he preached. The KKK burned a cross on his lawn in 1960 when he ran for mayor on a fair housing (no racial discrimination in selling or renting) platform. He was a fervent supporter of the student Free Speech Movement and fought against the 'loyalty oaths' to his great professional and personal disadvantage during the red-baiting McCarthy era.
¶
-Jeffrey J. Douglas, Free Speech Coalition"
6/25/2012, The Daily Californian, Fright in shining armor, Senior Editorial Board
"UC Berkeley: home of the Free Speech Movement, the Campanile, elite academics and athletics - and an armored vehicle?
¶
The Berkeley Police Department, Albany Police Department and UCPD recently combined forces to acquire funding for an armored vehicle - a bad idea with potentially detrimental effects."
06/18/2012, Publishers Weekly, Many Movements: PW Talks with Seth Rosenfeld, Diane Molleson
"When I came to Berkeley in the late '70s to study journalism, the student newspaper had some FBI files on the Free Speech Movement, and I wrote a series [about them] that ran in 1982. I submitted an expanded request to the FBI in 1981 under the Freedom of Information Act. I had no idea it would take so long. At the University of California during the '60s, you had the rise of the student movement, the Free Speech Movement, the antiwar movement, and People's Park. At the same time, you had the rise of the conservative movement, led by Ronald Reagan, who campaigned for his first public office in 1965 and made the protests at Berkeley one of his main issues. This convergence of forces had a huge impact on the nation over the following decades."
6/17/2012, The Republic, City renown for free speech and tolerance debating a ban on sitting and lying on sidewalks, Terry Collins
"BERKELEY, Calif. - Squatting on a corner on the always bustling Telegraph Avenue, Brandon Smith and Jamie Dunne, just hours in after hitching rides from Santa Cruz, shook their heads in disbelief at the news as they held signs asking for change - cat food for their 4-week-old kitten.
¶
'Seriously? They want to stop us from sitting on the sidewalks?' said Smith, 25. 'Nooo! Not here? Really? But it's Berkeley!'
¶
In the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, the city of Berkeley is in a hotly contested debate on a proposed measure for the November ballot that would ban folks from sitting on sidewalks. Despite loud objections, the City Council last week ordered the city attorney to draft ballot language."
6/14/2012, Berkeley Daily Planet, No Sit Ordinance Would Be A Violation Of Our Freedom of Assembly, Mahendra Ramanna Prasad
"I was born and raised in Memphis. One of the stigmatizing aspects of growing up in the American South and especially Memphis was knowing that its place in civil rights history was that MLK was killed there. On the other hand, as a kid, I was consistently given the impression that Berkeley was a bastion of freedom given its involvement in the Free Speech Movement to allow college students the right to advocate against segregation.
¶
However, as a Berkeley graduate student these days, I find myself more and more convinced that perhaps Memphis today is a better friend of free speech and civil rights than Berkeley. Memphis still has an ongoing Occupy encampment. Berkeley does not. Memphis has a thriving Tea Party community that invited Occupiers to debate with them. I don't see that many debates like that today in Berkeley."
6/6/2012, UC Berkeley Public Affairs, Police board calls for tighter oversight on use of force in student protests, Public Affairs
"'It is generally agreed that UC Berkeley holds itself to higher than legal standards regarding the use of force,' the report says. 'As the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, and as a locus for student protest throughout the past half-century, the Berkeley campus is especially tolerant of students' right to assemble and protest.'
¶
And though the panel observes that 'specific tactics for all combinations of campus events cannot be fixed in advance,' it closes with this exhortation: 'Finally, one thing is most clear: Strictly confined limits, as precise as possible, should be articulated regarding the use of force by law enforcement during any protest events.'
¶
UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof agreed that the campus 'can and should do a better job maintaining that delicate balance' between free speech and protecting the interests of all members of the community, including those who choose not to take part in protests."
6/5/2012, The California Aggie, Editorial: Robinson-Edley report, Editors
"Following the protests across UC campuses in November, UC President Mark Yudof commissioned a report, called the Robinson-Edley report, to make recommendations to facilitate free speech while maintaining the health and safety of those involved. A draft of the report has been released to allow the UC community to provide comments until June 8 to strengthen the report's recommendations.
¶
Beginning with the Free Speech movement in the '60s, free speech and civil disobedience have been intertwined with UC history and culture. To ensure the free flow of ideas we must take every step possible to protect our right to free speech."
6/1/2012, Huffington Post, Ansel Adams: Picturing California's Future, Ken Goldberg
"Everyone knows Ansel Adams' photos of Yosemite. But I'd never heard of Fiat Lux, a set of over 6,700 Ansel Adams photographs of the University of California that constitute his second largest body of work. Adams shot these photos at the request of UC President Clark Kerr in the early 1960s. His charge to Adams: photograph the future of UC.
¶
The University of California was at a crossroads, approaching its centennial. Kerr was working on his Master Plan for Higher Education.
¶
Fiat Lux, the book highlighting Adams' UC photos, was published in 1967. By this time Kerr had stepped down over the Free Speech Movement and the protest movement was at its peak. Adams' centennial project never received the attention it deserved and was never reprinted."
5/30/2012, The Moderate Voice, Your Free Speech Ends at the Point a Bully Says So, Logan Penza
"As someone who has been personally targeted in the past, I'm saddened to see the continuing disrespect for free expression by those whose political movement was supposedly born in the 'Free Speech Movement' of the 1960s. Since then, we've gone through campus speech codes, bans on 'hate speech' (defined as any speech the hearer disagrees with), attempts to get people fired for disagreeable political views, and now the use of the courts to get those on the other side arrested."
5/28/2012, Berkeley Daily Planet, Press Release: Father of Free Speech Memorial Planned, Bryan Bell
"Mario Savio's civil rights work as a university student in the Freedom Summer Project of 1964 in Mississippi led to his involvement as a leader of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley during 1964-1965. His brilliant rhetoric inspired thousands of students who demanded the administration lift the ban of on-campus political activities and acknowledge the students' right to free speech and academic freedom. Standing on the steps of Sproul Hall, Mario spoke to these students: 'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part...you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop.'
¶
Not known to everyone is that Mario Savio was also a beloved teacher of math, philosophy and the humanities at Sonoma State University from 1990-1996. An inspiring teacher, colleague and friend, eloquent spokesperson and courageous activist, Mario empowered others to act upon conscience in order to ensure justice. He was a strong supporter of student rights, immigrant rights, and affirmative action. A man of great integrity, compassion, and a deep respect for his fellow human beings, including those whose positions he opposed, Mario touched the lives of all who knew and worked with him."
5/17/2012, newsreview.com, Grads get mad, Ken Smith
"COGS [Council of Graduate Students] President Shane Morey recited an adaptation of Mario Savio's 1964 'bodies upon the gears' speech. Originally delivered during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, it likens students to products spit out by administration-run factories."
5/16/2012, East Bay Express, Pirate Radio Goes Legit, Phil Busse
"Not surprisingly, micro-broadcasting has its roots in the ideals, movements, and personalities of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. 'It is electronic civil disobedience,' said Stephen Dunifer."
5/11/2012, Los Angeles Review of Books, Myths and Depths: Greil Marcus talks to Simon Reynolds (Part 3), Greil Marcus
"Look, the founding event of the Free Speech movement came when the university police arrived to arrest someone who was at a table and was violating university rules by passing out political literature. They drove a police car into the university plaza and they put this guy, Jack Weinberg, into the backseat. They're going to drive away and immediately a crowd formed around the police car and surrounded it and sat down. And, within minutes, that crowd had grown to hundreds of people. And in an hour or two, it was thousands. I remember walking out of class and saying, let's walk down to the plaza and see if anything's happening, because the Free Speech movement barely had a name, but there was tremendous contentiousness. So you come out of your university building and turn a few steps and there's this enormous crowd in front of a police car. And you join the crowd, if only out of curiosity. For the rest of the day, people started to get up on top of the police car to make speeches about what's going on. And Jack Weinberg and three cops are in the car and they can't move. They can't get out. By the end of the day the roof of the police car is completely collapsed. Dozens of people are climbing on top of the police car to say what they think. Some of them are student government officers, some of them are people who later became identified with the movement, and some are just ordinary students who want to talk and want to be heard. A lot of people who never thought they'd have the nerve, or the reason, to speak in front of other people, they're climbing up too.
¶
So that is this great moment of free speech, and punk rediscovered that."
5/6/2012, Los Angeles Times, The Port Huron Statement: A manifesto reconsidered, Tom Hayden
"The achievements that came from participatory democratic activism in the years that followed the statement's publication were considerable: the ending of the Vietnam War and the draft, the enfranchisement of Southern blacks and young people, the rise of the feminist movement, the Roe vs. Wade decision, the growth and strengthening of public employee unions and California farmworkers, Richard Nixon's unsurpassed environmental laws (in response to the first Earth Day), the Americans with Disabilities Act (in response to activists in wheelchairs occupying federal buildings), and much more. Former Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg remembers carrying her copy of the statement to study groups during the free-speech movement, and Carl Wittman, a Port Huron-era activist who was closeted in 1962, later drew on it for inspiration in writing 'A Gay Manifesto.'"
5/3/2012, National Public Radio , OWS: A Case Study In Social Movements, Neal Conan, host
"ADLER: Well, I don't really know. You know, the movement that I like to compare Occupy to in a certain odd way is the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, which on the one hand had a very - had one simple goal, which was to be able to organize on campus. But then it had a much broader and more difficult goal, which of course was never achieved, which was to sort of change the entire educational system to not be a knowledge factory, to not have sort of like the military-industrial complex the kind of knowledge complex. And that kind of a sort of broad-based, you know, non-easy goal I don't think ever really got very far.
¶
And Occupy reminds me a lot of that. Even the rhetoric, you know, Mario Savio was, you know, there was a time when the - you know, when the machine makes you so sick at heart you can't take part, you can't even tacitly part. You have to put your body on the gears and the levers. Very, very similar to Occupy.
¶
And the question is: Can large, systemic goals, which really are about changing the entire thing, can those be achieved in a society that's fairly centrist?"
5/3/2012, americablog, Occupy Wall Street should explicitly reject violence, Gaius Publius editorial
"Side note: 'Outside resistance' is sometimes called the 'outside game' - the populist protests, the action in the streets - as opposed to more institutional responses like lobbying, law-making, and awareness writing. I'll be using the term 'outside game' a lot in this context.
¶
Tahrir Square, for example, is an outside game. The Berkeley Free Speech movement is an outside game. Every rebellion needs one to complement its inside - institutional - game. It's the way this stuff works."
4/27/2012, Justia, Five Free Speech Myths of Which College Demonstrators and Protestors Should Be Aware to Avoid Unexpected Trouble, Vikram David Amar
"My own university-the University of California-has seen its share of unrest. Protests at UC Berkeley, the birthplace of the so-called 'free speech movement' in the 1960s, got ugly last fall, with police who were ostensibly trying to remove encampments using batons against students. Things got out of hand here at UC Davis last fall too, with a campus police officer employing pepper spray against seated student protestors."
4/24/2012, spinner, Talking Heads' Chris Frantz: I Still Hope for a Reunion With David Byrne, Chris Epting
"Are there one or two pieces on 'Chronology' that stand out in your view or that you have special memories of?
¶
Two come to mind right away. One is playing 'Psycho Killer' at CBGB in the very early stages. Then there was the free lunchtime concert we did at the University of California at Berkeley at Sproul Plaza. That was the birthplace of the free-speech movement with Mario Savio, where all of that happened. We knew that then, and when we came off the stage somebody said, 'Oh my god, have you head the news?' We were like, 'No, what?' They said, 'Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk have just been shot.' And so that was a wild experience."
4/17/2012, Fox&Hounds Daily, From Master Plan to No Plan: California's Education Failure, Sherry Bebitch Jeffe
"In 1959, the Legislature mandated the preparation of 'a Master Plan for the development, expansion, and integration of the facilities, curriculum, and standards of higher education, in junior colleges [now Community Colleges], state colleges [now CSU], UC and other institutions of higher education in the state, to meet [its] needs during the next ten years and thereafter...'
¶
In 1960, lawmakers passed, and Gov. Pat Brown signed, the Donahoe Act, which codified portions of that Master Plan.
¶
By the mid-1960s, the Golden State's system of higher education was the crowning glory of a pulsing economy. Higher ed, particularly the UC system, ruled Sacramento.
¶
A phalanx of powerful UC lobbyists routinely wined and dined legislators. And they usually got most of what they wanted in the way of appropriations and policy.
¶
How the mighty have fallen.
¶
The decline in higher education's policy and political clout began in the unfriendly milieu of Gov. Ronald Reagan's administration, as the tumultuous Free Speech Movement and Reagan's 'cut, squeeze, and trim' philosophy of government shook California's campuses."
4/16/2012, The Nation, Participatory Democracy: From the Port Huron Statement to Occupy Wall Street, Tom Hayden
"Though they were not at Port Huron, there were other philosophical searchers at the time who practiced participatory democracy. Bob Moses, perhaps the single greatest influence on the early SDS and SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), could be described as a Socratic existentialist. The Free Speech Movement's Mario Savio described himself as a non-Marxist radical shaped by secular liberation theology who was 'an avid supporter of participatory democracy.' We were all influenced by Ella Baker, an elder adviser to SNCC with a long experience of NAACP organizing in the South."
4/6/2012, The Daily Californian, Ron Paul's upcoming appearance at UC Berkeley draws varied reactions, Charlie Smith
"'It's great Ron Paul is speaking here,' Reich said in the email. 'Our community learns by hearing all views … We're where the Free Speech Movement began.'"
3/30/2012, The Guardian, The tweet police should let us get on with it, The Secret Footballer
"Savio did not live long enough to witness how the flaws in his vision for free speech would play out many years later. In his landmark speech he said: 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious - makes you so sick at heart - that you can't take part ... And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.' Where Twitter is concerned, it's probably too late now."
3/25/2012, San Francisco Chronicle, Political poster collection at 'The 1968 Exhibit', Sam Whiting
"Michael Rossman of Berkeley started collecting social justice posters at about the time that social justice posters first appeared in these parts, which was the Free Speech Movement of 1964.
¶
By the time he stopped collecting, just before he died in 2008, the collection ran to 23,500 works on paper, the entire lot of which is being acquired over time by the Oakland Museum of California.
¶
With the opening of "The 1968 Exhibit" on Saturday, the first 68 political posters will be unveiled in the ancillary exhibition 'All of Us or None: Social Justice Posters of the San Francisco Bay Area.'"
3/23/2012, Inter Press Service, U.S. Occupy Activists Hit With Stay-Away Orders, Judith Scherr
"Recalling that the university had been home to the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, attorney Ronald Cruz, also speaking outside the courtroom, accused the government of trying to make an example of the protesters.
¶
'The political forces behind the witch hunt are trying to use the home of the free speech movement to set the precedent nationally that students and others that defend public education will be brutalised and prosecuted,' he said. 'This is a nationally prominent case. The students on the campus are going to be key to make sure free speech stays alive in Berkeley.'"
3/20/2012, The Daily Californian, Encouraging shared governance for students, Elliot Goldstein
"No longer are we the 'raw materials' being modeled by the 'employees' at the whim of 'managers.' Today, we are the major stakeholders in the UC enterprise. Today we are those whom the university administration should be chiefly beholden to. The moment is ripe for students to demand a renewed relationship as partners in the operation of the university and call for its priorities to be re-examined in accordance with greater student voice."
3/10/2012, San Francisco Chronicle, Louis Farrakhan speaks at UC Berkeley, John Cote
"UC Berkeley on Saturday was once again the crucible of the free speech debate.
¶
The birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s hosted another iconoclast from the era, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, whose speeches and writings have been denounced by critics for decades as bigoted, homophobic and anti-Semitic.
...¶
Even UC President Mark Yudof weighed in on the Farrakhan appearance, writing in an open letter that 'we cannot as a society allow what we regard as vile speech to lead us to abandon the cherished value of free speech.'"
3/10/2012, American Thinker, Berkeley's idea of 'free speech', Lee DeCovnick
"A local police chief sends an armed sergeant to a reporter's home at 12:45 a.m., insisting on changes to story that had been filed earlier that evening. Can you guess where this salty show of government intimidation took place, maybe Russia or Iran? The answer is the People's Republic of Berkeley, (California) home of the 1960's free speech movement.
¶
Conservative's have long known that liberals relish the use of police authority for their own personal agendas."
3/9/2012, The Daily Californian, Don't harbor hatred CAMPUS AFFAIRS: While Louis Farrakhan has made hateful statements in the past, he should not be prevented from speaking on campus., Senior Editorial Board
"UC Berkeley's place in the American story represents the best in scientific, social and cultural innovation. Its scholars have found treatments for heinous afflictions and advanced justice with their research and words. When we fight, we fight for freethinking justice, as exemplified by the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s. The uproar of criticism concerning Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan's upcoming visit to campus, then, is a far cry from what our campus symbolizes."
3/8/2012, The Daily Californian, Freedom of speech?, Salih Muhammad, Black Student Union
"Although we attend a campus that espouses the right to freedom of speech stemming from the Free Speech Movement in the 1960's, it is sad to see that this freedom is offered to some and denied to others. Freedom of speech does not imply that anyone completely agrees with what the speaker says; however, it does dictate the right for one to speak. The history of the Free Speech Movement seems to have been lost.
¶
Do we as students want to revert back to when 'controversial' speakers weren't allowed to speak on our campus? Should we allow our differences to cause us to forget about the legacies that have paved the way for us, like that of Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement, or Malcolm X, who at one time was forbidden to speak at UC Berkeley because of his political viewpoints?"
3/8/2012, San Francisco Chronicle, Ray Colvig - announced UC Berkeley news to nation, David Perlman
"As manager of public information, Mr. Colvig's job was representing the Berkeley campus and the seven chancellors whom he served over 27 years that took in the birth of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, the campus protests over the Vietnam War, the riots over People's Park and the Patty Hearst kidnapping. He did his job with such integrity that reporters - both in the Bay Area and nationally - relied on him to provide facts impartially, regardless of the controversies."
3/7/2012, The Daily Californian, Ray Colvig, former spokesperson and Public Information Office manager, dies at age 8o, Jeremy Gordon
"Ray Colvig, manager of UC Berkeley's Public Information Office for 27 years and a man remembered for his honesty, died Sunday. He was 80.
¶
Colvig was the school's spokesperson from 1964 to 1991, representing the campus through contentious issues ranging from the Free Speech Movement to the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, the 1990 Hotel Durant hostage crisis and the 1969 People's Park protests."
3/7/2012, Oakland Tribune, East Bay Women's Conference provides challenge, strength, Lou Fancher
"Her [Alice Waters'] political energy was stirred up by Free Speech activist Mario Savio and, recently, by Dr. Daphne Miller's work with indigenous populations. Elizabeth David, Richard Olney and Michael Pollen have been her mentors for cooking and growing food."
3/5/2012, UC Berkeley NewsCenter, Former campus spokesman and Cal booster Ray Colvig has died, Robert Sanders
"Ray Colvig, who for 27 years was the spokesman for UC Berkeley and a beloved leader of the campus's Public Information Office until his retirement in 1991, died Sunday, March 4, of sudden heart problems at Alta Bates Medical Center in Berkeley. He was 80, and passed away among his family and friends.
¶
From 1964 until 1991, Colvig served as manager of the campus's former Public Information Office. His tenure spanned the upheavals of the Free Speech Movement, anti-Vietnam protests, People's Park riots and the Patty Hearst kidnapping, not to mention UC Berkeley's rise to academic and research excellence rivaling that of Harvard and MIT. He served seven chancellors, from Nobel Laureate Glenn Seaborg to Chang-Lin Tien."
2/23/2012, San Francisco Chronicle, Groundbreaking journalist Belva Davis to retire, Nanette Asimov
"During the 1960s and '70s, Davis covered violent protests, the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, the birth of the Black Panthers, the Peoples Temple cult that led to mass suicides in Guyana, the assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the AIDS epidemic, and the terrorist attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania that brought Osama bin Laden to the attention of the FBI."
2/22/2012, Contra Costa Times, Belva Davis, a trail-blazing journalist and Bay Area television fixture, has announced that she will retire from the anchor chair later this year., Chuck Barney
"Over her career, Davis has reported on some of the most prominent stories of her time, including the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the birth of the Black Panthers, the Peoples Temple cult that ended in the mass suicides at Jonestown, the assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the onset of the AIDS epidemic, and the terrorist attacks on the U.S. embassy in Tanzania that first put Osama bin Laden on the FBI's Most Wanted List."
2/17/2012, The Guardian, Greil Marcus: a life in writing', Simon Reynolds
"The third life-changer was the frenzy of protest and debate that convulsed Berkeley in the autumn of 1964. Sparked initially by agitation against racist hiring practices in Bay Area businesses, it escalated into the Free Speech Movement in response to the university authorities' attempt to crack down on the pamphleteering and recruitment taking place on campus. 'People stepping out of the anonymity of their own lives', is how Marcus characterises this spontaneous upsurge of 'public speech'. During those "three solid months of arguing in dorm rooms and on picket lines, asking 'What's this place for?' 'What's this country about?', Marcus 'walked around the campus thinking how lucky I am to be here at this moment'."
2/14/2012, The Indypendent, The Fetishization of Expression, Paul Street
"'In my book I describe ....a tension in the praxis of the New Left from strategicism, which is grounded in a reasoned approach to thinking about social change, and expressivism, in which the need or even compulsion to express one's rebellion against established values... trump[s] longer-term planning and the careful articulation of tactics to strategy....with the New Left we see a key transition from a more strategic politics to a more expressivist one, i.e., a politics in which concrete thinking about how to achieve a desired objective was not considered as important as that primordial moment of giving expression to speech - 'letting speech run wild in the streets.' While there were intimations of this shift in the early 1960s, for example, in the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, the expressivist impulse only came to full flower in 1968. In a famous interview with the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, Daneil Cohn-Bendit - or Danny the Red, one of the leaders of May '68 - said, to paraphrase, 'people say now that the speech is running wild in the streets, and you, know, people say crazy things, but that's necessary.' What I argue in my book is that while this was a very important moment in our political practice, there's no reason to fetishize expression today. And in fact, perhaps it's gotten in the way of efficacious politics.'"
2/10/2012, Politico, Tribute to Madeline Mark, Joshua Levine Grater
"Berkeley in the '60s - now that was the place to be for a young, progressive, smart and gregarious young woman! It was there that Madeline first met Brian, her love of 43 years, at a mutual friend's wedding, where they bonded over good wine and their stories of being arrested in the free-speech movement."
2/7/2012, The Daily Californian, Renowned UC Berkeley professor speaks on challenges to higher education, Sam Buckland
"[Neil] Smelser, who received his bachelor's degree and PhD from Harvard University, published a book in 2010 entitled 'Reflections on the University of California: From the Free Speech Movement to the Global University' and is one of the 'accomplished leaders of American Higher Education,' according to the Center for Studies in Higher Education."
2/4/2012, New York Times, A Chance to See Disabilities as Assets, Peggy Klaus
"MANY people know of Berkeley, Calif., as the birthplace, in the 1960's, of the Free Speech Movement. Fewer people know that Berkeley also played a major role in the disability rights movement. It was here, also in the '60s, that Ed Roberts - a student with quadriplegia - became an outspoken advocate of the cause."
2/4/2012, New York Times, Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue, Hit by Hard Times, Needs a Makeover, Frances Dinkelspiel
"Telegraph Avenue has long been considered the spiritual center of Berkeley.
¶
Mario Savio stood on top of a police car on one end of the street in 1964 and called for free speech, creating a movement that swept the nation. Antiwar activists clashed with the police, adding to the momentum that ended the war in Vietnam. But the street has fallen on hard times."
1/28/2012, Santa Cruz Sentinel, Remembrance to be held March 16 for UC Santa Cruz professor John Schaar, Tanya Lewis
"Schaar was born July 7, 1928, in Montoursville, Pa., where he grew up on a farm in a Lutheran family. He attended UCLA for his bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees. In 1958, he came to teach political theory at UC Berkeley, alongside colleagues Norman Jacobson, Sheldon Wolin and Scharr's wife Hanna Pitkin. During what [Frank] Bardacke called a 'tumultuous and interesting time in the world and at Berkeley,' Schaar was an avid supporter of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.
¶
'[Schaar] had a way of arguing a case, and at same time, he invited and reveled in opposition,' Bardacke said. 'He loved honest debate and knew how to promote it.'"
1/27/2012, Los Angeles Times, Sundance 2012: 'A Fierce Green Fire' tells environmentalist tale, Mark Olsen
"Kitchell is a veteran documentarian based in San Francisco, best known for his Oscar-nominated 'Berkeley in the Sixties,' about the Free Speech Movement and counter-culture protest. He initially began work on 'Fierce Green Fire' in 2000 with the working title 'The Environmental History Project,' leaving and coming back to it in the intervening years as other work and production financing allowed.
¶
He returned to the project in earnest in 2007-08, conducting extensive interviews and research and acquiring some financing through online crowdsourcing.
¶
Kitchell landed on a five-part structure for the film, beginning with the origins of the environmental and conservation movement in the early part of the last century and moving forward to the efforts in the 1960s of the Sierra Club to halt dams in the Grand Canyon. From there, the film looks at the grassroots activism around the Love Canal in the 1970s, the origins of Greenpeace and the rise of an international environmental movement. It concludes with a chapter on the contemporary issue of climate change."
1/17/2012, PopMatters, Be the Best Gravy You Can Be: 'The Wavy Gravy Movie: Saint Misbehavin', Stuart Henderson
"By the late '50s, Hugh Romney was a Greenwich Village poet, actor, and comedian. He ran with the artists emerging from that heady proto-hippie scene, befriending burgeoning stars like Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, and Odetta, and appears to have been a key figure in the development of that influential little cosmos. But when Romney, an ex-military man and increasingly dreamy mystic, travelled to San Francisco in 1962 to record an album - after his new manager, Lenny Bruce, set it all up - he found himself seduced by the left coast. So he stayed, and the rest is certainly history.
¶
By 1966 he was running with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, setting up the Hog Farm (a commune outside of Los Angeles which also developed those famous light shows for rock bands like the Grateful Dead and the Jimi Hendrix Experience). Radicalised by the Berkeley Free Speech movement and the horror of the ongoing American War in Vietnam, Romney became a front line activist and was severely injured in repeated altercations with riot police."
1/12/2012, California Golden Bears, Bounding Toward the Top Gymnast Donothan Bailey Sets His Sights on International Glory,
"With his successful junior career complete, Bailey had many a schools from which to choose. While it was first the name that drew Bailey to Cal, a trip to the campus that values everything from the Free Speech Movement to national titles made him realize that Berkeley was a perfect 10."
1/10/2012, UC Berkeley NewsCenter, Howard Bern, expert on effects of hormones, has died at 91, Robert Sanders
"Bern's son Alan said his father's greatest commitment was to the development of his students. He was particularly committed to student diversity, supporting not only underrepresented minorities, but students from diverse countries, as well as students arrested for their political activity in the Free Speech Movement."
1/9/2012, Berkeleyside, UC professor Howard Bern, pioneer in endocrinology, dies, Alan Bern
"Bern's greatest commitment was to his students and their development. His laboratories embraced diversity in all respects beginning in the late 1940s, long before our current view of diversity was formed. Diversity was never an area of controversy for Bern, as it was a fundamental premise of the inquiring environment. It extended to his supporting students arrested for their political actions during the Free Speech Movement, which he supported strongly. Students from every U.S. ethnic group and from all parts of the world worked in his labs."
1/8/2012, Bangor Daily News, How campus codes threaten free speech, Greg Lukianoff
"Activists embarked on a campaign in the 1980s to eradicate hurtful, bigoted and politically incorrect speech by enacting speech codes at universities across the country. Although the movement presented itself as a forward-thinking way to make campuses welcoming, the initiative stood in stark contrast to the celebrated 'free speech movement' of the 1960s, whose proponents understood that vague exceptions to free speech were inevitably used by those in power to punish opinions they dislike or disagree with. And unfortunately the effort gained momentum as prestigious institutions passed speech codes."
1/7/2012, Salem-News.com, Pricing Orange County's Higher Educational Out of Reach, Tyrone Borelli
"Clark Kerr, the Berkeley Chancellor, at first refused to allow any political activities on the Berkeley campus. In response Mario and more than 800 students staged a peaceful sit in on the steps of Sproul Hall. Chancellor Kerr responded with police wielding batons and mass student arrests.
¶
On the sidelines was a washed up movie actor and McCarthy Era 'witness' named Ronald Reagan. By the mid 1960s Reagan had surrounded himself with some of the wealthiest and most reactionary businessmen in California. Among Reagan's advisors were the notorious department store heir Alfred Bloomingdale, beer baron Joseph Coors, and auto huckster Holmes Tuttle.
¶
Reagan and his kitchen cabinet openly criticized Kerr for being too lenient on student protesters. Together they decided to run Reagan for California Governor.
¶
In 1966 the California Republican Party nominated Reagan for Governor. Reagan's campaign emphasized two main themes: 'to send the welfare bums back to work,' and, in reference to burgeoning anti-war and anti-establishment student protests at the University of California at Berkeley, 'to clean up the mess at Berkeley.'"
1/3/2012, GoodToGo, A BETTER DAY, Tony Platt
"The FSM was a defining moment for activism in the 1960s and for my own political development. Poised between the civil rights struggles of the previous decade and the promise of the antiwar and feminist movements ahead, it offered our generation of students the opportunity to participate in history, to be activists in our own right rather than vicarious participants in other people's struggles. It was a joy to feel that we might be part of an emergent majority, with the moral authority of justice on our side for once. Savio was not the only leader of the student movement, but his example of self-sacrifice moved many people like myself to deeply consider our political commitments and to put our beliefs into practice. Also, it helped that we were on the winning side: the university revoked its ban on political speech."
1/3/2012, Berkeleyside, Terry Doran, longtime Berkeley educator, dies, Frances Dinkelspiel
"Doran moved to Berkeley in 1960 to attend UC and became involved with the Civil Rights Movement, the Free Speech Movement, and the Vietnam War movement. While a teacher, he was involved with the union and worked towards integrating Berkeley schools
¶
'He was a long time educator and social activist who really had visions for a better world,' said Jason Eshleman, a former student and family friend. 'He fought for that in the capacity of an educator, a friend, and as school board president - essentially all of his life.'"
1/2/2012, New Europe, Analysis: Internet finds voice as citizens cry freedom, Stratis G. Camatsos
"July 1956: Writers, journalists, and students started a series of intellectual forums, called the Petofi Circles, examining the problems facing Hungary. Later, in October 1956, university students in Szeged snubbed the official communist student union, which led to students of the Technical University to compile a list of 16-points containing several national policy demands. Days after, approximately 20,000 protesters convened organised by the writer's union, which grew to 200,000 in front of the Parliament, all chanting the censored patriotic poem, the 'National Song'.
¶
December 1964: The Free Speech Movement (FSM) at the University of California at Berkeley was started by students who had participated in Mississippi's 'Freedom Summer', and it provided an example of how students could bring about change through organisation. Later, in February 1965, the United States begins bombing North Vietnam. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organised marches on the Oakland Army Terminal, the departure point for many troops bound for Southeast Asia. In April 1965, between 15,000 and 25,000 people gathered at the capital, a turnout that surprised even the organisers.
¶
December 2010: Mohamed Bouazizi proclaimed that there was police corruption and ill treatment in Tunisia. This sparked revolutions well into 2011 in Tunisia and Egypt, a civil war in Libya resulting in the fall of its government; civil uprisings in Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen, major protests in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Oman, and less in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan."
1/1/2012, Washington Post, Clear campus rules needed on 'harassment', Greg Lukianoff
"Activists embarked on a campaign in the 1980s to eradicate hurtful, bigoted and politically incorrect speech by enacting speech codes at universities across the country. Although the movement presented itself as a forward-thinking way to make campuses welcoming, the initiative stood in stark contrast to the celebrated "free speech movement" of the 1960s, whose proponents understood that vague exceptions to free speech were inevitably used by those in power to punish opinions they dislike or disagree with. And unfortunately the effort gained momentum as prestigious institutions passed speech codes."
1/1/2012, reason.org, Controlling Guns, Controlling People, Thaddeus Russell
"In 1967 Don Mulford, the Republican state assemblyman who represented the Panthers' patrol zone and who had once famously denounced the Free Speech Movement and anti-war demonstrations at the University of California at Berkeley, introduced a bill inspired by the Panthers that prohibited the public carrying of loaded firearms, open and concealed. As Winkler puts it, the text of what became the Mulford Act 'all but pointed a finger at the Panthers when it said, 'The State of California has witnessed, in recent years, the increasing incidence of organized groups and individuals publicly arming themselves for purposes inimical to the peace and safety of the people of California.'?' The law made California the first state to ban the open carrying of loaded firearms."
12/26/2011, San Francisco Chronicle, Texas president Bill Powers a Cal man from way back, John Crumpacker
"More than four decades ago, UC Berkeley was his school. Powers, a Los Angeles native, enrolled at Berkeley in 1963 and was an undergraduate when the Free Speech Movement got its start at Sproul Plaza.
¶
'The Free Speech Movement was relatively peaceful,' Powers recalled. 'You thought it was just a rally on campus. I'd hear Mario Savio give a speech. I wasn't involved in politics. I was a politically naive young kid. I remember Joan Baez would be playing her guitar on the lawn.'"
12/25/2011, +972blog, Clampdown on campus politics in Israel feeds social apathy, Issa Edward Boursheh
"The main demand of the Free Speech Movement of '64-'65 in Berkeley was for the university's administration to lift the ban off of on-campus political activities, and acknowledge the students' right to free speech and academic freedom. One wouldn't envision that such concerns from the 1960s would still apply in Israel of 2011.
¶
Yet Tel Aviv University's security department recently wrote to professors from in the history, philosophy and literature departments: 'I will be grateful for your handing over the students' details as soon as possible, including full name, ID number and telephone number,' with a YouTube video of students protesting reportedly attached to the email. And in Ben-Gurion University, students, represented by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, recently appealed (Hebrew) to the Supreme Court demanding it lift a ban on the distribution of pamphlets and posters protesting the current government's policies."
12/19/2011, The New American Magazine, OWS Port Shutdown Strategy May Backfire, William F. Jasper
"Like many of the other professors supporting the OWS, [David] Hollinger, who is a past chair of the American Association of University Professors' (AAUP) Committee on Academic Freedom, has a "history" of his own. He was a student activist in the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s at UC Berkeley, and for the past few decades has been infusing his '60s radicalism into his writing and teaching."
12/19/2011, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Crisis of the Public University, Nancy Scheper-Hughes
"The prospects are grim, but Berkeley faculty and students are struggling to keep their promise-of an open, free, independent, and diverse public institution-to the people of California, even while the public has not kept its promises to them. It took a faculty rebellion in 1919-20 to force the California legislature and UC regents to recognize the Academic Senate and its role in shared governance of the university. Clark Kerr, Berkeley's chancellor from 1952 to 1958, fought against the firing of faculty who refused to sign the anti-communist loyalty oath the regents required employees to sign during the McCarthy era. And Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien fought against the regents' 1995 ban on affirmative action in undergraduate admissions by raising more than a billion dollars, part of which was used to recruit and prepare disadvantaged minorities for admission to the Berkeley campus.
¶
Berkeley students started the free-speech movement in 1964, and students and faculty fought against military recruitment on campus during the Vietnam War, held anti-apartheid divestment strikes, and fought for affirmative action. Not all these struggles were successful, but all of them were worthy fights."
12/16/2011, UC Riverside Newsroom, Neil Smelser, a professor emeritus of sociology at UC Berkeley, will give prestigious lecture Feb. 14 about perfect storm of factors threatening higher education, Sean Nealon
"The Clark Kerr Lectures series honors Clark Kerr, who served as president of the University of California from 1958 to 1967. He spearheaded the negotiation of California's Master Plan for Higher Education, a 1960 document that endures to this day and is considered a model plan by many states and other nations.
¶
This is fifth installment of The Clark Kerr Lectures, which were started in 2003. It is the first time UC Riverside has hosted one of the lectures.
¶
Past lecturers have been: Harold Shapiro, president emeritus of Princeton University and the University of Michigan; Chuck Vest, president emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Donald Kennedy, president emeritus of Stanford University; and Hanna Holborn Gray, former president of the University of Chicago.
¶
Smelser's research has focused on what he calls the 'macroscopic social structural level' of social life, including economic sociology, social change, social movements, and the sociology of education. His most recent book, published by the University of California Press in 2010, is 'Reflections on the University of California: From the Free Speech Movement to the Global University.'"
12/14/2011, Savannah Now, Occupy idea's time has come, Barbara Kelly
"All positive change in history starts with the power of an idea, just as did the American Revolution. This just might be the start of another revolution, one that benefits the people who are not in power. The Civil Rights Movement began like this, the Free Speech Movement, the Vietnam War protests. Thirty years of silence about what has happened to regular people is ending."
12/12/2011, vtdigger.org, The Occupy movement is right, Barbara Vacarr
"Almost 50 years ago students at UC Berkeley played a major role in the Free Speech Movement of that era. Today in 2011, the campus stands as an example of oppression as student protesters were beaten with truncheons. At UC Davis, unthinking police pepper sprayed students who assembled themselves in a prone position.
¶
If this continues, we are in grave danger.
¶
When educational leaders and administrators are more concerned with public appearance and endowments than they are with students taking action in teachable moments about democracy, we are all in trouble.
¶
The Occupy Wall Street protesters are exercising their rights and they are right to do so. That is a fact too often lost in the political and media frenzy over demands and tactics. The issues they raise - student debt, the rising cost of higher education, inequality, concentration of wealth, adysfunctional government - are the issues that we as leaders must confront in the university.
¶
Instead, we are calling the police.
¶
College presidents must hold sacred issues of freedom of expression and safety to ensure that students think critically about the core of higher education-morality, democracy and civic responsibility."
12/12/2011, The Patriot Post, The 1960s Live Again, Burt Prelutsky
'I have long insisted that the decline of America began roughly 50 years ago. That was the decade that saw the liberals take a hacksaw to the black family, as LBJ and thousands of social workers did everything they could to drive black husbands and fathers out of the household. It also saw the advent of the Free Speech movement that started out in Berkeley and culminated in Kent State.
¶
Snapshots of the decade would include the Yippies rioting in the streets of Chicago, the Black Panthers murdering people in Oakland, suburban couples engaged in wife-swapping, and parents all over the country looking to swap places with their children, while extolling the hedonistic life style summed up by the odious phrase 'sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.'''
12/8/2011, Toronto.com, Paul Goodman Changed My Life: Portrait of a radical thinker, Linda Barnard
"He tells a young studio audience at a taping of CBC's As It Happens in 1969 that the youth who embraced the free-speech movement initially were losing the 'moral integrity and insight' by the early 1960s. When interviewer Burton asks Goodman on another broadcast if he can, at age 58, still communicate with the young, Goodman shrugs and says no."
12/8/2011, Merced Sun-Star, Occupy Wall St. protesters hold a UC teach-in, Yesenia Amaro
"In the wake of incidents of police brutality on nonviolent Occupy protesters at UC Davis and UC Berkeley, UC President Mark Yudof declared that free speech is part of the university's DNA, and that nonviolent protesters have long been central to the university's history, Malloy said. 'That is a beautiful sentence, but it's also a little misleading,' he said.
¶
At least, that wasn't the case in the first century of the university's existence, he said.
¶
As late as 1964, students at UC Berkeley were prohibited from advocating, fundraising or recruiting for any political causes or social movements on campus property, Malloy said.
¶
When a group of students at UC Berkeley tried to challenge the university's restrictions on freedom of speech, the police were called, Malloy said. But thousands of UC students surrounded police cars for more than 24 hours to prevent police from arresting anybody.
¶
The students didn't leave until the university administration agreed to drop the charges, he said. 'That event was what started the free speech movement at the UC Berkeley campus,' he said.
¶
At that time, the university administration and police's reaction was not the same as today, he said. 'They didn't sponsor a teach-in,' he said. 'Instead, nonviolent protesters were forcibly dragged out of university buildings. They were jailed, they were threaten with expulsion - all because they advocated free speech on their campus.'"
12/6/2011, The Register-Guard, Gerry Gaydos is honored for decades of community involvement, Ilene Aleshire
"'I wanted to be a biologist,' he said. But after his first year at The Ohio State University, he said, "I couldn't resist the attraction of the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, that were going on when I was a kid. I wanted to get involved in public policy and the law."
¶
He was concerned, he said, that 'the aspirations set forth in some of our founding documents weren't being fully realized in a lot of people's lives, particularly those with different colored skin. The reaction, or over-reaction, by others to people trying to obtain freedoms, to obtain rights, also was troubling to me.'
¶
Gaydos initially switched his educational focus to political science before deciding that practicing law was the most direct route to addressing some of his concerns."
12/3/2011, Contra Costa Times, Forty-seven years later, the spirit of the Free Speech Movement lives on, Jay Feldman
"The students are demonstrating for far more than just the right to set up tents. By aligning themselves with the broader Occupy protests against the imbalance of wealth in this country, the campus movements are establishing a connection between the financial crisis and the issues of budget cuts to education, skyrocketing tuition, student indebtedness, the decreasing accessibility of public higher education, and the increasing privatization of the university. In this, there is an analogy to the Free Speech Movement's connection to the civil rights movement.
¶
Other parallels between the FSM and the campus Occupy movements are worth noting. In both instances, student resistance was aimed at an intransigent university policy restricting civil liberties. In both instances, student resistance was dealt with by an unnecessary show of force from campus police and (in the case of Occupy Cal) outside law-enforcement agencies."
12/2/2011, policymic, The Next Steps for Occupy Wall Street, Seth Green
"It is very difficult to come up with an example of a successful protest. The millions of people who demonstrated against the 2003 invasion of Iraq didn't persuade former British Prime Minister Tony Blair or President George W. Bush. If the Janjaweed cared that I once traveled 5 hours to Washington, D.C. to protest the Darfur Genocide, they didn't elect to e-mail me. The Free Speech Movement in Berkeley really did have lasting impact in 1964, but that was not quite analogous to OWS; they were protesting very specific features of an institution that viewed them as stakeholders. Neither condition holds today."
12/1/2011, Jweekly, Ginsberg's America and mine connect with a poetic symmetry, Emma Silvers
"I was entranced when I learned about the publication of 'Howl' -- at what a powerful moment it was for the First Amendment, at the notion that literature could be revolutionary. Later, my infatuation with Ginsberg's works paved the way for a fascination with the free speech movement in Berkeley, with the radical history of the area in which I grew up."
December 2011/January 2012, CCPA MONITOR, An Early (mid-‘60s) Occupier, Marylee Stephenson
"TELLING IT TO THE JUDGE -- FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT,
University of California, Berkeley, 1965
[July 1965] (I was one of 786 students arrested for a sit-in at Berkeley. The judge required all of us to write a letter. He fined every person but one, $150. When the reporters asked why one person got a fine of only $50, the judge said, 'because I liked her letter.' That was mine, as below.)....
This may sound as if my only regret in breaking the law was in my physical and emotional discomfort. But, though it may be ironic, I don't believe that it is incongruent to say that it is my very respect for and faith in the overall goodness and justice of the laws of the constitution, and my belief in those concepts of freedom and human dignity, which made me infringe upon these laws which I am charged with breaking; so there it is. I care enough about my immediate freedom and safety and self-respect not to let someone else try to gain or maintain it for me. And in the process of doing something for myself, I cannot help but to do the same for someone else. And if I sit back in nothingness, I drag another into nothingness with me. "
11/30/2011, The Daily Californian, A legacy of political art on campus, Kanwalroop Singh
"Here hides the danger of equating the Occupy Cal movement to the Free Speech Movement. The Free Speech Movement has been put through a commodifying machine and spit back out in the form of a packaged product meant to cater to the university's needs. Comparing the Occupy Cal movement to that is akin to cementing its enslavement as well as the enslavement of its artists. Artists who were at first instruments for social change, now, are merely instruments. They are stuffed into a box, tied with a bow and sold to tourists and prospective students along with the rest of higher education."
11/30/2011, San Francisco Chronicle, UC Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau's dilemma, William J. Drummond
"Many faculty members identify with the students and their grievances. They are real, not imagined. This is not the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, which sought to register voters in Mississippi. Today's UC students are being ground into ever-increasing indebtedness because of tuition hikes.
¶
Nothing changed because of the Monday vote. Student unrest and demonstrations are likely to continue. Campus authorities will attempt to handle them with more delicacy, and certainly away from the prying lenses of video cameras."
11/29/2011, truthout, Occupy: From Encampments to a Movement, Meaghan LaSala
"Some of you may feel a little bit like, 'What are we doing here? What exactly is our goal?' I urge you I urge you to be patient with yourselves. Because with regard to every major social movement of the last half century or more, it started with a sense of moral outrage. Things were wrong. And the actual coalescence of that moral outrage into specific demands for specific changes came later. The moral outrage was the beginning. The sense of things going wrong. (Cheers) The days of apathy are over folks! (Cheers) Once this has begun, it cannot be stopped and will not be stopped.
¶
Meaghan LaSala: That was the voice of Robert Reich, speaking on the day of UC Berkeley's general strike at an event to memorialize Mario Savio, a free speech movement organizer and UC Berkeley student of the 1960's."
11/29/2011, Savannah Morning News, The 'Occupy' movement: It matters, Mary Gilbert
"No banker has been arrested, much less sprayed in the face with a toxic chemical agent, for acts of corporate fraud that nearly drove our economy off the rails. Police didn't raid Lehman Brothers. Instead, police brutality has been reserved for citizens who are standing up for what they believe in and trying to ensure that the 'American dream' does not become a fantasy.
¶
These are fundamental issues that go to the core of what American democracy means. I was proud to join several thousand Berkeley students on Tuesday for a general strike and a protest in Sproul Plaza -- the birthplace of the free speech movement. But while not everyone who shares the sentiments of the protesters will be occupying public parks, there are other ways to register discontent. Our elected representatives, business, and civic leaders need to hear our call to action.
¶
Change begins with moral outrage. Eventually Occupiers will have to decide what they want, instead of what they don't want and move on to the onerous work of building consensus for political change. But for now, it is enough that Americans are speaking out. And, despite the pushback and condemnation, people, including the media and politicians, are beginning to listen."
11/28/2011, The Cap Times, Students occupy colleges, Sara Goldrick-Rab
"Higher education is not sure about these students. Sure, the initial shots were fired long ago, during the Free Speech Movement. But that was about far more than how higher education would work; it was about how society would work. And since that time, colleges and universities have become less -- not more -- hospitable to what they like to call 'nontraditional' students: those that some have labeled 'tenants' rather than 'landowners,' decried as 'academically adrift,' and said to care far less about the hard work of studying. Serving these students has evolved as a speciality, rather than the primary function it ought to be when they comprise at least half of the undergraduate population."
11/25/2011, The Nation Blog, Berkeley Faculty: No Confidence in Chancellor over Campus Police Violence, Jon Wiener
"This protest, Hollinger says, is not like the Free Speech Movement of 1964, which challenged university rules that did prevent political advocacy. Focusing the campus Occupy Wall Street movement on the Berkeley chancellor 'implies that the UC Berkeley itself is integral to the economic inequality against which Occupy Wall Street is directed,' which 'grossly underestimates the role of UC Berkeley in advancing egalitarian goals.' Thus, Hollinger concludes, 'It will not do to blame this on Chancellor Robert Birgeneau.'''
11/23/2011, Seven Days, Security Force, Judith Levine
"According to Minneapolis Examiner.com reporter Rick Ellis, the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and other federal police agencies have been advising cities on how to destroy their Occupy movement encampments [1]. Ellis' source at the Justice Department says the feds have recommended massive shows of police force, middle-of-the-night raids to avoid press coverage, and justification of the evictions using local zoning or health laws. DHS denies involvement. President Obama has said only that each municipality should do its own thing. ...UC Berkeley had offered the students the use of Sproul Hall for a week to talk about their issues, which they declined. Was it an ironic coincidence or a veiled threat for the administration to choose Sproul, scene of the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement occupation, during which thousands of students spent two days studying, singing and even celebrating Chanukah before the police cordoned off the building at 2 a.m. and moved in to arrest 800?"
11/23/2011, San Jose Mercury News, Former UC Berkeley Chancellor Ira Michael Heyman was a champion of diversity, civil rights, Kristin J. Bender
"During the free speech movement in the fall of 1964, Heyman was a professor and the chairman of the Academic Senate's ad hoc committee on student conduct, which published a report criticizing the university's procedures during the civil rights demonstrations and recommended procedures for student discipline. Last month, UC President Mark Yudof awarded Heyman the UC President's Medal for lifelong contributions -- 52 years connected to UC Berkeley and public service. "
11/22/2011, The Sacramento Bee, UC system struggles to control protests, maintain free speech, David Siders and Kim Minugh
"'They act like they don't know how to deal with student protests,' said Robert Cohen, a New York University professor who co-edited the book 'The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s.' 'To see police beating kids up, I think it's embarrassing for the university.'
¶
On Monday, as UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi apologized for the pepper-spraying of students on her campus, UC officials ran damage control.
¶
'We cannot let this happen again,' UC President Mark Yudof told the chancellors of the UC system's 10 campuses in a teleconference Monday, his office said.
¶
Meanwhile, Sherry Lansing, chairwoman of the university system's governing board, said in a video on Facebook that UC would 'immediately begin to develop system-wide procedures to ensure that students can engage in peaceful protests."'
11/22/2011, The Emory Wheel, Looking Though the Occupied Kaleidoscope, Jason Schulman
"Scanning the faces in the crowd of protesters, one sees hippies, irritated graduate students and even an occasional celebrity musician. But most of all, the gathered horde is made up of people dissatisfied with 'the system' and fearful of the trajectory of America's future. I'm speaking, of course, of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964."
11/22/2011, The Berkeley Blog, Occupy Cal and the Free Speech Movement, David Hollinger
"As someone who participated in the Free Speech Movement as a student and who is now a member of the Berkeley faculty, I want to caution against the widespread impression (left, e.g., by the New York Times on November 20) that Occupy Cal is an extension of the substance, as opposed merely to the spirit of the Free Speech Movement. The spirit is most definitely similar, and that is all to the good. The eagerness of students to vigorously oppose civic evil and to debate serious issues in public policy does indeed recall the days of 1964, appropriately remembered with our FSM Café and our Mario Savio Steps. But the substantive differences between then and now invite more emphasis than they have so far received."
11/22/2011, Reader Supported News, Occupy This: Learning From the Dark Side, Steve Weissman
"Helvey took his inspiration from Professor Gene Sharp, who greatly expanded on the pragmatic, post-Gandhi approach that student movements stumbled into at Berkeley, Stanford, and other hotbeds of 1960s activism. We tended to see non-violence primarily as a pragmatic choice of tactics, though at times we thought more strategically. In the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, for example, many of the graduate students and teaching assistants clearly saw in advance how a massive sit-in could lead to a strike that would close down the university, and how that would push a majority of the faculty to come down on our side against the administration. With that in mind, we chose our tactics, timing, and outreach to faculty members."
11/22/2011, New York Times, Occupy at Berkeley, David Hollinger
"As someone who participated in the Free Speech Movement as a student and who is now a member of the Berkeley faculty, I object to the impression left by your article that Occupy Cal is an extension of the substance, as opposed to the spirit, of the Free Speech Movement.
¶
The current movement, by applying the language and symbolism of Occupy Wall Street, implies that the University of California at Berkeley is itself integral to the economic inequality against which Occupy Wall Street is directed.
¶
This conflates two very different institutional complexes, grossly underestimates the role of U.C. Berkeley in advancing egalitarian goals, and implies that the definancing of higher education by voters and legislators is somehow the fault of the campus authorities and within their power to correct. "
11/22/2011, Los Angeles Times, Ira Michael Heyman dies at 81; led UC Berkeley, Smithsonian, staff
"During the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, he chaired the Academic Senate's Ad Hoc Committee on Student Conduct. That committee produced what became known as the Heyman Report, which was highly critical of the administration's reaction to and handling of campus demonstrations.
¶
After rising to vice chancellor in 1974, he directed the drafting of Berkeley's affirmative action plan, which, after much debate and negotiation, became the first such campus plan approved by the federal government.
¶
Named chancellor in 1980, he continued to promote opportunities for minority students and considered the ethnic diversification of the campus his major achievement."
11/22/2011, Huffington Post, Open Letter to Chancellors and Presidents of American Universities and Colleges -- From Your Faculty, Matthew Noah Smith + 1,200 university faculty
"We condemn this and any deployment of violence by university officials against members of the university community who are non-violently expressing their political views.
¶
We condemn university officials using violence or the threat of violence in order to limit political dissent to the narrow confines of print and university-sanctioned events.
¶
We condemn university officials using violence and the threat of violence to prevent members of the university community from peacefully assembling.
¶
For more than three generations, American university and college campuses have been crucial locations in which inspiring and important political activity has occurred. From the founding of SNCC at Shaw University and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the 1960's, to the divestment movements across American college campuses in the 1980s, to the establishment of student labor alliances in the 1990's, American college campuses have pulsed with hopeful and positive forms of dissent and visions of alternatives. This admirable tradition is being threatened by the use of violence by university officials against their own students and faculty who are acting within this tradition.
¶
We therefore call on chancellors and presidents of universities and colleges throughout the United States to declare publicly that their campuses are Safe Protest Zones, where non-violent, public political dissent and protest will be protected by university police and will never be attacked by the university police."
11/22/2011, Gazettes.com, NO MYSTERY HERE: Life's Plots Not Always Resolved, Wendy Hornsby
"As a teacher, I figured out a long time ago that I constantly need to update my frames of reference to help students relate to various topics. Demographically, current undergraduates were in elementary school when 9/11 happened. Vietnam? Their grandfathers tell them about being there. I can't drop the Free Speech Movement into a discussion of recent student and faculty protests and expect this generation to know what that was."
11/21/2011, Washington Post, I. Michael Heyman, who led UC Berkeley and Smithsonian Institution, dies at 81, Adam Bernstein
"From the start of his career, Mr. Heyman seemed to insert himself in controversial roles. At Berkeley in the 1960s, he led a university investigation into student conduct during the Free Speech movement that spurred campus sit-ins and demonstrations.
¶
Mr. Heyman once broke a gavel to silence a hostile crowd of students but eventually drafted a report sympathetic to the students' goals of the right to political protest at Berkeley."
11/21/2011, EdSource, California's public colleges and universities fertile ground for protest, Louis Freedberg
"These events are playing out against the historical backdrop of the events of 1964 of which Yudof is no doubt well aware. One of Yudof's predecessors, then UC President Clark Kerr, barred on-campus recruiting and solicitation of funds for off-campus groups on the Berkeley campus. These actions triggered the Free Speech Movement, which in turn helped usher in the transformative student protest movement of the 1960s. The events that roiled the Berkeley campus for years eventually led to Kerr's firing in 1967 by the Board of Regents, at the urging of then-governor Ronald Reagan.
¶
Yudof's affirmation yesterday of 'free speech' as being in the 'DNA of the university' was a direct reference to the legacy of those turbulent days.
¶
What sets this era of protest apart is that those in charge of higher education in California are themselves vehement critics of the budget cuts which students are now protesting. Kerr, the architect of the three tiered public higher education system in California, presided over a period of massive investment and growth in higher education. By contrast, today's university leaders are trying to manage a precipitous disinvestment in public education at all levels in the state."
11/21/2011, Beyond Chron, Occupy's Strategy of Ongoing Direct Actions is Unprecedented - And Sustainable, Randy Shaw
"Finally, Occupy's ability to sustain direct action confrontations over time will be boosted by ongoing incidents of brutal police violence. The recent pepper-spraying of peaceful protesters at UC Davis would have been a front-page story in every newspaper in the United States had the Egyptian or Syrian military so attacked non-violent students; as word of this incident spreads, along with that of the violent police attack on UC Berkeley students and faculty at a plaza dedicated to Free Speech Movement hero Mario Savio, the public recoils in horror."
11/19/2011, The Telegraph, The Occupy movement has failed the essential test of protest, Janet Daley
"It was a clear breach of the constitutional rights of a group of American citizens who happened to live and work within the bounds of the University of California. (It was widely believed at the time that this was done at the behest of local Oakland businesses, which were being picketed by students protesting over racial discrimination in their employment practices.)
¶
A student called Jack Weinberg defied the prohibition by setting up a fund-raising table in the usual spot, just outside the Telegraph Avenue entrance to campus, and was promptly arrested. But the police car - with Jack in it - was immediately surrounded by students, preventing it from moving. That spontaneous action grew until soon there was a crowd of roughly 3,000 around the car, who stayed there (in shifts) for three days. A succession of speakers climbed onto the car's roof to address the crowd. And so the Berkeley Free Speech Movement - which set off the international student revolution - was born.
¶
Eventually, with the support of the university faculty and the US Constitution, we prevailed. And yes, to be young then was very heaven. But, I repeat, we knew precisely what we were fighting against and what would have to change before we would desist from our actions. "
11/19/2011, New York Times, Poet-Bashing Police, Robert Haas
"The idea of occupying public space was so appealing that people in almost every large city in the country had begun to stake them out, including students at Berkeley, who, on that November night, occupied the public space in front of Sproul Hall, a gray granite Beaux-Arts edifice that houses the registrar's offices and, in the basement, the campus police department.
¶
It is also the place where students almost 50 years ago touched off the Free Speech Movement, which transformed the life of American universities by guaranteeing students freedom of speech and self-governance."
11/18/2011, The New York Times, Berkeley Crackdown Raises Fear of Move Backward, Jennifer Gollan
"But protesters and critics of the university administration said the tents were a form of political expression. They compared them to the acts of 1960s protesters like Mario Savio, who helped start the Free Speech Movement by climbing on top of a police car to address demonstrators who had staged a spontaneous sit-in.
¶
Savio, who died in 1996, would be 'disappointed that the administration violated the free speech principles' championed by the movement, said Robert Cohen, a social studies and history professor at New York University, who wrote 'Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s.'
¶
'Tents in this sense are protected speech,' Cohen said, 'and he'd have argued that U.C. trampled free speech by banning them.'
¶
Alex Barnard, a spokesman for Occupy Cal, said protesters planned to put the tents back up.
¶
'Tents are the means by which we have chosen to express our First Amendment rights,' said Barnard, who is working on a Ph.D. in sociology. 'We are not going away.'
¶
A half-century ago, Berkeley's protest movement revolved around racial equality, free speech and, later, opposition to the Vietnam War. Robert Cole, an emeritus professor of law who joined the Berkeley faculty in 1961 and provided legal assistance to the movement, said the tumultuous period primed students to fight the university's restrictions on political advocacy.
¶
'At first,' Cole said, 'the university couldn't really understand why students were asserting themselves in this way. But these issues were so blatantly American issues, so they appealed to a very large cross section of students and faculty.'
¶
In 1964, the Berkeley division of the Academic Senate voted to bar the university from restricting political advocacy on campus as long at it did not interfere with classes or disrupt the university's operations. Several universities followed suit. The landmark legislation followed a sit-in at Sproul Hall that led to the arrests of about 800 protesters."
11/18/2011, The New York Times, An Uprising With Plenty of Potential, James B. Stewart
"Sidney Tarrow, a visiting professor at the Cornell Law School, an expert in social movements and author of 'Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics,' agreed that the movement could emerge as a more potent national force once the encampments were no longer an issue. This week's evictions 'could be the foundation for a national social movement,' he said. The 1964 Sproul Hall sit-in at Berkeley 'created a communal basis for a future social movement. They hadn't met until they were carried out by police. That's a powerful solidarity-creating experience. We may well see networks of activists growing up because of this. People in the same encampments, and people in different encampments, are now in constant contact and can share experiences. They'll build a community. That's why occupation of space is important.'"
11/18/2011, The Daily Californian, Transcript: Robert Reich's speech at Occupy Cal, Javier Panzar
"And one final point. The summer before Mario Savio was here, on these steps, he was down in Mississippi registering voters - that was Freedom Summer of 1964. If you can permit me a personal note: because I was always short for my age -- I was always very short; in fact, when I was a little boy I was even shorter -- I was always getting beat up.
¶
It is OK. There are always bullies, but you know what I did? I learned at an early age that the way to stop getting beat up was to make alliances with bigger guys who were older than I and also bigger than I was and they protected me. They were my own protection racket. And one of the boys, during the summers that I spent up in the mountains with my grandmother, one of the boys who was a protector of me, older than me, his name was Mickey. And I grew very fond of Mickey.
¶
And then that same summer of 1964, that same freedom summer, Mickey -- his full name was Michael Schwerner -- Michael and two other civil rights workers were down in Mississippi exactly the same time Mario Savio was there. They were brutally tortured and murdered by racists who felt that they -- my friend, my protector and his two colleagues --were a threat to the status quo in Mississippi.
¶
But when I heard that Mickey Schwerner had been brutally murdered, himself had been murdered by even bigger bullies, I sensed that something fundamental had to change. Not only in American society, but also in me. And all of you, right now, understand intuitively that if we allowed America to continue in the direction it was going on, with the wealth and the income and the power and the political potential for corruption and all that represents, that the bullies would be in charge.
¶
And you know and you understand how important it is to fight the bullies, to protect the powerless, to make sure that the people without a voice have a voice. And for that reason -- if there were no other reasons, and there are many others -- for that reason, I want to thank each and every one of you for what you are doing. Thank you."
11/18/2011, NBC Los Angeles, Protest Movement Redux, Sherry Bebitch Jeffe
"Already, members of the media were hyping this new wave of student activism, crystallized by the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement as 'the Free Speech Movement of the 21st Century.'"
11/18/2011, CounterPunch, Are Drum Circles Protected Under the Constitution?, Alexander Cockburn
"Enter Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, who often likes to reminisce about his Freedom Rider days. At the fortieth anniversary of the founding of FSM, they had a mock police car and platform and Chancellor Birgeneau spoke from it, reminiscing warmly about the birth of FSM and the importance of free speech. I spoke at the same anniversary, giving measured praise for subversive free speech in an event organized by Lenni Brenner, 'FSM and the Sixties: Lessons for Today.'
¶
Chancellor Birgeneau seems to be a man changed from the freedom rider of the mid-1960s or even the man perched on the platform in 2004. Last week he emailed the campus, defending the administration's response by saying that it was necessary to remove the encampment for 'practical' considerations of 'hygiene, safety, space and conflict issues'. He remarked: 'It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience.' So Rosa Parks prevented a white person from sitting in the seat reserved for them on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Club her to the ground"
11/17/2011, Zee News, Occupy Wall Street protesters set up camp at UC Berkeley,
"The encampment at UC Berkeley went up Tuesday during a daylong strike on campus against big banks and education cuts that culminated in some 4,000 people rallying at a speech by former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich.
¶
He spoke on the steps of the same student plaza where the Berkeley Free Speech Movement was launched in the 1960s, and implored the protesters to take a moral stand against the very rich controlling so much of America's wealth.
¶
'The days of apathy are over folks,' Reich, now a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, said to a roaring crowd at Sproul Hall. 'There are some people out there who say we cannot afford education any longer, we cannot provide social services for the poor ... but how can that be true if we are now richer than we have ever been before?'"
11/17/2011, Time.com, Occupy Oakland Protests Regroup at Berkeley, Jason Motlagh
"The resurgence in Berkeley is a shot in the arm for Occupy movements across the country. The break up of Occupy Wall Street on Tuesday was accompanied by similar actions in Seattle and an ancillary camp in San Francisco, on the heels of other raids in Portland, Oregon, Salt Lake City, Denver and Oakland. Authorities cited concerns about sanitation, drugs and crime to justify police actions. But in Berkeley, heavy-handed police conduct (and an abundance of cameras) appear to have backfired, much as it did in Oakland on Oct. 25 when an Iraq War veteran was seriously injured by police. Last week, police used batons to disband a student rally against tuition hikes and budget cuts. Video of the incident went viral on the Internet, galvanizing sympathy for the campaign.
(Read 'Occupy Oakland: After Second Police Raid, Protest Ends with a Whimper.')
¶
Indeed, the Tuesday rally stretched from the columns of Sproul Hall, a touchstone of the Free Speech Movement, to rooftops surrounding the plaza out front. Students stood shoulder to shoulder with nostalgic veterans of the 60s-era protests, and counterparts from Oakland, many of whom had marched about five miles from the cleared City Hall plaza to show their support. 'You can raid a camp, but not a movement,' says Luke, 22, a displaced Oakland camper, moments before a speech by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich calling on students to take a moral stand against the hyper-wealthy. The rally culminated in a vote on whether to set up tents in defiance of a university order; it passed unanimously.
¶
'This is overpowering for me; it's a movement I helped start,' says Bradford Cleaveland, 80, a long-time activist and former graduate student who offered encouragement to students. He shared a black-and-white picture of him on the steps of Sproul Hall next to Mario Savio, the late student leader famous for his 'put your bodies upon the gears' address, to establish his bona fides. 'It's the same, but better, because it's more difficult to do this kind of thing now -- there's so much fear.'"
11/17/2011, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, Student protests shut down business as usual (VIDEO), Yael Chanoff, Nena Farrell, and Shawn Gaynor
"'I believe words have the power to create change,' Said Jeanie Shoumacer, 47, an undergrad student who'd brought her 5-year-old son along for the civics lesson. 'We must not let this end,' she urged the crowd, speaking from the steps of Sproul Hall. 'We cannot give up.'
¶
Berkeley's Free Speech Movement began at Sproul Plaza. Signs of free speech activist Mario Savio had been set up with a sign reading, 'This is Our History.' Speakers were flanked by banners that read, 'Free education for all,' and 'Defend public education.'"
11/17/2011, Reuters, Police evict protesters at University of California, Berkeley, Laird Harrison
"Moving in before dawn on Thursday, police cleared away a protest camp from a plaza at the University of California, Berkeley where 5,000 people gathered Tuesday night in an economic protest."
11/17/2011, Los Angeles Times, Berkeley police break up Occupy Cal; tents removed, 2 arrested,
"Police moved in early Thursday to break up the Occupy Cal protest at UC Berkeley, arresting at least two protesters.
¶
Scores of officers conducted the raid, removing the tents and clearing the area.
¶
On Tuesday, more than 1,200 singing, sign-waving students and faculty members rallied for much of the day on Sproul Plaza, a site of the 1960s Free Speech Movement."
11/17/2011, KGO-TV, For Occupy Cal, a history lesson, Wayne Freedman
"It's been a long time since UC Berkeley saw a protest like this one: Sproul Hall is surrounded with various purposes, which could be the undoing of the Occupy movement as experienced protesters see it.
¶
"We had a mission and a purpose," said 1960s Berkeley protester Fay Lawson. 'You need a direction, and there is no direction here.'
¶
It was October 1964 when UC Berkeley students surrounded a police car containing one student under arrest. The student's name was Jack Weinberg, and the students blocked the police car for 36 hours -- the start of a movement that made today's Occupy protests possible.
¶
"It took about three days for the free speech movement to go from a few hundred people to an incident where there were several thousand people surround a police car," Weinberg said.
¶
At UC Berkeley, fighting for free speech and against the establishment is an attitude as unchanging as the architecture of Sproul Hall.
¶
By December 1964, students grew so frustrated that they occupied the Venerable Building in protest to two students being suspended. The students sat in, eating food passed through a second floor window.
¶
Professor Richard Muller, Ph.D., took several pictures when he was one of those students.
¶
'If you believed some injustice was being done, you had to stand up for it and you've got to be arrested,' said Muller. 'We expected to be arrested.'"
11/17/2011, Beyond Chron, The Tragedy of Jean Quan, Randy Shaw
"Quan's failure toward Occupy harkens back to liberal U.C. Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr, who alienated both right and left in responding to 1964 Free Speech Movement. Like Quan, Kerr had a history of support for social justice struggles and even lost a Cabinet appointment because he had been on an FBI blacklist.
¶
Yet despite his background, Kerr dismissed the Free Speech Movement as 'a ritual of hackneyed complaints' and accused its leaders of being influenced by Communists. Like Quan, he alienated the left by initially cracking down on the protests, and then lost conservatives when he changed course and agreed to the students' demands.
¶
Kerr was fired by the UC Regents in its first meeting after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as California's Governor in 1967. Mayor Jean Quan now awaits a similar fate from voters."
11/16/2011, YouTube, Highlights from the Mario Savio lecture on Sproul , thedailycal
"Prior to the speech by Robert Reich, Lynne Savio, widow of Mario Savio introduced winners of this year's Mario Savio Young Activist award and spoke of Occupy Cal's connections with the 1964 Free Speech Movement."
11/16/2011, truthdig, A Night of Hope in Berkeley, Cherilyn Parsons
"I walked back from the gathering with a friend who had been in Sproul Plaza on that day in 1964 when Savio gave one of his most famous speeches, including these lines: 'There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part; and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels.'
¶
I asked my friend how the current vibe differed from then. She said that back then, she and other young people had a tremendous sense of hope. They had no doubt that a better future was ahead, and if they wanted a piece of the American pie, they could have it. They could do anything. Today, she said, kids feel like they have no chance. The system is stacked against them. They're more realistic, true, but there's despair, frustration and a casting about for a way to create change.
¶
She added that she feels a sense of loneliness in this movement today, a social loneliness. Back then there were so many different movements, and they connected together. There was so much to become involved in.
¶
Last night, at least, the crowd remembered and renewed the wellspring of hope. Before Reich spoke, one of the three young Savio award-winners stirred the crowd with a vivid vision of 'when hope comes back.' Here's hoping."
11/16/2011, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, The scene at Occupy Cal last night (VIDEO), Rebecca Bowe
"A general assembly drew thousands to Sproul Plaza, the historic site where Berkeley's free speech movement began. The 15th annual ceremony honoring recipients of the Mario Savio Young Activist Award was held on the steps outside Sproul Hall following the general assembly, and Robert Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and former secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton, delivered a speech on 'Class Warfare in America.'"
11/16/2011, The Guardian, Robert Reich's Mario Savio Memorial Lecture,
"Class warfare in America': remarks made at the Mario Savio Memorial Lecture [video 17:38]"
11/16/2011, The Bay Citizen (blog), Watch Robert Reich Speech at Occupy Cal, Queena Kim
"The spirit of Mario Savio lorded over Sproul Hall on Tuesday night and a sense of history was keen among the students and supporters gathered there.
¶
There were the obvious connections. As a student at UC Berkeley, Savio led the 'Free Speech Movement' in the 1960s. To add, organizers of the Mario Savio Youth Activist Awards moved their previously scheduled ceremony to the steps of Sproul Hall in a show of support for Occupy Cal.
¶
The evening started with a student reading of Mario Savio and the themes were eerily reminiscent of what we're hearing from students in the Occupy Cal movement today.
¶
When Robert Reich, the scheduled keynote speaker for the awards, stepped onto the steps of Sproul Hall, he "connected the dots" between the movement then and now.
¶
'We were graced with the eloquence and the power of Mario Savio's words from these steps,' Reich said. 'In fact, the sentiments and words that mario savio expressed 47-years-ago is as relevant or more relevant today as they were then.'" [includes videos of Daniel Savio and Robert Reich]
11/16/2011, The Atlantic, Occupy Cal Makes Occupy History at Berkeley, Tina Dupuy
"In the largest GA history has ever seen (larger by at least 3,500 than similar meetings in New York) the group consensus was that they would, in fact, bring tents and set up an occupation on the Mario Savio Steps.
¶
Berkeley professor Robert Reich, who was already slated to speak at the memorial tribute, offered the massive crowd these words: 'Moral outrage is the beginning. The days of apathy are over, folks. And once it has begun it cannot be stopped and it will not be stopped.'
¶
After he left the microphone, half a dozen tents slowly paraded through the crowd and up the Mario Savio steps to rest at the top. The PA system played the first song of a promised dance party. The first tune? Gloria Gaynor's 'I Will Survive.'
¶
Of course."
11/16/2011, San Jose Mercury News, Occupy Oakland joins Berkeley movement, Tammerlin Drummond
"Reich, a vocal supporter of the Occupy movement, drew parallels between the Free Speech Movement that started at Berkeley in the 1960s and today's Occupy protests.
¶
In the 1960s, Reich said, students were fighting for civil rights and voting rights. They were protesting poverty in cities and rural areas and demonstrating against the war in Vietnam.
¶
Today, Reich told the students, the battle is against the concentration of economic wealth that has corrupted our democracy. Since there are no controls over the amount of money spent in politics, he said, the political power also goes to the top.
¶
'You in the Occupy movements all over this country are the ways in which people are responding to the crisis of our democracy,' Reich said.
¶
The Berkeley students' protest against higher fees places them squarely in the context of the global Occupy movement. They join students all over the world -- most recently in Britain and Chile -- who have taken to the streets in their anger over student debt.
¶
Unlike in Oakland, one gets the sense that there is an exciting movement being birthed."
11/16/2011, San Francisco Chronicle, Huge protest at UC Berkeley - vote to set up camp, Justin Berton, Nanette Asimov, Demian Bulwa, Kevin Fagan
"As many as 10,000 students and Occupy activists overflowed UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza on Tuesday night following a daylong classroom walkout and established a small camp in defiance of the university's edict that no tents be erected, setting up a potentially tense standoff with authorities.
¶
There were so many people in the plaza that it was hard to move through it, and dozens of police officers stayed on the periphery as the tents went up around 9:30 p.m. The first time students tried to set up an Occupy Cal tent city on the plaza was last Wednesday, and police used batons to block that attempt, drawing community criticism.
¶
UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau issued orders last week and again on Tuesday that no tents be allowed past a symbolic few in the name of political expression. But the result of a vote by protesters -- said to be 88.5 percent in favor of tents -- was in clear opposition to those orders.
¶
'The seeds of resistance have been planted, and we will not be moved,' the woman who announced the hand-counted tally said to thunderous cheers.
¶
Reich delivers speech
The vote came just before UC Berkeley professor and former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich delivered the annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture in which he blasted economic inequity. Immediately after the hour-long address, the tents sprang up." [great photos]
11/16/2011, Salon, The students are coming!, Gary Kamiya
"From the Free Speech Movement to SDS and the anti-Vietnam War protests, many of the most important American protest movements have historically been spearheaded by students. In recent years, students, buffeted by hard times and growing up in an apathetic, me-first civic culture, have been as passive as the rest of the population. But in the last two years soaring tuition costs, draconian cuts in faculty and classes, and the prospect of a jobless, student-loan-burdened future, have begun galvanizing some collegians into action. And the Occupy Wall Street movement has lit a fire under more of them, and broadened their movement into a structural demand for social justice and equity."
11/16/2011, Reuters, Berkeley protesters pitch tents, defying authorities, Laird Harrison
"Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, an outspoken supporter of the anti-Wall Street movement, hailed the protesters in a late-night speech from the steps of Sproul Hall, invoking the leaders of the 1964-65 'Free Speech Movement' at Berkeley.
¶
'The Occupy movement is beginning to respond the crisis in democracy,' he said. 'You are already succeeding. ... The days of apathy are over, folks. Once this has begun, this cannot be stopped and will not be stopped.'"
11/16/2011, PBS NewsHour, Berkeley Students, 'Occupy Oakland' Protesters Join Force, Spencer Michels
"Former Labor Secretary and U.C. economics professor Robert Reich delivered the Mario Savio Memorial Lecture, honoring a leader of the 1960s free speech movement.
¶
ROBERT REICH, former U.S. labor secretary: Over the last three decades, this economy has doubled in size, but most Americans have not seen much gain. If you adjust for inflation, what you see is the median wage has barely risen. Where did all the money and resources go?"
11/16/2011, North County Times, Occupy protesters set up camp at UC Berkeley, Associated Press
"Campus police repeatedly told the protesters in the morning that they risked arrest if they did not take the tents down and leave. But the protesters remained in the plaza, where they were joined overnight by Daniel Ellsberg, a former defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers....The encampment at UC Berkeley went up during a daylong strike on campus on Tuesday against big banks and education cuts that culminated in some 4,000 people rallying at a speech by former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Reich, who spoke on the steps of the same student plaza that first launched the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the 1960s implored the protesters to take a moral stand against the very rich owning so much of America's wealth."
11/16/2011, Huffington Post, Occupy Cal Draws Thousands: Supporters Crowd Sproul Plaza For Robert Reich Speech (PHOTOS), Garance Burke and Terry Collins
"BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) -- Anti-Wall Street activists began rebuilding their tent encampment on the steps of the University of California, Berkeley student plaza Tuesday and cheered wildly when former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich implored them to take a moral stand against the very rich owning so much of America's wealth."
11/16/2011, Daily Kos, Berkeley, CA... This is f**cking beautiful. Photos and Videos, Jill Kay
"A lot of attention on Robert Reich's speech last night, and rightfully so. But I wanted to share some footage deserving equal attention: the words of Josh Healey--poet, community organizer and recipient of the Mario Savio Young Activists Award. He spoke just before Reich and read his poem for the 99%. Congratulations on your award Josh, and yes, we are all fucking beautiful.
¶
When Hope Comes Back
(A Poem for the 99%)
when Hope comes back
he will be more than a campaign slogan
and a face on a poster faded red, white, and blue
he will not come from a presidential palace
bought and paid for like a Citibank stock option villa
he will put not forget to put on his walking shoes
and join the picket lines in New York
the bread lines in Baltimore
to shake the calloused hands
of everyone walking by" more at link
11/16/2011, Daily Californian, Occupy Cal: Art and activism, Jessica Pena & Nastia Voynovskaya
"As the crowds converged at noon on Tuesday, Nov. 15 at the steps of Sproul Plaza, there were no signs of anxiety or inklings of unfettered anger. Instead, there was music, art and a relaxed environment of visionary enterprise. As the University Gospel Chorus, led by director D. Mark Wilson, chanted songs of social justice, the congregation of students, faculty and fellow supporters of the Occupy Cal movement stood spellbound. It was a moment of collective joy and pointed politics which would come to reflect the broader tone of Tuesday's protest as a movement characterized, as activist Amanda Armstrong stated, not by hostile aggravation but by 'creative power.'
¶
This was not the first time art, music and activism have merged with politics on Sproul Plaza. In 1964, Joan Baez provided a soundtrack of acoustic anthems to the Free Speech Movement while artists O' Brien Thiele and Osha Neumann immortalized the conflict surrounding People's Park with a memorial mural in 1969. On Tuesday, it became apparent not much had changed. A diverse array of provocative sculptures and paintings populated the scene alongside acoustic guitars, a capella groups and rock bands like Will Crum who came not only to play some tunes but to use music as a means for 'people to reach out and talk about what bothers them.'"
11/16/2011, Daily Californian, Some students choose not to protest on Day of Action, Christopher Yee
"Mullen did not immediately see the irony of being at the Free Speech Movement Cafe while more than 1,000 protesters gathered on Sproul Plaza for the Open University Strike and Day of Action on Tuesday at noon.
¶
She would have made more of a commitment to protesting, except she had developed a fear of potential police violence after seeing what happened six days earlier."
11/16/2011, Berkeley Daily Planet, Will Berkeley's Occupy Cal Save the World?, Becky O'Malley
"Carol Denney, a frequent contributor to these pages, is fond of saying that the reason the Free Speech Movement took place at the University of California at Berkeley was NOT because free speech flourished on this campus. Quite the contrary: it's been the tradition at Cal, going way back in pre-history before I was an undergraduate, for arrogant administrators to try to keep the lid on student speech. It could be described as a form of hubris (a ten-dollar word I learned in Cal's English department): 'we're the top ...students are damn lucky to be here...so they should shut up and drive'"
At the University of Michigan, another school I had the opportunity to observe in the 1960s after I graduated from Cal, the bosses took the opposite tack. By and large, they ignored student protests, so there were never any major riots on the part of either students or police. Eventually the more radical students got bored, founded first SDS and then the Weathermen, and went off to tear up Chicago instead, which was much more satisfying-and now like Bill Ayres they're almost all professors somewhere or other."
11/15/2011, thetruthpursuit, Occupy Movement Inspires Veteran Protesters,
"As the anti-Wall Street Occupy movement in the Bay Area meets resistance from law enforcement, older protesters are hoping to pass on the wisdom gained from their experience to a younger generation leading current demonstrations. After nearly 40 years since the Free Speech movement took hold in Berkeley, the Occupy movement is now uniting old and young in the pursuit of economic and social justice."
11/15/2011, San Francisco Chronicle, Huge protest at UC Berkeley - vote to set up camp, Nanette Asimov, Kevin Fagan
"Among the protest banners and signs being displayed were 'Poetry for Justice' and even the double-take-inducing 'Stanford is w/Cal.' The Mario Savio Steps -- commemorating the late father of the Free Speech Movement -- in front of Sproul Hall were turned into an outdoor living room of sorts, with a piano, bookcases and Persian rugs spread out across the pavement."[great photos]
11/15/2011, Rachel Maddow Show, Rachel Maddow Show, Rachel Maddow
"We're human beings!" [ed. note: Reviews FSM, Occupy Cal, Savio Lecture, Dan Siegel, and Robert Reich--wonderful!]
11/15/2011, Oakland Tribune, Occupy Cal protesters vote to pitch tents, Gary Peterson, Doug Oakley and Hannah Dreier
"Later Tuesday night at UC Berkeley, Reich rallied the crowd to the central message of the Occupy movement.
¶
'The fundamental problem (is) we are losing equal opportunity,' he said to a warm reception from as many as 3,500 who remained in Sproul Plaza, where the Free Speech Movement was born. 'We are losing the moral foundation stone upon which this country was built.'
¶
The 'days of apathy,' he said, 'are over.'"
11/15/2011, Los Angeles Times, Occupy: Day of protest begins slowly at UC Berkeley, Maria LaGanga in Berkeley and Carla Rivera in Los Angele
"Demonstrations are also planned Tuesday at Cal State campuses in Fullerton, where students were to conduct a flash mob in the main quad, and Los Angeles, with rallies and theatrical presentations on the impact of education cuts."
11/15/2011, Daily Californian, Lost and found: Mario Savio's reflections, Robert Cohen
"The lost letter was penned by Savio on Dec. 4, 1964, from Santa Rita Prison, where he and hundreds of students had been sent after being arrested for nonviolently sitting-in at Sproul Hall. The letter, which Savio had sent (or intended to send) to his parents, brother and grandmother, was discovered by Barbara Stack as part of a project -- funded by FSM veteran Thom Irwin of the Free Speech Movement Archive -- to gather and inventory the papers of FSM activists."
11/15/2011, Daily Californian, Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement 47 years later, staff
"This page will aggregate commentary on the iconic leader of the Free Speech Movement, Mario Savio, in light of the 15th annual Mario Savio Memorial lecture on Nov. 15. The lecture will be delivered by public policy professor Robert Reich and will be held on the steps of Sproul Hall at 8 p.m. Readers may continue to submit their thoughts to opinion@dailycal.org."
11/15/2011, Daily Californian, A few hundred protesters gather on Sproul for noon rally, Curan Mehra
"Protesters began Tuesday's strike and Day of Action setting up a home for themselves on the steps of Sproul Plaza.
¶
The psuedo-living room included couches, ornamental rugs and even a book shelf filled with titles like The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills and The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom.
¶
'The idea is to make this place more like a home,' said UC Berkeley freshman Sara Kei and member of the art committee that was responsible for furnishing the Mario Savio steps. 'This is our space - make it livable.'"
11/15/2011, Counterpunch, Birgenou's Rampage U.C. Berkeley Chancellor Sends in Riot Police to Batter Students, Michael Levien
"What Wednesday's events conclusively demonstrate is that Birgeneau and the UC Berkeley administration, not student protesters, are the greatest threat to campus safety. While many police offers displayed sadistic violence and should be fired and sued for police brutality, the responsibility lies at the top. In deciding to authorize U.C. and Alameda County police to inflict grievous bodily injury on its own students to enforce a minor clause of the campus code, UC administrators--including Chancellor Birgeneau, Executive Vice Chancellor George Breslauer, and Vice Chancellor for Student affairs Harry Le Grande--showed an astounding lack of judgment, intellect, courage, and human decency. They should be forced to resign immediately before they are able to hurt more students."
11/15/2011, Berkeleyside, Rally begins after teach-ins at Occupy Cal Day of Action, Frances Dinkelspiel
"Demonstrations will take place throughout the day. Occupy Oakland participants, many of whom were evicted from their tent city in downtown Oakland early Monday, are expected to march to the Cal campus starting at 2:30pm. And a general assembly, planned for 5:00pm, will include a vote on whether to build an encampment. UC Berkeley professor of public policy and former U.S. secretary of labor Robert Reich will deliver his annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture on Sproul Plaza at 8 p.m."
11/15/2011, Bay City News, Rally, Teach-Outs, Marches Planned For #OccupyCal Strike, Patricia Decker
"This evening, an annual lecture that honors the memory of Mario Savio, a key member of the 1964 Free Speech Movement that began on campus, was moved to Sproul Plaza from its original location in Pauley Ballroom, which is in the student union across from Sproul Hall."
11/15/2011, Associated Press, Former US Labor head Reich addresses Occupy crowd, Lisa Leff
"'Every social movement in the last half century or more -- it started with moral outrage,' Reich said, likening Wall Street to the bullies who battered him when he was an especially short kid. 'You understand how important it is to fight the bullies, to protect the powerless.'" [great photos]
11/14/2011, San Francisco Chronicle, Protest is not protest is not protest, Leah Garchik
"P.S.: Meanwhile, artist-bail bondsman Jerry Barrish, mentioned herein last week, went down to check out the Occupy San Francisco site. Barrish's long history of bailing out protesters started with assistance to demonstrators angry about hiring practices around town in the early '60s. Subsequently, he bailed out protesters for a variety of civil rights-connected causes, including the Free Speech Movement, Alcatraz-occupying American Indians, Port Chicago, People's Park and San Francisco State.
¶
The folks providing legal services to the Occupiers told him they needed office space with computer and telephone access, and other amenities. Barrish offered them space in his office, near the Hall of Justice. 'It seemed like the best way to support them.'"
11/14/2011, Oakland Tribune, Occupy Oakland Live Blog: Protesters rally outside library, with some saying they want to march back to plaza, Kristin J. Bender, Josh Richman, Thomas Peele
"Jack Radey, 64, took part in the Free Speech Movement and anti-Vietnam War protests in the 1960s. He now lives in Eugene, Ore., but was in Oakland for a visit and decided to check out what was going on at the plaza.
¶
'We're just getting started,' Radey said. 'I've seen a mass movement around Vietnam and civil rights -- and it's come again.'"
11/14/2011, Daily Democrat, Woodland's weekly planner Nov. 14 - Nov. 20,
"Tuesday, Nov. 15, 5:30 p.m. The Cross Cultural Series and Sociology Program at Woodland Community College welcome Ziza Delgado, from the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, to deliver a presentation called 'Put Your Bodies Upon the Gears: The Free Speech Movement and Third World Liberation Front.' Delgado is involved with a coalition of teachers from Oakland Unified School District, organizing and implementing a pilot program to teach Ethnic Studies in OUSD. The presentation will take place until 6:45 p.m., in the Community Room, Building 800, 2300 E. Gibson Road, Woodland."
11/14/2011, Daily Californian, Robert Reich's lecture to become part of UC Berkeley strike, Christopher Yee
"'Under the circumstances, the organizers of the annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture thought it would be more appropriate for me to give the lecture outside, and on the steps of Sproul Hall, rather than inside the Pauley Ballroom, where access would be limited, and the students who are involved in the current protest invited me to do so as well,' Reich said in an email."
11/14/2011, Daily Californian, Dec. 4, 1964 letter by Mario Savio while detained in Santa Rita Jail, Mario Savio
"Dear Mom and Dad, Noni and Tom,
¶
I won't be in here long, but I thought you might like to receive a letter from the 'Birmingham Jail.' They arrested about 800 of us students after we seized and held the administration building, Sproul Hall, for about 14 hours. We entered the building between noon and 1 a.m. on Wednesday. Here it's Friday morning already and they have not yet even now completed 'booking' us. In a speech on Tuesday noon I gave the administration an ultimatum -- 24 hours to accede to our demands. When they failed to do so we seized the administration building. Our action has electrified the entire state -- as well as many thousands in other states. It was Governor Brown himself -- the fink - who ordered our arrest. But the action we took has also lighted a fire under the faculty, who have raised thousands of dollars in bail money, who have demanded we be pardoned, who have demanded that our demands for free speech be met, and who may insist that the Chancellor resign. Furthermore, there is a strike going on right now on campus. The whole campus is shut down -- when I urged students to sit in on Wednesday I'd promised that either we would get our rights or we would completely halt the operation of the University! Its operation has been completely halted. So serious is our effort being taken that the Teamsters Union has refused to cross our picket lines. Accordingly, no materials which are brought into the University by truck are coming in. That means that no food is coming to the cafeterias -- none at all. Whereas before the administration held the students in seige (sic) in one building; now we hold the administration in seige (sic) on the entire campus!
¶
Even if the Regents do not now meet all our demands, at least we have brought the faculty over to our side. We have already won substantial victories. I am well and boyantly (sic) happy -- if a little grubby. Don't worry, please."
11/14/2011, Berkeleyside, UC Berkeley After Oakland eviction, Occupy focus shifts to UC Berkeley, Tracey Taylor
"'This is in protest against the use of excessive police force against non-violent demonstrators who were peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech in a symbolic encampment,' wrote Lynne Hollander Savio in an email release co-signed by the Mario Savio Memorial Lecture and the directors of the Young Activist Award Board. The lecture is scheduled to take place at 8 p.m. on Tuesday"
11/14/2011, Berkeley Daily Planet, Mario Savio Memorial Lecture on Tuesday in Berkeley Will Be Moved to Sproul Plaza,
"The Mario Savio Memorial Lecture and Young Activist Award Board of Directors and Robert Reich, the scheduled lecture speaker, have been asked by the Occupy Cal General Assembly to transfer the event to the Mario Savio Steps in Sproul Plaza at 8 p.m. Tuesday evening, instead of holding it inside Pauley Ballroom. This is in protest against the use of excessive police force against non-violent demonstrators who were peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech in a symbolic encampment. Although we recognize that this change of venue may pose a physical hardship for some of the attendees, it was unanimously agreed that we would be violating our mission statement (see below) to reject the request. Depending on the exact circumstances at the time, a somewhat shortened presentation of the Young Activist Award will be held, and the award winners will speak"
11/13/2011, libcom.org, Oakland's Third Attempt at a General Strike, Hieronymous
"Oakland, California has historically suffered by being in the shadow of the golden allure of San Francisco across the Bay. From the Gold Rush to the Summer of Love to the Castro District as a Gay Mecca to the Dot.com Boom, San Francisco has been known around the world as a magnet for get-rich-quick dreamers, bohemians and idealists. Berkeley, bordering Oakland on the north, was the birthplace of radical student agitation throughout the 1960s, beginning with the Free Speech Movement on the University of California campus in 1964. Oakland has always been a gritty industrial town, whose working class residents have ranged from reactionary whites in the Ku Klux Klan (in the 1920s) and Hells Angels (after World War II) to blacks at the cutting edge of civil rights struggles, and today is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the U.S. Oakland was thrust onto the world stage in 1966 with the Black Panther Party and its militant self-defense of the African American community.
¶
The radical history of the Bay Area is like a giant tapestry and its threads run through the whole region. Telegraph Avenue is 4.4 miles long; it merges into Broadway at Latham Square on the Oakland end, the exact location of the strike of women retail clerks at two department stores on either side that sparked the 1946 General Strike. That strike led to the Taft-Hartley Act (the 1947 federal law banning strike and solidarity tactics that make general strikes possible) six months later and was the beginning of Cold War politics that smothered class struggle for a generation. On the Berkeley side, Telegraph ends at Bancroft Way right at Sproul Plaza on the U.C. Berkeley campus. Exactly 18 years later, on the exact day that the Oakland General Strike was officially declared, December 3rd, the Cold War began to thaw in a mass arrest of over 800 (the largest mass arrest up to that time in California) at a Free Speech Movement sit-in at Sproul Hall. Several of those student protestors had been radicalized by participating in Civil Rights organizing in the Deep South for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); many had taught at Freedom Schools. For the rest of the sixties, U.C. Berkeley was shut down several times due to mass student strikes and protests, including a month-long occupation of People's Park by the National Guard, sending waves outwards as the youth revolt spread throughout the world. "
11/13/2011, Daily Californian, Free Speech Movement veterans, historians respond to the Occupy Cal events, Aptheker, Cohen, Druding, Felsenstein, Garson, Goldberg, Hollander, Lye, Medal, Smith, Stack
"An appeal to the UC administration to restore Berkeley's free speech tradition
¶
We the undersigned Free Speech Movement (FSM) veterans and historians remind the UC administration that the university's emergence as a center of free political expression on campus began in 1964 when the Free Speech Movement's free speech principles were adopted by the UC Berkeley division of the Academic Senate in its historic Dec. 8 resolutions. Those resolutions affirmed the 'content of free speech or advocacy should not be restricted by the university.' The resolutions established that there would be no restrictions on campus political expression but only on 'time, place and manner,' meaning protests cannot interfere with classes or interfere 'with the normal functions of the university.' The administration's unilateral ban on tents and on a peaceful encampment on the lawn alongside Sproul Hall (that neither interfered with classes nor prevented the 'normal functions of the university') clearly encroached on the free speech rights established by the Dec. 8 resolutions. In other words, the UC administration's confrontational actions violated the university's own free speech principles and policies, encroaching upon Berkeley's historic free speech traditions.
¶
This act of political repression threatens to return UC Berkeley to the pre-FSM era in which speech was freer off campus than on campus. Indeed, today there is greater free speech in New York's Zucotti Park -- where the dissident Occupy Wall Street encampment has been allowed to continue for months -- than on the Berkeley campus. The fact that there is greater personal freedom in a park in Manhattan than on a public university campus in Berkeley should be a mark of shame for this administration. The fact that the UC administration chose to enforce its ban on a non-violent student encampment by inviting on to campus armed police and county sheriffs who violently attacked unarmed students is an affront to the very mission of the university.
¶
We urge the University of California administration to cease and desist its violations of the Dec. 8 resolutions, to forswear and abandon all future use of police violence against law-abiding students and faculty, and to restore the campus to its historic free speech traditions.
¶
--Bettina Aptheker, Robert Cohen, Susan Druding, Lee Felsenstein, Barbara Garson, Jackie Goldberg, Lynne Hollander, Colleen Lye, Anita Medal, Gar Smith, Barbara Stack"
11/13/2011, Daily Californian, UCPD draws criticism for stopping Occupy Cal protesters carrying signs, Afsana Afzal
"Members of the Free Speech Movement Archives also sent an email condemning the actions of the police who they said suppressed the students' first amendment rights that were recognized 47 years ago during the Free Speech Movement in 1964."
11/11/2011, Wired, How Occupy Became This Century's Free Speech Movement, Quinn Norton
"It's been 47 years since the start of the Free Speech Movement, which inspired the anti-Vietnam War movement, the hippies, and perhaps even the internet as we know it.
¶
Free-speech veteran Lee Felsenstein sees parallels in Occupy to the movement he helped start.
¶
'It's an old story to us,' said Felsenstein, speaking for the board of the the Free Speech Movement Archives.
¶
'The fundamental thing that was going on with the Free Speech Movement was reclaiming public space, and I have seen this expressed recently with the Occupy movement,' Felsenstein said.
¶
During 1964, engineering students like him all over the country were not only watching Cal, but working on ways to connect the campuses together using the first nascent and slow computer network.
¶
'One of the effects of the Free Speech Movement, and that outbreak of freedom really, was manifested in the development of the internet,' Felsenstein said. 'We see the structure of the internet being an open structure, and open structure is what we were fighting for.'"
11/11/2011, Berkeley Daily Planet, Statement on UC Police Violence from Veterans of the 1964 Free Speech Movement, Members of the Free Speech Movement Archives (www.FSM-A.com)
"As veterans and historians of the 1964 Free Speech Movement that established the rights of students to freely express their concerns over critical social issues within the boundaries of the University of California's campus, we were shocked by the actions of campus police who seized banners from students peacefully demonstrating in Sproul Plaza and on the Sproul Steps.
¶
We join Berkeley Councilmember Kriss Worthington in demanding that the banners be returned and that University Administrators condemn this unconscionable police assault on Free Speech.
¶
The University is a commons dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. It appears that the campus police are in need of remedial education concerning fundamental protections offered by the US Constitution -- including First Amendment rights to Free Speech and Free Assembly that were clearly recognized and enshrined on the UCB campus 47 years ago on these very steps.
¶
We further condemn the actions of the armed police who beat and arrested students and faculty. We deplore the decision of University officials who, once again, opened the campus to armed and club-wielding Alameda County sheriffs. And we applaud the inspiring example of the students who bravely and nonviolently held their ground against police batons.
Members of the Free Speech Movement Archives [Board] (www.FSM-A.com): Bettina Aptheker, Robby Cohen, Susan Druding, Lee Felsenstein, Barbara Garson, Lynne Hollander, Anita Medal, Jack Radey, Gar Smith, Jackie Goldberg and Barbara Stack "
11/10/2011, The Atlantic, Close UC Berkeley Riot Police Use Batons to Clear Students from Sproul Plaza, Conor Friedersdorf
"In iconic Sproul Plaza, many hundreds or perhaps thousands of UC Berkeley students and Occupy Oakland activists clashed with university police late into the night Wednesday, after officers carried out instructions from administrators to clear Occupy Cal protesters from their makeshift encampment. 'We formed a human barricade around our tents, and they just beat their way through it with batons,' said one student. 'It really, really hurt - I got the wind knocked out of me,' another protester, doctoral student Shane Boyle, told the San Francisco Chronicle, showing the reporter a red welt on his chest. 'I was lucky I only got hit twice,' he added."
11/10/2011, San Jose Mercury News, Protesters regroup after night of protests at UC Berkeley, Matt Krupnick and Rick Hurd
"Those arrested in the afternoon were English professor Celeste Langan and UC Berkeley students Sonja Diaz, Zahide Atli, Ramon Quintero, Ricardo Gomez, Timothy Fisken and Zakary Habash.
¶
The demonstrations, just 4½ miles up Telegraph Avenue from the Occupy Oakland encampment at Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, were on the site Mario Savio and other Free Speech Movement leaders used for their protests in the mid-1960s.
¶
The current rallies have reflected widespread economic worries that culminated in Occupy Wall Street, a nationwide movement of encampments and demonstrations against banks and large corporations. As at other Occupy protests, picket signs at UC Berkeley referenced a variety of topics, including Palestine, student loans and affirmative action.
¶
California should lead the nation in reforming public higher education, Leigh Raiford, an associate professor of African-American studies, said during a rally. She decried high foreclosure rates and exorbitant spending on prisons at the expense of public education.
¶
'Reckless greed by the 1 percent caused this,' she said. 'Much of this student loan debt is held by the big four banks.'"
11/10/2011, Daily Californian, Drawing on Occupy movement, protesters turn out en masse, Anna Vignet/Senior Staff
"'I chose to come here because of the history in civil rights and the Free Speech Movement,' [Aseem] Kever said. 'If I'm here, I want to participate, and I leave a legacy.'"
11/10/2011, Daily Californian, What would Mario Savio say about the Occupy movement?, Nadav Savio
"What sort of movement would Mario help build? Well, that's the hard part. What I'm struck by in looking at a few of his speeches is that he wasn't at all extreme in his advocacy. Here's what he told an audience on the Berkeley campus in 1984: 'America, to accommodate the just demands of the new majority, has to become at least a little bit less capitalist.' He went on to advocate a fairly modest shift away from pure maximization of profit and towards basic social benefits like universal health care. (A similar sentiment was nicely expressed in a Wall Street protester's sign: 'Replace capitalism with something nicer.') Mario then added, and I think this is incredibly relevant: 'becoming less capitalistic means we don't have to become less democratic; we can become more democratic!'
¶
Indeed, for all the talk of tactics and strategy, perhaps the most salient aspect of this movement has been the conspicuous display of in-this-togetherness across a relatively wide swath of the country's demographics. My dad had a faith (though it could be shaken) that a more just world is possible and that such a change can only come about through people working together and caring for one another. He was never a Marxist but he loved the iconic statement: 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.' What I have found most moving and most hopeful in the Occupy movement is the embodiment of this sentiment in images and stories of simple communal living and spontaneous care-taking. I believe my father would have been deeply moved simply to see a broad spectrum of people coming together, laying their bodies on the gears, and helping each other face an unjust, inhumane machine."
11/9/2011, gannett.com, Author Frank Bardacke to read at Two Rivers, staff
"Two Rivers Bookstore in Binghamton will host a reading by author Frank Bardacke at 7 p.m. Monday. He will read from his new book, 'Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farmworkers.'
¶
Bardacke is a teacher and labor organizer who worked the fields in Salinas Valley, Calif., for more than seven years. He is the author of 'Good Liberals and Great Blue Herons: Land, Labor and Politics in the Pajaro Valley,' and translated 'Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiques of Subcommandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.' He was a student leader of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley, an organizer of People's Park in Berkeley, and was featured in the award-winning documentary 'Berkeley in the '60s.'"
11/9/2011, Berkeley Daily Planet, "Some things never change": Student Protests at UC Berkeley, Jane Stillwater
"PS: U.C. students in Berkeley are very well-represented by their district's councilperson, Kriss Worthington, who was also on Sproul Plaza, backing his young constituents up. Here's what he told the Berkeley Daily Planet tonight:
¶
'At the home of the Free Speech Movement, the UCPD appears to have suppressed Free Speech again! Please join us in questioning this behavior and challenge the UCPD to respect the Free Speech Rights of Occupy Cal.'
¶
Worthington then went on to admonish Chancellor Birgeneau and U.C. police chief Calaya for their violent actions against non-violent protestors. 'I wanted to bring to your attention that banners with Free Speech content appear to have been seized by UCPD in front of Sproul Plaza. ...It is hard to imagine that such an act could occur at the exact location in Berkeley where the Free Speech Movement began.' Worthington nailed it exactly.
¶
"You can imagine that the sense of irony will not be lost on the public, that the UCPD violated the Free Speech rights of protesters at this particular location. ...These students have made a firm commitment to no violence and no vandalism. The University should be commending the thousands of students that are participating. For many, this could be their very first political protest of their life. They are protesting specifically for additional financing for the University of California. The University should support this enthusiasm and help encourage this to be an effective protest that helps the University and our country.'"
11/8/2011, UC Berkeley Newscenter, Public policy professor, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich to deliver Savio Memorial Lecture on class warfare, Kathleen Maclay
"The Mario Savio Memorial Lecture honors the memory of the late Mario Savio, a spokesperson for the Free Speech Movement in 1964. The program will include a presentation of the Mario Savio Young Activist Award in recognition of a young person working to build a more humane, just society.
¶
Sponsors include the UC Berkeley Library, Goldman School of Public Policy, the Free Speech Movement Cafe and the Graduate Assembly."
11/8/2011, San Francisco Business Times, Robert Reich: Occupy movement not part of 'class war', Steven E.F. Brown
"Reich will be giving the 15th annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture on Nov. 15 in Pauley Ballroom in the university's student union. Tickets -- the event is free -- will be available that day at 6:30 p.m., 90 minutes before the speech."
11/6/2011, San Francisco Chronicle, 'Steve Jobs,' by Walter Isaacson: review, Dan Zigmond
"'There was the technology revolution that began with the growth of military contractors and soon included electronics firms, microchip makers, video game designers, and computer companies. There was a hacker subculture - filled with wireheads, phreakers, cyberpunks, hobbyists, and just plain geeks - that included engineers who didn't conform to the HP mold and their kids who weren't attuned to the wavelengths of the subdivisions.... There was the hippie movement, born out of the Bay Area's beat generation, and the rebellious political activists, born out of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Overlaid on it all were the various self-fulfillment movements pursuing paths to personal enlightenment: Zen and Hinduism, meditation and yoga, primal scream and sensory deprivation, Esalen and est.'"
11/6/2011, Reader Supported News, Why the 1% Love "Anarchist Violence", Steve Weissman
"For young white activists, this Realpolitik strengthened our tendency to see nonviolence as a pragmatic choice of tactics, not a philosophic commitment that most of us never embraced. Our stance faced an interesting test at Berkeley just before the Free Speech Movement's big sit-in on December 2, 1964. Joan Baez, the popular singer and committed pacifist, had agreed to take part, but suddenly suffered second thoughts. The evening before the sit-in, it somehow fell to me to field a call from her mentor Ira Sandperl, a Gandhi scholar who had marched for civil rights with Dr. King. "Would we commit ourselves to remain strictly nonviolent?" he asked.
¶
'No,' I replied. 'We can't.'
¶
My bluntness surprised us both, but FSM was a democratic movement and we would make our own decisions. As diplomatically as I could, I told Ira that we were a broad coalition of groups, from Goldwater Republicans to revolutionary socialists, and I could hardly speak for them all. But, as of our last meeting, we were planning to use non-violent tactics for our occupation of Berkeley's administration building, Sproul Hall.
¶
A great soul with a superb sense of whimsy, Ira heard what he needed to hear. Joan came to the sit-in, sang her songs, and had her say. 'Muster up as much love as you possibly can, and as little hatred and as little violence, and as little 'angries' as you can - although I know it's been exasperating,' she told us. 'The more love you can feel, the more chance there is for it to be a success.'
¶
By contrast, our own Mario Savio had already launched us onto a less loving path. 'There is a time,' he declared, 'when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop.'"
11/4/2011, Echo Park Patch, Echo Park Will March to Occupy LA Friday, Anthea Raymond
"The group is inspired by Art Goldberg, an Echo Park attorney, who's led a group of war demonstrators at that corner for most Fridays over the past eight years.
¶
Goldberg, 70, also runs the Working People's Law Center of Echo Park, where he offers sliding scale rates to working class clients who can't afford more.
¶
FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT
¶
Golberg was also part of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the 1960s, and did part of his legal education at Howard University, an historically-black college."
11/3/2011, Berkeley Voice, New Cal themed restaurant comes to Berkeley, Martin Snapp
"But Pappy's is going to be about more than the Waldorf era, or even Cal football. The giant, 200-inch-diagonal TV screen will feature videos of The Play that broke Stanford's heart in 1982 (but not, thankfully, Roy Riegels' wrong-way run that lost the Rose Bowl in 1929).
¶
But it will also show the Cal Marching Band doing its signature spell-out at the Big Game, Cecilia Bartoli in a Cal Performances concert at Zellerbach Hall, some of Cal's 22 Nobel Prize winners giving lectures, even Mario Savio speaking on Sproul steps.
¶
'We want to honor the whole spectrum of Cal/Berkeley/Telegraph Avenue history,' says owner Alex Popov."
11/1/2011, The Brooklyn Rail, ZELIG ON THE LEFT: BILL ZIMMERMAN, Lawrence Weschler
"Rail: So this was on the eve of 1968, basically. I wonder whether the people at Brooklyn College know any of this history today.
¶
[Bill] Zimmerman: I doubt it, as it's been covered up pretty well over the years. Students sat down in front of the Navy recruiters. The dean of students immediately called the police who came onto campus and arrested the students sitting in front of the recruiters. Other students wanted to set up a table facing the recruiters to distribute anti-war literature, and they were denied permission. A large crowd of students gathered, curious about what the cops were doing on campus, and we encouraged them-they had brought a paddy wagon on campus to pick up the arrested students-so Bart and I encouraged them to sit down around the paddy wagon and surround it and not allow it to leave, much as Berkeley students had done in the free speech movement in 1964. So we had the cops, the cops had the students, we had the cops surrounded, nobody could move. It lasted about an hour and then the tactical squad of the New York police force showed up, and a phalanx of cops drove through this crowd of students, swinging billy clubs, bloodying heads, dragging female students around by the hair, extraordinarily brutal-I've seen a lot of demonstrations, but this was one of the most brutal. They arrested 60 students and we then gathered the remaining students and called for a student strike, and the next morning the strike was 90 percent effective. The campus had been shut down. That happened to be the Friday before the march on the Pentagon. So Friday the campus was shut, Saturday we went to Washington for the Pentagon march, Monday we came back, and the strike was continuing."
11/1/2011, Counterpunch, The 1946 Oakland General Strike An Eyewitness Account by Stan Weir, Cal Winslow
"'The man who was always billed as leader of the 1934 San Francisco General Strike, ILWU President Harry Bridges, who was then also State CIO President, refused to become involved, just as he did 18 years later during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement struggles. The rank-and-file longshoremen and warehouse- men who had been drawn to the street strike were out there on their own.'"
11/1/2011, allAfrica.com, Africa: Lies, Deception, Betrayal in Video Game War On Libya, Cynthia McKinney
"We're human beings! There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious that you're so sick at heart that you can't take part.
¶
You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears, and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop.
¶
And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all! (Mario Savio, December 1964)
¶
In December 1964, the United States was a cauldron on fire. Fervent anti-Vietnam War protests occurred alongside demonstrations and sit-ins as part of the broader Civil Rights Movement that included calls for recognition of indigenous rights, Black rights, Puerto Rican self-determination, Chicano rights, and women's rights.
¶
At this important moment of synchronicity, Blacks wore signs proclaiming, 'I am a man' and young white pro-civil rights and anti-war demonstrators at University of California, Berkeley declared: 'We're human beings!' It is to our humanity that I now appeal. During this (past) long month of October, I can say without a doubt that all of our institutions, even those that exist solely for the pursuit of peace, have failed us: from international organisations founded so that there would be no more war, to international institutions whose sole mission is to render justice, the mighty prerequisite for there to be any peace at all."
10/30/2011, New York, Bangin', Amos Barshad
"PERCUSSIVE PROTEST
Drum circles started popping up in America around that time; history and social-studies professor Robert Cohen of NYU points to one early example in a 1964 memo recapping a meeting of the University of California at Berkeley dean of students' office regarding on-campus Free Speech Movement protests: 'The problem of bongo drums and other noise making in the area of Ludwig's Fountain was discussed.'" [ed note: Per Robert Cohen, personal communication, The issue with the drums came up the summer before the FSM not during FSM protests.]
10/29/2011, New America Media, Occupy Berkeley, Why So Quiet?, Zaineb Mohammed
"Jeffrey Lustig, a professor emeritus at Sacramento State and a UC Berkeley student during the 1960's, who was significantly involved in the free speech movement, commented on the degree to which obligations facing students have changed: 'I thought nothing about quitting school for a year and painting houses in SF and hitchhiking around the country. But the pressure on students these days is much more intense.'"
10/29/2011, LA Observed, Occupy LA as a leadership school, Bill Boyarsky
"That's one of the important points about the Occupy movements. Leaders will emerge from them, just as Art Goldberg's sister, Jackie Goldberg, emerged from the Free Speech Movement to become a teacher, a school board member, a legislator and a Los Angeles City Council member.
¶
What looks like a disorganized mess is, in many respects, a training ground for those who will join the next generation of leaders. They are receiving practical lessons in subjects ranging from getting agreement on a food-serving schedule to dealing with difficult people to organizing protests against what originally brought them together-income inequality and rapacious financial institutions."
10/28/2011, Tallahassee.com, Hang on to our real leaders, Gerald Ensley
"There is nothing wrong with a movement like Occupy Wall Street being leaderless. Grass-roots politics by its definition is a welter of ideas bubbling up from many sources.
¶
But when it comes time to cull the good ideas from the not-so-good ideas and push for change, you need a Mario Savio, an Abbie Hoffman or a Martin Luther King Jr. You need elected officials. You need individuals to marshal the ideas, balance the competing interests and make the tough decisions.
¶
You need leaders."
10/26/2011, Burnaby Now, Candidate wants more global role for city, Janaya Fuller-evans
"On Tom Tao's first day at the University of California Berkeley, he caught a speech by Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement, he says.
¶
The Burnaby mayoral candidate also says he was at People's Park in May 1972 when protesters tore down the fence in response to President Richard Nixon's announcement that he was going to put mines in North Vietnam's main port.
¶
'I saw how politics corrupt people,' he says of that time, adding he is running as mayor to ensure politicians, including himself, are held accountable for their actions."
10/25/2011, Maclean's, Occupy Column-Inches!, Colby Cosh
"To join the Left and participate in street politics is to join a tradition, to link oneself up with a heritage of activism; there is no simple analogue on the Right, which prizes tradition as a principle but does not favour theatrical open-air protest (with exceptions for partisans of particular issues, notably abortion). It is safe to say that every Occupy Someplace attendee who has any awareness of history thinks himself engaged in creating a distant echo, however hollow and distorted, of Selma and Greenham Common and the Free Speech Movement."
10/21/2011, Fox & Hounds Daily, Schwarzenegger Makes Movie Outside of CA, And other Friday Notes, Joel Fox
"This item was a surprise: According to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, the largest total donation from one source for President Obama in the 2008 election came not from a corporation or a political action group but from UC Berkeley employees.
¶
They contributed $1.6 million combined to Obama, more than from any other organization.
¶
Do you suppose the birthplace of the free speech movement now agrees with the U.S. Supreme Court that political money equals speech?"
10/20/2011, The Star Leger, Don't say Occupy Wall Street protesters don't get capitalism, Jordan Fullam
"While Bastian accuses the protesters of lacking a grasp of capitalism, it is clearly he who neglects the nuances of our current economic problems. Many opinion articles published during the free speech movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement and the civil rights movement used similar strategies to defame the integrity of those activists: They were all dismissed as 'anti-capitalist' by critics whose ideological blinders prevented them from seeing the complexities of the issues."
10/20/2011, Sacramento News & Review, A generation awakens, Jay Feldman
"When I speak in public, the person introducing me sometimes mentions that I was arrested in the 1964 Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, and upon hearing this, many people-younger people in particular-are visibly awed. The movement was the genesis of the student unrest of the 1960s and '70s, and an integral component of the larger rebellion that once again brought about profound change in this country.
I also took part in civil-rights demonstrations and anti-war protests. Early on, these efforts were scorned, red-baited and otherwise marginalized. With years of persistence, however, the rallies, marches, sit-ins and teach-ins grew to critical mass, leading to the end of both segregation and the Vietnam War."
10/20/2011, Indybay, Sacred Steps for a Nuclear Free, Peaceful, Just World with Louise Dunlap & Linda Seeley, Carol Brouillet
"Louise Dunlap is the author of Undoing the Silence: Tools for Social Change Writing who assists people to make their voices heard in the challenging debates of our times. A longtime advocate for peace and justice, she began her work for social change with the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, and taught at the University of Massachusetts in the 1970s. Later she taught graduate students in policy and development at M.I.T. and eight other graduate schools including three in South Africa."
10/19/2011, The Highlander, KUCR Celebrates 45 Years On Air, Abraham Lopez
"But there was a time when KUCR was not so well known amongst our community. In fact, KUCR had its humble beginnings as a student run pirate radio station during the mid 60's, broadcasting its signal from a dorm room bathtub in A&I. According to Hans Wynholds, former student and a founding manager of KUCR during the 60's, his then roommate, Kerry Kelts suggested the idea of a student run radio station. When word reached the chancellor, Ivan Hinderaker, he decided to help the group of students by funding $10,000 from the UC Regents towards the radio station. However, the 1965 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley caused some understandable hesitation in the UC Regents.
¶
Vandenberg interviewed Wynholds on air this past Tuesday. Wynholds explained that the regents feared that a student radio station could be used as a vehicle to further the free speech movement that had begun in Berkeley and had eventually spread to the US Capitol."
10/19/2011, Tablet Magazine, The documentary Paul Goodman Changed My Life profiles the forgotten, prolific, and bisexual New York Intellectual who inspired the 1960s New Left, Jacob Silverman
"Goodman eventually earned a reputation as a father of the New Left, although, in reference to his own refusal to be of any clique or party, he called himself 'a Dutch uncle to the young.' Still, the SDS and the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley sought him out for counsel. He was, like others of his ilk, a target of FBI surveillance."
10/19/2011, Gazettes.com, EYE ON ART: Orange County Highlights Conceptual Art Circa-1970, Julian Bermudez
"During the 1960s and 1970s, California experienced an era of significant social change.
A youth-oriented counterculture demanded educational reform igniting the Free Speech Movement of 1964. Inequality and racism led to the Watts Riots in South Central Los Angeles in 1965. And, that same year, Cesar Chavez organized the grape strike in the San Joaquin Valley."
10/18/2011, Park Forest, Love in Action Crunch Time For Occupy Wall Street, Michael Nagler
"Six years ago I stood with a large group of young people on the roof of the student union building on the Berkeley campus, ticking off the ways they were better off in their understanding than we had been in the heady, but not very sophisticated days of the Free Speech Movement. It was exhilarating to see that improvement. It's even more exhilarating to see it on the move."
10/18/2011, Oakland Tribune, Corkheads: 'Booze Island', Jessica Yadegaran
"To promote the location and celebrate San Francisco, Kane produces 11 wines under the Winery SF label, including a 2006 white blend called 'Love Child' to honor 1967's summer of love and a 2008 mourvedre blend titled 'Speak,' representing the free speech movement of 1964."
10/17/2011, BroadwayWorld.com, Hodges and Hodges Set the Stage for HAIR!, Linda Hodges and Nick Hodges
"If you go to Berkeley, head over the Cal Berkeley's Sproul Plaza where the Free Speech Movement began. Stand on the spot that reads 'This soil and the airspace extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity's jurisdiction.' Make a speech and pass out more flowers."
10/17/2011, Berkeleyside, Government Peace & Justice Commission to Obama: Apologize, Frances Dinkelspiel
"But many of Berkeley's stances that seem ridiculous end up being adopted by the broader American population, according to Charles Wollenberg, a historian and the author of Berkeley: A City in History. The Free Speech Movement began in Berkeley in the early 1960s and spread throughout the nation, he pointed out. In 1964, Berkeley students held some of the first protests against the Vietnam War. Berkeley was one of the first cities to call for divestment from the apartheid regime in South Africa. It also was the first to ban the use of Styrofoam cups."
10/14/2011, Northwest Cable News, Inside the 'Occupy Portland' camp, Erica Heartquist and Michael Rollins
"What's different between 1960s and 2011, said Randy Foster, attacked by police at Berkeley standoffs during the Free Speech movement, is the technology.
¶
The web and social media, said the Colton resident, have created transparency.
¶
'There was no computer, no email, the coverage that did exist was biased, there was no truth,' he said. 'Now, the media's covering it truthfully.'"
10/14/2011, Daily Californian, Students: Inspiration to change the world, Mary Ann Uribe
"Students are leading the way as they did in the Free Speech Movement, the Anti-Vietnam War movement, the Women's Liberation movement, the protests in Tiananmen Square in China and the Paris riots.
¶
This is a legacy today's students at UC Berkeley should not find hard to follow, as you walk in the shoes of those who have led the way before you. We will be there to support you, to stand toe to toe with you and offer advice.
¶
We must be ever vigilant to continue the fight to eliminate poverty and equalize the wealth held by 1 percent of the wealthiest Americans and others throughout the world in the face of the other 99 percent of us who are exploited, left homeless and in poverty, without employment, and seemingly without hope.
¶
The torch of the world's fate has been offcially passed to you."
10/13/2011, Penn Current, Q&A with Richard Beeman, Greg Johnson
"Q. You attended Cal Berkeley in the early 1960s. Were you involved at all in the student activism and protest movements?
A. I was an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley from 1960 to June of 1964. Berkeley at that time was politically a very active place that had a reputation even then as a left-wing university, but there was a kind of cheerful spirit about it. Even though liberals and conservatives would engage in debates, it was good-natured. Three months after I graduated, Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement launched the student revolution not only in America, but really in some senses around the world. So I missed the student revolution by three months. Then, in December of 1964, I got married as a 22 year old. By my calculations, I missed the sexual revolution by 15 minutes. I'm of an age and generation that I narrowly missed two important cultural revolutions. I watched them from afar, somewhat curiously, but I didn't actually take part in them."
10/11/2011, Daily Californian, UC Berkeley students demonstrate in support of Irvine 11, Curan Mehra
"Bazian drew a parallel between the issue of the Irvine 11 and Mario Savio of Berkeley's Free Speech movement.
¶
'The speaker has the right to free speech, and the protester has the right to free speech as well,' Bazian said."
10/10/2011, The Daily Orange, Pop Culture | I'm talking about my generation, Jessica Wiggs
"Student organizations do still exist; they just aren't being used in the same way. The Saturday Night Magazine article described how, instead of protests, riots and boycotts, students today set up booths and invite speakers to lecture. Compared to University of California-Berkeley's Free Speech Movement in 1964-65, this current strategy is weak. To me, expressing opinions in such an active manner is much more compelling and progressive than simply promoting awareness."
10/10/2011, Huffington Post, Occupy Wall Street In American History: An Interview With NYU Professor Robert Cohen, Christopher Mathias
"It's been a while since a movement on the left has gained this much traction, so I talked to Robert Cohen, professor of social studies at NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, author of 'The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s' and co-editor of 'When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America's First Mass Student Movement, 1929-1941' about how the Occupy movement compares to American protest movements in the past, and to gain a sense of how movements like this effect change.
¶
A major emphasis of protesters thus far is that they remain leaderless. Do you think leaders will eventually emerge? And do protests of this size need a strong set of leaders, or can the protests thrive without them?
¶
The question is not whether this protest movement has leaders, but whether our elected political leaders begin to address the problems this movement is dramatizing. No you don't need great leaders to lead effective mass protest movements if they tap into enough spontaneous dissent. The sit-ins in 1960 had no great leader. They began in Greensboro in February 1960 and generated similar protests all across the South, as well as sympathy demos in the North, and they won the desegregation of lunch counters, re-energizing the entire civil rights movement."
10/8/2011, Berkeley Daily Planet, Berkeley Dodges End of the World, Joins National Anti-Wall Street Revolution Saturday at Bank of America Plaza Downtown , Ted Friedman
"But thanks to heads up community organizing by a People's Park founder, Michael Delacour, 73, Berkeley is back in the game--with an initial crowd of more than one-hundred enthusiastic protesters, which is sure to grow.
...¶
'The students at the planning meeting told me, they can draw four-hundred students,' Delacour said Thursday. Students may have fallen short of 400 (I counted fifteen), but the ones who turned out were choice.
¶
The new Mario Savios are John Holzinger, 20, from Pasadena, and Bo-Peter Laanen, 20, a Scandinavian. Both are Cal Political Science majors. Remember those names."
10/7/2011, The New Republic, Why No One Is Right in California's Affirmative Action Debate, John McWhorter
"The College Republicans are exercising their right to free speech. One is to sense that as ironic, in that they are the conservatives, of the kind that Mario Savio and company were battling back in the days of Berkeley's Free Speech movement. However, to the extent that racial preference fans at Berkeley condemn opposition to their ideas as offensive-i.e. blasphemous-and leave temperate-minded people afraid to speak their minds, they have become, themselves, The Power-a kind of power that good people are responsible for Speaking Truth To." Ed note: The Free Speech Movement was a coalition which included conservatives
10/7/2011, The Daily Beast, The Occupy Wall Street Blow-by-Blow, Matthew DeLuca
"For a little while, between two and three o'clock, activity slowed. There were many speeches, but nothing that might be said to have conjured forth the soul of Mario Savio, the '60s-era student orator whose 'put your bodies upon the gears' speech stoked a fire in the belly of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. There were representatives from the loose collective of activists called Anonymous, as well as Code Pink, ReportWrongdoing.com, and groups protesting the then-pending execution of Troy Davis. There was a man with a pink toy rifle. As dark clouds overhead loosed a few stray drops and one young man chanted "This is just a practice" through a bullhorn, home seemed to be beckoning."
10/6/2011, Oakland Tribune, Oakland Tribune My Word: Little tolerance at UC Berkeley for views that are not liberal, Andrew David King
"The notion that the author of a statement is somehow responsible for how others react to it seems to me -- and should, to any sensible person -- beyond absurd.
¶
One chooses to be offended, just as one might choose to ignore the source of the offensive, remain calm or stage a counterprotest.
¶
But to say that people are not responsible for their feelings undermines the same idea of free will that allows the administration to condemn the Berkeley College Republicans in the first place.
¶
It is disheartening to note that, at one of the most financially chaotic times for the university in recent memory, all campus leadership has to offer in the way of comment is condescending didacticism directly contrary to the ethos of the Free Speech Movement."
10/5/2011, The Berkeley Daily Planet, "Occupy Wall Street" Comes to Berkeley, Becky O'Malley
"We've been down these paths before. Commenters on Occupyer websites and Facebook pages are already citing Mario Savio's famous Free Speech movement exhortation.
¶
And these new populists could easily take as their manifesto Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 speech announcing the Second New Deal, in which he denounced all of the same evils being catalogued this week on Wall Street. What's often forgotten is that America's most powerful homegrown Fascist, Father James Coughlin, started out as a strong supporter of the New Deal and denouncer of bankers. He cleverly manipulated radio, the modern media of his day, to build a strong national following for diatribes that sounded not unlike some of the speeches which are now being made in New York and elsewhere, if you leave out his anti-Semitism.
¶
The populism of the 1930s eventually diverged and re-coalesced into a variety of mass movements, some good and some bad. Even Hitler started out as a populist."
10/5/2011, Indiana Daily Student, Forgetting Neverland, Nico Perrino
"I'm talking about the generation that spawned the free speech movement. Yes, them. They are your professors, your elected officials and your parents. They are the reason the Indiana Daily Student doesn't have to worry about censorship from IU administrators and the reason, in part, that we didn't spend another decade in Vietnam.
¶
For all the good they did, they really screwed things up as they got older. They are now the generation responsible for campus speech codes, which are unconstitutional rules regulating what students can and can't say on campus."
10/3/2011, Daily Californian, A tale of two protests, Casey Given
"In 1971, professor John Searle of the philosophy department published a book called 'The Campus War' reflecting on the widespread student movements of the 1960s. At the end of his chapter on academic freedom, Searle warned of a rising 'radical intolerance' following the Free Speech Movement, where 'the right to dissent' is reserved only for 'a set of approved left-wing views,' while any others 'that departed from the orthodox' are chilled by the tyranny of the majority.
¶
Unfortunately, it looks as if Searle's prediction has manifested itself at Cal, with speech deviating from the political norm, like the bake sale, receiving threats of violence, administrative condemnation and possible defunding. While these channels of disapproval may not constitute a legal breach of free speech per se, they nevertheless take a form of backdoor censorship that is hypocritical to any institution dedicated to the free flow of ideas, let alone the home of the Free Speech Movement."
10/1/2011, Washington Post et al, Today in History, The Associated Press
"In 1964, the Free Speech Movement was launched at the University of California at Berkeley."
10/1/2011, NBC Bay Area News, Berkeley's Free Speech Movement Turns 47, Sajid Farooq
"Forty-seven years later the same spirit that sparked the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley is still alive with students and activists alike who continue to take a stand for their beliefs.
¶
The movement was organized by an informal group of students who demanded that UC Berkeley and colleges across the country lift rules banning political action on campuses.
¶
The protests made household names out of the likes of Mario Savio, Jackie Goldberg, Art Goldberg, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker and Steve Weissman.
¶
It also brought ushered in the political tables, fliers and speakers that UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza is now so famous for."
9/30/2011, Los Angeles Times, Review: 'California Design 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way' at LACMA, Christopher Hawthorne
"One of the most intriguing aspects of the curators' approach is the subtle way they foreshadow the changes that would remake architecture and design in the 1970s and 80s.
¶
The most important way that those professions pivoted - as the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley and the riots in Los Angeles gave way to Vietnam protests and counterculture nonconformism - was to trade optimism for a darker sensibility, and indeed to trade the idea that design's chief focus is to solve problems for an interest in using creative work to reflect societal fissures and political tensions. The key difference between a Craig Ellwood house from the 1950s and Frank Gehry house from the 1980s, in other words, is that the former uses architecture to resolve contradiction and the latter uses it to dramatize, or even redouble, contradiction."
9/30/2011, Jewish Currents, October 1: The Free Speech Movement,
"The Berkeley Free Speech Movement began on this date in 1964 when Jack Weinberg, an alumnus of the University of California at Berkeley, was arrested for violating new campus rules forbidding solicitation for “off-campus political and social action.” Weinberg, who had a long record of civil rights activism, went limp and was carried to a cop car, but then Mario Savio (not Jewish) climbed atop the car and aroused his fellow students to protest. They surrounded the car, deflated its tires, and kept it there for 32 hours. Among the Jewish leaders of the student protest movement that emerged were Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, and Art and Jackie Goldberg (a brother and sister; she went on to be a founder of the LGBT Caucus of the California State Legislature). Months later, the new acting chancellor of the university, Martin Meyerson, restored the right of students to organize on campus — and the Free Speech Movement morphed into the Vietnam Day Committee, led by Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and Stew Albert, among others."
9/30/2011, Eat the State, Reclaim Our History: Oct. 1-15, David M Laws
"Oct. 1, 1964: UC Berkeley math grad student Jack Weinberg is arrested for setting up CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) information table in Sproul Plaza, inadvertently starting the Free Speech Movement as students surround a police car for 32 hours."
9/27/2011, Jewish Journal, Acting rabbi brings rebirth to 1920s shul, Ryan E. Smith
"This month, Susan Goldberg became the acting rabbi of what is believed to be the city's second-oldest shul still operating out of its original location.
¶
For Temple Beth Israel (TBI), the addition signals the latest step in a rebirth that has seen membership triple in the past few years. For Goldberg, 37, it is the latest chapter in a unique story.
¶
'I'm an unlikely rabbi,' she said.
¶
This is not to say that her family doesn't have strong Jewish roots. Her great-grandfather may have been the first kosher butcher in Los Angeles, she said.
¶
But for the Goldberg clan, Jewish identity was always political, not theological. Her father, longtime community lawyer Art Goldberg, was a leader of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the '60s. Her mother, Ruth Beaglehole, established the Center for Nonviolent Education and Parenting, now known as Echo Parenting and Education. And her aunt, Jackie Goldberg, served as LAUSD school board president, an L.A. city councilwoman and state assemblywoman."
9/27/2011, Berkeley Daily Planet, Free Speech Day Is October 1! Two Unique Ways to Celebrate, Gar Smith
"As the raging debates over a student Republican 'bake sale' in Sproul Plaza demonstrate, the exercise of free speech is alive and well on the UC Berkeley campus. But there was a time when staging any kind of student demonstration intended to influence a governor's vote on a pending bill would have been illegal.
¶
In 1964, the Free Speech Movement changed all that. After an activist was arrested for soliciting funds to protect civil rights in the South, a police car was driven on campus to haul him off to jail. Instead, students spontaneously sat down around the car, bringing "the law" to a dead halt and kick-starting what became a national campaign for student liberty. After months of struggle (culminating in the occupation of Sproul Hall and the mass-arrest and imprisonment of hundreds of students), "the arc of history" finally bent towards justice and students established as fact that their First Amendment rights did not stop at the boundaries of the University.
¶
On September 17, 1985, the State of California officially honored this keynote victory at the dawn of the Revolutionary Sixties by declaring October 1 'Free Speech Day' in perpetuity."
9/26/2011, The Quad News, Free Speech On Campus, Danielle Susi
"The Student Free Speech Movement became a serious social movement on college campuses in the fall of 1964 at The University of California at Berkeley. Beginning in the 1930s, due to fear of the spread of Communism the university administration imposed a number of new rules on the campus in order to keep political involvement and protest off of the campuses.
¶
In 1958, by the time Clark Kerr had become president of UC Berkeley, no student groups were allowed to operate on campus if they engaged in off-campus politics in any way, shape or form. This included"electoral, protest or even oratorical" participation. Because of this rule, students began to protest in a variety of ways, including picketing, leafleting and speaking out."
9/22/2011, The Daily Campus, Overwhelming apathy has destroyed campus activism, Tim Brogan
"Like the suit that hung loose off his shoulders, Mario Savio's words seemed too big for his body.
¶
'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears...upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop,' proclaimed the UC Berkeley student."
9/19/2011, Berkeley Daily Planet, An Explanation of My Withdrawal from Cal, Ruby Pipes
"When Mario Savio stood on the steps of Sproul on December 2, 1964 he said, 'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.' The students and faculty of Cal all know this, but they do not live it. It's the big-picture equivalent of standing on a street corner in Nikes, trying to get a petition to close sweatshops signed. Coming in, I knew that universities were corporations cleverly disguised as pinnacles for higher education where great minds would meet and build the future. I naively believed that Berkeley had to be different. Unfortunately, the school has had its reputation so well cemented that it no longer has to provide that difference. In a world where a Bachelor's Degree is just another box that you are expected to check if you want to 'succeed', the premiere university to earn it at can let thousands of students pass through unnoticed without anyone raising an eyebrow. They can treat their employees badly. They can raise their tuition and fees in tandem with their administrator's salary. They can put 500 students in a classroom and charge hundreds of dollars for a term's worth of books. They can turn out a graduating class of privileged white kids that don't understand a thing about the real world or why they are now part of the problem. I understand that this problem is not unique. I understand that the university system is inherently corrupt. I understand that the country is fundamentally broken. These are all things that I know--that Cal would never teach me, mind you. What I also understand is that being angry is not enough. That no matter how many students turn out to rallies about tuition hikes or talk about how Berkeley ought to take better care of its employees or how wrong it is that minority groups--even when they are in majority--are not presented with the same options and few will go to university we are still supporting it. We still take on the debt or hand over the cash to help this machine perpetuate this type of blatant corruption."
9/14/2011, Winston-Salem Journal, Celebrating a legendary restaurant, JournalNow Staff
"Waters became a revolutionary in the food world. And Chez Panisse was born out of the revolutionary ideas and protests of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s, where Waters was a student. The movement's warnings of a 'sterilized, automated contentment' in this country led Waters to seek "a contentment that was unsterilized and fertile and handmade." She found it working in the kitchen."
9/13/2011, The Nation, Gratitude and Forbearance: On Christopher Lasch, Norman Birnbaum
"The New Radicalism in America appeared in 1965, after the civil rights movement, the Berkeley free speech movement and the protests against the Vietnam War had given some intellectuals connections to living history."
09/08/2011, Pasadena Weekly, Free speech-themed art installation comes to Colorado Boulevard, Sara Cardine
"Sometime during the week of Sept. 12, pedestrians along Colorado Boulevard will discover that five utility boxes have been transformed into distinctive works of art designed to remind viewers of the importance of freedom of speech.
¶
The installation 'Utility,' commissioned by the Pasadena Playhouse District, is the brainchild of contemporary LA artist Susan Silton, who created the text-based art pieces with this particular site in mind. It pairs an image from the 1964 Free Speech Movement with quotes from five influential Americans, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Frederick Douglass and George Washington. The message and image change as viewers drive or walk past each cube."
8/31/2011, Berkeley Daily Planet, FSM Vet Jack Weinberg Salutes Alice Waters at the UC Art Museum, Gar Smith
"'The FSM always had two parts to it. One part had to do with the reforming of the student role on campus - the education experience, the opening up of the university and rebelling against the university as a factory. The other part was equally important - and, for many of us more important - and that was the right of students to engage, as students, in the issues of the broader society - discrimination, later on, the anti-war movement, and many other movements... that changed society as a whole.
¶
'The very first protest against the Vietnam War in Berkeley drew 25,000 people. So what we did in the Free Speech Movement laid the basis for that,' Weinberg explained. In every previous era, if you spoke out against World War I, WWII or the Korean War, 'you went to jail.' Because of the perfect historical timing - during the days of the Civil Rights Movement - the FSM's insistence on free speech was soon being asserted on campuses across the nation. 'When the Vietnam War came, many more people were willing to stand up because they had learned that they have a right to stand up and speak out.'
¶
While anti-war protesters certainly faced repression and violence, 'it was nothing like what had come before,' Weinberg noted, because 'part of the legacy of the FSM was to assert and establish the right of students and others to express themselves and to advocate for social causes.'
¶
Reflecting on the current state of affairs, with the economy in free-fall and corporate power dominating the political process, Weinberg concluded: 'We live in a time when the country is falling back into much of the conservatism we had back then. So my hope - and the reason I agreed to come here today - is that anything that I can do to help a new generation of young people to rise up and develop their own movements and fight for their own causes, I welcome that and I'll do anything I can to help you.'
¶
Weinberg made good on his promise by joining a line-up of current student activists to discuss strategy. Most of the students were justifiably angry about tuition increases and the increasing 'corporatization of the campus.' While supporting their struggles, Weinberg offered a word of caution: Don't simply focus on issues of self-interest, as compelling and worthy as they may be. "The FSM was successful because it went beyond self-interest. We were concerned with broader issues of right and wrong." Because the issue of civil rights transcended the politics of the local struggle, the FSM won support far beyond the UC campus - with labor, with minorities, with civil libertarians."
08/29/2011, Inside Scoop SF, Chez Panisse: A Chef's After Party Perspective, Gayle Pirie
''And I love that you ended your crazy weekend at UC Berekley overlooking Sproul Plaza, home of the free speech movement, where "it" all began. Life is a circle, isn't it? We look forward to showing The Baker's Wife tonight to honor Nicolas Pagnol. Cheers."
8/29/2011, Berkeleyside, Photo essay: Edible learning at the Berkeley Art Museum, Tracey Taylor
"The 'free speech' police car: a nod to the 1964 moment when Mario Savio stood on top of a police car in Sproul Plaza"
8/26/2011, The Daily Californian, The art of the long view: seeing UC futures, Catherine Cole
"This week marks the fortieth anniversary of Chez Panisse, the legendary Berkeley restaurant that pioneered the Slow Food movement that has now prompted Americans to desire seasonal, local, organic, whole foods. The "mother" of Chez Panisse, Alice Waters, credits her student experiences at UC Berkeley as inspiration. She was among a group of countercultural activists who found their vision for sustainable agriculture on Sproul Plaza in the heady days of the Free Speech Movement."
8/26/2011, BerkeleyPatch, The 40th Birthday of Chez Panisse Rolls Through Berkeley, Barbara Grady
"The UC Berkeley Art Museum in collaboration with OPENrestaurant and Chez Panisse, will host an exhibit on Saturday called "OPENeducation" about food - farming, production, consumption of it. From 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. the public is invited, free of charge (although reserving a space is recommended) to participate in an experience about creation, production and consumption of food as collective performance.
¶
According to OPENrestaurant, the exhibit is 'Part demystification of the lore of the kitchen and part tracing the genealogy of Chez Panisse and its influences - from the free speech movement to Edible Schoolyards - OPENeducation invites participants to collaborate with students, educators, farmers, cooks, and artists in constructing the elements of a lunch menu in a series of independent classrooms.'"
8/24/2011, SF Weekly Blogs, The Winery SF Releases Its First Made-in-SF Wines, W. Blake Gray
"The Winery SF Speak North Coast Red Wine 2008 ($30) is a Mourvedre-based blend with pleasant crushed red plum and earthy notes. I wish the back label would tell me what the grapes are and where they're from instead of a trite paragraph on the free-speech movement, but I would drink this."
8/23/2011, San Jose Mercury News, Museums, food and art intersect at OPEN, Jennifer Modenessi
"Portable kitchens and outdoor classrooms will host interactive cooking activities, using produce from the edible gardens Waag and his cohorts planted on the grounds of the Berkeley Art Museum. There will be talks from a parked police car -- symbolizing Chez Panisse's roots in the Free Speech movement -- as well as gnocchi-making and beekeeping. In short, the event promises to be as much party as communal educational experience."
08/23/2011, San Francisco Examiner, In Republican politics, Texas is the new California, Tod Lindberg
"The state was an acknowledged trendsetter not only in culture, through the vast reach of Hollywood, but also in social trends and, especially, in politics. You could make a pretty good case that the 1960s began with the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964-65. Howard Jarvis' Proposition 13, a successful 1978 California ballot initiative to limit property tax increases, was the beginning of the modern "tax revolt," which Ronald Reagan would ride to the presidency in 1980."
8/22/2011, UC Berkeley Newscenter, Elaine Tennant named new Bancroft Library director, Kathleen Maclay
"The Bancroft is home to the world's finest collection of primary sources on the history of California and the American West, as well as to the Mark Twain Papers and Project, The Center for the Tebtunis Papyri, wide-ranging contemporary literary collections, the Free Speech Movement Archive, rare books and manuscripts and more. Most recently, The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life also became a part of the collections. In 2009, The Bancroft reopened on campus following a three-year, $64 million seismic retrofit and reconstruction financed jointly by the state and more than 700 private donors."
8/22/2011, KPLU, NPR, Alice Waters: 40 Years Of Sustainable Food, Terry Gross
"GROSS: Now, you went to the University of California at Berkeley during the free speech movement in the mid-'60s. You describe yourself as being on the periphery of the movement, but the movement had a profound effect on you. How did the free speech movement relate to your interest in food?
¶
Ms. WATERS: That's a very good question. I was listening to Mario Savio speak, and I was really impressed by this big vision he had for the world and that somehow we could live together in a harmonious whole and that communities could come together."
8/17/2011, Idaho Mountain Express, Pat Brown documentary is a family affair, Sabina Dana Plasse
"Brown has been called 'the architect of the Golden State,' but Rice takes a more critical look at her grandfather's life. When the Vietnam War shifted the nation's consciousness, Pat Brown was caught in the middle of the cataclysmic 1960s, with the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, fiery race riots in Los Angeles and the United Farm Workers movement in the Central Valley. His epic battle against capital punishment unleashed an international uproar. The Pat Brown story is an American dream story of humble beginnings with an incredible life's journey."
8/12/2011, San Francisco Chronicle (blog), Chez Panisse is turning 40! Here's a timeline., Sophie Brickman
"1964: Alice transfers from UC Santa Barbara, where she was in the Alpha Phi sorority, to UC Berkeley; Mario Savio delivers his famous speech at Sproul Hall during the Free Speech Movement:"
8/10/2011, Marketwire, San Gabriel Valley's First Vinyl Utility Box Art to Hit Pasadena, Josefina Mora
"The image is of Mario Savio, a key member in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, leading thousands of students in protest of the university's ban of on-campus political activities. His memorable speech made on that occasion asserts 'that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!'"
8/8/2011, East Bay Express, Celebrating Chez Panisse's 40th? Here's What You Can Afford, John Birdsall
"Oh, and one more thing. If you'd just rather enter through the gift shop, Clarkson Potter is releasing an anniversary tribute volume, Forty Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering ($55, goes on sale August 23), which begins in 1964 with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and pretty much ends with ends with Slow Food Nation, which looks a hell of a lot less complex on the page than it was to experience, and almost as impressive."
8/5/2011, San Francisco Chronicle, 6 thriving restaurants with Chez Panisse roots, Michael Bauer
"This month Chez Panisse celebrates its 40th anniversary. While there are older restaurants in the Bay Area, none has had the overriding impact of what Alice Waters has done at her little Berkeley restaurant that grew out of the Free Speech Movement. Waters wanted to lovingly feed her friends healthy food, and she fueled a farm-to-table movement that is still growing today."
7/27/2011, Berkeley Daily Planet, Where is Nuclear Energy Going? A Debate, Gar Smith
"Hertsgaard began with an explanation that the event nearly had been cancelled as a "security threat." A powerful but unnamed member of the environmental community had objected to offering a platform to Brand because of his pro-nuclear stance. There were threats of boycotting Earth Island Institute were it to sponsor the event. Fortunately, Hertsgaard concluded, Earth Island stood firm. Appropriately enough for the home of the Free Speech Movement, the Berkeley-based organization decided to go ahead with the event. The audience's applause indicated that Earth Island's directors had made the right decision."
7/26/2011, The Republic, Video: 'Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune' eyes singer's rise, fall, Bruce Dancis
"His first two albums, 'All the News That's Fit To Sing,' from April 1964, and 'I Ain't Marching Anymore,' released in February 1965, showcased Ochs' sweet, if a little thin, tenor voice, his melodic gift and his wide-ranging interests. Ochs sang about racism and the murders of civil-rights workers ('Too Many Martyrs,' 'Talking Birmingham Jam,' 'Here's to the State of Mississippi'), urban riots ('The Heat of the Summer'), the deaths of John F. Kennedy ('That Was the President') and Woody Guthrie ('Bound for Glory'), the plight of migrant farmworkers ('Bracero'), the crisis in the labor movement ('Links On the Chain'), the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley ('I'm Going to Say It Now') and the Vietnam War and American foreign policy ('I Ain't Marching Anymore,' 'Cops of the World,' 'Is There Anybody Here?')."
7/25/2011, Current Intelligence, Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, Jeanette McVicker
"And yet, there are inexplicable gaps here as well, beyond those referenced above. There is very little discussion, for example, of the impact of the free speech movement at Berkeley on the development of the underground press, a link one would suppose to be crucial for the blossoming of radical youth newspapers."
7/18/2011, Consortiumnews.com, The Rise of Pro-Democracy Journalism, Nozomi Hayase
"What is happening to WikiLeaks in terms of attempts to discredit them has already been done to ordinary people. Under the umbrella of professionalism, those in power tend to devalue or exclude the voices of citizens from participating in democratic action.
¶
"Freedom of speech is something that represents the very dignity of what a human being is," said Mario Savio, a spokesperson of Free Speech Movement.
¶
What was this freedom of speech that Savio so fiercely defended? The commonly held view is that freedom of speech is simply the right for people to speak without interference."
7/17/2011, San Francisco Chronicle, S.F. chefs who paved way for today's restaurants, Michael Bauer
"When it comes to food and dining, the Bay Area has been a trendsetter for 40 years, ever since Alice Waters wrestled live blue trout on the Chez Panisse floor. It was a restaurant built out of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and it seemed to set local chefs free, despite what some may contend today."
7/16/2011, SFGate.com, Brave New Voices Poetry Slam Grand Slam Finals Set for July 23 at San Francisco Opera House,
"This year opening ceremonies will be held at Sproul Plaza on the campus of UC Berkeley. 'As the symbolic birthplace of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s it is a fitting choice to open the festivities,' said Youth Speaks National Program Director Hodari Davis."
7/14/2011, Los Angeles Times, Theodore Roszak dies at 77; scholar coined the term 'counterculture', Elaine Woo
"In 1963, he joined the history department at Cal State Hayward (it became Cal State East Bay in 2005). He took a leave of absence a year later to edit a small pacifist newspaper in London. He was there in 1964 when the free-speech movement erupted at UC Berkeley.
¶
By the summer of 1967, Roszak was working on a series of articles for the Nation about the campus protests that had spread across the country. He was still in London when he began hearing of strange happenings in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, an epicenter of hippiedom in the so-called Summer of Love."
7/12/2011, Berkeley Daily Planet, First Person: Blood on the Tracks Calls Up Anti-War Memories, Gar Smith
"The proposal was approaching consensus and seemed certain to pass. But having recently benefited from the experience of participating the Free Speech Movement (and serving some jail time for my beliefs), I felt I couldn't remain silent, even though I was clearly in the minority. I spoke up to oppose that tactic. Remembering Mario Savio's passionate speeches (which demonstrated the transcendental power of a well-reasoned argument), I mustered all of my rhetorical skills. I argued that resorting to violence would put us in the same camp as the Pentagon and such an act would surely be used by the government to tarnish the entire peace movement. "
7/12/2011, Berkeley Daily Planet, Oakland Museum Debuts the Michael Rossman Collection of Political Posters, Gar Smith
"Karen McLellan and archiving consultant Lincoln Cushing have announced the posting of the first 1,322 of the 24,500 posters in Michael Rossman's unparalleled collection of political posters. The initial selection is part of the Oakland Museum of California's exhibition of Rossman's 'All Of Us Or None Archive.'
The All Of Us Or None (AOUON) archive project was started by Free Speech Movement activist Michael Rossman in 1977 to gather and document the poster-work of modern progressive movements in the United States. Though earlier work is included, its focus is on the domestic political poster renaissance, which began in 1965 and continues to this day.
...¶
http://collections.museumca.org/?q=category/2011-schema/history/political-posters"
6/27/2011, Chicago Tribune, Berkeley campus a subject that rewards study for travelers, Michelle Locke
"Coffee's a big part of campus life and the Free Speech Movement Cafe at Moffitt Library serves up a little counterculture with your caffeine with exhibits focused on a famous 1964 protest that helped usher in an era of college uprisings."
6/17/2011, Haaretz, Keeping it academic, Natasha Mozgovaya
BERKELEY, CA - About six years ago, Martin H. Blank, the chief operating office of the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation, approached the University of California, Berkeley, where three generations of his family had studied, with an offer to establish a center for Israel studies. He was politely informed that, politically, it wasn't the 'right time' for it.
...
¶
Marty Blank is certain that the institute could still be a target for hecklers, but is not overly concerned. 'Campuses are used to protests. I was at Berkeley in the '60s and '70s, during the free speech movement - protests against segregation and the Vietnam War. Berkeley was a hotbed of protest - people were arrested, there were police and troops on campus. It was violent, and it was incredibly exciting to be at Berkeley then. Campuses in this country are nowhere near as disruptive as they used to be.'"
6/14/2011, laist, '!Women Art Revolution' Documentary Premieres In L.A., Lauren Lloyd
"!Women Art Revolution traverses the Feminist Art Movement timeline from the 1960s to present day through archival footage, photographs and interviews with Leeson's artist colleagues, historians, curators and critics. A provocatively written narration performed by Leeson steers the documentary through these visual elements, interweaving motion graphics and comic book art by SPAIN Rodriguez. The gripping 'subterranean agitations,' as Leeson narrates, of the times are examined through footage of the Black Panthers, Vietnam War, Civil Rights Movement, Free Speech Movement, politician speeches, picketing, protesting and demonstrations. 'This film is peppered with images that for years you were prevented from seeing because there was no access to them,' Leeson narrates. 'This film is the remains of an insistent history that refuses to wait any longer to be told.'"
6/11/2011, groundviews, 'BE YOUNG AND SHUT UP!': A COURSE IN CIVIC DISENGAGEMENT, Lemek
"I am reminded of two significant student protests that utilised the latter principles for a wider movement of opposition and reform: the Free Speech Movement - a series of protests at the University of California, Berkeley that occurred between 1964 and 1965 against the proscription of political activities on campus and for the freedom of speech - led to the withdrawal of restrictions by the administration."
6/7/2011, California Watch, Want freedom? Leave California for South Dakota, report says, Lance Williams
"On the board of the Mercatus Center is a prominent Californian - Edwin A. Meese III, former U.S. attorney general and adviser to President Reagan. In 1964, when he was an Alameda County prosecutor, Meese orchestrated the mass arrests of UC Berkeley demonstrators during the Free Speech Movement protests, as the writer Greil Marcus has recalled."
6/6/2011, KALWNews.org, 99% invisible: Berkeley's invisible monument to free speech, Roman Mars
"In 1989, a group called the Berkeley Art Project decided to hold a national public art competition to create a monument that would commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, which began on the University of California, Berkeley campus in 1964. The winning design, created by Mark Brest van Kempen (who was then a graduate student at the San Francisco Art Institute), is an invisible sculpture that creates a small space completely free from laws or jurisdiction. The six-inch circle of soil, and the 'free' column of airspace above it, is framed by a six-foot granite circle. The inscription on the granite reads, 'This soil and the air space extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity's jurisdiction.'"
6/3/2011, Broadway World, Joan Baez to Perform at the Palace Theatre in Stamford 11/15, BWW News Desk
"Baez remains a musical force of nature whose influence is incalculable - from marching on the front line of the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King to inspiring Vaclav Havel in his fight for a Czech Republic to singing on the first Amnesty International tour and standing alongside Nelson Mandela when the world celebrated his 90th birthday in London's Hyde Park. She brought the Free Speech Movement into the spotlight, took to the fields with Cesar Chavez, organized resistance to the war in Southeast Asia, then forty years later saluted the Dixie Chicks for their courage to protest war."
5/25/2011, WEBWIRE, The Changing of the Guard at Cornucopia, Mark Kastel
"Michael James was born in New York City in 1942. He was raised in Connecticut on an old onion farm, and while growing up he helped old man Burtche around the farm down the road, feeding livestock and helping with harvesting. He was a member of the 4-H club and raised rabbits, muscovy ducks, King pigeons, African Tumbler pigeons, and Bantam chickens.
¶
James was active in sports, playing football at Lake Forest College where he took an interest in politics and social justice issues. James graduated in 1964 and received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, going to the University of California, Berkeley where he studied sociology. There James was involved in the Free Speech Movement, and joined Students for a Democratic Society, of which he became a national officer.
¶
James left school in 1966, heading to Chicago's Uptown to organize poor Southern whites in an attempt to build an interracial movement of the poor with an organization known as JOIN Community Union (Jobs or Income Now)."
5/23/2011, nazret.com Merkato Blog, Ethiopia - Africa: Cause Looking for Rebels, Alemayehu G. Mariam
"In contrast, in the 1960s, young Americans led the "counter-culture revolution" and were the tips of the spear of the Civil Rights Movement. The Free Speech Movement which began at the University of California, Berkeley was transformed from student protests for expressive and academic freedom on campus to a powerful nationwide anti-war movement on American college campuses and in the streets."
5/18/2011, Marinscope Newspapers, Aging activist shares excerpts from Freedom Ride journal, Mike Smith
"The May 9 Washington Post article "Can Freedom Ride Again?" and promotions for the May 15 PBS special "Freedom Riders" brought back vivid memories of my experiences in 1965 as a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee volunteer in Selma, Ala., and Jackson and Natchez, Miss. In 1964, I went from being a guard at San Quentin to a Free Speech Movement arrestee and FSM executive board member. In 1965, civil rights songs sung by the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger drew me to the South. Rather than rewrite history, I have chosen to share excerpts from my Mississippi journal, a true reflection of my experiences, in a two-part series."
5/18/2011, Jewish Daily Forward, UC Debates Free Speech Vs. Federal Protection, Rex Weiner
"The UCSC campus debate takes place within a special historical context for California; it was a UC campus (Berkeley) that in the 1960s gave birth to the Free Speech Movement. It was this student-led campaign, in which Jews figured prominently, that forced UC - and eventually campuses nationwide - to lift bans that had long been in place against outside political speakers on campus and against fundraising for political parties, except via the school's officially endorsed Democratic and Republican school clubs. The movement also led to the lifting of mandatory 'loyalty oaths' that had been required of faculty.
¶
A prominent student leader of that movement, Bettina Aptheker, is today a professor of feminist studies at UCSC. She is cited in Rossman-Benjamin's complaint as part of the institutional bias against Jews for sponsoring a program in 2004 featuring Holocaust survivor and Israel critic Hedy Epstein, 'who had demonized the Jewish state and compared the Jews of Israel to Nazis in many previous talks on other university campuses.'?"
5/18/2011, Huffington Post, Throw Yourself Upon the Gears of Big Publishing, Mark Coker
"Today's indie author revolution can trace its roots back to the Free Speech Movement that began at U.C. Berkeley forty-seven years ago.
¶
I gave a presentation in Berkeley this past Sunday before the Northern California chapter of ASJA where I argued that book publishing is a matter of free speech.
¶
My visit to Berkeley represented a homecoming of sorts for me. My parents were U.C. Berkeley students in the '60s, I was born there in '65, and my mom, who was active in the Free Speech Movement, brought me me along to many of the demonstrations (first in utero and later in a stroller). I returned in '83-'88 for my business degree."
5/13/2011, Puget Sound Business Journal, Gordon Bowker reflects on Starbucks, Redhook, Bethany Overland
"You left the University of San Francisco eight credits short of a degree: Right. I was ahead of the curve in dropping out of college, as entrepreneurs are famous for nowadays. It was the mid '60s and a very exciting time to be young. I was the editor of the paper, and it was the year of the free speech movement and there was a lot going on that was much more interesting than getting a degree."
5/11/2011, The Anniston Star, The passengers, Compiled by Eddie Burkhalter
"Of the 14 passengers on the Greyhound bus, seven were Freedom Riders. Two are still living.
¶
1. Genevieve Hughes, 28, white female, Washington, D.C., CORE field secretary. After the Rides, she studied sociology at the University of California and participated in the free speech movement at Berkeley. Later moved to Carbondale, Ill., and worked as the director of a women's shelter before retiring."
5/11/2011, The Advocate, Play excites, revisits turbulent Richmond, George Morin
"Written by drama department Chairman Clay David and directed by professor Kathryn McCarty, 'Rockin' in Richmond High 1966' was a grand musical experience.
¶
The musical followed the lives of 14 seniors attending Richmond High School in 1966. The issues of marriage, the Vietnam War draft and the student graduation were the main themes of the plot.
¶
The play was narrated by 71-year-old Odetta Jones, the first Bay Area disc jockey and a former Richmond High School counselor who worked at the school in 1966.
¶
She narrates the students' journey through this critical time in history. Jones, herself, spent time protesting during the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964 and found it important for her students to be engaged in the politics of their time."
5/10/2011, UC Berkeley NewsCenter, For the love of wisdom, philosophy majors grow in number at UC Berkeley, Yasmin Anwar
"Among the department's more popular courses are 'Political Philosophy,' taught this spring by Hans Sluga, a scholar of Nietzsche and Foucault; 'Philosophy of Language,' taught by John Searle, a 52-year veteran of the department and faculty pioneer in the campus's Free Speech Movement; and 'Heidegger,' taught by Hubert Dreyfus, whose lectures on the 20th century German existential philosopher have attracted a worldwide following via podcasts and webcasts on iTunes and YouTube."
5/9/2011, The Ottawa Citizen, Youth belong in politics, Kathleen Rodgers and Willow Scobie
"However, if we broaden our thinking about politics for a moment we know that youth are consistently engaged in transformative political behaviour. We need only to look to youth participation in social movements of the past and present for evidence of this: the free speech movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement, and the global justice movement to name a few. Through their participation in these kinds of movements youth have influenced public debate and helped turn them into mainstream political issues."
5/7/2011, The Moderate Voice, New York Times Discovers Free Speech Problem on Campus, Logan Penza
"The unfortunate truth is that progressive liberalism has often lost touch with its own core principles regarding free speech. The right of dissent that it championed in the 'free speech movement' at Berkeley in the 1960s and as recently as two years ago when many progressives sported "dissent is patriotic" bumper stickers has, with the installation of a Democratic President and Democratic control of (at least one house of) Congress, been relegated to a tertiary concern at best."
5/4/2011, Berkeley Daily Planet, Revolution and Resurrection Stalk Berkeley's First Congo after Osama Killing, Becky O'Malley
"Since [Chris] Hedges was born in 1956, he missed almost everything about the 60s counterculture except the FSM attitude, also available on recordings for those who missed it."
4/29/2011, The Daily Californian, Professor emeritus of public health dies at 97, Amruta Trivedi
"Between 1952 and 1957, Elberg chaired the department of bacteriology. In 1961, he was appointed dean of the Graduate Division, serving amid student unrest of the Free Speech Movement and the Vietnam War. During an interview for the Bancroft Library Oral History Project in 1989, Elberg said the challenges of addressing affirmative action in graduate student admissions brought into question the authority of the dean at the time."
4/29/2011, LA Weekly, Werner Herzog, Crazy-Man Film Director, Thinks L.A. Is The Only City in America With Substance, Dennis Romero
"As he argued a couple of years back during an event at the New York Public Library: 'The last half century, almost every single important cultural trend and technological trend originated from California--like computers, like the free-speech movement, like accepting gay and lesbian people as an integral part of society...on and on and on.' Los Angeles, he likes to tell people, is the only city in America with any real substance."
4/20/2011, The Hill, Brad Watson, 2011, Mario Savio, 1964, Bernie Quigley
"Instead of the glittery and institutionalized awards given to journalists nowadays, which since the concept of embedded journalism have brought about reinforcement of already calcified establishment norms, there might be a new Mario Savio award. Savio was a member of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement who jumped on the roof of a car and gave a speech that shook the world, and it didn't stop shaking for 15 years."
4/20/2011, The Claremont Institute, The Tao of Jerry, William Voegeli
"Before the '60s happened in the rest of America they happened-harder-in California. Pat Brown invested high hopes and huge governmental outlays in a 'master plan' for a system of public higher education. It would be both accessible and excellent, training and edifying young people in ways that prepared them to join and strengthen the middle class. In a 1961 commencement address he encouraged students to energize American democracy by being more engaged with politics than the 'silent generation' on campuses in the 1950s. 'Thank God for the spectacle of students picketing,' he said. 'At last we're getting somewhere. The colleges have become boot camps of citizenship-and citizen-leaders are marching out of them.... Let us stand up for our students and be proud of them.'
¶
Brown got more than he bargained for three years later, when students plunged the University of California's Berkeley campus into turmoil after demonstrations by the Free Speech Movement. Its leader was Mario Savio, a 21-year-old philosophy major who had returned to school after volunteering for Freedom Summer in Mississippi."
4/15/2011, The Daily Californian Online, Community honors local social justice advocate, Anjuli Sastry
" [Narsai] David, who called Walker a 'self- taught urban planner,' talked about her involvement in the Free Speech Movement, including her interactions with government officials like former President Ronald Reagan.
¶
"After a meeting with ... Reagan she walked up to him and said 'Let the blood of the people of Berkeley be on your hands,'" David said." [Eds. Note: As Pat Brown was Gov. during the FSM, perhaps it is People's Park that was being remembered]
4/11/2011, The Guardian, The likely atheists, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi
"Irreligiosity is tied to greater political liberalism, and to being less prejudiced.
Radical students who were members of the students' Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964 (which started the 1960s upheavals on American campuses), were more likely to come from families that were identified as Jewish, agnostic, or atheist." [Ed. note: source?]
3/28/2011, BBC News Magazine, Protest numbers: How are they counted?,
"The TUC's technique echoes what has come to be known as the Jacobs Method, named after Herbert Jacobs, a professor of journalism at the University of California in the 1960s.
¶
He estimated the numbers taking part in one of the Free Speech Movement protests in Berkeley, by measuring the concrete sections in the plaza, estimating the crowd density and counting how many sections were filled."
3/26/2011, The McGill Daily, Prof joins in student movement, Rana Encol
"Timothy Walsh: I was wandering around the campus when I heard the noises, I saw the student protests, I saw the sign. I'm old enough to remember the free speech movement, and I supported it then. I was glad to see that the spirit was still alive, and I support what they stand for. They were planning to raise the fees by some $3,000 at a go and the students were naturally quite upset about it."
3/24/2011, San Jose Mercury News, Berkeley history: UC Berkeley student union opened 50 years ago, Steven Finacom
"Since the university prohibited most political activity on campus, the nearest off-campus site for student political organizations to promote their causes shifted from right in front of Sather Gate, to a block south, on a narrow brick paved apron between Bancroft Way and Sproul Plaza at the southeast corner of the new student union.
¶
This area quickly became an active site for student tabling since then, as now, thousands of students came and went to campus each day past that point.
¶
It was believed that the university had given the 'Bancroft Strip' to the city of Berkeley, thus making the brick area 'off campus.'
However, in 1964 it was discovered that the property transfer had never been made, and the university banned political tabling there.
¶
Within weeks this new prohibition touched off what became known as the Free Speech Movement. And when the FSM ignited it also had a fine new plaza--today's Sproul Plaza--and broad steps at which to rally and demonstrate, right in front of the Administration Building."
3/16/2011, NikkeiWest, NJAHS Annual Awards Dinner to Celebrate 30th Anniversary,
"Betty Kano's activist days go back to the Vietnam war and Free Speech Movement. Though semi-retired, she continues to work as an artist, curator, educator, arts administrator, organizer and activist."
3/15/2011, The Daily Californian Online, Event Honors Outstanding Women of Berkeley, Victoria Pardini
"Nancy Schimmel grew up in what she called a political household and witnessed the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley as a graduate student in library science. Since 1976, she has worked as a librarian for the Berkeley Public Library and later as a songwriter and storyteller. In 1978, she published a book on the art of storytelling and last November, she co-wrote a song with fellow Berkeley songwriter Bonnie Lockhart for the 'No on Proposition 23' campaign. She currently coaches aspiring storytellers at the library and in her home."
3/7/2011, The Daily Californian Online, ASUC External Affairs Vice President Rallies for Change, J.D. Morris
"'I attuned to a different kind of organizing that wasn't just 'let's go talk to legislators,' it was 'lets do something about what's going on here,'' he said.
¶
It was a time when thousands of students across the state were mobilized in protest. The efforts at UC Berkeley resonated with Gomez as issues he had cared about were thrust to the forefront, prompting him to channel the spirit of the Free Speech Movement - a time when he said student government leaders were more directly engaged with social issues."
3/7/2011, e-flux, Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism, Part II, Martha Rosler
"Clark Kerr, a former labor lawyer, became president of the University of California, in the mid-1960s. This state university system, which had a masterplan for aggressive growth stretching to the turn of the twenty-first century and beyond, was the flagship of US public universities and established the benchmarks for public educational institutions in the US and elsewhere; it was intended as the incubator of the rank-and file middle class and the elites of a modern superpower among nations in a politically divided world. Kerr's transformative educational vision was based on the production of knowledge workers. Kerr-the man against whom was directed much of the energy of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, derisively invoked by David Brooks-coined the term the "multiversity" in a series of lectures he gave at Harvard in 1963.11 It was Kerr's belief that the university was a "prime instrument of national purpose." In his influential book The Uses of the University,Kerr wrote,
¶
What the railroads did for the second half of the last century and the automobile for the first half of this century may be done for the second half of this century by the knowledge industry.12 "
3/5/2011, The Bullet, This Is What Complicity Looks Like: Palestine and the Silencing Campaign on Campus, Mary-Jo Nadeau and Alan Sears
"Nowhere was this struggle sharper than at the Berkeley campus of University of California. There, the Free Speech Movement fought for political rights on campus, challenging the administration of Clark Kerr who was perhaps the most prominent advocate of the technocratic university serving the needs of corporations and the state. Clark Kerr was, in many ways, the forerunner of the current neoliberal strategy of reorganizing universities to focus more clearly on the service of business and the lean state. In the 1960s, Kerr was actually defeated by a mass, militant student movement. But the technocratic vision that the radical student movement of the 1960s successfully defended against has returned in new and aggressive forms under neoliberalism. And part of this agenda is to politically cleanse campuses, stripping away the political rights students won through militancy in the 1960s. The attack on Palestine solidarity is a leading thrust in the current campaign to roll back campus political expression and to define academic freedom in narrow professional terms. The Iacobucci report at York, discussed below, is an important example of this logic."
3/4/2011, Napa Patch, Students Protest Cuts at Napa Valley College, Louisa Hufstader
"Alex Shantz, president of the student senate, invoked the shade of Free Speech Movement orator Mario Savio with a fiery address.
¶
'We have the power to refuse unjust decisions,' Shantz told the assembled students and staff.
¶
'Community college is not a corporation, and we as students are not raw materials and do not need to be made into a product,' Shantz continued.
¶
'We are human beings, we are lovers of learning and we seek to reate a bettre society not to conform to the systems that have ruined our society on the first place,' he said, to cheers and applause."
2/27/2011, The Guardian, Can a group of scientists in California end the war on climate change?, Ian Sample
"In 1964, Richard Muller, a 20-year-old graduate student with neat-cropped hair, walked into Sproul Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined a mass protest of unprecedented scale. The activists, a few thousand strong, demanded that the university lift a ban on free speech and ease restrictions on academic freedom, while outside on the steps a young folk-singer called Joan Baez led supporters in a chorus of We Shall Overcome. The sit-in ended two days later when police stormed the building in the early hours and arrested hundreds of students. Muller was thrown into Oakland jail. The heavy-handedness sparked further unrest and, a month later, the university administration backed down. The protest was a pivotal moment for the civil liberties movement and marked Berkeley as a haven of free thinking and fierce independence.
¶
Today, Muller is still on the Berkeley campus, probably the only member of the free speech movement arrested that night to end up with a faculty position there - as a professor of physics. His list of publications is testament to the free rein of tenure: he worked on the first light from the big bang, proposed a new theory of ice ages, and found evidence for an upturn in impact craters on the moon. His expertise is highly sought after. For more than 30 years, he was a member of the independent Jason group that advises the US government on defence; his college lecture series, Physics for Future Presidents was voted best class on campus, went stratospheric on YouTube and, in 2009, was turned into a bestseller."
2/15/2011, Truthdig, When Protest Becomes a Crime, Bill Boyarsky
"Protests are part of student life, although they were much more common in the 1960s and '70s than today. In those days, plenty of people were arrested on campuses, 773 of them one night during a Free Speech Movement protest at UC Berkeley. But in that case they were charged with a specific criminal offense, trespassing, for refusing to leave the administration building.
¶
The Irvine students committed no such offense. Speech was their only offense. If Ambassador Oren had been swifter on his feet, he might have turned the evening against the hecklers. I'm sure he's seen ruder crowds in Israel."
2/11/2011, Huliq, Egyptian freedom fighters evoke American Sixties protests, Dave Masko
"For the 1960's youth culture, Berkeley was where the Free Speech Movement 'really came to life. It's the place that gave birth to the Free Speech Movement that later turned into the Civil Rights, Women's Rights and anti-Vietnam War protest movements,' explained Berkeley historian Mark Rossiter.
¶
"If you'd visit Berkeley back in the late fifties, the students would be in clothing of respectability: jackets and ties and gals in clean-cut dresses. The male students had short haircuts with no sideburns. The female students looked more like Nancy Reagan and someone's mom than university gals.
¶
Then, in 1961, the clothing turned to jeans, denim jackets, blue work shirts and bib overalls for both males and females. It was a first protest of sorts, and it included how we wore our hair and how we dressed. This was the start of the Free Speech Movement,' explained Rossiter who knew the famous Berkeley student protester Mario Savio." [Eds. note: Rosssiter may be pegging the fashion change a bit too early in the decade. See: http://www.btstack.com/FSM%20Photo%20Collections.html]
2/9/2011, Berkeley Daily Planet, Berkeley's Telegraph Ave. Saturday Demonstration: It was Small, But It Re-writes Berkeley Street Politics, Ted Friedman
"According to his fans and acquaintances, Moe hosted free speech movement planning meetings on the balcony of his store, often contributing to the deliberations.
¶
At one point, when FSM protestors were gassed in the streets, he invited them to seek shelter in his store, according to Julia Vinograd, 62, who said she was there. Always irascible, Moe denounced them for not sheltering themselves sooner."
2/7/2011, Indybay, Hidden in Plain Sight: Media Workers for Social Change, Chapter 9, Peter M King
"Geoffrey King is the subject of this ninth chapter of 'Media Workers for Social Change,' the series by Peter M. King is a public interest lawyer serving the community of media workers, and a professional documentarian of social protest. In the photo below, he stands on the Mario Savio Steps in front of Sproul Hall, where the Free Speech Movement was born. The FSM influenced King, and he wanted to be photographed in this spot. A long lens compressed the steps, which appear almost as a solid wall behind him."
2/3/2011, The Examiner, USC hosts Brokaw, Wilson and historians at Reagan Library Retrospecitve, Max Emanuel Donner
"Several instances of Reagan's inclination to improvise with verbal attacks came up. For example, when questioned about the Free Speech movement at UC Berkeley during the 1966 California's Governor's race, Reagan remarked 'I'd like to harness their youthful energy with a strap.'"
2/3/2011, New Zealand Herald, From chaos to creation, Rebecca Barry
"Gimblett first arrived in the United States in the 1960s and has experienced the assassination of JFK, the explosion of cultural change in Haight Ashbury, San Francisco, and the free-speech movement in Berkeley. He was here for the emergence of the Zen poets, the beat poets and the birth of Zen in America via one of his heroes, Dr D.T. Suzuki. He married Barbara Kirshenblatt, a university professor and expert on the history of Polish Jews. But New Zealand, he insists, will always be home."
2/1/2011, New University, The Tuition Tide Has Arrived, Traci Garling Lee
"When UCI first opened its doors in 1965, there were 1,589 students enrolled and it cost approximately $220 per year in fees to attend. The following year, Reagan was elected as governor and made it no secret that he was unhappy with Kerr's decisions regarding the UCs, citing Kerr's refusal to expel protesters at UC Berkeley during the 1964 Free Speech Movement."
1/28/2011, Chicago Sun-Times, Linkin Park is spoiled in sell-by date, attitude, Mark Guarino
"Songs from 2010's 'A Thousand Sun' were an attempt to transition the band to a more mature sound and thematic credibility. At first you knew matters were getting serious when the video screens were filled with that old stand-by: the mushroom cloud. Archival video clips of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Free Speech Movement activist Mario Savio also were borrowed to set the mood."
1/26/2011, Ask the Agent, How I Came to Own Cody's Part 1, Andy Ross
"Fred was an early supporter of the Free Speech Movement that galvanized radical dissent at UC in 1964. Later Fred was an outspoken peace activist. And Cody's became an intellectual center for left wing politics, a tradition that continued after I took over the store. FSM leader, Mario Savio, briefly worked at Cody's."
1/20/2011, The Daily Californian Online, Photography Seminar Zooms In on Current Events, Victoria Pardini
"Alluding to the pictures from the Free Speech Movement in 1964 that his students studied in the course, Barsky speculated that photos taken in the class could one day serve other individuals as historical documents.
¶
'Perhaps after the next 46 years have passed, students will be interested in looking at photographs taken way back in 2010,' he said."
1/19/2011, El Cerrito Patch, Who's Who: Avery Miller, Kyrsten Bean
"Did you go to school for engineering? I went to El Cerrito High School and then I went to UC Berkeley. I was there in the '60s during the free speech movement.
How was going to school during those years? I stayed pretty much away from it, but it was pretty intense. The engineering part of the school is way away from where the activities were going on, and I wasn't very political in those days so it didn't have much of an effect. It had much more of an effect in later life, in retrospect."
1/14/2011, HULIQ, Hey Boomers: Free Speech Movement celebrates 50 years of political force, Dave Masko
"This café-cluttered college town of Berkeley is where it all happened 50 years ago; in January 1961, when our nation's youth wanted to overcome their own alienation and shape their own lives while helping others achieve true freedom in what became the start of the 'Free Speech Movement.'
¶
Some 50 years later, it's still 'very cool, man' to visit Berkeley, and view Sixties photo exhibits at the University of California. 'This is the place that inspired the sit-ins and the anti-everything demonstrations,' states a billboard on campus with a big peace sign over it." [eds note: the Free Speech Movement took place October through December, 1964]
12/22/2010, El Cerrito Patch, El Cerrito Environmentalist Catherine "Kay" Kerr, Co-founder of Save the Bay, 1911-2010, Charles Burress
"She was the wife of the influential UC President Clark Kerr, who created the state's Master Plan for Higher Education and presided over the university during the turbulent time of the Free Speech Movement. He died in 2003."
12/21/2010, Berkeley Daily Planet, Call to Boycott Caffe Med Over Free Speech Leaves Medheads Speechless, Ted Friedman
"A recent incident at the notorious Caffe Mediterraneum on Telegraph has led to calls for a boycott of the home of the Sixties Free Speech Movement."
12/16/2010, Time Magazine, Jackson Browne: Singer, Songwriter, School Board Member, Andrew J. Rotherham
"I have a high school education. I didn't think I had the time to go to college and didn't think I'd be able to learn what I wanted to learn. I was in school during the free speech movement when Berkeley blew up and, of course, the civil rights movement was going on. It was revolutionary, and I really felt school was on the side of the status quo. I got into a debate with one of my civics teachers. I objected to his characterization of the free speech movement as crazy. I said, 'What do you mean 'crazy?' And it got worse from there. He was going to discuss how they looked and their demeanor - not the ideas. I got bounced out, not because of anything I did. I did what you were supposed to. I asked questions."
12/14/2010, Berkeleyside, Berkeley bashing: A favorite sport, Frances Dinkelspiel
"But many of Berkeley's stances that seem ridiculous end up being adopted by the broader American population, according to Charles Wollenberg, a historian and the author of Berkeley: A City in History. The Free Speech Movement began in Berkeley in the early 1960s and spread throughout the nation, he pointed out. In 1964, Berkeley students held some of the first protests against the Vietnam War. Berkeley was one of the first cities to call for divestment from the apartheid regime in South Africa. It also was the first to ban the use of Styrofoam cups. Of course there are issues, like the Marine recruitment protests, that don't gain broad national support, he said.
¶
'There are things that begin in Berkeley that become national jokes but there are things that begin in Berkeley that become national trends,' said Wollenberg."
12/11/2010, The Australian, Fired with Enthusiasm: Universities remain places where freedom and creativity are celebrated, Glyn Davis
"Such tensions around the role of management on campus offer a familiar international story.
¶
One of the great educational visionaries was Clark Kerr. As leader of the University of California, Berkeley, Kerr designed the Californian university system.
¶
It was Kerr's proud boast that no qualified student was ever turned away from a Californian state university under his watch.
¶
Kerr believed a university should protect academic freedom. For this, he paid a high price.
¶
As the free speech movement grew up around Berkeley in 1964, Kerr found himself caught between students demanding a greater voice in the university and a conservative governing board, which felt the university was already too accommodating."
12/1/2010, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Rites of nude math professors and Berkeley, Caitlin Donohue
"Frenkel, who grew up in a small town near Moscow is surprised at the response to his film in his adopted community, home of such a storied free speech movement."
12/1/2010, Eat The State, Reclaim Our History: December 1-15, David M Laws
"Dec. 7, 1928: Birth of linguist and radical political analyst Noam Chomsky. 1964: Mario Savio, leader of Berkeley Free Speech Movement, arrested. Univ. of California-Berkeley administration makes presentation at the Greek Theatre to 18,000 students; followed by strike by 9,000 of 27,000 students, and faculty resolution (824 to 115) supporting rapidly growing Free Speech Movement." [Editor's correction: The actual date was December 5, 1964.]
12/1/2010, CBS San Francisco, Eye on the Bay On the Spot, Brian Hackney
video
December 2010, Bookslut, Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010, Robert Loss
"In an improvised lecture given at the thirtieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, Marcus practically prophesizes the first decade of this century:
¶
'I think we're going to see a lot of people dressing up in other people's clothes, so to speak, denouncing, criticizing, claiming to offer alternatives, but doing so in a way that really only takes away an individual sense of self, of confidence, of power, of imagination.'"
11/30/2010, UC Berkeley News, The true language of love? It's math, says Berkeley professor Edward Frenkel, whose steamy new film touches a nerve, Carol Ness
"The Berkeley showing is special, says Frenkel. 'It's my town, it's where I have my friends, my students, my colleagues.'
¶
And as the home of the Free Speech Movement, he adds, 'It's a place I feel comfortable showing the film. It's unconventional - and controversial even here.'"
11/29/2010, NaturalNews.com, Urgent call for action, last chance to defeat S 510 Food Safety Modernization Act, Mike Adams
"'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious -- makes you so sick at heart -- that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!' - Mario Savio, December 2, 1964
¶
Although Mario Savio's speech was about political activism and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_...), it could have very well been about Senate Bill 510, the so-called Food Safety Modernization Act."
11/25/2010, The Guardian, Things I give thanks for, Clancy Sigal
"I've a bad back, so my hat's off, in thanksgiving, to dissenters who climb fences, sneak into military bases and sit down in the path of an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Or, in the words of the passionate free-speech activist Mario Savio:
¶
'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious... that you can't take part… And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.'"
11/12/2010, San Francisco Chronicle, No suspension recommended for UC protester, Nanette Asimov
"The occupation was one of the year's largest demonstrations across the University of California system. Students protested budget cuts and a 32 percent tuition increase approved by the UC regents, who are poised to approve another 8 percent hike Thursday.
¶
Yet as the first of those protesters to face a disciplinary panel - and because she opted for a public hearing - Zelko has come to represent the right to protest at Berkeley, a distant echo of her outspoken, '60s-era counterpart, Mario Savio.
...¶
One witness, a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature named Judith Butler, told the panel that the university should protect, not prosecute, student demonstrators - even those who disrupt the university in their protests.
¶
'Sometimes, you know, seizure or strike is a way of stopping ordinary life so that we might reflect for a moment on what the conditions are that make education possible,' Butler said. 'We call a halt to business as usual because the conditions under which education is possible are being threatened by policies that we object to.'"
11/11/2010, The Student Life, Alice Waters Tells Her Story of Restaurant Chez Panisse, Marnie Hogue
"The decisive experiences of her life-from Berkeley's free speech movement, to her travels to France, to her early work as a teaching assistant at a Montessori elementary school-may seem unrelated, but all shaped her basic philosophy: in order to be engaged with life, one must be able to touch, smell, feel, and taste, just like a curious child."
11/9/2010, Gibson.com, This Day in Music Spotlight: Rolling Stone Rolls Off the Presses, Bryan Wawzenek
"The magazine was the brainchild of Jann Wenner, a native New Yorker who had traveled to the University of California at Berkeley in the mid-'60s. During his student years, Wenner was an activist in the Free Speech Movement and wrote a column in the University's student-run newspaper, The Daily Californian. After dropping out in 1966, Wenner landed a job at the muckraking publication Ramparts, mostly due to the help of his mentor (and San Francisco Chronicle jazz critic) Ralph J. Gleason."
11/4/2010, PopMatters, What Sustains so Many Dreamers Turned Fighters Against the Odds? 'The Verso Book of Dissent', John L. Murphy
"Verso also sells a spoken word and song anthology. It ranges from Langston Hughes to Mario Savio, Salvador Allende to Harold Pinter. It spans William Blake's 'Jerusalem', Nina Simone's 'Mississippi Goddam', Marvin Gaye's 'What's Going On', Fela Kuti's 'Zombie', and a Nicaraguan Misa Campesina."
11/4/2010, OpEd News, Take A Stand For Peace: A Call To Action By Veterans for Peace & Anti-War Activists, Elaine Brower
"During the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King called our government 'the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.' That was true then--and is even more so today.
¶
A few years before that, in 1964 Mario Savio made his great speech at Berkeley; at the end he says, 'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!'"
11/3/2010, The Berkeley Daily Planet, The Envelope Please!, Editor
"The results of the Daily Planet's Measure R cartoon contest have been tabulated.
¶
Gar Smith is the winner by a nose, followed closely by Justin DeFreitas, with J.Epstein a very respectable third and Matt Breault and Joseph Young not far behind.
¶
The announced prize was $500. But Gar, an active Free Speech Movement veteran and frequent Planet contributor, made what he called a "collectivist suggestion" instead: give a $100 prize to each of the five contestants."
11/2/2010, The Berkeley Daily Planet, Elizabeth Warren Addresses the Savio Memorial Lecture at UC Berkeley, Gar Smith
"The 14th annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture (http://www.savio.org/) drew a huge crowd to UC Berkeley's Pauley Ballroom on Thursday, October 28. The event honors the memory and legacy of a remarkable student leader whose presence and passion became synonymous with the favor of the Free Speech Movement, which rocked the Berkeley campus in 1964. The unprecedented student sit-in and occupation of Sproul Hall - and the mass-arrest that followed - reverberated across the country challenging the established order of the Eisenhower years and triggering the social ferment that became known as 'The Sixties.' (For details, see the FSM Archives http://www.fsm-a.org./.)
¶
Each year, The Savio Lecture honors outstanding individuals with a Young Activist Award. This years awards went to Reyna Wences and Rigo Padilla, two students who risked their academic careers - and their freedom - by publicly announcing that they are undocumented. The two students are leaders of the Youth Justice League (http://www.fsm-a.org./), an organization created to advocate for the rights of undocumented students in the US. "
10/29/2010, UC Berkeley News, Elizabeth Warren envisions launch of tough '21st-century' watchdog agency, Cathy Cockrell
"A 'serious, tough' new consumer agency 'won't fix everything,' the Harvard law professor told a large crowd gathered in Pauley Ballroom for the 14th annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture. But as an organization' devoted solely to the economic strength of American families,' she said, it 'gives us an opportunity to plug a very big hole in the bottom of the economic boat.'"
10/28/2010, Market News International, US's Warren Determined To Make Cons Agency A Force For Public, Brai Odion-Esene
"It must succeed, she said, 'because we are running out of options.'
¶
In remarks prepared for the Mario Savio Lecture at the University of California-Berkeley, Warren made it clear she envisions an agency that will be proactive in rooting out predatory financial products and services, saying after being 'pushed and squeezed and hammered for a generation ... we have a moment -- right here, right now -- to turn a corner.'"
10/28/2010, Art Daily, Oakland Museum of California Acquires Historic "All of Us or None" Poster Collection,
"Aptly titled after the poem by Bertolt Brecht, the All Of Us Or None collection comes to OMCA from the estate of Berkeley writer, social historian, and Free Speech Movement veteran Michael Rossman, who dedicated his life to gathering and documenting the collection. It was his intention for the poster collection to remain whole and for it to reside in Northern California---two key reasons for the collection coming to the Oakland Museum of California."
10/15/2010, The Guardian UK, Brutal deportations must stop, Anna Morvern
"The free-speech activist Mario Savio said: 'There comes a time when the operation of the machine is so odious that you cannot even passively participate. You've got to place your body on the gears, the levers, all the apparatus.' The task that Savio describes is not the task of the individual migrants who are handcuffed and forced into the vans and onto the planes, although many do pit their voices and bodies desperately against the deportation machinery. It is the task of all of us who do not believe that the ends of border control justify the increasingly inhuman means. We live in a democracy and we can demand change."
10/15/2010, The Guardian, Brutal deportations must stop, Anna Morvern
"The free-speech activist Mario Savio said: 'There comes a time when the operation of the machine is so odious that you cannot even passively participate. You've got to place your body on the gears, the levers, all the apparatus.' The task that Savio describes is not the task of the individual migrants who are handcuffed and forced into the vans and onto the planes, although many do pit their voices and bodies desperately against the deportation machinery. It is the task of all of us who do not believe that the ends of border control justify the increasingly inhuman means. We live in a democracy and we can demand change."
10/13/2010, Berkeley Daily Planet, What If They Called a Riot and No One Came?, Ted Friedman
"When Berkeley officials who oversee the park were lobbied by the Telly businessmen to promote 'multi-use,' and 'free speech,' they at first thought it a reasonable enough notion. Why not hold that Sproul Hall pepper right smack dab in the center of People's Park. Why, indeed, not?
¶
Miracle would be too strong and a funny thing happened, too weak. Yet, the university suddenly became too late wise.
¶
Using the brains their educations gave them, U.C. officials saw through the specious argument for free speech, advanced by the businessmen.
¶
Students have been freely speechifying at Sproul Hall since the Free Speech Movement of the Sixties; in fact, pep rallies are held in the Sproul Plaza routinely."
10/10/2010, Oakland Tribune, Oakland Museum of California obtains historic poster collection, Kristin Bender
"They were collected beginning in 1977 by Rossman, one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the '60s. Rossman died of leukemia in May 2008 at age 68, but left his wishes for the collection with McLellan and his good friend, Cushing.
Cushing reviewed the entire collection three times, photographed each poster -- 23,542 high-resolution images -- shared them with students, community scholars, reporters and friends."
10/8/2010, The Daily Californian, Power to the People? I Don't Think So, Nadine Levyfield
"I refuse to support Berkeley's 21st century notion of activism--it is unorganized, lacks a tangible goal to unite its participant, and tarnishes the memory of the vastly better executed Free Speech Movement of the 1960s."
10/7/2010, The Daily Californian, History Makers, Gianna Albaum
"Seaborg was succeeded by Edward Strong, who was chancellor from 1961 to 1964 - a tumultuous time. His failure to address or manage this agitation, manifested at Berkeley in the Free Speech Movement, eventually culminated in Strong's resignation."
10/4/2010, Berkeleyside, Pat Cody, co-founder of Cody's Books, dies, Frances Dinkelspiel
"In 1964, as the Free Speech Movement attracted thousands of young people from across the country, Pat helped start the Berkeley Free Clinic to attend to their health needs. Pat became the clinic's treasurer and was intimately involved in making it a viable institution."
10/4/2010, American Thinker, Marching Toward Oblivion: Obama's Core Supporters and the Corruption of Idealism, Frank Burke
"The Kennedy presidency appealed to the idealism of many young people. The assassination in 1963 was a cataclysmic event and marked a watershed. Kevin Starr, writing in Golden Dreams - California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963 (2009, Oxford University Press U.S.), states, '... the Free Speech Movement erupting on the UC Berkeley campus in the fall of 1964 inaugurated a new era ...'"
10/1/2010, news24, On this day - October 1, AP South Africa
"Today is Friday, October 1, the 274th day of 2010. There are 91 days left in the year.
¶
Highlights in history on this date:
...¶
1964 - The US Free Speech Movement is launched at the University of California at Berkeley."
9/24/2010, Taiwan News, Today in History, Associated Press
"Highlights in history on this date: ...1964 - The U.S. Free Speech Movement is launched at the University of California at Berkeley."
9/22/2010, Spot.US, The Regents Club: Conflicts of interest are nothing new at UC, but they may be getting worse, Peter Byrne
"In the past half-century, the financial pedigrees of many regents have created particular challenges for avoiding conflicts of interest. In 1965, Free Speech Movement activist Marvin Garson responded to a call by the California Federation of Teachers to "investigate the composition and operation of the Board of Regents." He produced a well-documented study noting that, 'taken as a group, the Regents are representatives of only one thing-corporate wealth.' The study observed that the prospect of conflicted interests was very real for the regents, whose 'business is carried on in executive session in informal meetings of which no written record may exist. ... It is entirely possible for a Regent to telephone his broker with a buy or sell order right after the Committee on Investments decides to buy or sell a big block of shares.'"
9/22/2010, Guardian, Mad Men: season four, episode three, Will Dean
"When Don finds out that Stephanie is at Berkeley he asks 'are you sitting in?' in reference to the Free Speech Movement protests demanding freedom of political expression."
9/16/2010, San Francisco Chronicle, Cal free-speech talk illuminates Constitution, Debra Levi Holtz
"'The time to be concerned about students is not when they are exercising freedom of expression - picketing, demonstrating, disturbing the peace - but when they are quiet, when they despair of changing society, even of understanding it,' Litwack, 80, a professor emeritus of American history and a Pulitzer Prize winner, said in a speech Tuesday night about the Free Speech Movement that began on the Berkeley campus nearly 50 years ago.
¶
The forum was UC Berkeley's way of fulfilling a federal law requiring all federally funded schools to provide educational programs related to the U.S. Constitution every year to mark the anniversary of the signing of the nation's founding document on Sept. 17. Congress enacted the law six years ago out of concern that Americans did not have adequate knowledge of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution."
9/16/2010, Fox News, It's the Law: Government Agencies, Schools and Universities Mark Constitution Day, Joshua Rhett Miller and Alexandria Hein
"Several events are planned at the University of California-Berkeley, where students have been invited to attend a free seminar on 'The Free Speech Movement and the Constitution.'"
9/14/2010, San Francisco Chronicle, Bill Coblentz: powerbroker and a gentleman, editors
"Coblentz also stood up for principle. He used his perch as a University of California regent to fend off conservative attacks during the Free Speech Movement and was a fierce advocate for civil rights."
9/14/2010, Saint Mary's College of CA), Linkin Park misses the mark with A Thousand Suns, Michael Bruer
"The other single on the album, "Wretches and Kings," begins like many songs, with a voiceover, this time from Mario Savio, an American political activist and a key member in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. His famous "bodies upon the gears" speech is played at the start. As he finishes, the drum beat begins with synthesizer, leading up to Shinoda's rapping excellence. This song represents Shinoda's best chance to showcase his talents, with multiple lengthy verses. The song ends on the same quote."
9/9/2010, Boulder Weekly, If you can count a crowd and keep your virtue, Paul Danish
"On Aug. 31, [sic] campus cops arrested a student member of the Congress for Racial Equality who wouldn't abandon his table, and hundreds of sit-in protesters immobilized the police car he had been taken to, the roof of which becoming an impromptu speakers' platform. (The student, Jack Weinberg, emerged from the car two days later and went on to coin one of the defining one-liners of the '60s: "Don't trust anyone over 30.") After that, there were protest rallies almost daily. The size of the crowds at the rallies was routinely estimated at 3,000 or 3,500. In December, there was an occupation of the administration building, followed by mass arrests, and crowds at the rallies visibly swelled. Somebody - the press or the campus police - estimated attendance at one of the largest ones at 7,000 to 10,000. Protesters howled that the count was being low-balled.
¶
That prompted Herbert A. Jacobs, a Cal journalism professor, to obtain an aerial photograph of the rally, divide it into 1-inch squares, and, with the aid of a magnifying glass, count the crowd. His final number was 2,804."
8/27/2010, Crawdaddy Magazine, What Makes a Legend: Country Joe McDonald, Denise Sullivan
"'Country Joe' McDonald's early '40s baby diapers couldn't have been redder: Legend has it his activist parents named him after Joe Stalin. Honorably discharged from the US Navy in 1965, Joe made the move from El Monte, California, where he'd schooled himself in R&B and old time music, to Berkeley at the height of the Free Speech Movement."
8/24/2010, Indymedia, Open Letter from a Listener to Robbie Osman about the KPFA Board Elections, Jack Radley
"We are of the same generation, and 'fought in the same wars.' My particular vantage point, and after getting my preparatory education in high school (civil rights and antiwar agitation in some rural settings), a trip through the south in 1963, and then, my ultimate stroke of fortune, arriving at Cal as a 17 year old freshman in 1964, getting elected to the Executive Committee of the Free Speech Movement and getting arrested, I 'graduated' to working full time in the peace movement, from 1965-1972."
8/24/2010, Berkeley Daily Planet, Birgenau Greets Incoming Students at Convocation, Steven Finacom
"He [Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion Gibor Basri] read campus principles of community and said, 'This is, after all, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement. On the other hand, we want to respect our differences.' He called for 'free speech of the productive sort.'"
8/10/2010, Huffington Post, Mad Men Review: "The Good News" Is Sad Yet Very Good, William Bradley
"The niece, incidentally, who I suspect we'll see more of, is yet another harbinger of the coming 'real '60s' as many have it, as well as a reminder of how much of what we think of as the 1960s stems from California and the West instead of the more hide-bound New York. She's a poli-sci major at Berkeley, an admirer of the somewhat inchoate Free Speech Movement there, but she's not an activist. At least, not yet.
¶
She already shows signs of refusing to be 'folded, spindled, or mutilated,' to borrow an FSM phrase, rejecting Don's field of advertising as bullshit and saying that its incessant selling of products people don't actually need leads to 'pollution.'"
8/3/2010, Berkeley Daily Planet, Oakland's Cop-out: Equal Opportunity Abasement, Gar Smith
"California's 'illegal assembly' statue - '2686: Refusal to Disperse: Riot, Rout, or Unlawful Assembly' - is even more rigorous. It defines an unlawful assembly as any occasion where 'two or more persons assemble together to do an unlawful act, or do a lawful act in a violent, boisterous, or tumultuous manner.' Two Californians don't even have to create a 'tumultuous' disturbance (in which case they could be arrested for causing a 'riot'), they also can be cuffed and jailed if the police deem that they are 'about to start a disturbance' - i.e., a 'rout.' (The Free Speech Movement students who occupied Sproul Hall in 1969, were officially charged with being 'at the scene of a rout.')"
7/26/2010, Berkeley Daily Planet, Blogbeat: What?! Those are the Leftists?!?, Thomas Lord
"There are many sources of Berkeley history to be found on the net. I would be remiss to not mention the Berkeley Historical Society's curated collection of links, [http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/histsoc/default.htm] found on the City's own website. There you can find links to histories of famous things like People's Park, the Free Speech Movement, and Peet's Coffee. You'll also find the fascinating link I most wanted to tell you about."
7/4/2010, The Washington Post, Rich Lowry's review of books on neocons and the conservative movement, Rich Lowry
"It's impossible to write a history of neoconservatism without recapitulating twice-told tales. It all started in the 1930s at the City College of New York, where the smart, politically engaged Jewish kids excluded from Columbia by a quota system did intellectual battle with one another -- the Stalinists gathering in Alcove 1 in the dining hall, the anti-Stalinists in Alcove 2. And before you know it, we're invading Iraq in 2003.
¶
Vaisse dates the beginning of neoconservatism to the reaction of certain liberal intellectuals against the Berkeley Free Speech Movement beginning in 1964 and its threat, in the words of Seymour Martin Lipset, to "the foundations of democratic order." Vaisse writes, 'The subsequent history of the movement was an extended variation on the themes sounded at Berkeley.'" [Eds. Note: The view that neoconservatism arose in response to the FSM is not supported by oral histories of the time. Alex Sheriffs, who instigated the activity ban through dishonest tactics, could be said to be the original neoconservative activist, pursuing a veiled racist agenda against the civil rights movement.]
7/4/2010, The Beachside Resident, Cesar Chavez, UFW, and the Grape Boycott, Mickey Z
"This peaceful yet strong dedication garnered the attention of another non-violent struggle being waged at the time as Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) workers took some time from the civil rights movement to head west and help out. They were joined by members of the Free Speech Movement from Berkeley to form a powerful multi-ethnic coalition."
July-August 2010, AARP Bulletin, Power of 50: Social Change-In, Betsy Towner
"3. Free Speech Sit-Ins. University of California, Berkeley Sept. 30, 1964-Jan. 3, 1965 Protesting: First Amendment restrictions on campus Participant peak: 7,000 Trivia: When police put a protester In a squad car, activist Mario Savio climbed on top and addressed a crowd that would block the car for 32 hours.
¶
4. Berkeley Teach-In University of California, Berkeley May 21-22.1965 Participant peak: 35,000+ Protesting: Vietnam War Trivia: Smithsonian Folkways still sells an album of speeches and songs from antiwar teach-Ins."
6/27/2010, San Francisco Chronicle, 'Freedom Summer,' by Bruce Watson, David Levering Lewis
"No matter the cool, unvarnished depiction of firsthand dangers by Moses, Hamer and white Alabamian Bob Zeller or careful explication of what little legal protection William Kunstler and assistant attorney general for civil rights John Doar vouchsafed them, when students from Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, Michigan and elsewhere like Tom Hayden of SDS, Mario Savio of future Free Speech Movement fame, and Casey Hayden and Anne Moody of future feminist eminence, boarded buses for Mississippi on June 20, almost none of them could have measured the full meaning of a sign this reviewer recalls hanging in SNCC's Atlanta headquarters: 'There's a town in Mississippi called Liberty. There's a Department in Washington called Justice.'"
6/26/2010, San Francisco Chronicle, SELZNICK, Philip,
"He chaired the Department of Sociology from 1963-67 amid heated debates and political tensions generated by the Free Speech Movement. In 1965 his strong defense of student free speech and protest appeared in Commentary magazine as a pointed exchange with follow professor Nathan Glazer who viewed the protestors as extremists. Selznick founded the Center for the Study of Law and Society and served as director from 1968-72."
6/24/2010, TruthDig, David Kipen on 'Freedom's Orator', David Kipen
"If Columbia students were marching on Albany this year and a biography of Mark Rudd had just come out, you could bet the book wouldn't go unreviewed in the so-called national media. Berkeley has erupted again, and a fascinating biography of Mario Savio-a figure far more influential than Rudd, and not just because he helped lead a sit-in at Berkeley four years before the Columbia protests-has just come out. But its author, Robert Cohen, would have to stage a sit-in at 42nd Street and 8th Avenue for much of anybody to notice. Could it be that, for all the supposed decentralization of media in the age of Twitter, what's left of the commentariat is more Manhattanized than ever?
¶
That would be a shame, because 'Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s' rescues from creeping amnesia a student firebrand perhaps second only to Tom Hayden in his rhetorical gifts. What Hayden did in his epochal Port Huron Statement over a stretch of weeks-give eloquent voice to a generation-Savio did from the top of a squad car on no sleep. 'Freedom's Orator' succeeds in taking us back to a time when Berkeley students would actually fight not just to speak freely on campus, but also to 'emphasize intensive study of the classics in intimate seminars.' The more things change, apparently, the more they get completely different."
6/21/2010, The Los Angeles Times, UC Irvine protest case raises questions about discipline practices, Larry Gordon and Raja Abdulrahim
"The University of California has a long and difficult history of grappling with student protests, dating back to the tumultuous 1960s Free Speech Movement. Still, even as student rallies over higher fees have rocked UC campuses this year, it remains rare for a campus to sanction an entire student group in a civil disobedience case, experts say."
6/17/2010, Berkeleyside, Is demonstrating part of "The Berkeley Experience?", Frances Dinkelspiel
"'The Berkeley Experience,' according to the report, is every student's desire to do something that is very Berkeley: participate in a demonstration.
¶
Students come to Berkeley not only to study, according to the report. Since the university has a tradition of massive protests dating back to the days of the Free Speech Movement, students often come to Cal with the expectation that they, too, will hold placards, shout slogans, denounce a policy, and perhaps even occupy a building.
...¶
'We were told by some students that they came down to the rally in the mid-afternoon or late afternoon because they didn't want to go through four years of Berkeley without going to a demonstration,' said Brazil. 'Most people were demonstrating out of a deep conviction and concern that the university was being privatized, ... and some were protesting to have it on their resume.'"
6/16/2010, UC Berkeley News, Philip Selznick, leading scholar in sociology and law, dies at 91, Andrew Cohen
"After teaching for one year at the University of Minnesota and for five years at UCLA, Selznick joined UC Berkeley's faculty in 1952 as an assistant sociology professor. He chaired the Department of Sociology from 1963-'67 amid heated debates and political tensions generated by the Free Speech Movement. Though Selznick rejected later student militancy on campus, in 1965 his strong defense of student free speech and protest appeared in Commentary magazine as a pointed exchange with fellow sociology professor Nathan Glazer, who viewed the protestors as extremists."
06/16/2010, San Jose Mercury News, Panel: UC Berkeley responded badly to November protest, Matt Krupnick
"BERKELEY - UC Berkeley police and administrators bungled their response to a November protest that ended in dozens of arrests and police beatings, an investigative panel has concluded.
¶
In a 128-page report released Wednesday, the university's Police Review Board criticized leaders at UC Berkeley - birthplace of the Free Speech Movement - for being unprepared for civil disobedience. The lack of preparation gave the impression that administrators did not care about students' concerns about tuition increases and budget cuts, which "fanned flames of anger" Nov. 20 among protesters, the panel wrote."
6/16/2010, Business Insight Malaya, Hay Moritos en las costas', Alberto Romualdez
"Masao Miyoshi is a Japan-born and raised scholar who specialized in Victorian literature. As Professor of English Literature in the University of California Berkeley, Miyoshi became deeply involved in the defining political issues of the 60s and 70s such as the free speech movement and the Vietnam War protests. Following these experiences, the English Professor became a very strong advocate of a strong political role for the academe and the transformation of universities as focal points of political activism."
6/1/2010, The Brooklyn Rail, High Plains Curators-IN CONVERSATION: Brendt Berger with Jim Long, Jim Long
"Brendt: As a student in California there were San Francisco HUAC hearings and subsequent student demonstrations. In Hawaii I witnessed a hydrogen bomb test from 900 miles away. I saw Martin Luther King and met James Farmer civil rights activists, and returning to California in 1964 I was involved in civil rights demonstrations in Oakland, and the Free Speech movement and Vietnam War teach-ins at Berkeley."
5/21/2010, NewsBlaze, Former UC Berkeley Business School Dean John Cowee Dies at 91,
"[John] Cowee came to UC Berkeley as a professor in 1953 and taught business and insurance law at the law school before becoming dean at the business school. Cowee left UC Berkeley in 1966 under what his son name, John Cowee Jr. described as "political circumstances." At the time, Cowee favored the students' Free Speech Movement that was opposed by Gov. Ronald Reagan, who ordered state funding cuts and National Guard troops to campus. "I knew I could not work for a board of regents that treated Clark Kerr the way it did," Cowee said in an interview earlier this year. (Kerr was UC Berkeley's first chancellor and later a UC president. The UC Regents fired Kerr for his sympathetic attitude toward student demonstrations while Reagan was governor.)"
5/17/2010, UC Berkeley News, Tiffany Shlain's keynote address at Commencement Convocation, Tiffany Shlain
"You could say UC Berkeley is in my DNA. In 1961, my mother came to Cal from Detroit to be where the action is, the Free Speech Movement was just starting."
5/17/2010, Berkeleyside, Malcolm X Day - more than a day off?, Lance Knobel / Thomas Lord
"In 1961, Malcolm X was banned from speaking on campus on the grounds that he was a religious leader. That same year, Billy Graham spoke on campus. Malcolm gave his talk at the Y.
¶
By 1963 the ban had been lifted. The student political party SLATE (instrumental to the campus Free Speech Movement) invited two speakers: Malcolm X and a representative of the Ku Klux Klan."
5/10/2010, Berkeleyside, A mother's day, the Berkeley way, Jane Stillwater
"Next we drove past the law office where I used to work. 'Remember when I used to work for Bob Treuhaft? He was a lawyer for the Free Speech Movement.' And his wife Jessica Mitford had gone to Spain to fight against Franco in the 1930s."
5/4/2010, Daily Orange, Permanent record: Protests leave lasting change in relationship between SU, students, Erinn Connor
"The conservative atmosphere of the Syracuse campus did not match that of other university cultural revolutions across the country. There was the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley and protests at Southern Illinois University, among others, which sought to stop the control the university had over students."
5/4/2010, Columbia Missourian, Columbia educator Aline Kultgen remembers the Holocaust, Dean Asher
"She attended the University of California-Berkeley as the Civil Rights movement was unfolding and earned a bachelor's degree in sociology.
¶
'It was the beginning of the free speech movement, an exciting time,' Kultgen said in her living room. 'Everyone was majoring in sociology. We were going to change the world.'
¶
She reflected for a moment on the history after the Holocaust and the fight for civil rights in America, then softly conceded that 'we never did.'
¶
'We've come a long way in civil rights but we still have a long way to go,' she said later, over the phone.
¶
'We talk about the Holocaust and genocide, but there are still genocides going on now. Sudan, Congo, Rwanda, Darfur, Yugoslavia, Bosnia. There are still a lot of people killing other people and a lot of intolerance. Our work is not done, not by a long shot.'"
5/3/2010, Berkeleyside, Test your knowledge of Berkeley's many murals, Tracey Taylor
"According to Brett Weinstein, there are more than 80 murals in our city. Some are well-known, such the one commemorating the history of the Free Speech Movement on the side of Amoeba Records, or the 3-D work at La Peña Cultural Center on Shattuck. Others are less visible, tucked down alleys or on roll-up garage doors."
5/2/2010, Oakland Tribune, Protest passion, Angela Hill and Kristin Bender
"Others argue that extremism merely creates a backlash.
¶
'The occupation of the freeway, for instance, was unacceptable, and indeed monstrous,' said John Searle, a UC Berkeley philosophy professor who was a faculty member active in the Free Speech Movement at Cal in the 1960s. He said he witnessed the effectiveness of those demonstrations 50 years ago, but says many protests today, especially student protests, are misguided and therefore ineffective.
¶
'It is ridiculous self-indulgence to think that the protest is more important (than the message),' he said.
¶
The freeway occupation 'was an event of self-indulgent imbecility,' he said. 'However, this should not distract from the many, maybe thousands of people who were seriously trying to communicate something to Sacramento.'"
5/1/2010, Wired Magazine, Geek Power: Steven Levy Revisits Tech Titans, Hackers, Idealists, Steven Levy
"Lee Felsenstein is keeping the flame alive as well. Felsenstein was the subversive moderator of the Homebrew Computer Club, the PC industry launchpad whose members - including Woz - were the target of Gates' letter. A veteran of the Berkeley free speech protests, Felsenstein thought that putting cheap computers in the hands of "the people" would allow everyone to take information, manipulate it to better reflect the truth, and distribute it widely. He was right about the rise of the PC, but he says he's still waiting for its democratizing effect."
April 30 - May 2, 201, Counterpunch, 50 Years Later, the Civil Rights Struggle Continues, Saul Landau
"On April 17, 2010, some of those sit-in organizers heard Attorney General Eric Holder. 'There is a direct line from that lunch counter to the Oval Office,' he told the 1,500 people assembled to celebrate the 50th anniversary of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) at Shaw University in Raleigh North Carolina. 'If not for SNCC,' Holder said, 'I would not be Attorney General. If not for SNCC, Barak Obama would not be President.'
¶
SNCC became a school for organizers. Mario Savio learned from Bob Moses at the Mississippi SNCC project and returned to Berkeley to become the spokesman for the Free Speech Movement. David Harris went from SNCC to non-violent anti-war protests."
4/26/2010, Berkeley Daily Planet, Exhibition: "Women Hold Up Half The Sky: Bay Area Women's Posters of the 1970s and 1980s",
"How do we remember a social protest movement? Often by words that have been left behind: founding documents, manifestos, flyers, and the like. But visual artifacts can be powerful too: sometimes a movement's images reveal its deepest character and commitments.
¶
That's the case for an exhibition of posters that is being shown at a café/coffee house called 'Local 123' (www.local123gallery.com), named after a Painters' Local union hall that previously occupied the space. The posters, all of which were created here in the Bay Area, will be on display through June 1.
¶
The posters gathered for this exhibition come from various local collections, including Michael Rossman's 'All Of Us Or None' archive. Rossman, who was a leader of the Free Speech Movement in 1964, a social activist, teacher, and historian, assembled this archive, which now consists of 24,000 posters. The entire collection is being donated to the Oakland Museum."
4/25/2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Times, They Changed, Jerry Lembcke
"It's the best and brightest who get the tickets [junior-year-abroad], of course, and by spring break of sophomore year, the class leaders, the ones who might have gone to Port Huron in 1962, set their sights ahead and begin withdrawing their commitments to the campus community. On an annual basis, the friendship networks and organizational connections that might have grown into a Free Speech Movement in 1964 are fractured and left for the next year's first-term sophomores to rebuild. Seniors returning from overseas have majors to complete, LSAT's and GRE's to master, and the next round of application forms to fill out-little time to make a better campus, let alone end a war."
4/23/2010, The Daily Californian Online, Bill Would Pave the Way to Peace, Rick Sterling
"6. Is this issue 'too controversial' and 'divisive?' Challenging the status quo is always controversial. In the 1980's calling for divestment from Bank of America because of their loans to apartheid South Africa was controversial. Even during the Free Speech Movement there were many students who did not agree with Mario Savio. In the short term it was divisive but in the long run it was progress."
4/15/2010, Berkeley Daily Planet, The Day Our Sixties Started, Becky O'Malley
"Somehow I seem to have become an honorary member of the Free Speech Movement, on their mailing list and invited to their reunions. In all honesty, I must admit that when the FSM was making waves in 1964 I was in Ann Arbor making babies. But before that, four years before that, I was present at the creation, so to speak. I was one of the five thousand Bay Area citizens who rose in protest against the House Un-American Activities Committee (commonly known as HUAC), the trailing edge of ugly '50s McCarthyism which finally got its deserved comeuppance during the merry month of May in the newly minted 1960s."
4/12/2010, Washington Examiner, Greenlining founders emerged from civil rights movement, Tori Richards and Mark Tapscott
"Gamboa grew up in a Mexican barrio in San Bernardino and dropped out of high school to work in a steel mill. But he went to community college and then the University of California at Berkeley, which then was in the throes of the Free Speech Movement. Now 68, Gamboa graduated with a social sciences degree and worked for Pacific Bell Telephone. His leftist activism from within Pacific Bell's marketing department twice nearly got him fired, and he later organized the Latino Issues Forum, met Gnaizda, and the two organized a number of community groups from around California into a loose patchwork of activism known as the Greenlining Coalition (a purposeful play on the banking term, "redlining')."
4/8/2010, The Daily Californian Online, Change I Can Believe In, Roman Zhuk
"Looking for real change to come from student 'leaders' is a fool's errand. To challenge that claim, one might note in reply the Free Speech Movement and student pressure for UC divestment from apartheid South Africa. Sadly, the comparison rings hollow. (True, the former did have the wonderful benefit of jumpstarting Ronald Reagan's political career-Mario Savio's most meaningful achievement.)"
4/5/2010, UC Berkeley News, For prospective undergrads, student-authored Golden Bears Blog could just be the X factor in choosing Cal, Wendy Edelstein
"Student activism is alive and well at Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement.
...¶
Two days later, Pavlova, a legal-studies major, attended the March 4 strike for public education in Sacramento and wrote: 'The people that spoke up at Sacramento kept bringing up Mario Savio and the movements of the '60s. ... Whenever there's an injustice or an infringement of rights, Berkeley takes a stand. Every time. I feel that Berkeley is the social justice capital of the U.S.'"
4/4/2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Charles Muscatine, a Champion of Free Speech at Berkeley, Dies, Jill Laster
"Mr. Muscatine was a strong advocate for students' academic freedom during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, from 1964 to 1966 (sic).
¶
Friends and colleagues described him as someone with an unending commitment to his students' personal and academic growth. He was the lead author, in 1966, of what became known as the Muscatine Report, which called for small, student-led courses and emphasized the need to strengthen undergraduate education at a research university."
4/4/2010, San Francisco Chronicle, Designers look to the future of gardening, Joe Eaton, Ron Sullivan
"Four Winds has a new edible citrus, the Australian finger lime; Skagit Gardens, a fragrant wallflower. As Berkeleyans, we had to love Monterey Bay Nursery's trio of Salvia hybrids: 'Telegraph Avenue,' 'Free Speech' and 'Flower Child.'"
Spring, 2010, California Magazine, The Berkeley Rebellion, Robert Cohen
"But this honoring of the FSM is relatively recent. Much of the California electorate in 1964 were outraged by the disruptive protests, which broke campus regulations and were portrayed as subversive and anarchical. When those tactics spread to campuses across the nation, a backlash against Berkeley-style protests grew, enabling such conservative politicians as Ronald Reagan to gain office by pledging 'to clean up the mess' in Berkeley"
3/31/2010, FrontPage Magazine, Surviving the Sixties (Not), David Solway
"These strictures and insights resonate with me. I was at UC Berkeley at around the same time as Horowitz, participated in the student takeover of Sproul Hall, and fellow-traveled with the leaders of the Free Speech Movement. We reveled in our self-proclaimed status as rebels with a cause, who would remake America and the West in our own bearded image.
...¶
Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces: A Secret history of the Twentieth Century remembers those days fondly. "In the fall of 1964, in Berkeley," he writes, 'I was, day after day, for months, part of the crowd that made up the Free Speech Movement...It was a period of doubt, chaos, anger, hesitation, confusion, and finally joy-that's the word...This event formed a standard against which I've judged the present and the past ever since.'"
3/30/2010, The Daily News Online, Pioneering filmmaker remembered with retrospective,
"Strand, nicknamed Chick by her father, studied anthropology at Berkeley in the 1960s, joined the free speech movement, and experimented with photographic collage. She joined the filmmaker Bruce Baillie and editor Ernest Callenbach to found Canyon Cinema, a screening collective that evolved into the San Francisco Cinematheque and the independent distributor Canyon Cinema."
3/24/2010, Scoop, Protest Picket For Student Democracy, Matt McCarten
"'IN the 1960s, American students spent their summer holidays helping Black people to register to vote in racist states such as Alabama and Mississippi. When they returned to campus, they tried to set up Civil Rights Clubs in their universities. Draconian College authorities cracked down hard, forbidding students to hold any political opinions or exercise their democratic rights. But the repression saw an explosion of resistance, and the Free Speech Movement was born. Within five years, American universities became centres of resistance to racism, capitalism and the Vietnam War. Mario Savio's famous speech still echoes throughout the decades...'"
3/20/2010, Oakland Tribune, Renowned UC Berkeley English professor dies, Martin Snapp
"Charles Muscatine, a renowned scholar of Chaucer and medieval literature who became even more famous as a champion of free speech during two of the gravest crises in the history of the University of California, died March 12 of an infection at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Oakland. He was 89."
3/20/2010, New York Times, Charles Muscatine, Chaucer Scholar, Dies at 89, William Grimes
"Student unrest at Berkeley in the 1960s created a new role for Mr. Muscatine, who had begun teaching at the campus in 1948. During the Free Speech Movement, as students staged sit-ins and demonstrations to protest restrictions on political speech on university property, he played a leading role in mediating between students and the university administration.
¶
His sympathy for student demands over free-speech issues came from hard experience. In 1949 he and 30 other professors, invoking the principal of academic freedom, refused to sign an anti-Communist loyalty oath then newly required by the State of California. Mr. Muscatine was fired and regained his job only after the California Supreme Court ruled that the oath was unconstitutional.
¶
After the immediate crisis on campus had subsided, Mr. Muscatine was asked to lead a faculty committee charged with proposing educational reforms at the university. 'Education at Berkeley,' published in 1966, quickly became known as the Muscatine Report and attracted widespread attention for the boldness of its plans to encourage nontraditional courses and break down interdisciplinary barriers."
3/18/2010, The Los Angeles Times, Charles Muscatine dies at 89; UC Berkeley Chaucer expert fought Red Scare loyalty oath, Dennis McLellan
"'Chuck Muscatine was a vital figure in the political leadership of the Berkeley faculty all the way from the loyalty oath controversy through the Free Speech Movement,' said David A. Hollinger, a professor of history at UC Berkeley.
¶
'He also was a leader in the reform and enrichment of undergraduate education at Berkeley,' Hollinger said. 'He was the chief author of the [1966] 'Muscatine Report,' which set the frame for thinking about undergraduate education at Berkeley for the last several decades.'"
3/17/2010, UC Berkeley News, Charles Muscatine, Chaucer scholar and educational reformer, dies at 89, Kathleen Maclay
"He was in the public eye before, during and after the 1960s' Free Speech Movement, gaining widespread attention as chair of the Select Committee on Education, which in 1966 produced 'Education at Berkeley,' or the 'Muscatine Report.' The controversial document anticipated many student demands and included recommendations for instituting small, student-based and student-led interdisciplinary courses.
¶
The same year, Muscatine criticized undergraduate education as a 'mechanized training ground for the upper reaches of the labor market' and said 'political turmoil feeds on educational failure.'"
3/16/2010, Washington Post, Chaucer expert, activist Charles Muscatine dies at 89, Emma Brown
"At Berkeley, Dr. Muscatine was so widely known for his resistance and so admired for his courage that he became a pivotal figure in restoring peace to the campus after the rebellion known as the Free Speech Movement, in which students disrupted classes and staged sit-ins and large-scale protests to demand that university officials allow on-campus political activity."
3/16/2010, Sonoma State Star, Free speech policy would be disasterous for SSU, Jonah Raskin
"When hundreds of students at UC Berkeley were arrested during the Free Speech Movement in 1964, it wounded the University deeply and it took more than a decade to heal those wounds. And when hundreds of students were arrested at Columbia University in 1968, it took 40 years before student protesters returned to campus and were acknowledged by the administration, including the University Professor Lee Bollinger, that they were honorable human beings."
3/16/2010, San Francisco Chronicle, Charles Muscatine dies; fought UC loyalty oath, Nanette Asimov
"In the summer of 1950, the University of California vigorously enforced a state law requiring public employees to sign such an oath, and more than 11,000 UC employees did so rather than risk losing their jobs.
¶
Charles Muscatine, a recently hired assistant professor of English, said no. He was among 31 UC Berkeley professors who refused to sign.
¶
Won in court
Their refusal - and subsequent legal victory - is seen as helping to lay the groundwork for the Free Speech Movement that took hold on campus a decade later."
3/15/2010, The Los Angeles Times, 'Theology After Google' conference takes look at religion in Web era, Mitchell Landsberg
"Clayton, the organizer, said that what was happening at the conference and in emerging Christian movements reminded him of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s. 'It's raw, it's unrehearsed, but it's unapologetic, it knows its purpose and it's powerful,' he said."
3/15/2010, Sonoma State Star, New free speech policy not to include Mario Savio Corner, Sara Pohlman
"According to Raskin, the legacy of Mario Savio goes back to the early '60s at University of California, Berkeley, where Savio was a student and a leader of the free speech movement.
¶
At that time, students were not permitted to discuss politics in public or to pass out literature or table to promote political ideas. Savio led protests in 1964 against the school's policies and often clashed with campus and city police. In one memorable demonstration, Savio and many others took over the steps of Sproul Hall and over 700 people were eventually arrested. It was here on Dec. 2, 1964 that he gave his famous speech on the 'operation of the machine.'"
3/12/2010, The Oil Drum, From Counterculture To Cyberculture: The Life And Times Of Stewart Brand, Big Gav
"Yet, to the students of the Berkeley Free Speech movement in which these writers began and which provided the origin of the counterculture, cybernetics represented a militarized and menacing force antithetical to the longed-for new society. The students of the Berkely Free Speech movement of the 1960's and their colleagues across the country sometimes demonstrated and protested using computerized punch cards as the emblem of a repressive society."
3/11/2010, The Nation, Book review: A Body on the Gears: On Mario Savio, Scott Saul
"Robert Cohen dedicates much of Freedom's Orator, his absorbing and even-keeled biography of Savio, to this very question, peeling back the layers of myth that have enveloped Savio and the Free Speech Movement while substantiating their achievement. By necessity Freedom's Orator is a dual biography of a man and his movement, and almost half the book follows less than four months of Savio's life, the pivotal fall semester of 1964. The FSM ran what we might call a textbook student-activist campaign in that interval--if we overlook the fact that the textbook didn't exist yet. President Nixon's 1970 Commission on Campus Unrest termed militant student protest 'the Berkeley invention,' and rightly so, since the FSM pioneered the use of civil rights strategies of direct action in a university setting, demonstrating how such disruptive tactics could mobilize a majority of students and even win the sympathies of a formerly passive faculty.
...¶
At the time, Savio's language tapped into a deep reservoir of aspiration and emotion, calling together all those 'people who have not learned to compromise, who for example have come to the university to learn to question, to grow, to learn.' In some quarters, such people would be known simply as 'nerds'--and in fact, one sociological study of Berkeley undergraduates in 1964 concluded that a key variable separating FSM supporters from their opponents was GPA. (More than half of those with a GPA of B+ or better were self-designated radicals, while only one-tenth were conservatives.) Savio's rhetoric allowed these young people to recognize themselves as a community with higher motives than liberals like Clark Kerr, who was not only the UC president but also the nation's foremost labor-management negotiator, and therefore an expert in the art of compromise. Savio's nerds, by contrast, were proudly impractical: they were those who would 'die rather than be standardized, replaceable, and irrelevant.'"
3/11/2010, The Daily Californian, Professor Brought Attention to Canadian Studies, Kim Bielak and Kelly Strickland
"In addition to being a professor and co-founder of the Canadian Studies Program, [Thomas] Barnes was also the assistant dean of students during the Free Speech Movement in 1964."
3/10/2010, The Daily Californian, Dude, This is Just Like the '60s, Katie BentiVoglio
"And while they may think they are unique and invidiual, they are simply joining the wave of activists, egomaniacs and general misfits that have, since the Free Speech Movement, tried to become the next Mario Savio. Or just engage in general acts of sticking it to the man.
¶
To which you may say, shouldn't we take this as a compliment? Be proud of Berkeley's seemingly magnetic quality in attracting social movements? After all, this outsider presence is simply a testament to the Berkeley student's desire to change the world. Right?"
3/4/2010, UC Berkeley News, To Sacramento and back,
"As the march crossed Ashby, participant Mario Zelayan, a retired elementary school teacher from Berkeley and Oakland, gestured with a double peace sign. Involved decades ago in the Free Speech Movement as a UC Berkeley student, Zelayan said Thursday's march is "great to see. I like justice." When asked if today's protest activities are as effective as those during the Free Speech Movement, he said, 'You gotta do what you can do. Just sitting down and being quiet doesn't bring about change.'"
3/4/2010, The Daily Californian, Ode to Covered Faces: Taking the Struggle for Public Education Seriously, Matthew Senate
"I think it is time to cast away masks and black clothing and lighters. I think it is time we learn from the Free Speech Movement and decisively step away from violence and destruction.
¶
I say this as a young person, as a Californian, as a student who believes in public education."
3/4/2010, The Daily Californian, Campus Readies for Statewide Demonstrations with Workshops, Teach-In, Nick Meyers
"Student organizers held four 'peer to peer' workshops in Wheeler Hall, which were followed by a larger teach-in entitled "Educate the State" organized by SAVE the University and the UC Berkeley Faculty Association in support of today's protests.
¶
The workshops included a lecture by professor emeritus Michael Nagler on his experience with the Free Speech Movement and organizing protest tactics."
3/4/2010, Huffington Post, Is College Censorship Destroying Our Society's "Sophistication Machine"?, Greg Lukianoff
"Meanwhile, today I will be speaking at my alma mater, Stanford, a school that in the 1990s had to be told by a court order to drop its highly restrictive speech code, and soon thereafter at UC Berkeley, once known primarily as the birthplace of the free speech movement, but these days a little bit more famous for mass budget protests. Wish me luck"
3/2/2010, Tufts Daily, Budget cuts, fee increases draw anger of University of California students, Noa Naftali
"These changes have been met by protests at the various campuses. UC Berkeley, known for its history of activism - most notably the Free Speech Movement in 1964 and 1965, a response to the university restricting on?campus political activities - has been bustling with student outrage.
¶
'There have been lots of intense protests,' Emma Levine, a freshman at UC Berkeley, said. 'It's Berkeley, dude.'"
2/27/2010, San Jose Mercury News, Movie at Cinequest tells of birth of Silicon Valley, Mike Cassidy
"'People think of revolution in the Bay Area in the '60s and they don't think of down here' in Silicon Valley, said producer Sackett, who worked on the film with director Paul Crowder and writer Mark Monroe. The war protests and the free speech movement, Sackett said, not the digital revolution, come to mind. 'But what these guys did is as long lasting and more important, or as important.'"
2/27/2010, Chicago Tribune, Jay Arnold Levine, 1932 - 2010: Retired UIC professor, dean, Trevor Jensen
"Dr. Levine came to UIC in 1969 from the University of California at Berkeley, where he had been a member of the Academic Information Committee during the Free Speech Movement that roiled the campus."
2/19/2010, The Sacramento Bee, Viewpoints: Reform can't come from CEOs, Jeff Lustig
"It was a surprising end for a protest movement, and the die-hard group expired fairly easily, after all. I'm a veteran of a few political movements - the free speech movement, the civil rights and anti-war movements. And I've read about the state's populist, Progressive and labor movements. But I never heard of a movement that suspended operations because of cash-flow problems or the need to pay signature-gatherers. Penury came with the territory. Volunteer labor was the norm."
2/18/2010, Berkeley Daily Planet, Berkeley Hosts African-American History Month Celebrations, Raymond Barglow
"In the 1950s and '60s, the Civil Rights Movement helped to widen and deepen interest in black history and culture. In Berkeley, UC students returning from a summer of activism in the South in 1964 formed the Free Speech Movement to support civil rights locally, and third-world studies programs were organized on campus. Today, all of Berkeley's public schools have programs that teach about racism, and all celebrate African History Month."
2/14/2010, Rapid City Journal, Veterans writing group preserves memories for future generations, Jan Hill
"'Our meetings represent the act of coming together and speaking as a way of recollecting, sometimes jogging memories,' said Brad Morgan, co-founder of the group.
¶
Morgan, a U.S. Army veteran of the Vietnam war era, joked that he got most of his combat experience "at the University of California/Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement," before his military career."
1/28/2010, Berkeley Daily Planet, FSM ON STUDENT ACTIVISM, Hank Chapot
"Somebody should tell them that student activism at UC is in very good hands in 2010. Those who sat-in at Wheeler and their supporters were politically astute and overwhelmingly non-violent. A solid coalition of students, workers, teachers and community supporters stuck to the message for that entire flammable week in December 2009, even after the police beat people with clubs. Our demands remain current: No fee increases, no layoffs, no privatization."
1/28/2010, Berkeley Daily Planet, UC Must Respect Due Process Rights, Carmen Comsti, Sean Graham and Nathan Shaffer
"Currently UC Berkeley is more closely aligned with the McCarthy-ite policies that swept college campuses in the 1950s than the values represented by the Free Speech Movement of 1964. The attack on Ms. Miller's rights is only a thinly veiled assault on student expression and activism."
1/26/2010, Asbarez Daily Newspaper, Commonality In Struggle, Vaché Thomassian
"Here in the United States, the free speech movement in the 1960's was a pivotal time in developing and shaping our country's activist spirit. It was a time when students stood up to authority to demand their right to express themselves. This spirit was captured by the immortal words of Mario Savio on the steps of Sproul Hall in Berkeley when he said:
¶
'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus - and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it - that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!
¶
This was the movement that secured free speech and academic freedom here in America."
1/21/2010, Berkeley Daily Planet, Free Speech at UC Berkeley Today, FSM-A Board
"The Board views the events of Nov. 20 and Dec. 11 on the Berkeley campus with the greatest concern. We are appalled by the violence perpetrated by police forces on bystanders outside Wheeler Hall on Nov. 20. Police violence has escalated far beyond that which we experienced forty-five years ago, with fingers broken by clubs and firearms inappropriately aimed and fired at unarmed people behind barricades. Where was the University administration, which today claims the FSM as its own, while this was happening?
¶
We are also both shocked and appalled by the assault carried out against the occupied residence of the Chancellor on Dec. 11. Regardless of provocations, violence as an act of protest serves no worthwhile purpose; it divides the community and benefits our opponents by diverting attention away from the real issue-the defunding of public education. It is a sure route to scaring people away from action and can accomplish nothing positive in this situation."
1/18/2010, Counterpunch, Teach for America Needs to Review History, Frederick B. Hudson
"By educating the educators prepared themselves for dramatic new roles in their future lives. The New Left had learned the pragmatic organizational lessons in the South and carried them to new arenas. One of the first parallel agendas occurred on September 14, 1964 when student organizational tables used by civil rights groups were banned in a certain area of the University of California at Berkeley campus. The ensuing turmoil became one of this country most disruptive student uprisings and protest-the Free Speech Movement. (FMS) Its most dynamic speaker was a former teacher in a Mississippi freedom school, Mario Savio. He wrote to a friend, I'm tired of reading history, I want to make it." The FSM demonstrations ultimately resulted in over eight hundred arrests and set the stage for many more student demonstrations around the country."
1/17/2010, Truthdig, Making the Case for Gay Marriage, Bill Boyarsky
"I talked about this with Jackie Goldberg, one of the nation's most influential gay and lesbian activists. As a member of the California state Assembly, she was the author of the state's domestic partner law. While a University of California student, she was a leader of Berkeley's free speech movement. She fought for desegregation of Los Angeles schools as a school board member and served on the Los Angeles City Council. She and her longtime partner, Sharon Stricker, were married during the short time such unions were legal in California.
¶
Even though Goldberg and Stricker have a legal marriage in their own state, they are denied a wide range of federal benefits. If Goldberg dies, 'none of my benefits will go to my spouse,' she said. These include survivor benefits for Social Security and related programs. Also, same-sex couples do not get as much aid for the needy aged, blind and disabled as straight men and women who are married."
1/17/2010, Indybay, Why we reject the plan to fix the schools by cutting prison funding, occupy ca
"The counter-revolution was not purely repressive, but actively constructed with millions of tons of concrete in the new, more modern schools and prisons. The kinds of crowds that gathered by the thousands in Sproul Plaza during the Free Speech Movement were preventively dispersed by the new campuses designed to have no central gathering point."
1/8/2010, Forbes, Hell No, We Won't Pay!, Peter Robinson
"The New Yorker has chosen to welcome the new decade by publishing an obituary: 45 years after the founding of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, the magazine lets us know in its Jan. 4 issue, the campus protest movement is dead.
¶
Not that Tad Friend, author of the article in question, "Protest Studies: Berkeley Rebels Again," has noticed he is writing about a corpse. Recounting the present controversy at Berkeley, Friend proves unrelievedly earnest."
1/7/2010, Berkeley Daily Planet, Reader Commentaries: Free Speech vs. Hate Speech, Leon Mayeri
"As the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, Berkeley residents have long honored the responsibility of speaking truth to power in the name of advocating social justice and racial equality. After all, the Free Speech Movement (FSM) was born directly from the efforts of civil rights activists to set up an information table on Sproul Plaza promoting CORE (The Congress on Racial Equality). While as a matter of legal technicality, the principles of free speech encompass even the most odious racist hate mongering, the true moral authority of the FSM was born out of the desire to speak out and organize against racial and ethnic bigotry."
1/6/2010, San Francisco Chronicle, UC Berkeley: A tour through history and art, Gail Todd
"Begin at Sproul Plaza, bordered on the north by Sather Gate and on the south by Telegraph Avenue. Here is where the Free Speech Movement of 1964-65 began. The plaza and the steps of Sproul Hall were also the sites of Vietnam War and People's Park protests. Today, student groups of all persuasions set up tables in the plaza to expound their points of view. The steps leading up Sproul Hall have been renamed the Mario Savio Steps to honor this Free Speech Movement leader."
1/4/2010, The New Yorker, Letter from California Protest Studies, Tad Friend
"In December of 1964, a twenty-one-year-old philosophy student named Mario Savio stood on the steps of Berkeley's Sproul Hall and gave the Free Speech Movement's most incendiary oration, lighting the fuse for the Vietnam protests to come. He looked, with his altar boy's forehead, like Art Garfunkel, but he lashed the crowd with the cadences of Bob Dylan: 'You've got to put your bodies upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.' The Free Speech Movement's fight for the right to proselytize on campus for off-campus political organizations, particularly those which supported civil rights, was clean and quick. After some eight hundred students were arrested for occupying Sproul Hall, an overwhelming faculty vote in support of the students forced the administration to cave by early January.
Ironically, Savio's unruly language also helped elect Ronald reagan governor of California, in 1966. Reagan campaigned on the promise to 'clean up the mess in Berkeley,' a place that in his mind was 'a hotbed of Communism and homosexuality.'"
1/3/2010, Arizona Daily Star, 'Illiterate' mag nearly scuttled writing career, Bob Kovitz
"The three of us were suspended from high school for "distributing unapproved material on campus." The three included the president of the National Honor Society chapter and two members of the Student Council. Please note: This was 1964 - well before the "Free Speech" movement at the University of California-Berkeley. Mario Savio would have blessed our endeavor if he had only known us then."
January/February 2010, Tikkun Magazine, FREEDOM'S ORATOR: MARIO SAVIO AND THE RADICAL LEGACY OF THE 1960s by Robert Cohen, Bettina Aptheker
"The Free Speech Movement sent shock waves through campuses across the country and the world, resulting in changes in university regulations and educational access, teach-ins against the war in Vietnam, and (within three years) the historic, pro-democracy student uprisings in Paris and Prague, Mexico City and Santiago. Among the UC Berkeley students who led and participated in the Free Speech Movement were Jack Weinberg, who is now an international leader of Greenpeace; Jackie Goldberg, who until her recent retirement was a member of the California State Legislature; Rabbi Michael Lerner, now editor of Tikkun; and Susan Griffin, feminist author of a dozen best-selling books."
12/20/2009, The Wrap, Stuff a Stocking With 'Pictures at a Revolution', Peter McAlevey
"For instance, he's clearly most drawn to 'Bonnie and Clyde,' certainly a seminal movie whose violence was well understood by a young generation used, since the Berkeley Free Speech movement of 1964, to rioting in the streets."
12/18/2009, In These Times, One Year After Republic: Workers' Hidden Sit-Down Strike Tradition, Roger Bybee
"Overt sit-down tactics were re-kindled by the civil rights movement and the Free Speech movement at UC-Berkeley in the 1960s, and soon spread widely across urban centers and campuses, as detailed by historian Nelson Lichtenstein of UC-Santa Barbara, author of Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit."
12/17/2009, Berkeley Daily Planet, Missing the Point, H. Scott Prosterman
"People who choose to move to Berkeley are aware of the importance of our local history as it has impacted global trends. As a Michigan grad, I'm especially proud of the connection between Ann Arbor and Berkeley for their parallel traditions of academic excellence and positive activism. The Free Speech Movement began as an organic movement in Berkeley in reaction to the last days of the HUAC ugliness-possibly the ugliest chapter in domestic American history. But some historians ask if the FSM would have been as dynamic or effective as it has been without the support it drew from Students for a Democratic Society, which began two years earlier in Ann Arbor under Tom Hayden. I was proud to follow in Hayden's footsteps in Ann Arbor as a campus leader and point-man activist for important causes."
12/15/2009, CBS News, Jim Taylor CBS News Correspondent, Radio,
"(CBS) Jim Taylor was born in San Francisco and raised in the Bay area. He got his first taste of news and the impact of event-coverage while delivering the Berkeley Gazette newspaper in the hills above the UC Berkeley campus during the free speech movement of the sixties."
12/14/2009, Contra Costa Times, UC vandalism complicates protests, Matt Krupnick
"During the 1964 Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, 'one of the early arrests was somebody who was a recent graduate of Berkeley,' Johnston said. 'He was picked out for arrest because he was a nonstudent. The term in the 1960s was 'outside agitators.'"
12/11/2009, Los Angeles Times, 60 protesters arrested at UC Berkeley for occupying classroom building, authorities say, Gerrick D. Kennedy
"'[We want] a university that is accessible to all people, that is free to all people and that educates people,' Owen said in a telephone interview. 'Right now, the lessons we're learning is that you'll get beaten or arrested for standing up in what you believe in.
¶
'It's very ridiculous the school is so proud of their diversity and having a role in the free speech movement," she said. "But they got those things because people did what we're doing now. They can't have it both ways.'"
12/10/2009, Eyeweekly.com, Know Your Plaid, E.D. Cauchi
"Plaid has been a symbol of anti-establishmenteers since the Scots wore tartans during rebellions against the English. Through the Free Speech Movement and '90s grunge (and in its life as a common rural accessory offering that necessary patina of legitimacy) plaid is, well, a little bit country, a little bit rock ' n' roll."
12/10/2009, Christian Science Monitor, Fee hikes bring student protests back to California universities, Michael B. Farrell
"Indeed, the similarities between the 1960s' protests and today's are 'easily exaggerated,' said David Hollinger, professor of history at Berkeley, in an e-mail. 'By and large, 1960s campus protests were not chiefly directed at issues in higher education as such. Now, the big issue is taxpayer support for higher education.'
¶
What's more, the students and administrators largely find themselves on the same side of the issue, he said.
¶
'If someone occupies a building and the cops are called, everyone gets excited about that and too easily looses track of the fact that the administrators who call the cops and the people who occupy the building are both committed to the same large goals,' said Professor Hollinger.
¶
Still, there are some parallels between today's protests and those of the 1960s, says Lisa Rubens, a research specialist at the Regional Oral History Office at Berkeley.
¶
'These student have certainly invoked the free speech movement in trying to save the university,' she says, referring to the protest movement at Berkeley in the mid-1960s that aimed to overturn school limits on political speech.
¶
She sees a similar commitment today to upholding the broader goals and 'the commitment to maintaining the public university.'"
12/04/2009, The Nation, UCLA Protests are a Sign of the Times - Now and Then, Jeff Kisseloff
"When students at UCLA recently demonstrated against tuition hikes and as a result were treated like children and warned about the 'limits of protest,' my mind immediately raced back to October 1964 when officials at Berkeley expressed similar finger-wagging contempt for students who believed that the First Amendment didn't end at the gates to the campus. Out of that sprung the Free Speech Movement, the first mass protest on a college campus since the 1930s. The FSM not only helped light the fire of student activism in Berkeley and across the country, it also spawned one of the most memorable quotes to come out of the '60s as well as maybe the decade's best student speech."
12/4/2009, The Daily Californian, It's 1964 No More, Senior Editorial Board
"Forty-five years ago this week, Mario Savio made an impassioned cry for awareness and freedom of expression that awoke a powerful movement on this campus. Today, references and comparisons to the Free Speech Movement are inescapable. But in the midst of another struggle on this campus to challenge the status quo, are Savio's words still relevant?"
12/3/2009, The Daily Californian, Protesters Interrupt Free Speech Celebration, Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato
"Gar Smith, who was a campus activist in the 1960s, said that despite a small turnout, the rally was 'good work.'
¶
'Sometimes it takes a small number of people to start a large movement,' he said. 'I am honored to join your generation in this fight for free speech.'
¶
One of the main criticisms of the protest was the alleged 'museum-ification' of the free speech movement.
¶
'Free speech is not a fossil-it is a constant struggle, and that struggle continues right now on UC campuses through this movement,' said Praba Pilar, a graduate student of performance studies at UC Davis."
12/3/2009, The Daily Californian, Anniversary for Free Speech Movement on Sproul, YouTube Video
"The ASUC organized an anniversary event for the Free Speech Movement on Wednesday. Student protesters also spoke on Sproul that afternoon."
12/3/2009, The Berkeley Daily Planet, Free Speech Movement Commemoration Held at UC, Raymond Barglow
"The meeting was originally planned by the Associated Students (ASUC) and other campus organizations. They sent an e-mail message to FSM arrestees, said Susan Druding, 'inviting us to speak at the event, [but] we were asked not to say anything about the budget crisis or current events, only to speak about what happened 45 years ago.'
¶
Students who are protesting the budget cuts and fee increases met with some of the FSM veterans and agreed that the current protests deserved a hearing at the commemoration. Hasty negotiations just before the event resulted in a compromise: the protestors would be heard, followed by the scheduled speakers."
12/3/2009, The Berkeley Daily Planet, First Person: Remembering the Free Speech Movement On its 45th Anniversary, Raymond Barglow
"The social forces that we face today tell us that money for higher education simply is not there. We're up against not only a self-serving Board of Regents and Governor, and overpaid administrators reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them, but also against a federal government that starves public schools at the same time that it provides a banquet to the weapons manufacturers. And now the President aims to escalate the war in Afghanistan, costing many more hundreds of billions of dollars and many lives.
¶
Forty-five years ago was, it seems to me, a more hopeful time in our nation's history. Can today's protest movement on college campuses up and down the state keep hope alive? I don't know. But I'm encouraged when I perceive the Kantian community-mindedness that links the generations. My guess is that Mario would have appreciated that too."
12/2/2009, San Francisco Chronicle, UC protesters invoke Free Speech Movement, Nanette Asimov
"On Wednesday, three gray-haired campus activists from the '60s - Gretchen Lipow, Anita Medal, and Gar Smith - addressed the students, recalling their own experiences.
¶
'I still remember how an officer held me so another could slap my face,' Smith said to loud boos. 'They were white men. I discovered from YouTube that today's students are being beaten by a fully integrated police force. That's progress!'"
12/3/2009, FluxRostrum, UC Berkeley Mario Savio Free Speech Movement 45th Ann., YouTube Video
"An intervention during the depoliticized, sanitized commemoration of the 45th Anniversary of Mario Savios famous speech. 'We will not permit the museumification of Berkeleys radical past, especially now, as we enter into a new cycle of struggle. The Free Speech Movement is not a way to sell coffee, nor is it a rhetorical sop the administration can use to pacify the existing movement.'"
12/2/2009, Contra Costa Times, Protesters shut down Free Speech Movement tribute, Matt Krupnick
"Some Free Speech Movement veterans who watched Wednesday's event said the current issues have yet to take on a life of their own, as they did in the 1960s. But many on the Berkeley campus at first ignored rallies 45 years ago, said Bob Roundy, an analyst in the academic personnel office who was a UC Berkeley student in the 1960s.
¶
'The broader understanding (of the issues) grew with the Free Speech Movement,' he said. 'It wasn't instantaneous.'
¶
One former leader of the movement told current students to keep up the fight.
¶
'What you're seeing here today is really a continuation of the fights we went through,' Gretchen Lipow told the group as many protesters chatted among themselves. 'Do your research and stay out there.'"
12/3/2009, The New York Times, The Bay Area Sampler, Michelle Quinn
"Clashing Protests | People protesting recent university fee hikes and other issues interrupted an event celebrating the 45th birthday of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley."
11/27/2009, The New Mexico Independent, Yes, N.M.'s budget woes are bad. But pain is relative, Trip Jennings
"Signs of California's ongoing budget catastrophe came last week as a 32 percent hike to student fees was approved for the University of California system, which encompasses several campuses across the state. The move incited student protests on UC's Berkeley campus reminiscent of the Free Speech movement and anti-war protests."
11/27/2009, Orange County Register, Campus protests: a look back, Andrew Galvin
"But the Free Speech Movement and the Vietnam War protests tested Californian's pride in UC.
¶
In 1966, Ronald Reagan was elected governor 'on an outspokenly anti-student protest platform,' and in 1967, a Reagan-dominated UC Board of Regents fired Kerr, Starr wrote.
¶
In 1966-67, student fees were just 5.7 percent of the amount that the state contributed to UC. In 2008-09, student fees reached 53.4 percent of the state's contribution, according to the California Postsecondary Education Commission.
¶
The latest fee hike and the protests they inspired are a consequence of the economic recession and its decimation of the state's tax revenues.
¶
But if you ever wonder what happened to the statewide consensus that propelled UC to a place among the world's elite universities, look back to the big campus protests of the 1960s."
11/27/2009, New York Times, In a Home to Free Speech, a Paper Is Accused of Anti-Semitism, Jesse McKinley
"Still, she says she has no intention of stopping the publication of submitted letters, citing a commitment to free speech that is a legacy of the city where the Free Speech Movement was born in the 1960s.
¶
'I have the old-fashioned basic liberal thing of believing that the remedy for speech you don't like is more speech,' said Ms. O'Malley, 69, a veteran local journalist who bought the paper in 2002 as a retirement project with her husband, Michael, now 72. 'If somebody says something you don't like, say what you think. And I felt it a privilege here in my middle age to be in a position to make that happen.'"
11/25/2009, Berkeley Daily Planet, Partisan Position: The UC Protest: Can It Succeed?, Raymond Barglow
"Although the path forward for today's campus advocates of public education is a challenging one, they will have many of us whose school years are in the past to keep them company.
¶
Raymond Barglow participated in UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement in 1964 and is the founder of Berkeley Tutors Network."
11/24/2009, Oakland Examiner, UC fee increase will only exacerbate student loan crisis, Heather Ehmke
"The protests at UC Berkeley this past week have rendered national media coverage, echoing the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s when Berkeley became known as a radical university. It's refreshing to know that Berkeley still has those seeds of malcontent within her. Many of us are happy to see that the students are embracing their heritage of bucking the system."
11/23/2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Berkeley Protest: Fresh Anger in the Footsteps, Murray Sperber
"But then as now, the protests were about education. Often forgotten in the history of that era is the fact that the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964-the Ur-protest of American students that decade-was about education. We wanted freedom of speech on campuses and in classrooms; we protested the assembly-line education we were receiving. The most famous speech by Mario Savio, the FSM's leader, was about education. He urged students to put their bodies into the gears of the machine to disrupt it, and to fight back against the university administrators who were responding in their heavy-handed, factory-owner manner. He said nothing about peace, Vietnam, or drugs. He spoke only about education."
11/23/2009, San Francisco Chronicle, UC to look into police actions at protest, Nanette Asimov, Justin Berton
"On Monday, up to 100 demonstrators gathered on the steps of Wheeler Hall to protest what they considered overly aggressive action by police. They also called for a 1,000-person occupation of Wheeler Hall sometime in early December to coincide with the 45th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, when 800 students were arrested inside Sproul Hall."
11/23/2009, Associated Content, Campus Protests Demand Change, Evoke History of Student Activism, Jacob Heselschwerdt
"The protests at the Berkeley and Santa Cruz campuses are just the latest in a long history of student activism in the California State University system. The Free Speech movement was pioneered at Berkeley in 1964. Further United States involvement in the Vietnam War and the arrest of Black Panther co-founder Huey Newton caused student protests to continue throughout the late 1960's at the Berkeley campus."
11/22/2009, Monthly Review Zine, Orange Alert on Education, Ra Ravishankar
"Beside the costs of a university education, there is also the issue of control. Control of public universities is currently vested in bodies such as the Board of Regents, Board of Trustees, etc. The Regents/Trustees are almost always men (and much less likely, women) of great wealth from the corporate world and are appointed by the Governor of the state for favors rendered in the past. In the words of the Free Speech Movement:
¶
Taken as a group, the Regents are representatives of only one thing -- corporate wealth. As major employers and as Regents of the University, they control more than money; they make money through the control of other men. They direct the productive energies of hundreds of thousands of human beings and set the limits to their opportunities for creative and satisfying achievements through work and study." [Eds. Note: source is Marvin Garson, "The Regents," 1965, available in full at http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt9p30076p&brand=calisphere&doc.view=entire_text]
11/22/2009, Martin Snapp blog, Remembering Mario, Martin Snapp
"Even today, opinions of the Free Speech Movement - aka FSM - are split. A few months ago, I wrote a story about the new Center on Civility in Public Discourse at Cal, funded by donations from the Class of '68, who were freshmen during FSM.
¶
Half the donors told me FSM was the greatest thing that ever happened, and they were contributing because they considered the new center to be the logical extension of all the good things about FSM.
¶
The other half said FSM was the worst thing that ever happened, and they were contributing to make up for all the bad things about FSM."
11/17/2009, Democracy Now, Why Are We Destroying Public Education? University of California Students and Staff Prepare for System-Wide Strike to Protest Cuts, Amy Goodman, et al
"AMY GOODMAN: I'm going to end with Blanca Misse. Yesterday we were at the Free Speech Cafe at the University of California, Berkeley, which honors the free speech movement back to 1964. And for people who aren't familiar with Mario Savio, who gave this famous speech, where he said, 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.' What specifically are the actions that are happening here on the campus at UC Berkeley and also at UCLA?"
11/16/2009, Oakland Tribune, Award-winning TV news cameraman and Tribune photographer dies, Angela Woodal
"Award-winning TV cameraman and Oakland Tribune photographer Harold A. "Buck" Joseph had a front-row seat to the most tumultuous events in recent Bay Area history. Through the lens of his camera, the ex-Marine and avid ballroom dancer watched the '60s, '70s and '80s unfold - the Black Panthers, the Free Speech Movement, the San Francisco State University sit-ins and two presidential assassination attempts."
11/9/2009, The Independent Collegian, Visiting documentarian workshops with students, Katie Martin
"Quotes used throughout the film helped to further illustrate the concepts that the film displayed. Mario Savio's quote from the free speech movement of the 1960s lent a powerful ending note for the film."
11/5/2009, Berkeley Daily Planet, Remembering Alexander Hoffman, Elijah Wald and Lincoln Bergman
"In the 1960s, Hoffmann joined Charles Garry's legal team, working closely with the United Farm Workers and the Black Panther Party. His legal career reads like a chronology of the 1960s in the Bay Area, from opposition to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to his involvement with the Farm Workers in Delano, the mass arrests at Sheraton-Palace Hotel, and the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM), during which he developed a lasting friendship with Mario Savio."
11/5/2009, Berkeley Daily Planet, Editorials: Dealing Sensibly with H1N1, Becky O'Malley
"Dr. Brunner's not just a physician, he's a political person, a veteran of the Free Speech Movement. I asked him what he thought of a story prominently featured on the front page of the New York Times on October 28 under the headline 'Shortage of Vaccine Poses Political Test for Obama.'
¶
This was the lead: 'The moment a novel strain of swine flu emerged in Mexico last spring, President Obama instructed his top advisers that his administration would not be caught flat-footed in the event of a deadly pandemic. Now, despite months of planning and preparation, a vaccine shortage is threatening to undermine public confidence in government, creating a very public test of Mr. Obama's competence.'
¶
Wendel took the words out of my mouth on this one. 'All he has to do is walk on water,' he quipped."
11/2/2009, The Irish Times, A woman with protest on her mind, Fiona McCann
"'In 1964, when I [Marsha Hunt] was a student at Berkeley and we resisted the police and held the free speech movement sit-in, we were risking our futures. We were not hippies. We were students, committed to something that we thought was important." Hence the show. 'My intention is to bear witness to something that I think is really, really important about the 1960s epoch that has been forgotten,' she says. 'We talk a lot about it being about love, and perhaps the most extraordinary thing is that it was about violence. About war, about protest, about resistance.'
¶
Forty years on from 1969, she's asking where all the protesters have gone. 'How is it that we feel that there are so many problems that we cannot make change? Why are people not marching in the United States to say we must have health care?'"
11/2/2009, The Daily Californian, New Biography Preserves the Life and Legend Of Mario Savio, Maggie Owens
"In our turbulent times as Berkeley students, with ever-rising tuition, budget cuts and consequent walkouts, it's nearly impossible to miss Savio's legacy in our political climate as a university. No matter which side of the debate or spectrum we may find ourselves, we can always recognize that it was Savio that paved the way for the activism that we see every day before us. 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part,' Savio once said. This quote adorns the wall of the Free Speech Movement Cafe.
¶
Cohen balances fact with sensation well. He never gets too mundane and yet never actually canonizes Savio. He approaches the entire subject, start to finish, with careful passion. But it would have been quite remarkable had he not managed to describe such a charismatic icon with passion. Ultimately, the appeal of the work comes not from Cohen's approach, which is an effective one, but from the desire to catch a glimpse of the famous Mario Savio beyond his legacy-the man behind the movement. There can be no better or more appropriate time to further understand a man who forever redefined what it means to be a UC Berkeley student,"
11/2/2009, In These Times, Free Speech Radical: Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement, Don Lazere
"Savio's orthodox Catholic upbringing gradually morphed into sympathy with liberation theology and Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement. At Queens College in 1963, he spent the summer on a project organized by the campus Newman House, assisting the poor in Taxco, Mexico. That fall, his parents moved to California and he transferred to Berkeley. Baptized by San Francisco protests for civil rights and against the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1963-64, he became active in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, whose campaign he joined for the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi."
10/29/2009, Philadelphia Inquirer, Review: Kevin Starr concludes his 9-volume history of 20th-century California with a magisterial look at the late '40s through the '60s, John Timpane
"What a cast of characters: Nixon, Warren, Walt Disney, Ronald Reagan, Dave Brubeck, Herb Caen, Walter O'Malley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ray Bradbury, Dorothy Chandler, Jack Webb, Ray Kroc, Mario Savio, even the very young Joan Didion and Dianne Goldman (who would become Dianne Feinstein) - so many who shaped, or soon would shape, a nation as well as a state."
10/29/2009, Berkeley Daily Planet, Arts Calendar,
"MONDAY, NOV. 2
READINGS AND LECTURES
¶
David Lance Goines on 'The Free Speech Movement: Coming of Age in the 60s' at 7:30 p.m. at The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. 848-3227. www.hillsideclub.org "
10/28/2009, Macalester College News, Macalester Student wins Mario Savio Young Activist Award, Barbara Laskin
"Although condemned by university administrators and public opinion at the time, the Free Speech Movement has been recognized for some years as having made a positive contribution to university life."
10/26/2009, UC Berkeley News, UC Berkeley amplifies national voice via The Berkeley Blog, Kathleen Maclay
"The forum is not an institutional blog with an 'official' voice, but rather an open exchange of ideas and opinions involving the campus as well as the local community and the country - a tradition at UC Berkeley since the founding of the Free Speech Movement on campus in the 1960s, said Claire Holmes, UC Berkeley associate vice chancellor of public affairs."
10/26/2009, Indybay, URGENT ALERT! Defend Women, Defend Choice! Rightwingers Assault Both in Berkeley!, Wex
"All day Monday this anti-abortion/anti-women group covered Sproul Plaza with (according to one outraged eyewitness) '...an elaborate huge huge display of bloody fetus pictures, targeting Obama, comparing abortion to Nazi genocide and lynching in the old south, and sporting a picture of Mario Savio as its 'free speech' centerpiece.' This horrendous display looks like it cost huge bucks, and they had a crew of dozens of anti-abortion 'disciples' including their own 'documentary' film crew and both speaker types but also plenty of them walking through the crowd dressed in pink or purple, mostly older but some younger, trying to engage students in conversations about the 'horrors' of abortion."
10/25/2009, Pacific Free Press, Talking Back with Retort, Iain Boal
"The figure of the oppositional public intellectual in America more or less disappeared during the anti-communist witch hunts of the Cold War, partly through the destruction of careers, partly through the choking off of access to the fourth estate. Chomsky's essay, 'The Responsibility of Intellectuals', printed as a special supplement to the New York Review of Books, made him notorious as a critic of the Vietnam war but by the time it was published in 1967 Chomsky was safely tenured at MIT thanks to his path-breaking work in mathematical linguistics, funded by the US Navy and the Army Signal Corps. The burst of antinomian energy that flared here in the Bay Area in the 1960s, captured in the voices of Huey Newton and Mario Savio who articulated the demands of the Black Panthers and the Free Speech Movement, was soon snuffed out or suppressed. The handful welcomed into the new model multi-cultural academy were beneficiaries of those struggles, but black radical voices like Angela Davis, Adolph Reed, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore are occluded from the mainstream media. The underground presses of the counterculture were either closed or normalized by the mid-1970s. Public discourse since then has been dominated by the agenda of conservative and neoliberal think-tanks, established in direct response to the events of the late sixties. The reaction set in and Chomsky, for example, found himself excluded from the pages of the New York Review of Books. Likewise his fellow anarchist Howard Zinn, who taught at Boston University across the river from MIT. Although hugely popular with young students who flocked to his lectures on civil liberties, Zinn was perennially harried and humiliated by the university administration in an effort to oust him. Zinn gained national recognition very late, following the extraordinary success of his textbook A People's History of the United States, which continues to sell 100,000 copies a year. Ironically, the marginalization of critical voices in America means that the ongoing collapse in circulation of major newspapers and magazines is not having the consequences it would have, say, in India."
10/22/2009, Pasadena College Courier, A look back with . . . Professor A.C. Panella, Hannah Leyva
"Most Interesting: When she was only 20, Panella had the chance to learn from one of the most famous student activists. 'I was lucky enough to work with Mario Savio, who was a leader of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the 60s,' she said. 'He was a phenomenal man.'"
10/22/2009, Berkeley Daily Planet, Recalling the Days When Savio Spoke for the Movement, Conn Hallinan
"A new generation of activists has appeared on the campuses, fighting to keep the university open to all Californians. They too have marched and struck, and are finding that they are most effective when they tap into their allies outside the ivy tower. There are many of those.
¶
The arrogance and elitism of the university has not changed a whit from the days when UC Chancellor Edward Strong and UC President Clark Kerr plotted and schemed against the FSM.
¶
The students who are digging in to take on the university and the regents would do well to read this book. Because in the end its message is simple: get your politics right, recruit allies in the wider world, and mobilize enough students to pull down the walls."
10/20/2009, New York Times, Think Again, Stanley Fish
"It was not always thus. In the early sixties, when I taught at UCBerkeley, faculty members received special and respectful attention from merchants and shopkeepers. Weeks after the Free Speech Movement of 1964, we had already learned that it was best to keep our university affiliation under wraps. A corner was turned and it doesn't seem that there is a way back. David Berman tells us that "the solution is to stop whining and behave well." I have been preaching that lesson myself, but even if it were heeded (an unlikely outcome) it probably wouldn't be enough."
10/9/2009, Berkeley Daily Planet, Berkeley Law Students to Launch Torture Accountability Initiative, Riya Bhattacharjee
"Berkeley Law spokesperson Susan Gluss told the Daily Planet that students were allowed to form whatever group they wanted at Boalt.
¶
'It could be to discuss all sorts of controversial issues-political, international, medical--UC Berkeley is the home of the free speech movement and we are a critical part of it,' she said. 'I don't think any group has ever been denied permission by the university.'"
10/8/2009, Prison Planet, The New Left Was Right, Dylan Hales
"The Berkeley 'Free Speech Movement' exploded in the fall of1964 after the University of California fiercely enforced a rule barring political activities that weren't directly subordinate to the two major political parties. Led by Mario Savio, an amalgamation of libertarians, liberals, conservatives, and all points in-between participated in several protests and sit-ins that resulted in ma-jor concessions by the university. In a series of speeches - one of which was made on the roof of a police car holding another member of the FSM - Savio summed up the nature of the beast in a style rarely seen before or since: 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part!And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus-and you've got to make it stop!'"
10/8/2009, globalgrind.com, We Are the Obama Effect (Part II), Sara Haile-Mariam
"Students for a Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Students for a Democratic Society, The Berkeley Free Speech Movement, are our examples. They organized sit-ins and freedom rides to Mississippi to register voters. They took on racism, sexism and a senseless war. They weren't perfect. Some went on to become radicals and advocated for the violence that they entered politics to stop. Yet, they serve as an example for us, of what we should avoid, and of our own capabilities.
¶
What if we used music to educate? What if artists rhymed about policy and politics?"
10/8/2009, Berkeley Daily Planet, UC Students Gear Up for Oct. 24 Conference, Riya Bhattacharjee
"UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and Executive Vice-Chancellor and Provost George W. Breslauer sent an e-mail to faculty, staff, students and members of the campus community thanking them for the 'orderly, peaceful and effective way in which the Sept. 24 budget protest actions were held on and around campus.'
¶
The letter acknowledged that, although a large number of people took part in the day's actions, there was minimal disruption to university operations and classes.
¶
'Berkeley is proud of being the home of the Free Speech Movement and yesterday's protests exemplified the best of our tradition of effective civil action,' the letter said. "
10/6/2009, The Daily Californian, 45 Years Later, Walkout Echoes Free Speech Fight, Robert Cohen
"Whether or not the current struggle to preserve California's low-cost public higher education succeeds this year, it is an effort that is totally consistent with Savio's democratic educational vision. In this sense, those who marched against budget cuts were keeping alive the spirit of the Free Speech Movement, whose 45th anniversary we mark this fall semester."
10/4/2009, The Guardian UK, The promise of affordable higher education is dying. The University of California's students and faculty demand answers, Judith Butler
"It may seem that the thousands of people who converged on the University of California Berkeley's famous Sproul Plaza, home of the free speech movement, on 24 September were simply upset about money. Where has all the money gone? Who has taken it away? And perhaps there is no one to blame."
10/1/2009, The Writer's Almanac, On this day..., Garrison Keillor
"On this day 45 years ago the Free Speech Movement was launched on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley.
¶
The day before, on September 30th, 1964, UC Berkeley students associated with the civil rights groups SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) had set up tables on the Berkeley campus to fundraise. The university had a policy that prohibited off-campus political action, so the students had been denied permits and were tabling in brazen violation of university regulations. Campus officials approached five people sitting at the fundraising table, jotted down their names, and told them to appear at a disciplinary hearing before the dean at 3:00 that afternoon."
10/1/2009, The Daily Californian, At UC Berkeley, Activism Comes With the Territory, Javier Panzar
"Lynne Hollander Savio, who was married to Mario Savio-one of the Free Speech Movement's most well-known leaders-said she saw the walkout as a 'resurgence' in activism.
¶
'It's certainly important for Berkeley students to not focus so narrowly on their academic education that they forget their roles as citizens in the larger community,' she said.
¶
However, she credits the Free Speech Movement's success in part to the cheap housing and tuition fees of the time. Students then had to work only part time and enjoyed the freedom to be more politically active. In contrast, today's scarce job market makes students more career-oriented and focused on their futures."
10/1/2009, The Associated Press, Today in History, Oct. 1, The Associated Press
"1964 - The U.S. Free Speech Movement is launched at the University of California at Berkeley."
10/1/2009, Berkeley Daily Planet, The Corporate University Grinds On, Becky O'Malley
"Will rallies and walkouts make any difference in this discouraging picture? As long as so many researchers are content to take home generous paychecks from BP and its ilk, protests by the teaching faculty and by students are not likely to prevent the machine from working, as Mario Savio and his Free Speech Movement colleagues earnestly hoped they would. In his famous 'throw your bodies upon the gears' speech, Savio derided a 'well-meaning liberal' who compared the president of the university to 'the manager of a firm' and the regents to 'his board of directors.' That was 1964, but not much has changed."
10/1/2009, Berkeley Daily Planet, Student Protesters Gear Up for Oct. 24 Conference at UC Berkeley, Riya Bhattacharjee
"UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and Executive Vice-Chancellor and Provost George W. Breslauer sent an e-mail to faculty, staff, students and members of the campus community thanking them for the "orderly, peaceful and effective way in which the Sept. 24 budget protest actions were held on and around campus."
¶
The letter acknowledged that although a large number of people took part in the day's actions, there was minimal disruption to university operations and classes.
¶
'Berkeley is proud of being the home of the Free Speech Movement and yesterday's protests exemplified the best of our tradition of effective civil action," the letter said. "Your actions have sent a clear and important message to our legislators and to the California public that the State's disinvestment in public higher education must stop. We hope that we can build on these actions together to continue to inform the public and the State legislature that cuts to the University of California undermine our state's future and that it is in the interests of all of the people of our great State of California to reinvest in public higher education.'"
9/29/2009, fxstreet, Into the Fourth Turning, John Mauldin
"[Neil] HOWE: There is only one Prophet archetype generation alive today: the Boomer Generation. We define them as being born between 1943 and 1960. Those born in 1943 would have been part of the free-speech movement at Berkeley in 1964, the first fiery class whose peers include Bill Bradley, Newt Gingrich, and Oliver North.
The last cohorts of this generation came of age with President Carter in the Iran Hostage Crisis."
9/28/2009, The Nation, The Student Sex Column Movement, Alex DiBranco
"Reimold conceptualizes the resistance to student sex columns as an authoritarian and protective parental mindset that reacts against "the student generation taking back control of the sexual messages targeted at them." This rings partially true; after all, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the '60s was also about student activism versus the control of the administration and older generation. But--again, as in the '60s--antagonism stems from fellow students as well."
9/28/2009, The Bulletin, The Week In History, The Associated Press
"Thursday, October 1
¶
In 1800, Spain ceded Louisiana to France in a secret treaty.
¶
In 1908, Henry Ford introduced his Model T automobile to the market.
¶
In 1918, Damascus fell to Arab forces as Turkish Ottoman officials surrendered the city.
¶
In 1936, Gen. Francisco Franco was proclaimed the head of an insurgent Spanish state.
¶
In 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China during a ceremony in Beijing.
¶
In 1958, the American Express charge card made its official debut.
¶
In 1964, the Free Speech Movement was launched at the University of California at Berkeley."
9/27/2009, The Los Angeles Times, College radicalism redux, Cathleen Decker
"The campus protests of the 1960s happened long enough ago that the images filter through in black-and-white, the tint of television newsreels and newspaper photographs back in the day:
¶
Mario Savio, ushering in the Free Speech Movement from atop a police car and exhorting fellow Berkeley students to block the arrest of their friend in the car below. The months-long student strike at San Francisco State, marked by the college president yanking out speaker wires to disrupt a rally. And as the 1970s dawned, the post-Kent State march at UCLA that disintegrated into scores of arrests and 10 injured cops."
09/26/2009, Pasadena Star-News, Perspectives: UC students rally, protest proposed 32 percent tuition hikes,
"This editorial appeared in The Daily Californian, the independent student newspaper at UC Berkeley, last week:
¶
On Thursday, Sproul Plaza - the locale closely linked to the Free Speech Movement - played host to a new campus movement to challenge the governing and funding of this university. Though the Free Speech Movement is one of this campus's most well-known legacies, for many years the spirit of student activism at UC Berkeley has seemed to virtually disappear. And it is undoubtedly a good thing that students are finally getting informed and doing something about the long-term problems facing the UC system."
9/25/2009, The Socialist Worker, Thousands join UC walkout, Todd Chretien
"At UC Berkeley, the oldest campus in the system, Sproul Plaza--the historic site of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s--was the site of the largest rally of the day, with 4,000 students, faculty, staff, alumni and community supporters chanting 'Whose university? Our university!'"
9/25/2009, The Daily Californian, Thousands Rally on Sproul Plaza Against Cuts, Emma Anderson, Melody Ng and Tomer Ovadia
"Some speakers at the rally drew parallels between today's events and the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.
¶
'They're telling us, 'screw you,' said African American studies professor Percy Hintzen. 'They're telling us that they're going to take it out on our backs. And we have to be courageous like the '60s ... Berkeley has changed the world. We have been called to change the world over and over again, and we are going to win this war.'"
9/25/2009, The Daily Californian, Crowds Flood UC Berkeley in Protest, Emma Anderson, Melody Ng and Tomer Ovadia
"Some speakers at the rally drew parallels between today's events and the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.
¶
'They're telling us, 'screw you,'"'said African American studies professor Percy Hintzen. 'They're telling us that they're going to take it out on our backs. And we have to be courageous like the '60s ... Berkeley has changed the world. We have been called to change the world over and over again, and we are going to win this war.'"
9/25/2009, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Solidarity shown during UC walkout, Sarah Morrison
"While the protests began at 7.15 am yesterday with strikes initiated by the University Professional and Technical Employees union (UPTE) and the Coalition of University Employees (CUE) throwing up a picket line at the campus, by midday the plaza was crammed full with an estimated 5000 protestors in a scene reminiscent of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s."
9/25/2009, Monthly Review Zine, UC Workers Strike as Faculty, Students Boycott Classes, Seth Sandronsky
"Lisa Kermish is a UPTE vice president and administrative analyst at UC Berkeley, who spoke from Sproul Plaza at the campus. 'Today is a remarkable show of our union members and supporters coming out in solidarity and coalition with faculty, students, and other unions," she said. "I haven't seen crowds like this since the 1980s South Africa apartheid divestment movement and 1960s Free Speech Movement.'"
9/24/2009, Wilton Villager, Local printmaker to display work at CCP, A.J. O'CONNELL
"The third piece is titled 'Mario Savio,' and depicts Savio, an activist with the free speech movement in Berkeley, Calif., delivering his "put your bodies upon the gears" address at the University of California.
¶
'My work is not decorative,' said Frasconi."
9/24/2009, whoisylvia, Save Our University From What?, Sylvia Paull
"An incongruity of constituencies -- students, a few professors, unions representing gardeners, janitors, and administrative assistants, old-time revolutionaries left over from the Free Speech Movement, and demonstration-nostalgic alumni -- joined forces, a few thousand strong, at UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza at noon today for a demonstration to "save the University," presumedly from budget cuts enacted by the UC Regents this summer. The argument, inferred from all the signage -- UC is not BP, Chop from the Top, and Keep the University Public -- is that cuts should be made in the administration not in staff and faculty wages and definitely not by raising student tuition"
9/24/2009, The Guardian, University of California campuses erupt into protestStudents and faculty members demonstrate against plans to raise tuition fees and cut workers, Mary O'Hara
"For many this latest wave of protest in California is reminiscent of the 1960s when UC Berkeley in particular earned a reputation as the epicentre of student activism when it spawned the Free Speech Movement. It was also the last time a former Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan, was governor. Author and scholar at UC Berkeley's geography department Gray Brechin, who was an undergraduate at Berkeley during the 60s unrest said the current dispute had been "simmering" under the surface for months."
09/24/2009, The Emory Wheel, Fighting the Good Fight, 1969, Rodney Derrick
"The Free Speech Movement started in Berkeley in 1964. Yet this energy, plus opposition to Vietnam and the kaleidoscope of a Woodstock generation took five years to come to Emoryland and the Southeast."
9/24/2009, The Daily Californian, On the Eve of Demonstration, Professors Call for Activism, Javier Panzar
"Junior Ricardo Gomez, founder of Berkeley Students Against the Cuts, is looking forward to today as a big day for the student body.
¶
'Cal has a really rich history of student activism-it has worked in the past,' Gomez said, citing the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s and recent movements to save the ethnic studies department. 'We need to remember that right now more than ever.'"
9/24/2009, The Daily Californian, HUNDREDS TO RALLY AGAINST BUDGET CUTS TODAY, Angelica Dongallo and Zach E.J. Williams
"If turnout at the walkout is as large as organizers expect, it could turn out to be the Free Speech Movement of this generation. Many members of the UC Berkeley community said they do not remember an occasion when staff, students and faculty all banded together around a central cause, at least in the recent past."
9/24/2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Thousands Protest Budget Cuts on U. of California Campuses, Josh Keller
"The largest crowd appeared to be at Berkeley, where police officials estimated that 5,000 people gathered for a noontime rally on Sproul Plaza, the historic site of protests during the Free Speech Movement. Several speakers lamented the university's dire budget situation, and protesters held signs and chanted, 'Whose university? Our university!'"
9/24/2009, Indybay, Thousands at labor/student picketlines at California universities,
"This fall is of course the 45th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley that was also a milestone in history as it won the right of the students to be treated as adults and engage in political activity on campus and it was part of the anti-racist movements of the 1960s which resulted in affirmative action programs at all universities to admit more students of color and more women. Previously, most university students were white men. It is only since around 2000 that women were the majority of university students and at around 50% of the students at law schools and medical schools. The FSM website is linked to the strike:
http://www.fsm-a.org/ "
9/24/2009, Indybay, KPFA's poor coverage of UC strike,
"KPFA is in such a moribund state that its coverage of the 9/24/09 UC statewide labor/student strike was miniscule and NONE OF IT WAS LIVE. This writer can easily remember that LIVE COVERAGE of the 1964 Free Speech Movement's sit-in at Sproul Hall by KPFA, including the screaming students as they were thrown down the stairs by the National Guard and County Sheriffs, called to action by Democratic Governor Pat Brown, father of current Democratic Attorney General Jerry Brown, and the LIVE COVERAGE of the protests against the US war against Vietnam and against the draft, which took place almost daily in Berkeley as students could be drafted before 1973, and the war escalated between 1964 and 1971. It was this LIVE COVERAGE that built the solid financial support for KPFA. "
9/24/2009, Berkeley Daily Planet, Walkout, Rally Hailed as Rebirth of UC Activism, Richard Brenneman
"The action, endorsed by the American Association of University Professors, the University of California Student Association, UC Berkeley Graduate Assembly, the Associated Students of the University of California, CalSERVE and campus unions, is being heralded as the return of broad-based activism to the campus that gave birth to the Free Speech Movement."
9/24/2009, Berkeley Daily Planet, Thousands Rally to Save Education- A New Movement Rising in Berkeley?, Richard Brenneman
"During the noon rally, Michael Delacour, one of the co-founders of People's Park, told a reporter he hadn't seen such a large protest in Sproul Plaza for decades.
¶
And at least one veteran of the Free Speech Movement was on hand with a sign saluting her modern day counterparts."
9/24/2009, ABC 7 News, UC students, staff protest budget cuts, Cecilia Vega
"'40 years ago, with Mario Savio on these same steps, was here it was a free speech movement,' said a student to the crowd."
9/23/2009, San Francisco Chronicle, 'Freedom's Orator,' by Robert Cohen, Jonah Raskin
"From October 1964 to April 1965, Savio was the most famous - and notorious - student activist in the United States. He was also the progenitor of a radical style that would be borrowed and adapted by Abbie Hoffman of the Yippies and Mark Rudd of the Students for a Democratic Society. Like them, Savio repeatedly defied college administrators, including Clark Kerr, the liberal president of the University of California, who recognized Savio's 'genius at understanding crowds.'"
9/22/2009, The Daily Californian, Walk the Talk, Senior Editorial Board
"On Thursday, Sproul Plaza-the locale closely linked to the Free Speech Movement-will play host to a new campus movement to challenge the governing and funding of this university. Though the Free Speech Movement is one of this campus's most well-known legacies, for many years the spirit of student activism at UC Berkeley has seemed to virtually disappear. And it is undoubtedly a good thing that students are finally getting informed and doing something about the long-term problems facing the UC system."
9/21/2009, NorthumberlandView, NDPers Join Free Speech Movement?, Wally Keeler
"Once upon a time (early 60's) at UCLA, a large portion of the student body affiliated with left-eaning politics went on a march to advocate FREE SPEECH. Many documents and photographs can be found at the Free Speech Movement Archives." (sic)
9/17/2009, UC Berkeley News, Fernando Botero exhibit exploring Abu Ghraib abuses opens at Berkeley Art Museum, Kathleen Maclay
"'Fernando Botero's artful commentary has resonated with people around the world,' said UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. 'UC Berkeley - with its excellent and innovative art museum, leading centers for Latin American studies and human rights, top-ranked departments of art practice and history, and as birthplace of the Free Speech Movement - is the perfect home for Botero's Abu Ghraib collection.'"
9/11/2009, The Los Angeles Times, William Trombley dies at 80; journalist reshaped The Times' coverage of higher education, Elaine Woo
"His stories documented the upheaval of the period, including the birth of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley and the firing of UC President Clark Kerr."
9/10/2009, Santa Barbara Independent, UCSB Arts & Lectures Turns 50, Charles Donelan
"Kerr's dream was not long in colliding with the realities of the Vietnam War, the Free Speech Movement, and the eventual waning of the military-industrial complex that underwrote so much of the development of his beloved UC campuses."
9/9/2009, Mail Tribune, Reeve Hennion remembered as civic leader, Damian Mann
"Born on Dec. 7, 1941 - Pearl Harbor Day - in Ventura, Calif., Hennion went on to work for United Press International for 22 years before coming to Jackson County.
¶
In an obituary that he prepared before his death, Hennion wrote that he covered many of the top stories of the '60s, including the Berkeley free speech movement and the Cesar Chavez farm worker movement. He was a bureau chief in Hawaii, then an editor in San Francisco in the '70s, supervising the coverage of the Patty Hearst kidnapping. He later became western division manager for UPI in San Francisco."
9/8/2009, Portland Monthly, Review: Robert Boyd's Conspiracy Theory, Lisa Radon
"The big reveal comes in footage of Mario Savio, the 1960's Berkeley activist, here sounding like a 1930's labor organizer: 'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who own it that unless you are free the machine will be prevented from working at all.'
¶
The piece pivots on this (inspired) speech. Boyd is half criticizing the conspiracy kooks ('And that was the first time I was abducted by an alien.') and half saying the kooks may be kooky but they've got one thing right: "forces" are controlling the 'machine' and at least the kooks are doing something about it. Are you?"
9/4/2009, The Daily Californian, Cuts Harm UC's Quality and Character, Ricardo Gomez, Viola Tang, Tanya Smith and Shannon Steen
"The work of student, staff and faculty in the Free Speech Movement, the struggles for disability rights, ethnic studies, South-African divestment and the women's movement are deeply entrenched in the history of our campus. It is crucial for us to stand together in this struggle to hold the doors to this university open for future students and to preserve the values on which it was founded."
9/4/2009, Los Angeles Chronicle, HUGE LINEUP FOR FALL SAN FRANCISCO WOODSTOCK CONCERT,
"Scoop Nisker - KFOG; David Harris - speaker; Matthew Rosenthal - Prevent Hate; Bettina Aptheker - Free Speech Movement; Ben Fong -Torres (Rolling Stone); David Hilliard - Black Panther Party; Benjamin Hernandez - Harts and Hands elders; Blue Thunder - spiritual healer, Teton; Dennis Banks - AIM Wounded Knee; Dennis Peron and Richard Eastman (Marijuana Initiative); David Rovic; Rabbi Joseph Langer ; Ed Rosenthal; Terrance Hallinan (Former SF DA); Paul "Lobster" Wells (DJ), Aron "Pieman" Kay (from the Yippies); Alex Reymundo - comedian;"
9/3/2009, San Francisco Chronicle, Just one glance, then off to Walgreens, Leah Garchik
"Working on a story about the effect of state budget cuts on UC students and faculty, The Chronicle's Nanette Asimov, who's written about education for 20 years, visited the UC Berkeley campus. She chose random people to interview, and, in keeping with the rules of reporting, asked each for his or her name. But this time, no one - whether student or faculty or teaching assistant - wanted to identify himself.
¶
Asimov, who'd had no trouble doing similar interviews at San Francisco State the day before, says she'd never before encountered this reluctance, this fear of reprisal. It's especially eerie, she notes, in the home of the Free Speech Movement."
8/21/2009, Truthdig, A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America, Peter Richardson
"Although the Firing Line episode produced more heat than light, it showed that Scheer was becoming the magazine's face to the world. He was also recruiting more staff from his Berkeley circle. One such recruit was Peter Collier, a graduate student in English who dropped his dissertation on Jane Austen and joined the Free Speech Movement."
...
"1961, [Sol] Stern began a doctoral program in political science at Berkeley, where he also worked with Scheer and David Horowitz on a radical journal called Root and Branch. Later, he became involved in the Free Speech Movement, dropped out of his graduate program, and joined Ramparts, where he wrote or contributed to many of the magazine's most memorable pieces, including the CIA stories."
...
"His [David Horowitz] book on Berkeley activism, Student, was edited by Saul Landau and published by Ballantine in 1962. Student sold briskly in paperback and reportedly inspired Mario Savio, a key leader in the Free Speech Movement, to move to Berkeley."
...
"Likewise, McWilliams commissioned Hunter Thompson's articles on two Bay Area phenomena, the Hell's Angels and Free Speech Movement."
8/21/2009, ScienceBlogs, Walt at Random: The Library Voice of the Radical Middle, Walt Crawford
"Another digression: I can get irritable about free speech issues partly because I was at UC Berkeley throughout The Troubles. The Free Speech Movement was precisely about prior restrictions on speech--at the time, there were whole categories of speakers who could not appear anywhere on the Berkeley campus, thanks to restrictions from the Regents. Understand: I wasn't directly involved with FSM (although I should have been), but I listened. They were dead on--and they expected consequences. When they were arrested for sitting in, they dealt with it, they didn't try to duck it. Oh, and they won: the restrictions were lifted."
8/11/2009, Wednesday Journal, Pragmatic pacifists, Tom Holmes
"Who are those people standing on the corner of Lake and Harlem most Saturday afternoons waving placards that declare 'War Is Not the Answer,' urging motorists to honk in support and flashing the peace sign?
One of them is named Roger Beltrami, an Oak Park resident who worked as a college English professor and then an IT manager before retiring. Beltrami said he became a radical in the 1960s after witnessing three events. First, he was wandering across the Berkeley campus in 1964 when he saw a football player push a 98-pound graduate student named Carol Spindler down the steps of Wheeler Hall. The young women, who had been protesting the Vietnam War, broke her leg and hip.
A few months later, while he was walking by the W.E.B. DuBois House on campus, somebody set off a bomb inside, and Beltrami got hit with flying glass. The third experience involved a visit he made to a rally in support of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement.
'Ronald Reagan [then governor of California] sent the National Guard over in helicopters,' he recalled, 'and tear-gassed us. I was standing next to a woman holding her baby who was choking. Those three things turned me permanently radical, and I've been doing it ever since.'"
8/9/2009, Trans World News, West Fest seeking original Woodstock '69 veterans in bay area., Boots Hughston
"40th Anniversary; Scoop Nisker - KFOG; David Harris - speaker; Matthew Rosenthal - Prevent Hate; Bettina Aptheker - Free Speech Movement; Ben Fong -Torres (Rolling Stone); David Hilliard - Black Panther Party; Benjamin Hernandez - Harts and Hands elders; Blue Thunder Dennis Banks - AIM Wounded Knee; Dennis Peron and Richard Eastman (Marijuana Initiative); David Rovic; Rabbi Joseph Langer ; Terrance Hallinan (Former SF DA); Paul "Lobster" Wells (DJ), Aron "Pieman" Kay (from the Yippies)"
8/2/2009, San Francisco Chronicle, Holiday magazine: A majestic trip to 1961 S.F., Richard Rapaport
"Taken together, according to Tynan, they illustrate that 'In this bright, free-wheeling, precipitous city ... a new America is being made, far away from the imperatives of the Pentagon and Madison Avenue.'
Within very few years, Tynan's prescience would be proved with the enshrinement of the Beat generation and the rise of the Free Speech Movement and the hippies."
07/26/2009, Pasadena Star News, No end to free speech at UC Berkeley, Leslie Toy
"Walking across Sproul Plaza, a landmark for the 1964-65 Free Speech Movement, card tables line the way daily. Amid the vast variety of campus clubs their members set up there to attract potential converts, you can always find organizations of protesting students. Yet it's not as if there is a weekly uproar that unifies everyone. Or very many people at all."
7/25/2009, Los Angeles Times, The famed lawyer's latest cause is overturning Proposition 8 and legalizing same-sex marriage, Patt Morrison
"You went to Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement. How did you fit in?
I was president of the Boalt Hall Republican group. I think there were five of us during the Goldwater-Johnson election of 1964. I don't think they considered us much of a threat. I think the people in Berkeley thought of us as a sort of quirky novelty."
7/19/2009, Los Angeles Times, Kenneth M. Stampp dies at 96; UC Berkeley historian repudiated paternalistic interpretations of slavery, Elaine Woo
"Stampp was the author of "The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South," a 1956 book that marked a turning point in historians' treatment of slavery. Rejecting the moonlight-and-magnolias mythology that inspired such stereotypes as the benevolent plantation owner and the smiling black mammy, he concluded that slavery was in fact a "most profound and vexatious social problem," a radical view in an America that had just begun to experience the tremors of the modern civil rights movement." [ed. nite: Stampp was a faculty supporter of the FSM and bailed Bettina Aptheker out of Santa Rita]
7/17/2009, UC Berkeley News, Cell biologist Richard Strohman has died at 82, Robert Sanders
"Strohman's passion for innovation in cellular and genetic research paralleled his outspoken participation in movements for change on the UC Berkeley campus, Zaretsky said. He supported the Free Speech Movement in 1964, when students demonstrated for their constitutional right to express political views to end racial discrimination. He was a member of the Faculty Peace Committee which opposed the Vietnam war, and a member of the group Faculty for Social Responsibility, which, in the 1980s, promoted nuclear disarmament and opposed a U.S. military build-up and interventionist policies in Central America."
7/16/2009, The Daily Times, Peace signs and trying times: The legendary Joan Baez perseveres through it all, Steve Wildsmith
"Introduced at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, Baez was immediately heralded as one of the torch-bearers for the then-burgeoning folk movement. Four years later, she stood beside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial while he gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, and for the rest of that turbulent decade that was the 1960s, she took part in almost every conceivable protest against injustice, oppression and war. In 1964, she withheld 60 percent of her income tax from the Internal Revenue Service to protest spending on the Vietnam War ... she participated in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California-Berkeley and co-founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence ... she protested alongside Cesar Chavez and migrant farm workers on behalf of fair wages in 1966 ... she traveled to Hanoi in the early 1970s, meeting with starving North Vietnamese."
7/14/2009, opednews, My Non-Interview with a CIA Recruiter in 1966, GL Rowsey
"The next year or sometime during the next ten, as I drifted undrafted around California and the American Southwest and dropped farther ever farther out, it dawned on me that: (1) Getting military and CIA recruiters off campus at UC-Berkeley was a big part of what got the Free Speech Movement rolling in 1964;" [ed note: significant awarenesss of CIA on campus may have begun post-FSM.]
7/13/2009, Hamptons Online, Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center Hosts Joan Baez,
"Baez remains a musical force of nature whose influence is incalculable - she's marched on the front line of the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King, inspired Vaclav Havel in his fight for a Czech Republic, sung on the first Amnesty International tour and just last year, stood alongside Nelson Mandela when the world celebrated his 90th birthday in London's Hyde Park. She brought the Free Speech Movement into the spotlight, took to the fields with Cesar Chavez, organized resistance to the war in Southeast Asia, then 40 years later saluted the Dixie Chicks for their courage to protest war."
7/10/2009, The Telegraph, Joan Baez, one folkie flower not gone, Vicki Bennington
According to her official biography, "Her influence is incalculable. Having marched on the front line of the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King Jr., inspiring Vaclav Havel in his fight for a Czech Republic, singing on the first Amnesty International tour and standing alongside Nelson Mandela when the world celebrated his 90th birthday in London's Hyde Park, she brought the Free Speech Movement into the spotlight, took to the fields with Cesar Chavez, organized resistance to the war in Southeast Asia, then 40 years later saluted the Dixie Chicks for their courage to protest war."
7/10/2009, Hartford Courant, McNamara's Ghosts in Afghanistan, Tom Hayden
"The Vietnam War was the greatest American folly of the 20th century. Applied to large universities, the same scientific management approaches provoked the Free Speech Movement. And of course, Ford is in ruins."
6/1/2009, San Francisco Chronicle, Ronald Takaki, Cal ethnic studies pioneer, dies, Matthai Kuruvila
"'I was born intellectually and politically in Berkeley in the 1960s,' Professor Takaki said.
He was moved by the moral vision of Martin Luther King Jr. to join the Free Speech Movement. The slaying of student activists registering voters in Mississippi inspired Professor Takaki to do a study of slavery for his doctoral dissertation.
The Watts Riots in 1965 helped push UCLA to develop the first course in black history a year later, Professor Takaki told The Chronicle. He was asked to teach it."
5/31/2009, New York Times, Ronald Takaki, a Scholar on Ethnicity, Dies at 70, William Grimes
"He continued his education at Berkeley, where he earned a master's degree in 1962 and a doctorate in history in 1967. He was deeply influenced by the Free Speech movement at the university and by the civil rights struggles in the South. "I was born intellectually and politically in Berkeley in the '60s," he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2003."
5/28/2009, UC Berkeley News, Ronald Takaki, pioneer and legend in ethnic studies, dies at age 70, Yasmin Anwar
"Takaki went on to earn a master's degree in 1962 and a Ph.D. in history in 1967 from UC Berkeley, where he became drawn to campus activism, including the Free Speech Movement. "I was born intellectually and politically in Berkeley in the '60s," he told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter in 2003 after winning the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association's Fred Cody Award for lifetime achievement."
5/27/2009, UC Berkeley News, Ronald Takaki, pioneering scholar of race relations, dies at 70, Yasmin Anwar
"Ronald TakakiDuring his more than four decades at UC Berkeley, Takaki joined the Free Speech Movement, established the nation's first ethnic studies Ph.D. program as well as Berkeley's American Cultures requirement for graduation, and advised President Clinton in 1997 on his major speech on race."
5/21/2009, The Press Democrat, Graton resident is UC Berkeley's top graduate, Meg McConahey
"Crane didn't have to travel to the birthplace of the free-speech movement to become engaged in social causes. Her parents were social activists."
5/14/2009, The Union, Amy Goodman: Baucus' raucous caucus, Amy Goodman
"Mario Savio led the Free Speech Movement on the UC Berkeley campus. In 1964, he said: 'There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.'
'Unless you're free,' the Baucus 13 might add, "'o speak.' The current official debate has locked single-payer options out of the discussion, but also escalated the movement -- from Healthcare-NOW! to Single Payer Action -- to shut down the orderly functioning of the debate, until single-payer gets a seat at the table."
5/13/2009, Capitol Hill Blue, Round Table, Phil Hoskins
"Events on this date
...
* 1960 - Hundreds of UC Berkeley students congregate for the first day of protest against a visit by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Thirty-one students are arrested, and the Free Speech Movement is born."
5/6/2009, Oakland Tribune, 'Up Against the Wall': Berkeley posters from the 1960s and '70s on display, Kristin Bender
"When Michael Rossman, an activist in the Free Speech Movement, died last May, he left behind about 25,000 vibrant posters that promoted concerts and rallies, advertised political campaigns, and gave ink to social causes, such as the women's movement, gay liberation and marijuana legalization.
Rossman collected the posters starting in about 1977, carefully untacking them from light posts once an event was over, scanning eBay for them and scouring flea markets and thrift stores for a find."
5/1/2009, Washington Monthly, Death in Stuttgart: Revisiting Germany's 1970s war on terror, Paul Hockenos
"Aust also neglects to flesh out the 1960s student movement-die Studentenbewegung-which grew out of the disarmament campaigns of the '50s and early '60s. German students began to organize to liberalize the educational system, purge academia of old Nazis, and explore the roots of Third World poverty. Their inspiration was the U.S. civil rights campaign, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and the earliest Marches on Washington. It was the brutality that the police inflicted on the student protesters that radicalized the movement, which originally was not violent, revolutionary, or ultraleftist."
5/1/2009, Denver Post, Free speech for some, Mike Rosen
"How ironic that left-wing college activism was launched at the University of California- Berkeley in the 1960s as the 'Free Speech Movement.'
For today's college lefties, free speech is a one-way street. They justify this double standard with an arrogant, self-absorbed, self- righteous belief that the ends justify the means, that they alone have a monopoly on truth, and that heretics cannot be tolerated. The broken glass that halted Tancredo's speech is a symbolic flashback to the forebears of these UNC student thugs: the SS and Hitler Youth gangs that terrorized Jews. The violence is only different in degree. Student lefties have pushed pies in the faces of conservative speakers on campus. On principle, that is no less an affront to the First Amendment than clubs or guns."
4/30/2009, Counterpunch, The McCarthyism That Horowitz Built, Dana L. Cloud
"From the 1964 free speech movement to today's anti-occupation organizations, campuses have always been places where struggles for justice break out. This potential might explain why, losing ground in politics and the economy, the Right seeks to maintain its grip on outspoken faculty and students. David Horowitz, Laura Ingraham, the Association of College Trustees and Alumni, and the like have played their assigned roles in fostering a new McCarthyism that has given rise to a series of witch-hunts against both prominent and emerging critical scholars and activists."
4/30/2009, Berkeley Daily Planet, People's Park Plus, Judy Gumbo Albert
"The Free Speech Movement's Jack Weinberg coined the phrase: 'Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty' which morphed into Yippie leader Jerry Rubin's 'Kill Your Parents'-a slogan which, Jerry later admitted, didn't work because people thought he meant it literally. But symbolically Jack and Jerry were right-to change the system and completely re-invent ourselves, we had to break from the repressive, war-mongering, right wing, dysfunctional values of our parent's generation."
4/26/2009, San Francisco Chronicle, Dalai Lama promotes peace through dialogue, Peter Fimrite, Matthai Kuruvila
"The exiled spiritual leader of Buddhist Tibet chose the university where the Free Speech Movement began more than 40 years ago to endorse President Obama's philosophy of establishing dialogue, even with reviled world leaders."
4/26/2009, Centre Daily Times, Lead the return to civil discourse, Charles Dumas
"In '64, I was part of a civil rights group in Oakland, Calif., which was recruiting students at UC-Berkeley to protest racist hiring policies of the local daily paper. The paper's publisher, also a university trustee, demanded that the school shut us down. They did. It resulted in a series of violent confrontations that ultimately led to the Free Speech Movement."
4/23/2009, UC Berkeley News, Plugging away at the riddle of consciousness John Searle, world-renowned philosopher and disaffected FSM backer, marks a half-century at Cal, Barry Bergman
"Searle has, in fact, found time to be the most public of public intellectuals, from his solidarity with the Free Speech Movement in 1964 - he was the first tenured faculty member to take up the cause, and among the first to break with it - to his longstanding dispute with the late deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida and his acolytes over what Searle, writing in the New York Review of Books, once called their attack on 'the concern with truth, rationality, logic, and 'the word' that marks the Western philosophical tradition.'
A man of the world as much as of the mind, Searle was a regular on the PBS program World Press from 1960 to 1977. In the FSM's wake he served as an adviser on student unrest for two presidential commissions and a special committee of the American Council of Education, and authored the 1971 book The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony."
4/23/2009, The Nation, The Free Speech Movement,
This article appeared in the December 21, 1964 edition of The Nation
"Assistant Professor John Leggett, of the department of sociology at Berkeley, believes that in Kerr's writings lie the keys to the FSM and The Day of the Cops.
All of us who witnessed that day were puzzled to understand how such a situation could have come to pass. That it involved 'administrative ineptitude,' in one professor's phrase was undeniable; whatever their motives, Brown, Kerr and Strong were all convicted of ineptitude by the fact that the police were not only present on the campus but in command of it. That it involved student intransigence was equally undeniable; at the very least, there was little honest effort in the FSM to see the other side objectively. But why the ineptitude and why the intransigence?
The key to the first question, Leggett suggests, is in the relationship between Kerr's multiversity and the civil rights movement. As a number of observers have pointed out, the civil rights movement is genuinely revolutionary; it threatens a number of established standards. As one example, a completely new look at the economy is necessary if we are genuinely to open the job market to Negroes at a time when automation dominates the future.
This, in turn, is an open threat to the military-industrial complex. In the process of Kerr's 'nvited' collaboration, the civil rights movement on campus is disruptive, and being disruptive, it must be stopped.
4/21/2009, The Carolinian, Morals Week speech causes interruption, Craig Veltri, Lili Johnson
"To further drive home his point, he recalled a visit he made to the University of California at Berkeley, or as Flynn called it 'the Rome of the Left,' before the release of Why the Left Hates America. According to Flynn he was not very well received.
'At the end of the event, there was a Nazi-style burning of my writings,' he said 'at Berkeley, home of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.'"
4/16/2009, Business Wire, 40th Anniversary of Woodstock,
"Hundreds of San Francisco stars and musical luminaries will perform at this event to commemorate the original principles of Peace, Love and Spirituality. The Woodstock 40th will begin with a blessing by the American Indigenous People and several Beat Generation poets. There will be many speakers from the Peace Movement, the Free Speech Movement and the Anti-War Movement along with many of the acts who originally performed at Woodstock (to be announced)."
4/16/2009, Berkeley Daily Planet, Historical Society Exhibits 1960s Berkeley Poster Art, Steven Finacom
"Fortunately for our understanding of local history over the past generation, Free Speech Movement activist Michael Rossman began collecting local posters in the 1960s. By the time he died in 2008 he had amassed more than 25,000 items, a varied and irreplaceable record of the local past."
4/16/2009, Berkeley Daily Planet, The Untold History of People's Park, Reverend Paul Sawyer
"Many of us are familiar with the Free Speech Movement on the Berkeley campus in 1964 that followed the Loyalty Oath Struggle of the 1950s, which cost the University of California 68 of its finest professors and teachers, who refused to sign it."
4/14/2009, The Daily Californian, Local Radio Station KPFA to Celebrate 60 Years, Tess Townsend
"KPFA was also the first station to broadcast Allen Ginsberg's controversial poem "Howl" and served as a forum for Free Speech Movement activists."
4/13/2009, SFGate.com, A Tale of Two Oppenheimers, Ken Goldberg
"Robert Oppenheimer was a UC Berkeley professor when he was recruited for the Manhattan Project. After the war, he was highly critical of US policy on the bomb and Joe McCarthy spent years trying to discredit him. McCarthy despised Berkeley, and the subsequent 1960 HUAC meeting in San Francisco helped spark Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, which in turn led to the Anti-War and Free Love Movements."
4/7/2009, The Nation, The Rise of the New Student Left, Jack Newfield
This article appeared in the March 10, 1965 edition of The Nation
"Their revolt is not only against capitalism but against the values of middle-class America: hypocrisy called Brotherhood Week, assembly lines called colleges; conformity called status, bad taste called Camp, and quiet desperation called success.
At the climax of the Washington march, arms linked and singing "We Shall Overcome," were the veterans of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, freshmen from small Catholic colleges, clean-shaven intellectuals from Ann Arbor and Cambridge, the fatigued shock troops of SNCC, Iowa farmers, impoverished urban Negroes organized by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), beautiful high school girls without make-up, and adults, many of them faculty members, who journeyed to Washington for a demonstration conceived and organized by students."
4/6/2009, The Daily Aztec, Mexico ad raises controversy, Whitney Lawrence
"'The AUHTM Coalition would like to thank Editor Carbajal ... for (her) service as (a) reincarnation of the anti-free speech Republicans who tried to close down the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s,' Schwilk said."
4/6/2009, Pioneer Press, PAL's anti-war activists champion various causes, Patrick Butler
"And PAL will also be joining with other groups in opposing the Blackwater private army's upcoming convention in Stockton, Ill., said Beltrami. "We're just sort of opposed to the idea of private soldiers," said the onetime Renaissance English teacher and now-retired IT project manager whose own activist credentials date to the 1964 Berkeley, Calif. Free Speech Movement. "
4/3/2009, Santa Cruz Sentinel, Forty years later: Country Joe's role at Woodstock,
"Joe moved to Berkeley in the early 1960s ostensibly to go to school, but ended up playing music in numerous bands and working at Lundberg's Guitar Shop. In the fall of 1965 members of the FSM Free Speech Movement were organizing a series of demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the Oakland Induction Center.
The anti-war organizers wanted to provide entertainment before or after the march to hold the people's attention, so Joe and some others played. This was during the era that a big part of the folk revival was starting to turn into the rock scene in San Francisco and bands were starting to appear almost everywhere."
4/2/2009, Oakland Tribune, Celebration of life for Free Speech Movement veteran to be held in Berkeley next month, Kristin Bender
"Hamilton initially considered becoming a Christian minister but got caught up in political actions in Berkeley, joining the Free Speech Movement, the Progressive Labor Party and the Revolutionary Union. In 1966, he was dismissed from UC Berkeley for protesting the university's attempt to take away protections gained from the Free Speech Movement, according to information about his memorial service."
3/30/2009, San Francisco Chronicle, Anti-war activist Steve Hamilton dies, Seth Rosenfeld
"In the fall of 1964, Mr. Hamilton was arrested during the Free Speech Movement, the first big student protest of the '60s. In 1965, he joined the anti-war Vietnam Day Committee and the Maoist Progressive Labor Party.
He was dismissed from Cal in 1966 for manning an unauthorized literature table on campus."
3/29/2009, San Francisco Chronicle, Campus security bills for speakers challenged, Bob Egelko
"That sounds logical, but it's also unconstitutional, says the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a conservative-leaning group that defends free speech on campus. Citing a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the foundation has been challenging security fees at colleges around the country.
'It doesn't matter how unpopular or controversial the speech is,' said foundation spokesman Adam Kissel. 'The amount of security has to be the same as for all other events.'
UC Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, got the message. Saying its police may have misunderstood the nature of the event, the university lowered its fee to $460 for two officers for the March 3 speech at Dwinelle Hall by Elan Journo of the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine."
3/27/2009, Contra Costa Times, Editorial: UC Berkeley's punishing of John Yoo violates academic freedom, Editors
"The mark of a strong society is one that guards the freedoms not only of those in the mainstream but also of those on the fringe.
Of all the universities in the nation, Berkeley, the home of the Free Speech Movement, should be especially sensitive to that notion. For years, the principle has been used to protect voices from the left. That protection should be just as strong for someone on the political right - however wrong he may be."
3/24/2009, McGill Tribune, TRAVEL: Peace, love, and granola, Carolyn Gregoire
"Though the city is a haven for tree-huggers, granola-lovers, and radical leftists, Berkeley's charm, character, and natural beauty offer something for everyone. No trip to Northern California is complete without at least a day in the home of the Free Speech Movement, the place that Jack Kerouac wrote of seeking spiritual transcendence in The Dharma Bums, and a city which still stands as an epicenter of bohemian culture."
3/23/2009, Palm Beach Post, Commissioner showed courage in protest, arrest, Becky Mulvaney & Marc Ward
"We elected Cara Jennings because Lake Worth needs representatives who understand that, as Mario Savio said during the free speech movement of the 1960s: "With great freedom comes great responsibility." Dissent is a democratic responsibility, and Commissioner Jennings exercised her responsibilities peacefully and thoughtfully. She was in Miami as a private citizen advocating peace and protesting the maiming of a friend engaged in human rights work. What could be more quintessentially American?"
03/20/2009, Oakland Tribune, Third World Strike at 40, Kelly Rayburn and Kristin Bender
"The Berkeley Third World Strike is often overshadowed by the campus's Free Speech Movement earlier in the decade or the later fight over People's Park. And the strike, which began in January 1969, came months after the more famous - or infamous - strike at San Francisco State University."
3/19/2009, Renew America, The politics of meaning vs. Israel, Moshe Phillips
"Rabbi Lerner does have excellent credentials for his real vocation -- that of radical activist, nee community organizer. Lerner has a doctorate in philosophy from University of California at Berkeley. While at Berkley he was a leader in the Free Speech Movement, the SDS and, in a broad sense, the militant, revolutionary left in the Bay Area. Other products of that time and place are the Weatherman / Weather Underground, the Black Panther Party and the Symbionese Liberation Army."
3/7/2009, San Francisco Chronicle, Berkeley students decry proposed Panda Express, Patricia Yollin
"Other students say Panda Express food has too much fat and sodium, is an affront to the historic legacy of Sproul Plaza - birthplace of the 1964 Free Speech Movement - and is culturally inappropriate."
3/4/2009, UC Berkeley News, Stiles Hall: a 'living room' with a committed fan club, Carol Ness
"Dave Stark, executive director for the last 12 years, likes to tell the story of the African American man in his 60s who wandered into Stiles a few years back, found his way to the upstairs community room and said aloud, in wonder, to no one in particular: 'This is it! This is it!'
Stark overheard him and asked, 'It's what?'
'This is where Malcolm X spoke. I was here,' the man responded. The civil-rights leader had spoken there in the early 1960s, before the Free Speech Movement opened up the campus to speakers of all political bents."
3/4/2009, Berkeley Daily Planet, Take Back Public Education for Society, Not for Economy, Sebastian Groot
"The type of activism found on campus today is not completely different or less powerful than it was in the past. The Free Speech Movement (FSM) and the Third World Strike in the '60s and '70s eventually shut down the university. The FSM was based on ideals of openly speaking one's emotions and concerns without fear of being punished and suppressed. This freedom related to a broad range of UC students as well as people outside the university."
3/4/2009, Berkeley Daily Planet, Daily Planet Forum Features Author David Bacon, Ken Bullock
"Bacon's activism began while he was attending Berkeley High School; he was, at 16, one of the youngest protestors for the Free Speech Movement to be arrested. Working later as an organizer for the United Farm Workers, United Electrical Workers, Molders Union and Ladies Garment Workers Union, he said he has been fired for organizing-and arrested more times than he can remember."
3/3/2009, Mustang Daily, The '60s are back: students march for environmental change, Nancy Cole
"Radicalism, student power and nonviolent direct action spark images of the 1960s protests against the war, the free speech movement and the civil rights movement. Student activists lobbied the U.S. Congress, marched the White House, staged boycotts, strikes and sit-ins and participated in civil disobedience. This was a time marked by such overt societal decay that people, especially young people, became sick of the powers that led the country. Young people raised their voices and refused to be an accomplice to what they believed to be wrong."
3/2/2009, Charlotte Observer, Joan Baez,
"She brought the Free Speech Movement into the spotlight, took to the fields with Cesar Chavez, organized resistance to the war in Southeast Asia, then forty years later saluted the Dixie Chicks for their courage to protest war."
2/24/2009, Daily Californian, Philosophy Professor Honored After 50 Years at UC Berkeley, Christina Berke
"Searle was a key figure during the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s, Wallace said. He was the first tenured professor to become involved, influencing his student Mario Savio-one of the movement's major activists."
2/21/2009, The Australian, End of conservative crusades, Sam Tanenhaus
"The same policymakers who conceived and executed New Frontier and Great Society programs, from the Peace Corps and Volunteers in Service to America to the War on Poverty, were helpless to manage a politics of countercultural protest from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement to the March on the Pentagon to riots in Los Angeles's Watts district and Detroit. The most conspicuous energies flowed outside the bounds of organised government and normative society and, in many instances, against them both."
02/21/2009, Contra Costa Times, Campus to celebrate 50 years of John Searle, Matt Krupnick
"One reason Searle is such a draw could be his role in the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s. He was the first tenured professor to join the movement, and he became a driving force alongside Mario Savio, who was one of his students.
Aside from a brief period of satisfaction brought on by the movement, Searle does not have fond memories of the 1960s and 1970s. Even the Free Speech Movement changed for the worse and became violent, he said.
'People like to sentimentalize that period, but it was just awful,' he said.
He eventually worked against the movement once it became clear it was trying to politicize the university, he said. The change of heart didn't win him friends among former supporters, but he has no regrets."
2/20/2009, The Daily Californian, It's Time for a Protest, Josh Green
"I know campus apathy has been around since the end of the '60s. The Free Speech Movement itself was probably driven less by genuine student outrage and more by zeitgeist."
2/19/2009, Press Democrat, How do you protest a stalemate?, Derek J. Moore
"Adam Williams, a 24-year-old environmental studies major who signed one of the protest letters, said his instructors lived through the Free Speech Movement and other major campus uprisings, but his generation has not caught a similar fervor. He fears they may regret that.
'We're the future work force,' he said. 'If we don't raise our voice now, we don't have a right to say anything five years from now when we can't get a job.'"
2/17/2009, OneNewsNow, Camille Paglia Says Democrats Betrayed the Soul of Their Party,
"Camille Paglia appeared on WABC-AM's 'The Mark Simone Show' yesterday to talk about the Fairness Doctrine, and you may be surprised at what she said. Paglia blasted the Democrats for even mentioning a reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, saying 'I don't get it . . . the essence of the 1960's, my generation, was about free speech . . . that's what Lenny Bruce was about - it was about the free speech movement, for heaven's sake, at Berkeley! What are my fellow Democrats doing? Not for one second should the government be wandering into survelliance of, monitoring of, the ideological content of talk radio. The Democrats, they've totally betrayed the soul of the party to even mention this.'"
2/17/2009, Broadway World, CAPA Presents An Evening With Joan Baez 3/9, BWW News Desk
"Baez sang about freedom and Civil Rights from the backs of flatbed trucks in Mississippi to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's March on Washington in 1963. In 1964, she withheld 60% of her income tax from the IRS to protest military spending and participated in the birth of the Free Speech movement at UC Berkeley."
2/16/2009, Time Magazine, California's Big Race to Succeed Schwarzenegger, Michael A. Lindenberger
"The state that once drew people from all over the world to create Silicon Valley, the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and Hollywood, now sees too many of its best people leave."
2/11/2009, Berkeley Daily Planet, Mario's La Fiesta Restaurant Leaves Telegraph After 50 Years, Riya Bhattacharjee
"'The Free Speech Movement in 1964 was not that bad,' Tejada said, 'but 1969 was the worst of it. As soon as we opened the restaurant there would be tear gas all around, and we would have to close it immediately. I had to send my workers home, sometimes the rioters broke all my windows. It was a war zone-people didn't want to come to eat, people didn't want to come to Telegraph.'"
2/9/2009, San Francisco Chronicle, Cal's Bancroft Library starts new chapter, Patricia Yollin
"UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library is a place where papyrus from ancient Egypt, pamphlets from the 1964 Free Speech Movement and photographs of the Gold Rush can all be found under one roof."
2/3/2009, the Missoulian, Folk singer Joan Baez to perform at UM, Jamie Kelly
"Baez is equally known for her political and social activism, marching for civil rights in the 1960s, lending her support to Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, singing at the 1969 Woodstock festival and later spearheading efforts against the death penalty and for gay rights."
1/30/2009, San Francisco Chronicle, Dellums fills 5 key city positions, Christopher Heredia
"(01-29) 19:31 PST -- Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums named a longtime aide and former World Bank executive as the city's top nonelected official on Thursday, a nomination that is expected to be confirmed next week by the City Council.
Dan Lindheim, 62, of Berkeley, a former World Bank senior economist and aide to Dellums during his years in Congress, has been serving as interim city administrator since July, when the mayor fired Deborah Edgerly. "
1/29/2009, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Crouch: Obama traveled road paved with civil rights heroes, not race, Stanley Crouch
"Barack Obama has the presence and creates the effects expected of adults. He is not a frat boy or an ethnic bad boy. It is well past the time when Americans should show their pride in this country by moving as swiftly as they can away from the adolescence that our nation has been progressively overcome by since the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the slogan of which was, 'Don't Trust Anyone Over 30.'"
1/29/2009, Oakland Tribune, Mario's La Fiesta Mexican restaurant celebrates 50 years on Telegraph next month, Kristin Bender
"During the Free Speech movement in the 1960s, the restaurant was a sanctuary for police officers and demonstrators alike. 'You'd have police in one corner and protesters in one corner, and everybody would be having lunch,' Mario said."
1/26/2009, The Daily Californian, Historic Cafe Grounds For Coffee and Conversation, Jessica Kwong
"Yet the Med's fame is rooted in more than its coffee grounds. The cafe served as the meeting grounds for radicals from Beat Generation artists to Free Speech Movement activists.
'I would go into the Med and I would see somebody with a blue serge suit on and a big wig-it was Ginsberg, and I would say 'Hello, how you doing?'' said Brad Cleaveland, 76, a Berkeley resident who was a principal activist during the Free Speech Movement. 'He was standing around a group of people sitting there, all talking intensely. I saw him lots over a period of two to three years.'"
1/25/2009, The Bloomington Alternative, BLUES & MORE: Hail, hail, rock 'n' roll!, George Fish
"Rock 'n' roll was, for me, the bridge over which I eagerly walked to support the Civil Rights Movement, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the early anti-Vietnam War protests. And it didn't hurt at all that this music I loved so much was consistently derided by my parents, teachers and other pillars of 'respectable society'!"
1/22/2009, UC Berkeley News, Glued to the ObamaTron Thousands crowded Sproul Plaza on Jan. 20 to watch the historic inauguration of President Barack Obama on TV, Carol Ness
"In Berkeley, the campus police department's estimate of 10,000 by far eclipses the previous high of some 6,000 for Sproul Plaza, set both in 1967 when Martin Luther King Jr. spoke, and in December 1964, during a Free Speech Movement rally.
The event was made possible by the gift of an anonymous donor, which paid for the rental of the 15-by-20-foot screen, plus vats of free coffee for everyone."
1/21/2009, San Francisco Chronicle, Bay Area celebrates nation's new president, Kevin Fagan, Heather Knight, Patricia Yollin,Carolyn Jones
"At UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza across town, a JumboTron drew a shoulder-to-shoulder mass of thousands of students. A sense of past and future was felt everywhere, because after all this wasn't just any venue - it was the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, which in 1964 when Obama was only 3 helped shape the brand of activism that made his election possible."
1/21/2009, Inside Higher Ed, Here Comes the Flood, Scott McLemee
"As it happens, all of this was predicted almost 50 years ago by Hal Draper, a figure best known (at least among people who know this kind of thing) for numerous definitive works in the field of Marxology. Draper also translated literary works by Goethe and Heinrich Heine, and wrote a widely circulated book about the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley. I've heard that when the Sixties catchphrase 'Don't trust anyone over the age of thirty' first caught on in Berkeley, people sometimes added "except for Hal Draper.'"
1/20/2009, UC Berkeley News, Throngs at Berkeley witness dawn of the Obama era, Cathy Cockrell
"Those emotions were palpable on the storied 'ground zero' of the Free Speech Movement. 'Somebody can hand me a flag and I'd be happy to wave it,' said Jessica Broitman - there with her son Jacob, 17, and her husband, Gibor Basri, the campus's vice chancellor for equity and inclusion. As a biracial couple, she said, there were times when 'people would not let us in their door." For her and her family, she said, "this one of the most momentous days in our lives.'"
1/20/2009, ABC Channel 7, UC Berkeley linked to new administration, Laura Anthony
"Not since the free speech movement have so many people gathered in UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza. The crowd was 10,000 strong for an event many imagined would never happen in their lifetime."
1/18/2009, Philadelphia Inquirer, A display of vases, quiet, with poetry from vets, artists,
"The play of dichotomy continues to be a strong force in Irish's work, this time carried out in lushly decorated whiteware vases in the style of 18th- and 19th-century French Sevres porcelain, onto which Irish has also painted poetry written by Vietnam veterans and the visual arts writers Tom Devaney, Vincent Katz and Carter Ratcliff. One vase features excerpts from a speech by Mario Savio, the political activist and Berkeley Free Speech movement leader."
1/12/2009, BusinessWeek, Autopsy of an Indie Bookseller, Stacy Perman
"During the '60s, Cody's stood at the center of the Free Speech movement and became known for its unwavering stand against censorship. When in 1989, the store was firebombed for selling Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, Cody's employees voted to continue selling the controversial novel that earned its author a fatwa (death sentence) from Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini."
1/8/2009, Wall Street Journa, The Pro-Life Movement as the Politics of the 1960s, Richard John Neuhaus
"Supervisor Tom Ammiano complained about the audacity of pro-life activists who 'think that they can come to our fair city and demonstrate.' The head of the Golden Gate chapter of Planned Parenthood was outraged that activists 'have been so emboldened that they believe that their message will be tolerated here.' The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the mid-1960s has come to this."
1/7/2009, Berkeley Daily Planet, Saving Strawberry Canyon, Neal Blumenfeld
"A watershed is an apt metaphor-for a new awareness, after which nothing appears like it had been. For the Free Speech Movement-out of which the Savios and this lecture series sprung-seeing what corporate UC was up to was old home week. It took Lynn Savio no time flat to get it. UC, the local 800-pound gorilla, wants to turn the Strawberry watershed into an industrial park. That includes a half-billion dollar deal with British Petroelum for a biofuel "factory"; a big expansion of Lawrence Berkeley Lab; and a new building for an expanded computer facility."
1/6/2009, International Herald Tribune, Left adjusts to a new patriotism under Obama, Sasha Issenberg
"At Berkeley, the university has, quite deliberately, chosen to host its first-ever large-scale observance of a presidential inauguration in a spot most closely identified with its radicalism, said Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. At Sproul Plaza, site of the Free Speech Movement protests beginning in 1964 - now commemorated with a monument declaring 'this soil and the air space above it should not be part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity's jurisdiction' - students will gather round giant television screens to take in the ritual.
'It will be a patriotic celebration,' Birgeneau said in an interview. 'That small circle will now be surrounded by a lot of students who are happy to be members of a nation that just elected its first African-American president.'
Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt turned the federal government into an aggressive agent of liberalism - pushing the New Deal at home and confronting fascism abroad - has the left felt such a deep attachment and invested such hopes in a head of state.
'People in the '30s felt that for once the government was on their side,' the Berkeley historian Leon Litwack said in an interview. 'They had never had that kind of relationship to a president before.'"
1/4/2009, Boston Globe, Something new brews in Berkeley: patriotic pride, Sasha Issenberg
"'There's a left-wing tradition of being systematically opposed to the US government, knee-jerk reactionary - most of our presidents have made it fairly easy to do,' said Jo Freeman, author of 'At Berkeley in the Sixties,' a memoir of her student activism. 'Those who view everything the US does as automatically suspect already have a problem doing that with Obama.'
At Berkeley, the university has, quite deliberately, chosen to host its first-ever large-scale observance of a presidential inauguration in a spot most closely identified with its radicalism, said Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau. At Sproul Plaza, site of the self-described Free Speech Movement protests beginning in 1964 - now commemorated with a monument declaring 'this soil and the air space above it should not be part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity's jurisdiction' - students will gather around giant television screens to take in the nation's most solemn ritual."
1/1/2009, San Francisco Chronicle, Bay Area people of note who died in 2008, Chronicle Staff
"Michael Rossman was a pivotal figure in UC Berkeley's historic Free Speech Movement in 1964.
His interests ranged from science to collecting political posters to playing the flute.
He got his first taste of being on his own at an early age - his parents allowed him to roam Mount Tamalpais by himself when he was young, and it contributed to his ideas of personal freedom.
On an October day in 1964, students in Sproul Plaza created a demonstration, the highlight of which came when authorities put student Jack Weinberg into a UC Berkeley police car. Students surrounded the car and some sat on top of it. After that, Mr. Rossman came up with the idea that there should be a report done on how the university had dealt with political activity over the years.
The report was produced, and Mr. Rossman was chosen to be on the executive and steering committees of the movement.
He died from leukemia May 12. He was 68."
12/18/2008, The Guardian, The tragedy of Greek apathy, Iason Athanasiadis
"Others waxed lyrical about a new Paris uprising timed to perfection with the 30th anniversary. But unlike Paris, the sound of broken glass and exploding petrol bombs was not overlaid by reasoned oratory.
¶
"Have you heard any voice of substance from those who hold the streets," asks [Simon] Baddeley. 'Men or women of the potential of Cohn-Bendit, Rudi Dutschke, Petra Kelly, Angela Davis, Mario Savio and others?'"
12/12/2008, National Post, Going to San Francisco?, Alec Scott
"A food pilgrimage to the Bay Area should start where the so-called delicious revolution began: Alice Waters's restaurant in Berkeley, Chez Panisse. A Berkeley student on the fringes of the campus's radical Free Speech movement, Waters fell for food during her junior year abroad in France and named the restaurant for a big-hearted character in Marcel Pagnol's picaresque Provence-set cycle of comedic plays and films. It wasn't the haute cuisine in the Michelin-rated Parisian restaurants that enamoured Waters. As Thomas McNamee wrote in his bestselling biography Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, "Alice loved la cuisine du marché. A French housewife would stroll through a village market, sniffing, appraising, thinking."
12/11/2008, UC Berkeley News, RFK Jr. vs. 'corporate plunder',
"The longtime environmental crusader, asserting "a direct correlation between the level of environmental injury and the level of tyranny" in nations around the world, was the keynote speaker at the annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture, staged since 1997 to honor the fiery Free Speech Movement icon and promote the work of a new generation of activists. Savio, he said, understood the "subversion of American democracy" inherent in the efforts of corporate lobbyists - aided and abetted today, he said, by a compliant White House - to rewrite or undermine laws and regulations intended to safeguard public health and the environment."
12/10/2008, San Francisco Chronicle, Everyone's in that holiday mood, Leah Garchik
"Robert F. Kennedy gave the Mario Savio Memorial Lecture on Thursday at the Berkeley Community Auditorium. It was the first time, reports Gar Smith, that the event was not on campus. RFK refused to speak on campus to protest what he thought was the university's unfair treatment of union workers. RFK's assessment of the political divide in America: 'I've finally come to the conclusion that 80 percent of Republicans are actually Democrats who just don't know what's going on.'"
12/9/2008, The Edinburgh Journal Limited, Student activism: What's our problem?, editorial
"There is an antidote, readily available on the internet: Mario Savio's address from the steps of Sproul Hall, on 2 December 1964. The power of his words is their undoing, because they need no context to captivate the listener.
'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part; and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears, and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop, and you've got to indiciate to the people who run it-the people who own it-that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from running at all.'"
12/8/2008, Truthdig, The Best and the Brightest Led America Off a Cliff, Chris Hedges
"'Political silence, total silence,' said Chris Hebdon, a Berkeley undergraduate. He went on to describe how various student groups gather at Sproul Plaza, the center of student activity at the University of California, Berkeley. These groups set up tables to recruit and inform other students, a practice know as 'tabling.'
...
'Our Sproul Plaza shows that so well-the same place Mario Savio once stood on top a police car is filled with tens of tables for the pre-corporate, the ethnic, the useless cynics, the recreational groups, etc.'"
12/8/2008, The Nation, Stewartsville: George R. Stewart's Names on the Land By Christine Smallwood,
"Though The Year of the Oath is a defense of academic freedom and is often held up as a precursor to the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, ... "
12/8/2008, The Daily Californian, 'The Berkeley Pit' Embodies Spirit of 1960s, Danica Li
"Through the eyes of narrator Ruth Carson, a professor at the college where Harry enrolls, we see things unbolt. The Free Speech Movement, having occurred just years earlier, marks the turmoil to come. The Black Panther Party is beginning to stage incendiary attacks on the establishment. A combustible student population is poised to riot. Dread-locked youth squat on Telegraph Avenue, smoking pot and doing tabs of LSD."
12/7/2008, Mercury News, Herhold: Cop killing echoes down the years, Scott Herhold
"Defense attorney Crittenden, who became the judge who presided over the cases emanating from Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, died in 1966. And the building housing the Mercantile Acceptance offices was razed during San Jose's push to redevelop its downtown (It's now a parking lot across from the Gordon Biersch restaurant)."
12/5/2008, The Daily Californian, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Speaks on Energy, Zach Williams
"Addressing a sea of audience members enthused about a new direction for America, keynote speaker Robert F. Kennedy Jr. led a rousing discussion of the future of American energy policy at Thursday night's Mario Savio Memorial Lecture."
12/05/2008, Oakland Tribune, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. boycotts UC Berkeley over labor dispute, Kristin Bender
"BERKELEY - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke at an annual event honoring a late leader of the Free Speech Movement on Thursday night, but the event was held off campus because the environmental activist boycotted UC Berkeley in support of campus service workers' two-year labor battle with the university.
The Mario Savio Memorial Lecture and Young Activist Award honor Savio, a leader of the 1964 Free Speech Movement, a civil rights worker, a UC Berkeley student and later a teacher at Sonoma State University. He died in 1996 at age 53."
12/4/2008, Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, Robert Kennedy Jr. Moves Speech Off UC Berkeley Campus in Support of UC Service Workers Fight to End Poverty Wages at UC,
"'We are saddened and frustrated that, for the first time in its twelve year history, the Mario Savio Memorial Lecture cannot be held on the Berkeley campus because of the university administration's failure to reach a fair and just agreement with its lowest paid workers. Our speaker, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has refused to speak on campus until UC resolves this contract dispute over poverty-level wages for its service workers. While we are grateful that the Berkeley School District has made the Community Theater available for the lecture on Dec. 4th, it is bitterly ironic that an event honoring a Berkeley campus hero cannot be held on that campus due to the intransigence of the administration' - Lynne Hollander Savio"
12/3/2008, Capitol Hill Blue, Events on this date,
"* 1964 - Berkeley Free Speech Movement: Police arrest over 800 students at the University of California, Berkeley, following their takeover and sit-in at the administration building in protest at the UC Regents' decision to forbid protests on UC property."
12/1/2008, University of Minnesota Morris, Jim Keady: Behind the Swoosh, Judy Riley
"The Mario Savio Foundation's 2001 Young Activist of the Year, Keady played soccer with the NJ Imperials and coached the St. John's University Red Storm. Along with directing EFJ, he plays soccer for a semi-pro team in New York City and coaches a high school boy's team in New Jersey."
December 2008, The Monthly, The Kilduff File: Sculpting the Past, Paul Kilduff
"Scott Donahue: The Free Speech Movement really was the beginning of [Berkeley's] international prominence and so I started with that..."
11/28/2008, The Calgary Herald, Students are becoming frightening speech stiflers, Naomi Lakritz
"What a bunch of wimps a large number of university students are these days. They're about as far removed from the heady era of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement in the '60s and '70s as Jerry Rubin was from his firebrand days as a socialist Yippie, after he knotted his necktie, grabbed a briefcase and headed for Wall Street. The Free Speech Movement was launched when students --many of whom had gone south to sign up black voters during the Freedom Summer of 1964--set up booths on the Berkeley campus to raise money for various civil rights projects. The university objected because its rules forbade political fundraising unless it was done by the Republican and Democratic student clubs."
11/26/2008, Berkeley Daily Planet, Community Calendar,
"THURSDAY, DEC. 4
Mario Savio Memorial Lecture 'Our Environmental Destiny' with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Community Theater, 1930 Allston Way. Free. 707-823-7293."
11/24/2008, The Daily Californian, Late Peter Camejo Honored on Campus, Kat Murti
"Camejo's reputation for rule-breaking, however, led to him being expelled from UC Berkeley for improperly using a bull-horn during the Free Speech Movement. He was only a few credits short of a degree, friends said."
11/16/2008, New York Times, First Chapter 'Alphabet Juice', Roy Blount Jr.
"I say 'oddly enough' because McLuhan, according to Marchand, 'was never interested in the 'music of words.'' In Understanding Media, McLuhan maintained that the phonetic alphabet-'in which semantically meaningless letters are used to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds'-had alienated people from the body. The ink had hardly dried on that notion when the Free Speech Movement broke out at Berkeley, and pretty soon people were running naked and letting their hair grow wild."
11/14/2008, Forbes, The Rise Of The West, Michael Auslin
"It was a great irony that in the very year McNeill won the award, the Berkeley "free speech movement" and campus riots exploded. These were the first salvos in a sustained attack on the rational underpinnings of the university and a new front in the war against liberal capitalism. Yet the gathering storm had swirled about McNeill during the decade it took him to write the book. When he penciled the first lines of The Rise of the West, Elvis Presley was an anonymous teen in Memphis and barely one in 10 Americans had a TV set. By the time of the book's publication, McNeill's students were demanding instant utopia and denying that America had seen any progress from its founding to their own day. And then, they became the teachers, imprinting their own ideological views on succeeding generations of impressionable students."
11/11/2008, San Francisco Chronicle, Leah Garchik, Leah Garchik
"The Free Speech Movement's annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture - at the Berkeley Community Theater on Dec. 4 - will be delivered by Robert Kennedy Jr., who was mentioned by Politico.com last week as a possible head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Gar Smith suggests that Ralph Nader, who made his name fighting the auto industry, be appointed secretary of transportation."
11/6/2008, The Telegraph, All for Obama, Amartya counts the gains, Amit Roy
"Amartya Sen...
Since I have been involved in the civil rights movement in America for a long time --I visited this country many times and I was very much present at Berkeley in 1964-65 when the free speech movement occurred and at Harvard during 1968-69 when there were also participatory movements on the campuses -- it is a moment of particular joy to see what is ultimately a success of the fruits of the civil rights movement."
11/4/2008, San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center, A Thousand UC Berkeley Students Celebrate in the Streets, dharmatica
"A impromptu victory parade eventually attracting more than a thousand Berkeley students took shape around 9 pm at the south edge of the UC Berkeley campus tonight. The party began on Bancroft Avenue, a stone's throw from the birth of the Free Speech movement at Sproul Plaza, and wended its way down Telegraph, up to College Avenue, and back down to Telegraph, where a jam-packed crowd stood around cheering and marveling at the spectacle and this moment in history."
11/3/2008, Berkeley Daily Planet, Artists Charge Censorship at Berkeley's Addison Street Windows Gallery, Riya Bhattacharjee
"'The poster is more than a gun being pointed at them,' Sances, who has served on Berkeley's Civic Arts Commission for six years, said.
'It shows how things are being taken from them by an imperialistic oppressive state. I was very surprised by the city's decision. My poster went up in 50 different places all over the country, including the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco, which used it in their mailers and never had any problems. It's peculiar that they would be censoring the poster in Berkeley, home of the free speech movement.'"
10/29/2008, Daily Californian, Close to Election, Professors Take Different Approaches to Political Commentary, Emily Grospe
"But while UC Berkeley faculty belong to a campus with a long history of noisy activism hailing back to the Free Speech Movement, many said they have no problem keeping their opinions about controversial issues out of the classroom."
10/26/2008, San Francisco Chronicle, S.F. State to mark 40th anniversary of strike, Tanya Schevitz
"UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Carlos Munoz Jr., who teaches a course on the civil rights movements of the 1960s, said the San Francisco State strike was for students of color the equivalent of the Free Speech Movement in the mid-1960s in Berkeley."
10/25/2008, Sacramento Bee, Alameda County politics' hue looks decidedly blue, Marjie Lundstrom
"In Berkeley, birthplace of the Free Speech Movement and 1960s anti-war protests, the 2008 presidential race between Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain is pretty much a no-brainer."
10/23/2008, San Jose Mercury News, Berkeley rewrites trespassing law to prevent UC police from using it to arrest protesters, Doug Oakley
"Kortney Blythe of Riverside, a 25-year-old member of Survivors of the Holocaust Revolution who was cited by University of California-Berkeley police in 2007 and who sued the city, found it ironic that she was arrested at the home of the free-speech movement.
'I was just appalled that a place like Berkeley, which is a mecca for free speech, would do that to us,' Blythe said."
10/21/2008, San Francisco Chronicle, Comment: 'Berkeley Big People' invites mockery, Kenneth Baker
"A series of small vignettes around the sculpture's elevated base symbolize protests, ranging from the Free Speech Movement to the tree-sitters who recently lost their bid to save a stand of old oaks on the designated site of a new university sports complex."
10/20/2008, University of Texas at Dallas Mercury, Naysayers must make peace with youth voters, Nazir Salas
"In the 1960's, Free Speech Movement organizer Jack Weinberg said, 'We have a saying in the movement that we don't trust anybody over 30.'
Contemporary youth are not politically active in all the ways their parents' generation chose, but must continue to build interest in campaigns and voting. The older generation must allow them room and listen to what the young generation has to say."
10/19/2008, Daily Californian, Civic Art Celebrates Berkeley's Spirit, Liz Chang
"At the base of the pedestals are a number of smaller bas reliefs, or structures that protrude from flat surfaces on a piece of art. Some of the reliefs include Mario Savio standing atop a police car during the Free Speech Movement and an image of a lone protester perched on a tree to represent the tree-sit protest in the oak grove near Memorial Stadium, among other images."
10/17/2008, San Francisco Chronicle, Sculpture depicts Berkeley's biggest protests, Carolyn Jones
"Close up, people can view a dozen or so scenes from Berkeley's past, such as: a People's Park protest complete with National Guard helicopters; bicyclists surrounding a car; Mario Savio leading the Free Speech Movement; a disabled person abandoning a wheelchair to crawl up the steps of City Hall; and a lone figure perched in a grove of trees."
10/16/2008, San Francisco Chronicle, 'It Came From Berkeley': Wackiness in context, Justin Berton
"But for anyone who has wondered how and why Berkeley became an adjective meaning zany-liberal-smarty-pants, Weinstein tracks down the historical and cultural dominoes that led to milestones such as the Free Speech Movement, bans on plastic foam cups, traffic "calming" roundabouts and, of course, tree-sitting."
10/9/2008, Berkeley Daily Planet, District 2 City Council Candidate Statement: Jon Crowder, Jon Crowder
"As I got older, I realized I would have to leave Mississippi to create opportunities to realize my potential. While traveling throughout the country as a younger man, I began to dream of California. I felt a particular pull to Berkeley because of its liberal reputation and the lasting impact of the Free Speech Movement."
10/9/2008, Berkeley Daily Planet, Historic Sather Gate To Get Million Dollar Facelift, Riya Bhattacharjee
"It has weathered the Great Depression, World War II, the McCarthy Era and the Free Speech Movement."
10/6/2008, UC Berkeley News, Iconic Sather Gate to be restored to its former majesty, Yasmin Anwar
"In 1958, UC Berkeley extended its southern boundary, purchasing the last block of Telegraph Avenue. Efforts to keep the area a traditional island of open expression spawned the campus's Free Speech Movement, which is immortalized in a 1964 photograph of student protesters and their supporters marching through Sather Gate carrying a Free Speech banner."
10/2/2008, Sacramento News & Review, WWPCD: What would Peter Camejo Do?, Cosmo Garvin
"He was an MIT man, got a perfect score in math on his SAT. He was a Socialist Workers Party candidate for president in 1976, then a successful investment-fund manager-specializing in socially responsible investments. He was a champion of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, and was repeatedly denied a chance to debate alongside the big boys from the Democrat and Republican parties. (Not that he didn't have some admirers in each of the "major" parties. Check out this week's Essay on page 48 for a tribute from Republican apparatchik Sal Russo.)"
10/2/2008, Sacramento News & Review, Peter Miguel Camejo, Sal Russo
"We first met on the picket lines at UC Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement in the mid-1960s. In those early days, he had comfortably positioned himself at the extreme, ultimately getting expelled from school for illegally using a microphone during a campus demonstration."
10/1/2008, East Bay Literary Examiner, Moe's Books: The Best Of Berkeley, Tony R. Rodriguez
"Soon the Free Speech Movement erupted on the streets of Berkeley. There were innumerable anti-war protests and large gatherings held in People's Park. Moe soon reinvented the functions of his already prosperous bookstore. He decided to become intensely proactive. When tear gas canisters scuttled along the asphalt streets, and protesters and voyeurs scattered in chaotic panic, Moe often refused to close and lock his doors. He felt compelled to provide the protesters and on-lookers with a safe, temporary haven. Moreover, Moe would often use his bookstore for public debate. Moe and intellects openly discussed matters of politics and history. And at times, Moe's Books was a place to conduct a form of street-level "court". Moe had a knack for understanding the people and providing them with a place to allow their thoughts to be conversed and acknowledged."
10/1/2008, East Bay Express, Dining at the Hotel, Anneli Rufus
"Adagia occupies Westminster House, built in 1926 by Bernard Maybeck's pal Walter Ratcliff, who was known for his eclectic European touches. Latticed windows, arched entryways, quaint sconces, and red-brick chimneys jutting from a steep shingled roof lend the look and feel of a grand old auberge. During the '60s, Free Speech Movement activists gathered here. Today, the restaurant space is leased from the Presbyterian Campus Ministry, which uses the rest of the building for ministry programs and student housing. Savored on the romantic enclosed outdoor courtyard - with a view of the sky, the student apartments, and the restaurant's warmly woodsy Wind in the Willows-y dining room - our blue-cheese-and-walnut ravioli comprised ten chewy and bright-tasting, if a bit under-stuffed, pillows."
10/1/2008, Associated Press, Today in History - Oct. 1, Associated Press
"In 1964, the Free Speech Movement was launched at the University of California at Berkeley."
9/25/2008, Village Soup, Workshop focuses on writing for social change,
"[Louise] Dunlap travels the country helping citizen groups and social justice-minded scholars make their voices heard in the challenging debates of the times. She is a longtime advocate for peace and justice who got her start in the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s. She has taught at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, the University of California in Berkeley and Los Angeles, Tufts and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and done training for labor and women's activists in South Africa. She also teaches yoga and meditation."
9/25/2008, Berkeley Daily Planet, Books: How Berkeley Changed the World, Steven Finacom
"The 1960s exerted such a powerful influence on the image of Berkeley-and lured so many people here-that they are a demarcating line in history that often blinds contemporary locals to the lessons and experiences of Berkeley's past before the Free Speech Movement.
Weinstein works expertly on both sides of that divide, as does historian Charles Wollenberg in his Berkeley: A City in History, also published this year."
9/16/2008, Bleacher Report, The Oaks - 0, Cal Football - 1, Tess Minsky
"What to make, then, of the tearing down of an oak grove for the building of a new varsity training center? Berkeley, widely known for its Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, for its efforts in sustainability, and its grassroots traditions, has gotten slightly more conservative than its infamous prior-self of the '60s, not to say that its tradition is any less appreciated, celebrated, or forgotten in any way."
9/14/2008, San Francisco Chronicle, Peter Camejo dies - helped found Green Party, Rachel Gordon
"Active in the Free Speech Movement and in protests against the Vietnam War as a student at UC Berkeley in the late 1960s, Mr. Camejo landed on then-Gov. Ronald Reagan's list of the 10 most dangerous people in California. School officials eventually expelled him, two quarters shy of a degree."
9/14/2008, Oakland Tribune, Green Party activist Peter Camejo dies at 68, Judy Lin
"His fiery activism also got him expelled from the University of California, Berkeley in 1967 for using a school microphone during a demonstration. A year later, then-governor Ronald Reagan put him on his list of the 10 most dangerous people in California because he was 'present at all anti-war demonstrations.'"
9/11/2008, LA City Beat, Art Goldberg, Ron Garmon
"Art is an attorney, a longtime activist (an original Free Speech Movementer), and the cheerful, stork-like fellow seen waving a "STOP THE WAR" sign every Friday afternoon at the corner of Sunset and Echo Park boulevards. Which was where I found him, grinning happily in the heat and smog, collecting horn-hoots and 'Fuck yeahs!' from commuters only too eager to yell at quitting time. We spoke while 6-foot-4 Art ran from car to car, with 5-10 me waving my tape recorder in pursuit. Some onlookers regarded the scene as comic."
9/10/2008, Los Angeles Times, UC Berkeley tree-sitters end their protest, Richard C. Paddock
"They brought shame to the name of Berkeley, which is famous for the Free Speech Movement and protests against the Vietnam War," the computer science student said. "It's an outrage. The university should have been harsher and brought them down faster."
9/9/2008, Counterpunch, From Berkeley to Mexico City: Retorno a 1968, Chellis Glendinning
"Every noon I'd wend my way to Sproul Plaza, greet Michael Lerner at the political table he had fought for during the Free Speech Movement, grab a yogurt with Marty Schiffenbauer in his shorts and combat boots -- and get my political education as expounded from a microphone on the steps. Eldridge Cleaver, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Michael Rossman, Angela Davis, Frank Bardacke, Pete Camejo, Dolores Huerta --they were our teachers. With predictable frequency we'd tear-ass down Telegraph Avenue brandishing our anti-war placards or take on the Oakland Induction Center with shields made of garbage-can lids, and invariably we'd be met by the Berkeley Police, the Oakland Police, the National Guard, and/or the Alameda County Sheriff's Department, nicknamed The Blue Meanies for their blue-clad counterparts in Yellow Submarine."
9/8/2008, Media With Conscience, Arrogance, ignorance, and cowardice: Lessons from 9/11, Robert Jensen
"And, in retrospect, the only thing that might have been effective in impeding the mad rush to war was for those dissenting from that madness to take real risks, to put our bodies in the path of the war machine. Mario Savio, one of the leaders of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, articulated this so passionately on the University of California campus in December 1964:
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all. "
9/8/2008, Counterpunch, Lessons From Denver and St. Paul: How Far From a Police State?, Howard Lisnoff
"Both Nixon and Agnew were understudies to Ronald Reagan in using the government's police power against protesters. Reagan had honed his anti-activist credentials as a snitch while president of the Screen Actors Guild. When assuming the office of governor in California, he immediately went to work against the Free Speech Movement at the University of California's Berkley campus, vowing to 'clean up the mess in Berkley.'"
9/5/2008, Berkeley Daily Planet, Campus Rally Protests Long Haul Police Raid, Richard Brenneman
"'In 1964, I spoke on top of a police car here,' said attorney Anne Fagan Ginger, referring to that memorable day Free Speech Movement activists surrounded a car that contained one of their own who had been arrested moments."
8/29/2008, The Daily Californian, Effect of Voting on the Campus, Kevin Dayaratna
"After the federal government banned on-campus political activity, student protests sprouted throughout the country. In 1964, under the leadership of Mario Savio, among others, Cal students demanded the university lift these bans and recognize their First Amendment rights of free speech. After the massive sit-in in Sproul Hall resulting in the arrest of over 800 students, acting chancellor Martin Meyerson established provisional rules for political expression on campus, which would eventually enabled students to fully express themselves.
This Free Speech Movement has become a defining aspect of our great school's identity."
8/26/2008, The Daily Star, Muslims or not, no one has an absolute right to be offended, Shahed Amanullah
"Back in 1989, when the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel 'The Satanic Verses' sparked a new phenomenon of protests from Muslims - particularly by those in the West - I was a student body senator at the University of California at Berkeley, where the Free Speech Movement was born in the 1960s. Two bookstores were firebombed - apparently in retaliation for the book, though without any claims of responsibility.
Along with several other Muslim students, I appeared on local television to denounce the bombings and state our belief that while Muslims could understandably be offended, no one had the right to impose censorship or intimidate others with threats to their safety or property"
8/22/2008, Chicago Tribune, SCREEN SCENE: Facets turns the clock back 40 years, Robert K. Elder
"'I think it's appropriate for a couple of reasons,' says [Judy] Hoffman. 'It looks back at the civil rights movement, the American Indian movement. ... We have to look back, really, at late '50s and early '60s with the free speech movement and civil rights movement. That kind of revolutionary thought continues throughout the Vietnam War.'"
8/9/2008, San Jose Mercury News, Poster child for hippie era, Kristin Bender
"Michael Rossman wasn't just an activist in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the counterculture movement of the 1960s and '70s. He was its curator."
8/7/2008, Oakland Tribune, Posters chronicle Free Speech Movement, Kristin Bender
"Rossman was one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. He was at Sproul Plaza on campus on the afternoon of Oct. 2, 1964, when 3,000 students sat around a police patrol car and kept it from taking student protester Jack Weinberg to jail. Many of those involved in 'the movement' did not continue their involvement with it, but it consumed Rossman and a good portion of his life.
He wrote essays, news stories and books about it. He was the president and chief executive officer of the Free Speech Movement Archives. He was also a science teacher, a father, a husband, a collector and a lifelong Berkeley resident. In June 2007, he learned in had leukemia. He died May 12 at age 68."
8/5/2008, The New York Times, 'Hair' Revival: A Time Warp for Tears and Fun, Patricia Cohen
"But that wasn't how Ms. Friedman, an exuberant woman with bright red lipstick and a head of black, white and gray-streaked hair, felt. 'It seems shockingly relevant,' she said. 'I know every word of this, and as I was singing, I was back in time with it. It seems totally familiar and fresh at the same time.' Her husband, Darrell Friedman, 65, was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, during the Free Speech Movement when he saw 'Hair' in San Francisco.
'They were the moral conscience of our society, whether we liked it or not,' he said of the antiwar protesters and hippies depicted onstage. 'I sit here today and look back at my life, and it seems like we're back where we were 40 years ago,' mired in a war waged by a deceitful administration, he said."
8/1/2008, Counterpunch, The Boot McCain Puts in His Mouth, Nikolas Kozloff
"Continuing on in his usual haughty tone, Boot wrote 'Ever since Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement electrified the nation in 1964, this city has been famous for its protests against anything and everything. Berkeleyites have marched against apartheid, the contras, sweatshops, plans to build on People's Park, and CIA plots to water down their lattés. Okay, I made that one up.'"
7/30/2008, Borderfire Report, Senator Obama, Citizen of the World, Thomas E. Brewton
"In 1970, [Jean-François] Revel had high hopes for the late 1960s cultural anarchy in the United States: the Cal-Berkeley Free Speech Movement, SDS, Weatherman, the Reverend Martin Luther King's civil right campaign, feminism, homosexual outing, the black power groups, and the push for abortion, no-fault divorce, and sexual promiscuity. All of these, he anticipated, would lead to full-fledged socialism in the United States and would become the model for the remainder of the world."
07/25/2008, Oakland Tribune, Wacko tree-sitters need to find a real cause, Tammerlin Drummond
"There was a time when the name Berkeley was synonomous with social and political activism. Cal students and others turned out in huge numbers in the '60s and early '70s to protest the war in Vietnam. In what became known as the Free Speech Movement, Berkeley students fought for their right to distribute literature on campus in support of the civil rights movement. Those struggles made international headlines."
7/24/2008, Berkeley Daily Planet, Editorial: Obama Leads the Way for Young Candidates, Becky O'Malley
"The first discussion of the Obama phenomenon in this space featured an enthusiastic letter from the son of a Free Speech Movement stalwart. Since then I've checked in on the offspring of several '60s radicals and seen a similar response."
7/23/2008, Newsbusters, Gastronomic Baloney: Food Choices Can Make You 'Conservative', P.J. Gladnick
"There has been a trend in recent years for liberals to try to rebrand themselves as conservatives. The purpose is to con people into thinking that they somehow uphold traditional values. One of the more laughable of these rebranding attempts has been put forward by one John Schwenkler, a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. The very title of Schwenkler's Boston Globe article, 'Eat Republican,' along with the subtitle, 'How an organic movement born in Berkeley exemplifies conservative values,' sets the tone for the attempted con. Schwenkler leads off by attempting to convince us that someone who cooked a fundraising dinner for a Democrat is really a conservative:"
7/20/2008, The Boston Globe, Eat Republican: How an organic movement born in Berkeley exemplifies conservative values, John Schwenkler
"ALICE WATERS SEEMS at first like an unlikely conservative. A veteran of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement who once cooked a $25,000-a-seat fund-raising dinner for Bill Clinton, she eagerly compares her campaign for 'edible schoolyards' - where children grow, prepare, and eat fresh produce - with John F. Kennedy's attempt to improve physical fitness through mandatory exercise. Her dream of organic, locally and sustainably produced food in every school cafeteria, class credit for lunch hour, and required gardening time and cooking classes is as utopian as they come. The name she has given her gastronomic movement, the 'Delicious Revolution,' strikes the ear as one part fuzzy-headed Marxism, the other David Brooksian bobo-speak."
7/16/2008, San Leandro Times, Book Publishing Goes Online, Julie Barsamian
"As a student at UC Berkeley during the famed free-speech movement, JoAnn Ainsworth rode a motorcycle to class past the national guard and under the watch of military helicopters."
7/16/2008, Country Standard Time, Joan Baez to receive Spirit of Americana award,
"Baez has long been an activist. She marched for the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King, inspired Vaclav Havel in his fight for a Czech Republic, sang on the first Amnesty International tour and earlier this year stood alongside Nelson Mandela when the world celebrated his 90th birthday in London's Hyde Park. She brought the Free Speech Movement into the spotlight, took to the fields with Cesar Chavez and organized resistance to the war in Southeast Asia."
7/16/2008, Boston Globe, Les Crane; talk-show host challenged Johnny Carson, Bruce Weber
"During a taping of "The Les Crane Show" in December 1964, Mr. Crane (right) interviewed Mario Savio, leader of the 'Free Speech' movement at the University of California at Berkeley. (United Press International)"
7/15/2008, Huffington Post, You Aren't Just Losing Teachers, Jonah Lalas
".One of my professors, Paul Von Blum, an over 65 year old militant white guy with crazy hair and a beard, taught a class called the Art of Social Conscience, where we studied art critical of society or as he stated "art that makes you uncomfortable." He was active in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the 1960s, went to the South to help register African Americans and fought against the Vietnam War. He painted for us a picture of those tumultuous times through his stories, pieces written by activists at the time, and art."
7/10/2008, The Socialist Worker, Red State Rebels,
"But the union organizers kept at it, largely in the person of the International Workers of the World's (IWW) Frank Little, a mesmerizing speaker who was running the IWW's Free-Speech campaign in Butte--the model for the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley."
7/10/2008, Canadian Free Press, A Dying Ideal: Opposing the Fairness Doctrine with a Real Fairness Doctrine, Bruce Walker
"The irony of this is that the very ideologues who protested and demanded the right to offend in the Berkley Free Speech Movement forty-five years ago, now that they are the administrators, want to protect themselves and their allies from being offended by draconian censorship that no one running American colleges in 1963 would have dreamed of imposing upon students or faculty."
7/3/2008, Berkeley Daily Planet, Tree Sitters Disgraced the Progressive Movement, H. Scott Prosterman
"Promoting bicycle safety has been part of the script for every Berkeley politician since the Free Speech Movement."
6/29/2008, Deccan Herald, my generation: Rebellious 70s, Vijay Nambisan
"Worldwide, the hopes raised in the 60s had been quashed, usually by the Establishment, but as often as not those carrying the banners tripped over their own feet. You can say the Establishment killed both Kennedys (and Martin Luther King, Boris Pasternak and John Lennon), crushed the Prague Spring, put paid to the 'merry month of May' 68 in Paris, ended the moon landings programme. But who finished the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, or turned the Hell's Angels on the anti-war protestors, or destroyed the souls of rock'n'roll and hippiedom with big bucks?
The 70s were the ugliest decade since the Fascist triumph in the 30s, perhaps for the very reason that hope was all but dead. In the glacial depths of the Cold War, both sides competed brutally for the moral low ground. Allende succumbed to a CIA-sponsored coup in Chile; Neruda died 12 days later."
6/26/2008, Berkeley Daily Planet, Old Recordings by The New Age Get New Release on CD, Ken Bullock
"[Susan Graubard] Archuletta went to Cal, where she played at vespers on the Campanile carillon, played viola in the university symphony, and participated in the Free Speech Movement."
6/26/2008, Berkeley Daily Planet, Confrontation at Stadium Triggers New Arrests, Richard Brenneman
"Also on hand to speak at the press conference held during Sunday's rally were former Mayor Shirley Dean, Free Speech Movement veteran Neal Blumenfeld, two Native American activists, two medical experts and Oakland attorney Carol Strickman, who is representing the tree-sitters.
Asked to describe the difference between the Free Speech Movement (FSM) activism of the early 1960s and the new millennium's protest at the grove, Blumenfeld said 'the major difference is in the movement,' which had a broad base of support in four decades ago.
'The university's behavior,' he said, 'is exactly the same'
In addition to their larger numbers, said Blumenfeld, a psychiatrist, FSM members carried out extensive research on university funding and the revenues of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which he called 'the huge industrial park on the hill.'"
6/26/2008, Berkeley Daily Planet, MICHAEL ROSSMAN, Arnie Passman
"Some recent breaths ago, our dearly departed homo luden Michael Rossman asked me to get him a few minutes on this year's Bolshevik Cafe stage. No problem. On May 3, Michael, masked--initially, to some, a robber in our midst--arrived at Red Finn Hall on 10th Street and read his now core-of-our-lyrical lore "thank you to my body" poem, nine days before he passed (on George Carlin's final birthday)."
6/24/2008, The New York Times, More Closing Doors, Patricia Cohen
"During the 1960s the bookstore was an outpost of the Free Speech Movement."
6/23/2008, San Francisco Chronicle, Cody's, landmark Berkeley bookstore, closes, Michael Taylor
"More than just dollars and cents, however, Cody's was something of a symbol in Berkeley, a witness to and supporter of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, a well-stocked cornerstone of literacy for the thousands of students and faculty patrons from nearby UC Berkeley and a practitioner, in its own right, of free-speech principles.
In February 1989, Cody's was firebombed, and an unexploded pipe bomb was later found inside the store. This all happened shortly after the store had prominently displayed Salman Rushdie's 'The Satanic Verses' at a time when many in the Muslim world were outraged by Rushdie's novel, and the author had to go into hiding because of threats on his life."
6/22/2008, Earth Times, Wolf Pack Charges Finish Line in Inaugural Concrete Canoe Victory, American Society of Civil Engineers
"The University of California, Berkeley paddled into second place with the gray, black and red, 229-pound, 19.92-foot-long VoCal -- a tribute to the 'Free Speech Movement' and the Ecole de technologie superieure finished a close third with the gray, green and black, 170-pound, 20-foot-long Toutatis -- a Celtic tribute."
06/20/2008, Oakland Tribune, Memorial service for Michael Rossman on Monday, staff
"Rossman was at Sproul Plaza on the UC Berkeley campus the afternoon of Oct. 2, 1964, when 3,000 students sat around a police patrol car and kept it from taking student protester Jack Weinberg to jail. That was the beginning of what became known as the Free Speech Movement.
Rossman spent much of his life writing and talking about and promoting the movement. He was the president and chief executive officer of the Free Speech Movement Archives and headed the 20th, 30th and 40th anniversary commemorations of the movement."
06/20/2008, East Bay Express, Cody's Books Closes Permanently,
"Founded by Fred and Pat Cody in 1956, Cody's has been a Berkeley institution and a pioneer in the book business, helping to establish such innovations as quality paperbacks and in-store author readings. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Cody's was a landmark of the Free Speech movement and was a home away from home for innumerable authors, poets and readers."
6/19/2008, San Jose Mercury News, UC-Berkeley blocks food and water, removes one protester, as tree sit goes on, Lisa Krieger
"Here at the birthplace of campus protest, where Mario Savio launched the Free Speech Movement in 1964, a dozen activists sit in trees, mostly coast live oaks, marked for the chain saw. They took to the trees in December 2006 to prevent the proposed $125 million facility, which would be built next to Memorial Stadium."
6/19/2008, Berkeley Daily Planet, New UC Vice Chancellor Worked for Carlyle Group, Richard Brenneman
"The press release from Marie Felde, the university's executive director of media relations, mentioned past employers Citigroup, Lehman Brothers and Salomon Smith Barney-names certain to worry Free Speech Movement veterans and those with similar outlooks.
But she didn't cite the one employer absolutely certain to set their blood boiling, an outfit that included some of the nation's leading retired spooks and neocons-the Carlyle Group."
6/16/2008, AXcess News, A Generation of Wimps, W R Marshall
"There was once a willingness to commit to something bigger than yourself, something important, something dangerous, something that needed to be done. People were willing to sacrifice themselves for what they believed in."
6/6/2008, Daily Camera, Review: Renny Russell self-publishes sequel to his outdoor classic, 'On the Loose', Clay Evans
"The book slips smoothly between that journey, the horn-rimmed boys' upbringing in an appealingly unusual family, their early adventures in the wild, and even Terry's time with the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley. Renny also does not shy away from the anger he feels (nurtured in the 1960s, in part through the brothers' friendship with Sierra Club founding father David Brower) about the damming of rivers in the American West."
6/5/2008, Los Angeles Times, Idealism lost in '68 is reborn in L.A. classroom, Joe Mozingo
"In his final year as an undergraduate, he was accepted to Boalt Hall School of Law.
Steiner was fascinated as the Free Speech Movement roared up at Berkeley. But he didn't have an impulse for rebellion. Only one time did he step into the fray: He joined the massive sit-in at Sproul Hall.
When police told students they would be arrested if they didn't leave, he left.
He felt like a coward as he walked away. But he was just a mainstream kid."
6/4/2008, City Beat, Then And Now: How today's political climate mirrors 1968 ... and how it doesn't, Lew Moores
"David Altman, a local attorney who deals with environmental issues, was a senior at UC during the 1967-68 academic year and editor-in-chief of The News Record. He and his team of editors and reporters had begun to change the culture of college journalism that year, where a prior editor was a 'dewy-eyed sorority person.'
Altman saw his team as transitioning from a sports-dominated, fraternity-and-sorority-minded, social-calendar culture to a more edgy, skeptical and questioning brand of journalism. Just a few years after the Free Speech movement at Berkeley, politics had begun to arrive on other college campuses."
6/2/2008, San Francisco Chronicle, June services set for free speech activist, Michael Taylor
"A memorial service will be held in Kensington June 23 for Michael Rossman, a key figure in the historic 1960s Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. Mr. Rossman, who was 68, died at his Berkeley home May 12.
The Free Speech Movement was, in effect, the progenitor of student movements and war protests on U.S. campuses during the 1960s and 1970s; Mr. Rossman was on the steering and executive committees of the movement."
5/30/2008, The Times and Democrat, The demand for democracy is local, Corry Stevenson
"'Go back to the base, the civil rights movement, the black power movement, farm workers movement, the Chicano movement, the free speech movement and the anti-war movements; youth organizing develop many of today's leaders, teachers, analysts and activists."
5/30/2008, Daily Hampshire Gazette, Women power Why a student protest still matters 30 years later, Judy Van Handle
"So when he and his wife, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, arrived in town 35 years ago, she exclaimed, 'The '60s aren't dead, they just moved to Amherst.'
The Whiteheads were about to re-experience an era whose seeds had been planted a decade earlier, 3,000 miles away. From the time that Mario Savio and his supporters in the Free Speech Movement staged what is considered to be the first college sit-in, at the University of California, Berkeley "
5/29/2008, The Daily Californian Online, Campus Rights Organizer Remembered for his 'Zest', Jacqueline Johnston
"Rossman, who was born in Colorado in 1939, was a member of the Free Speech Movement Steering Committee.
Rossman is credited with designing and organizing efforts to publish a research report analyzing the progressiveness of the UC Berkeley administration. Rossman and other members of the Free Speech Movement wanted to show that the university was not as liberal as was commonly believed, Hollander said."
5/27/2008, Wall Street Journal, On the Sadness of Higher Education, Alan Charles Kors
"Thus, under the heirs of the academic '60s, we moved on campus after campus from their Free Speech Movement to their politically correct speech codes; from their abolition of mandatory chapel to their imposition of Orwellian mandatory sensitivity and multicultural training; from their freedom to smoke pot unmolested to their war today against the kegs and spirits-literal and metaphorical-of today's students; from their acquisition of young adult status to their infantilization of "kids" who lack their insight; from their self-proclaimed dreams of racial and sexual integration to their ever more balkanized campuses organized on principles of group characteristics and group responsibility; from their right to define themselves as individuals-a foundational right-to their official, imposed and politically orthodox notions of identity. American college students became the victims of a generational swindle of truly epic proportions. If that part of the faculty not complicit in this did not know that it was happening, it was by choice or willful blindness."
5/27/2008, cinematical, RIP: Reel Important People, Christopher Campbell
"Michael Rossman (1939-2008) - Activist, Author - Helped organize the Free Speech Movement in the '60s. He appears as himself in the Oscar-nominated documentary Berkeley in the Sixties. He died May 12 in Berkeley, California. (NY Times)"
5/22/2008, The Vancouver Province, Keep campuses free, editors
"If you're old-school and hear the phrase "campus free-speech movement," you might harken back to the 1960s when students fought for their right to be politically active on school grounds.
Hear the phrase now and it could well mean the opposite: Student unions trying to take away other students' right to express themselves"
5/22/2008, San Francisco Chronicle, 'Seeing Music': Freight & Salvage at 40, Mary Eisenhart
"For Goines, who grew up in a large family that entertained itself by singing and playing cowboy songs, Scots-Irish ballads and the entire American songbook, the scene that spawned the Freight was a place he felt right at home. 'During the Free Speech Movement everybody sang all the time,' he recalls. 'When we'd come back on the bus from some outing, we'd sing. We'd sing all kinds of songs - spirituals, songs from 'The Sound of Music' - singing was part of my life.'"
5/19/2008, New York Times, Michael Rossman, Who Fought for Campus Rights, Dies at 68, Margalit Fox
"A close friend of Mario Savio, the movement's best-known leader, Mr. Rossman left graduate school in 1966 to devote himself to activism, lecturing on campuses around the country. The Free Speech Movement, which quickly spread to other universities, made political discourse a basic right on college campuses throughout the nation."
5/19/2008, College of Letters & Science, Berkeley Students Get Behind the Camera, Kate Rix
"Skoller teaches a graduate production seminar that attracts anthropology students who want to make films of their fieldwork. One of those students is planning a trip to Brazil to study the favelas, or shantytowns. Another of Skoller's documentary students made a film as part of her research into women and girls who play computer games. Another is researching changing ideas about free speech, and has made a film about Berkeley's Free Speech Movement."
5/18/2008, Oakland Tribune, Free Speech Movement leader dies at 68, Kristin Bender
"During a time when student protests were unprecedented, Rossman and students Mario Savio, Hal Draper, Brian Turner, Steve Weissman, Art Goldberg, Bettina Aptheker, Jackie Goldberg and others insisted that the UC administration lift a ban on campus political activities, academic freedom and free speech. It was a student protest that lasted about three months during the 1964-65 school years.
But for Rossman it was something that consumed most of his life. He wrote essays, news stories and books about it. He was the president and chief executive officer of the Free Speech Movement Archives and took very seriously the way information was presented on the group's Web site, said Lee Felsenstein, secretary-treasurer of the archive.
"Michael, I would have to call him a renaissance man because he embodied both art and science and activism. He was a poet and had that sort of sensibility, which could be hard to bear when you were reading one of his long writings. Nevertheless, he had a way with metaphors that was a very important part of him," Felsenstein said."
5/17/2008, San Francisco Chronicle, '60s activist Michael Rossman dies in Berkeley, Michael Taylor
"In the nascent days of the Free Speech Movement, Hollander said, it was Mr. Rossman who said, 'early on, that one thing that was needed was a counter thought to the idea that UC had always been this tremendously liberal, free speech-oriented institution. He felt this was a myth and needed to be shown it was a myth.'
On an October day in 1964, students gathering in Sproul Plaza created a demonstration whose highlight came when authorities put student Jack Weinberg into a UC Berkeley police car. Students surrounded the car and some sat on top of it.
'After that,' 'Hollander said, 'Michael came up with the idea that there should be a report done on how the university had dealt with political activity over the years.' The report was produced, "and it's that report that got him known,' Hollander said. Mr. Rossman was chosen to be on the executive and steering committees of the movement, along with such protest luminaries as Savio, Weinberg, Suzanne Goldberg, Bettina Aptheker and others."
5/15/2008, Berkeley Daily Planet, Editorial: The Art and Science of Living Well, Becky O'Malley
"The big political news on campus was the primeval student political party-- indeed I think it was the only one at that time--Slate. It was perennially being thrown off campus for assorted sins of free speech. Student rabble-rousers, including Michael, spoke when they could, standing on the planters in Dwinelle Plaza. Sproul Plaza was still under construction.
Michael himself documented in exhaustive detail much of the frenetic activity in those days, and a lot of it can be found on the Internet with a Google search. The facts are actively disputed by participants with failing memories, but the passion behind them is unmistakable. A peak was the demonstrations in San Francisco in May of 1960 against the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was the first big mass demonstration of a generation scared by McCarthyism, and it was the precursor of the Free Speech Movement of 1964.
By the time of the FSM I'd graduated, moved away and lost touch. I saw Michael interviewed on television on 60 Minutes in the early '60s, part of a program whose theme was 'The Death of the Student Movement.' He argued to the contrary, and soon thereafter the FSM happened, with his enthusiastic participation."
5/15/2008, Bay Area Reporter, Aptheker wows women at forum, Heather Tirado Gilligan
"Aging women are frequently diminished in social exchanges, Aptheker said, noting that her students often describe her as 'cute,' and tell her 'you remind me of my grandmother.' 'I am not cute. That's just insulting,' said Aptheker, a leader of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the 1960s and a civil rights, feminist, and lesbian activist of 40 years."
5/14/2008, Democracy Now, 1968, 40 Years Later: Student, Worker Protests Sweep France, Leaving Indelible Mark on the Country and the World, Amy Goodman and George Katsiaficas
"The vans-much like the free speech movement in Berkeley, the vans taking away the arrested students were surrounded. One of the vans never made it out. The prisoners were released. And the then police attacked. Students counterattacked. The residents of the Latin Quarter supported the students. The special riot police that had been created after the workers' strikes of 1958 were then mobilized, and workers instinctively sided with the students."
5/12/2008, The Guardian, Don't Tread on Us Tritons, Hadley Mendoza
"STUDENT LIFE - Somehow, history always seems to repeat itself. Will people ever learn? The national government didn't learn anything from Vietnam, pulling the country into another needless war, only this time it's the terrorists, not communists, we're chasing. The federal government didn't learn anything from the civil rights movement or those hot '60s summers, still pushing around political minorities, but now discriminating against Latinos with border-long walls instead of prosecuting blacks with Jim Crow policies. And the University of California administration didn't learn anything from the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement, deciding to still introduce a new speech policy that would limit the rights of nonaffiliates on the public university's 10 campuses."
5/11/2008, The Columbus Dispatch, Author separates facts, myths of '60s, Joe Blundo
"DeGroot patiently separates them. He delineates the difference between the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (spawned by an effort to restrict campus protest that enraged both liberal and conservative students) and the incoherent Rubin, an egotist whose main interest was in showing off."
5/11/2008, New York Times, The Boss Voices in Concert, Peter Grosslight as told to Amy Zipkin
"I arrived at the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall of 1963. Sproul Plaza, a major center of student activity, was full of card tables with different student organizations like the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. When I returned to campus the following year, all the tables were gone. The Regents of the University of California had ordered them off campus after students had organized to picket Barry Goldwater, who was being nominated for president at the Republican convention in San Francisco. That was the beginning of the free-speech movement, with students insisting that the school administration lift a ban on on-campus political activities.
It felt empowering, being part of a group of young people that felt we could change the world. I remember watching Joan Baez singing peace songs while she was standing on top of a police car."
5/8/2008, New Statesman, All along the watchtower, Greil Marcus
"From the sightlines in Berkeley, California, where I lived then and live now, I recall 1968 as a year of horror and bad faith. The great storm of student protest that would convulse the US and nations well beyond it had begun there in 1964 with the Free Speech Movement. It was three months of daily speeches, marches, building occupations, and finally played out in a Greek open-air theatre as high drama. That drama - a university in convocation with itself, everyone present, the leaders of the institution speaking quieting words, then a single student, standing to speak, immediately seized by police, an act of violence actually revealing the face of power behind the face of reasonableness - brought that moment to a close and opened a field that in the years to come would be crossed by thousands."
5/2/2008, openDemocracy, The 1968 debate in Germany, Paul Hockenos
"The student partisans' relationship to the United States was equally complex. On the one hand, the war in Vietnam specifically and "US imperialism" in general were central to the movement. Amerikahaus cultural centres were routinely stoned and one of the protest chants was "USA-SA-SS", comparing the US to Nazi Germany. But the same protesters were philo-American in so many ways. They were conscious they were using protest forms pioneered in America - the sit-ins, teach-ins, and other forms of civil disobedience picked up from the US civil-rights movement. Their politics would have been inconceivable without Bob Dylan's lyrics, the works of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and the examples of Haight-Ashbury and the Berkeley free-speech movement. This post-war generation was incomparably more American - in so many ways - than its parents ever could have been."
5/1/2008, Prospect Magazine, California dreaming, Anthony Giddens
"It was also a time of multiple social movements. 1968 had its origins in the civil rights movement in the south, which began some years before, and the free speech movement in Berkeley. These converged with the movement against the Vietnam war, a catalysing agent for many radicals. They overlapped too with the hippies, although most hippies were against all political power and authority."
4/29/2008, San Francisco Chronicle, Berserkeley has been that way a long time, Carolyn Jones
"Besides the innovations from City Hall, Berkeley has been the birthplace of less tangible ideas, such as the Free Speech Movement, the disability rights movement and California cuisine."
4/18/2008, American Enterprise Institute, Remembering 1968, Michael Novak
"The academic profession reinforced this appearance of disengagement with its supine response to the misnamed Free Speech Movement, which began across the bay from Palo Alto at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964. Many kinds of political activity, such as students promoting non-university events or organizing on behalf of campaigns, were prohibited on campus, but much of the controversy and student anger involved a nearby piece of land, at the intersection of Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue, that was owned by the university. When police attempted to enforce the ban there in October 1964, students responded with sit-ins and other protests that eventually disrupted the university in December.
The very idea of a university rests on the principle that professors have superior wisdom to convey to their far less knowledgeable students, yet the Berkeley faculty, intimidated by menacing students, caved in to the demonstrators' extortion. Any moral or intellectual standing that professors might have had in the eyes of students was dashed to the ground. Similar craven surrenders occurred at some 300 other campuses over the next few years."
4/17/2008, BC Heights, Time to make history happen at BC, Amanda Leahy
"Yesterday, I spent the afternoon reading about leftist movements of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s for a history class. Among the readings was Mario Savio's 'An End to History,' the famous 1964 speech that helped to ignite the free speech movement at not only UC Berkley, where Savio was a graduate student, but at colleges and universities all over the United States. Reading Savio's impassioned words, I could not help but imagine what life must have been like for a college student during this era of turbulent and volatile change in our nation's history."
4/13/2008, Pajamas Media, Viewing the 1960s From My 60s, Burt Prelutsky
"Perhaps the biggest lie fomented back then was something called the Free Speech Movement. It was like something taken straight out of George Orwell's "1984." The title, alone, would have made Big Brother smirk. The movement, which stretched across America's college campuses from UC Berkeley to Columbia, consisted of student radicals commandeering offices and classrooms, doing their level best to silence professors and administrators who didn't buy into their fascistic dogma. Funny how little some things have changed over the years."
4/13/2008, Indybay, Jackie Goldberg "The Changing Climate of Our Schools: Put Students on the Endangered List, m
"Jackie Goldberg delivered a rousing, but also gut-wrenching address yesterday at the California Studies Conference on the state of California's education system, under the onslaught of the Schwarzenegger, Bush and earlier administrations, and a backward educational ideology promulgated by various interests, entitled 'The Changing Climate of Our Schools: Put Students on the Endangered List'."
3/20/2008, Israel e News, Radical Clergy And The Democratic Party, Moshe Phillips
"Lerner does have a doctorate in philosophy from University of California at Berkeley. While at Berkley he was a leader in the Free Speech Movement, the SDS and the militant, revolutionary left in the Bay Area."
3/15/2008, Augusta Chronicle, Foundation crusades to stamp out absurd assaults on free speech, unsigned
"In the tumultuous 1960s far-left student radicals launched the "free speech movement" at the University of California-Berkeley. Cruelly exploiting anti-Vietnam War and civil rights sentiments, the movement soon spread across the country to other campuses, often resulting in violence, property damage and shutdowns of universities and colleges -- at least temporarily until police were finally called in.
These young thugs, who were christened the "New Left" by generally friendly national media, were no more interested in free speech than they were in signing up for a stint in Vietnam. What they really sought was free speech for themselves, but not for anybody else -- especially those who disagreed with them."
3/14/2008, Contra Costa Times, Tolerance should be the top priority, Martin Snapp
"The irony is that this is the exact opposite of everything Mario Savio, who was the reason many of us came to Berkeley in the first place, stood for.
Mario loved to hear people whose views differed from his own.
'If someone had an alternate view, he'd listen seriously,' the late Prof. Reggie Zelnick, who was a junior faculty member during the Free Speech Movement era, once told me. 'And he was not above changing his position if he thought they were right.'"
3/7/2008, Workers' Liberty, Learning more in 32 hours than in 32 ordinary months, Tom Unterainer
"Jack Weinberg was arrested for trespass on the morning of 1 October 1964. His real "crime" was to be the loudest, most outspoken critic amongst a large group of students and campaigners who'd gathered to challenge restrictions against political campaigning at the University of Berkeley. Weinberg was typical of a number of students who'd started to question not only the world around them but the significance and relevance of their day-to-day lives. These students were influenced by and involved in the civil rights movement where their exposure to brutal, institutional racism armed them with the ability to resist oppression no matter how it was manifested."
3/7/2008, Oakland Tribune, Fashion intersects with history at UC Berkeley's 'From Plugs to Bling", Dino-Ray Ramos
"Switching gears from the traditional to a more radical fashion statement, Benemann displays one of his own outfits, something he wore in the '70s: a denim jacket paired with a Cal state shirt and blue-and-gold muffler. Though simple in appearance, the pieces personified the free speech movement, a stylish way to rebel from the more acceptable sport coats and ties of the '60s."
3/5/2008, San Francisco Chronicle, History of Cal student fashions on display, Patricia Yollin
"'It's so easy to lose history when your population is changing every year,' he said. 'You could stop a student and ask who Mario Savio or Bettina Aptheker was, and they wouldn't have any idea.'
The two were leaders of the Free Speech Movement on campus, which began in 1964. Although many demonstrators then actually sported ties and took their shoes off when they jumped on police cars, Benemann said, their challenge to authority soon transformed fashion on campus."
2/20/2008, The Guardian, In defense of oratory, Sasha Abramsky
"Mario Savio's 1964 peroration outside UC Berkeley's Sproul Hall, the famous words that summed up the goals of Berkeley's free speech movement and set the stage for the campus upheavals of the second half of the 1960s, is still quoted and written about, not because Savio was a strategic genius but because he was an utterly magnetic speaker, throwing his words out before an agitated audience hungry for change."
2/18/2008, The Arizona Republic, Berkeley now is what it fought against, Jock Patton
"I was a freshman there in 1963 when the Free Speech Movement was at its loudest. People don't realize today that the administration of the school and the faculty were very conservative at that time. We had to swear we were not Communists just to register for classes, and all on-campus activities were strictly regulated."
2/12/2008, The Los Angeles Times, Power to all the people, editors
"It's no secret that the epicenter of the free-speech movement does not always encourage or easily tolerate speech with which it doesn't agree. But using city powers and resources in an effort to silence one side's speech while advocating another's goes over the top -- and in Berkeley, that's saying something."
2/12/2008, San Mateo County Times, Cancer claims San Mateo County's voice, Shaun Bishop
"At San Francisco State University, where he taught for several decades, Lantos had tested his oratorical skills several years before the free-speech movement took hold at UC Berkeley.
William Mason, a professor emeritus of economics at the university, remembered seeing Lantos perched on top of the 'speaker's platform' in front of the campus cafeteria, debating politics with a professor of international relations."
2/9/2008, Workers' Liberty, speech fight that shaped the New Left, Tom Unterrainer
"Mario Savio, a student leader of the FSM and undergraduate in Physics and Maths, described the university administration as follows: 'We should not ask whether such intellectual cacophony and bureaucratic harassment are appropriate at universities - for certainly they are not - but rather, whether these local 'plants' in what Clark Kerr calls the 'knowledge industry' deserve the name university at all.'"
2/4/2008, The Daily Californian, Festival Shows That Hip-Hop is Alive and Well, Ethan Strauss
"It started with a panel discussion dedicated to examining the legacy of activism at Cal. There was a considerable trickle-down of Reagan-hating, as well as credit given to the "cultural revolution" that subversively accompanied his reign. The discussion seemed to be one part reflection, one part torch-passing. Older alumni (like former ASUC president Jeff Chang and Free Speech Movement veteran Bettina Apthecker) were conveying a tradition to the next generation."
2/4/2008, Jimma Times, Academic Unfreedom in Ethiopia Universities, Alemayehu G. Mariam
"There is ample evidence to show the dynamic role of universities and dissenting voices in bringing about far reaching social change. In the mid-1960s America, for instance, opposition to the war in Vietnam began at the University of California, Berkeley. The anti-war movement soon evolved into a Free Speech Movement which transformed American universities and the society at large in the decades that followed. Academic freedom in American universities contributed significantly to the debate and policy formulation in civil rights, civil liberties and social justice issues."
1/30/2008, Canada Free Press, City Calls Marines "Unwelcome Intruders", OnTheWeb
"'It is disgraceful that in the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, anti-military activists would attempt to silence the same military men and women who serve this country and give their lives to protect the free speech rights of all Americans, including these ungrateful and despicable people on the Berkeley City Council,' said Melanie Morgan, Chairman of Move America Forward."
1/29/2008, The Daily Californian Online, Selective Disservice, Editorial
"Berkeley of local lore is a haven for ideas that are unwelcome anywhere else. Whatever your beliefs, the story goes, you can pitch them safely here in a place whose name still evokes images of the Free Speech Movement. This city is the place to make an argument?-any argument.
Unless, apparently, you work for the armed forces."
1/27/2008, The Boston Globe, Free Bob Avakian! Oh, he's already free? Never mind., Mark Oppenheimer
"In 'From Ike to Mao and Beyond' (2005), Avakian tells the riveting story of a middle-class California boy who moved left during the '60s, first in the Free Speech Movement and Students for a Democratic Society at Berkeley, then with the Black Panthers, and finally into the far-left Maoism of the party he founded in 1975."
1/25/2008, San Francisco Chronicle, Albert H. Bowker - UC Berkeley chancellor, Jim Doyle
"He joined the UC Berkeley administration after the turmoil of the Free Speech Movement and students' anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s - at a time when the university faced an erosion in state funding, overcrowded classrooms, and both salary and hiring freezes and layoffs."
1/24/2008, Los Angeles Times, Albert H. Bowker, 88; UC Berkeley chancellor, Elaine Woo
"When the opportunity arose to become Berkeley's sixth chancellor, Bowker was ready for the challenge. He found an atmosphere of 'deep suspicion if not open warfare,' not only on the Berkeley campus, where the Free Speech Movement erupted in 1964, but throughout the UC system.
He decided at the outset that he would tolerate no sit-ins or unruly demonstrations. He met his stiffest challenge early in his tenure, when hundreds of students occupied the building that housed the criminology school, which Bowker found academically deficient.
Calling in the police to remove the protesters 'wasn't the most pleasant thing in my administration,' Bowker recalled in an oral history some years ago, 'and I remember that practically all of my senior officers, the president of the student body, and everybody were there saying, 'No, don't do it; there will be bloodshed.''
'Sometimes,' he observed, 'you have to crack a few heads.'"
1/22/2008, Berkeley Daily Planet, Commentary: A Free Speech Conundrum on Telegraph, David Nebenzahl
"This situation, a group with a religious axe to grind taking up residence in the heart of Berkeley's 'time warp' zone extending straight back to the 1960s, with the expected resulting jaw-grinding, is the classic free speech conundrum. And the proper reflex here, one would think, would be to let free speech prevail. After all, this spot is just a couple blocks from the holiest of holies, the public birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, the place where free speech became sacrosanct.
...
What would Mario do?"
1/13/2008, The New York Times, Their Satanic Majesties, Charles Taylor
"This is a novel about the '60s in which the great political upheavals, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, civil rights, Vietnam and the assassinations are barely mentioned. The Beatles, who stood for the greatest sustained explosion of the utopian ideal in all of pop, are dismissed by one character as a group "from Liverpool of all places." In contrast to the love-and-peace ethos the decade is remembered for, every early Stones gig here ends with a fight."
1/13/2008, Los Angeles Times, UC Berkeley's bones of contention, Richard C. Paddock
"Similar disputes have played out elsewhere, but Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, is widely regarded as a bastion of liberalism. Since 1992, the city of Berkeley has celebrated Indigenous People's Day instead of Columbus Day. But at UC Berkeley, the debate over the bones has turned ugly.
The bones, along with 400,000 Native American artifacts, are held by UC's Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, which has a small exhibit space on campus but one of the largest collections of human remains in the U.S. outside a cemetery."
1/9/2008, Culture Change, What a Free Speech Movement instigator teaches us today, Jan Lundberg
"BC [Brad Cleaveland]: The resistance was intensive from about the time of my manifesto was published September 10, 1964, by SLATE. Many, including myself, had been working 24/7 until October 2, 1964 when the movement became explosive and hit the national and international press. That was the day we seized the police car in front of the Administration Building.
¶
This event was an astonishing one; explosive even, and in no small part because of the international press coverage. So, the beginning was the two weeks prior to October -- of highly intensive student activism -- and October 2, with the dramatic take-over of a UC police car. It occurred at noon during the heaviest foot traffic in the center of Sproul Plaza. We turned a police car into a speakers' platform and held it for 72 hours.
¶
By '64, and the FSM revolt, I'd been active for 7 years. I was the first treasurer of the first radical student group, SLATE Student Political Party. In '59, just after the top 3-4 leaders of SLATE left Berkeley for points East to grad schools, such as Columbia and NYU, I led SLATE in a 'defiance rally,' which, in turn brought about the early retirement of UC Berkeley's Dean of Students. In 1960, I was a principal organizer of the anti-HUAC demos in SF, on May 13th, l960. In 1962, I got my MA, under three principal faculty members, in Political Theory. The group formed under Hannah Arendt, who was a Spring '55 Lecturer, in the Political Science Department."
12/23/2007, New York Times, Think Again: Bound For Academic Glory?, Stanley Fish
"The decline in state support for higher education noted by Yudoff is in part a legacy of the 60's. I remember as a fledgling member of the Berkeley faculty in 1962 being given special treatment by merchants. The university, known as Cal, was a source of community pride. Three years later, after the Free Speech movement and a wave of student protests across the country, I had to be careful not to identify myself as a university employee. The middle-class reaction to left politics on campus had already set in, and in the decades that followed it has become an orthodoxy."
12/21/2007, The Berkeley Daily Planet, Circa Berkeley, J. Cote
"Usually when people write stories or talk about Berkeley in the '60s and '70s, it involves Mario Savio and the Vietnam War. They also tend to go on and include facts about hippies, Telegraph Avenue, tear gas, the University of California, People's Park, James Rector, Ronald Reagan, the National Guard, SDS, the SLA, the Weather Underground, as well as painting vivid pictures of the counter-culture, subculture, and drug culture of those times."
12/07/2007, Pasadena Star-News, Five-star hotel or college campus?, Steve Scauzillo
"At Berkeley, the student guide emphasized the Nobel Prize winners and the number of volumes (as in books) housed in its historic library. He even spoke of the free speech movement."
12/7/2007, Middle East Online, Needed Now: Spirit of the Sixties, Vincent L. Guarisco
"The middle finger was directly pointed towards University administrations as well, for a variety of legitimate reasons. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement resulted in many arrests in its struggle. In fact, it had the largest number of student arrests in United States history.
Like an army of hungry vultures, 700 angry policemen wielding clubs and spraying mace descended on the University during a peaceful day of protest and instigated a full-blown riot, assaulting dissenters (and news anchors) whose only crime was simply exercising their constitutional right to peaceably dissent in a public forum.
Many were beaten unconscious in this shameless display of unnecessary violence. Only one day of many to remember in our nation's history."
12/7/2007, Ithaca Journal, The betrayal of the free speech movement, Alex Kantrowitz
"In late 1964 a fiery Mario Savio led thousands of Berkley students in what would become known as the now famous 'Free Speech Movement.' What had set the movement off was Berkley's refusal to allow students to disseminate civil rights literature on the university's 'Ho-Plaza-like' Bancroft strip. This refusal set modern liberalism's ancestors on fire in a quest to ensure free speech for all.
In talking about the pursuit of free speech Savio exclaimed, 'The most beautiful thing in the world is the freedom of speech. And those words are in me, they're sort of burned into my soul ... To me, freedom of speech is something that represents the very dignity of what a human being is ... It is the thing that marks us as just below the angels.'
The Berkley campus rallied around Savio and other student leaders and eventually won that right to free speech. They had beaten the university.
Savio and his gang then went on to protest Vietnam and the rest is history; modern liberalism had its start."
12/7/2007, Berkeley Daily Planet, No Conflict: Opposing Military, Supporting Free Speech, Becky O'Malley
"As traditional as is Berkeley's anti-war philosophy, the city has an equally long and passionate history of support for the rights of free speech and assembly, which supports the right of this Office to exist in Berkeley. The essence of the Free Speech Movement was protecting the right of all voices to be heard, even those at odds with the prevailing political climate of the time and place.
Free Speech must not be limited to speech with which one agrees. To allow a legally permitted Office to be shut down, or to limit its right to do business because one disapproves of its message, gives lie to Berkeley's claim as a city tolerant of diverse viewpoints, and home of the Free Speech Movement."
12/4/2007, The Berkeley Daily Planet, Tree-Sitters Celebrate One-Year Anniversary, Richard Brenneman
"For Michael Rossman, one of the leading activists of the Free Speech Movement that rocked the Berkeley campus more than four decades ago, it was the erection of the fences that transformed the protest into a free speech issue.
'I didn't know then that even earlier campus police had seized tables and literature' during the tree-sit, he said."
11/30/2007, The Berkeley Daily Planet, Goines Posters on Display at Hillside Club, Karen Jacobs
"Goines came to Berkeley in 1963 to study classics. Advocating free speech, he was among 800 students arrested for occupying Sproul Hall. This landed Goines, then 19, in jail. His personal account of these times is told in his compelling book, The Free Speech Movement; Coming of Age in the 1960s."
11/29/2007, City on a Hill Press, Politics and personalit, Jessica Parral
"Bettina Aptheker has been many things in her life. She has been a feminist, a lesbian, a Communist, a leader in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, a victim of childhood sexual abuse, Jewish, Buddhist, an activist, an author, a mother, and a grandmother. Right now, she is one of UC Santa Cruz's most popular and renowned professors. Her classes regularly fill up and students give her intimate teaching style rave reviews. David Horowitz can't stand her, and historians question whether she is telling the truth about her childhood abuse. For Bettina Aptheker, the personal has always been political."
11/28/2007, Pacifica Tribune, Wandering and Wondering, John Maybury
"SWAMI SEZ
'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!' (Mario Savio)"
11/27/2007, The Daily Californian, Glory, Glory Hole-lelujah, Christine Borden
"Glory holes, however, have long been a UC Berkeley institution, at least since 1965. In November of that year, the Daily Cal launched a features series about homosexuality, starting with glory holes. Features editor Konstantin Berlandt wrote that 'in a 21-month period ... the Berkeley police arrested 240 people for homosexual offenses of 'soliciting or committing a lewd act in a public place or open to the view of the public' or 'loitering in a public restroom for the purpose of engaging in a lewd act,'' according to then Berkeley Police patrolman Joe Mulvey. Despite the liberalism of the Free Speech Movement, homosexuality was still hush-hush. Discreet pleasure was the only pleasure, and even then it could be a pain to tiptoe to the restroom."
11/27/2007, Berkeley Daily Planet, Commentary: Act Rationally: Go Independent, Joanna Graham
"Which brings me to my second point. Vote. Why not, it's fun. It feels all patriotic and small-town like Norman Rockwell, with the cute little flag out in front and the 'I voted' sticker to wear. But don't stop there! Think of something! Do something! Find others to do it with! Be creative! Be brave! Be aggressive! Throw yourself on the gears, like Mario Savio said. Absent divine intervention, what I do and you do and you do is our last, slim, chance to save the American republic. Which reminds me. Don't forget to keep your fingers crossed."
11/26/2007, The New York Sun, The Clintons' Berkeley Summer of Love, Josh Gerstein
"Mrs. Clinton's book says she and her then-boyfriend "shared a small apartment near a big park not far from the University of California at Berkeley campus where the Free Speech Movement started in 1964."
Records from the university show that Rosenberg, who died in 1998, graduated from Berkeley in March 1971 and lived at that time in a small, second-floor apartment on Derby Street. The apartment was about six blocks from the main university campus and just three blocks from People's Park, the site of a violent 1969 confrontation between protesters and police that left one protester dead and more than 100 wounded.
The left-wing law firm where Mrs. Clinton worked was still representing one of the leaders of that day's protests, Daniel Siegel, when she clerked there in 1971."
11/23/2007, Berkeley Daily Planet, A Free Speech Grizzly Sermon, Michael Rossman
"This is the profound lesson from the Free Speech Movement, also. You should get it straight. The press makes it look like, 'oh, there were giants in the earth, in those days!' It's not true. We were just like you. Except we didn't have T-shirts like yours printed up, because it cost too much then. We had the same feelings of being outshouldered, neglected, bulldozed, nobody listens to us. We looked a little funny. We dressed a little funny. So it's not the past. The past is still in the present. This is a profound free speech issue. These people in the trees, they're there for me. I didn't climb the tree. They did it for me. Thank you, people in the trees. [applause] I'd like to say, 'because you were there, I didn't have to climb the tree.' But you know, that's a cop-out. That I didn't come before this, that I didn't climb a tree like Sylvia climbed the tree."
11/22/2007, San Diego Union Tribune, Authorities mull thorny options to uproot tree-sitters, Michelle Locke
"Both sides say they don't want a treetop confrontation in Berkeley, home of the Free Speech Movement of 1964, when students protested the university's ban on campus political activities and touched off a national debate over freedom of expression. The city is also home to People's Park, a haunt of '60s radicalism - and site of a 1969 occupation by the National Guard on the order of former Gov. Ronald Reagan."
11/18/2007, The State, Angie LeClercq's letters from the Lowcountry and beyond, Claudia Smith Brinson
"The two left for the University of California, where they supported Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, one of the opening salvos of the 1960s' culture wars."
11/11/2007, The Reporter, For 'Rosie' and all the riveters, Cathy Bussewitz
"'He [Henry Kaiser] brought people here into the Bay Area, black and white, who had never shared drinking fountains,' Soskin said. 'So the entire system of southern segregation was imported to the Bay Area. The groundwork was laid then, when the war ended, for the civil rights movement, which swept from Port Chicago to Richmond, from the Bay Area on to the University of California campus, into the free speech movement, on to Selma and across the country, and accelerated that social change.'"
11/8/2007, UCSD Guardian, Academic Fixation Encourages Political Apathy on Campus, Jake Blanc
"In the 1960s, Berkeley rode the wave of radical thought emanating from San Francisco, and still has a prevalent activist movement today. Founded during the '60s - a time of immense social and political upheaval - UCSD originally did have foundations in political dissent. The campus should be proud of its political roots and look to its once-proud activist community as motivation to revive its current one. UC Berkeley holds claim to the Free Speech Movement and Mario Savio's bold speech on top of a police car, but few are aware of UCSD's own historical protests, including that of George Winne, a 23-year-old graduate student who set himself on fire in the middle of Revelle Plaza in protest of the Vietnam War."
11/8/2007, The Daily Californian, Berkeley Filmmaker Connie Field's 'Apartheid and the Club of the West' is a Riveting History of Protest, Lisa Xu
"The arresting sight of thousands of protesting students flooding Sproul Plaza, jam-packed and agitated, appears about midway through 'Apartheid and the Club of the West,' the first installment of Berkeley filmmaker Connie Field's new documentary series about the history of apartheid in South Africa. Those who have no memory of the anti-apartheid movement in the United States, including the majority of current UC Berkeley students who hadn't even been born at the time, might be forgiven for assuming Field recycles footage from the Free Speech Movement and the Vietnam War protests in the 1960s."
11/8/2007, Indiana Daily Student, What is Art?, Ryan Brown
"The term 'activist art' refers to a style of art that uses imagery and irony very heavily to highlight public concern and (hopefully) promote a change in the status quo. It first began in the 1930s and reached a very strong peak in the 1960s, most notably in the civil rights, free speech and anti-war movements. Perhaps the most well-known quote from the free speech movement came from Mario Savio, a UC Berkeley philosophy major, who in a speech at Sproul Plaza in Berkeley, called out to activists:
'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!'"
11/7/2007, The Huffington Post, Better Green Late than Never, Tim Berry
"There's no denying that 'Greening' has been a long time coming. A show of hands please ... how many remember the stir caused by 'The Greening of America?' Published in 1970, (Ok, a show of hands, how many were alive in 1970?) it was essentially a tribute to so-called 'counter-culture' ideas of the late 1960s. We're talking about Mario Savio and the free speech movement in Berkeley in 1964, then the anti-war movement of the late 1960s, the world wide student movement in 1968, civil rights, hippies, and, among all of that, environmentalism. It wasn't global warming back then as much as Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring; but it was a start."
11/7/2007, Los Angeles Times, A branch office of Berkeley's protest tradition, Thomas Bonk
"Welcome to Protest Central, where the roots grow deep in the campus soil. Protest is a well-known concept here, nurtured by the Free Speech Movement of Mario Savio in 1964, the People's Park protest of 1969 and the crackdowns by UC system President Clark Kerr."
11/5/2007, The Nation, Father of History, Christopher Phelps
"The precise nature of that painful past remained obscure until one year ago, when Seal Press published Bettina Aptheker's memoir Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel. Its central revelation, that her father had sexually molested her when she was a child, set off a furious, still-unsettled Internet debate over the veracity of those memories and came as a bombshell to admirers accustomed to thinking of Herbert Aptheker as a stalwart opponent of oppression."
11/4/2007, Santa Cruz Sentinel, Chris Watson Bookends: Tom Brokaw's book 'Boom!' looks at the outfall from the Sixties, Chris Watson
"The collected reminiscences run the gamut -- from the drugs of Haight Ashbury to the March on Selma and the Free Speech Movement, and including the riots in Watts, the assassinations, Ms. magazine, Watergate and Woodstock."
10/30/2007, Berkeley Daily Planet, Berkeley This Week, Editors
Mario Savio Memorial Lecture: "From Jim Crow to Guantanamo: Prisons, Democracy and Empire" with Angela Davis, social activist and UC Santa Cruz professor at 7 p.m. at Pauley Ballroom
10/25/2007, The Golden Gate Xpress Online, Passion in protest, then and now, Deana Saenz
"Along with the idealistic views of the past, Ethnic Studies Professor Larry Salomon, who has taught his students about the history of SF State's involvement in the 60s protests, recounted the support of other major movements such as the Free Speech Movement and the Civil Rights Movement that were going on at the same time as the anti-war protests.
'Young students had already been cutting their teeth with things like the Civil Rights movement and Free Speech before the anti-war movement came along,' he said. 'And young people in the 60s believed that what they were doing on this campus would actually lead to change.'"
10/24/2007, The Van Der Galiën Gazette, Loss of Free Inquiry on Campus Betrays Liberal Legacy, Jason Steck
"In the 1960s, the origins of the campus free speech movement lay within the political left. The reaction by moderates and conservatives to the left on this issue is not always arising out of ideological hostility, but rather out of disappointment and disillusionment. We had thought that this was one issue where liberalism and conservatism should and did have common cause. For myself, it is love for the liberal principle of free inquiry - a principle that too many post-modern leftists and radicals have betrayed - that motivates special condemnation towards the left.
It is time for some campus leftists and liberals to recapture their own moral and intellectual heritage."
10/21/2007, Boston Globe, Bonded with paper, Sam Allis
"Her conviction was further strengthened upon learning that, as an undergraduate at Berkeley in the 1960s, Sid [Berger] collected fliers announcing campus protests, labeled them and eventually sold the lot to the Free Speech Movement Archives at the California State Library."
10/19/2007, The Daily Californian, EDITORIAL: In Enemy Territory, Editors
"Since the Free Speech Movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, Berkeley has been viewed as the Mecca for anti-military sentiments. The city of Berkeley has declared itself a sanctuary for soldiers who choose not to fight in Iraq, and only this summer did Berkeley High School finally capitulate to allow the federal government to collect data on students interested in military service."
10/19/2007, Human Events.com, Showdown at Berkeley, Catherine Moy
"But Code Pink's calendar shows a concerted campaign to drive the recruitment office out of Berkeley, the birthplace of the free speech movement. One Code Pink protester held a sign that said, 'No military predators in our town.' 'A lot of good men have spilled their blood so Code Pink can do this,' veteran Jim Kelly said."
10/17/2007, San Francisco Chronicle, Campus Movie Fest: Student filmmakers let loose at San Jose finale, Justin Berton
"While many of the 41 movies submitted by UC Berkeley students aim for laughs on some level, others are serious-minded documentaries, such as 'A Free Lunch at People's Park,' which offers a glimpse into the city's homeless programs, and 'Billy,' an accounting of the campus's Free Speech Movement."
10/17/2007, Los Angeles Times, '60s still alive on a corner in Echo Park, Steve Lopez
"'The free speech movement literally started in my house,' says Goldberg, who hasn't ever been muzzled in the years that have followed. Every Friday evening, the brother of longtime teacher and pol Jackie Goldberg is at Sunset and Echo Park, happy to get a horn honk or a raised fist for all his cajoling about this crazy war and its crazier sponsors."
10/13/2007, The Berkeley Daily Planet, Berkeley/Berslickerly, Ted Friedman
"In shop windows, on banners, everywhere one looks, Berkeley is celebrating itself like a gaggle of narcissists. Recently Berkeley has recognized the Free Speech Movement, various Nobel laureates, Julia Vinograd (Telegraph Avenue's best-known street poet), and Telegraph Avenue itself."
10/12/2007, The Daily Californian, EDITORIAL: Avoid the Stereotype, Editors
"As students, we see everyday that this campus is not the same school as it once was in the '60s. But to the rest of the nation, Berkeley is still synonymous with the revolutionary Free Speech Movement, radical flowers-in-their-hair hippies and crazy liberal politics. When the media displays images of the protesters the day of the debate, it will only reaffirm this generalization."
10/12/2007, Contra Costa Times, Snapp Shots: Beloved Cal professor a father figure to many, Martin Snapp
"Above all, they were brilliant teachers, and none was more brilliant than Jacobson. For many students, his lectures were life-changing experiences.
I was one of them. I was attending college on the East Coast when the Free Speech Movement broke out at Cal in 1964, and I flew here to see what the shouting was all about."
10/8/2007, New York Magazine, Are the controversial comments of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (or Larry Summers or Bill O'Reilly or NARAL) really so threatening?, Kurt Andersen
"The seminal student uprising, the takeover of the UC Berkeley administration building in 1964, was driven by the all-American urge to expand the discourse: The Free Speech Movement protesters, liberal and conservative, demanded the right to hand out political fliers on campus. However, the following year, the emigre German Marxist Herbert Marcuse, newly tenured at UC San Diego, published his influential essay 'Repressive Tolerance,' arguing that the free expression of every sort of idea lulls us into accepting a larger oppression. We should not practice 'tolerance toward that which is radically evil,' he wrote; at a time 'of clear and present danger' to progressive dreams, 'tolerance cannot be indiscriminate ... it cannot protect false words.'"
10/6/2007, Beyond Chron, Forget Columbus: Let's Remember Italian Radicals, Tommi Avicolli-Mecca
"From 1935-50, Harlem Congressman Vito Marcantonio fought hard for progressive legislation (including civil rights) and was attacked vociferously for it by Joe McCarthy and his buddies. During the Civil Rights Movement, Italian Americans, such as singer Tony Bennett and Father James Groppi, joined the pickets and marches down South. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane DiPrima and Gregory Corso were prominent voices among the Beat poets. Student activist Mario Savio led the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley."
10/4/2007, Payvand News, The New Warfront, Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich
"In 1964 a coalition of student groups at the University of California, Berkeley claimed the right to conduct political activities on campus; the coalition became known as the Free Speech Movement. Political activism and protests spread to other campuses in the 1960s. The youth movement's demonstrations soon merged with the protests of students who opposed the Vietnam War. By the spring of 1968, student protests had reached hundreds of campuses. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, antiwar demonstrators clashed with the police, and the images of police beating students shocked television audiences. Violence peaked at an antiwar protest at Ohio's Kent State University in May 1970 when National Guard troops gunned down four student protesters."
10/2/2007, The Daily Californian, Judge Orders Protester to Vacate Grove, Angelica Dongallo
"Doug Buckwald, director of the Save the Oaks at the Stadium coalition, likened the tree-sitters to the Free Speech Movement.
'The new Sproul Plaza is in the oak grove,' Buckwald said."
10/1/2007, OpEdNews, The New Warfront, Soraya
In 1964 a coalition of student groups at the University of California, Berkeley claimed the right to conduct political activities on campus; the coalition became known as the Free Speech Movement. Political activism and protests spread to other campuses in the 1960s. The youth movement's demonstrations soon merged with the protests of students who opposed the Vietnam War.
10/1/2007, Today in History October first, Associated Press
"In 1964, the Free Speech Movement was launched at the University of California at Berkeley."
10/1/2007, On-line Interview: Greil Marcus,
"Greil Marcus was born in 1945 and attended Berkley in the early 1960s. He majored in 'American Studies,' just as Berkley's Free Speech Movement was ratcheting up into its very own American study. Then he did some post-grad work in poli-sci. Lots of people, moved by their exposure to the transforming energies of the FSM, may have done likewise. What lots of people didn't do was become Rolling Stone's first reviews editor in 1969, thereby embarking on a career in music criticism so intellectually, emotionally and, yea, spiritually ambitious that by even calling it 'music criticism' I've already lied twice."
9/28/2007, The Huffington Post, Julie in the Sky with Diamonds: Across The Taymor Universe, Gregory Weinkauf
"'I think that young people were very turned on to the power that they had to change what was around them. There were so many movements: Black Power movement; Women's movement; Anti-War movement; Free Speech movement; Psychedelic Tune-In Drop-Out Don't-Get-Engaged movement, go off to a commune and live your own life. These kids were rebelling, they were rebelling against the 50s. They were rebelling against their conservative, adult parents who thought that they were actually giving their children everything, every opportunity, post-War."
9/28/2007, The Berkeley Daily Planet, 'Shakespeare's Greatest Hits', Ken Bullock
"Subterranean Shakespeare's CD, Shakespeare's Greatest Hits ('Two years in the making!') is something of an instant Berkeley minor classic, what with Michael Rossman (he of the Free Speech Movement) belting out 'The Ballad of Tom O'Bedlam' (which Robert Graves and Edith Sitwell both credited to the Bard) or tootling flute on other numbers with The Rude Mechanicals, or funnyman Ed Holmes and poet G. P. Skratz doing up the Scottish Weird Sisters' 'Double, double, toil and trouble' with Andy Dinsmore as World Music."
9/28/2007, Contra Costa Times, Piedmonter is who's behind wild, wacky parade in Berkeley, Martin Snapp
"He [John Solomon] grew up in the San Fernando Valley, where his family moved when he was 5 and entered Cal in the fall of 1964.
'Just in time for the Free Speech Movement,' he said. 'I didn't go to class; I struck with everyone else. It was mind-blowing -- and eye-opening, too.'"
9/26/2007, Christian Science Monitor, Hateful speech isn't hateful action, Jonathan Zimmerman
"Recall that in 1961, the University of California at Berkeley barred Malcolm X from appearing on campus. Communist speakers were banned until 1963, when the university decided to allow 'radical' speakers if they were balanced by "traditional" ones. Students' own speech was closely regulated, too. They could not solicit money or members for any political organization, because allowing such activity might give the university's imprimatur to their cause.
Sound familiar? Today, the critics of Columbia sound a lot like Berkeley's administrators forty years ago. If you allow someone to speak on campus, the argument goes, you're giving them implicit approval. And some people are so reprehensible that they don't deserve it.
But we can't trust university administrators - or anyone, really - to make this distinction.
That's why students protested at Berkeley in the Free Speech Movement of 1964, the first salvo in a great national wave of campus dissent. Across the country, Americans won the right to say whatever they wished at our universities."
9/17/2007, The Daily Californian, Five Minutes With... John Garamendi, Angelica Dongallo
"Garamendi said although the environment on campus has changed since he was a UC Berkeley student during the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, students today should strive to act on issues that affect them."
9/13/2007, New York Times, University Fences In a Berkeley Protest, and a New One Arises, Jesse Mckinley
"'I am appalled," said Michael Kelly, who leads a group opposing the stadium plan. 'I cannot believe that the institution that gave birth to the Free Speech Movement has done this.'"
9/13/2007, Los Angeles Times, Politicized UC Regents?, Amina Khan
"The one notable exception to this rule was UC President Clark Kerr, and his handling of the Free Speech Movement. The former UC Berkeley chancellor, who had clashed with Gov. Ronald Reagan, was summarily fired by the Board of Regents in 1967. But that was a different time and place, paranoia still reigned, the FBI was plotting actively to depose the chancellor, and Reagan made dumping Kerr part of his 1966 campaign. California, fortunately, has changed a lot since then, and academic freedom is prioritized far higher than political leanings."
9/13/2007, Daily Californian, This Week: Capturing Berkeley, Louis Peitzman
"'Berkeley in the Sixties': You know how people always talk about bringing back Berkeley? This is what they're referring to. Well, not the documentary so much as what it depicts: the political activism, the Free Speech Movement, the awesome music. Apparently there were also some drugs involved. Just a rumor I heard somewhere."
9/12/2007, Tikkun, The Israel Lobby, Michael Lerner
"My friend (and former leader of the Free Speech Movement) Mario Savio (not a Jew), shared that perception about the misguided harshness of Left critiques of Israel and joined with me in creating an organization that would be my first attempt at a 'Middle Path' that was both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine and that would support a demilitarized Palestinian state, an international force to provide security for both Israel and Palestine, reparations for Palestinians, and a return of Israel to the pre-1967 borders with minor border changes so that Jews could continue to live in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem and worship at the Kotel (Western Wall)-it was called 'The Committee for Peace in the Middle East.'"
9/7/2007, American Thnker, Football and the Soul of Berkeley, Thomas Lifson
"But even more importantly, a great football team brings excitement and starts to change the atmosphere on campus. It is a fact that for all its academic honors and worldwide eminence, Cal is a bit of a laughingstock, a worldwide symbol of student and faculty radicalism run amok. At roughly the same time the Free Speech Movement broke out on campus, political control of the city switched from the Republicans to the Democrats, and continued onward in a leftward vector. Town and gown are inextricably linked; in point of fact, the university preceded the establishment of the municipality.
To the consternation of local leftists, Berkeley, the campus and the community alike, is in the grip of pigskin fever. Comparatively few remember longhaired Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement; quarterback Nate Longshore and wide receiver DeSean Jackson are the heroes of the day, along with other players who create excitement. Instead of smelly hippies and fulminating Marxists, images of celebrating frat boys, cute and sexy cheerleaders, and heroic athletes dominate media mentions of Berkeley."
9/5/2007, UC Berkeley Press Release, Professor known for his inspirational teaching has died,
"Jacobson's interests in political theory, at times led to political action. During the 1960s he delivered a noted address in support of student demonstrators who had been arrested during the Free Speech Movement in 1964. He was an early public opponent of the Vietnam War. During the early 1980s, said Ken Jacobson, his father participated in demonstrations held to protest UC investments in companies with interests tied to South Africa, which then was living under apartheid."
9/3/2007, California Progress Report, A Remembrance of Alameda County's Labor Day Picnics, Bill Cavala
"Groulx himself was arrested and convicted of misdemeanors arising out of picket line incidents dozens of times. He used to laugh about being characterized as having the fastest left hand in the labor movement. (His only felony arrest stemmed from an accusation that he'd thrown a sheriff's deputy out of a second story window during the student sit ins during the UC Free Speech movement)."
8/31/2007, The Berkeley Daily Planet, UC Stadium Oak Grove Fence Prompts Violent Clash, Riya Bhattacharjee
"This fence is contrary to Judge Barbara Miller's ruling on Feb. 9 that there should be no physical alteration on the environment of the oak grove until the court rules on the merits of the case on Sept. 19,' he [Steve Volker, attorney for the California Oaks Foundation] said. 'It is a direct attack on fundamental rights, a noose on the First Amendment ... Berkeley is the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement and it now threatens to be its graveyard. This day will be remembered as a day of infamy for this university as an attempt to crush the community's voice.'"
8/24/2007, The Berkeley Daily Planet, Kornbluth at Berkeley Rep, Ken Bullock
"Before the semi-triumphant finish, which brings the audience to an epiphany that they're part and parcel of their entertainer's commitment to recovering his actual sheepskin, Josh has brought in a cast of dozens, at least; by implication, teeming masses, including his unregenerately Red parents, his preemie brother (introduced afterwards in the audience), whom his father saved by holding and pacing the ward, the brave African American students caught between guardsmen and white mobs in the integration experiment at Little Rock, Lonnie Hancock and Don Perata (a wry sketch of a master politico working a not-too-friendly room) each finally facing an irritable gaggle of Berkeley activists in the state capitol, the Free Speech movement ... and whoeverelse he can recover from the history of Western Civilization for a temporary fit."
8/23/2007, SF Bay Guardian, The Human Be-In, Bruce B. Brugmann
"The anti-war and free speech movement in Berkeley thought the hippies were too disengaged and spaced out. Their influence might draw the young away from resistance to the war. The hippies thought the anti-war movement was doomed to endless confrontations with the establishment which would recoil with violence and fascism."
8/18/2007, San Jose Mercury News, California dream of free college wilts under fiscal pressure, Michelle Locke
"Big changes were sweeping across campus-the 1964 Free Speech Movement is considered a bellwether for the decade of campus protests that followed.
'Everybody in Berkeley was involved in politics during those days,' recalls Garamendi. "
8/14/2007, The Berkeley Daily Planet, Pagodas? on Telegraph?, Richard Brenneman
"But if Ken Sarachan has his way, the pagodas will crown "Berkeley's greenest building," housing businesses on the first floor, a Free Speech Movement museum on the mezzanine, a grassy rooftop park doubling as a venue for live entertainment and public events, and a collection of pagodas accommodating a restaurant and what could become Berkeley's most unique apartments.
He calls it the Free Speech and Architectural Expression Building, 'the Free Speech Building for short.'"
8/10/2007, The Argus, Technology enhances art of storytelling, Cecily Burt
"The organizers hope to collect stories from ordinary residents; early settlers on the railroad, those who moved west during and the war to work in the shipyards, and those who were part of civil rights struggles epitomized during the heyday of the Black Panther Party and Free Speech Movement."
8/7/2007, Le Monde Diplomatique, Unexceptional Californian exception, Christian Ghasarian
"This is the campus of Berkeley, home of the 1964 Free Speech Movement - student protests with international repercussions - where being different is the norm. There are stickers on cars and walls: 'Why be normal?' and 'Question reality!'"
8/6/2007, Chicago Sun-Times, Bears put faith in veteran line, Mike Mulligan
"Legend has it that a 24-year-old college student named Jack Weinberg, then the leader of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California-Berkeley, was the first to utter this sacred line: 'We have a saying in the movement that we don't trust anybody over 30.'"
7/22/2007, San Bernardino County Sun, Couple still activists after all these years, Debbie Pfeiffer Trunnell, Staff Writer
"In the years leading up to the Summer of Love, Ellen [Hattis], now a librarian and computer technician at Smiley Elementary School in Redlands, was caught up in the Free Speech Movement, which began in the 1964-1965 school year at UC Berkeley.
At the time, students insisted that the university administration lift a ban on on-campus political activities and acknowledge the students' right to free speech and academic freedom.
'I remember wearing black arm bands and boycotting classes," Ellen recalled. "Everyone was radicalized - you couldn't help it.'
...
To get his music out there, he formed a group called The Medicine Cabinet.
The band included a guitarist who had been part of the Free Speech Movement, a drummer who was a classmate in medical school and two black kids from San Francisco who had entertained at his medical fraternity."
7/20/2007, Berkeley Daily Planet, Council Clashes Over Decorum, Shuts B-Town, Judith Scherr
"Spring's proposal calls for a public hearing in September on rules for public comment, which Phoebe Anne Sorgen told the council she supports. 'We need more public comment in the home of the free speech movement,' she said."
7/17/2007, Berkeley Daily Planet, Commentary: Mayor's Proposed Public Comment Rules Violate Fair Play, Dona Spring
"Urge the Council to set this matter for a special meeting/workshop to flush out the issues and to fully discuss the pros and cons of the alternative methods of structuring public comment proposed by Council-member Worthington and myself. (How ironic it is that we have to fight Berkeley's Mayor for our legal right to public comment in the cradle of the Free Speech Movement?!)"
7/13/2007, The Berkeley Daily Planet, Controversial Planning Manager Rhoades Quits, Richard Brenneman
"It was [Art] Goldberg, a veteran of the Free Speech Movement, who characterized Rhoades as 'the duplicitous insect who runs the Zoning Department (a subdivision of planning) and who specializes in keeping neighbors in the dark' in a June 6, 2003 letter to the Daily Planet."
7/10/2007, Salon Books, "The Trap", Astra Taylor
"Brook points out that Ronald Reagan instituted tuition at Berkeley -- reversing a 100-year-old tradition -- only after the Free Speech Movement of the early 1960s, a ploy to punish radicals. 'In the end,' Brook writes, 'tuition and other conservative economic policies did more to undermine student activism than any CIA-style investigation ever could.'"
7/10/2007, Blogcritics Magazine, Music DVD Review: Turned Up And Turned On, The Original Country Joe Band, T. Michael Testi
"Country Joe and the Fish were founded in the San Francisco area in 1965-66 as a political device; partially of necessity, and partially for entertainment when the Free Speech Movement was organizing a series of demonstrations on the Berkeley campus against the war in Vietnam."
#1 - July 11, 2007 @ 15:27PM - Lee Felsenstein [URL]
A point of history - the Free Speech Movement did not organize any demonstrations against the Vietnam war - it was an umbrella organization that fought for the right of student to organize for any political activity, and it dissolved itself shortly after that right was effectively won.
The FSM created the political and cultural space for other organizations such as the Vietnam Day Committee to form and organize the demonstrations for which Country Joe wrote his songs.
Much more detailed information can be found on the web page of The Free Speech Movement Archives.
07/01/2007, Mercury News, Tech pioneer weighs future of energy, Nicole C. Wong
"Lee Felsenstein might be best known for his role in the 1970s and 1980s as the legendary Homebrew Computer Club's master of ceremonies. Or as the 1990s inventor of the 'pedal-powered Internet.'
But few know that he's never really liked using computers. He's a paper-and-pencil kind of guy.
'My talents are day dreaming and explaining - neither of which requires a computer,' said Felsenstein, a 62-year-old designer and developer of analog and digital products."
6/26/2007, San Francisco Chronicle, Can People's Park change?, Rick DelVecchio
"The park is best remembered for the 1969 violence, sparked when Gov. Ronald Reagan ordered in police to protect what was then a vacant construction site from squatters. It turned into one of the bloodiest confrontations of the Vietnam era. Less known is the work done by volunteers, in the spirit of the Free Speech Movement of 1964 and the ecology movement of the 1970s, to gradually transform the site into a real park and to persist despite the university's attempts to regain control. The pride and militancy of those who contributed to this effort can't be underestimated."
6/24/2007, Boston Globe, Privilege, tragedy, and a young leader, Neil Swidey and Michael Paulson, Globe Staff
"In the fall of 1965, Mitt Romney left behind Cranbrook, with its varsity sweaters and hand-delivered courtship letters, and moved across the country to San Francisco's Bay Area, which was fast becoming the capital of the counter-culture movement. By the time he settled into his freshman dorm at Stanford University, the nearby campus of the University of California-Berkeley had been fully radicalized by the anti-authority Free Speech Movement. In San Francisco, Haight-Ashbury was emerging as an LSD-fueled mecca for free-loving hippies in peasant skirts and dashikis."
6/18/2007, The Daily Californian, Chancellor Decries U.K. Group's Israeli School Boycott Proposal, Amanda Ott
"'Their threat to cut off all funding, visits, and joint publishing with Israeli institutions violates the fundamental principles of academic freedom and freedom of speech that are the hallmarks of great universities nationally and internationally,' Birgeneau said in his statement. 'We hold these values most deeply at Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement.'"
6/15/2007, Connecticut Post Online, Greek students anything but apathetic, Thomas Keane
"American college students should know about the Free Speech Movement and demonstrations that rocked the University of California's Berkeley campus in 1964. These protests led the way for student opposition to administrations limiting their academic freedom. Today, it seems, students no longer march over campus issues. Over spring break, I saw that this is not necessarily true. There are still students who choose to demonstrate, and even battle the police, over matters concerning their schools and academics. My family visited Athens, Greece, where we witnessed a student demonstration that became a riot."
6/14/2007, UC Berkeley News, Statement in response to British faculty union's proposed action against Israeli universities, Robert J. Birgeneau
"As chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, I share the growing outrage over the efforts by some members of Britain's University and College Union to promulgate a boycott against Israeli academics and academic institutions. Their threat to cut off all funding, visits, and joint publishing with Israeli institutions violates the fundamental principles of academic freedom and freedom of speech that are the hallmarks of great universities nationally and internationally. We hold these values most deeply at Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement."
6/12/2007, Black Star News, "Revolution" Comes To Harlem, Sunsara Taylor
"Bob Avakian is a revolutionary communist leader from the 60's who fought alongside the Black Panther Party, against the Vietnam War, and came through the Berkeley Free Speech movement and has never sold out, never given up, and never backed away from the toughest questions and obstacles confronting the people and the prospects for real revolutionary transformation."
6/7/2007, Los Angeles Times, Martin Meyerson, 84; led UC Berkeley during '60s, Elaine Woo
"Meyerson was dean of UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design when he was named acting chancellor in January 1965, three months after student protests over the right to engage in political activity and debate had exploded into the Free Speech Movement.
During his six months as campus chief, Meyerson was confronted with a number of crises, including a controversy over graduate student participation in student government, rules for student political conduct and the so-called Filthy Speech Movement, which brought the expulsion or suspension of several students who insisted on the right to utter an obscenity in public.
He was credited with uniting a sharply divided faculty and introducing changes that addressed some of the key complaints of student leaders.
'He was very supportive of open dialogue on campus,' recalled Bettina Aptheker, a professor of feminist studies at UC Santa Cruz who as a Berkeley undergraduate had been a leader of the Free Speech Movement along with Mario Savio and others."
6/7/2007, London Review of Books, Lectures about Heaven, Thomas Laqueur
"(No one has researched the question of how refugees from Nazi persecution reacted as a group to the student unrest of the Vietnam War era. At Berkeley, the two most important supporters of the Free Speech Movement at the Law School, Richard Buxbaum and Hans Linde, were Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution; the refugee scholar Leo Lowenthal, a leading member of the Frankfurt School, also sided with the FSM students. Others were on the side of the administration at various times or not engaged at all.)"
6/6/2007, UC Berkeley News, Martin Meyerson, former CED dean and acting chancellor, dies at age of 84, Kathleen Maclay
"BERKELEY - Martin Meyerson, who is credited with defusing some of the Free Speech Movement tensions at the University of California, Berkeley, while serving as acting chancellor in 1965, died Saturday (June 2). He was 84."
6/6/2007, Philadelphia Inquirer, A Penn president who reached out, Gayle Ronan Sims
"When the 1964-65 student uprisings began at the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Meyerson was dean of the College of Environmental Design. When he became acting chancellor at Berkeley in January 1965, the student newspaper's headline read: 'Who's Martin Meyerson?'
The leaders of the student Free Speech Movement soon found out. It was Mr. Meyerson who restored peace to the campus, opening his office to students and, in a symbolic move to address student complaints about dehumanized education, signing each of the thousands of diplomas Berkeley awarded that year."
6/6/2007, Daily Californian, Former UC Berkeley Chancellor Dies at 84, Tamara Bartlett
"Meyerson then rose to the position of acting chancellor at UC Berkeley in 1965, where he embraced the demands made by students during the Free Speech Movement.
He opened up Sproul Plaza for political speeches and the distribution of literature, while also suspending students participating in the 'filthy speech movement,' displaying signs with obscene language, said his son Adam Meyerson.
'He came in and sort of brought peace to the campus,' Adam Meyerson said. 'He was quite admired by a lot of students and faculty.'
At a time when relations between students and administration were tense, Adam Meyerson recalled his father bringing a personal touch to the chancellor's position when he personally signed every diploma for the graduating class of 1965."
6/2/2007, opednews.com, The Fall and Rise of Flower Power, Richard Neville
"THE ODIOUS OPERATION OF THE MACHINE
The counter culture evolved through three stages: student power, flower power and peoples power. The Free Speech Movement sprang from of the university campus at Berkeley, California in the early sixties, as a result of attempts to stifle political discourse, and it set helped off a spirit protest that re-shaped the West. The Berkeley uprising mysteriously coincided with "anti establishment" protests in London, and again in far away Sydney, where students and academics rose up to eradicate censorship."
5/20/2007, San Francisco Chronicle, THE SUMMER OF LOVE, Joel Selvin
"'When the Haight was healthiest was when it wasn't known as the Haight,' says political activist Michael Rossman, one of the organizers of the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement that started the era of student protests.
'There's a funny thing. I've known a number of people who've become famous and, by and large, the experience is really destructive,' he continues. 'Why do I mention this? Because something certainly as destructive happened from media attention to the Haight.'"
5/16/2007, San Francisco Chronicle, JON CARROLL (column), Jon Carroll
"Wolin was one of the people at the center of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, a movement that I was on the periphery of. Now he is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. In between, he worked at Princeton and inspired Kornbluth, luring him away from the hard sciences and into hard thinking."
5/16/2007, Los Angeles Times, Paging Dennis Kucinich: Can Berkeley lure a decent graduation speaker next time around?, Paul Thornton
"That's right: UC Berkeley, home of the 1964 Free Speech movement whose liberal student body scared conservatives into electing Ronald Reagan governor, was snubbed by an actor best known as Mel Gibson's Lethal Weapon sidekick. For a back-up speaker, the university looked in-house to its chancellor, Robert Birgeneau."
5/16/2007, Campus Progress News, Campus Con: A flimsy new film treats young conservatives as victims, Philissa Cramer
"Of course, these good old tensionless, no-backtalk days never really existed for the academy. It was tension within the academy that produced the Free Speech Movement, which began at Berkeley in 1964 and rapidly spread to campuses across the country as students called for changes to speech-limiting campus policies. Maloney and his colleagues say this movement inspired them; they've even trademarked the phrase "New Free Speech Movement." But the original Free Speech Movement was characterized by students' forceful assertion that they could think for themselves. The contemporary incarnation, in contrast, depends on the "empty-vessel" theory of education, which holds that students know nothing and absorb unquestioningly whatever they are told. Lack of respect for young people and those who choose to teach them is a recurring theme in conservative rhetoric, and here the New Free Speech Movement fits right in."
5/9/2007, The Japan Times, CHARTER TURNS 60, Eric Johnston
"Lummis first came to Okinawa with the U.S. Marine Corps in 1960. He later became a leading opponent of the Vietnam War. A veteran of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, Calif., in the mid-1960s, he returned to Japan and formed the group Gaijin Beheiren, which was associated with Beheiren, the nationwide movement that author Makoto Oda founded to help American soldiers who did not want to go to Vietnam."
5/9/2007, FrontPageMagazine, The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity, Jamie Glazov
"I was very much a part of this Arcadian Jacuzzi, a member of the approved Left, anti-American, anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian, anti-colonialist, anti-corporatist, embracing all the multicultural pieties of the times. When I was a student at Berkeley, I used to hang out with Mario Savio and the guys and gals who roistered in the cafes and bars on Telegraph Avenue. You might say I was a fringe member of the Free Speech Movement."
4/30/2007, The Victoria Advocate, Filmmaker: Where have all the protests gone?, Aprill Brandon
"In 1964, at the University of California, Berkley, the student-led free speech movement helped lead the way for students' rights to free speech and academic freedom on college campuses.
Over 40 years later, however, censorship and intolerance has come back full force in academia, according to filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney. In an ironic shift, Maloney said, many of the people involved in the free speech movement are now running the schools and censoring speech from the other side."
4/23/2007, The Daily Californian, Howard Jeter, 89, Was Civil Rights Activist, Ryan Curtis
"During the 1960s, Jeter was involved in the Free Speech Movement and worked on the city's Committee for Fair Housing to obtain fair housing for people of all races, religions and ethnicities."
4/23/2007, San Francisco Chronicle, Editorial: Faculty speak on Cal-BP deal, Editors
"At least the turnout was larger than the typical sparsely attended faculty meeting. Some professors with long memories think it was the largest faculty meeting since the stormy days of the Free Speech Movement in 1964."
4/20/2007, Los Angeles Times & syndicated, 'Alice Waters and Chez Panisse' by Thomas McNamee, Susan Salter Reynolds
"Waters spent her early years in New Jersey and then moved with her family to Van Nuys, where she attended high school. She went to UC Santa Barbara, then transferred to Berkeley in 1964 and graduated in 1967. Waters was active in the Free Speech Movement. In 1965, she and a friend took a life-changing trip to France; Waters returned, Sabrina-like, with a changed palate and a new appreciation for all things French. She and Free Speech Movement leader David Goines set up a household full of music and art and friends and books by the likes of Elizabeth David, Richard Olney and M.F.K. Fisher. Waters' reputation as a cook grew, and dreams for a restaurant coalesced around the name (after a Pagnol character)."
4/19/2007, Oakland Tribune & ANG Papers, Influential Berkeley activist dies, Kristin Bender
"BERKELEY - Howard Jeter, the first African-American substitute teacher in Berkeley and a man who fought for fair housing and other civil rights for African Americans in the Bay Area, has died.
Mr. Jeter died of heart failure at Eden Medical Center in Castro Valley on Friday, said his son Charles Jeter.
He was 89.
Living in Berkeley in the 1950s and '60s, he was involved in the Free Speech Movement, the struggle for fair housing and equality and other issues."
3/30/2007, Frieze.com, Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, USA, Megan Ratner
"By the early 1960s industrialized societies had begun conforming to the binary realities of computer bureaucracy, automation and standardization, often symbolized by the punch card. 'Do not fold, spindle or mutilate' became part of the vernacular. In a 1964 speech at the University of California, Berkeley, Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio declared: 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, it makes you so sick at heart, that [...] you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon wheels [...] and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.' His revulsion was provoked as much by society in general as by the tyranny of information technology."
3/28/2007, The New York Sun, Chez Alice Waters, Fred Volkmer
"In the late 1960s Ms. Waters was involved in a different type of revolution. She was caught up in the Free Speech Movement that turned the University of California on its head. When students began to be arrested, Ms. Waters, whose ideology was probably more reflexive than considered, decided that an opportunity to study at the Sorbonne was simply too good to pass up."
3/24/2007, The Arab American News, City takes stand against Iran war, Omid Memarian
"Berkeley is well known in the United States for its free speech movement in the 1960s and early 1970s, when the issues of racial justice and the Vietnam War absorbed the nation. It was also an era of social and cultural rebellion against conformity and 'the establishment.' No place was more affected by the politics and rebellions of these years than Berkeley. The city's image as 'the People's Republic of Berzerkeley' derives from this period."
3/23/2007, The Student Life, How Will Pomona React to Leader of Minutemen?, Mark Cromer
"I thought that's what Mario Savio, founder of Berkeley's legendary Free Speech Movement, said it was all about? Or as Jim Morrison put it to the cops on stage in New Haven in late 1967: 'Say your thing, man.'
Maybe my baby-boomer roots are showing, but I still believe more ideas-even bad ones-are better aired than fewer ideas just because some people are willing to shout them down."
3/23/2007, The Seattle Times, "Alice Waters and Chez Panisse" | The whisk that stirred a revolution, David Laskin
"The story starts, fittingly, at Berkeley in the 1960s. Waters was a petite UC coed with a Patty Duke hairdo from Van Nuys High School when, in the fall of 1964, she got caught up in the Free Speech Movement that kick-started a decade of campus protest. Before she could blossom into a full-fledged campus revolutionary, however, she decamped to Paris for junior year abroad, tasted soupe de légumes and discovered that her true passion was French cuisine. The rest is culinary history."
3/21/2007, UC Berkeley News, Students adore retiring historian, Yasmin Anwar
"After seven years teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Litwack returned to UC Berkeley to join its history department in 1964, and became active in civil rights and the Free Speech Movement."
3/15/2007, Counterpunch, Confronting BP, Standard Schaefer
"So far, in pursuing this deal, UC Berkeley has tried to avoid public scrutiny, has tried to cover up the fact that BP might be able to control an enormous amount of the curriculum as well as research trajectories. It has disrupted the students right to demonstrate in front of California Hall-this at the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement."
3/11/2007, The Davis Enterprise, From page to screen, Elisabeth Sherwin
"'I met my husband, Hugh, there. He'd been part of the free speech movement; that was my idea of glamor. We got married the year I graduated and we came to graduate school at UCD together,' she added."
3/8/2007, Statesman Journal, Country Joe to perform at Lefty's, Michelle Theriault
"McDonald, 65, was at the center of the Berkeley free speech movement of the 1960s. But it wasn't until Woodstock, when his famous chant erupted from the mud-soaked audience and made its way into the Woodstock movie, that it became a cultural touchstone."
3/1/2007, KurdishMedia.com, Kurds and the forbidden fruit, Dr Rashid Karadaghi
"'I am tired of reading history; I want to make it,' the student leader of the Free Speech Movement in America was quoted as saying in 1964. It is about time the Kurds stopped reading history and started making it!"
2/27/2007, The Daily Californian, A Name of Some Significance, Roland De Wolk
"Jim Branson was a student at UC Berkeley in early 1964 when he got a reporting job at the Daily Californian. How was he to know, as he put it later, 'all hell would break out'?
The 'hell,' of course, was the Free Speech Movement, a signature event in the history of this nation that reaffirmed with blood and tears and money that the 'whatever' amendment is for all Americans, not just those-as one old newspaper curmudgeon once put it-wealthy enough to own a printing press.
As the never-ending battle for free speech continued, Branson became the Daily Californian's City Editor, then Managing Editor and finally, Editor in Chief. When the paper finally broke free of the university and became truly independent in the late 1960s, Branson was there, helping direct the paper's history of excellence in its most turbulent, challenging time."
2/27/2007, Berkeley Daily Planet, Tables Seized At Oak Grove; Running Wolf Jailed, Richard Brenneman
"Seizing information tables evoked strong resonance among members of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) because it was a campus move to evict information tables that ignited the spark that led to the movement's creation, said Jackie Goldberg, a retired member of the California Assembly and an FSM activist.
'That really started it all,' she said. 'It's interesting that they haven't quite figured it out yet. The random terror of the administration, as we called it then, only created more people interested in supporting the demonstrators. You would think the university had learned that the more you do stuff to these people, the more people will support them.'
A Sept. 14, 1964, letter from Dean of Students Katherine A. Towle banning information tables from the sidewalk on Bancroft Way at the corner of Telegraph Avenue sparked simmering tensions on campus and ignited what was to become the FSM."
2/21/2007, The Berkshire Eagle, Shannon, Brian A.,
"After serving in the Army, Brian attended law school at the University of California Berkeley, where he became deeply involved in the Free Speech and Civil Rights movements. During this time, he worked to help register black voters in the South and became interested in Socialist politics. Brian worked in the field of typesetting and graphic design for most of his career and was the owner of Village Type and Graphics in New York City."
2/19/2007, The New Yorker, Notable Quotables, Louis Menand
It was Jack Weinberg, of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, who first said 'You can't trust anybody over thirty.'"
2/15/2007, Los Angeles Times, A radical change for two union militants, Joe Mathews
"A trumpet player in his youth, [Joel] Jordan became radicalized during the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, where he was a student."
2/7/2007, East Bay Express, Botero's Politics of Mediocrity, Chris Thompson
"'It is important because the subject matter is crucial to America's current image and reputation, and Botero has made a permanent record in this unlike that made in any other medium,' Ashley wrote. 'It is important for the way in which it was organized - outside of the museum and gallery channels - and for where it is shown - in the library of the university known for being the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement.'"
2/2/2007, Santa Cruz Sentinel., National activist-scholars to converge at UC Santa Cruz, Roger Sideman
"'It's very unusual to have this combination of scholars and activists with this amount of collective experience in scholarship and activism,' said Aptheker, a leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement who is now chairwoman of UCSC's Women's Studies department."
1/24/2007, UC Berkeley News, Botero exhibit joined by talk with artist, panels on violence, art, human rights, Kathleen Maclay
While the Abu Ghraib paintings are disturbing, Shaiken said, they also are powerful works of art and commentary that should be displayed and freely discussed.
'And what better place to host the exhibit than UC Berkeley, a great research university with ideals of openness?' he said, noting the campus is home to the Free Speech Movement.
1/22/2007, San Francisco Chronicle, The art of Abu Ghraib, Louis Freedberg
"'A library is a place which has enormously controversial and provocative ideas at its core,' said Shaiken. 'The only difference is that we're putting these works on the walls instead of on the shelves.'
For a campus that spawned the Free Speech Movement, that is an entirely appropriate sentiment."
1/19/2007, Berkeley Daily Planet, Editorial: Cal's Continuing Cluelessness, Becky O'Malley
"We spent the exciting years of the '60s in Ann Arbor, from 1961 to 1973, so we had the chance to observe another way of doing university business close at hand. While our friends in Berkeley were enjoying riots and demonstrations of all kinds-the Free Speech Movement, People's Park, the anti-war movement-we in Ann Arbor enjoyed relative tranquility. It wasn't that nothing was going on: Students for a Democratic Society was founded in Ann Arbor, and someone burned down the naval ROTC building, among other excitements. But the phlegmatic reaction of the University of Michigan administration to any and all provocations avoided the massive confrontations that defined Berkeley in the '60s. As Carol Denney is fond of observing, Berkeley is not the home of the Free Speech Movement because the campus had so much free speech, but because the clueless UC administrators did their best to stifle it, with predictable results."
01/12/2007, San Francisco Chronicle, Leah Garchik, Leah Garchik
"At previous events, Larner has read a humorous poem not in the book, about 'the gerbil rumor' and a certain actor. In New York, he says, the poem got a laugh. In Berkeley, a man 'loudly interrupted me,' saying the actor who was the butt of the rumor was a good and spiritual man. Larner, who won an Oscar for writing the screenplay for 'The Candidate,' told the man that he is acquainted with the actor and that he didn't believe the rumor and 'I was having fun with it. But a suspicious growl arose from the audience, and I was advised never, ever to read this poem again.' In Berkeley, home of the Free Speech Movement, words must be watched."
1/7/2007, The New York Times, Little Asia on the Hill, Timothy Egan
"Today, he is iPod-free, a rare condition on campus, taking in the early winter sun at the dour concrete plaza of the Free Speech Movement Cafe, named for the protests led by Mario Savio in 1964, when the administration tried to muzzle political activity. 'Free speech marks us off from the stones and stars,' reads a Savio quote on the cafe wall, 'just below the angels.'"
1/7/2007, Sacramento Bee, Berkeley: Quirky university town evolves into an oasis of trendy shops, eateries, Allen Pierleoni
"The mural on the side of a building at Telegraph and Haste Street commemorates the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and People's Park, which is a short walk up Haste. For some perspective, see the condensed history at www.sacbee.com/travel."
1/2/2007, Chronicle of Higher Education, My Dream Archive, Christopher Phelps
"The experience can be transcendent, as it was for me this past summer when, sitting at a table in the special-collections department at the University of California at Davis's Peter J. Shields Library, I held a handwritten letter from Mario Savio, leader of the 1964 Free Speech Movement, to Hal Draper, gruff mentor to young Berkeley radicals. (Maybe you had to be there.)"
12/31/2006, Los Angeles Times, The city rediscovers the street, Christopher Hawthorne
"ACCORDING to urban-planning legend, the University of California at Santa Cruz, which opened in 1965, was designed without a central plaza for one reason: to inoculate the campus against the large student protests that were by that point already beginning to overwhelm UC Berkeley. Instead, students were scattered among smaller residential colleges designed, on the cloistered Oxford-Cambridge model, by Charles Moore and other leading California architects.
In truth, it's unlikely that the layout of UC Santa Cruz flowed from any deliberate anti-protest strategy, since the campus master plan was largely fixed by the time the Free Speech Movement crowds filled Berkeley's Sproul Plaza in 1964. But UC Santa Cruz's multi-centered design, whatever its inspiration, did help keep the place relatively quiet even during the height of the Vietnam War. At least to a degree, planning was destiny for the political life of that campus."
12/17/2006, Los Angeles Times, Fred Turner's 'From Counterculture to Cyberculture', Giles Slade
"In 1964, Mario Savio of the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement denounced what Turner calls "the power of computers to render the embodied lives of individual students as bits of computer-processed information." But in 1996 John Perry Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, saw the same computational power as a chance to enter a world of authentic identity and communal collaboration. Clearly, something had changed. The remainder of Turner's book is an account of what changed, why and how."
12/8/2006, Berkeley Daily Planet, Committee Looks at People's Park's Future, Judith Scherr
"Advisory committee member, George Beier, president of the Willard Park Neighborhood Association, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that he envisages changes in the park that include a memorial to the free speech movement and a café."
12/4/2006, Los Angeles Times, People's Park in Berkeley is still a battlefield, Rone Tempest
"What's missing now, Siegal said, is historical context. At the time that People's Park was created, Berkeley students had been in conflict with the university administration since the Free Speech Movement of 1964. Protests against the Vietnam War were escalating and the countercultural movement that began in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district was at its height. Ronald Reagan was governor."
12/4/2006, Huffington Post, "Bobby," A Moving Tribute to Robert F. Kennedy, Joseph A. Palermo
"I sense that the brief voiceover in the beginning of the film of Mario Savio's famous speech during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement was aimed to speak directly to the young people of today."
12/3/2006, TPM Cafe, When Father Didn't Know Best, Ruth Rosen
"Bettina Aptheker's engrossing memoir, 'Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech and Became a Feminist Rebel' is about breaking free -- emotionally, politically and intellectually -- from her father, Herbert Aptheker, the most famous Marxist historian in the United States, whose 1943 book 'American Negro Slave Revolts' shattered the image of happy, complacent slaves.
It has also angered a few unreconstructed Marxist historians and scholars who still don't understand that incest is a crime, not simply an embarassing blemish on an otherwise significant career."
12/3/2006, San Francisco Chronicle, Coming to terms with Father, Ruth Rosen
"Determined to be his loyal, perfect daughter, Aptheker writes that she repressed this memory, so that she could function in her father's world. Her denial allowed her to become one of the few female leaders of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964 and to play a major role in the trial of her childhood friend and comrade Angela Davis, who was acquitted of murder charges."
11/27/2006, San Francisco Chronicle, Taj Mahal cools his heels in Berkeley again, blending thirst for world's music and its link to the land, Joel Selvin
"'It was Mario Savio got me out here,' he says, referring to the charismatic UC Berkeley '60s student protest leader. 'I saw Mario Savio on top of that car in Sproul Plaza and said 'great google-bee, I'm outta here.' I drove across the country. I wanted to go somewhere where it looked like the youth knew what time it was. Every other place, they were so afraid. Out here, it was happening.'"
11/27/2006, Political Affairs, Privatized Schools Don't Make the Grade, Lawrence Albright
"At the height of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, student leader Mario Savio spoke of the university as representing autocracy and viewing students as raw material to be used by corporations, which he opposed."
11/26/2006, Washington Post, The charming correspondence of a feisty British aristocrat who became a larger-than-life writer, Michael Dirda
"Throughout his career, Treuhaft took on myriad cases of perceived injustice, defending the wrongfully accused, agitating for retrials, fighting for prisoners' rights. He even became lawyer to the legendary Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and something of a hero of the times. In the late 1960s, a young Yale law student named Hillary Rodham spent a summer clerking for Treuhaft's law firm."
11/19/2006, Kansas City Star, 'Bobby' for a new generation MOVIES, Robert W. Butler
"'That's how far we've fallen,' Estevez said. 'Students at Berkeley, home of the Free Speech Movement and campus activism, don't know how to get politically involved.'"
11/16/2006, Los Angeles City Beat, Jackie Goldberg, Marc Haefele
"Those who know the details of her past may recall that her political career really began with the Free Speech movement at Berkeley, where she was a student over 40 years ago."
11/15/2006, Spiked, Overthrowing the father, James Heartfield
11/13/2006, Political Affairs Magazine, Celebrate...and keep organizing, Lawrence Albright
"The late Mario Savio, a leader of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley, celebrated the FSM's victory by giving a speech and, at its close, said 'Don't go anywhere. We still have a war to stop.' He was, of course, referring to the Vietnam war."
11/10/2006, FrontPageMagazine.com, The Political Is Personal: Bettina Aptheker's Odyssey to Nowhere, David Horowitz
"'United Front' was itself a Communist term of art, and thanks to the ham-handed response of the FBI and the anti-Communist groups who attempted to taint the Free Speech Movement with Aptheker's presence, she became the most prominent figure of the Free Speech Movement after its actual leader, Mario Savio."
11/10/2006, Denver Post, Joan Baez keeps on singing out, John Wenzel
"She participated in historical protests, from Dr. King's march on the Lincoln Memorial to the birth of the free speech movement at Berkeley. She co-founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in Carmel Valley, Calif. She traveled to Hanoi as the Vietnam War raged and helped establish Amnesty International on the West Coast."
11/5/2006, Los Angeles Times, Rose-colored view of political history, Michael Escobar
"I doubt the rose-colored version of the political past that George Skelton paints. I wasn't alive to see Ronald Reagan as governor, but I understand that he said, "If it takes a bloodbath to silence the demonstrators, let's get it over with," in reference to the 1960s student unrest at Berkeley. Is this quotation apocryphal? Students there started the Free Speech Movement in 1964, a watershed that led to the antiwar movement. From there, the "culture kampf" has divided this country ever since."
11/4/2006, Los Angeles Times, State's local ballot items include the symbolic, surreal, Lee Romney
"Critics of Berkeley's measure groused that its leaders should focus on neighborhood crime and economic decline. But backers - including Berkeley's mayor and assemblywoman - note that the city led the nation with the Free Speech Movement 40 years ago and could do so again with this issue.
Besides, they say, federal agents have spied on nonviolent UC Berkeley antiwar activists, bringing the issue home."
11/3/2006, The Daily Californian, Lecture Ties Hip-Hop To Activism, Will Kane
"The lecture featured spoken-word artists and a panel discussion about the possibility of the hip-hop culture becoming the modern youth political movement, modeled after the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s. "
11/2/2006, The Daily Californian, The Dude Speaks, Robert Bergin
"The Dude of "the Big Lebowski" fame (Jeff Bridges) resembles more the Dude of days gone by-the Dude of the 60s and 70s who was part of the "Seattle Seven" student anti-war protesters (a group who spent a year in jail for trying to take a stand against the war in Vietnam.) This political activity runs in the family: [Jeff] Dowd's father, a former UC Berkeley professor, took part in the Free Speech Movement."
11/01/2006, Pacifica Tribune, Country Joe: Folksinger for the Ages, John Maybury
"Country Joe and the Fish came about during the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, entertaining and politicizing 'the troops' on campus and Telegraph Avenue, then moving on to performing at civil rights marches and antiwar/antidraft demonstrations throughout the Bay Area. Joe and his band, including Barry Melton, had a big hand in fusing folk music, the blues, and psychedelic rock and roll. They played regularly at the Fillmore and the Avalon in San Francisco, and the Jabberwock coffee house in Berkeley. Their big hit, the Sixties anthem 'I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag,' propelled Country Joe and the Fish to the upper reaches of Billboard's charts, where they stayed strong for two years."
11/1/2006, Los Angeles Times, Lawrence W. Levine, 73; historian's work backed multiculturalism in higher education, Elaine Woo
"He joined the civil rights movement in the 1960s, participating in sit-ins to integrate businesses in the Bay Area. He also joined other historians who marched in Alabama from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to draw attention to blacks' struggle for voting rights. During the Berkeley Free Speech movement, Levine defended students who protested the ban on political activity on campus."
10/31/2006, Washington Post, Lawrence W. Levine; Altered History Research, Joe Holley
"In 1962, he joined the history department at Berkeley, where he not only taught but also plunged into the occasionally raucous political life of the campus. He supported Berkeley students during the Free Speech Movement of the early 1960s and joined in sit-ins the Congress of Racial Equality organized to force local businesses to hire blacks. He also marched from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965."
10/31/2006, Berkeley Daily Planet, Arts: Photos of 1960s Berkeley at Art Center, Peter Selz
"Consisting of numerous photographs, the show is an eloquent visual document of the turmoil and agitation in the Bay Area at a time, when, it can be said, history was changed. The exhibition is organized in sections, addressing Civil Rights, Black Power and the Black Panthers, Berkeley and the Free Speech movement, the Peace Movement, the Feminist Revolution, the Rise of Latino Power, Cesar Chavez and La Huelga, Queer Defiance, Native American Activism and the beginning of the Environmental Movement. Among other things, it demonstrates the close relationship between apparent opposite activities: political action and the hippie counterculture. But the latter, with its slogan "Make love, not war" was also political in its stance against conforming to a corrupt system. It was all related to the war in Vietnam."
10/29/2006, Santa Cruz Sentinel., Bookends: Memoirist recalls the fight for free speech, the trial of Angela Davis and the rise of the Women's Movement, Chris Watson
"Deep into the 10-year process that resulted in her memoir - a memoir that was designed first and foremost to recall details about the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the Communist Party, the beginnings of the Women's Movement and her intimate involvement with the trial of friend Angela Davis - Aptheker had an awakening that would change the arc of her story."
10/28/2006, San Francisco Chronicle, Berkeley historian who championed multiculturalism dies at 73, Associated Press
"While on UC Berkeley's faculty in the 1960s, he [Lawrence Levine] participated in civil rights sit-ins and supported the student-led Free Speech Movement."
10/23/2006, UC Santa Cruz Currents, 'Stunning new memoir' from feminist studies professor Bettina Aptheker, Scott Rappaport
"In her new book, Intimate Politics: How I Grew up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel, Aptheker tells a fascinating story of her life-a life that traces her role in major historical and political events ranging from her co-leadership of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, the movement against the war in Vietnam, and the trial of Angela Davis, to the building of the Women's Studies Department at UCSC.
Aptheker also tells a parallel story of shocking childhood sexual abuse, depression, and violence amid the backdrop of events that made up a key chapter in our nation's history. As Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, puts it in a quote on the book's cover: 'You can read Intimate Politics as part of the history of American radicalism...Or you can read it as the painfully honest, often shocking, story of one woman's coming of age from confusion and depression to self-confidence and peace. Either way, you'll be riveted.'"
10/20/2006, Wall Street Journal, Young Republicans Now Flourishing At Liberal Berkeley, Pui-Wing Tam
"The University of California at Berkeley has been notable for firebrand leftist students like Mario Savio. The 1960s leader of the Free Speech Movement staged sit-ins on campus to demand students' rights to academic freedom and free speech. On a recent Thursday, one of the university's new generation of student leaders was playing with a life-size cardboard cutout of Ronald Reagan."
10/15/2006, Los Angeles Times, My Father the Icon; My Father the Molester, Bettina Aptheker
"As a child, I attempted to protect my parents from the political onslaught of the McCarthy era in the only way that I could: by my silence, and the erasure of the untenable, protecting myself from what a child could not bear.
A little over two weeks after my mother's death in June 1999, my father and I talked about the sexual abuse. He initiated the conversation, asking as we were driving home from a Vietnamese restaurant. 'Did I ever hurt you when you were a child?' was how he started. I had been furious with him for about five years, carrying around the memories like a truncheon and yet unable to confront him. But I said yes, and once we talked, his anguish was so great, his apology so heartfelt, that all the anger left me in a great whoosh of an out breath, and then I felt nothing but great waves of compassion for him."
10/11/2006, ABQJournal.com, Vatican II Began On This Day, Bruce Daniels
"There's the Civil Rights marches, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, but no other event captures the worldwide cultural revolution and last impact of the Sixties like the Second Vatican Council, also known as Vatican II."
10/8/2006, History News Network, Shhh! Don't Talk about Herbert Aptheker, Jesse Lemisch
"But Intimate Politics is positively gripping, on Herbert as well as Bettina, on the CP, conflict within it, some of it directly between father and daughter (particularly on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968), Bettina's movement away from it, her resignation and the family conflict around it, Bettina's awakening to feminism and to her lesbianism, the Free Speech Movement and its aftermath. With the re-release of Warren Beatty's Reds, maybe somebody will see the dramatic possibilities in this and make a movie out of it. Meantime, everybody in the left and feminism, as well as opponents of the left and feminism, should read this powerful book."
10/3/2006, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Divorcing Columbus, Tommi Avicolli Mecca and James Tracy
"This year, instead of conquest, we acknowledge those who stood up for justice. Everyone knows about Al Capone, but what about Mario Savio, a founder of the free speech movement in Berkeley in the '60s?"
10/3/2006, Contra Costa Times, Nobel for Berkeley physicist who mapped birth of the universe, Betsy Mason
"'It was: pick out the best science you can do and do it. That was so liberating. At Berkeley, it's no wonder the Free Speech Movement started here. It was the free science movement,' he said. 'That was the thing that really made it so that I could think about science that was out of the ordinary and into a new field.'"
10/1/2006, The Monthly, The Kilduff Files: Pearls of Wisdom | Stephan Pastis on Rat, Pig, and living the legal life, Paul Kilduff
"Occasionally I'll have a reference to Mario Savio or protesting. There's a series coming up where Rat becomes Bob Dylan. These are all things I picked up when I was at Berkeley."
9/30/2006, Boston Globe et al, Today in history - Oct. 1, Associated Press
"In 1964, the Free Speech Movement was launched at the University of California at Berkeley."
9/29/2006, The Oregonian, Always staring at 'creative stuff', Jeff Baker
"Baross was involved in the Free Speech Movement and picked up a camera to take pictures of what was happening. It was the beginning of a lifelong period of restless creative energy that's seen her exhibit her paintings and photographs, write 15 plays and a libretto, publish film reviews, travel articles and cartoons, produce more than 40 documentary films, six animated films and some music videos."
9/28/2006, Oakland Tribune, East Bay on rise as destination for international travelers, Malaika Fraley
"'When you go international and say you're from Berkeley, people know exactly where it is. It's very esteemed abroad, more than it is locally,"'Hillman said. 'A lot of people are interested in the'60s and the Free Speech Movement; they want to know where the hippies were.'"
9/20/2006, UC Berkeley News, Schlock today, dissertation tomorrow, Barry Bergman
"He's compiled a burgeoning archive of online holdings as well, including a wide array of campus events - talks and interviews featuring such figures as Malcolm X, Robert Oppenheimer, and Margaret Mead, or everything you've ever wanted to know about the Free Speech Movement."
9/20/2006, The Connection Newspapers, American Century Theater Mounts "MacBird!", Brad Hathaway
"The play 'MacBird!' ran a whole year off-Broadway in 1967, upstairs at the Village Gate, during the days of the free speech movement at Berkeley, the rock movement at Woodstock and the free-love movement of the sexual revolution. It relied on the literate wit and audacity of its author Barbara Garson to create the headline-making, having the nerve to imply that Lyndon Johnson (or his wife Lady Bird) had ascended to the Presidency by having his predecessor, John Kennedy, assassinated in his home state of Texas - and it did it with much of the plot and a lot of the language from Shakespeare's 'Macbeth.'"
9/19/2006, Sarasota Herald Tribune, Enduring game Simon says a lot about generation gap, Smithsonian Magazine/AP
"Many who study tipping points in social history contend that the oft-noted generation gap spontaneously erupted in the mid-1960s, when Jack Weinberg, a 24-year-old leader of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, Calif., told followers not to trust anybody over 30."
9/12/2006, Los Angeles Times, 125 YEARS / EDUCATION: A COMMEMORATIVE EDITION / AN INTELLECTUAL CLIMATE, Patt Morrison
"The UC and Cal State campuses became the small stage on which the nation's vaster social dramas would be played out - the Free Speech Movement, anti-draft and anti-Vietnam War protests, all of which would bedevil both Gov. Ronald Reagan, who railed about 'beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates' at Berkeley, and San Francisco State University President S.I. Hayakawa, who dramatically ripped the wires out of speakers at a student rally."
9/12/2006, Los Angeles Times, From Berkeley, challenge to authority spreads, James Ricci
"Considering the circumstances and the sometimes violent nationwide student protest movement the incident was to help spawn, the arrest of Jack Weinberg was a decorous affair.
Campus police officers took shifts sitting with Weinberg. They permitted students to pass him food and water, and empty cartons he concealed under his coat while relieving himself. Graduate student Savio took off his shoes before climbing atop the car to speak."
9/12/2006, Los Angeles Times, Buildings with reputation,
"Sproul Hall and Sproul Plaza with the Mario Savio Steps are located on the UC Berkeley campus. The hall and plaza are named for Robert Gordon Sproul. The steps were dedicated in 1997 for a leader of the 1964 free speech movement. (Robert Durell / LAT) Jul 19, 2006"
9/7/2006, Yahoo News, Los Angeles Times to Publish Sept. 12 Commemorative Special Section Profiling California Higher Education,
9/6/2006, UC Berkeley News, Mario Savio Memorial Lecture,
"Another familiar '60s figure, Tom Hayden - a leader of the student, anti-poverty and peace movements and a California state legislator for 18 years - will headline a special Mario Savio Memorial Lecture program commemorating the 10th anniversary of the death of Savio, a leader of UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement. Hip-hop journalist/author Jeff Chang will discuss youth activism yesterday and today, and hip-hop artist Aya de Leon, newly appointed director of Poetry for the People at UC Berkeley, will perform. The evening includes a presentation of the Mario Savio Young Activist Award. Thursday, Nov. 2, 7:30 p.m., the Pauley Ballroom, Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Center"
9/5/2006, Washington Post, She Hopes 'MacBird' Flies in a New Era, Jane Horwitz
"When the play opened at New York's Village Gate, Garson was in her mid-20s, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley -- that hotbed of anti-Vietnam War sentiment -- and a founding member of the Free Speech movement there. After 'MacBird!' she won a 1976-77 Obie Award for her off-Broadway children's play 'The Dinosaur Door,' but is more prolific as the author of nonfiction books, including 'Money Makes the World Go Round' and 'The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers Are Transforming the Office of the Future.' She is working on a new play, titled "Security," about the economic, not the national kind."
9/1/2006, Contra Costa Times, A tale of two cities, Gary Peterson
"Tennessee has a statue honoring the Volunteer creed -- a toga-clad God, holding a torch bearing a real flame. If Cal were to commission such a statue, incorporating a real flame to honor its legacy, it would probably be of Mario Savio trying to give 1960s-era school president Clark Kerr a hot foot."
8/26/2006, Los Angeles Times, Liberal 'base' emboldens Republicans, Paul Kujawsky
"IN the 1960s, my sister was part of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. She was arrested in a civil rights sit-in. Naturally, she was a lifelong Democrat."
8/22/2006, Gilroy Dispatch, New Public Web Site Boasts,
"For example, a high school teacher may use the site to quickly locate photos of the Black Panthers or University of California, Berkeley's free speech movement to illustrate the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s or a fourth-grader may use it to dig up photos of diverse miners during the Gold Rush to show California's early multicultural population, according to the California Department of Education's press release."
8/20/2006, Marin Independent Journal, Dr. Milton Estes advocates care for people at risk, Jane Futcher
"Steel, who founded the Gay and Lesbian Committee of the National Lawyers Guild and the Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom, won cases against many formidable opponents, including the U.S. military - for operating a train at the Concord Naval Weapons Station that severed the legs of protester Brian Willson as he tried to stop a shipment of weapons to El Salvador - and the FBI - for refusing for 15 years to release documents to San Francisco Examiner reporter Seth Rosenfeld about Berkeley's Free Speech Movement."
8/14/2006, KABC-TV and CNS, Jackie Goldberg May Be Next L.A. Superintendent,
"The openly lesbian Goldberg, a Democrat, is considered ultra-liberal by many of her colleagues in the Legislature's lower house. In her college days at UC Berkeley, she was active in the Free Speech Movement."
8/11/2006, New York Times, In 'Half Nelson,' a Student Knows a Teacher's Secret, Manohla Dargis
"Early in 'Half Nelson,' Mr. Fleck slips in a black-and-white news clip from 1964 of Mario Savio, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, and a leader of the Free Speech Movement, declaiming in front of Sproul Hall, the administration building that had become a flashpoint and battleground. "There is a time," says Savio, voice quavering with brilliant passion, 'when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.'
That time Savio spoke of passed, at least for the left. 'Half Nelson' is a lament for the radical fires of the 1960's, but its makers are too utopian, and commercially savvy, to suggest all is lost. If Savio were alive (he died in 1996), he would be roughly the same age as Dan's parents, whom we meet over a dinner filled with loud talk and too many uncorked bottles."
August 10 - 16, 2006, Gay City News, Film Review: The Awkward Age, Ioannis Mookas
"At another point Dunne screens his own clip, of an unidentified Mario Savio shouting on the Berkeley campus amid the '60s student tumult.
The autobiographical gesture-Fleck is a Berkeley native-points to one source of Dunne's corrosive weltschmerz. He's foredoomed to self-abasement, it would seem, by his '60s-firebrand parents, who live nearby in a more genteel neck of Brooklyn. "
8/2/2006, East Bay Express, What Killed Cody's?, Anneli Rufus
"From the end of WWII to 1964, those five blocks of Telegraph nearest campus were a quiet crewcut bohemia with two-way traffic and a supermarket. The founding of the Free Speech Movement that year by Cal student and future Cody's clerk Mario Savio turned it into the radical world capital of peace and love and sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll and manifestos and tear gas."
8/1/2006, Los Angeles Times, Eli Katz, 77; Yiddish Scholar Once Dismissed From UC Berkeley Over Political Affiliations, Dennis McLellan
"'It became an important case for faculty independence at the university,' Katz's son, Dan, told The Times on Monday. 'On the one hand, certainly it was one of the last examples of McCarthyite persecution - it was happening well after the heyday of McCarthyism.
'It had to do with a whole other era, the free speech movement, and the right of the faculty to be independent in terms of their assessments of someone's qualifications and ability to teach or not to teach in their department and be free from administrative interference."
7/29/2006, San Francisco Chronicle, Eli Katz -- activist, Yiddish scholar at Cal, Sonoma State, Rick DelVecchio
"'Eli told me he had refused to answer those questions when asked by HUAC,' recalled a close friend, Sonoma State economics Professor Victor Garlin, 'and that he would continue to refuse to answer those questions because they were irrelevant to his qualifications as a professor.'
As a result, he was let go at the end of the academic year.
Professor Katz took his case to the Academic Senate Committee on Privilege and Tenure. The committee decided the chancellor had been wrong and persuaded the university, which was under pressure from the burgeoning Free Speech Movement on campus, to reinstate Professor Katz."
7/27/2006, PBS, What goes on the Net stays on the Net: Is there a beer bong on YOUR resume?, Robert X. Cringely
"Maybe the answer, as Jack Weinberg put it during the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1965, is to not trust anyone over 30."
7/27/2006, International Herald Tribune, Europa: The Tuscan paradise, and the world beyond, Richard Bernstein
"The scene here reminds me of something that I heard a long time ago during the American countercultural revolution of the '60s, when Mario Savio predicted that the struggle over leisure time would constitute the main political battle of the future."
7/26/2006, Contra Costa Times, Berkeley council passes on Cal election ruling, Martin Snapp
"'Cal students have been fighting outside meddling in their political rights since the Free Speech Movement,' said senior Van Nguyen. 'This resolution may be only symbolic, but it's a slippery slope.'"
7/24/2006, The Daily Californian, City Council Has No Business Meddling in ASUC Affairs, Van S. Nguyen
"Since the 1960s, thousands of UC Berkeley students like Mario Savio and Michael Rossman have protested on the steps of Sproul Plaza and California Hall at the forefront in the fight for free speech and press in student government and the campus newspaper. Fast forward 40 years and students at UC Berkeley are reaping the benefits of the struggle in the form of ASUC autonomy. While it is difficult for students to conceptualize a campus where our voices are silenced, the reality is that student voice has come with a price and a historical struggle. We are part of this struggle, and in order to preserve our autonomy, we must take action. "
6/18/2006, The New York Times, In Berkeley, a Store's End Clouds a Street's Future, Jesse McKinley
"In the 1960's, the Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio worked behind the counter at Cody's, and tear gas was known to waft in occasionally when Vietnam War protesters clashed with police. With a mix of obscure and scholarly texts and superstar writers - Mr. Rushdie dropped in unannounced in the mid-1990's, as did Mr. Ginsberg - Cody's was a must-see stop on college tours and in guide books."
6/16/2006, Berkeley Daily Planet, Comrades Recall Stew Albert, Richard Brenneman
"Albert came to San Francisco in 1965, befriending poet Allen Ginsberg and other prominent figures of the Beat era before finding his way to Berkeley and plunging into the heady radicalism ignited two years earlier by the Free Speech Movement."
6/15/2006, Artnet, Reflected Glory, Ben Davis
"It is important to put this influence in perspective, however. Like Beuys, [James Lee] Byars had an activist streak, staging performances in solidarity with anti-war protestors and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. But he could also be fickle in his intellectual enthusiasms. The same year as his anti-war work, strangely, Byars also voyaged to the east coast to spend time with the archetypical Cold War intellectual, Herman Kahn, father of the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction and inspiration for Dr. Strangelove. Byars made a series of artistic tributes to Kahn, and was taken enough with the man that he would later refer to himself as "the skinny Herman Kahn." (Still later, as a conceptual project, he was to declare himself the 'artist of the Pentagon.')"
6/9/2006, El Vaquero, Student Activist Overcomes Racism, Olga Ramaz
"'The] Bay area seems a lot more progressive than Los Angeles,' she said. 'In terms of politics, I felt that Berkeley has more to offer to someone like me who is into history and anything that involves politics.'
During the '60s, Berkeley was famous for its student activism. The Free Speech Movement of 1964 began when the university tried to remove political pamphleteers from campus."
June 2006, The East Bay Monthly, How Not to Die in Oakland | Newspaperman Al Martinez takes Oakland sensibilities to L.A., Paul Kilduff
"I was doing a column six days a week [on the op-ed page] and he [Knowland] kept killing the columns. When I backed the Students for the Democratic Society or Mario Savio and his Free Speech Movement, he'd kill 'em. I went into his office many times and said, more or less, this is bullshit, it's my byline, it's a column. This went on for a couple of years, fighting and fighting, and finally he said, you do it my way or not at all."
5/31/2006, Berkeleyan, Cody's final chapter, Wendy Edelstein
"Ben Bagdikian, former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, recalls that during the Free Speech Movement protests of the '60s, Cody's provided 'a safe harbor for people in danger from the troops and the hostility of Gov. [Ronald] Reagan.'"
5/26/2006, Berkeley Daily Planet, Willa Klug Baum, 1926-2006, Brandon Baum
"Ongoing ROHO projects include oral histories of the wine industry, mining, the environmental movement, the Disability Rights Movement, the Free Speech movement, anthropology, UC history, engineering, science, biotechnology, music, architecture, and the arts. ROHO's largest projects document California government from the Earl Warren Era to the present."
5/23/2006, Berkeley Daily Planet, Andrew Martinez, 'The Naked Guy,' Dies in Jail, Riya Bhattacharjee
"Martinez was responsible for staging a "nude-in" on campus with over 20 people in September 1992, an action he vociferously defended at the event as well as in the media. Martinez defended his Sproul Hall Plaza "nude-in" by saying that he was trying to make a point about free expression in the birthplace of the 1964 Free Speech Movement."
5/21/2006, Los Angeles Times, UC Berkeley's `Naked Guy' Dies in His Jail Cell, Associated Press
"In 1992, Martinez organized a 'nude-in' protest at the university's Sproul Plaza. He said he was trying to make a point about free expression at the birthplace of the 1964 Free Speech Movement."
5/19/2006, Berkeley Daily Planet, Beier Challenges Worthington Again for District 7 Seat, Judith Scherr
"'The more people in the park, the safer it will be,' said Beier, who envisages a park café where people who frequent the park would train and work, an idea Beier credits to the park advisory committee. He is also calling for a memorial to the Free Speech Movement."
5/17/2006, UCLA Daily Bruin, Board no stranger to government pressure, Nancy Su
"During the 1960s' Free Speech Movement that emerged from student protests at UC Berkeley, Kerr was criticized by conservative government leaders for being too lenient on student protesters. The FBI was also tracking Kerr because he fought against the firing of UC Berkeley faculty who refused to sign anti-communist loyalty oaths required of UC faculty in 1949."
5/16/2006, Berkeley Daily Planet, 50th Anniversary of the Great UC Panty Raid, Steven Finacom
"'In reality, two years after the raid Chancellor Clark Kerr-still viewed as a liberal in those pre-Free Speech Movement days-was named UC President."
5/14/2006, The New York Times, The Way We Live Now, Josef Joffe
"The European student movement of the late 1960's took its cue from the Berkeley free-speech movement of 1964, the inspiration for all post-1964 Western student revolts. But it quickly turned anti-American; America was reviled while it was copied."
5/9/2006, The Edmond Sun, They're stealing our pride, Dick Tunison
"I'm not sure when the downward slide began. I know self-criticism was alive and well in December 1964 when Mario Salvio led the Free Speech movement in Sproul Plaza at the University of California, Berkeley. I was there at the time on a recruiting mission for my company.
The language used to describe almost everything I held dear, including my country, was either crude or searing to the ears. It was likely not the first time those bad actors belched their vitriol at nearly everything our society viewed with pride. But Salvio participated in the creation of a movement that has gained momentum and now seems unstoppable."
4/27/2006, Gay City News, Haven Herrin being arrested at West Point, along with 20 others Wednesday., Paul Schindler
"In a brief address to the reception guests on Tuesday evening, Reitan amplified on the importance of empowering LGBT youth. After reciting a list of earlier social justice campaigns he had studied-including the Freedom Ride that began in May 1961, the anti-war movement, the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, the battle against apartheid, and the 1989 demonstrations at Tian'anmen Square in Beijing-Reitan said, 'At all these major justice movements youth are on the forefront and I look at the LGBT rights movement and I wonder where the youth are. We see individual acts of heroism here or there... but there is not an interconnectivity. Soulforce Equality Ride was our first try at it, but it will not be our last.'"
4/13/2006, Los Angeles Times, California as global symbol, Robert Lloyd
"But best of all is Emiko Omori's 'Ripe for Change,' possibly because it is about the real stuff of life: food. Alice Waters is here, the link between the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and fine dining, arguing for the seasonal and locally grown, and so is writer-grower David Matsumoto, making you care crazily about a peach."
4/5/2006, San Francisco Chronicle, Examiner archives to Cal, Rick DelVecchio
"'This has got Jonestown. It's got the Loma Prieta quake,' he said. "'t's got the Free Speech Movement, World War II, the 1934 waterfront strike.'
The materials stretched end to end span 3,000 linear feet, or more than a half-mile of shelf space. They will be moved bit by bit from the Examiner's building in San Francisco to a university warehouse in Richmond, where they will be cataloged and eventually made part of the library's resources on campus."
4/1/2006, New York Times, Norman Leonard, 92, a Defender of Rebels and Dissenters, Dies, Wolfgang Saxon
"During the same decade, Mr. Leonard helped defend West Coast leaders of the Communist Party against charges, under the Smith Act, of advocating the violent overthrow of the government. The Supreme Court reversed their convictions on First Amendment grounds.
¶
He also represented clients called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, defendants charged with harboring a fugitive, and one who was tried under the Taft-Hartley Act for serving as a union officer while being a member of the Communist Party.
¶
In the 1960's and 70's, Mr. Leonard argued for demonstrators protesting hiring practices at San Francisco hotels; students arrested during the 'Free Speech' rebellion at the University of California, Berkeley; and Vietnam-era draftees who had refused induction into the Army."
3/30/2006, People's Weekly World Newspaper, 'Walkout' highlights Chicano history. MOVIE REVIEW, Pepe Lozano
"Esparza went on to say, 'How one's ancestry could be pejorative is hard to grasp today, but there have been people who have experienced discrimination and overcame it, and that's one of the things we were looking to do, to stand up for our rights and be treated like all other Americans.
'The free speech movement of '64 at Berkeley, the civil rights movement of Dr. Martin Luther King, what Cesar Chavez was doing in the fields and the growing women's movement were all very vivid examples to us.
'There was a feeling we could change the world,' he concluded. 'That's what protected and motivated us.'"
3/26/2006, Alternet, Neocons as a "foreign import", Jan Frel
A second reason for the low ebb of dissent is an attitudinal shift in the American Jewish community, particularly among those active politically, a shift exemplified by the rise of neoconservatism. It is clear to anyone remotely interested in the question that the Old Left (the American Communist Party and its related organizations) was in great part Jewish, the New Left in great part the direct offspring of the Old. Without the radical Jewish children of radical parents, there would have been no early SDS, no Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, no New York kids going South for Freedom Rides to turn the civil-rights movement into a matter of national conscience. By the late 1960s, the Left was more ethnically diverse, but young Jewish radicals had been its leavening agent.
3/19/2006, San Francisco Chronicle, How former sex writer Laura Albert and her extended family became 'JT LeRoy,' pulling off one of the strangest literary hoaxes of our time, Heidi Benson
"In the mid-'60s, the Knoops returned to the States, settling in San Francisco -- drawn to the Free Speech Movement and the literary scene around City Lights Books. Here, Knoop began making films. Geoffrey was born in 1967; the Knoops divorced soon afterward."
3/15/2006, San Francisco Chronicle, Marion Nestle, the nutritionist and author the food industry wants to muzzle, is speaking freely at UC Berkeley, Carol Ness
"Just last week, Nestle spoke to a standing-room-only forum on obesity and free speech at Cal's Free Speech Cafe (no soda served). Behind her, a wall-size photo showed students massed for a Free Speech rally in the 1960s, when she was a grad student in nutrition.
'I'm there, somewhere,' she says. Later, after her SpongeBob-sprinkled talk about freedom of speech and food marketing, she compares then and now."
3/15/2006, Houston Chronicle, When a peaceful walk turns ugly HBO film traces 1968 protest in Walkout, Mike McDaniel
"'The free-speech movement of '64 at Berkeley, the civil rights movement of Dr. Martin Luther King, what César Chávez was doing in the fields and the growing women's movement were all very vivid examples to us. There was a feeling we could change the world. That's what protected and motivated us.'"
3/11/2006, San Francisco Chronicle, Norman Leonard -- noted labor, civil rights lawyer, Marianne Costantinou
"Mr. Leonard's cases included his 1954 defense of Harry Bridges before the U.S. Supreme Court, in which he successfully got the labor leader's perjury conviction overturned. Other cases included the defense of activists who picketed in spring 1964 at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel to protest a whites-only hiring practice; the defense of UC Berkeley students during the fall 1964 Free Speech Movement; conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War; and the representation of people subpoenaed before the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings for alleged Communist Party activity."
3/9/2006, San Francisco Chronicle, Leah Garchik [column], Leah Garchik
Mario Savio's oration inspiring the Free Speech Movement's campus revolt is the basis of a talk given in a "Battlestar Galactica'' episode to be broadcast Friday by the Sci-Fi Channel. Lynne Savio gave permission for use of her late husband's words.
3/8/2006, UC Berkeley News, A man of civility and conscience, Cathy Cockrell
"Chamberlain's activism extended to issues on the Berkeley campus, most notably the 1964 Free Speech Movement - in which he tried to serve as an intermediary between students and the administration - and subsequent skirmishes over free speech at Sproul Hall (now Mario Savio) Steps and the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (now Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory). At one point during the FSM, recounts physicist Art Rosenfeld, 'students had taken over Moses Hall, demanding some UC action which Owen and I thought was partly reasonable, partly overdone.' According to Rosenfeld, the two faculty members shouted to students inside that they wanted to speak with them, were hoisted by rope to the second story, and worked out a compromise with the students over coffee, beer, and doughnuts.
At the end of the FSM crisis, Chamberlain penned a letter to faculty at other UC campuses, saying that 'some of our best students are supporters, and ardent ones, of the FSM. I am trying to listen and I ask you to listen. See if they are not saying, 'Respect our civil disobedience.....Show us that we have the full rights of citizens whether we are this year on the learning end or the teaching end of the University.''
Two years later, when the campus administration wanted to restrict student speakers to Lower Sproul Plaza, it was this letter of Chamberlain's that Mario Savio quoted in an address to 5,000 students - and Chamberlain to whom he appealed by name, along with the rest of the faculty, to stand up, again, 'for what they once thought was worth defending....'
'I have found that the practice of having speakers at noon on Sproul Steps has been most pleasant and refreshing,' Chamberlain subsequently wrote Chancellor Roger Heyns, in characteristically civil wording. 'I like the feature that as one walks through Sather Gate one hears a few sentences and can then decide whether to tarry or move on I think it has added to our campus life a very positive tone.....I have heard,' he went on, 'that Sproul Steps has become a symbol of student defiance of the Administration, of its ability to show the students who is master in this house. I think I too am guilty a bit of symbolism. I feel that the use of voice amplification on Sproul Steps stands as a symbol of freedom of speech on the Campus.'"
3/2/2006, San Francisco Chronicle, Owen Chamberlain -- co-discoverer of the anti-proton, David Perlman
"As one of the world's great contemporary physicists, Dr. Chamberlain was noted for his long and vocal opposition to nuclear weapons and the arms race, for his eloquent defense of dissident Soviet scientists and, on the Berkeley campus, for his strong support of students and the Free Speech Movement during the turbulent '60s. He was also tireless in his opposition to the Vietnam War and worked hard at Berkeley to increase the enrollment of minority students."
3/1/2006, Los Angeles Times, Physicist Owen Chamblain Dies at 85, AP
"Besides his scientific achievements, Chamberlain was a humanist and social activist who took part in Free Speech Movement demonstrations in the 1960s and spoke out on race relations, the Vietnam War and many liberal causes, Steiner said. In the 1950s and 1960s, he campaigned for a nuclear test ban treaty."
2/27/2006, Z Magazine, No Activism?, Yves Engler
"One of the very best examples of what can be accomplished by organized and dedicated student activists is the Berkeley Free Speech movement. ... 1964 when the university administration declared a stretch of Telegraph Avenue, the Bancroft strip, just outside the main gate to the Berkeley campus, off limits for political activity. The area had become associated with demonstrations against Berkeley and Oakland businesses that practised discrimination. The conservative university regents pressured Berkeley to close this recruiting ground for activists and restrict student agitation in adjacent areas.
...
After some 800 people were arrested in a peaceful sit-in the events reached the point where on Friday December 4, 8,000 students attended a Free Speech Movement afternoon rally. '[A] strike on December 3-4 was supported by 60 to 70 percent of the [27,000-strong] student body' and most teachers assistants and even faculty supported it. On December 8 the academic senate voted 824-115 in favor of the substantive demands of the FSM and by January the regents had more or less given in to student demands."
2/17/2006, Stanford Review, Door-to-Door Policy Violates First Amendment Rights, Robert J. Corry, Jr.
Door-to-door leafleting enjoys a long tradition in American jurisprudence, and it is the only way for the Stanford Review and other alternative publications to effectively disseminate their message. Ever since the 1960's Free Speech movement that began across the Bay at Berkeley, student freedoms have expanded while university efforts to restrict free speech have waned. The historical trend (and student, faculty, and public opinion) favors my clients in this instance.
2/10/2006, Contra Costa Times, Eclectic exhibit celebrates library's centennial, Robert Taylor
Among the revelations is the faded, spotted handwriting in a diary by Patrick Breen, one of the survivors of the Donner Party ("Unsuccessful attempt to cross the mountains" he wrote in the snowbound Sierra in 1846.) Another is the collection of political fliers and newsletters from the Berkeley campus, from the right-wing "America First" contingent in 1941 to the 1965 "declaration of independence" by the Free Speech Movement.
2/05/2006, Oakland Tribune, People's Park advocate dies of cancer at 66, William Brand
"A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., Albert moved to Berkeley in the early 1960s and took part in almost everything radical as opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam escalated. Although he wasn't a UC Berkeley student, he was arrested during the Free Speech Movement in 1964 and made bail along with Mario Savio."
2/2/2006, lewrockwell.com, A Non-Nostalgic Recap of the 'Sixties, Cary North
"I shall mark the beginning of the youth counter culture with the Free Speech movement at UC Berkeley, which was put together on an ad hoc basis on October 1, 1964, by Bettina Aptheker - another Mencken pin-up girl - who was the daughter of American Communism's chief ideological spokesman, Herbert Aptheker. When all is said and done, Bettina had more effect on American culture in one afternoon than her father had in a lifetime of Marxist speculation."
1/31/2006, San Jose Mercury News, Former Berkeley anti-war figure dies, Martin Snapp
"A veteran of the 1964 Free Speech Movement, Albert joined with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin in 1968 to found the Youth International Party, better known as the Yippies. More of a theatrical happening than a political party, the Yippies nominated a pig named Pigasus for president."
1/29/2006, Los Angeles Times, Rich Life on Behalf of Poor, Henry Weinstein
"Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles), a leader of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, praised Wilkinson as man 'who inspired people because he was courageous.'
'It's important to remember his life, but it's also important to pick up the torch," she said. "We should have a Frank Wilkinson Memorial Brigade. No meetings. Just a large e-mail list to do outrageous actions.'"
1/29/2006, Agencia Reforma, Rebeldia universitaria, Claudia Ruiz-Arriola
Corría el mes de diciembre de 1964 cuando Mario Savio, estudiante de Filosofía, se trepó sobre el cofre de un auto frente a la Rectoría de la Universidad de Berkeley, en California y, ante miles de jóvenes, lanzó una vibrante protesta contra los caciques universitarios de su País: "Llega un momento cuando la inercia de la maquinaria universitaria es tan odiosa, que tienes que poner tu cuerpo sobre los engranes y sobre las ruedas, sobre las palancas, y sobre todo el aparato burocrático para obligarlo a detenerse. Y debes indicarle a la gente que maneja el aparato, a la gente que se cree dueña de él, que a menos que seas libre, harás todo lo que puedas para evitar que la maquinaria trabaje".
1/26/2006, Belfast Telegraph, Bishops, beatniks and Free Derry Corner ..., Eamonn McCann
"The vibrancy of beat poetry still shimmered in Berkeley when the black civil rights and anti-war movements erupted in the following decade. The college commendably filled its history-conferred role, and emerged as one of the epicentres of US student radicalism. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement was especially significant. (One of its leaders, Lenni Brenner, aka Glaser, later one of Bob Dylan's gurus on New York's lower east side, was in Derry last year as a guest of the Foyle Ethical Investment Campaign.) At one point, Berkeley students, like their counterparts at the Sorbonne, the London School of Economics, Berlin etc, occupied the campus. Whereupon, they erected a scrawled sign outside: "You Are Now Entering Free Berkeley." Which came back to mind in the small hours of the morning of the day after the student march from Belfast - the Burntollet march - arrived in Derry in 1969."
1/8/2006, Los Angeles Times, Protest politics on canvas, Lynne Heffley
"'When I came here,' Selz says, 'it was the free speech movement ... the civil rights movement, moving right into the antiwar movement. And the counterculture was very much centered here, especially in San Francisco. At the same time, we must not forget that two of our right-wing presidents, Mr. Nixon and Mr. Reagan, came from here. So we really are very much a center of political art.'"
1/2/2006, Oakland Tribune, You see gridlock, I see heaven, Douglas Fischer
"Take the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley. The 1964 protests alienated a tax base that didn't understand why they had to pay to educate a bunch of ill-mannered ingrates. Ronald Reagan swept into the governor's mansion in part on the promise to "fix the university." State support for its crown jewel was never the same.
But the riots launched a student movement that eventually shook the nation in the late 1960s and revolutionized higher education in the country. And it came, organizer Mario Savio said, because of the political character of the Bay Area.
'This is one of the few places left in the United States where a personal history of involvement in radical politics is not a form of social leprosy," he wrote in "West of the West.'"
1/1/2006, The Seattle Times, Notable area deaths in 2005,
"Scott Glascock, 63, activist who co-owned Cafe Flora, a well-known vegetarian restaurant, died May 12 in Seattle of cancer. His experiences extended from California's Free Speech Movement in the 1960s to the rise of the gay-rights movement, the AIDS epidemic of the '80s and the blending of liberal politics and for-profit business in the '90s."
January 2006, Monthly Review, Lost and Found: The Italian-American Radical Experience, Marcella Bencivenni
"Another significant example is that of Mario Savio, a principal figure of the New Left and the Free Speech movement of the 1960s, presented by Fagiani, who was expelled by the university and sentenced to four months of prison for his political activism."
12/28/2005, WorldNetDaily.com, Who is Cary Grant?, Jim Rutz
"The under-30s of today seem even worse off than Jack Weinberg, when he gave the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement its trademark, 'Don't trust anyone over 30.'
Well, dudes and dudettes, I was there when Clark Kerr was getting Sproul Hall cleaned out and Mario Savio was whipping up the troops. The FSM was great fun, but it was mainly a bunch of quasi-moral children, none of whom ever planned to be over 30. However, their memories did extend back further than last week, which I can't say for the wired-but-weird trendoid kids of today."
12/14/2005, Hampton Roads Daily Press, At HU, the really big issues remain to be resolved, editors
"The graduates of Hampton and all our schools will have opportunities because previous generations - of women and men, of blacks and whites, of visible leaders and anonymous citizens, of suffragettes and civil rights advocates - weren't compliant and complacent. They sat down and sat in. They stood up and they linked arms and they hoisted signs and they marched: across bridges and down streets, across the mall in Washington and into segregated classrooms. They cajoled and proselytized and spoke up until their throats were raw and their voices were heard. They were as obtrusive as they could stand to be. Because being unobtrusive is no way to secure freedoms, or to gain rights, or to pursue justice or equality - or to protect any of the freedoms or rights or justice or equality that were hard won by those who went before"
12/4/2005, San Jose Mercury News, The Politics of Art, Jack Fischer
"The wall text never really tries to answer why California artists of the post-war years have been more willing to engage politics than their colleagues elsewhere around the country, except to note that many of the popular political movements of those years -- the 1964 Free Speech Movement at the University of California-Berkeley, the Chicano labor movement that grew from the work of Cesar Chavez, environmental activism -- all have early and deep roots in the state."
12/2/2005, The Daily Tar Heel, Film scales UNC's political culture, Morgan Ellis
"Kindem's focuses on how students protested the ban and the 'across the wall talks' in March 1966.
For the talks, communists Herbert Aptheker and Frank Wilkinson spoke to University students on the Franklin Street side of the wall, which didn't break the law and allowed people to protest the ban.
The documentary doesn't confine itself to the University and thoughtfully places the situation on a national scale, connecting the area to more celebrated free speech movements, such as Mario Savio's at the University of California-Berkeley."
11/29/2005, Berkeley Daily Planet, Books: Burdick and the Ugly American: The Novelist as Propagandist, Phil McArdle
"The student protest movement burst into flame two years later. Although civil rights activists in the Free Speech Movement struck the initial spark, many observers believed the tinder that turned an incident into a conflagration was the university's severe neglect of undergraduate teaching."
11/23/2005, Muzica, Joan Baez, Arthur Levy
"In 1964, she withheld 60% of her income tax from the IRS to protest miltary spending, and participated in the birth of the Free Speech movement at UC Berkeley."
11/21/2005, San Francisco Chronicle, Abstract painter who shunned the gallery scene, revered Jesse Reichek gets a posthumous exhibit, Jesse Hamlin
"'His work could've been seen and collected a lot more if he'd been more of a mind to market it,' said Berkeley architect Murray Silverstein, a student of Reichek's at Cal in the '60s who bonded with him during the Free Speech movement. Silverstein, who worked on the renovation of the Cheese Factory space, recalled Reichek as a 'great rebel spirit and a great storyteller, a kind of Brooklyn street kid who joked about everything under the sun, a lefty who was angry at authority. He could be difficult. He came to certain convictions about painting and art, and they were kind of chiseled in stone for him.'"
11/19/2005, The Age, Berkeley the template of higher learning, Gerard Wright
"IT MAY be only an accident of geography, but the University of California at Berkeley really does look down on the world, from high in the hills above San Francisco Bay. This is the American brain factory that Melbourne University has taken as a model for its new two-tiered system of degree structure, in the same way that a church architect would look to Notre Dame as a template.
...
But for all that (and them), Berkeley is best known as the incubator of the free speech movement, the place where what became national student protests against the Vietnam War began."
11/18/2005, Berkeley Daily Planet, Conservative Professor Faces Critical Audience, Judith Scherr
"With Yoo on the panel sponsored by Black Oak Books and the Berkeley-Richmond Jewish Community Center was moderator Jeffrey Brand, dean of the University of San Francisco Law School, Gordon Silverstein, political science professor at UC Berkeley and Peter Irons, political science professor at UC San Diego. A participant in Berkeley's Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, Irons is best known for his role in the 1983 overturning of the conviction of Fred Korematsu, the Japanese-American man who refused orders to go to an internment camp during World War II."
11/17/2005, UC Berkeley News, Obituary Joseph Tussman,
"The crisis occasioned by the Free Speech Movement of 1964 again found Tussman in the fray. He rejected 'the attempt to deal coercively and punitively with problems of mind and spirit.' Working with Jacobus tenBroek, who chaired the Senate's committee on academic freedom, he supported the more permissive of two competing resolutions, noting it was 'public knowledge that it is strongly supported by chairmen of departments. Nevertheless, it is a good motion.' It passed by a large majority, and the crisis was resolved."
11/16/2005, Oakland Tribune, Activist Berkeley professor dies--Joseph Tussman headed philosophy department, played part in free speech movement, Katherine Pfrommer
"After a brief stint of teaching at Syracuse and Wesleyan universities starting in 1955, he returned to Berkeley in 1963. He became chair of the department of philosophy the following year and played a fairly significant role that year in helping mediate a solution between students and the school during the Free Speech Movement, his son said."
11/9/2005, Newsday, 'Easy Rider' joins the Army, Kate O'Hare
"'I've always been political,' Hopper says, 'but I haven't always been a Republican. I was with Martin Luther King [and] at the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley. I was a hippie. I was probably as left as you could get without being a Communist.'"
11/8/2005, The Navhind Times, Music school declares results,
"Panaji Nov 7: The Associated Board of the Royal School of Music, London, has declared the results of the successful candidates of the October 2005 practical examinations.
MERIT (piano)
Grade 3: Antonio Mario Savio D'Costa"
11/4/2005, The Post, 'World Can't Wait' for decent journalism, Damon Krane
"Many historians date the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement with the student walkout at Virginia's Moton High School in 1951. That walkout led to one of the court cases that resulted in the Supreme Court's landmark desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The Free Speech Movement, which occurred at the University of California at Berkeley during the 1964-65 academic year, held its first student strike in Dec. of 1964."
11/4/2005, Berkeley Daily Planet, Berkeley: The View From Hiroshima, Steve Freedkin
"Can cities really help rid the world of the ultimate weapon of mass destruction? To the naysayer, we can point to our own city's legacy. Was it 'pie-in-the-sky' idealism to expect that apartheid could be brought down largely by a boycott started in a small California city? Was it 'wishful thinking' for UC Berkeley protesters to believe their Free Speech Movement could break the shackles of censorship on campuses throughout the country?"
11/1/2005, American Heritage, The Power of 2857, William S. Pretzer
"I had just entered kindergarten in Sacramento, California, when Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery. I was in high school as the Free Speech Movement rocked the Berkeley campus of the University of California just 80 miles to the west and as the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy rocked the nation."
10/30/2005, Revolution, The Free Speech Movement, Bob Avakian
"I think this was just when we found out that the governor, Pat Brown, was sending the troopers to bust us, and Mario talked about the duplicity and the double-dealing of the university administration and the governor and so on - that they hadn't negotiated in good faith and that they'd done these back-handed things - but then he said, 'And this is just like what our government is doing in Vietnam.' This was in early December of 1964, and I was actively looking into the Vietnam War and trying to figure out what stand to take on it, but I hadn't made up my mind yet."
10/28/2005, Daily Californian, Journalist Blasts Bush at Memorial Lecture, Kevin Amirehsani
"In front of an overflowing Pauley Ballroom audience last night, investigative journalist and author Seymour Hersh, who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the 1968 My Lai Massacre, gave a harsh critique of American foreign policy as the main speaker for the ninth annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture.
...
In addition to Hersh's speech, The Mario Savio Young Activist Award was also presented to Erin Durban, a 22-year old activist from Denver, who among other things, has led Colorado's first anti-Iraq war student effort and organized gay and lesbian rights groups."
10/28/2005, Columbia Journalism Review, FOIA Falters, Martin E. Halstuk
"San Francisco Chronicle reporter Seth Rosenfeld successfully sued the FBI to obtain records that revealed that in the 1960s, during the tumultuous free speech movement in Berkeley, the bureau had launched a covert - and illegal - campaign to fire then University of California President Clark Kerr and conspired with the CIA to pressure the California Board of Regents to force out liberal professors. Rosenfeld filed his request in 1981, while a journalism student at UC-Berkeley. It took three lawsuits and fifteen years before the FBI began releasing the records, which would form the basis of Rosenfeld's 2002 series 'Reagan, Hoover and the UC Red Scare.' As the court battle played out, the FBI spent $1 million to suppress the documents. To date, Rosenfeld has yet to receive all of the records that the FBI agreed to release, totaling some 17,000 pages. 'In my experience, the FBI's reluctance to comply with the FOIA is even greater now, a time when it's collecting more information on citizens that ever before,' he said."
10/27/2005, Oakland Tribune, Faded star does not deter 'peace mom', Josh Richman
"'She who bursts upon the scene as new news very quickly departs the scene as old news, and for the same reasons,' said Todd Gitlin, a 1960s activist who is now an author and Columbia University journalism and sociology professor. 'In August, in contrast to the news surroundings then, she was hot. In October, she's not.'
It is not a judgment on her sincerity or efficacy, he said, but she does not - and perhaps cannot - have the star status and historical staying power of some'60s activists such as Mario Savio or Abbie Hoffman, Gitlin said."
10/17/2005, Contra Costa Times, Veterans Day event canceled in Berkeley, Martin Snapp
"'Their position was that no matter what he said, because he was a member of Gold Star Families, he wouldn't be allowed to speak,' McDonald said. 'I've been doing this for 10 years, and this is the first time content and affiliation ever came up for discussion. I was shocked to find this kind of narrow-mindedness in my own hometown, in Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement.'"
10/12/2005, San Francisco Chronicle, THE NORTH COAST: A Kayak Adventure, Paul McHugh
"Crusaders included country veterinarian Kortum and his brother Karl; a feisty, elderly rancher named Rose Gaffney; Dave Pesonen, a young veteran of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement; and Hazel Mitchell, a Texan working as a Bodega waitress."
10/6/2005, Keene Equinox, 'Bringing it all back home' with 'No Direction Home', Katelyn Sommer
"Scorsese did a superb job emphasizing the relationship between Dylan's topical writing and the events that mounted his lyrical poetry. In one scene, we see the Free Speech Movement in the early '60s, shot together with a performance of 'It's Alright Ma'. 'So don't fear, if you hear, a foreign sound, in your ear, it's alright Ma.'"
10/6/2005, Daily Californian, After 46 Years, The Party's Still Going at Local Restaurant, Bryan Thomas and Emma Gutierrez
"The couple opened the popular Mexican restaurant Mario's La Fiesta on the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Haste Street in 1959, and was soon playing host to tear-gassed students and baton-wielding police officers who dropped in for a quick bite between protests during Berkeley's Free Speech Movement days."
10/4/2005, Village Voice, New Scorsese Documentary Only a Pawn in Dylan's Game, Jon Dolan
"Scorsese only rarely condescends to the "while Vietnam escalated, America did the twist" school of pop history gew-gawing. When he does (say, for the Kennedy assassination or a Mario Savio freestyle), the images have a refracted rush and seem almost new."
10/4/2005, Berkeley Daily Planet, First Person: UC, Berkeley Honda: Free Beer, But No Free Speech, Zelda Bronstein
"'We can't distribute our fliers?' I said. 'Isn't that what the Free Speech Movement was all about?' John Lame, a passerby who said he was a UC employee and a member of AFSCME, joined the protest. But the lieutenant was adamant. I asked: 'Is this part of the university's time, place and manner [of assembly] rules?' She said it was and told me to check out UC's website."
10/02/2005, Chico Enterprise-Record, But This is Chico: Let's hope City Plaza can become vortex of downtown's energy, Steve Brown
"UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza was the mother of all vortexes - academic, cultural and political - when I was a student there in the early 1970s. The plaza was completed in the early 1960s, just in time to be the staging area for the Free Speech Movement. It was the site of numerous protests throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. As a budding journalist, I once covered an anti-Vietnam War demonstration there for the student newspaper, the Daily Californian."
9/30/2005, Boston Globe et al, Today in history - Oct. 1, The Associated Press
"In 1964, the Free Speech Movement was launched at the University of California at Berkeley."
9/29/2005, UC Berkeley News, Talking straight while walking backward, Cathy Cockrell
"Later this week a rare breed will gather at the foot of the Campanile to celebrate and reminisce - folks who know by heart not only the number of bells in the tower's carillon but how many bones are in the Valley Life Sciences Building's T. rex, what year Doe Library was built and who it's named for, where to find the largest (and smallest) campus bear sculptures, and how many were arrested during the Free Speech Movement. The Friday event will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the campus Visitor Center and the generations of student tour guides who have shared the campus, through their own eyes, with the public"
9/27/2005, The Weekly Standard, The Cost of Free Speech, Harvey Mansfield
"At Berkeley, home of the Free Speech Movement of the late '60s, 'progressive social censorship' was applied against opponents of affirmative action (outlawed in California in 1996 by Proposition 209). A series of incidents arising over cartoons in the student newspaper, law school admissions, and protests against visiting speakers created an atmosphere of intimidation, even though it was not formalized in a speech code."
September 23 - 29, 2005, Orange County Weekly, Criticize Larry Agran, Go to Jail, Stephen C. Smith
"Larry Agran likes to acknowledge that he participated in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the 1960s-can even recite key passages from Mario Savio's famous 1964 speech outside Sproul Hall in which Savio called on students 'to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus' of 'the machine' 'to make it stop.'"
9/14/2005, UC Berkeley News, Lettter to the Editor, Andrew Paul Gutierrez
"But sometimes the UC bureaucracy resurrects miscreants after death for its own purposes. A good example is Mario Savio, who at the height of the Free Speech Movement uttered words now found scripted on the walls of the campus Free Speech Café:
'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.'"
9/12/2005, Daily Times, VIEW: An unreconstructed sixties liberal, Syed Mansoor Hussain
"Students all over the world were now able to do things that young people had never been able to do before. It all started with the free speech movement in the University of California at Berkeley in 1964 and went on to become the anti-Vietnam War movement that forced Lyndon Johnson, who was president of the US, to decline a second term. Internationally, the government of Charles de Gaulle was almost brought down in 1968 as was the Soviet control over Czechoslovakia the same year (the Prague Spring)."
9/2/2005, FrontPage Magazine, Fighting Campus Hate, Leila Beckwith
"Bettina Aptheker, professor of women's studies, is a self-identified lesbian activist who was also a Communist Party member until 1991. She was one of the leaders of the Free Speech movement at UC Berkeley, which in 1964 executed the first takeover of a university building in order to protest a regulation forbidding recruitment for political organizations on campus. The success of the Free Speech movement marked the beginning of the politicization of campus life and of university curricula, which continues to this day."
8/31/2005, Daily Californian, Tradition of Political Protest No Longer A Source of Pride, Jane Yang
"Even today, the notion of UC Berkeley spirit conjures up images of the infamous Free Speech Movement, Mario Savio and the hippie counter-culture."
8/29/2005, Daily Californian, Opinion: Stuck in the Muck, Darryl Stein
"But how much remains of the Free Speech Movement-era Berkeley? I mean, sure, there are the residents of the surrounding city, some of whom seem unaware that the 60s have ended, but more Berkeley students spend their time working on problem sets than protest signs."
8/25/2005, San Francisco Chronicle, Burney Threadgill Jr. -- FBI agent in Bay Area during the Cold War, Seth Rosenfeld
"By the late 1950s, membership in the Communist Party had dwindled. But in 1964, student protests erupted at UC Berkeley, and Mr. Threadgill was among the agents initially assigned to investigate whether communists had caused the demonstrations. The agents concluded they had not, he said, and that the students were rebelling against campus rules restricting free speech."
8/18/2005, Contra Costa Times, Universities go digital, Matt Krupnick
"'I think the pressure on faculty is to recognize that there's a level of digital literacy (with incoming students) that wasn't there when they were students,' Eckhouse said. 'Any attempt by faculty to pretend they're on the cutting edge is like professors in their 60s and 70s trying to be part of the Free Speech Movement. The students are smarter than that.'"
8/14/2005, Washington Post, Burned, Baby, Burned: Watts and the Tragedy of Black America, John McWhorter
"But political rebellion always leaves in its wake people who are moved more by the sheer theatrics of acting up than by the actual goals of the protest. At the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, for example, the Free Speech Movement rose up against indefensible suppression of students' speaking truth to power. But on the same campus the following year, a new bunch started the 'Filthy Speech Movement,' based on emblazoning curse words on placards and watching the suits squirm. It was rebellion for rebellion's sake."
8/13/2005, The Coffee House, John McWhorter's Bad Dream, Todd Gitlin
"In a peculiarly phantasmagorical piece in today's Washington Post Outlook section, John McWhorter asks why the Watts riots broke out forty years ago this month, and supplies an amazing answer: a new mood of "treating rebellion for its own sake," a mood that--are you sitting down?--came from whites. Yes, blacks ran amok in Watts because 'it became a hallmark of moral sophistication among whites to reject establishment mores, culminating in the counterculture movement.'
McWhorter keeps talking about his 'research,' but all he can offer toward this bizarre substitute for history is the notion that the admirable Free Speech Movement of 1964 morphed into 'the 'Filthy Speech Movement,' based on emblazoning curse words on placards and watching the suits squirm....That kind of unintentional by-product of genuine activism hit black America between the eyes.'"
8/12/2005, Berkeley Daily Planet, Is Free Speech Dead in Berkeley?, Jonathan Wornick
"Known around the world for alternative thinking, tolerance, magnificent beauty, a great university and birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, Berkeley residents have much to be proud of."
8/10/2005, Laconia Citizen, School integration pioneer remembered in Meredith, Bethany Gordon
"'Of course around that time the Free Speech movement was going on,' explained Michael. 'While my father [Dr. Neil Sullivan] was in the process of integrating the K-12 system, there were massive student strikes at the University to decide if students would be punished for off-campus activities.'"
8/1/2005, Daily Californian, Opinion: Children of the Corn, Alex Stathopoulos
"UC Berkeley is famous for its history of defending stifled freedoms and breeding activism among the intellectual elite. There's no doubt about it-incoming students have seen and been awed by the 1960s movies in which angry mobs fill Sproul Plaza with demands for First Amendment rights. The daring students of the Free Speech Movement breathed life into a stagnant educational culture and catalyzed change through personal sacrifice."
7/31/2005, San Francisco Chronicle, Cook's Night Out: Victoria Wise, GraceAnn Walden
"I have to ask Wise -- who said she wasn't a leader, but 'sat at the feet of Mario Savio' -- if they won.
'In the very long run, yes. In the short run, no,' she says, 'because everyone got sapped.'"
7/26/2005, Berkeley Daily Planet, Commentary: Life in a Company-I Mean, University-Town, Neal Blumenfeld
"You know the answer to the riddle: Where does a 900-pound gorilla sit? Anywhere he wants. Forty-one years ago, during the Free Speech Movement (FSM), we learned that there is indeed a gorilla in town, but camouflaged in Blue and Gold and crying out 'Go Bears!' Questions about nuclear weapons labs, the treatment of UC workers and teachers' assistants, or deals with the City of Berkeley are finessed by the administration ultimately down-or up-to the Regents, the university's own college of cardinals."
7/23/2005, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Linda Farris, 1945-2005: Gallery pioneer promoted young artists, Regina Hackett
"She enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley in 1962 and participated in the free speech movement of 1964, the dawning of radical campus politics. After graduation, she knocked around Europe, looking at art. When she came home, she married a commercial airplane pilot and moved to Seattle. One day, she saw a small space for rent in Bellevue and opened a gallery."
7/12/2005, Berkeley Daily Planet, Berkeley This Week, editors
"Free Speech Movement Poetry Festival, featuring Jack Hirschman, Paul Sawyer and others, from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Berkeley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Hall, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. 528-5403."
7/9/2005, Los Angeles Daily News, Goldberg has strength of her own convictions, Jim Sanders
"Goldberg, a leader in the 1960s Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley, is as comfortable with a microphone as Lance Armstrong is with a bicycle or Barry Bonds is with a bat."
7/6/2005, New York Times, Keep These Kids From Eating Veggies? Try., R. W. Apple Jr.
"IDEALISTIC as she is, Ms. Waters, 61, is no political naif. During and after her years at the University of California she was active in the radical Free Speech Movement there, and she has maintained a lively interest in public affairs ever since."
Summer 2005, Western Historical Quarterly, Book Review: At Berkeley in the Sixties, Amy E. Farrell
"Freeman's perspectives on life at Berkeley in the early 1960s should captivate any historian of the 1960s, from her keen observations about the role that the built environment of the Berkeley campus played in shaping the movement to her overarching argument that the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964 was 'not a battle in the Civil Rights Movement but a skirmish in the Cold War.'"
July 2005, The Monthly, The Kilduff File: How PC Can You Be?: An interview with Camille Paglia, Paul Kilduff
"And it's a scandal that the whole Berkeley campus has ostracized me because, you know, for havens sakes, anyone from the 60s who was on the progressive side regards the free speech movement at Berkeley as the beginning of it all and I feel when I came on the scene in the early 90s that I was just in the direct line of that. It was my libertarian positions against the campus speech codes and so on. I think Berkeley itself has forgot about it's own progressive roots"
Summer 2005, Pressing Times, David Lance Goines: An Interview, Shirl Pleskan and Matt Marsh
PRESSING TIMES: With the advantage of history and hindsight, what is your view of the Free Speech Movement?
GOINES: Well, it's hard to say. I'm not sure we have enough history and hindsight yet to say, but it was definitely instrumental in getting Ronald Reagan elected governor and that was, of course, his steppingstone to the White House. I'm not sure that he would have been elected without the FSM to use as his punching bag. It was part of a trend of university students becoming actively involved in the politics of the day. I don't think that it could be isolated and said to be either seminal or indispensable. It was important in forming a nucleus of people who started the anti-war movement. Then again, I think it would have happened anyway. If it hadn't happened at the University of California, Berkeley, it probably would have happened somewhere else.
6/27/2005, Los Angeles Times, Longtime Democratic insider dies at 82, Myrna Oliver
"The two men remained close even after Dutton left to join the John F. Kennedy presidential campaign in 1960, and Brown appointed him to a prestigious 16-year term as a University of California regent.
Serving from 1962 until he resigned in 1976, Dutton championed student protesters in the free-speech movement at Berkeley's People's Park and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations on all campuses."
6/21/2005, Berkeley Daily Planet, Column: The Public Eye: What's the Matter with Berkeley?, Zelda Bronstein
"But what else would you expect? Progressive Lawrence and Irvine are newsworthy; progressive Berkeley rates a yawn. Ever since the Free Speech Movement coalesced in Sproul Plaza 40 years ago, this town has symbolized cutting edge liberalism to the world at large."
6/17/2005, FrontPageMagazine.com, Jerusalem Bus 19 Comes to Berkeley, Abraham H. Miller
"Observers of the Berkeley political scene had a different interpretation of the disparity in the city's accommodation to the two groups of demonstrators. Up until the 1970's, the City of Berkeley, unlike the the campus, was a fairly middle of the road to conservative city. In the 1970's, the ranks of the citizenry swelled with former students and leftist activists who had come to Berkeley to be involved in the social movements that began with the Free Speech Movement in 1964. Some of these students did not leave, even if they graduated. Enchanted by the Berkeley lifestyle and political scene, they stayed and directed their political activism into local politics as well as into national issues. By the mid-1970's, the Berkeley City Council reflected this new political reality."
6/12/2005, Contra Costa Times, Campuses reject polarizing guests, Matt Krupnick
"In 1983, United Nations Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick was heckled so mercilessly during a speech at UC Berkeley that she withdrew as the commencement speaker at Smith College. Berkeley Chancellor Ira Heyman wrote in the university newspaper afterward that he was disgusted by students' actions, especially at the home of the Free Speech Movement.
'I am deeply troubled by recent events that violate basic principles of respect for other people and opposing views," Heyman wrote at the time. 'I am embarrassed that Berkeley has been advertised around the world as a place that succumbed to mob rule.'"
6/10/2005, SiliconValleyWatcher, how the Sixties counterculture smashed the work of leading computer researchers, Tom Foremski
"Mr Markoff points out that the PC revolution grew out of the turbulent times in the 1960s, from the free speech movement, the anti-war protests, and the drug culture. The implication is that out of
this internal societal war between the generations - the old and the young - good things emerged such as the PC.
....
Lee Felsenstein, one of the computer researchers mentioned in the book remarked "We were caught up with what was going on around us, we were against the institutions."
6/9/2005, SiliconValleyWatcher, A tribute to one of Silicon Valley's most influential and forgoten researchers at Xerox Parc event, Tom Foremski
"Both these labs had the same types of uber-geeks, super smart and inspired by the 60s free-speech movement to question everything.
....
Challenging accepted notions and speaking your mind was not done much. It was difficult. That's why there was a free speech movement. It was revolutionary. The computer lab researchers of the time found they were discovering new methods of communication and computing by challenging accepted notions."
....
"Lee Felsenstein ran the Homebrew Computer Club, and designed the Sol and Osborne 1, two of the original personal computers. He is currently a partner at the Fonly Institute, a consulting and research organization focused on developing groundbreaking products that place computer power in the hands of ordinary people."
6/5/2005, San Francisco Chronicle, How the state Democratic Party left Pat Brown and me, Phil Tracy
"Until the free-speech movement and the war in Vietnam shattered it, close to 10 years later, the liberal-labor coalition ran the state of California and in retrospect, didn't run it all that badly. You could say the fumes from that last burst of political synergy -- a dozen university and college campuses, 1,000 miles of freeways, the California Water Project -- is what's keeping us going today, despite all the abuse the state's infrastructure has been handed."
6/3/2005, Berkeley Daily Planet, Not Just for Undergrads: Adagia Opens on Bancroft, Kathryn Jessup
"The building is owned by a Presbyterian Ministry, which uses the rest of the facility to house more than 100 students and host conferences and events. During the 1960s, Westminster House was a gathering place for student organizers of the free speech movement."
5/27/2005, The Socialist Worker, The struggle that stopped the Vietnam War, Paul D'Amato
"There was a direct connection between these struggles. For example, Mario Savio, a leader of the Free Speech movement in Berkeley, which was the immediate prelude to the antiwar movement, had gone to Mississippi to take part in Freedom Summer civil rights organizing in 1964. He returned to participate in sit-ins against racial discrimination in restaurants, hotels and supermarkets in the San Francisco Bay Area."
5/16/2005, The Seattle Times, Gentle activist Scott Glascock lived his beliefs, Warren Cornwall
"His [Scott Glascock's] experiences extended from California's Free Speech Movement, in the 1960s, to the rise of the gay-rights movement, the AIDS epidemic of the '80s, and the blending of liberal politics and for-profit business in the '90s."
5/4/2005, The Nation, Keep Talking, Asheesh Kapur Siddique
"When most Americans think of student activism, they are likely to recall the Port Huron Statement of 1962, UC-Berkeley's Free Speech Movement in the mid-1960s, Kent State in 1970, the antiapartheid and Central American solidarity protests of the 1980s or the more recent fights against sweatshop labor on campus. But this past week here at Princeton University suggests that the list needs updating."
5/4/2005, San Francisco Chronicle, Vernon DeMars -- UC professor, architect who influenced Bay Area, John King
"'Without Sproul Plaza it's hard to imagine the Free Speech Movement' that attracted international attention in 1964 when students occupied nearby Sproul Hall, said David Littlejohn, a professor emeritus of journalism who has written extensively on architecture. 'Vernon certainly didn't know that would happen, but he thought in terms of places for living ... all along he wanted street theater, where people could live the public life.'"
5/4/2005, East Bay Express, Jury Rigged?, Will Harper
"You might think that the district attorney in a county that spawned the Free Speech Movement and the Black Panthers would be no stranger to controversy."
5/2/2005, ZD Net, The true origins of the personal computer, Dan Farber
"In the San Francisco Bay area, in the midst of Vietnam War protests, acid trips, folk dancing, minicomputers, est, Spacewar, the Free Speech Movement and youthful idealism, a diverse group of individuals-both buttoned-up scientists and hippie nerds-saw the potential to scale from world of punch cards, time-sharing and minicomputers to powerful computers designed for individuals."
5/2/2005, Slashdot, What The Dormouse Said, timothy
"But the truth of those half-heard folktales from my youth is that nearly every concept in the personal computer predates all of this, in a delightfully picaresque tale that starts in the late 1950s and weaves together computers, LSD, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the Vietnam War and dozens of characters....The list goes on: Larry Tesler, Ken Kesey, Joan Baez, Ted Nelson, Lee Felsenstein, Bill English, Janis Joplin, and Bill Gates."
4/29/2005, San Francisco Chronicle, Berkeley: Memoir follows author's road to communism, Rick DelVecchio
"Avakian, 62, a veteran of the Free Speech Movement and other upheavals of the Bay Area in the 1960s, makes an unqualified case for Marxism-Leninism as a fertile thought system that's as alive now as it was when the two revolutionary masterminds created it to answer what they saw as capitalism's fundamental inhumanity."
4/29/2005, Revolution Online, SF Bay Area Celebrates Release of Bob Avakian's Memoir, correspondent
"A group of honorary co-hosts--who feel in different ways that having a society-wide conversation about Bob Avakian's memoir, and Avakian himself, is important--came together. The co-hosts included Lawrence Ferlinghetti, internationally known poet, publisher, and owner of City Lights Bookstore; actor Peter Coyote; author and activist Julia Butterfly Hill; veteran activist Yuri Kochiyama; Barbara Lubin of the Middle East Children's Alliance; former political prisoner (San Quentin 6) Luis "Bato" Talamantez; hip hop artist and popular Refa One; UC Berkeley African American Studies Professor Ula Y. Taylor; social activist Richard Aoki; SF State Professor of International Relations Dwight Simpson; attorney Bob Bloom; Michael Rossman, an activist and archivist from the Free Speech Movement; the spoken word crew Chico Speaks Out; veterans of the Black Panther Party, and others."
4/29/2005, Berkeley Daily Planet, Campus Bay-Inspired Bills Clear Assembly Committee, Richard Brenneman
"Tuesday's hearing was a reunion of sorts for Goldberg and Wendel Brunner. Both were activists in Berkeley's Free Speech Movement."
4/26/2005, Daily Californian, ASUC and Academic Senate Need to Get Priorities Straight, Peter Tadao Gee
"In Mario Savio's famous speech before the FSM Sit-in he said, 'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!' This quote gives us a great metaphor for UC Berkeley, about how it's just a giant machine that needs to be fixed.
As optimistic as I am about our new campus leadership, I strongly believe the only way Birgeneau can be successful here at UC Berkeley is if everyone in the "machine" gets their act together. Student leaders and academic faculty alike need to be equal partners with the Birgeneau administration in order to make sure that everyone in California has the right to an equal and valid education."
4/26/2005, Berkeley Daily Planet, Berkeley Author Offers Portraits of Spanish Civil War Vets, Richard Brenneman
"Berkeley's New Left was flourishing, an evolution of the same sense of moral outrage that had fueled the Free Speech Movement and the earlier protests against the House Un-American Activities Committee protests in San Francisco, where Berkeley people had played leading roles."
4/21/2005, Ka Leo O Hawaii, Philosopher to hold lecture at Ballroom,
"A former Rhodes Scholar and Don at Oxford University, Searle received his Ph.D. in Philosophy there in 1969. At Berkeley in the 1960s, Searle was the first tenured faculty member to support the Free Speech Movement. He is the author of numerous books, the most recent -- Mind: A Brief Introduction -- was published in 2004."
4/20/2005, UC Berkeley News, Chapela files suit against UC over denial of tenure, Public Affairs
"Reacting to this claim, Associate Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs George Strait said, 'Given that this campus is the home of the Free Speech Movement, and is where academic freedom is tightly guarded, the charge has little credibility.'"
4/19/2005, Tri-Valley Herald, Professor sues UC in tenure spat, Michelle Maitre
"Strait said it was ironic Chapela would accuse the university of squelching opinions. We're the home of the Free Speech Movement and the champion of academic freedom. For someone to allege we are anything other than that is not to be believed, Strait said."
4/18/2005, The Militant, American concentration camps, Patti Iiyama
"The parents of the author, Patti Iiyama, were held at the Japanese internment camp at Topaz, Utah, during the second world war. Iiyama was on the executive committee of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964; a labor organizer for the National Farmworkers Association in Delano, California, in 1966; and the Socialist Workers Party candidate for Secretary of State of California in 1970. She also ran on the SWP slate for various offices subsequently."
4/18/2005, Hawaii Reporter, Freedom for Me But Not for Thee, James Roumasset
"The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the mid 60's was a reaction against the administration's suppression of anti-war literature. But with the increasing influence of former campus radicals in the nations colleges and universities, the effort to suppress speech that is judged offensive to women and minorities was embodied in the proliferation of speech codes."
4/12/2005, Daily Californian, Opinion: Give the Assembly Its Independence, Rishi Sharma
"The Graduate Assembly at UC Berkeley has represented the interests of graduate students for generations. Its legacy includes the boycott of apartheid South Africa, the free speech movement, the civil rights struggle, and resistance to McCarthyism."
4/12/2005, Columbus Free Press, Congresswoman Cynthia Mckinney Urges Reform of Voting Process at Historic Conference, Anna Thompson
"'We don't know if our elections have been rigged. We need to be concerned about this. The curtain will have to be pulled off the wizard. Mario Savio said 'There comes a time when the machine becomes so odious that you can't take it apart. You have to stop the machine.'"
4/8/2005, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Teach-in set at Albion, staff
"Among those expected to attend are: Staughton Lynd, a labor attorney, Quaker and lifelong pacifist; Bill Davis of Vietnam Veterans Against the War; Joel Geier, a member of the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement; Sherry Wolf, an editor of the International Socialist Review, a Chicago-based magazine; Bille Wickre, associate professor of art history at Albion College; and Greg Martin of the United Methodist Church of Ann Arbor"
4/6/2005, Excalibur, Progressive disruption, Maryam Behmard
"From Berkeley's Free Speech Movement to the Thai student uprising in 1976, Tehran's revolt in 1979, the formation of the Black Panthers and even the notorious Weather Underground, student activism is a widespread phenomenon, the centre of social justice issues and civil rights and a voice that cannot be suppressed. The underlying message of any retaliation in the history of student movements has been a fight for freedom."
4/5/2005, Daily Californian, Graduate Assembly Seeks Autonomy, Tiffany Hsu
"The assembly is the only graduate student government in the state that is a subsidiary to its undergraduate equivalent and has been so since its conception during the Free Speech Movement. The assembly is still not recognized by the chancellor as a formal, autonomous body."
4/1/2005, Berkeley Daily Planet, New Look, New Year, Same Goals, Becky O'Malley
"Carol Denney likes to remind us that Berkeley was the home of the Free Speech Movement because of the University of California's determined opposition to free speech, not because free speech was protected here. Berkeley needs a newspaper which remembers its complex and paradoxical past, and which understands and accepts its responsibility for shaping the future."
3/29/2005, Contra Costa Times, Free speech at risk, professor tells Cal crowd, Matt Krupnick
"Free-speech rights used to protect professors who offered personal opinions in class, but that day has passed, Churchill said Monday at an academic-freedom forum on the campus where the Free Speech Movement began in 1964."
3/29/2005, Berkeley Daily Planet, The Nonstudent Left, Hunter S. Thompson
"One of the realities to come out of last semester's action is the new 'anti-outsider law,' designed to keep 'nonstudents' off the campus in any hour of turmoil. It was sponsored by Assemblyman Don Mulford, a Republican from Oakland, who looks and talks quite a bit like the 'old' Richard Nixon. Mr. Mulford is much concerned about 'subversive infiltration' on the Berkeley campus, which lies in his district. He thinks he knows that the outburst last fall was caused by New York Communists, beatnik perverts and other godless elements beyond his ken. The students themselves, he tells himself, would never have caused such a ruckus. Others in Sacramento apparently shared this view: the bill passed the Assembly by a vote of 54 to 11 and the Senate by 27 to 8. Governor Brown signed it on June 2. The Mulford proposal got a good boost, while it was still pending, when J. Edgar Hoover testified in Washington that forty-three Reds of one stripe or another were involved in the Free Speech Movement."
3/29/2005, Berkeley Daily Planet, Hunter S. Thompson's Portrait of Berkeley, Michael Rossman
"In 1965, the late Hunter Thompson got his first break as a journalist when he was asked to write an article for the venerable Left journal The Nation, about Berkeley after the Free Speech Movement."
3/26/2005, San Francisco Chronicle, Controversial professor to speak at Cal, Charles Burress,
"'I am pleased to invite Professor Churchill to the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in higher education,' said panel organizer Ling-chi Wang, an associate professor of ethnic studies at Cal."
3/16/2005, East Bay Express, The Revolution Comes to Rossmoor, Chris Thompson
"As a woman in a silver Mercedes-Benz SUV shot him the first scowl of the day, Stephens glanced at her rear bumper and guffawed, 'A Cal sticker! Oh, my God! She must have been before Mario Savio!'"
3/14/2005, Boston Globe, Reporter's FOIA request dates to 1981, Martha Mendoza
"'The (FOIA) statute says 20 days,' said Barbara Elias, the FOIA coordinator at the National Security Archive, who surveyed federal agencies to find the oldest pending request. 'There is no excuse that could extend search and review to 24 years.' She said she'd urge Rosenfeld not to get frustrated and give up.
He's not about to."
3/11/2005, Berkeley Daily Planet, No Decision on Landmark Law Revision, Richard Brenneman
"Then the planners launched into a discourse about the use of the term 'integrity,' prompting a discussion about places where 'Mario Savio slept here' and an eventual burst of laughter from O'Malley and more discussion."
3/11/2005, Berkeley Daily Planet, An Easy Place to Cut Spending, Becky O'Malley
"The meeting I attended last week was graced by the presence of City Attorney Zach Cowan, Planning Department chief Dan Marks, Current Planning Director Mark Rhoades and LPC secretary Giselle Sorensen. Discussion got off into deeply uncharted waters on frivolous topics like landmarking Mario Savio's student apartment, and yes, Virginia, they all looked somewhat silly, and I couldn't help laughing a bit."
3/10/2005, San Francisco Chronicle, Leah Garchik Column, Leah Garchik
"The following appeared in Herb Caen's column 10 years ago: 'As you may have heard, KPFA's left-winging McCarthy-defying political commentator, William Mandel, has been fired, justlikethat, after 38 years, and such prominent lib/rads as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, David Brower and journalist Alexander Cockburn are protesting loudly, to no avail. ...''
That 'no avail'' turns out to have been true, but old lefties don't give up on matters of principle. A petition to the station's general manager, Roy Campanella II, demanding Mandel's return, was presented on Monday. Ten years is a long time to be collecting signatures, and the signers list now includes Daniel Ellsberg, Pete Seeger, Ed Asner, Tillie Olson and the three mentioned above, except it's now the late David Brower.
Campanella wasn't at the station when the 13 Mandelistas (including 88- year-old Mandel, 'smiling ear to ear,'' said my spy) arrived. They demanded that the station agree to Mandel's return by April 4 (or else more petitioning, I guess). Power to the people."
3/4/2005, UC Berkeley News, The struggle for Berkeley's 'soul as an institution', Jonathan King
"Berkeley's handicaps are not insignificant, Edley said. It's no longer a wealthy campus, but instead one suffering from a decline in public support that afflicts K-12 as well as public higher education. It is vulnerable to state regulation and other forms of political oversight, continuing a trend, he said, that extends back half a century to the McCarthy and Loyalty Oath era, on up through the Free Speech Movement and the Reagan reaction against it right up to the present day. Efforts to stand against the current climate, Edley said, guarantee that 'trouble will rain down upon us from political quarters.'"
2/27/2005, Orlando Sentinel, Remembering gonzo journalism's founding father, Elaine Woo
"His break came when Carey McWilliams, editor of the Nation, hired him to write a story on the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley. It was McWilliams' idea to tackle the Hells Angels next."
2/27/2005, Associated Press, Thompson's tales of California-based counterculture produced admiration, backlash, Beth Fouhy
"He covered the 1964 Free Speech Movement at University of California, Berkeley and immersed himself in Haight-Ashbury's hippie subculture. He even spent a year covering the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang as they cruised up and down the Pacific coast. To his far-flung readers, Thompson's California was a free-spirited and often lawless environment that celebrated illegal substances and rebellion."
2/23/2005, Oakland Tribune, City Took Its Lumps from Thompson, William Brand and Nicholas Yulico
"One of his former editors Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist, said he met Thompson in the mid-1960s, appropriately, at a Vietnam Teach-in at the University of California, Berkeley, the campus that gave the world the Free Speech Movement."
2/18/2005, Sacramento Bee, Prejudice and pride: A daughter's film examines bold stand by Japanese American couple in WWII, Dixie Reid
"'I went home to San Francisco one weekend after the Mario Savio speech, and I was angry about human rights,' Ina said. 'My mother said, 'I have to tell you something.' My parents were afraid I was going to be an outspoken radical and bad things would happen to me. My mother would say, 'We don't want to see your face in the newspaper. You don't know what the consequences can be.'"
2/12/2005, Morocco Times, Books: Review: Semantics and epistemology, Anita Burdman Feferman
"My talk today is about Tarski in the 1960s, when he himself was in 'his' sixties. It is a period that more than one of his students labeled "the heyday of logic in Berkley." It was the heyday of a lot of other things too: the free speech movement, the student revolution, the civil rights movement, the anti-war, or peace movement, and of course the famous "summer of love" that was accompanied by the constant sound of rock and roll music, and lasted for much longer than a summer. But that story is, of course, way beyond the scope of this talk."
2/11/2005, The Denver Post, Gov't Mule guitarist on successor to FM, listening "with our eyes", Warren Haynes
"Photography: "Jim Marshall: Proof" is a book of the legendary photographer's amazing photos, mostly shot during the '60s and '70s. He's got everyone, from rockers Jim Morrison, Joplin, Bob Dylan, the Beatles and the Grateful Dead, to blues and jazz greats T-Bone Walker, Charles, Ben Webster and Thelonius Monk to filmmakers Woody Allen and Elia Kazan, labor leader Cesár Chavez and the leader of the Free Speech Movement, Mario Savio. This collection is filled with familiar photos, including shots that would become album covers for Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane and the Allman Brothers Band."
2/8/2005, Oakland Tribune, Berkeley puts $650,000 into library book tracking system, Kristin Bender
"But in Berkeley, the home of the Free Speech Movement, concerns about Big Brother are emerging. Some worry the radio-frequency identification technology - used by other libraries, the government and as a retail tracking device - could become a surveillance tool compromising the privacy of everyone."
2/1/2005, San Francisco Chronicle, Is the biographer of activist Judi Bari a tool of the right -- or just a skeptical liberal?, Edward Guthmann
"Collier is a former left-wing radical who met Coleman during the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the mid-'60s and worked with her at the leftist magazine Ramparts. Coleman says Collier approached her to write the Bari biography, but she denies he tried to influence her interpretation."
1/21/2005, News Tribune, Protesters organize 'counter-inaugural', Kristie Miller
"Jo Freeman, a veteran of the 1968 Berkeley Free Speech movement, remarked on the diversity of the protest groups.
'So many people want to participate, one organization can't contain them all.'"
1/21/2005, LA Weekly, To Succeed, Must We Secede?, David L. Ulin
"We talk about our history of progressive politics, from Llano to Upton Sinclair's 1934 End Poverty in California campaign to the free speech movement to gay rights."
1/21/2005, Colorado Daily, 'Out of class, in the moment', Bronson R. Hilliard
"If there was a leader of the protest, it was BHS senior Travis Moe, who said he had been corresponding with '60s activist (and current California politician) Tom Hayden and researching the Berkeley Free Speech movement to draw inspiration this year."
1/19/2005, Arab News, If You Don't Love It, Leave Town, Fawaz Turki
"So to get away from a campy event like the inauguration of a Republican president, and the hicksters attending it, I shall head on to California, California dreamin', laid back, mellow New Age California where the Free Speech Movement started at Berkeley, hippies took over Haight, Rodney King wants us all to get along, Tania (nee Patty Hearst) robbed a bank with her putative revolutionaries from the Symbionese Liberation Army, and O.J. Simpson, well, the man just walked."
1/14/2005, San Francisco Chronicle, Pot-using politician did dopey thing, Chip Johnson
"As an attorney, Siegel is surely familiar with the legal concept of time, place and manner restrictions on even sacred First Amendment rights, although come to think of it, he may not have been too hot on those rules when he was a student activist and Free Speech Movement supporter in his days at UC Berkeley."
1/11/2005, Daily Times, VIEW: Students and politics, Syed Mansoor Hussain
"The formal beginning of it all in the US was the free speech movement in (University of California) Berkeley in 1964; and the foundation of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) in 1960, leading in time to the anti-war (in Vietnam) movement that forced President Johnson not to seek re-election. The upheaval also gave us the hippies, drugs and the sexual revolution."
1/9/2005, San Francisco Chronicle, S.F. may no longer be the state's most progressive city, James B. Goodno
"The authors identify several key actors in this drama, notably Jackie Goldberg, a former city council member and current state legislator, who worked tirelessly to pull together 'various (and sometimes conflicting) strands of the progressive community.'"
1/8/2005, Grand Forks Herald, IN THE SPIRIT: As the saying goes, what goes around comes around, Naomi Dunavan
"Pastor Don recalls the turbulent 1960s, especially Mario Savio, the student leader who became nationally known when he boldly articulated students' concerns over the Vietnam War."
12/31/2004, Los Angeles Times, A Merry Prankster Keeps On Chuckling, Steve Lopez
"'Lenny Bruce opened the doors for all the guys like me; he prefigured the Free Speech Movement and helped push the culture forward into the light of open and honest expression.' Bruce went after 'the powerful people, to puncture the pretentiousness and pomposity of the privileged.'"
12/25/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Pearls Before Swine [comic], Stephan Pastis
"I should tell you Pig, that my name is not really 'Wee Bear."...My real name is Moses Savio Chavez...Moses is for Robert Moses, the civil rights activist who struggled to help Blacks vote in Mississippi...Savio is for Mario Savio, whose famous speech atop a police car ignited the Free Speech Movement...and Chavez is for Cesar Chavez, whose hunger strikes improved the lives of immigrant farm workers."
12/23/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Ralph J. Gleason's 'J'accuse', Ralph J. Gleason
"Forty years ago this month, Ralph J. Gleason spoke out eloquently in support of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. At the time, there wasn't great support for the movement in the press, but that didn't stop Gleason from speaking his mind. The following column originally appeared on Dec. 9, 1964, and was later reprinted to honor Gleason after his death. It remains a significant document in the history of the movement, a document made, to quote Gleason, 'with sweat and passion and dedication to truth and honor.'. "
12/23/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Don't let the tweed jackets, trench coat and pipe fool you -- Ralph J. Gleason was an apostle of jazz and rock with few peers, Joel Selvin
"The Gleason home, less than a mile from campus, was action central. Student leaders sought his advice and held meetings in the living room."
12/23/2004, North Carolina Times, Bears' program rises swiftly despite BCS snub, Mike Sullivan
"During White's time on the Berkeley campus, the football program was overshadowed by the ongoing Free Speech Movement, which began in 1964 and celebrated its 40-year anniversary this fall.
Demonstrations and protests were regularly held against the wishes of campus administrators. On Oct. 1, 1964, when police attempted to arrest a civil-rights organizer who was passing out leaflets, students conducted a sit-in and the police car was unable to leave campus. Two months after that, approximately 800 students were arrested for occupying Sproul Hall. It remains the largest mass arrest of students in U.S. history.
'Berkeley became noted as the center of disenchantment and rebellion,' White recalled. 'It was really an unfortunate thing. It affected the athletic department in a horrible way. A lot of people liked the fact it was known as a radical place. Ironically, most of the radicals weren't involved with the university.'"
12/22/2004, San Francisco Bay View, Decentralize the power grid, Leuren Moret
"The Free Speech Movement was about the Vietnam War - and corporations - and now it's that time again, to put sand in the gears of the machine and prevent it from working at all until we too are free.
'There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon all the apparatus, and you've got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.' That's a quote from Mario Savio, icon of the Free Speech Movement, written on the walls of the Free Speech Café on the UC Berkeley campus.
'People power' can bring public power to our municipalities. Citizen by citizen, city by city, we must make a collective effort to take back our democracy and have fair and representative elections."
12/20/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE: The Berkeley backlash, Louis Freedberg
"It would be easy to explain what's happening as a sign that Berkeley, the home of the Free Speech Movement and the the first city to pass a divestment ordinance against apartheid South Africa, is losing its progressive edge.
But that would be a faulty analysis."
12/20/2004, Contra Costa Times, Multimedia savvy leads Campanella to KPFA, Tony Hicks
"Founded in 1949, KPFA is one of the loudest liberal voices in one of the nation's most liberal cities. The station practically provided play-by-play for the 1960s cultural revolution as one of the first media outlets willing to give voice to UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement. A decade earlier, KPFA was one of the nation's only radio stations to give a forum to man and women targeted by McCarthyism."
12/19/2004, New York Times, Where Aquarius Went, Christopher Hitchens
"Easy as it is to mock the atmosphere of Berkeley -- ''Berserkely'' -- in those days, there was a thread that connected the free speech movement to the freedom riders and to the exposure of depraved statecraft overseas, and this volume [''What's Going On, California and the Vietnam Era," Edited by Marcia A. Eymann and Charles Wollenberg, Oakland Museum of California/University of California Press] restores that connection with exemplary force."
12/8/2004, Stoneham Sun, I sound funny in Texas, Peter Costa
"I tell the story of being one of two reporters serving as the news pool selected to interview then-governor of California, Ronald Reagan. I had prepared a list of questions that I thought would push the good governor back on his heels. But after talking with him and listening to what he had tried to do as governor to improve the plight of the poor, to improve public education, even to protect free speech - a big issue back then during the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley - we came away with a different, better impression of the man."
12/7/2004, New York Press, Column, Paul Krassner
"And although the San Francisco FBI office had once put Mario Savio on the Reserve Index, a secret list of people to be detained without judicial warrant in the event of a national emergency, in 1997, a year after Savio's death, the steps in front of Sproul Hall were named the 'Mario Savio Steps.'
I guess those are signs of progress."
12/7/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, Changes Would Speed Landmarks Process, Becky O'Malley
"The ad recited charges against project opponents which skirted the cliff of libel without actually falling over it, but since the targets were pillars of the Free Speech Movement, we figured they'd be able to take it in their stride."
12/5/2004, San Luis Obispo Tribune, Mr. Blakeslee goes to Sacramento, Ryan Huff
"The famously liberal university -- birthplace of the Free Speech Movement -- profoundly impacted the Republican Blakeslee to be tolerant of others' views."
December 2004, The Journal of American History, Review: At Berkeley in the Sixties, W. J. Rorabaugh
"Jo Freeman's carefully researched, gracefully written, but curiously subdued book, part memoir and part scholarship, joins a growing list of works about the free speech movement {FSM} at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964. Other recent additions include President Clark Kerr's self-serving memoirs, the activist David Lance Goines's exuberant account, and the excellent collection of essays edited by the historians Robert Cohen and Reginald Zelnik."
12/1/2004, California Monthly, Letters to the Editor: The FSM's footprints, various
"As a student at Cal during that era, I believe that the Free Speech Movement directly contributed to the healthy skepticism of government's so-called truths in this country. Whatever one's political beliefs, the FSM helped expose the tendency of government agencies to cover up uncomfortable facts. The UC administration did it, LBJ the Democrat did it, Nixon the Republican did it. We learned many things in that era, and one of the constant truths we learned is, Never take a politician's statement at face value. This generation of students needs to learn the lessons of that generation.
Jerome Fishkin '65
San Francisco"
11/30/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, Vote Count Protests Blast Media Silence, J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
"Anderson likened the movement to investigate election irregularities to Berkeley's Free Speech Movement of the '60s. 'Just like then, we're going to have to throw ourselves into the machine and stop its gears,' he said."
11/23/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, After career springing others, bondsman sculpts himself a new life, Marianne Costantinou
"His biggest bailout was after 800 people were arrested at Berkeley. The arrest so overwhelmed the jail that Barrish offered to just bail out everyone en masse, and worry about their paperwork and financial backing later.
'I'll just guarantee everybody,' he says he told the D.A. and judge.
To this day, Barrish says, strangers walk up and thank him.
'You don't know me,' they tell him, 'but you bailed me out for the Free Speech Movement.'"
11/18/2004, New York Times, Republicans Outnumbered in Academia, Studies Find, John Tierney
"BERKELEY, Calif. - At the birthplace of the free speech movement, campus radicals have a new target: the faculty that came of age in the 60's. They say their professors have been preaching multiculturalism and diversity while creating a political monoculture on campus"
11/8/2004, The Newspaper Guild, Bosses put 'the Boss' off-limits for journalists, Andy Zipser
"Ironically, this December 3 marks the 40th anniversary of an event that should be celebrated by every champion of free speech, uncensored reportage and unfettered thought-even if he or she works for a newspaper, magazine, television station or other news medium. Forty years ago, Mario Savio stood on the steps of Sproul Hall at Berkeley and launched the Free Speech Movement by thundering: 'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!'
Savio died in 1996. It's taking the rest of us a little longer."
11/8/2004, Contra Costa Times, Cal chancellor wrestles with familiar woes, Matt Krupnick
"Since taking over from Berdahl on Sept. 22, Birgeneau has tried to acclimate himself to the vibrant campus amid the rumbling of fiscal worries.
He attended Cal's slim football loss to top-ranked USC in Los Angeles last month. He spoke to students from atop a car to commemorate the Free Speech Movement's 40th anniversary. And he endured the bureaucratic hassles of securing a physics office and lab to continue his research into the microscopic."
11/7/2004, The Statesman, Bush at the gate, Oindrila Mukherjee
"One of the places where protest has been most vociferous is the university campus. The leader of the pack was University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s when student activists against the war in Vietnam clashed with university administration over the use of campus facilities for their campaign, a confrontation that led to the Free Speech Movement. Campus counterculture peaked in 1968 when 221 major demonstrations took place in over 100 campuses across the country between January 1 and June 15."
11/7/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Letters: Inspired by Savio, Wendy Preuitt
"I was a high school classmate of Savio's in New York. At that time in his life, he was known as Robert 'Bob' Savio. What comes to mind foremost about him, is his gentility, tremendous intelligence and his awful stutter. Through the years I had heard bits and pieces about him and his multitude of problems, both political and emotional. However, until reading this article, I never really had the complete story. Thanks for all of your hard work researching and writing about this tragic figure. It is a sad tale because he was so brilliant and had so much potential -- so much more to give to us."
11/7/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Letters: Inspired by Savio, Mike Sher
"A personal reminiscence about Mario Savio. Decades ago, we both went to Van Buren High School in Queens Village, N.Y. We were one class apart, and everyone called him Bob. He was astoundingly bright and good looking, but had a bad speech problem, a stutter. The year I graduated, he began to overcome his speech problem and ran for president of the student body. In the time I was there, he was the only intellectual who ever won. He went on to become the dynamic speaker we all recall from Sproul Plaza."
11/2/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, Self-Government: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?, Sharon Hudson
"Berkeley recently-and rightfully-celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. But news coverage of the events barely mentioned the heavy-handed role the university played, in first causing the movement by curtailing speech, and later in ratcheting up the violence that accompanied subsequent protest activities. Today UCB basks in the glow of the FSM, but don't forget: UC was the oppressor that made Berkeley radical. And still does."
11/1/2004, UC Santa Cruz Faculty Newsletter, Faculty in the News, editor
"Bettina Aptheker was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, Alameda Times-Star, Berkeley Daily Planet, Oakland Tribune, San Mateo County Times, the Argus, and Tri-Valley Herald and in additional stories about the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. Various news outlets also featured Aptheker as a recipient of an award for Excellence in Education presented by the National Organization for Women (NOW)."
11/1/2004, The News Tribune, Where have all the protest songs gone?, Diane de la Paz
"Savio, who became a philosophy professor, died in 1996 at age 53. He's been featured in a History Channel special and in the documentary 'Berkeley in the Sixties.' But with no musical legacy, he's been eclipsed by other free-speaking spirits such as John Lennon."
11/1/2004, Oakland Tribune, 'Bear Minimum' memories, Dave Newhouse
"'My mom and dad dropped me off on campus,' McCaffrey recalled of his freshman year. 'We walked around campus just when Mario Savio was giving his first speech. My dad said, 'Mike, you're going home.' My mom said, 'He can't, he's on scholarship.' That was my introduction to Cal.'"
November 2004, California Monthly, 'It changed my life', Martin Snapp
"Restaurateur Alice Waters '67 said, 'Without FSM, there would have been no Chez Panisse.' Waters opened her trend-setting restaurant in north Berkeley in 1971, instigating a 'delicious revolution' around the world. 'Mario led by example, not by telling people what they ought to do, and I've tried to do that, too,' she said of Savio, who withdrew from the public eye in the late 1960s because he feared that a cult of personality was forming around him. (Savio died at age 53 in 1996 of heart disease after a lifetime of heart trouble.)"
November 2004, California Monthly, Repossessing ourselves, Michael Rossman
"In the FSM, for the first time, our energy and critique focused on the institution we inhabited. Many of us felt that we revolted against the administration mainly because its decree kept us from continuing to serve others. Yet even this was personal, selfish, in being our deeper education, a reaching for soul. So, immediately, our focus turned from the threatened Civil Rights Movement to ourselves; it was our own state as political citizens that was being threatened, abused, that was to be fought for."
November 2004, California Monthly, Speaking freely: Former students remember the FSM, Lisa Rubens
"Weissman exercised those skills as head of the Graduate Coordinating Committee and as a member of the FSM Steering Committee, but he says that the power of the FSM came primarily from its many participants. 'The amazing thing was that people would come to rallies, hear discussions, talk with their professors, and then write stuff up,' he says. 'Lots of people did things on their own. Because of the way the movement was operating, there was no need to get central authority for anything.'"
November 2004, California Monthly, Robert Birgenau's path to Berkeley, Russell Schoch
"In the summer of 1965, Birgeneau joined six fellow students in the Southern Teachers Program at Benedict College in South Carolina to teach and do civil rights work. The group included two veterans of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley who, Birgeneau volunteers, 'were much more politically sophisticated than I was. I got a lot of my political education from those FSM people.'"
10/30/2004, Le Web de L'Humanité, histoire En 1964, le campus faisait la revolution, Envoye special
"Sous la houlette de Mario Savio, les étudiants s'organisent. Un mouvement voit le jour : le Free Speech Movement (FSM, mouvement de la liberte de parole), qui va appeler a la greve."
10/29/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, Preservationists Fight to Save Venerable West Berkeley Pub, Richard Brenneman
"The building figures prominently in Berkeley history as a popular watering hole and gathering spot for students, Cal fans, community groups and a large contingent of regulars-among them Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio and many of his colleagues."
10/26/2004, Counterpunch, Lessons for 2004, Lenni Brenner
"Most Americans had never heard of Berkeley. Suddenly Mario Savio, the FSM's gifted orator, was listened to all over the world. Abroad, decades after, when I said I lived in Berkeley, educated people commonly said something about the FSM. The town became the holy land for freedom fans everywhere."
10/25/2004, San Jose Mercury News, Flood of campaign ads hard to miss, voters say, Truong Phuoc Khánh, Connie Skipitares and Dan Stober
"Poizner, an articulate and intense man, has pursued the Assembly seat with the energy needed for a corporate takeover. The more casual Ruskin wears his hair longer and is not as polished a speaker. He talks to voters about his days during the University of California-Berkeley free speech movement in the 1960s and of his long involvement in Democratic politics in Redwood City."
10/24/2004, Boston Globe, Vietnamese want war exhibit in Calif. to include their voice, Bobby Caina Calvan
"California became the center of early antiwar demonstrations, which in turn helped give rise to the Free Speech Movement, the tie-dye culture, acid rock, and later the Black Panthers."
10/20/2004, North Gate News Online, Free Speech Era Expert Sees Links to 1934 Strike, Emilie Raguso
"'The story of Berkeley in the '60s starts in the '30s,' said Jo Freeman, an outspoken organizer in the Free Speech Movement while an undergraduate at Berkeley between 1961 and 1965. Freeman--who later registered voters with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta's Southern Christian Leadership Conference and went on to get both a doctorate in political science and her law degree--put Berkeley's early activist history in perspective in a lecture at Moses Hall on how anti-communism misunderstood and subsequently shaped the protest movement: 'People were connecting the dots wrongly. I don't think a single party in that conflict had any idea of what was going on.'"
10/19/2004, Daily Californian, Peaceful Muslims Deserve Better, Hiraa Amber Khan
"In light of the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, it is hard to believe that blatant travesties of free speech not only still exist in our society, but stand unchallenged by a public that highly values freedom of expression."
10/18/2004, The California Aggie, UC service workers rally at Berkeley over weekend, Katy Tang
"'I'm hoping that the public actually starts to recognize that the workers on all the campuses are providing a vital service for keeping the campus clean, and that we're as valued as any of the faculty out there,' she said. 'If it wasn't for us, the campus would have to shut down, but we don't feel like we're being represented in the contract negotiations that way.'
Slichter participated in the march where workers flooded the major intersection of Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue - across from the Free Speech Movement's birthplace."
10/18/2004, Daily Californian, Time Reporter Named Daily Cal Alumnus of Year, Josh Keller
"'I owe so much to the FSM, and not just for my career,' he [Jim Willwerth] says. 'I got in the middle of the FSM, and I saw what happens when people make a political protest that really annoys whoever is in power.'"
10/17/2004, The Malaysia Star, Cool look at hip era: review of The Hippie Dictionary, Martin Vengadesan
"Another section lists the most influential people then: besides current icons Bob Dylan and Mohamad Ali, and "period-people" like Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, the likes of Bella Abzug, Buckminster Fuller and Mario Savio also had a great impact at the time."
October 16 / 17, 2004, CounterPunch, Those Who Went Before, Alexander Cockburn
"These days the left and PC crowd would find that the woman was opposed to affirmative action, or some such, and would have driven her out with oaths and curses. They have no idea of tactical coalitions. So much for the heritage of Sixties radicalism. Not everyone's gone to seed, to be sure. There's Lenni, who finally got me off the chair and actually there are many, many more who understand the importance of the third word that comes after Free Speech, namely 'Movement'. Without a movement you have nothing, and you've built nothing. That's what the ABB 'leftists' don't understand now. November 3 will be a bit late in the day to start looking for one."
10/15/2004, Santa Cruz Sentinel, Greenwood, Aptheker honored by NOW, uncredited
"Aptheker, a leader in the Free Speech Movement, has taught the popular 'Introduction to Feminism' course at UCSC for 24 years."
10/15/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, LEAH GARCHIK, Leah Garchik
"At one of those Free Speech Movement events, Gar Smith heard Paul Krassner saying, 'I ran into Jesus the other day. He had a tattoo. It read 'W.W.I.D.''"
10/15/2004, Daily Californian, Opinion: Revive the Movement, Kevin Deenihan
"The only way to truly honor the Free Speech Movement would be to keep its ideals alive and fighting. Instead we've been spending weeks killing it.
Students familiar with the Free Speech Movement should recoil from the sentimentalized, self-congratulatory Boomer Lovefest that is FSM 2004"
10/14/2004, UC Santa Cruz Press Releases, UC Santa Cruz professor Bettina Aptheker receives California NOW Award for Excellence in Education, Scott Rappaport
"'Awardees are selected based on their commitment to equality-driven education and the general advancement of women in the field of education.' said CA NOW president, Megan Seely. 'These women are stellar examples of the kind of individual who not only is successful in her chosen profession, but for whom the personal is professional, and the professional is political. They are well deserving of accolades, and we are proud to honor them.'
A leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964, Aptheker is a scholar of history with a national reputation for her talents as an instructor. She started out in 1980 as the sole lecturer in the UC Santa Cruz Women's Studies Department, became the department's first ladder-rank faculty member in 1987, and was honored with the Alumni Association's Distinguished Teaching Award in 2001."
10/14/2004, UC Berkeley News, For some, the free-speech battle isn't over yet, Barry Bergman
"Rossman, who has written extensively about the FSM, pointed to what he termed the 'schizophrenic relationship' between Berkeley administrators and free speech. 'Free speech was never won at Berkeley,' he insisted, citing difficulties faced by graduate- student instructors in their attempts to form a union. 'It's not over,' he said. 'The same problems, the same struggles occur and occur again.'
Widespread acceptance of the FSM, he said, began only after Mario Savio's death in 1996. 'When Mario dies, the Free Speech Movement suddenly becomes OK across the county. It becomes known as part of the 'good Sixties,'' said Rossman sardonically, complaining that Berkeley has yet to properly honor the movement.
Rossman bluntly derided the doughnut-shaped slab on the plaza - a monument to the FSM. The hole in the center of the concrete circle, he observed, is 'too small to contain even an individual human brain, let alone to testify to the fact that the FSM was a superbly collective movement.'
'There is [still] no explicit mention of the Free Speech Movement' in Sproul Plaza, Rossman continued. There is a plaque for Savio on the steps of Sproul Hall, he noted, but 'Mario was not the movement. He was a hero, but he was not the movement.'"
10/14/2004, UC Berkeley News, Molly Ivins said that?, Wendy Edelstein
"'Don't you know, that's what we do again and again in this country,' said Ivins, pointing out that Americans willingly surrender civil liberties in an effort to quell their fears of such menaces as communism, crime, drugs, illegal aliens, and terrorists. 'We think we can make ourselves safer by making ourselves less free. I'll tell you something: When you make yourselves less free, all that happens afterwards is that you're less free. You are not safer.'"
10/14/2004, Daily Californian, Alums Fund-Raise to Leave Gift of New Political Center, Stefanie Shih
"Instead of donating the usual bench or fountain to UC Berkeley, the class of 1968 is hoping to leave a more personal mark on campus-launching a campaign to raise between $500,000 and $1 million to develop a Center for Social and Political Civility.
The graduates, who were sophomores when Mario Savio stood atop a police car to fight for free speech rights on campus during fall 1964, are hoping the new center will reflect the values and goals of their time spent in the Free Speech Movement."
10/14/2004, Berkleyan, FSM vets urge students to change the world, Bonnie Azab Powell
10/13/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Letter: On art and war, Robbin Henderson
"Besides the many fascinating writers and activists participating in 'The Free Speech Movement at 40' celebration at UC Berkeley, the Berkeley Art Center has mounted an exhibition titled 'War, Peace and Civil Liberties' that features local artists and others from across the country, Argentina and Canada."
10/12/2004, Oakland Tribune, Berkeley honors Free Speech Movement, editors
"At the celebration Friday of the Free Speech Movement on Sproul Plaza, Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, who was a graduate student at Yale when the Free Speech Movement inspired him to join the Civil Rights Movement, told students they should be proud to carry on the tradition. But he said he agreed with some critics, saying free speech too often is reserved for those who preach certain 'politically correct' views."
10/12/2004, Daily Californian, Editorial: FSM Should Mean Free Speech for Al, editor
"In using his speech as a platform for bashing our current president, former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean cheapened the message of the Free Speech Movement and presented a partisan call to arms, rather than what event planners had anticipated, an unbiased rally for freedom of speech."
10/12/2004, Daily Californian, Letter: FSM Event Coordinator Criticizes Dean, Michael Rossman
"The San Francisco Chronicle's Saturday story about the Free Speech Movement's 40th anniversary commemoration includes a significant mistake. In a picture captioned, 'Former presidential candidate Howard Dean is surrounded by well-wishers after his speech,' I am shown hugging Dean and whispering in his ear. I was actually saying, 'You sure are a selfish, egocentric, self-centered S.O.B.!' My remark was justified, because Dean completely violated advance agreements about his speech."
10/12/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, FSM Meets Again at Sproul, Richard Brenneman
"Howard Dean opened his own stump speech with an homage. 'Arnold, you better watch out, because Jackie Goldberg's comin' ta getcha!'"
10/12/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, Psychiatrist's Encounter With FSM Shaped Life, Richard Brenneman
"When young psychiatrist Neal Blumenfeld read that students had staged a protest at Sproul Plaza, he drove his Triumph TR-3 sports car as close as he could get to the campus, then walked over for a first-hand look.
Within days of that 1964 protest he'd been ousted from his part-time consultancy with the Berkeley Police Department and had established himself as what Free Speech Movement leaders described as 'the movement shrink.'"
10/11/2004, UC Berkeley News, "Give up cynicism": FSM@40 speakers call on today's students to change their world, Bonnie Azab Powell
"And this time, they also had a platform on top of the car to stand on. ASUC president Misha Leybovich held up his sneakers as he told the crowd how the 1964 students had respectfully removed their shoes before climbing on top of the car. (Despite their care, the hood of the car was damaged - "and we paid for that damage," Goldberg asserted later.) Leybovich admitted that he had known little about the Free Speech Movement until the untimely death of history professor and FSM veteran Reginald Zelnik, and marveled that at 20 years old he was older "than half the cats" who had been involved back then. He said he felt shame when reading about how cowardly the student government of the day had been, and pride that today's ASUC actively battles injustice on behalf of students."
10/11/2004, UC Berkeley News, Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh spills the secrets of the Iraq quagmire and the war on terror, Bonnie Azab Powell
"'Bush scares the hell of me'
¶
Hersh came to Berkeley at the invitation of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and the California First Amendment Coalition. His appearance in the packed ballroom of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union was the fitting end to a week of high-profile events in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement."
10/11/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Leah Garchik [Column], Leah Garchik
"Dorka Keehn was at dinner at Chez Panisse after Molly Ivins gave a Mario Savio Memorial Lecture at UC Berkeley last week, and Ivins talked about becoming a celebrity. 'People used to come up to me and tell me I was their hero.' And she used to respond, 'Please, for your sake, get a new hero.' Nowadays, she said, she just says, 'Bless your heart.'"
10/11/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, 40 years on, Free Speechers talk all they want, Meredith May
"Hirsch, a statistics instructor at Ohlone College in Fremont, brought his celebrated poem about the Free Speech Movement to share:
'It was about democracy -- slow, painful, laborious, lasting through the night, the height of inefficiency, yet in the morning's light, the coalition, like the flag, was still there.'
It was Joan Baez, leading us in singing, 'We Shall Overcome.'
It was people climbing ropes to get into Sproul Hall to be arrested. ...'"
10/11/2004, Daily Californian, Dean Leads Calls for New Movement, Catherine Ho and Betty Yu
"'I was surprised, as a representative of a nonpartisan group that co-sponsored it I was a little upset,' said Becca Cramer, co-president of the Berkeley ACLU."
10/11/2004, Daily Californian, FSM Panel Recalls Movement's Origin, Kim Perry
"As more students pushed for free speech, administrators cracked down by limiting even more avenues of expression, Franck said.
Although the students began their fight for rights they considered fundamental, they became the leaders of a larger movement.
'We started out as liberals and we became radicals,"'Franck said."
10/11/2004, Daily Californian, Students Not Eager for FSM Events, Rachel Luna
"As dozens of Free Speech Movement veterans flocked to UC Berkeley to relive what they created 40 years ago, they had a chance to teach students on campus about how they caught national headlines in the fall of 1964."
10/10/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, '60s Free Speech leader got caught in FBI web, Seth Rosenfeld
"The FBI trailed Mario Savio for more than a decade after he led the 1964 Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, and bureau officials plotted to 'neutralize' him politically -- even though there was no evidence he broke any federal law, according to FBI records obtained by The Chronicle.
J. Edgar Hoover's FBI targeted Savio because he was the nation's first prominent student leader of the '60s, and top FBI officials feared protests would spread from Berkeley to other schools, the records show.
The bureau used tactics against Savio that Congress in 1976 found were improper -- including some similar to investigative methods that agents may now use against suspected terrorists under the Patriot Act and under loosened FBI guidelines, experts said"
10/10/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Mario Savio's FBI Odyssey, Seth Rosenfeld
"The 1964 Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, which staged the nation's first major campus sit-ins of the '60s, was being used in a Soviet plot against America. Hoover implied that the Communist Party USA was manipulating Mario Savio, the Berkeley student who'd become famous for leading the FSM. "Communist Party leaders feel that based on what happened on the campus at the University of California at Berkeley, they can exploit similar student demonstrations to their own benefit in the future," Hoover testified on March 4, 1965.
But FBI files show Hoover knew there was no evidence Savio or the Free Speech Movement were under the influence of any group plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. He knew the FSM was a nonviolent protest against a university rule barring students from engaging in political activity on campus. He knew Savio broke no federal law. He knew because his agents had told him."
10/10/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, When politics met theater in the streets, Heidi Benson
"At that moment, what would become a decade of social protest was just getting started at UC Berkeley. First came the Free Speech Movement, launched in 1964 to protest campus crackdowns on freedom of expression. []Stew Albert -- like thousands of other young people -- was attracted to the FSM's insistence that students had the same constitutional rights as adults.
The FSM opened the door for the Vietnam Day Committee, the Berkeley anti- war group that staged one of the nation's largest campus teach-ins about Vietnam in 1965. Albert soon became a leader of the committee."
10/10/2004, Sacramento Bee, Papers: FBI trailed 1960s movement leader, Associated Press
"FBI investigators trailed a 1960s student protest leader for more than a decade despite having no evidence he broke any federal laws, a newspaper reported Sunday.
Hundreds of pages of FBI files, obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle, showed that investigators collected personal information about Mario Savio, including documents on his marriage and divorce, without a court order. The FBI also obtained copies of Savio's tax returns in violation of federal rules."
10/10/2004, NPR, Free Speech Landmark for Colleges, Margot Adler
"But if there was one main theme of the rally it was an attack on cynicism. Jackie Goldberg, a member of the California State Assembly, and one of the original leaders of the Free Speech Movement told students there's a mythology - that you are disinterested and that we who are in our sixties are better than you... hogwash, she said, you're light years ahead of us."
10/9/2004, The Washington Post, After the Revolution, The Commemoration, Tommy Nguyen
"The notion that the Free Speech Movement was a victory of the left is a time-honored misconception. At the beginning of the school year in 1964 when, at the height of the civil rights era, the university banned political advocacy of off-campus social issues on school property, both liberal and conservative student groups joined forces, calling themselves the United Front.
'It's always exciting to be a part of a movement made up of people who don't normally agree with one another,' says Goldberg. She is the first spokeswoman for the group. 'That was the genius of the FSM: It had left, right and center.'"
10/9/2004, San Jose Mercury News, University commemorates Free Speech Movement, which started 40 years ago, Associated Press
"The 1964 Free Speech Movement successfully protested a ban on political activity on campus. It is viewed as opening doors for the wave of protests that followed in the following decade."
10/9/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Free speech returns to Sproul, Charles Burress
"The Free Speech Movement's electrifying act of defiance 40 years ago -- surrounding a police car at UC Berkeley and using it as a speaker's platform -- received a long-delayed curtain call Friday as movement veterans and former Democratic Presidential contender Howard Dean used another police car as a stage for fiery oratory.
This time, however, UC police willingly provided the vehicle, and the former scowls of campus administrators had become smiles."
10/9/2004, Oakland Tribune, Free Speech Movement vets look to pass torch to Berkeley students, Michelle Maitre
"BERKELEY -- In 1964, University of California, Berkeley students dented the top of a police car when they hopped up on it and staged an impromptu protest that would later become known as the start of the Free Speech Movement.
On Friday, when hundreds gathered in Sproul Plaza to mark the 40th anniversary of the movement, speakers addressed the crowd again from the top of a police car. Only this time, they mounted the steps of a specially constructed wooden platform bearing a stern warning sign that no more than two people -- max! -- were to stand on the platform at the same time.
Obviously, concessions to the establishment were made at the 40th anniversary celebration, but some of the spirit of the original day remained."
10/9/2004, Daily Californian, The Spirituality of Free Speech, Walt Herbert
"'Who am I?' asks the anguished young soul. 'You're a prospective employee' answers the authorized guardian of our culture's knowledge and spiritual wisdom.
So the FSM was a thing of the spirit not only because of the intellectual and historical developments that have confounded religious traditions in the West, but also because the modern multiversity has traded in its spiritual mission in favor of marketing knowledge to the highest bidder."
10/9/2004, Contra Costa Times, Free Speech Movement trumpeted at Cal, Martin Snapp
"'I really didn't know much about the Free Speech Movement until professor Reggie Zelnik was killed last summer,' said student association president Misha Leybovich, referring to the co-author of the definitive book on movement. Zelnick was killed in a truck accident on campus in May.
'The more I found out about it, the more I realized it has important lessons for my generation,' Leybovich said."
10/8/2004, The Guardian, UK, Berkeley Celebrates Free Speech Movement, Michelle Locke, Associated Press
"'They depend on cynicism to keep you out of the battle,' thundered state Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg of Los Angeles and a former Free Speech Movement leader. "Are you going to keep out of the battle?'
'No!' roared the crowd.
[Howard] Dean told students merely voting is not enough. They should run for office or support someone else's campaign.
'You have the power to stand up as they did in this very spot 40 years ago for a democratic America which allows ordinary people to reclaim their government," he said. "You have the power. Use it.'"
10/8/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Free Speech Movement Turns 40: Celebrating 4 decades of mouthing off, Charles Burress
"Such accessibility and two-way communication with the mass of students, combined with group leadership, kept the movement going strong even after 95 percent of the leadership and 85 percent of the core followers were locked up after the Sproul Hall occupation, said Kathleen Piper, another executive committee member who is now an artist.
'We still put a picket line around every major building on campus,' she said at a panel of movement leaders speaking on 'The Nuts and Bolts of the FSM.'"
10/8/2004, Oakland Tribune, Ivins' left-leaning humor hits mark, Michelle Maitre
"She also sat down for a brief question-and-answer session with Orville Schell, dean of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, one of the sponsors of Ivins' talk. Most of the questions -- solicited from the audience and written on slips of paper before Ivins' lecture -- were about President Bush, except for one posed by UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. In brief remarks before Ivins took the stage, Birgeneau asked about the status of free speech in America today -- whether it's better or worse than it was when the Free Speech Movement launched in 1964.
In some ways it's better and in some ways it's worse, Ivins said. 'There is more pressure to conform,' she said, pointing to a national mass media that is increasingly owned by a small number of corporations that she said are more concerned with the bottom line than providing news coverage."
10/8/2004, Daily Californian, His Speech Muzzled Before, Professor Stood With Students, Sonja Sharp
"Movement leaders found a sympathetic ear in Searle, who felt his own free speech had been curtailed previously by Berkeley administrators in 1961, when he was barred from speaking at a Boalt Hall School of Law function against 'Operation Abolition,' an anti-communist propaganda film. Searle was informed just an hour before he was scheduled to talk that he would not be speaking."
10/8/2004, Daily Californian, Movement Preservation Is His Life's Work, Catherine Ho
"As a teaching assistant in mathematics, he-alongside thousands of other students-was struck by a "historical thunderbolt," finally finding a venue to voice his ideas on civil rights."
10/8/2004, Daily Californian, Editorial: Shirts Should Be Sold, Editors
"On the same day the campus celebrated fortieth anniversary of Free Speech Movement, administrators barred the Cal Surf Club from selling "Fuck the Trojans" T-shirts on campus, citing an infringement of the school's copyright.
UC Berkeley should embrace this swell of school spirit, rather than quell students' free speech."
10/7/2004, UC Berkeley News, Researching the Free Speech Movement, Jonathan King
"Collections of primary-source materials are vast and varied in the Free Speech Movement Digital Archive and the Online Archive of California's Free Speech Movement Archive, not to mention the plainly named Free Speech Movement Archive, developed by Michael Rossman and other FSM activists. The latter contains numerous items of interest not duplicated on either UC site."
10/7/2004, The New York Sun, 40 Years After Free Speech Movement, Counterculture Figures Have Become the Establishment, Josh Gerstein
"In 1964, thousands of students surrounded the police car that was preparing to haul away the violator. This time, the police are providing a police cruiser for the movement's commemoration.
'It's a perfect example of how institutionalized it's become,' said one of the movement's leaders, Jo Freeman."
10/7/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Free Speech Movement Turns 40, Carrie Sturrock
"'Every decade is different,' said New York University Professor Robert Cohen, who co-edited 'The Free Speech Movement, Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s.' 'I don't think students today should be put down for not having a mass insurgency. There has always been an activist tradition to Berkeley, and when issues matter to students, they protest. It's a stereotype that students don't care or are ready to riot at the drop of a hat.'"
10/7/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Leah Garchik, Leah Garchik
"A couple of hecklers shouted out during Monday night's Herb Caen Lecture at UC Berkeley, a Mark Danner/William Kristol debate on the election. After one man ignored J-school Dean Orville Schell's repeated requests that he refrain from interrupting, campus police removed him. This was a justified action in the eyes of many, but my spy notes with irony that UC Berkeley's celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement."
10/7/2004, Oakland Tribune, It's not Big Brother, but someone's watching at Cal, Kristin Bender
"It's no coincidence that Goldberg and his group of students are on Sproul Plaza this week introducing and explaining the camera. This month, UC Berkeley is commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, which in 1964 opened doors for greater student involvement in campus affairs and launched a spirit of activism that is still a trademark of university students today.
'The name 'Demonstrate' is meant to have multiple meanings,' said Goldberg, who is also an artist. 'It's about the technology and also a reference to the demonstrations that have been out here (in Sproul Plaza).'"
10/7/2004, Daily Californian, Opinion: Disintegrating Integrity, Tejas Narechania
"This week, we celebrate the civil liberties which we, as a campus community, have fought to protect. The Free Speech Movement was a great win for, well, free speech. While it is important to reflect on the victories we've won for the Bill of Rights, it is equally important to be aware of-and fight against-abuses of these civil rights, including the constant attacks to the unabridged right of freedom of press."
10/7/2004, Daily Californian, Free Speech to Bash Bush, Elysha Tenenabum
"One of President Bush's most famous journalism foes from his home state of Texas stood in front of the generation that led the Free Speech Movement last night to tell them something they already knew: Politics should be fun-especially when exercising free speech."
10/7/2004, Daily Californian, Club Banned From Selling Explicit Shirts, Conor Dale
"He said it was ironic that he could not produce a shirt with an expletive on it during the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement."
10/7/2004, Daily Californian, FSM Veterans Wax Nostalgic for '60s, Sonja Sharp
"'It turns out it's more dramatic than the formula heroism,' Timberg said. 'When you actually conjure their different views, then you get a better image of what the movement was actually like.'"
10/7/2004, Daily Californian, Art Review: "War, Peace and Civil Liberties", Alice Fanchiang
"Remedios Rapaport continues the optimism of 'Soupcart' by positively addressing all three topics of the exhibition with her three dimensional work, 'Power to the People.' Painted in the style of carousels from the 1800s, the piece is eye candy with purpose. A peephole lets viewers see a collage of demonstrations-the suffrage picketers of 1917, Ghandi's Salt March in 1930, Martin Luther King Jr. leading the last leg of the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965. The piece debuts just in time for the 40th Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, and it reminds us that we, as a people united, have the power to affect change."
10/6/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Free Speech Movement Turns 40, Charles Burress
"Asked why the FSM changed from pariah to icon, Cohen said UC officials in 1964 had had a 'more constricted view of campus free speech rights' conditioned by the Red Scares of the '30s and '50s and a fear that campus leniency with radical activism would jeopardize state funding.
'In hindsight,' he said, 'it is easier for UC officials to look at the FSM more calmly and to see that it was at its heart a democratic movement championing free speech.'"
10/6/2004, Daily Californian, Opinion: Some Assembly Required, Andro Hsu
"Last Friday marked the fortieth anniversary of the start of the Free Speech Movement. In 1964, Mario Savio ignited the movement with these impassioned words: 'If (the university) is a firm ... then I'll tell you something: the faculty are a bunch of employees, and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw material that don't mean to have any process upon us, don't mean to be made into any product ... We're human beings!'"
10/6/2004, Daily Californian, DE-Cal Courses a Legacy of FSM, Catherine Ho
"'The students were on a mission to return the university to the students-the body of masters and scholars,' Felsenstein said."
10/6/2004, Daily Californian, Public Access to Robotic Camera Fosters Discourse, Angela Chen
"In conjunction with ongoing Free Speech Movement activities, the Vice Chancellor's office has authorized a temporary increase in zoom level between noon and two o'clock this week in order to demonstrate the camera's power, capable of a 22x zoom-a magnification previously deemed too close for comfort by former Chancellor Robert Berdahl and Vice Chancellor Paul Gray last spring. It was reduced to 10x to avoid the possibility of privacy infringement on neighboring apartment buildings."
10/5/2004, Daily Californian, Crossing Paths, Lindsay Meisel
"'(Kerr) was moving in a methodical and careful way to bring about more freedom of speech on the campuses,' said then-UC Berkeley spokesperson Ray Colvig, 'but he didn't realize how fast things were moving by 1964.'
Kerr had a predicament: As the Free Speech Movement gained steam, he was too liberal for many of the UC regents, and too conservative for student activists."
10/5/2004, Daily Californian, What Was the Free Speech Movement?, Jeff Hirsch
"It was a questioning of authority. Did the administration have the right to set arbitrary rules governing political activity? The first rule was that there were to be no tables, as they obstructed traffic. Later, it was that there could be tables where they had been, but with no advocacy of actions like registering to vote. Later still, the administration declared students could advocate actions, but not ones that might later lead to arrests for civil disobedience or anything else. This is known as prior restraint of speech."
10/5/2004, Daily Californian, Editorial: Stanford Speech Silenced, Editors
"At a time when Berkeley is celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, the censorship of art for religious or any other reasons is ironic. College campuses are seen as a place where discourse is more free than in other arenas. A decision such as this one turns the clocks backward-whatever happened to freedom of expression? "
10/5/2004, Daily Californian, Lawyer Recalls Free Speech Activism, Mal Burnstein
"We hear of the 'leaders,' an impressive bunch, but too few ever appreciated that the 'leaders' were merely reflective of the moral strength of the rest of the FSM, not the cause of it. While Mario Savio was more articulate than most, he knew he was not more moral than his cohorts and tried to make the press understand that. That is the most significant lesson, to me, of the FSM."
10/5/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, Free Speech-The Next 40 Years, Becky O'Malley
"Many universities, particularly private ones, have lately been seduced by the European concept, in the interest of maintaining order on campus, but it's a bad idea. If hating is going on, better we should all know about. Just shutting up nasty people doesn't put an end to whatever nefarious action plans they may be contemplating, and in fact it makes it harder for the rest of us to combat their influence with effective counter-speech. And it's easy for those in power to slide over from banning "hate speech" to banning any form of expression of ideas which is annoying someone. Just last week we got a report that the Berkeley police, on orders from above, had been ticketing people who honked their horns to show support as they passed a union demonstration."
10/5/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, Hersh, Ivins, Krassner on Campus For FSM Anniversary Events, Richard Brenneman
"Friday's main even happens-where else?-around a police car in Sproul Plaza at noon. The rally features movement speakers, campus representatives and a dissection of the Patriot Act."
10/5/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, Berkeley This Week, editors
"Free Speech in Dangerous Times Celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, Oct. 5 - Oct. 10. at UC Berkeley. For details on events, see www.fsm-a.org "
10/4/2004, Tri-Valley Herald, University of California, Berkeley, commemorates the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement with a number of public events this week.,
"Oct. 14:
- Film of a talk by Bob Avakian, Free Speech Movement participant, 7 p.m., ACT 1 & 2 Theater, 2128 Center St., Berkeley. Tickets: Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way, Berkeley, (510) 848-1196. This event is not sponsored by the campus"
10/4/2004, Oakland Tribune, Free speech fight lives on, Michelle Maitre
"'The free speech movement, in and of itself, was one of the greatest actions taken on behalf of the furtherance of democracy,' said Amaury Gallais of the Berkeley College Republicans. 'The fact that we can set up a table on campus every day and we can express our minds -- we can speak against the administration if we want to, or speak against actions taken by other student groups -- it's the primary legacy of the free speech movement. It's huge.'"
10/4/2004, Daily Californian, Saying Less Today: Some Say Free Speech Spirit Lost on New Generation, Betty Yu
"'If you aren't willing to fight for (your rights) you will lose them,' Lustig said. 'They're not set down for all time. Once they're won they're not won for all time.'"
10/4/2004, Chico Enterprise Record, The Free Speech Movement in 1964 was largely peaceful., Larry Mitchell
"The Free Speech Movement in 1964 was largely peaceful.
One has to say 'largely' because during the initial demonstration, when students surrounded a police car, a group of 100 or so mostly fraternity members threw lighted cigarettes and eggs at the protesters. They stopped at the request of the pastor who ran the Catholic Newman Center."
10/3/2004, Chico Enterprise Record, Locals were at Berkeley for movement that made history, Larry Mitchell
"Brannam recalls seeing Weinberg loaded into a police car.
He said another student, David Goines, who later became a leader in the Free Speech Movement, turned to him and said, "What can we do?"
'I'd been reading some of the stuff Gandhi had written, so I said, We could sit down,' Brannam recalled."
October 2 / 3, 2004, Counterpunch, The First Ex-Catholic Saint, Lenni Brenner
"However, when someone goes through Mario's suffering, then studies physics -- when I can't do elementary algebra -- & then says he doesn't have a head for politics, he gets all my affection."
10/1/2004, The Globe and Mail, SOCIAL STUDIES: A DAILY MISCELLANY OF INFORMATION, Michael Kesterton
"It was a joke?
On this day 40 years ago, University of California student Jack Weinberg was arrested for distributing civil-rights leaflets on the Berkeley campus. Before the police car could take him away, more than 2,000 students sat down around the vehicle and remained there for 32 hours. It was the beginning of the Free Speech Movement, which helped shape a generation. Mr. Weinberg later coined the phrase: 'We don't trust anyone over 30,' when officials appointed a youngish man to negotiate with the FSM, thinking he might be more acceptable to them. In 1988, Morgan Spector of Pasadena wrote The Los Angeles Times that the student radical was just stalling negotiations with his remark -- which students treated as a joke -- but the press seized on the catchphrase and kept it alive. Years later, reporters even tracked down Mr. Weinberg on his 30th birthday, to his apparent embarrassment."
10/1/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, LEAH GARCHIK, Leah Garchik
"So today's subject is peep shows. UC Berkeley announced this week that as commemoration of the Free Speech Movement 40th anniversary approaches, a new Web cam has been installed at Sproul Plaza. According to UC Berkeley industrial engineering professor Ken Goldberg, the plaza is 'inherently a stage,' and the Web cam 'opens that stage up to the world.' Not everyone sees it that way. Peter Franck, lawyer for the Free Speech Movement, says the Web cam also makes it possible to 'monitor and tape everything that anyone does on Sproul Plaza.'''
October 2004, reasononline, Welcome to the Fun-Free University The return of in loco parentis is killing student freedom., David Weigel
"Ironically, a one-time member of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement seized on this approach when she became an administrator. Annette Kolodny, a dean of the University of Arizona's College of Humanities, used her 1998 book Failing the Future to explain why colleges needed to regulate what students said. In concert with other administrators, Kolodny had stiffened penalties for offensive speech and created workshops in which new students could have their values certified or corrected. Her bogeyman was 'antifeminist intellectual harassment,' and her polices were designed to bring contrary speech out into the open, so it could be 'readily recognized and effectively contained.'"
10/1/2004, People Magazine, The Week Ahead, Serena Kappes
"MONDAY, OCT. 4: Movie and music stars will come together to defend civil liberties at the ACLU Freedom Concert at Avery Fisher Hall in New York City's Lincoln Center. Sean Penn, Robin Williams and Jake Gyllenhaal will be on hand to do spoken-word pieces while Mos Def and Paul Simon are among the musical performers. "History has shown us that a little censorship, wiretapping, unlawful detention and deporting all lead to the radical dissolution of our freedoms," composer and producer of the event Philip Glass said in a statement. Among the highlights of the evening is a tribute to late comedian Lenny Bruce, a poster boy of the free speech movement."
10/1/2004, Los Angeles Times, Free to Be Silent at UC Berkeley, Rone Tempest
"Searle predicted that one day there would even be a statue of the late Free Speech leader Mario Savio, who died in 1996, on the campus next to the monuments to Free Speech era Chancellor Clark Kerr - who blamed the protests on 'Mao-Castroite' influences - and legendary football coach Pappy Waldorf."
10/1/2004, Juneau Empire, This Day in History,
"In the nation
In 1964, the Free Speech Movement was launched at the University of California at Berkeley."
10/1/2004, Daily Californian, Editorial: Honor the Free Speech Movement by Voting, Editors
"What they wanted was simple-the right to table and flier for outside political causes on campus. Today, the tables line up daily on the concrete for President George W. Bush, for candidate Senator John Kerry, for socialism, for abortion-for political beliefs of any stripe and color.
But with less than one-third of those ages 18 to 24 voting in the last presidential election, we must ask in Mario Savio's words: are we passively taking part?"
10/1/2004, Daily Californian, FSM Cafe Serves Up History, Traci Kawaguchi
"Prior to the dedication of the cafe, angry letters from staff and alumni were sent to then-Chancellor Robert Berdahl slamming the commercialization of the Free Speech Movement.
Nonetheless, Stephen Silberstein, the benefactor who donated $1.3 million to build the cafe, said he wanted students to have a connection to the Free Speech Movement.
'I thought it was a good idea to have a memorial to Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement in the center of campus,' Silberstein said. "
10/1/2004, Daily Californian, Still Much to Say: 40 Years After Clash, Students and Administration Collaborate to Honor Tumultuous Pas, Catherine Ho
"Forty years ago to the day, UC Berkeley sophomore Bettina Aptheker scrambled shoeless atop a police car in Sproul Plaza in front of a sea of blinding television lights and a roaring crowd of 2,000.
She read Frederick Douglass: 'Power concedes nothing without a demand.'"
10/1/2004, Contra Costa Times, SNAPP SHOTS, Martin Snapp
"As Lee Felsenstein, who was actually there, told me last week, 'I had to make a choice. Was I a scared kid who wanted to be safe at all costs? Or was I a person who had principles and was willing to take a risk to follow them? It was like that moment in 'Huckleberry Finn' when Huck says, 'All right, I'll go to Hell.''"
10/1/2004, Boston Globe et al, Today in history - Oct. 1, The Associated Press
"Today's Highlight in History:
Forty years ago, on Oct. 1, 1964, the Free Speech Movement was launched at the University of California at Berkeley."
10/1/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, From Atop a Police Car, A Revolution Was Born, Richard Brenneman
"I remember him [Savio] saying that the principle was freedom of speech on campus, not the tables. So he suggested moving the tables to Sproul Plaza. That was when the police car came," she [Aptheker] said."
9/30/2004, UC Berkeley News, The Free Speech Movement at 40: Greybeards join with today's ASUC in planning a weeklong commemoration of 1964-65's watershed events,
"Any attempt to mark the 'anniversary' of the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement requires that you first identify its genesis. Was it the mid-September 1964 announcement by Dean of Students Katherine Towle that advocacy literature and activities on off-campus political issues would no longer be permitted within 'the 26-foot strip of brick walkway at the campus entrance on Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue'? Was it the Oct. 1 arrest of Jack Weinberg on Sproul Plaza (followed by the 32-hour immobilization of the police car in which he was placed) that took place after much debate and demonstration in response to Towle's directive? Or the arrival on campus, a day later, of some 500 police and Highway Patrol officers, some armed with riot sticks, as the crowd of onlookers and protest sympathizers swelled to more than 7,000?"
9/30/2004, Daily Californian, Free Speech: Past and Present, Sonja Sharp
"A former member of the movement's steering committee, Rossman said UC Berkeley would not be the campus it is today without the Free Speech Movement.
'The first thing that put modern Berkeley on the map was the struggle against House Committee on Un-American Activities,' Rossman said. 'The university said essentially that thou shalt not make political action from this campus.'"
9/29/2004, Oakland Tribune, UC Berkeley holds public events leading up to Nov. 2, Staff
"Ivins delivers the eighth annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture from 7 to 8:30 p.m. next Wednesday in Zellerbach Auditorium. Free tickets on a first-come, first-serve basis beginning at 5 p.m. in front of the auditorium."
9/28/2004, UC Berkeley NewsCenter, Sproul Plaza webcam adds new dimension to free speech, Sarah Yang
"The new webcam is being unveiled at Sproul Plaza, the heart of activity on the University of California, Berkeley campus as the University prepares to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement.
'Sproul Plaza is inherently a stage, and by putting the webcam here it opens that stage up to the world,' said Ken Goldberg, the UC Berkeley professor of industrial engineering and computer science who is heading the project called 'Demonstrate.'"
9/28/2004, Contra Costa Times & Knight Ridder News Service syndication, Free speech at 40, Martin Snapp
"[Marilyn] Noble's vantage point as den mother gave her a unique view.
'As I was cooking in the kitchen, I listened to the arguments going on, and I was struck by their scholarship and sophistication. These were highly educated people trying to figure out how to do the right thing. It was like listening to the founding fathers debating the Declaration of Independence. I kept thinking, 'The administration are idiots if they don't realize what they're up against.'"
9/28/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, Berkeley This Week,
"WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 29
KQED Public Radio's 'Forum with Michael Krasny' Live broadcast from the Pauley Ballroom East in the MLK Student Union, UC Campus. Program topics are: 9 a.m. Proposed changes to UC's undergraduate eligibility standards, 10 a.m. Student activism 40 years after the Free Speech Movement. Free and open to the public. 415-553-2119. www.kqed.org/radio."
9/26/2004, The Daily Bruin, Where is your voice?, Richard Clough
"Savio's agitation, along with several other growing movements, served as a model for large-scale protests and gave birth to widespread civil rights and, later, anti-war protests on campuses across the country."
9/24/2004, Sacramento Bee, Social consciousness: A role that Danny Glover embraces, Marcus Crowder
"'I graduated from high school in 1965 and went to college during the era of the civil-rights movement, the free-speech movement and the anti-war movement,' he said. 'Being socially active was practically a rite of passage during that time.'"
9/24/2004, North County Times, Cal State students: Moore to come after all, Bruce Kauffman
"Sociology professor Sharon Elise echoed the sentiment. Invoking the replacement of Malcolm X's scheduled appearance with one by the Rev. Billy Graham at Berkeley during the free speech movement of the 1960s, she said, 'We are not supposed to think. We are just supposed to obey ... Question to the president: Who and what is served by the refusal to bring Michael Moore to campus?'"
9/24/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, Free Speech Movement Veterans Plan Commemoration for October, Richard Brenneman
"Though four decades have passed since the Free Speech Movement (FSM) rocked the world, many of the same threats that galvanized the movement then have returned full force, say participants organizing the upcoming 40th anniversary commemoration."
9/22/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Leah Garchik, Leah Garchik
"Country Joe McDonald and his band will play at World Peace Music Awards ceremonies in San Francisco Saturday; at the Oakland Museum in conjunction with its show about California and the Vietnam War, Oct. 1; and at a 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement event at the Greek Theatre Oct. 8."
9/22/2004, Eureka Times-Standard, Nation's historians converge in Eureka, Sara Watson Arthurs
"But other aspects of California history are also up for discussion. The citrus industry in the Santa Clara Valley; the 1960s free speech movement in Berkeley; and the history of land preservation in Big Sur are also among workshop topics."
9/15/2004, Daily Californian, ASUC, New Ninja Discount Card Join Forces, Sonja Sharp
"The extra windfall will help fund the student government's sponsorship of the 40th anniversary celebration of the Free Speech Movement this October and a possible "battle of the bands" in the spring, Leybovich said."
9/13/2004, H-1960s, Jo Freeman, At Berkeley in the Sixties: The Education of an Activist 1961-1965, Judith Ezekiel
"Freeman's memoir provides a blow-by-blow narrative of events seen through the lens of an FSM moderate.' Indeed, despite her participation in sit-ins and her repeated arrests, Freeman emerges from the story as a moderate who, contrary to "Rumor Central," remained a dedicated member of the movement's core and subsequently a life-long political activist."
9/10/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Columnist defends racial profiling as aid to war on terror, Charles Burress
"The reaction to Malkin's speech, recorded by a bank of TV cameras, was closely watched in part because of past disruptions of conservative speakers on a campus famous as the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement."
9/9/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, LEAH GARCHIK column, Leah Garchik
"Among the array of events announced by organizers to mark the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley is an Oct. 10 all-day 'FSM veterans gathering in Strawberry Canyon. . . . General socializing . . . food, levity, trinkets, more hootenanny, dancing, wheezing ...'"
9/9/2004, Daily Californian, Oppression of the Lefties, Tejas Narechania
"I challenge the campus community at UC Berkeley to lead the path and get behind the left-handed population to fight for their rights. Here, at the heart of the Free Speech Movement, we can start a new revolution in civil rights equality and demand equal accommodations across the lines of dexterity. In doing so, we can improve Berkeley's reputation as an academic center of excellence, one that offers greater amenities to the left-handed students bound for great things, and to me."
9/8/2004, East Bay Express, The Wars at Home, Brady Kahn
"With so much material to cover, the editing process must have been a challenge. One museumgoer who said she lived through the era complained about the display on the Free Speech Movement because it failed to discuss the movement's origins in the protests against the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in San Francisco. Arguably more problematic than the FSM display is a short video clip of Nixon's resignation speech, mixed in with other footage from the early 1970s. Here, spectators who didn't live through the Watergate era may get the false impression that Nixon's resignation was an outgrowth of his Vietnam policy."
9/7/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, Oakland Museum's Vietnam Exhibit Evokes a Time Gone, And Yet Still Here:, J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
"At the Free Speech Movement station there is another huge photo, a familiar one of FSM leader Mario Savio marching through Sproul Gate followed by thousands. Beside it is a 1964 Oakland Tribune with a headline reading 'Hundreds of UC Sit-Ins Jailed.' The headline is in red, as if the conservative Knowlands, then-owners of the Tribune, were making the less-than-subtle point that the "red" Communist menace was swarming into Berkeley."
9/2/2004, Washington Square News, A link to the past, one sit-in at a time, Rivka Bukowsky
"Cohen, chair of Steinhardt's department of teaching and learning, has written two books on student activism, 'The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s' and 'When the Old Left Was Young,' on Depression-era activists. He explained that in America, college activists have historically succeeded in changing the status quo."
9/2/2004, UC Berkeley News, Berkeley's new faculty arrivals hear about the campus's traditions and opportunities from those who know them best, Barry Bergman
"For the most part, though, the daylong orientation session, in the Lipman Room of Barrows Hall, steered clear of present financial straits, focusing instead on Berkeley's singular history - from its humble beginnings in 1868 through Rube Goldberg, Mario Savio, 18 Nobel laureates, and the enduring Cal-Stanford rivalry - and the bright future facing the latest additions to the Berkeley faculty, including another 20 new hires not in attendance."
Fall 2004, The Museum of California, Clothes: More Than Meets the Eye, Inez Brooks-Myers
"Clothing is often an indicator of how a society is changing. Mario Savio, a leader in the 1964 Free Speech Movement at U.C. Berkeley, wore a suit, neat shirt, and necktie. His degree of formality was higher than we find now among some pastors at Sunday services!"
September 2004, California Monthly, Reginald Zelnik, professor of history and free speech advocate, Leon Litwack
"He held steadfast to his belief in social justice, even as so many others--the politically stylish--fell by the wayside of compromise, indifference, and accommodation. He exemplified in many ways the slogan popularized in 1968 by French students in the streets of Paris: "Soyez realistes, demandez l'impossible." (Be realistic. Demand the impossible)."
8/30/2004, Daily Californian, Commemorating the History of a Professor, Amaris White
"'He believed passionately in human rights and social justice,' said Eugene Wong, a former Princeton roommate and UC Berkeley colleague. 'He believed that change was possible and fought for it.'"
8/30/2004, Contra Costa Times, Friends mourn Berkeley scholar, Kiley Russell
"'Most of us in academia are either eccentrics or bores or both, and it is extraordinary how Reggie was neither ... Most importantly, he made life make sense,' Slezkine said."
8/29/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Heyday founder is booked for life, Annie Nakao
"In those heady times, as Berkeley was in the midst of a publishing ferment unleashed by the Free Speech Movement, there were no less than 100 small presses, with (now defunct) names like Shameless Hussy Press and Somber Reptile."
8/29/2004, Contra Costa Times, Vietnam era's legacy lingers, Robert Taylor
"Alison Greenberg, 59, and her husband Jerry, 65, said the exhibit captured the era well -- from Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement to rock record albums. Alison Greenberg took part in protests during the war, she said, much to her mother's horror."
8/27/2004, Santa Cruz Sentinel., Patriot Day discussions planned for around the county, Ramona Turner
"Santa Cruz's Resource Center for Nonviolence will host "Dissent is Patriotic." Panelists will include David Harris, a Vietnam draft-resistance leader and journalist; Bettina Aptheker, a leader of the UC Berkeley free speech movement, lifetime radical organizer for women's rights and member of the UC Santa Cruz Department of Women's Studies; and Noura Erakat, a young Palestinian-American peace activist and Boalt Hall law student. The event begins at noon at the Del Mar Theatre on Pacific Avenue."
8/27/2004, San Mateo County Times, Readying for the political challenge, Justin Jouvenal
Friday, August 27, 2004 - Assembly candidate Ira Ruskin's political career largely began on a stage before 5,000 protesters during one of the seminal political events of the late 60s: U.C. Berkeley's Free Speech Movement.
Mario Savio, the well-known leader of the movement, asked Ruskin to speak one afternoon after Berkeley's administrators threatened to banish protesters to a far corner of the campus for making too much noise.
'See, it's not the microphone the chancellor is concerned about,' Ruskin yelled from the stage after abandoning the mike, according to his autobiography. 'It's what we're saying that he objects to.'"
8/26/2004, The Daily Californian, Administration Hails Freshmen, Transfer Students, Kelly Paik
"Leybovich celebrated the fighting spirit of the campus by telling the history of famous campus sites in his speech, including Sproul Plaza and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union.
Sproul, home of the Free Speech Movement, will celebrate its 40th anniversary in October."
8/26/2004, Daily Californian, Administration Hails Freshmen, Transfer Students, Kelly Paik
"Leybovich celebrated the fighting spirit of the campus by telling the history of famous campus sites in his speech, including Sproul Plaza and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union.
Sproul, home of the Free Speech Movement, will celebrate its 40th anniversary in October."
8/26/2004, Alameda Times-Star, Rites to eulogize UC Prof Zelnik, Staff
"Zelnik mentored young Russian history scholars during his tenure at UC Berkeley, defended students during the tumultuous Free Speech Movement and wrote several books on Russian labor history."
8/25/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Reginald Zelnik -- UC Berkeley historian, Charles Burress
"He was a leading expert of Russian labor history and was well-known for his support of students, beginning with his defense of Free Speech Movement activists during his first year on the Berkeley faculty in 1964."
Aug. 25 - Aug. 31, 2004, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Rad storm rising, Tom Gallagher
"Freeman hadn't previously known Mario Savio, 'the philosophy undergraduate who articulated our innermost feelings so well,' as she describes him, but she quickly recognized the ability to connect global and local issues that made him the movement's prime orator. She also noted the weaknesses that would plague the student movement as it turned its attention toward the war: a new 'generation' of activists coming along every two years, the dream of 'revolution on one campus,' and the spirit of Savio's comment to her that 'the difference between you and me is that you would settle for a drab victory, while I prefer a brilliant defeat.'"
8/24/2004, AlterNet, The Summer When Everything Changed, Ruth Rosen
"Many of these college students returned home transformed. They had stood up to authority and challenged received wisdom about racial superiority. No surprise, then, that many of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement, which erupted in early fall at the University of California at Berkeley, had been among those who had fought segregation in the South. No surprise, either, that some of the young women in the civil rights movement jump-started the feminist revolution after they had learned to question the "natural order of things" and because some felt they had been subordinated or exploited during Freedom Summer."
8/21/2004, San Jose Mercury News, A visit to our haunted past, Mike Antonucci
"'What's Going On? -- California and the Vietnam Era' opens Saturday and runs through February. It's a big exhibition, more than four years in the making, mixing displays of memorabilia and photographs with audio guides that include oral histories from refugees, soldiers and others. Although it's global in its implications, its focus is California, where the Free Speech Movement was born in 1964, where key military installations existed and where many Southeast Asia refugees later settled."
August 20-26, 2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, Commentary: A Modest Proposal For a Berkeley Roadside Attraction, Albert Sukoff
"SIXTIESLAND...Daily demonstrations would be scheduled on the plaza: the Free Speech Movement would be recreated at 10 o'clock, filthy speech at noon and an generic anti-war theme would take center stage at 2 o'clock. The highlight of the day would come every afternoon at 4 o'clock with a recreation of the 1964 incident when demonstrators encircled a police car, a bronze replica of which would be installed as a permanent sculpture on Sproul Plaza. A Mario Savio look-alike would take to the roof and give the memorable throw-your-bodies-on-the-levers-of-the-machine speech."
8/17/2004, Dissident Voice, Don't Trust Anybody Over Thirty, Harold Williamson
"For those of you who don't know about the free speech movement at Berkeley during the sixties, a twenty-four-year-old Jack Weinberg said, 'We have a saying in the movement that we don't trust anybody over thirty.' Being in my sixth decade as a member of the human community, I think that is still damned good advice."
8/13/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, Berkeley Technophiles Launch Campaign Software Revolution, Richard Brenneman
"The newest revolution to emerge from Berkeley may seem quieter-even geekier-than those surrounding People's Park and the Free Speech Movement, but its architects hope its effects will prove even more enduring in reshaping the fabric of the American body politic.
Henri Poole, the organizer of presidential contender Dennis Kucinich's Internet campaign, and Dan Robinson, who ran the national Meet-Up list for Howard Dean's campaign have come up with a piece of software they believe will bring political power back to the neighborhood and community."
7/30/2004, Berkeley Voice, Brennan's isn't going anywhere, Martin Snapp
"'He was very disturbed by the protest demonstrations of the '60s,' said Elizabeth. 'One time he saw a demonstration on TV, and he spotted one of our customers. He was outraged. He said, 'That guy eats here!' It was Mario Savio.'"
7/28/2004, East Bay Express, Bananas and Vengeance, Anneli Rufus
"The book probes cultural clashes between Napa and its funkier neighbor Sonoma, a longtime magnet for ex-Berkeleyites including Free Speech Movement helmsman Mario Savio, who became a professor at Sonoma State."
7/19/2004, Daily Californian, Campus Sociology Professor Emeritus Dies at 79, Amy Penn
"As UC Berkeley professor during the 1960s, Kornhauser always engaged himself and mentored students in the Free Speech Movement, Brown, a former student of Kornhauser, said."
7/13/2004, Santa Cruz Sentinel, Crossed signals: Parties fume over station license, Donna Jones
"'It's a sad story,' said Frank Bardacke, a Watsonville activist with a leftist pedigree rooted in the 1960s Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. 'A group of people came close - the distance between your thumb and forefinger - to an authentic community radio station ... and it slipped through our fingers.'"
7/7/2004, sfweekly.com, Free the Science!, Matt Smith
"I couldn't make it to Sproul Hall when Joan Baez and Mario Savio rallied students to confront UC regents over free speech at the inception of what became nationwide protests against the Vietnam War."
6/21/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Country Joe's next stop won't be Vietnam, Richard S. Ehrlich
"McDonald was born in Washington, D.C., in 1942, grew up in El Monte, near Los Angeles, and came to Berkeley in the 1960s where he became heavily involved in the Free Speech Movement."
6/15/2004, New York Press, News & Columns, Matt Taibbi
"How about Mario Savio? The leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement died quietly in 1996. He ought to have been mentioned this week, because Savio was very much responsible for Reagan getting elected to the governorship of California. He was the one who started all that fuss in 1964 when he challenged the University of California's rule that said that students could not hand out political literature-in particular about the civil rights movement-on University grounds. While Savio spent time in and out of jail for nonviolent protests, Reagan swept into office on a promise to 'clean up the mess at Berkeley.'"
6/14/2004, South Australia Advertiser, Not all remember Reagan with fondness, Laura Kurtzman and Dana Hull
"Mr Reagan began his career in elective office with a campaign for California governor in which he promised to 'clean up the mess at Berkeley,' a reference to the burgeoning Free Speech Movement and anti-Vietnam War protests on the northern Californian campus.
Mr Reagan used the demonstrators as a foil for his conservatism."
6/8/2004, UC NewsCenter, Ronald Reagan launched political career using the Berkeley campus as a target, Jeffery Kahn
"Kerr was fired three weeks after Reagan took office. The act was the culmination of a process that began long before, when then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover first tried to persuade Kerr to crack down hard on Berkeley students involved in the 1964 Free Speech Movement, which Hoover alleged was a front for communist sympathizers. Unable to convince Kerr, Hoover turned to gubernatorial candidate Reagan, a rising conservative star. As revealed by a 2002 investigation by San Francisco Chronicle reporter Seth Rosenfeld, Reagan and the FBI interacted throughout the campaign about dealing with Kerr and the student protesters.
¶
Cheit said Kerr's firing galvanized the campus. 'The firing of Clark Kerr really caught the attention of everybody on campus and to a great extent unified the students and faculty. It was a very emotional time. Most fundamentally, because of the constitutional independence of the university, the idea that a governor could force out a president was very disturbing.'
¶
John Douglass, a historian and senior research fellow at UC Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education, faulted Reagan for a 'failure to understand the importance of the University of California in the life of the citizens of this state.' Douglass said that after his election in 1966, Reagan proposed cutting the UC budget by 10 percent across the board. He also proposed that, for the first time, UC charge tuition and suggested that Berkeley sell collections of rare books in the Bancroft Library. By and large, Douglass said, these measures were not approved by the Legislature, but lesser funding cuts were imposed."
6/7/2004, The Daily Bruin, Relationship with UC full of conflict, Charles Proctor
"Though he made many accomplishments for the state, Reagan also worked with the FBI to wage an intense campaign against the student-led Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, a campaign that would end in the firing of then-UC President Clark Kerr and culminate years of feuding between Kerr and the FBI.
The nationwide Free Speech Movement provided students a forum to voice discontent with issues ranging from the Vietnam War to civil rights, and declare their unwillingness to accept the government's authority."
6/7/2004, Los Angeles Times, The Reagan Legacy, Jordan Rau, Carl Ingram and Robert Salladay
"A part of Reagan's legacy was his skill in winning over blue-collar Democrats through attacks on the party's more liberal elements - something GOP politicians often aspire to today. Reagan identified the approach even before he was elected, when he incorporated into his gubernatorial campaign criticism of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley."
6/6/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Hard line helped him win, flexibility helped him stay, Mark Simon, William Carlse
"Reagan's political career had many beginnings, but one of the most prominent was his rhetorical confrontation with the students leading the Free Speech Movement demonstrations at UC Berkeley in 1964.
'Look,' he is quoted telling political aides only a few weeks into the 1966 race, 'I don't care if I'm in the mountains, the desert, the biggest cities in the state, the first question is: What are you going to do about Berkeley? ... And each time, the question itself gets applause.'"
6/6/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, As governor, he led state through turbulent times, Nanette Asimov, Lynda Gledhill, Janine DeFao and Cicero Estrella
"For much of the Free Speech movement and Vietnam War protests of the late 1960s and early '70s, Reagan presided over a state at an emotional time in history."
6/6/2004, Contra Costa Times, UC Berkeley bore the brunt of Gov. Reagan's bark and bite,
"Searching for issues as he tried to make the transition from actor to politician in 1966, Reagan latched onto 'the mess in Berkeley.' He meant the protests associated with the Free Speech Movement two years earlier.
Democratic Gov. Pat Brown had sent in police to clear away students occupying university offices, but Reagan said the protests never should have been allowed, and he promised to get tough."
6/4/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, TWO CENTS: Have your political views changed as you've gotten older?, column
"Steve Tapson, Placerville: As a graduate of the Free Speech Movement and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, I find it really hard to give a damn anymore. I suffer from political dysfunction. I need a purple pill called 'Political Passion' or 'Instant Invective' that will last at least 36 hours."
6/4/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, Bubble Lady Captures Berkeley's Beat, Richard Brenneman
"Caught up by the turbulent events of the early '60s, she found herself among the 700 students who occupied Sproul Hall for the Free Speech Movement Sit-in."
6/1/2004, New York Times, Reginald Zelnik, 68, Historian of Labor Movements in Russia, Dies, Wolfgang Saxon
"In 2002, he and Robert Cohen of N.Y.U. edited a collection of essays, 'The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960's' (University of California). It included Dr. Zelnik's thoughts about the Berkeley faculty of the time and the story of his own friendship with Mario Savio, one of the student leaders, who died in 1996."
5/27/2004, THE DAILY BRUIN, Slate files suit against Berkeley's student judicial council, Shaudee Navid
"Defend Affirmative Action pointed out the irony of being charged of unlawfully making a speech at a campus that is the home of the 1960s Free Speech Movement."
5/26/2004, BuzzFlash Interviews, On Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time, Paul Rogat Loeb
"In an essay for my new book, The Impossible Will Take a Little While, Howard Zinn talks of what he calls 'The Optimism of Uncertainty.' You don't know, he says. You never really know what is going to change and when, because you can't look over the horizon of history. A friend of mine, Dick Flacks, was traveling around for SDS in the early '60s. He was a young University of Chicago professor and he visited Berkeley, where everybody was telling him, 'This is the deadest campus on earth. Nothing is going to happen here. We try and we try, and it's so frustrating.' Then, four months later, the Free Speech Movement breaks out and Berkeley becomes the activist Berkeley of legend. So you just never know. And I think that that's part of what we have to remember to keep us going."
5/22/2004, Miami Herald, Reginald E. Zelnik Defended free-speech cause, Claudia Luther
Stephen B. Brier, director of the graduate center of City University of New York who was a student at UC Berkeley at the time of the Free Speech Movement, said Zelnik 'was an inspiration for young students like me who were immersed in the heady politics of that time.'
'He was a calm presence and a moral force who helped support, inspire and challenge all of us,' Brier said."
5/21/2004, Contra Costa Times, History professor killed in accident, Scott Marshall and Martin Snapp
"Police examined the truck Monday and have called the California Highway Patrol, which has specialized equipment and experts in accident reconstruction."
5/21/2004, Berkeley Voice, Council roundup, Martin Snapp
"Adjourned in honor of the memory of Reggie Zelnik -- the Free Speech Movement activist who became a world-renowned Russian history scholar and chairman of the UC Berkeley history department -- who was killed in a fluke traffic accident on campus Monday."
5/21/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, Free Speech Defender Dies in UC Accident, Richard Brenneman
"Cohen said Zelnik's contribution, a chapter on the faculty's part in the Free Speech Movement, 'is the best piece ever written on the role of faculty in an student movement. Because the media portrayed the events in Berkeley as a student revolt, people didn't realize it was also a faculty revolt.
'It was fabulous to work with him on this. He was a brilliant historian, very thoughtful and fair-minded, a fabulous editor, and he had a great sense about how to write history.'"
5/20/2004, Contra Costa Times, D.A. to get findings in professor's death, Scott Marshall
"Zelnik was walking to the Faculty Club for a farewell party for a colleague departing for England when the truck struck him, causing him to hit his head on the pavement.
The truck did have a warning beeper that sounded when it was driven in reverse and it was working, Celaya said. Police also found witnesses to the accident."
5/19/2004, The Argus, Berkeley history professor struck, killed by truck, Kristin Bender
"An impromptu memorial service with dozens of faculty members and students was held in the history department Tuesday afternoon, said longtime family friend Liisa Zanduyts, adding that 15 people stood up and called Zelnik their 'best friend.'"
5/19/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Esteemed UC history professor hit by truck and killed on campus, Henry K. Lee
"Robert Cohen, associate professor of education and history at New York University who co-edited the Free Speech Movement book, said Zelnik's wide interests in different types of history reflected his intellectual versatility.
'Reggie was a great citizen, a great teacher," Cohen said Tuesday. He was an incredible mentor of students.'"
5/19/2004, Oakland Tribune, Police identify Cal prof killed by water truck, Kristin Bender
"Two years ago, Zelnik and New York University associate professor Robert Cohen turned their attention to a different era in history. The two co-edited a book of essays called 'The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s."'
Before the book's release, Zelnik said, "' hope the book helps people understand that a movement's slogans are never a substitute for careful analysis of the historical events,' according to a university news story. "
5/19/2004, Los Angeles Times, Free Speech Defender Dies in Traffic Accident, wire reports
"Zelnik joined the faculty in 1964 and was a respected historian and teacher of Russian and Soviet history. During the Free Speech Movement that year, he came to the defense of students protesting a ban on political campaigning on campus."
5/19/2004, East Bay Express, Berkeley Intifada, Anneli Rufus
"'That's why I came to Berkeley -- because of its strong romantic aura of the Free Speech Movement and Mario Savio,' he recalls. 'Then I got here and discovered that that light seems to have been extinguished. You have this vitriol. You feel it everywhere. Berkeley is now the epicenter of real hatred.'"
5/19/2004, Contra Costa Times, Cal history professor dies in campus accident, Scott Marshall and Martin Snapp
"Zelnik co-edited a 2002 anthology of 33 essays on the movement with New York University associate professor Robert Cohen, called "The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on a Campus Rebellion." Zelnik consistently defended free speech whether the assailed speech came from the left, the center or the right, Cohen said."
5/18/2004, UCBerkeleyNews, History professor Reginald Zelnik dies in campus traffic accident, Janet Gilmore
"Zelnik first joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1964. A junior faculty member at the time, he supported student rights and defended the activists leading the Free Speech Movement. Support for students remained a constant throughout his career."
5/18/2004, San Diego Union Tribune, Professor who defended Free Speech Movement protesters dies in accident, Associated Press
"'This is a terrible tragedy for the campus that has left us greatly saddened,' Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl said in a statement. 'Reggie Zelnik was an extraordinarily popular professor for over 40 years and a personal friend of mine. Our heart goes out to his family. He will be terribly missed by the entire community.'"
5/18/2004, NBC11.com, Berkeley Professor Killed By Delivery Truck,
"The U.C. Berkeley police department reports the incident occurred at 4:20 p.m. near the south side of Sather Tower, the main clock tower near the center of campus."
5/8/2004, Asia Times, You have the right to be misinformed,
"BERKELEY, California - Eighty percent of Americans get their information from Fox News, according to a recent University of Maryland poll. Not included in this estimate are the usual customers at the Free Speech Movement Cafe in one of the top US universities, dedicated to a Berkeley student leader-icon of the 1960s, Mario Savio (1943-96). Buried behind waves of laptops, stealing a glance toward a flat-screen TV not tuned to Fox, an international elite at the cafe skateboards to academic - and professional - glory. Wherever you look around - Cory Hall, the Campanile, the library - at least 50 percent of the students at the University of California, Berkeley are from Asia, the future elites of China, South Korea, India, Singapore, Malaysia."
5/7/2004, The Barnstable Patriot, Freedom fighters, Stew Goodwin
"Three months before his short speech, Mario Savio had returned to Berkeley after spending a Freedom Summer registering black voters in Mississippi under extremely arduous conditions. He had joined a wave of student activism that started out campaigning for civil rights and wound up in opposition to the Vietnam War, which was ostensibly fought in the name of democracy."
5/4/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, Shortage of Pledges May Empty Frat House, Matthew Artz
"The brothers of Alpha Sigma Phi didn't always live on the edge of extinction. The fraternity was founded in 1913. Like many UC Berkeley fraternities it died in 1965 at the peak of the Free Speech Movement."
May 2004, Altar Magazine, Jo Freeman, an interview, Janni Aragon
"However, after I read his memoir and other materials I realized that reaching out to his adversaries was Kerr's personal style. He never quite understood why he couldn't reach the FSM this way. He thought the students should trust him, and was surprised when they didn't. I subsequently became friends with his research associate, who let me copy some of her research materials. With Kerr's permission, she and his secretary sent me some documents from his files which explained what I read in the draft of his memoirs and gave me a better perspective on the story behind the story."
4/30/2004, The Christian Science Monitor, When everybody sounds like Tony Soprano, Theodore Roszak
"Of course, the generation that came out of the Free Speech Movement and the 1960s has grown up to season its speech with casual profanity. Its political opponents once deplored such incivility, but, if we can judge by Richard Nixon's White House tapes, they were themselves no less foul-mouthed, if only behind closed doors. Exposing such hypocrisy was an issue of the day."
4/30/2004, Larchmont Chronicle, Fairfax High reunion, Alicia Doyle
"'It was a time before student protests,' recalled alumni Elliot Zwiebach of Miracle Mile, who noted that the free speech movement at Berkeley came a year later, when he and most of his classmates were freshman in college."
4/27/2004, The Daily Northwestern, NU's activism: It's all about the little things, Daniel Magliocco
"In the end, the policy was reversed. But more significantly, these students participating in the Free Speech Movement became a model of radical political activity and influenced countless student-led movements in the late sixties. The movement was the first of its kind but between 1967 and 1969, 411 student protests erupted on 211 different campuses."
4/27/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, Treuhaft Sends Pianos To Havana -This Time With Bush's Blessing, Richard Brenneman
"Robert Treuhaft played a major role in the defense of students arrested in the Free Speech Movement's struggles at UC Berkeley. Mitford worked with current City Councilmember Maudelle Shirek to bust the restrictive covenants barring African Americans from owning homes in much of Berkeley."
4/27/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, St. Joseph the Worker Celebrates 125 Years, Jakob Schiller
"Gray said he [Father Patrick Galvan] was also known for hanging out with Free Speech activist Mario Savio, who lived next door.
'I don't think it changed either of their minds,' said Gray about the conversations Savio and Father Galvan used to have about politics and the different worlds they came from."
4/22/2004, Democracy Now, Quiet Americans? How to Support the Iraqi Resistance Loudly & Proudly, Amy Goodman, et al
"Cynthia McKinney's repetition of the Mario Savio mantra, 'Stop the Machine,' should be taken to heart. But it should rise above traditional talk and action. And everyone who cares - no matter what contributions they're currently making - might consider adopting unconventional tactics that will stop it running. Immediately."
4/16/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, Country Joe McDonald Revives Anti-War Anthem, Richard Brenneman
"He's been a familiar face around Berkeley since he first arrived here in 1965, as the campus was moving from the era of the Free Speech Movement into that of the Anti-War Movement. He teamed up with Melton not long afterward."
4/14/2004, San Francisco Bay View, Amy Goodman, popular host of Democracy Now!, Wanda Sabir
"'The role of the media is to be a forum for dissent,' Amy Goodman, recipient of the 2004 Mario Savio Free Speech, said. And as host of the daily Pacifica news and public affairs show Democracy Now! she does just that. It's what she calls 'going to where the silence is. That is the responsibility of a journalist,' she writes in her just released book, 'The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them,' to "give a voice to those who have been forgotten, forsaken, and beaten down by the powerful."
4/9/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, State Law Should Back Volunteer Efforts, Susan Schwartz
"As a gray-haired 60-year-old whose activism, such as it is, started with Free Speech Movement sit-ins, I find it ironic to be back to civil disobedience."
4/4/2004, Poughkeepsie Journal, New Paltz: Home of the free ... thinkers, John W. Barry
"Sperber added, ''The whole strategy of trying to educate other students, they were told they were forbidden to do so. That led to what became known as the free speech movement.''"
March 31 -April 6, 2004, East Bay Express, Food Fight, Will Harper
Take Out;:All Speech is not created equal [photo of Feee Speech Movement Cafe with sign, 'No Commercial Postings.']
3/29/2004, San Diego Union-Tribune, Daring to be Republican on UC Berkeley campus, Steve Schmidt
"Forty years ago, Berkeley students demonstrated against rules that prohibited certain political activities on campus, leading to the Free Speech Movement.
Today, the campus is thick with politically minded groups, from Berkeley Earth First! to Queers for Social Justice.
Then there's the Berkeley College Republicans, who meet once a week to plan activities and discuss politics."
3/29/2004, Daily Californian, Commissioners Vote Down Police Canine Unit, Regina Chen
"'There is a stigma associated with the dogs when they were used to terrorize citizens in the Free Speech Movement," Sheen said. 'And a lot of the people from the '60s and '70s when activism was really big are still around.'''
3/25/2004, Hartford Advocate, The Steps of Mario Savio?, Alan Bisbort
"When the school administration tried to enforce a ban on distributing literature on matters "not directly related to campus affairs" (read: anything other than Homecoming Queen elections), the students revolted. When police tried to arrest a student for handing out antiwar leaflets, hundreds of students surrounded the car and would not let it move. For 32 hours, the standoff ensued. Savio addressed the crowd from the roof of the police car via bullhorn. On Dec. 2, 1964, during another sit-in, Savio stood at Sproul Hall Plaza and addressed 6,000 students, his voice echoing down Telegraph Avenue -- appropriate for words that would rattle across the land and plant a seed of pure American dissent in every young and idealistic heart. Here's an excerpt:
'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even tacitly take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.'"
3/19/2004, The Daily Californian, Opinion: The Times Are a-Changin', Joe Mellin
"In Berkeley's prime there was a sense of solidarity in the campus community. In 1964, more than 1,000 students were arrested during a protest in Sproul Hall. Now the student body is divided. The majority of student groups tabling on Sproul are designed for certain religions or races. Where did the unity that once gave the student body the power to change this country go? Was it lost or was it just traded in on a vintage pair of Converse?"
3/19/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, UC regents censure colleague for article on admissions policy, Tanya Schevitz
"Moores said it is ironic that his free speech rights were trampled over an issue about Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement.
¶
'It is a sad moment in the history of the university that has a well- publicized history of free speech,' he said outside the meeting. 'This is absolute political orthodoxy run amok.'"
3/19/2004, Oakland Tribune, UC regents enraged by Op-Ed piece, Michelle Maitre
"In comments before the regents, Moores' blasted the resolution for stifling his opinions. 'This will be seen clearly as an attack on free speech, and the fact that it's overwhelmingly a Berkeley issue is especially troubling' because Berkeley students ushered in the Free Speech Movement, Moores said."
3/10/2004, Counter Punch, Read This Book! "Who The Hell is Stew Albert?", Hammond Guthrie
"Change is hardly the most descriptive word for the complete dismemberment of the existing socio-political hierarchy, and Stew placed himself squarely on then radical front line in Berkeley. Those of us who were there in any capacity can well remember the smell and feel of the intriguing air surrounding the little card tables set up along Sproul plaza. Madeline Murray (O'Hare) was there in the first support for abortion rights, Mario Savio was there warming up for the moments that would freeze the university system and much of the nation in free speech, as Stew was there representing The Vietnam Day Committee (VDC), which became the prototype to anyone and everyone with the sand and heart to step up against our government's illegal war in Southeast Asia"
3/10/2004, CBSNews.com, The Weekly Standard: The Perpetual Adolescent, Joseph Epstein
"Soon after the assassination of Kennedy, the Free Speech Movement, which spearheaded the student revolution, positively enshrined the young. Like Yeats's Byzantium, the sixties utopia posited by the student radicals was 'no country for old men' or women. One of the many tenets in its credo -- soon to become a cliché, but no less significant for that -- was that no one over 30 was to be trusted. (If you were part of that movement and 21 years old in 1965, you are 60 today. Good morning, Sunshine.)"
3/9/2004, San Francisco Examiner, Lesbian legislators join City Hall union rites, Adriel Hampton
"The quiet hum of ongoing civil disobedience at City Hall rose again to a roar of trills and cheers Monday afternoon, as state Sen. Sheila Kuehl married six lesbian and gay couples, including Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg and her partner of more than two decades, Sharon Stricker."
3/9/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, State lawmaker joins S.F.'s gay wedding waltz, Rachel Gordon
"Goldberg, 59, of Los Angeles, married Sharon Stricker, 61. State Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Los Angeles, officiated.
The newlyweds have been together for 28 years.
"It's been a very long engagement,'' quipped Goldberg, who quickly turned serious in describing one reason that she wishes she had the right to marry long ago. When she and Sticker got together, she said, Sticker could not share legal custody of Goldberg's son, whom they raised together."
3/9/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Governments grapple with replies to San Fran's same-sex marriages, Lisa Leff
"Also Monday, Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, came to San Francisco to marry her partner of 28 years, poet and activist Sharon Stricker."
3/9/2004, Sacramento Bee, Assemblywoman Goldberg marries same-sex partner, Ed Fletcher
"Goldberg said joining what she called a 'modern civil rights movement' was only fitting, because she has been involved in civil rights fights most of her life.
'This is about my own civil rights instead of somebody else's,' she said."
3/9/2004, Los Angeles Times, Goldberg and Partner Marry in San Francisco, Lee Romney
"SAN FRANCISCO - This city once again saw the melding of the personal and political Monday when state Sen. Sheila Kuehl presided over the marriages of six couples who have long been active in the gay and lesbian community, including Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg.
In back-to-back ceremonies on the steps of the City Hall rotunda, Kuehl, California's first openly gay state legislator, pronounced her close friends and political colleagues married to tears and shouts of jubilation."
3/8/2004, Daily Californian, 'At Berkeley in the Sixties' Author Relishes Free Speech, Activism, Monica Appelbe
"'It's so vivid and personal and encompassing of the depth and complexity of the events before and leading up to the Free Speech Movement,' said Berkeley resident Barbara Stack. 'It's a great California history.'"
3/4/2004, The Chicago Sun-Times, Dropped T's, trou in at Harvard, Lynn Sweet
"I'm part of the Vietnam War generation, though I never took seriously the slogan of our time, 'Don't trust anyone over 30,' suspecting that I would live long enough to regret the arbitrary cutoff. I don't think I had the word 'ageism'' in my vocabulary at the time. (I just checked, and the man who coined the phrase -- Jack Weinberg, who came out of the University of California at Berkeley's free speech movement -- went on to a life of political activism and is in his 60s.)"
2/27/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, Last Words On Lecture Controversy, Joseph Anderson
"First, Savio was not a racist or a bigot. Second, Savio championed the meaningful free speech rights of those who politically dissent--those without state or corporate media backing--to speak truth to power; he didn't champion power's right to free speech, which it inherently has. Third, Savio said that when a system becomes so heinously oppressive, people of conscience must throw themselves upon the gears of that onerous system. In a small but visible way, that's what we protesters did. Savio also said that protest should be principled, not necessarily polite."
2/26/2004, Marin Independent Journal, Looking toward peace, Beth Ashley
"Part of his disaffection at Berkeley stemmed from the outcome of the Free Speech Movement, which he had supported but which in his view had turned into the 'filthy speech movement,' trivializing free speech with obscenities."
2/23/2004, Daily Californian, Education Trailblazer Clark Kerr Honored at Campus Memorial, Emma Schwartz
"Kerr, who became UC Berkeley's first chancellor in 1952, served as UC president from 1958 to 1967 during the university's major expansion, the opening of three new campuses and the tumultuous Free Speech Movement."
2/21/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Clark Kerr receives posthumous honor, Darryl Bush, photographer
"Clark E. Kerr thanks the audience after his father, Clark Kerr, former chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, was given the Berkeley Medal posthumously at a memorial service Friday at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Auditorium."
2/21/2004, Oakland Tribune, An upbeat Clark Kerr memorial, Kristin Bender
"Campaigning for governor in 1966, Ronald Reagan promised to do what Kerr couldn't -- sweep the Free Speech Movement demonstrators out of Berkeley. In 1967, just three weeks into office, newly elected Gov. Reagan used his position to orchestrate Kerr's firing."
2/21/2004, Contra Costa Times, Cal's Clark Kerr lauded in memory, Martin Snapp
"But he also presided over some of the university's most tumultuous times, from the loyalty-oath controversy of the early 1950s to the Free Speech Movement and Vietnam War protests of the 1960s.
"'t was an ironic fate for someone who believed so strongly that all problems have solutions and all conflicts can be resolved,' Berdahl said"
2/20/2004, Oakland Tribune, UC Berkeley plaza gets a makeover, Kristin Bender
"Friday, February 20, 2004 - BERKELEY -- UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza, where history was made during the Free Speech Movement and the campus' focal point for student rallies, political demonstrations and even drumming circles, will close for three months for a much-needed face-lift."
2/20/2004, International Herald Tribune, AT BERKELEY IN THE SIXTIES, Karla Jay
"Freeman, author of 'A Room at a Time: How Women Entered Party Politics' and other works about feminism, brings enormous research to bear on her heady college days. In a book that is less memoir than political history, the descriptions of some of the players and of her own life pale against the campus uprisings - sparks that allowed later protests against the war in Vietnam to ignite."
2/19/2004, San Francisco Chronicle, Sproul pavement set for dustbin of history, Charles Burress
"The asphalt trod upon by thousands of Free Speech Movement demonstrators who made history when they surrounded a police car on UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza will soon be history."
2/18/2004, Oakland Tribune, Memorial set for former UC President on Friday, Staff
"Kerr was the first chancellor at UC Berkeley and was the system's president from 1958 to 1967 before being fired by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, who felt Kerr was too lax on student protesters during the Free Speech Movement."
2/4/2004, Oakland Tribune, Cal lures the Tedford Recruits, By Dave Newhouse
"What about Berkeley politics? Does the, say, Free Speech Movement from the 1960s have a lingering negative effect on recruiting? "
2/1/2004, New York Times, At Berkeley in the Sixties, Karla Jay
"When Jo Freeman began her undergraduate education in 1961, the University of California, Berkeley, like many colleges then, took in loco parentis seriously. Administrative rules enforced curfews, banned political groups from operating on campuses and forced professors to sign loyalty oaths. Freeman and other students joined Slate, 'a permanent student political party' that began by protesting racial segregation in fraternities and sororities, then quickly moved on to demonstrate against the death penalty, for civil rights in the South and for fair housing in Berkeley. They joined the Urban League and the N.A.A.C.P. in picketing local hotels and auto dealerships 'because so many local Negroes complained that they could not get jobs in San Francisco that they had held in Southern cities.' The more the university attempted to crack down on student unrest, the larger the dissident groups grew. The arrest of one alumnus for handing out leaflets at a student-only table led to the birth of the Free Speech Movement. At the height of the protests in the fall of 1964, 1,500 students occupied an academic building. Almost 800 were arrested and charged with trespassing."
February 2004, California Monthly, Driving Mr. Kerr, David Pierpont Gardner
"When the Free Speech Movement hit, 'I just took it as part of life--a problem to be handled,' Kerr said in a 1997 interview with the Los Angeles Times. 'But an awful lot of people--alumni, regents-just got terribly upset. A lot of people felt this was the beginning of the revolution, the storming of the Bastille. They felt that something drastic had to be done. I got phone calls [from people suggesting] taking a machine gun and shooting the students off Sproul Plaza.'"
1/28/2004, UC Berkeley News, The campus's next-door neighbor, Stiles Hall, turns 120, Wendy Edelstein
"'Historically, Stiles Hall has had a profound influence on the community and individuals who have been a part of it,' says Assistant Vice Chancellor Steve Lustig. 'My own history is a case in point: I mentored a 15-year-old in 1965 who had been in prison since age 10. Knowing him influenced my choice to work with youth throughout my career.'
Lustig also pointed out that 'Stiles has a reputation for incubating and then spinning off projects, including the university co-ops.' He adds that the nonprofit also functioned as a politically neutral space where controversial speakers like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X spoke before the Free Speech Movement came to Berkeley."
1/23/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, Free Speech Movement Activist Finds Tarnish On Clark Kerr's Legacy, Michael Rossman
"There was no vision of learning, geared to deep values; only the same waving and bowing to pressures, to power. And so it was in a larger frame too. Clark Kerr's response to our awakening in the FSM was an earnest of his response to the entire predicament of the university during a deep phase of historical transformation. He will not be remembered for promoting visions and values of education that might balance its increasing corporatization. Indeed, his failure will pass beyond mention, invisibly, for no one expects the head of a major public institution to provide this sort of leadership now. And that's a genuine, deep shame."
1/16/2004, The Seattle Times, Book Review: '1968': evocative, exhaustive report on turbulent year, Bob Simmons
"Kurlansky writes with a historian's diligence and a storyteller's eye. He notes, for example, Berkeley protest leader Mario Savio taking off his shoes to avoid scarring the roof of a captured police car, where he stood for hours inciting anti-war demonstrators in 1963. He also recounts the shift from Savio's gentleness to the often-aimless violence that marked the movement by 1968."
1/16/2004, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Book Review: '1968' brings a global perspective to a tumultuous time, John Marshall
"He relates how Mario Savio of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement removed his shoes prior to climbing up to address a crowd from atop a police patrol car, in order to avoid scratching it. He explains that 'Don't trust anyone over 30,' an emblematic phrase during that era of the generation gap, was first uttered by Charlton Heston to a group of rebellious chimps in the 1968 film, 'Planet of the Apes.'"
1/16/2004, Financial Times, Where the radical chic is for real, Richard Waters
"At the top of Telegraph lies the University of California campus. It was at this junction in 1964 that the Free Speech Movement was born, as university authorities tried to enforce rules against political speech on campus. The sit-in that followed at the university's Sproul Hall was the event that brought Berkeley's activists national attention and helped to fuel the politics of protest."
1/14/2004, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Elizabeth Carlson [Obit],
"Carlson came to California in the early 1960s to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where, she proudly noted on her SRJC job application, she was arrested during a Free Speech Movement sit-in at Sproul Hall."
1/9/2004, CNN.com, Examining Berkeley's liberal legacy, Meriah Doty
"'The Free Speech Movement and everything that happened here in the '60s was a big reason I wanted to come out here,' said Brant Rotmem, an international environmental politics major and a sophomore. 'I'm from Boston. I wanted to come out to Berkeley because it has this huge reputation for forward thinking.'
Christine Baker, a senior and anthropology major said, 'I'm very proud of that legacy. When my son comes to visit I take him to the Free Speech Cafe.'"
1/9/2004, CNN.com, Professor recalls pros, cons of Free Speech Movement, Meriah Doty
"SEARLE: Well, the city of Berkeley is more left-wing than the university. This is an amazing discovery because by tradition universities are always left of their surrounding communities. But not in Berkeley. I would say that Berkeley became a left-wing community as a result of the '60s. The university is about the same as it was before politically. But the city is much more to the left than it was prior to all of this."
1/7/2004, Humanities & Social Sciences Online, H-NET BOOK REVIEW: The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s, Joseph Palermo
"This compilation of essays is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the dawn of the modern student movement. Any history course with subject matter relating to America in the sixties would benefit from including this volume."
1/5/2004, Contra Costa Times, Youth equals inconsistency for Bears, Gary Peterson
"Turnovers aren't a big deal. Turnovers are a very big deal. Amit Tamir couldn't make a 3-pointer if the free speech movement depended on it."
1/2/2004, The Age, Cultured revolutionaries will lead us into prosperity, study finds, Leon Gettler
"What set apart California's Bay Area - which encompasses San Francisco, Oakland and Silicon Valley - was the aesthetic that gave us the Beat Poets of the '50s, the free-speech movement at Berkeley and the "summer of love" in the '60s; not to mention a music scene that included the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane."
2004, The Sixties Chronicle,
2004, Encyclopedia of American Social Movements, Free Speech Movement, Jo Freeman
"From the 1930s onward, largely in response to fears generated by Communism, the University-wide administration imposed numerous rules designed to keep politics off of all the University campuses. By the time Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr became University President in 1958, student groups could not operate on campus if they engaged in any kind of off-campus politics, whether electoral, protest or even oratorical. At the Berkeley campus students spoke, leafleted and tabled on the city sidewalk at the campus edge. When the campus border was moved a block away, this activity moved with it. Since the sidewalk at the new boundary was too narrow for much activity, Kerr authorized the creation of a small plaza just inside the new boundary for student political groups to use. The Regents of the University voted to give the 26 x 40 foot strip at Bancroft and Telegraph to the City of Berkeley, but the transfer never took place. For the next few years student groups of all persuasions used this strip as though it was public property when legally it was still part of the University."
12/28/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, PASSAGES 2003 This year saw the loss of giants in the arts and entertainment worlds, staff
"March 27, TED STRESHINSKY, 80, noted photojournalist who photographed Cesar Chavez, Janis Joplin, the Black Panthers, Ken Kesey and U.S. presidents. During the 1960s, he documented the Free Speech Movement, Vietnam War protests and the People's Park riots in Berkeley."
12/28/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, DEATHS IN 2003: People we'll miss, staff
"Frederick J. Lupke III was a familiar face to many in Berkeley, where he was a tireless advocate for the rights of the disabled and supporter of the city library. And while he came to activism late in his life when he joined the campaign in 1998 to save the pool at Berkeley High, he was, many said, cut from the same cloth as noted activists Ed Roberts and Mario Savio."
12/27/2003, New York Times, Helen Gustafson, 74, Dies; Championed Fine Tea in America, Carol Pogash
"'People who a decade before were chanting `Two-four-six-eight, organize and smash the state!' would get dressed up and go to Helen's,' said Kate Coleman, a journalist who was a leader in the Free Speech Movement of 1964."
12/25/2003, Tri-Valley Herald, Clark Kerr memorial to be held Feb. 20, Staff
"Kerr ran afoul of conservative politicians for his treatment of student protesters during the Free Speech Movement and in 1967 newly elected Gov. Ronald Reagan fired Kerr, saying he had been too soft on the students."
12/25/2003, Oakland Tribune, Ex-UC chief Clark Kerr's memorial set for Feb. 20, Staff
"Kerr ran afoul of conservative politicians for his treatment of student protesters during the Free Speech Movement and in 1967 newly elected Gov. Ronald Reagan fired Kerr, saying he had been too soft on the students."
12/14/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, BEST BOOKS OF 2003, Oscar Villalon
"The Gold and the Blue: A Personal Memoir of the University of California, 1949-1967: Volume Two: Political Turmoil by Clark Kerr (University of California Press; 427 pages; $34.95): For those seeking the real man behind the warring reputations, the late Clark Kerr completed a memoir that recalls not just the view from the UC president's office of the biggest upheavals in the university's history -- the 1949-52 loyalty oath controversy and the 1964 Free Speech Movement -- but also the personal anguish, philosophy and dreams of this Quaker pacifist and son of a Pennsylvania farmer who found himself at the famous university's helm during its greatest trials. Kerr is by turn self-critical and free of false modesty in describing his accomplishments and accolades, while he settles old scores and forgives old enemies."
12/13/2003, The Guardian, The warrior skylark, Maya Jaggi
"As a graduate student at Berkeley she [Maxine Hong Kingston] was active in the Free Speech Movement of 1964, when moves to limit students' political activities sparked mass protests, and in the anti-war movement when the US began bombing North Vietnam in 1965."
Dec. 9-11, 2003, Berkeley Daily Planet, Cody's Books Co-founder Leads an Activist's Life, Dorothy Bryant
"When the 1964 Free Speech Sit-ins hit the media, floods of disaffected young people began pouring into Berkeley.
'To some people they looked adventuresome, romantic, but the truth is they got sick, they got raped, they overdosed. They really needed help, and often they were too broke and too confused or scared to get it,' she explains."
12/7/2003, The New York Times, 'Caroline,' Kennedy and Change, Frank Rich
"These Americans knew something was going to hit them, but they didn't know what. And how could they? What was to follow in 1964 alone was unfathomable: the Beatles invasion and the overdue civil rights act, the rise of Muhammad Ali and the fall of Khrushchev, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and the surgeon general's warning about cigarettes, the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley and the KKK's murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner in Mississippi."
12/7/2003, Contra Costa Times, Former UC president opened the door to higher education, Ed Diokno
"While the youthful demonstrators of 1964 only knew about the revolution taking place in the streets, what they didn't see was that an equally important change taking place in the rarified halls of academe and gritty streets far from Berkeley. And Kerr's vision was at the head of that movement. He was as much a revolutionary as Savio.
His revolution was taking place in the barrios and other ethnic neighborhoods: In Watts, the Mission, Chinatown, West Oakland, Richmond, the farming communities of Delano and Salinas, and even on the eastern fringes of Contra Costa County. Attending a university stopped being a dream and became a possibility for all students."
12/5/2003, Contra Costa Times, 1960s UC president framed the future of higher education, Carrie Sturrock and Liz Tascio
"Because most political activity was forbidden on campus, students had been paying the city $2 to set up tables on the sidewalk at Bancroft and Telegraph. In fall 1964, it was discovered the space actually belonged to the school, not the city.
Kerr, who had a hero's reputation among students for standing up for his professors and others in the 1950s against the House Un-American Activities Committee, was out of the country then. Had he been present, the Free Speech Movement might not have materialized because Kerr would have found a diplomatic solution to the conflict, said David Goines of St. Hieronymus Press in Berkeley and a sophomore at Cal in 1964.
Kerr's appointees at Berkeley handled the sidewalk dispute by enforcing the ban on political activity. When Kerr returned, he made the mistake of backing them, Goines said.
Within a few weeks, students had stopped calling for their right to assemble at Bancroft and Telegraph and began to demand the right to organize anywhere."
12/5/2003, Berkeley Voice, Clark Kerr's legacy, editorial
"In Kerr's 1963 book "The Uses of the University," he wrote that a good university president should be a mediator "always subject to some abuse. He must aim more at avoiding the worst than seizing the best. He must find satisfaction in being equally distasteful to each of his constituencies," Kerr wrote. Soon after, he had the opportunity to put his theories to the test. In 1964, Kerr was the man in the middle as president of the UC system as he was attacked equally by liberals and conservatives. While demonstrators called him fascist, conservatives called him soft in his treatment of the protesters."
12/4/2003, Los Angeles Times, The Cautionary Tale of Clark Kerr, Seth Rosenfeld
"And when UC students joined a protest against the House Committee on Un-American Activities at San Francisco City Hall in May 1960, the San Francisco FBI chief wrote to Hoover: 'Undoubtedly of special interest to you, is the fact that much of the manpower ... was provided by students of the University of California at Berkeley. Since Clark Kerr has become president, the situation on all campuses has deteriorated to the point where the so-called academic freedom has become academic license.' Kerr's refusal to block a 1961 student request to have HUAC opponent Frank Wilkinson speak on campus led Hoover to scrawl a note for the file: 'I know Kerr is no good.'
Then came Berkeley's Free Speech Movement in the fall of 1964, the first major campus protest of the era. Mario Savio and other FSM members portrayed Kerr as a hypocrite. Conservatives portrayed him as weak-kneed."
12/3/2003, Washington Post, Clark Kerr Dies; Headed Calif. University System, Adam Bernstein
"In recent years, he wrote his memoirs, the two-volume 'The Gold and the Blue.' He retained a sense of humor about the past. The second volume addressed some of the more tumultuous years, and he suggested a better title might have been 'The Black and the Blue.'"
12/2/2003, UCBerkeley News, Former UC President Clark Kerr, a national leader in higher education, dies at 92, UC Berkeley Public Affairs
"Students protested a decision by the Berkeley administration to shut down a section of the Bancroft/Telegraph corner because student activities there violated a rule prohibiting the on-campus raising of funds and recruiting of participants for political activities off campus. That sparked a prolonged confrontation that ended with the mass arrest of 800 students who had taken over the administration building, Sproul Hall. Kerr ultimately persuaded the UC Regents to allow political activities and demonstrations on campus."
12/2/2003, The Daily Californian, Editorial: Will Kerr's Legacy Survive? Keeping a 43-Year Promise, Editorial
"Throughout the intense bureaucratic growth pains, however, Kerr remained closely allied to his students. He was the first UC president to guarantee complete editorial freedom to all campus newspapers. Successfully arguing that education is the best investment a state could make, Kerr also helped students avoid a mandatory tuition at UC. Though he could not avoid conflict with radical students, he reached out and compromised with Free Speech Movement protesters while the rest of the state was crying for administrators to discipline them tyrannically."
12/2/2003, The Daily Californian, People of the Past, Amelia Heagerty
"'If President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I'll tell you something: the faculty are a bunch of employees and we're the raw material!' Mario Savio, Free Speech Leader (December 2, 1064)"
12/2/2003, San Jose Mercury News, UC president who designed state's college system dies, Carrie Sturrock and Liz Tascio
"As president of UC during the tumultuous 1960s, he was excoriated by the right for not cracking down on the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, and was ousted in 1967 by the new governor, Ronald Reagan. The left criticized him for the university's collaboration with government and Kerr's view of UC's mission: to produce skilled professionals for an industrialized society."
12/2/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Clark Kerr 1911-2003, Tanya Schevitz
"A political furor generated by the Free Speech Movement of 1964 and fueled by reports of Communists, sexual "filth" and marijuana smoking at the university led to the election of Ronald Reagan as governor and ultimately to Kerr's firing by the Board of Regents."
12/2/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, He made the UC system a model for education, Charles Burress, Tanya Schevitz, Chronicle Staff Writers
"'He did for higher education what Henry Ford did for the car,' said Levine, who worked with Kerr at the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education.
...
His faith in reason and honest communication were underscored in a famous moment in the 1964 Free Speech Movement when he rejected mass arrests and negotiated with protesters who had surrounded a police car on Sproul Plaza, Cummins said.
As a 'staunch defender of academic freedom and individual rights,' Kerr refused to crack down on student protesters and became the target of a secret FBI attempt to get him fired, said Chronicle reporter Seth Rosenfeld, who uncovered the FBI plot."
12/2/2003, Oakland Tribune, UC legend Clark Kerr dies, staff
"As UC president, Kerr became a lightning rod for controversy when Ronald Reagan used the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in his campaign for governor in 1966, promising to do what Kerr couldn't -- sweep demonstrators out of Berkeley. After winning the election, Reagan used his new position as president of the UC Board of Regents to orchestrate Kerr's firing in January 1967."
12/2/2003, New York Times, Clark Kerr, Leading Public Educator, Dies at 92, Grace Hechinger
"Mr. Kerr dismissed the Free Speech Movement as ''a ritual of hackneyed complaints.'' He and other Berkeley administrators suggested that its leaders were rabble-rousers who were dominated by Communists. But the protesters, many of whom took part in a sit-in inside the main administration building, ranged from socialists to Goldwater Republicans.
The police arrested 800 of the protesters in what was the largest mass arrest in California history. A week later, on Dec. 8, 1964, in the face of mounting protests, Mr. Kerr backed down and granted the students the right to unrestricted political protest on campus.
The events of 1964 in Berkeley preceded almost a decade of student unrest across the country and around the world, gathering intensity when the protests moved beyond campus issues to the war in Vietnam and social problems."
12/2/2003, Los Angeles Times, CLARK KERR | 1911-2003, staff
"'When it hit, the Free Speech Movement, I just took it as part of life - an episode, a problem to be handled,' Kerr recalled in the 1997 interview. 'But an awful lot of people - alumni, regents - just got terribly upset. A lot of people felt this was the beginning of the revolution, the storming of the Bastille. They felt that something drastic should be done. I got phone calls [from people suggesting] taking a machine gun and shooting the students off Sproul Plaza at Berkeley - just fierce stuff.'"
12/2/2003, Daily Californian, Clark Kerr, 1911-2003, Emma Schwartz and Kim-Mai Cutler
"Kerr himself fell prey to that war when protests erupted on the UC Berkeley campus in 1964. The arrest of a student protesting a ban on political activity on campus compelled hundreds to swarm Sproul Plaza in a 32-hour sit-in that sparked the Free Speech Movement. Regular protests ensued, and on campus Kerr faced a sharply divided faculty and an outraged student body. In the public arena, Kerr was assailed by conservative regents and state politicians for being too lenient with the protesters.
'I think the Free Speech Movement took him entirely by surprise,' said UC Berkeley history professor Reginald Zelnik, who wrote a book on the Free Speech Movement. 'He was caught in a crossfire from which there was no escape.'"
12/2/2003, Daily Californian, Friends, Colleagues, Admirers Mourn Death of Higher Education Visionary, My-Thuan Tran and Alicia Wittmeyer
"'He distanced himself from the controversy,' said former student Michael Rossman, a leader in the Free Speech Movement. 'He took no responsibility either for the conditions that lead to the Free Speech Movement or for the bitterment (sic) of the problems revealed.'"
12/2/2003, Berkeley Daily Planet, Corrections, editor
"Corrections: In the article "Amy Goodman Praises Berkeley 3 at Savio Awards," (Daily Planet, Nov. 25-27), featured lecturer Goodman was incorrectly reported to be the recipient of the Mario Savio Free Speech Award."
12/2/2003, Associated Press, Former University of California president Clark Kerr dies at 92, Michelle Locke, Associated Press Writer
"Trouble erupted in 1964, when Berkeley students led the Free Speech Movement, protesting a ban on political activities on campus. On Dec. 2, nearly 800 students were arrested at a sit-in.
Kerr became a lightning rod of controversy when Reagan used the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in his campaign for governor in 1966, promising to do what Kerr couldn't -- sweep demonstrators out of Berkeley. After winning the election, Reagan used his new position as president of the UC Board of Regents to orchestrate Kerr's firing in January 1967."
11/25/2003, Berkeley Daily Planet, Amy Goodman Praises Berkeley 3 at Savio Honors, Jakob Schiller
"'If for one week [America] saw the true face of war, war would be eradicated,' broadcaster and activist Amy Goodman told a supportive crowd of several hundred who turned out to see her receive this year's UC Berkeley Mario Savio Free Speech award at UC Berkeley's student union."
11/21/2003, Democracy Now, The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s, Amy Goodman, et al
"MICHAEL ROSSMAN: Well, you actually have to back up, because this developed at Berkeley because this locale has been intensely progressive since the 1930's. This was the place where the revolt against the House Un-American Activities Committee happened in 1960. It was substantially organized by Berkeley students, and a lot got arrested in the protest against that. That is what broke the back of the principle force of repression against free speech in the country."
November/December 2003, Christianity Today, Book Review: How the Counterculture Went to Church, Alan Wolfe
"Oppenheimer turns next to the introduction of folk music into the Catholic Mass. Although the Catholic Church was a bastion of conservative support for American values, many of the country's most famous new leftists-most notably, Mario Savio of the Free Speech Movement and Tom Hayden of Students for a Democratic Society-were raised Catholic. Protests against the Vietnam War were led by radical priests such as the Berrigan brothers, Daniel and Philip. Mary Daly was among the first feminists who made religion her special concern."
10/27/2003, UC Berkeley News, Roger Montgomery, former UC Berkeley dean, professor emeritus and architect, dies, Kathleen Maclay
"A backer of the Free Speech Movement, People's Park and other liberal causes of the 1960s and '70s, Montgomery was extremely popular with students. During that era, he grew out his military-style crew cut, continuing to wear a beard and long white hair until his death."
10/1/2003, Altar Magazine, Review: Freeman, Jo. 2004. At Berkeley in the 60s: The Education of an Activist, Janni Aragon
"Freeman explains her justification for getting involved in civil disobedience and ever the political scientist in training, she ruminates about her actions and the consequences. She ends the book duly noting that the students confrontations with the UC Berkeley administrators, UC Regents, and others was not so much a Civil Rights Movement action, but rather a showdown with Cold War politics of the era."
9/21/2003, Oakland Tribune, Greek Theater's centennial recalls glorious memories, William Brand
"Unfortunately, Dec. 7, 1964 was a dire day for Kerr, the peacemaker. In the middle of the meeting, campus cops -- apparently acting on their own -- dragged Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio off the stage. Kerr managed to free him and Savio later spoke to the crowd. But the damage was done. President Kerr was on his way out."
8/25/2003, Toogood Reports, Losing Vietnam And Losing The Ten Commandments, Michael D. Shaw
"The Rosenberg spy case, the revelation of the terrible deeds of Joseph Stalin, and the election of JFK, an establishment liberal in 1960, effectively put a stake through the heart of the activist/loony Left. They would be energized by the civil rights demonstrations, but after President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964, there was really not much to protest. December, 1964 would see some arrests connected with Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, but our escalation in Vietnam, starting in 1965, provided the real spark."
8/24/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, The Big Cheese, Sam Whiting
"I applied to. It was during the Free Speech Movement. I had teachers and fellow students who said, 'Why in the world would you want to go to Berkeley? It's full of communists.'"
8/12/2003, AIM Report, HILLARY CLINTON'S BIGGEST COVER-UPS, Cliff Kincaid
"During the summer of 1971, Mrs. Clinton writes in her book, she was a law clerk at the Oakland firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein. 'I spent most of my time working for Mal Burnstein researching, writing legal motions and briefs for a child custody case,' she said. In fact, however, the public record shows that Clinton worked for Robert Treuhaft, a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and Harvard-trained lawyer for the party.
Citing public sources, Peter Flaherty's book, The First Lady (Vital Issues Press, 1996), says that 'Hillary was recommended to Treuhaft by some of her professors at Yale. She was looking for a 'movement' law firm to work at for the summer. As it turns out, Hillary would continue her association and support of the Black Panther cause while working as a law clerk for Treuhaft.' Flaherty notes that Treuhaft told Herb Caen of the San Francisco Examiner, 'That was the time we were representing the Black Panthers, and she worked on that case.'"
8/10/2003, Kansas City Star, Major candidates for California governor,
"Peter Miguel Camejo, in a political life that spans four decades, has gone from a Free Speech Movement firebrand and Socialist presidential candidate to the California Green Party's standard-bearer. As the Green gubernatorial candidate last fall, he received 5.3 percent of the vote. Camejo, 63, makes a living as a consultant on socially responsible investing and is a reliable presence at anti-war and civil rights protests."
8/8/2003, USA Today, The day after: Calif. recall election is script-worthy, Martin Kasindorf
"Reagan ran as an outsider who pledged to clean up what many Californians viewed as excesses of the 1960s, starting with the raucous free speech movement on the University of California-Berkeley campus."
8/1/2003, The Washington Post, UC Berkeley Faculty Supports Revising Free Speech Rules, Michelle Locke, Associated Press
"The 45 to 3 vote Wednesday by the legislative arm of the systemwide Academic Senate was held in Berkeley, birthplace of the 1964 campus Free Speech Movement. The body advises UC President Richard C. Atkinson, who has the final say over the policy."
7/25/2003, Chicago Tribune, Academic freedom debate comes to boil at Berkeley, V. Dion Hayes
"BERKELEY, Calif. -- In the 1960s, this University of California campus helped give birth to what has become a worldwide tool for social change: the free-speech movement, which forced administrators to recognize students' right to demonstrate."
7/22/2003, FrontPageMagazine.com, Exit Ahead: Book Review of "Breaking Free", Peter Wood
"Stern, who was once a participant in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and an editor of the New Left magazine Ramparts, has lived in New York City for several decades. His roots in the Left made Stern an initial enthusiast for the 'child-centered' ideology that teachers are indoctrinated with at most schools of education, and he was likewise a reluctant critic of teacher unions, but his experience with his children's teachers and school principals eventually cured him of these sympathies."
7/13/2003, San Mateo County Times, Designer creates 'sustainable' landscapes, Francine Brevetti
"Planning her thesis on sustainable development -- the philosophy that development must protect the earth's resources for future generations -- she was determined to do this project in Berkeley, which had always held a mystique for her. Watching the Free Speech movement unfold on television when she was a teenager thrilled her. "
7/13/2003, Anchorage Daily News, That '60s Show: Juneau artists find time-capsule photos in shoeboxes, Mike Dunham
"In 1964, after spending his whole life in Juneau, he enrolled as an art student at the University of California Berkeley, ground zero for the exploding 'Free Speech' movement.
The movement was driven in part by politics and in part by a fascination with language that seems unfathomable now. DeRoux recalled hearing the young Gary Snyder read poems to an audience of 5,000. 'You could hear a pin drop. That could never happen today.'"
7/11/2003, Oakland Tribune, Between the Lines: Retired assistant city manager could not leave her mayor,
"Steal papers, get elected, pass a law: The home of the Free Speech Movement may take a small step to reclaim its title. Several months have passed since 'the Daily Californian incident,' as Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates calls it, in which he stole about 1,000 copies of the free UC Berkeley student-run paper because it endorsed his opponent in the November 2002 election. At the time, Bates was charged with an infraction, paid a small fine and promised to pass a law against stealing 'free' newspapers.
He's finally coming through on the latter, asking the city manager to draft such an ordinance similar to one in San Francisco which says 'unauthorized removal of newspapers infringes on the right of the public to a free press.'"
6/29/2003, Denver Post, Excerpt: Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton
"Bill and I shared a small apartment near a big park not far from the University of California at Berkeley campus where the Free Speech Movement started in 1964. I spent most of my time working for Mal Burnstein researching, writing legal motions and briefs for a child custody case. Meanwhile, Bill explored Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco. On weekends, he took me to the places he had scouted, like a restaurant in North Beach or a vintage clothing store on Telegraph Avenue."
6/28/2003, India-West, DA Hopeful Kamala Harris Passionate About Debate, Richard Springer
"India-West Staff Reporter
SAN FRANCISCO - Kamala Devi Harris, who is challenging incumbent district attorney Terrence Hallinan in the November election in San Francisco, came out of the free speech movement - literally.
Her father, a national scholar from Jamaica, and her mother, a scholar born in Chennai, met when they were both graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley during the free speech protests in the 1960s."
6/25/2003, PBS: Online NewsHour, Essay; At Odds With Ourselves, Richard Rodriguez and Jim Lehrer
"RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: The notorious '60s on the American campus began here, on Sproul Plaza at the University of California at Berkeley, with the free-speech movement. The students won, but four decades later, Berkeley is governed by politically-correct codes that limit free speech."
6/22/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Chronicle wins 29 awards in East Bay, Ryan Kim
"Chronicle investigative reporter Seth Rosenfeld has received the 2003 Iris Molotsky Award for Excellence in Coverage of Higher Education. He was honored for the series, 'The Campus Files: Reagan, Hoover and the UC Red Scare,' which was based on secret FBI files he obtained after 17 years of litigation. It detailed the FBI's covert campaign to disrupt the Free Speech Movement, topple UC President Clark Kerr and help then-Gov. Ronald Reagan crack down on campus unrest."
June 20 - 27, 2003, Orange County Weekly, The 129 Greatest OC Bands Ever!: 1 - 50, Gustavo Arellano, Andrew Asch, Joel Beers, Claudia Figueroa, Rich Kane, Bill Kohlhaase, George A. Paul, John Roos, Alison M. Rosen, Rebecca Schoenkopf, Buddy Seigal, Jason Thornberry, Jim Washburn and Chris Ziegler.
"The genesis of [Jackson] Browne's political upbringing, though, was at Sunny Hills; whenever his uptight teachers went off about the longhairs protesting the Vietnam War (one of whom claimed that free speech activist Mario Savio was clearly insane just because, well, he looked insane), Browne would demand that the teach explain himself."
6/18/2003, Oakland Tribune, Academic freedom policy under fire, Michelle Locke
"Appropriately, the move to amend the policy was sparked by an incident last year at UC Berkeley -- birthplace of the Free Speech Movement -- when a course description advising conservative thinkers to 'seek other sections' set off a national uproar."
6/17/2003, Los Angeles Daily News, Academic freedom on UC agenda, Michelle Locke
"Appropriately, the move to amend the policy was sparked by an incident last year at UC Berkeley -- birthplace of the Free Speech Movement -- when a course description advising conservative thinkers to 'seek other sections' set off a national uproar."
6/12/2003, Wall Street Journal, The Tehran Regime Must Fall, Michael Ledeen
"For the most part, these demonstrations have been led by 'students,' but these are not the kids in Paris or Berkeley in the 1960s. Iranian 'students' are considerably older (some of the leaders are in their late thirties or early forties), and hardened by years of street fighting, imprisonment and torture. Soviet dissidents like Vladimir Bukovsky and Natan Sharansky are better models than Mario Savio and Daniel Cohn-Bendit."
6/9/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, AND THE BEAT GOES ON City Lights and the counterculture: 1961 - 1974, Heidi Benson, Jane Ganahl, Jesse Hamlin, James Sullivan
"CITY LIGHTS BOOKSTORE 50TH ANNIVERSARY
1961 - City Lights publishes Journal for the Protection of all Beings, an early ecology magazine, and City Lights Journal #1, an international literary review.
1961 - Alan Shepard Jr. makes the first U.S. space flight, a five-minute sub-orbital ride on the Freedom 7 capsule.
1963 - President Kennedy assassinated in Dallas.
1964 - Berkeley Free Speech Movement grows after university bans distribution of political material on campus."
6/2/2003, Washington Times, The young right finds its groove, Suzanne Fields
"At the top of the reading list is 'Letters to a Conservative' by Dinesh D'Souza, sort of a right-wing Mario Savio, who set off the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964. D'Souza crusades for free speech as leftist administrators and professors push restrictive speech codes and mandatory sensitivity sessions. At Stanford, liberals even want to kick the Hoover Institution off the campus because it's 'too conservative.'"
6/2/2003, Boston Globe, Students challenge 'free speech zones', Lisa Falkenberg, Associated Press
"At the University of California at Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement during the 1960s, administrators replaced the school's broad ban on 'fighting words' a year ago with a more narrow policy that prohibits harassing speech toward a specific person. Generally, hate speech is allowed against a group but not an individual, said university counsel Maria Shanle. (Berkeley does not restrict speech to certain zones.)"
5/30/2003, The Baltimore Sun, Students take universities to court over free speech, Associated Press
"At the University of California at Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement during the 1960s, administrators replaced the school's broad ban on 'fighting words' a year ago with a more narrow policy that prohibits harassing speech toward a specific person. Generally, hate speech is allowed against a group but not an individual, said university counsel Maria Shanle. (Berkeley does not restrict speech to certain zones.)"
5/30/2003, Berkeley Daily Planet, UC Senate Confronts New Rules In Debate for Academic Freedom, David Scharfenberg
"UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement of the 1960s sharply challenged the notion of an apolitical campus. And many intellectuals, dating back at least as far World War II, disputed the notion that there is an objective "truth," arguing instead that everyone brings their own biases and perspectives to the study of any given issue."
5/27/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Busy S.F. corporate lawyer prizes his volunteer work, Harriet Chiang
"When he got accepted at UC Berkeley, Ridless remembered how excited his father was that his youngest son was heading to the heart of the Free Speech Movement."
5/25/2003, New York Times Magazine, The Young Hipublicans, John Colapinto
"If the interest groups have worked hard to retrofit the college conservative movement as a right-wing version of the leftist Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 1960's, they have worked equally hard to frame the conservative women's movement on campuses as a new brand of empowering feminism."
5/22/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, The world according to Google, Ruth Rosen
"You never know what you'll find when you google yourself. Several California elected officials, for example, are probably not thrilled that the University of California has published the entire archives from the 1964 Free Speech Movement. Up come their pasts as Berkeley activists, slices of life they had not discussed during electoral campaigns."
5/21/2003, Tri-Valley Herald, State attorney general disavows protest warning, Ian Hoffman
"Lockyer said his commitment to protecting those liberties goes back to the Free Speech Movement in 1965, when he was part of a sit-in at UC Berkeley's Sproul Hall."
5/11/2003, The Power Vacuum, How LBJ Killed Liberalism, edboz
"Students in the free speech movement jumped on the black power bandwagon. They believed they were just as oppressed by "the system" as blacks, which is absurd. During the 1960s you had blacks rioting in the streets and white middle class students protesting on college campuses."
5/9/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, UC practicing home lung security, Rob Morse
"But how curious it is that a university famous for its Free Speech Movement is now worried about the free movement of small droplets of spit during speech."
5/5/2003, Human Events, College Republicans Now Biggest Group on Campus, John Gizzi
"Admitting that he was 'not very politically active when I came to Berkley,' Galich recalled how, in dinners with classmates while a freshman, 'I felt the atmosphere of intolerance that was the legacy of the Free Speech movement and the '60's. If you said, say, you were a Republican or you liked George W. Bush, you were called a racist and not even listened to.'"
5/4/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Dillon sticks it to shrinks, Heidi Benson
"'The time was crucial,' Dillon says. 'A great change was about to take place in the culture -- in the way women were addressed, the whole question of sexuality, the Free Speech Movement.'"
May/June 2003, Via Magazine, Gourmet Ghetto, Jeanette Ferrary
"Everybody knows something about the legacy of Berkeley from the 1960s--from the Free Speech Movement and People's Park to an uncompromising commitment to dark-roasted coffee and a mania for goat cheese. The peculiarly Berkeley brand of activism that moved seamlessly between civil liberties and the larder still thrives, and nowhere more robustly than on Shattuck Avenue, between Vine and Hearst."
5/1/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Controversy over whether UC should be in bomb business, James Sterngold, Keay Davidson
"But Bettina Aptheker, a leader of the Berkeley Free Speech movement in the 1960s who now runs the women's studies department at UC Santa Cruz, insisted, 'The one good thing out of this is that it has called into question the continued UC involvement with Los Alamos. I don't think it is appropriate for a university presumably dedicated to the pursuit of education and research for the good of humanity to engage in managing or researching its destruction.'"
4/30/2003, Daily Vanguard, Group takes aim at campus speech codes, James M. O'Neill
"Penn's Kors has been fighting speech codes since the 1980s. He calls them the 'infantilizing of students.' He said the irony is that college administrators who enjoyed the free-speech movement of the 1960s during their own college years have turned around and imposed restrictions on today's students.
'It's the generational swindle of all time,' he said."
4/28/2003, Oakland Tribune, Famous Berkeley park site turns 34, staff
"The park, which played a pivotal role in the Free Speech Movement and the anti-war protests of the previous generation, welcomed a new breed of peace advocates with the celebration."
4/24/2003, CNN.com, Staff at a Shanghai hospital take a break during a WHO visit. WHO has been extending its SARS probes, Willy Wo-Lap Lam
"That Hu and many of his moderate colleagues are basically sympathetic toward a Chinese-style free speech movement is evident from their treatment of the petition that Li Rui wrote to the CCP Central Committee during the 16th Congress last November."
4/14/2003, Los Angeles Times, Editorials, Op-Ed, Rone Tempest
"Coleman, 60, whose political pedigree goes back to her years as a UC Berkeley undergraduate during the Free Speech Movement, sees the Bari phenomenon as a last gasp for late '60s-style activism. 'Judi Bari anticipated being able to take the level of protest to that of the Vietnam War era. She had visions of glory. She was smart and courageous,' said Coleman."
4/13/2003, San Jose Mercury News, Berkeley mayor gets 'Muzzle' award for trashing student newspaper, Associated Press
"BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) - Mayor Tom Bates received an honorary title Sunday courtesy of a Charlotte, North Carolina group that each year names the country's top stiflers of free speech.
.
.
The copies of The Daily Californian were taken the day the newspaper endorsed Bates' opponent, incumbent Shirley Dean. The student newspaper reported that about 90 percent of the papers were recovered from trash cans in the University of California, Berkeley's Sproul Plaza, the birthplace of the 1964 Free Speech Movement."
04/11/2003, The Oregonian, Documentaries of dissent, Marc Mohan
"The Oscar-nominated documentary 'Berkeley in the '60s' looks at how the rebellion sprang from one localized area, including the Free Speech movement, anti-HUAC demonstrations, and on to the Black Panthers. Ronald Reagan and Joan Baez contribute cameos in vintage footage of the unrest, while now-middle-aged protesters offer nostalgia and very little regret."
4/10/2003, Missoula Independent, The revolution will not be proselytized, Mike Keefe-Feldman
"The now infamous lecture to which Holt refers took place in his level 270 UM linguistics class on Friday, March 21. As he recounts the details of his presentation that day, Holt does not appear to be a nutcase, though his manner of speaking is eccentric. He draws on literary, linguistic and metaphysical analogies that rarely make their way into the vernacular of everyday conversation. As he recalls his days as part of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, Holt is cool and collected, though his eyes reveal a heavy sadness. Dennis Holt is not happy with the world in which we live."
4/4/2003, Berkeley Voice, Savio's legacy: the lore and spirit of activism, Martin Snapp
"The news media did a hatchet job on Savio. They painted him as a cynical manipulator who seduced naive students -- the dreaded 'outside agitator.'
The funny thing is that he was exactly the opposite. All he ever wanted to do was read poetry, hang out with his family and have intense intellectual discussions with his friends."
4/4/2003, Berkeley Voice, Revolution grew from Waters' restaurant, Martin Snapp
"But it all changed in 1971, when Waters and a small band of friends -- many, like her, veterans of the Free Speech Movement at Cal -- got together to found Chez Panisse, and a new American cuisine was born."
4/4/2003, Berkeley Voice, Student groups open dialogue on hate crime, Brian Kluepfel
"Two hundred hate letters to the Cal Muslim Students Association. Banners torn down. Students in traditional veils followed home and verbally abused. Nazi graffiti on an African-American theme house. Is this really happening at UC Berkeley, home of the free speech movement?"
4/3/2003, Great Falls Tribune, Teachers walk fine line discussing war in class, Stacy Haslem
"Dennis Holt, a linguistics professor at the University of Montana was suspended Monday after he gave an impassioned lecture on the war with Iraq. Administrators investigated Holt's performance as a professor after several students complained that his behavior was erratic."
4/1/2003, The Missoulian, UM adjunct suspended after war talk, Betsy Cohen
"He told students that he once was a member of the free speech movement in Berkeley, Calif., in the early 1960s, who protested the Vietnam War by holding sit-ins and other peace protests; that he was a former Peace Corps volunteer; and that he once produced a revolutionary newsletter calling for the removal of government."
4/1/2003, Berkeley Daily Planet, Editorial: Why a Newspaper Now?, Mike and Becky O'Malley
"Carol Denney likes to remind us that Berkeley was the home of the Free Speech Movement because of the University of California's determined opposition to free speech, not because free speech was protected here."
3/31/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, OBIT: Ted Streshinsky -- noted photojournalist, Kelly St. John
"As a freelancer who created photo essays for Time, Life, Look and other magazines, Mr. Streshinsky photographed Cesar Chavez, Janis Joplin, the Black Panthers, Ken Kesey and four U.S. presidents. During the 1960s, he documented the Free Speech Movement, Vietnam War protests and the People's Park riots in Berkeley. And his assignments took him around the world, from documenting a two-week royal wedding in Tonga to attending a young girl's funeral in Samoa."
3/31/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Service celebrates Herbert Aptheker's life, John Wildermuth
"'I asked (Mr. Aptheker) how he was doing just three days before his death, when he was weakened, but not uncomfortable,' Kranz remembered. 'A lot better than the president,' he told me.'"
3/30/2003, Oakland Tribune, City in vanguard of change, Angela Hill
"Then the Free Speech Movement made world history. Protests swelled on the UC campus over a policy prohibiting political speeches and distribution of literature.
Soon there was Mario Savio giving powerful speeches from atop a police car. Then Joan Baez was leading students in "We Shall Overcome." More than 10,000 demonstrated on Sproul Plaza, and held a dramatic sit-in at Sproul Hall."
3/28/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Gasp! Berkeley will celebrate its namesake, Charles Burress
"'We're not as tight with matters historical as we should be in this community,' said Sayre Van Young, who oversees the public library's new Berkeley History Room. 'Berkeley is not just the latest development in politics or the Free Speech Movement.'"
3/28/2003, Counterpunch, When Bombs Replace Reason, Saul Landau
"In 1964, Mario Savio exhorted students at the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. His words remain the appropriate response to the Perles and the imperialists in the White House.
'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop.'"
3/24/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Ethical quandary: Ex-activists confront issues of tech and war, Benjamin Pimentel
"Lee Felsenstein, who invented the Osborne 1, the world's first portable computer, blasted what he called the political decadence behind the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq."
3/24/2003, Houston Chronicle, Portable computer inventor Adam Osborne dies, Eric Auchard, Reuters News Service
"'My appreciation of him was that he was too much of an entrepreneur and not enough of a jack-of-all-trades,' recalled Lee Felsenstein, another co-founder of Osborne Computer.
3/23/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Book review: Changing how history is told, Heidi Benson
"'I was born intellectually and politically in Berkeley in the '60s,' says Takaki.
Inspired by the moral vision of Martin Luther King Jr., he joined the campus Free Speech Movement. 'We wanted free speech so we could speak out about civil rights,' he says."
3/22/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, '60s protesters return to roots in marches against Iraq war, Kevin Fagan
"Peggy Rogers was right there when Martin Luther King Jr. boomed, 'I have a dream,' at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Judith Ross stood below Mario Savio in Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley as he launched the Free Speech Movement from the top of a cop car in 1964."
3/21/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Herbert Aptheker -- historian of blacks in America, Michael Taylor
"Mr. Aptheker is survived by his daughter, Bettina Aptheker, one of the founders of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley some 40 years ago and now a professor at UC Santa Cruz; two grandchildren; and a great-grandson."
3/21/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Anti-war protesters rally throughout Bay Area, Janine DeFao, Kelly St. John, Pamela J. Podger
"Speakers who condemned the attack on Iraq compared the large crowd on Sproul Plaza to those that gathered during the Free Speech Movement and Vietnam protests."
3/21/2003, Los Angeles Times, Herbert Aptheker, 87; Scholar of Slave History, Quit U.S. Communist Party, Dennis McLellan
"His daughter, Bettina Aptheker, now a professor of women's studies at UC Santa Cruz, was a leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the 1960s. And Angela Davis, the Black Panther and onetime UCLA professor, was a close family friend."
3/20/2003, New York Times, Herbert Aptheker, 87, Prolific Marxist Historian, Is Dead, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
"In 1942, he married Fay Philippa Aptheker, his first cousin. She died in 1999. They had one child, a daughter, Bettina, a leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement who is a professor and the chairwoman of Women's Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is also survived by two grandchildren."
3/19/2003, San Jose Mercury News, Scholar Herbert Aptheker dies at 88, Jack Fischer
"He was for decades a leading theorist of the Communist Party U.S.A. before resigning in 1991. He also was the father of Bettina Aptheker, a former leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and was a friend to 1960s radical and Black Panther leader Angela Davis. (Both women now teach at UC-Santa Cruz, where Aptheker was the chair of Women's Studies.) And it was Herbert Aptheker who, in Christmas 1965, led a delegation that included former state Sen. Tom Hayden, then the leader of Students for a Democratic Society, to Hanoi during the Vietnam War.
Aptheker spoke widely on college campuses in the 1960s. His rapport with students in 1965 prompted the FBI in internal memos to dub him "the most dangerous communist in the United States,'' an appellation that amused and pleased him."
3/18/2003, San Jose Mercury News, Noted scholar of African-American history, Herbert Aptheker, dies in Mountain View, Jack Fischer
"He also was the father of Bettina Aptheker, a former leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and was friend and adviser to 1960s radical and Black Panther leader Angela Davis."
03/06/2003, The Times Literary Supplement, Book Review: The Free Speech Movement, Christopher Hitchens
"In mid-January I took the side of regime change in Iraq at a debate in Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, where 2,500 citizens attended and some 600 more had to be turned away. There is probably no town in the United States that has had a more serious or more protracted or more bitter discussion about what it means to be American, and about the limits of American power."
3/5/2003, Oakland Tribune, Rockridge sounds off after vandal hits store's free speech, Mike Adamick
"In the days that followed, the action has sparked a miniature free-speech movement in this tiny, tight-knit neighborhood populated by a wealth of artists and a bevy of charming Craftsman bungalows."
2/14/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Bay team's jungle PC is zapped, Kevin Fagan
"So Thorn went straight to the tech-smartest guy he knew -- 57-year-old Felsenstein, who in the '60s was tech-whiz to the Free Speech Movement around the time Thorn was co-founding Veterans for Peace. Felsenstein, who had gone on to invent the Osborne 1, the world's first portable computer, delighted in the challenge."
2/12/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, A Mideast rift in peace coalition, Joe Garofoli, Suzanne Herel, Chronicle Staff Writers
"'Frankly, I'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner,' said Michael Nagler, professor of peace and conflict studies at UC Berkeley, who has known Lerner since their work together in the Free Speech Movement a generation ago. 'Every peace movement has had to deal with an issue that could divide them.'"
2/9/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Book Review: The long, hard years at Berkeley Second volume of Clark Kerr's memoir covers politics and 'blunders', Charles Burress
"Looking back, he sees three great administrative 'blunders' in UC history. The greatest, he says, was President Robert Gordon Sproul proposing the loyalty oath during the Red Scare in 1949. The proposal, to require faculty to sign an oath more stringent than the one already required of all state employees, provoked what Kerr calls 'the most bitter confrontation between a board of trustees and its faculty in all American university history.'
The other two blunders were responsible, in Kerr's view, for an unnecessarily inflamed Free Speech Movement, which he calls 'the student uprising that was heard around the world.'
The 'second greatest blunder' was the decision in September 1964 by UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Strong and Vice Chancellor Alex Sherriffs to revoke permission for political advocacy tables at the south campus entrance at Telegraph Avenue, a move that sparked the protests that escalated over the next three months.
The third mistake was what Kerr calls 'my big blunder . . . I should have told him [Strong] that I would have to declare his action null and void.' Kerr had been in Tokyo when the tables were ordered removed. But, Kerr writes, he did not cancel Strong's order, in part because Kerr was the 'principal author' of the decentralization plan that transferred authority to the chancellors on each campus and because he didn't want to embarrass Strong."
1/29/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Arts and Crafts gems shine in Berkeley's velvet hills, R. W. Apple Jr.
"Many famous men and women have walked its streets -- Ernest O. Lawrence, the remarkable physicist who invented the cyclotron; Clark Kerr, who helped develop the nation's best statewide system of higher education; Mario Savio, the leader of the radical Free Speech Movement during the turbulent 1960s; and in our own day Alice Waters, arguably the nation's greatest restaurateur."
1/26/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Reviews in Brief: The Portable Sixties Reader, G. Beato
"To that end, she divides the book into chapters focusing on a particular mode of '60s rebellion: the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the Free Speech Movement, and so on. Charters' informative headnotes, along with journalistic selections from people such as Rachel Carson and Calvin Trillin, provide context; and poetry, polemics, journalism and other ephemera from contributors ranging from Denise Levertov to Lenny Bruce offer more personal takes on the forces that shaped the era."
1/26/2003, Newsday, THE ANTI-WAR PROTESTS It's A Long Road IRAQ, Jo Freeman
"Jo Freeman is the author, editor or co-editor of numerous books on social movements. Her next book, "At Berkeley in the Sixties," will be published later this year."
1/19/2003, Oakland Tribune, Goldman case proves history never truly is behind us, Brenda Payton
"There are so many ironies, the ironies are ironic.
Officials of the University of California at Berkeley, the birthplace of the free speech movement, censored a fundraising letter for the center that collects the letters of Emma Goldman, the anarchist, radical feminist and champion of free speech."
1/17/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Pedal-powered e-mail in the jungle, Kevin Fagan
"For Felsenstein, the idea of making a computer "for the people" has driven him since the 1960s, when he wrote for the Berkeley Barb and was tech whiz for the Free Speech Movement."
1/17/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, UC Berkeley lifts gag on radical, Charles Burress
"Also Thursday, a group of faculty members began circulating a petition to 'condemn administration suppression of free speech.'
The campus, birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, has been squirming under harsh criticism from those who saw the incident not only as a threat to free speech but also a sign that recent curtailment of civil liberties was creeping into famously liberal UC Berkeley."
1/17/2003, New York Times, JOURNEYS; In Berkeley, Strollers Find Art With Curb Appeal, R. W. Apple Jr.
"Many famous men and women have walked its streets -- Ernest O. Lawrence, the remarkable physicist who invented the cyclotron; Clark Kerr, who helped develop the nation's best statewide system of higher education; Mario Savo, the leader of the radical Free Speech Movement during the turbulent 1960's; and in our own day Alice Waters, arguably the nation's greatest restaurateur."
1/15/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, UC finds anarchist's words too red hot, Charles Burress
"Anarchist firebrand Emma Goldman has been dead 63 years, but her words apparently are still too hot for an administrator at the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, UC Berkeley."
January 15-21, 2003, East Bay Express, 7 Days: Journalism with attitude?, Chris Thompson
"Whatever Faludi will ultimately conclude, there's little doubt how Kate Coleman feels about the issue. Coleman reached national prominence in the 1970s when she broke news about the Black Panthers' history of extortion and brutality in the pages of the New Times magazine. She is just finishing the epilogue to her own book about Bari and Earth First, which is due out in June."
1/14/2003, New York Times, Old Words on War Stirring a New Dispute at Berkeley, Dean E. Murphy
"'It seems the administration is mocking freedom of expression by limiting it,' Professor Litwack said. 'The First Amendment belongs to no single group or ideology, but that message is often difficult to implement even at the University of California, Berkeley.'"
1/14/2003, Associated Press, Emma Goldman's anti-war stance stirs controversy anew, Ian Stewart
"'The question that has arisen was originally seen not as a free speech issue, but as a question by the associate vice chancellor over what was appropriate in a fund-raising letter,'' Berdahl said. 'I can understand how others might view it differently and in retrospect, had we to do it over, we would have done it differently.'''
1/9/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Mayor walks with $100 fine, Charles Burress
"Bates, who said the crime was an irrational act of election fatigue, did not appear in court. He was represented by two attorneys, Malcolm Burnstein, former chief counsel for the 1964 Free Speech Movement, and Robert Cheasty, former mayor of Albany."
1/5/2003, San Francisco Chronicle, The Chronicle's 137th Annual Emperor Norton Awards, Tim Goodman
"Tom Bates, the recently elected mayor of Berkeley, admitted he walked onto the Berkeley campus, birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, and dumped 1,000 copies of the Daily Cal into a trash can. That issue's paper has endorsed his opponent, incumbent Shirley Dean."
January 2003, Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, In Review: The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s, Henry Reichman
"The FSM was the first of the great student rebellions of the 1960s and in many respects the most influential."
12/29/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, When freedom wasn't just a word, Lisa Rubens
"Perhaps the most compelling articles wrestle with the language and vision of the emerging new left and the continuities and contradictions of battles over the First Amendment. The 1960s have become mythic in U.S. culture, and students often become glassy-eyed when they study the era. Yet students today, no less than in that now-storied time, are testing the limits of authority and contesting the meaning of freedom of speech. Now more than ever, when civil liberties and rights are under attack, when economic injustices and war encircle the globe, the old slogan 'a free university in a free society' cautions us to learn from the past."
12/22/2002, Oakland Tribune, Letter: Tom Bates' redemption, Robert Englund
"Bates not only broke the law, but his actions betray the spirit of Berkeley by committing his act in Sproul Plaza, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement."
12/17/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Letter: Bad in Berkeley, Scott Abramson
"As Saunders points out, this same Berkeley free-speech crowd is the first to rail about "silencing dissent," unless, of course, it is their guy doing the silencing. Included in the list of hypocrites should be the San Francisco Chronicle. Although your editorial board (Dec. 9) paid lip service to criticizing Bates, ultimately you termed it a 'juvenile stunt.'"
12/13/2002, Oakland Tribune, Cartoon: BERKELEY FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT..., S. Lait
12/12/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Berkeley mayor will plead guilty, Charles Burress
"The contrite and embarrassed Bates, a former state assemblyman and current leader of the leftist-liberal faction that controls the city council, admitted last week that he stole about 1,000 copies of the campus newspaper Nov. 4 from their kiosk on Sproul Plaza, birthplace of the Free Speech Movement. In an apparent fit of pique, he threw them into the trash."
12/12/2002, Oakland Tribune, Mayor Tom Bates owes more than apology, editorial
"That the mayor of a city proud to call itself the home of the free-speech movement would trample on those First Amendment rights is not only ironic but also embarrassing."
12/11/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Bates apologizes publicly for paper theft, Charles Burress
"Bates' attorney, Mal Burnstein, who served as chief counsel for the 1964 Free Speech Movement, said Bates was always a stalwart supporter of free speech. "There wasn't a better assemblyman since Phil Burton on civil liberties issues," Burnstein said."
December 11-17, 2002, East Bay Express, It's a Small Town After All, Chris Thomson
"Bates just threw a temper tantrum, and no one doubts the sincerity of his remorse -- if only because he knows the consequences of suppressing speech at the very spot where thousands of students went to jail to secure their right to the free exchange of ideas."
12/7/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Berkeley mayor apologizes for trashing of newspapers, Charles Burress
"Bates, 64, standard-bearer for the city's progressive left, accepted responsibility for the Nov. 4 theft of about 1,000 copies of the free, student- run Daily Californian from a kiosk on Sproul Plaza -- the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement -- and tossing them in the trash."
11/22/2002, Berkeley Voice, Poll finds Berkeley still leads neighbors in anti-war sentiment, John Geluardi
"A group of 21 Japanese citizens interested in Berkeley's penchant for democratic participation is visiting town right now. They have spent time at KPFA and met some original members of the Free Speech Movement, which began in Berkeley in the 1960s."
11/21/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Tolling of the bellwether: Pacifica radio network struggles to save its past, Tyche Hendricks
"Berkeley -- Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio bellows through a megaphone atop a police car at a 1964 UC Berkeley rally. Playwright Bertolt Brecht testifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero gives his last interview before his 1980 assassination.
They are among the voices on 47,000 recordings in the Pacifica Radio Archives in Los Angeles, and they are in various states of decrepitude. "
11/21/2002, Counterpunch, The Betrayal of Lenny Glaser, Michael Rossman
"As background to this story of betrayal, one should understand the role of Lenny Glaser (later known as Lenni Brenner) in the political culture of the Berkeley campus during the era leading to the Free Speech Movement. If one can summarize six rich years of history by saying that SLATE was the key organizer of students' increasing expression of civil liberties, one might say on the same scale that Lenny Glaser was the individual exemplar of free speech.
¶
For years, his thoughtful and passionate tirades greeted students on cold mornings, assailed them at noon as they hurried past the pedestal at Bancroft and Telegraph where he perched, eyes gleaming as he criticized Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, mocked the Pope's stand on birth control, told us marijuana wouldn't make us crazy. One must understand the era's context, still shadowed with McCarthyism's chill, to grasp how aberrant his act seemed; and one must understand the subtext of collective feelings, gathering to erupt in the later 1960's, to grasp the shameful fascination of his lingering words and example for many who hurried past, averting their eyes from that crazy guy.
¶
In the annals of campus political history, the laurel for solitary courage is often credited to Fred Moore, for his fast on Sproul Hall's steps in 1961 in protest of compulsory military training. Yet to my mind, the courage of Glaser's lonely example was as vivid, long sustained, and more fertile in influencing the emerging culture of political expression."
11/21/2002, Counterpunch, The Rossman Report: a Memoir of Making History, Michael Rossman
"In the episode of the Free Speech Movement, I think we were inhabited by spirits larger than ourselves -- somewhere between ancestral and primordial in nature, and sharply formed. We had no cultural vision to recognize them as such, nor language to speak of being the vehicles of what flowed through us. All we could say even of 'the spirit of Democracy' was that this was a metaphor. And all we knew was that the mundane world, in which our ordinary selves felt their ways through the common crisis, had become charged with an extraordinary energy -- a luminosity at times almost tangible (yet invisible to the eye, so how could one refer to it?), that made each occasion, each decision, each act no more than what it funkily was, but ever so much so, resonant in its significances.
¶
Such a frame seems pertinent to the story of the report that came informally to bear my name; for I have always thought that vital dimensions of the FSM episode have escaped historical recognition and examination. Though I alluded to them long ago (1), until recently I hardly connected them with my personal experience of organizing the 'Rossman Report.' I saw the Report's story simply as an illustration of the FSM's participatory energy and spirit, in the usual metaphorical sense. Readers concerned only with what can be stated precisely may well take it simply as such, as an exemplar of the FSM's organizing process, and be satisfied with its face value."
November 2002, California Monthly, Great Divide: Understanding the Free Speech Movement, Watson M. Laetsch
"The Berkeley of the 1960s, symbolized most potently by the Free Speech Movement, still lives on as either a great promise or a vile threat. Whatever one's opinion, the FSM represents a major dividing point in campus history...."
10/20/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Chronicle reporter named Journalist of the Year, Wyatt Buchanan
"Rosenfeld uncovered the information behind "The Campus Files" during a legal battle that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The series, published in June, detailed the FBI's covert campaign to disrupt the Free Speech Movement, topple UC President Clark Kerr and help then-Gov. Ronald Reagan crack down on campus unrest."
10/20/2002, Los Angeles Times, Campus rebels with a cause, Jonathan Kirsch
"'To reduce the FSM's story to a chapter in the history of the New Left is to fail to see that the historical moment cannot be compressed into a single meaning,' insists co-editor Robert Cohen. And Berkeley history professor Leon F. Litwack makes an even broader claim for the achievements of the movement in his preface to the book: 'In the 1960s, first on the Berkeley campus and then nationally and internationally, students tested the limits of permissible dissent, challenged the conventional wisdom in unprecedented ways, and insisted on participating as active agents in the shaping of history.'"
10/11/2002, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Hot Type: Back to Sproul, David Glenn
"In November 1995, Mario Savio gave a lecture in Santa Cruz, Calif., about the 1964 free-speech movement at the University of California at Berkeley, in which he had played a leading role. He reminded his audience: 'We almost lost. This is important to understand.'"
10/4/2002, Berkeley Voice, Martin Snapp Column: Remember the time when speech was finally set free, Martin Snapp
"The Free Speech Movement changed all that in an instant. It taught me that social change wasn't something other people did, that it was my duty to take responsibility. It taught me that there are things more important than your career - namely, the state of your soul. In short, it told me to grow up."
10/2/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, CAMPAIGN PROFILE: Peter Miguel Camejo, Suzanne Herel
"Studying American history at UC Berkeley in the late '60s, Camejo gained a reputation as a fiery student leader along with the likes of Mario Savio, helping forge Cal's reputation for student activism.
He marched in Selma, Ala., with Martin Luther King Jr., and rallied for the rights of migrant farmworkers."
10/2/2002, Oakland Tribune, Free Speech Movement milestone barely noticed, William Brand
"While speakers on both sides of the Palestine-Israel issue and other controversies of the day, including abortion and affirmative action, argued, a never-ending stream of students crossed the plaza, unaware that it was the 38th anniversary of a revolution that shook campuses across the world."
10/2/2002, Daily Californian, Students Hold Debate in the Name of Free Speech, Kim-Mai Cutler
"Some of UC Berkeley's most contentious ideological opponents gathered at Sproul Plaza yesterday to celebrate one idea they could all agree on-their disagreement.
Students took to the Mario Savio Steps of Sproul Hall to debate controversial issues in honor of the 38th anniversary of UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement."
10/2/2002, Berkeley Daily Planet, UC students mark civil rights anniversary, Judith Scherr
"On Oct. 1, 1964, former student and Congress of Racial Equality worker Jack Weinberg was passing out flyers at Sproul Plaza after the college had forbidden the distribution of literature for non-university causes. Police arrived and put Weinberg in a squad car. But they couldn't take him away. A group of students had surrounded it, and they held the car captive until the college agreed to lift the distribution ban.
'The students won,' said Matt Murray of the student ACLU Tuesday to about 50 people celebrating the 38th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley."
9/7/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Letter: Gens X and Y may get a war to protest, Larry Burdick
"Watch out people! The new generations of Abbie Hoffmann, Mario Savio, Eugene McCarthy and Ken Kesey are on the horizon, and we can thank "W" for bringing them into the world!"
8/27/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Clerical workers on strike at UC Berkeley, Charles Burress
"'The issue in this strike is (the university's) unwillingness to bargain fairly and abide by the law,' said Margy Wilkinson, chief negotiator for the clerical workers. Most of the picket signs said, 'Unfair Labor Practice Strike.'"
8/21/2002, Daily Californian, UC Berkeley Clerical Workers and Lecturers on Strike, Emma Schwartz
"'There was nothing else we could do after having our dignity and respect so degraded that anything less extreme would be a disservice to the people we represent,' said Margy Wilkonson, chief negotiator for Coalition of University Employees."
7/6/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Letter: Truths without cant, Greil Marcus
"Editor -- I've been reading The Chronicle since I was old enough to read, but I don't know that, aside from Ralph J. Gleason's 'Tragedy at the Greek Theatre' in 1964, I have read anything in your pages as strong, plain-spoken and singular as your July 4 editorial."
7/4/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, What does it mean to be an American on this Fourth of July?, Dorothy M. Ehrlich
"Those regulations were in place for a reason. A recent Chronicle report unveiled remarkable abuses by the FBI and CIA in the '60s and '70s, when the agencies systematically infiltrated UC Berkeley, sabotaged the Free Speech Movement and ousted then-University President Clark Kerr. And Kerr was far from alone."
6/30/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Chronicle's FBI probe wins freedom award, staff
"The California Newspaper Publishers Association honored The Chronicle and reporter Seth Rosenfeld for "The Campus Files: Reagan, Hoover and the UC Red Scare," an investigation based on secret FBI files obtained after nearly two decades of litigation."
6/23/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Feinstein demands answers from FBI, Seth Rosenfeld
"In addition to Feinstein, several prominent public officials and organizations expressed concern about the FBI's past activities at UC -- and the possibility that the bureau could again veer from protecting national security to targeting people involved in constitutionally protected activities.
Among those concerned are University of California President Richard Atkinson, the American Association of University Professors, state Senate President Pro Tem John Burton, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, who is the House Democratic whip and a member of the House committee writing the bill to create the proposed Department of Homeland Security."
6/21/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, The In Crowd/The woman behind the man, Leah Garchik
"SEEMS LIKE OLD TIMES: Lawyer Bill Coblentz, who served for 16 years on the University of California Board of Regents -- the Chronicle's Seth Rosenfeld wrote recently that Coblentz was viewed by conservatives as an 'ultraliberal' - - retired from that job in 1980. The other day, apparently feeling sentimental, he listened to a tape made at a retirement gala thrown for him in the Fairmont Hotel's Venetian Room.
Coblentz was touched to hear the voices of old friends Bill Graham, Wally Haas, Herb Caen and Cecil Poole, all gone now. And then he listened to a tribute from Ronald Reagan, who was running for president: 'Bill, you and I have had our differences. But let bygones be bygones. If you support me, I may make you the next ambassador to Afghanistan.'"
6/16/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, LETTERS: FBI's covert war on UC chief Clark Kerr, Leon Wofsy
"Is it far-fetched to wonder whether today's covert agenda may include the election of the governor of Florida - or sustaining a "war emergency" through the elections of 2004?"
6/16/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, LETTERS: Federal agencies worked together, Ray Carlson
"That it took 17 years to obtain this information through the very Freedom of Information Act that Attorney General John Ashcroft refuses to follow is more evidence that both agencies are fundamentally flawed, precisely because of their lack of accountability to the American people."
6/16/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, LETTERS: Get Hoover's name off FBI building, Dan Fitzgerald
"Editor - The first thing the new Cabinet-level appointee to head the proposed Department of Homeland Security should do is seek to have J. Edgar Hoover's name taken off the FBI's headquarters in Washington, D.C."
6/16/2002, New York Times, The Bad Old Days at the F.B.I., Editorial
"Throughout the 1960's, according to The Chronicle, the F.B.I. investigated not only students active in Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, but also their family members, a CBS reporter who covered them and a company that produced an album of Free Speech Movement Christmas carols. It also prepared a 60-page report on the school's political makeup, including a list of faculty whose politics the bureau found questionable, who were to be detained in case of a national emergency, without a judicial warrant."
6/14/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Sign me up on dotted line for the FBI, Rob Morse
"I want to learn how to destroy people's careers and reputations, the way the FBI did with Earth First's Judi Bari and former UC President Clark Kerr, as shown in Seth Rosenfeld's eye-opening piece in last Sunday's Chronicle."
6/12/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Deal reached over sit-in at UC Berkeley, Chronicle staff and wire reports
"Seth Chazin, an attorney for the protesters, said Berkeley, the birthplace of the free speech movement, should not pursue student conduct charges."
6/10/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Ex-UC chief calls FBI actions despicable, Seth Rosenfeld
"Kerr said he was unaware of the FBI's efforts against him until he was contacted by The Chronicle.
He had requested his FBI files under the Freedom of Information Act in the late 1970s, Kerr said, but an FBI official told him that 'they couldn't send me anything."'
'My guess is,' Kerr said, 'they were trying to keep it quiet.'"
6/11/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Letter: Kerr's class, Tom Miller
"Editor -- To complete Seth Rosenfeld's timely revelation of how politics and paranoia undermined the legitimate aims of the Free Speech Movement and destroyed UC President Clark Kerr's career, one should not forget Kerr's classic and classy departure comment: 'I am leaving as I arrived: Fired with enthusiasm.'"
6/9/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Secret FBI files reveal covert activities at UC, Seth Rosenfeld
"The FBI records show that after the Free Speech Movement staged the nation's first large campus sit-ins of the era, CIA Director John McCone met with Hoover at FBI headquarters in January 1965 and planned to leak FBI reports to conservative regent Edwin Pauley, who could then 'use his influence to curtail, harass and at times eliminate' liberal faculty members."
...
"The FBI campaigned to get Kerr fired from the UC presidency, the bureau's records show, because it disagreed with his policies and handling of the Free Speech Movement protests."
6/9/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Reagan, Hoover and the UC Red Scare, Seth Rosenfeld
"Gov. Reagan had just been elected after campaigning to restore order at UC Berkeley, where 'beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates' were proof of what he called the 'morality and decency gap in Sacramento.' Now he was "damned mad" at campus officials, one agent recalled, and he was asking the FBI to tell him 'what he was up against.'"
6/9/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, The FBI's secret UC files, Seth Rosenfeld
"'I shall be eternally vigilant to preserve freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression for the students and for the faculty,' Kerr said in an Oct. 1, 1952, campus speech."
6/9/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Trouble on campus, Seth Rosenfeld
"As the crowd clapped and chanted, 'Let him go,' FBI agents in the crowd of bystanders watched in amazement, snapping photographs and jotting down names they would rush back to Hoover at headquarters.
In Washington, Hoover reviewed the reports and photographs his agents had taken on campus.
He was not pleased.
First came the university's suggestive essay question about the FBI in 1959. Then Berkeley students joined in the 1960 demonstrations against the House Un-American Activities Committee at San Francisco City Hall. Now they had captured a police car.
Hoover ordered agents around the country to determine whether the FSM was influenced by the Communist Party or other subversive groups, and whether the protest violated federal laws against civil disturbances.
But the bureau's investigation quickly expanded beyond the FSM's leaders to include their family members, faculty supporters, a CBS newsman who reported on them, even a company that produced an album of Free Speech Movement Christmas carols.
And Hoover soon went beyond gathering intelligence and began covertly manipulating public opinion about campus events.
At his direction, the San Francisco FBI office slipped information about some protesters' past political activities and arrests at civil rights demonstrations to Ed Montgomery of the San Francisco Examiner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who had developed an unusually close relationship with the bureau.
In late November 1964, the Examiner published his series depicting the Free Speech Movement as a Marxist dominated' plot to disrupt colleges around the country."
6/9/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, The governor's race, Seth Rosenfeld
"Appearing at the Greater Los Angeles Press Club in January 1965, Reagan said he approved of the arrests of the Free Speech Movement protesters."
6/9/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, The legacy of the FBI's UC activities, Seth Rosenfeld
"Clark Kerr, 91, lives in El Cerrito. After his dismissal as UC president -- and the FBI's misleading background report about him -- he never received another White House appointment. He worked as an educational consultant, had the Clark Kerr Campus at UC Berkeley named for him and published a memoir."
6/9/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, The 17-year legal battle to get the campus files, Seth Rosenfeld
"In 1981, Chronicle reporter Seth Rosenfeld, then a journalism student at UC Berkeley, sent the FBI a Freedom of Information Act request for "any and all" records on more than 100 people, events and groups involved in controversies at UC over academic freedom, civil rights and national policy.
The FOIA requires federal agencies to release public records in a timely way, so people know "what their government is up to." But the bureau refused to comply with the request. Only after a protracted legal fight that reached the U.S. Supreme Court did the FBI agree to release the withheld information.
Totaling more than 200,000 pages, those papers constitute one of the single largest releases of FBI records under the FOIA. In court, the bureau estimated it cost more than $900,000 to process the request."
6/9/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, the campus files: Galleries: Days of Protest,
6/9/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, A note on sources, Seth Rosenfeld
"The following books were especially useful in providing context for the FBI activities disclosed in the bureau's files:
...
On UC Berkeley: 'Berkeley at War: The 1960s,' by W. J. Rorabaugh; 'The Free Speech Movement: Coming of Age in the 1960s,' by David Lance Goines; 'The Beginning: Berkeley, 1964,' by Max Heirich; and 'The Gold and the Blue: A Personal Memoir of the University of California, 1949-1967,' by Clark Kerr."
6/9/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Timeline, Part One: 1945-1960 Into the Cold War, Seth Rosenfeld
"1947
Hoover testifies
March 26: FBI director J. Edgar Hoover warns HUAC that communists had launched 'a furtive attack on Hollywood' 12 years earlier."
6/9/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Timeline, Part Two: 1961-1965 Student Unrest, Seth Rosenfeld
"1964
...
Berkeley protests reined in
Sept. 14: UC Berkeley officials announce a new policy prohibiting political action at the campus entrance at Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue.
UC police arrest student
Oct. 1: Former graduate student Jack Weinberg is arrested for conducting political activity on campus, but students surround the police car and prevent the officers from leaving. Mario Savio, a junior, addresses the crowd from the car.
Free Speech Movement born
Oct. 2: Kerr meets with students, including Savio (center), and reaches an agreement that includes dropping charges against Weinberg. Over the next two days, student leaders create the Free Speech Movement."
6/9/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Timeline, Part Three: 1966-1973 The Rise of Reagan, Seth Rosenfeld
"1967
Kerr fired
Jan. 20: At Reagan's first meeting of the UC Board of Regents, he votes to fire Kerr as UC president."
6/8/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, PEACE BRIDGE Japan looks to Berkeley for anti-war inspiration, Charles Burress
"The camera's lens caught People's Park, a pro-Cuba gathering, the history of the Free Speech Movement and meetings of the Peace and Justice Commission, the Police Review Commission and the City Council. It also will let Japanese viewers see whom Berkeley honors on its street signs and buildings: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Rosa Parks."
5/26/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Letter: Jocks vs. the Free Speech Movement, Diana Landau
"When he and his lunkhead 'let the jocks kick out the freaks' mindset are a forgotten footnote in a sports encyclopedia, the Free Speech Movement will be remembered as a beacon and wakeup call to millions of students that they didn't have to spend all their college hours sniffing beer fumes in frat houses or striving for letterman prestige."
5/18/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Berkeley's student union honors namesake, Charles Burress
"Believing that King deserved better, Harold Adler, curator of the Free Speech Movement Cafe on campus, and Charles Henry, chairman of African American Studies at UC Berkeley, presented a framed, poster-size photo of King speaking at Sproul Plaza exactly 35 years earlier, believed to be his only speech on campus. It was taken by Helen Nestor, the only person at Friday's ceremony who witnessed the speech delivered from Sproul steps."
5/17/2002, UCB Campus News, Martin Luther King's legacy lives on: historic Berkeley photo from 1967 will hang in Berkeley student union, Diane Ainsworth
"During King's 1967 speech on the steps of Sproul Hall, the civil rights leader told students: "You, in a real sense, have been the conscience of the academic community and our nation." A gold plaque with King's name and that quote will be hung below the photograph."
5/15/2002, East Bay Express, The Unreal David Brock, Will Harper
""The scene shook me deeply,' Brock recalled in 'The Making of a Conservative,' a chapter from his new confessional memoir. 'Was the harassment of an unpopular speaker the legacy of the Berkeley-campus Free Speech Movement, when students demanded the right to canvass for any and all political causes on the campus's Sproul Plaza? Wasn't free speech a liberal value?'"
5/15/2002, East Bay Express, Unlikely Heirs to the Free Speech Movement, Will Harper
"Conservatives at Berkeley often invoke the ghost of the Free Speech Movement. David Brock does so in his new book when describing his revulsion at the crude efforts of the campus left to silence people like Jeane Kirkpatrick. And conservatives are the unlikely inheritors of the spirit of the Free Speech Movement, in that they still must constantly fight for their right to express their political opinions on campus. This month, Berkeley lecturer Snehal Shingavi, leader of a pro-Palestinian group, warned in the written description of a class he's teaching that 'conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections.' In his recent visit to Berkeley, author Dinesh D'Souza argued that conservatives at colleges such as Cal must act like radicals because if they tried to "conserve" the current campus culture they'd be conserving liberalism."
5/9/2002, Washington Post, Free Radical; Libertarian -- and Contrarian -- Ed Crane Has Run the Cato Institute for 25 Years. His Way, Richard Morin
"He [Ed Crane] transferred in 1963 to the University of California, Berkeley, where the free-speech movement was soon to be in full-throated roar and beer in the dorm rooms was the least of the administration's worries. Crane wistfully recalls how 'you would wake up in the morning and smell tear gas and know you didn't have to go to class.'"
4/30/2002, Daily Californian, Letters: Suspending SJP, Robert Cruickshank
"The Chancellor's office is very obviously looking to set a precedent for further restriction of the rights of students to organize and protest, and the way they have reacted to the Wheeler Hall protest shows their desire to return Cal into a pre-1964 era, negating 40 years of hard-won free speech rights on campus."
4/30/2002, Daily Californian, Letters: Suspending SJP, Karen Kenney, UC Berkeley Dean of Students
"Free speech is a cherished tradition at UC Berkeley. As Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl said on April 8, the day before the building occupation:
"This university has a proud history in the defense of free expression. It is our responsibility to provide a neutral forum for individuals and groups to advocate their cause ... Most importantly, it is our responsibility to protect the rights of all members of the campus community to pursue their reason for being here--the work of teaching, learning, and research--uninterrupted by anyone.'"
4/25/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Berkeley suspends group in April 9 takeover, Tanya Schevitz
"We have a Free Speech Movement Cafe on campus. We have the Mario Savio steps," Phan said. "We were making clear our political message. Our event did not threaten anyone. There was no property destruction. We didn't lock it down -- the police locked down the building."
4/16/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Gubernatorial wild card, Carla Marinucci
"A former firebrand student leader alongside Mario Savio during University of California at Berkeley's free speech heyday, Camejo was arrested for "unauthorized use of a microphone" in an incident 35 years ago that resulted in his suspension just shy of his graduation."
4/10/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Berkeley lecture series goes to Oakland, Charles Burress
"A lecture series that includes former world leaders is leaving Berkeley for Oakland, the organizer said, because the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement has not been cooperative in arrangements for controversial speakers."
3/6/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, First, they'll take Marin . . . and its BMWs, Rob Morse
"Term limits keep changing its makeup. A homophobe elected from San Diego, say, can make it tough for a gay man elected from San Francisco or Santa Cruz. Kuehl mentioned how hard it was for a lesbian member of the Assembly when one of the other members said, 'Nothing personal, Jackie Goldberg, but you're the spawn of the devil.'"
Spring 2002, the MCLI newsletter, Jack Weinberg details moment that launched Free Speech Movement, Monica Alanis
"Weinberg was placed under arrest. For the next 32 hours, the New York native remained in the car whose roof served as a platform for numerous speakers, including student Mario Savio and Ann Fagan Ginger, then employed by UC Extension/CEB. "By that point, the police would have liked me to leave. I felt like the cat who ate the canary," Weinberg said. Student representatives and University officials soon reached an agreement: the students would leave, Weinberg would be booked but charges dropped, and the University would begin what became a four-month period of negotiations with students. Although the Bancroft-Telegraph issue was the "opening salvo," Weinberg said the matter quickly transformed from being about tables and leaflets to "students' right to be heard on campus.'"
2/21/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Robert Treuhaft Memorial, staff
"He defended blacks beaten by police in Oakland, and as the somnolent '50s gave way to the fractious '60s and '70s he supported the Free Speech Movement, the Black Panther Party and the Oakland Seven draft resisters, among others."
2/3/2002, Oakland Tribune, Retired Alameda County judge Spurgeon Avakian dies at 88,
"Preceeded in death by his wife in February 2001 and by daughter, Marjorie in April 1999, Mr. Avakian is survived by daughter Mary Louise, son Robert Bruce, and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren."
2/2/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, OBIT: 'Sparky' Avakian -- racism-fighting judge, Rick DelVecchio
"He is survived by a daughter, Mary Louise, and son, Robert Bruce. A second daughter, Marjorie, died in 1999."
1/9/2002, San Francisco Chronicle, Open Forum: Free speech -- casualty of war?, Jeff Lustig
"Unfortunately, Heaphy made her comments at a time when we are witnessing a growing culture of intolerance and demagoguery. A public university is supposed to be a bulwark against such a culture. Its vocation is to impart knowledge and train citizens, to help create a larger public capable of learning from history and debating the major questions before it."
12/13/2001, San Francisco Chronicle, Remembering Community Memory, Joyce Slaton
"Community Memory was born when a group of wild-eyed nerdish Berkeley types started thinking about information systems and community and how they fit together. Ken Colstad, Mark Szpakowski, Lee Felsenstein and Efrem Lipkin were friends and partners, computer-savvy types who wanted to create a simple little system that could function as a source of community information."
11/26/2001, New York Times, TREUHAFT, ROBERT E.,
"Bob lived in the Bay Area, California, since he married the late Jessica Mitford in 1943. He formed several radical law firms in San Francisco and Oakland, representing labor unions, victims of police brutality, the Free Speech Movement, and working people seeking workers' compensation."
11/19/2001, Los Angeles Times, OBITUARIES: Alice Hamburg, 96; Activist Began Women's Peace Group, Myrna Oliver
"In the 1960s, she was actively involved in Berkeley's Free Speech Movement and in marches and protests for civil rights in the South, including the Mississippi Summer campaign of 1964."
11/17/2001, San Francisco Chronicle, Obituary: Alice Hamburg -- peace activist for 5 decades, Eric Brazil
"During the 1960s, Mrs. Hamburg became engaged in the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley and the Mississippi Summer campaign for civil rights in 1964. She also was a leader in several organizations that demonstrated against the Vietnam War."
11/16/2001, Berkeley Voice, Martin Snapp Column: Bob Treuhaft and Jessica Mitford left an enduring legacy, Martin Snapp
"Treuhaft was a labor lawyer during the 1940s and '50s, a civil rights lawyer during the '50s and '60s, an anti-war lawyer during the '60s and '70s, and a fighter for the underdog until the day he died. His clients included Harry Bridges, Mario Savio, Huey Newton, the Oakland 7, and thousands of ordinary men and women who were being trampled underfoot by the rich and powerful."
11/12/2001, San Francisco Chronicle, Robert Treuhaft, crusading Bay Area lawyer Champion of leftist causes for decades, Rick DelVecchio
"Mr. Treuhaft had a role in nearly every chapter in the Bay Area civil rights struggle for decades. He defended blacks beaten up by police in Oakland after World War II; he supported the Free Speech Movement, the Black Panther Party and the draft-resisting Oakland Seven during the Vietnam War; and he played a prominent role in Oakland's political power shift from conservative whites to liberal blacks."
10/22/2001, New York Times, Bastion of Dissent Offers Tribute to One of Its Heroes, Evelyn Nieves
"In her district, which includes Berkeley, where the Free Speech Movement was born, Oakland and the neighboring city Alameda, Ms. Lee would probably have raised more hackles had she voted otherwise."
10/7/2001, Oakland Tribune, Cityscape: Protest photos reveal East Bay history, Susan Lydon
"The Vietnam War was just one of the targets of the peace and social justice movements of that explosive era. Other events chronicled include the Free Speech Movement on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley..."
10/5/2001, Oakland Tribune/ANG Newspapers, A new picture/ Joan Baez becomes Teatro ZinZanni's blond contess--and only her father protests, Chad Jones
"In 1964, around the time of her fifth album for Vanguard Records, her tour with the Beatles and her participation in the free speech protests on the University of California, Berkeley, campus, Baez created what would become the Resource Center for Non-Violence."
9/13/2001, San Francisco Chronicle, Activists turn fiercely patriotic, Chip Johnson
"The Bay Area is a hotbed of liberalism, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, where protesters typically take to the streets at the mere suggestion of U.S. military retaliation."
9/12/2001, San Francisco Chronicle, Mesmerizing scenes of hell, John Carman
"Mesmerizing scenes of hell / Reporters grope for accurate info A somber crowd at UC Berkeley's Free Speech Cafe watched television news coverage of yesterday's attacks. Chronicle photo Lacy Atkins"
9/2/2001, San Francisco Chronicle, Bail Bond Row Jerry Barrish has seen it all in his 40 years across from the Hall of Justice, Sam Whiting
"In 40 years across the street from the San Francisco Hall of Justice, Jerry Barrish has never closed, and still pulls the night shift himself. When not asleep on the couch in back, Barrish has seen the evolution of this rough patch of San Francisco even better than the cops and cons have seen it."
September 2001, The Monthly, Back Talk: The Butcher, the Baker, Paul Kilduff
"Paul Bertolli: It takes some kind of rare event to change public consciousness. Some confluence of events maybe. When I think about what happened in Berkeley in the early '70s after the Free Speech Movement, people were pretty upset with corporate America. That contributed to the groundswell of interest in getting back to basics."
08/29/2001-9/4/2001, East Bay Express, & Days: School Blues in Emeryville; Traffic Relief for Hayward, Staff
"The story of Berkeley in the '60s has been so thoroughly documented that most residents would just as soon never hear Mario Savio's famous speech again."
8/28/2001, San Francisco Chronicle, The In Crowd/Around the Campanile, Leah Garchik
"Waters' remarks included an emotional reference to Sproul Plaza, just down the hill, where she said the seeds of her personal credo had been planted in the Free Speech Movement."
July 2001, The East Bay Monthly, 1964 Protest Leaders Speak Freely, Laura McCreery
"Lynne Hollander enjoys this moment of relating issues of the present to activism of the past. 'The events of 1964 gave us the belief that we could actually bring change,' she says. 'That was the great lesson of the FSM.'"
5/20/2001, San Francisco Chronicle, Susannah McCorkle, 55, put her own stamp on jazz-pop songs, Stephen Holden
"Born in Berkeley on Jan. 4, 1946, she had a peripatetic childhood because her father, an anthropologist, took teaching positions at colleges around the country. Eventually, she enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, where she majored in Italian literature.
It was the era of the free speech movement, and Ms. McCorkle, disillusioned with American politics, dropped out of college and traveled to Europe to study languages and to begin a literary career. It was while living in Paris that she discovered American jazz, when a friend played her a recording of Billie Holliday singing 'I've Got a Right to Sing the Blues.'"
5/12/2001, L'Unita, Berkeley Dove il '68 e nato nel '64, Franco Farinelli
"Mai fidarsi di nessuno sopra i 30 anni". Oggi Jack Weinberg ne ha piu' del doppio e lavora per Greenpeace. Ma ricorda ancora vividamente il settembre del 1964, quando coniò lo slogan che segnò il battesimo, a Berkeley, di un nuovo soggetto politico internazionale: gli studenti. La cui comparsa in Europa è nota come il movimento del 1968."
5/12/2001, L'Unita, Cinema, musica e beat: la vita come rivolta, Stefano Pistolini
"Perchè se davvero un valore va attribuito a ciò che Mario Savio e compagni seppero infiammare nei giorni della rivolta fu proprio quello di costituire una gigantesca miccia generazionale, all'interno di un caos che sentiva l'urgenza di esprimersi ma ancora non trovava i giusti canali per farlo."
5/1/2001, San Francisco Chronicle, Letter: Freedom Misused, B. Meredith Burke
"Editor -- Like Jon Carroll ("Let the geezer talk at you!," April 17), I found that the single most valuable lesson I received from my participation in the Free Speech Movement was the firsthand knowledge that the press cannot be trusted. I recall reporters interviewing students on the Executive Committee and central staff, then writing of all the "nonstudent, radical agitators" infiltrating the FSM. Only the Christian Science Monitor seemed to tell the straight story."
4/26/2001, San Francisco Chronicle, Mum's the word for far too many laid-off media workers, Dan Fost
HISTORY LESSON: John Markoff...to write "a revisionist history of Silicon Valley."...theory that the personal computer was really born out of the convergence of the anti-war movement and tech hobbyists. ...One man who was active in the War Resisters League put together the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club, Markoff said ..."
4/19/2001, San Francisco Chronicle, Robert Johnson, adviser to four UC presidents, Nanette Asimov
"Although Mr. Johnson was eyewitness to the inner workings of the University of California during its most politically sensitive eras, such as the free speech movement of the 1960s and a sports scandal a decade earlier, his loyalty to these presidents was such that he rarely gossiped, even at the dinner table."
4/18/2001, Daily Californian, Free Speech Digitized, Cyrus Farivar
"A lot of the students seem to be using it, which is very gratifying for us," she said. "I've had people e-mail me from England and France. I had someone from Australia ask to mirror the site."
4/17/2001, San Francisco Chronicle, Let the Geezer Talk at You!, Jon Carroll
"IT WAS THE FSM that taught me to distrust the media. I knew what was happening, and I knew that the way it was reported was dead wrong. Wild-eyed off-campus agitators with radical demands! Communists from across the nation, invited by pinko professors! Soon we would bring out the rifles and begin the revolution."
4/17/2001, Daily Californian, Letters to the Editor: Fashion Shoot Shifts Spotlight to Sweatshops, Jon Rodney
"In fact, while the shoot was taking place, a group of students exercising rights won by the Free Speech Movement put on a very different sort of fashion show. As we presented our Sweatshop Fashion Show, we had a "statement to make," too--garment workers are mistreated and exploited on a regular basis."
4/13/2001, San Francisco Chronicle, MEMORIES OF A MOVEMENT, Charles Burress
"Berkeley -- The remains of the fabled Free Speech Movement ironically have come to their final resting place in the vaults of the movement's enemy -- the University of California at Berkeley."
4/13/2001, Daily Californian, Campus is Backdrop for Photo Shoot, Sarah Mourra
Shahid, who has used campuses like Princeton University and the University of Virginia in previous issues of the catalog, says UC Berkeley's unique history rooted in the Free Speech Movement captivates the "aggressive" essence of this season's quarterly.
"Berkeley helped to find a voice for youth and that is what Abercrombie and Fitch does today," Shahid explains. "It's about feeling good and having a good time and having a statement to make."
4/6/2001, San Francisco Chronicle, PROFILE: DAVID BACON, Rona Marech
"Unions are schools. People learn about the realities of the world and raise their expectations of what they want their world to be like," said Bacon, whose activism harkens back to his Berkeley High School days when, at 16, he was one of the youngest people arrested in the Free Speech Movement protests. "The idea is we're part of a whole network of families, friendships, people we work with. We try to move forward together rather than every person for himself."
3/30/2001, East Bay Express Books, , staff
"He's known nationwide for his Algebra Project--an intensive program, tested in Oakland, and aimed at getting public-school kids up to snuff on what x equals.Now Bob Moses, author of Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights (Beacon, $24) is set to appear April 13 at UC Berkeley's Sibley Auditorium, where he will discuss how lessons learned during the Free Speech Movement can be applied to teaching math."
3/13/2001, Daily Californian, Letter, Aaron Smith
"I was part of the Berkeley College Republican counter-protest on Thursday, an effort to engage affirmative action supporters in a dialogue. While some of the affirmative action protesters did engage in a dialogue, the majority did not.
...
It is sad to see that Mario Savio's most enduring legacy is a set of steps and the cafe attached to Moffitt Library--on this campus, his ideals are dead and buried with him."
2/15/2001, Daily Californian, Editorial: For True Free Speech, Deal With Inconvenience, Editors
"In an open letter to the campus community printed Monday as an advertisement in this newspaper, Chancellor Robert Berdahl decried the protest for not conforming to "campus expectations and regulations."
In a lunchtime forum with students Tuesday, the chancellor jostled and argued with students and denounced the demonstration again, saying that "free speech is structured free speech.""
1/3/2001, San Francisco Chronicle, Nonprofessional Workers Reach Contract With UC, staff
"Margy Wilkinson, an administrative assistant in the library and the union's bargaining representative at UC Berkeley...said she is pleased, but said workers deserve more"
Spring 2001, Bancroftiana, With the Free Speech Movement Collections, You are There, Elizabeth Stephens
"A number of photographers contributed their work on the Free Speech Movement to the project including Ron Enfield, Steven Marcus, and Ronald Hecker. A selection of Helen Nestor FSM photographs is available through the courtesy of the Oakland Museum."
January-February 2001, ACLU News, Monterey County Chapter Receives Dick Criley Activist Award,
"The Dick Criley Activist Award was created this year to honor the legacy of Dick Criley, a civil liberties activist whose work spanned 3/4 of a century, and who died this year at age 88 at his home in Carmel Highlands. Criley, who was part of the first Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the 1930's and went on to found the Committee to Abolish HUAC, was a leader in the ACLU-NC and a well-known activist for peace and social justice."
12/24/2000, San Francisco Chronicle, Letter: PROTESTERS IN 'WRONG', Steve Wagner
12/22/2000, Berkeley Voice, On free speech for Netanyahu, Osha Neumann
"*Fifth, and finally, in the absence of an open market place for ideas, we have learned that it is only by disruption and misbehavior that we succeed in being heard. We are told to obey the rules, but when we do, we are ignored. Free speech, if it has any value at all, must protect the dissenting voices of the powerless and oppressed. If those voices can be heard only by interrupting a conversation from which they are excluded, then, I for one, want to be counted on the side of the disrupters."
12/19/2000, San Francisco Chronicle, Letter: Threats to Free Speech, Lewis A. Glenn
"Lubin's claim in her article, 'Netanyahu Protest Did Not Dishonor the Free-Speech Movement,' that nobody who planned to attend the canceled Benjamin Netanyahu lecture was ever in danger is belied by those who stood in line to hear it."
12/18/2000, San Francisco Chronicle, Netanyahu Protest Did Not Dishonor The Free-Speech Movement, Barbara Lubin
"Contrary to assertions that we sullied Berkeley's proud tradition of free speech, our demonstration honored that tradition. This was true democracy in action. But Netanyahu recoiled when confronted with peaceful opponents he could not send his army out to bludgeon."
12/18/2000, San Francisco Chronicle, Letter: Netanyahu's Speech, Joseph Anderson
"Mario Savio, the late charismatic Free Speech Movement leader, championed free speech rights of those without state power to speak truth to power -- not the free speech rights that power inherently has."
12/16/2000, Berkeley Daily Planet, Letter: Protesters were seniors, parents, not 'goons', Steve Wagner
12/16/2000, Berkeley Daily Planet, Letter: Netanyahu, not protests often on TV, Joseph Anderson
12/15/2000, Berkeley Voice, Martin Snapp Column, Martin Snapp
I just received a letter signed by a veritable Who's Who of FSM veterans, including activist Bettina Aptheker, noted graphic artist David Lance Goines, journalist Kate Coleman, former Cal History Department chairman Reginald Zelnik, and Lynne Hollander Savio, widow of Mario Savio.
"Let there be no mistake," they write. "We consider any infringement of the free speech of controversial speakers (and, equally important, the rights of their would-be listeners) to be a serious violation of the principles for which thousands of students struggled in 1964. Free speech, as Mario Savio said, is not just 'a tactic for political ends,' it is a good in and of itself, a touchstone of humanity."
12/15/2000, Berkeley Voice, Letter: Who really canceled the speech, Carol Denney
"Attention Shirley Dean, Herman Kahn, FSMers, and everybody else: the protesters at the Netanyahu rally didn't cancel the speech! The police did!"
12/15/2000, Berkeley Voice, Letter: The peace movement in the Middle East, Jackie Riskin
12/15/2000, Berkeley Voice, Letter: Investigate non-role of police at protest, Aubrey Lee Broudy
"Berkeley, 'the Athens of the West,' and so well known from Mario Savio on as to make 'freedom of speech' the motto of our fair city, will have to bow its head in shame until this is resolved."
12/13/2000, Oakland Tribune, Protesters sully Berkeley's free speech image, editorial
12/12/2000, San Francisco Chronicle, Letter: Free Speech Includes the Unpopular, Reginald Zelnik, Lynne Hollander Savio, Bettina Aptheker, Mal Burnstein, Kate Coleman, Tom Savio, Lee Felsenstein, David L. Goines
"Editor -- As former members and supporters of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, all active in efforts to preserve the movement's legacy, we affirm that the right of free speech exists even when -- perhaps especially when -- the speaker and/or the content of his or her speech is unpopular or offensive, as the views and actions of Benjamin Netanyahu are to many of us.
While peaceful and even vigorous protests are more than warranted, we are very disturbed by attempts of participants and apologists for the Nov. 28 incident at the Berkeley Community Theatre to justify preventing the former Israeli prime minister from addressing his audience by associating this position with the Free Speech Movement. We are equally offended by those who imply such a connection.
The Free Speech Movement, which began as an attempt to protect the free- speech rights of students engaged in the civil rights movement, never limited its defense of free speech to those with whom we agree or to advocates of causes we like. Free speech, as Mario Savio said, is not just "a tactic for political ends." It is a good in and of itself, a touchstone of humanity.
We consider any infringements of the free speech of controversial speakers, and the rights of their would-be listeners, to be a serious violation of the principles for which thousands of students struggled in 1964. Berkeley is, should be and will remain a bastion of free speech and free assembly."
12/12/2000, Berkeley Daily Planet, Letter: Free speech must protect dissension, Osha Neumann
"Fifth, and finally, in the absence of an open market place for ideas, we have learned that it is only by disruption and misbehavior that we succeed in being heard. We are told to obey the rules, but when we do, we are ignored. Free speech, if it has any value at all, must protect the dissenting voices of the powerless and oppressed. If those voices can be heard only by interrupting a conversation from which they are excluded, then, I for one, want to be counted on the side of the disrupters."
12/10/2000, San Francisco Chronicle, Infringing on Free Speech, Charles Burress
The Free Speech Movement also used civil disobedience when students surrounded a police car in Sproul Plaza for 30 hours and staged a sit-in at Sproul Hall, but Michael Rossman, a Berkeley writer and member of the movement, called the Netanyahu protesters' definition of civil disobedience "illegitimate."
"That's like saying any time you do anything against the law for principle, it's civil disobedience," he said. "That's too broad."
12/7/2000, Daily Californian, The Mind, the Body: Searle Knows Best, William Newhouse
"When he left Oxford, Searle became involved in the Free Speech Movement, and Mario Savio was one of his students. A research professor at the time, Searle was the first tenured faculty member to take the side of the students."
12/7/2000, Daily Californian, Letter: Community Reacts to Free Speech Hullabaloo, Lynne Savio
"As former members and supporters of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, all currently active in efforts to preserve the movement's legacy, we wish to affirm that the right of free speech exists even when the speaker or the content of the speech is unpopular or offensive, as the views and actions of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are to many of us ("Netanyahu Calls Off Speech," Nov. 29)."
12/7/2000, Berkeley Daily Planet, Letter: Debate continues on Netanyahu protests and free speech rights, Herman Kahn
"In its letter to the Daily Planet and the City of Berkeley, the Anti-Defamation League, describing itself as a 'civil rights organization dedicated to countering division and hatred and protecting all people's rights to fair representation and expression,' expresses concern about the handling of Netanyahu's recent aborted speech and asserts that 'the city has an obligation to do whatever it can to provide a safe environment in which people can express their opinions freely.'
In fact, the ADL is much more concerned about some people's rights than others.' In its written statement on the ongoing Palestinian crisis (see www.adl.org), the ADL one-sidedly blames the Palestinians and Palestinian leadership while whitewashing the violence perpetrated by Israeli forces."
12/7/2000, Berkeley Daily Planet, Letter: The ACLU gets speech rights right, Harry Siitonen
"I joined the American Civil Liberties Union in Los Angeles in the 1950s, inspired by the work of the late A. L. Wirin, its general counsel.
He was the Southern California counterpart of the late Ernest Besig, the inspirational ACLU spokesperson here in the North.
The Netanyahu free speech controversy reminds me of a comparable situation in the 1930s in Southern California in which A. L. Wirin had intervened.
The notorious fascistic demagogue the Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith was refused the right to use Glendale High School for a speech. Wirin took the issue to court on behalf of the ACLU arguing Smith's Constitutional rights of free speech. He won. On the night of Smith's meeting, there was an angry picket line in front of the school protesting his reprehensible views. A prominent demonstrator in that picket line was one A.L. Wirin."
12/7/2000, Berkeley Daily Planet, Letter: Need to hear all sides, even offensive speech, Reginald Zelnik, Lynne Hollander Savio, Bettina Aptheker, Mal Burnstein, Kate Coleman, Tom Savio, Lee Felsenstein, David L. Goines
"As former members and supporters of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, all currently active in efforts to preserve the FSM's legacy, we wish to affirm that the right of free speech exists even when (perhaps especially when) the speaker and/or the content of his or her speech is unpopular or even offensive, as the views and actions of Benjamin Netanyahu are to many of us."
12/3/2000, San Francisco Chronicle, Letter: Berkeley Brown Shirts, Dan Spitzer
"Editor -- Isn't it a small gem of irony that Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, should be the continuing site of suppression of expression?"
12/3/2000, San Francisco Chronicle, Letter: Silencing Netanyahu, H. David Teitlbaum
"Editor -- Your Nov. 29 headline said it all: "Berkeley Protesters Block Netanyahu Speech."
What these protesters are obviously saying is that they believe in free speech, but only for those who agree with their politics. For shame!"
12/1/2000, Berkeley Daily Planet, Letter: Let Netanyahu speak out -- at the World Court, Peter Kleinman
"Steve Wolan, formerly of the Free Speech Movement, and others who protest that B. Netanyahu should be allowed to speak publicly defending a political position and not harassed until they leave town do have a point."
12/1/2000, Berkeley Daily Planet, Letter: Prohibiting Netanyahu speech hypocritical, Lance Montauk
"I see, according to an article in Wednesday's Planet, that Berkeley, the home of the Free Speech Movement, no longer protects or even tolerates free speech."
11/30/2000, San Francisco Chronicle, Security Fears Cancel Speeches by Netanyahu, Charles Burress
"The Berkeley protesters were assailed by critics who pointed to the irony of seeing Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, not allow Netanyahu to speak. But demonstrators said they had a right, if not an obligation, to engage in civil disobedience against what they called "fascists" who oppress Palestinians."
11/29/2000, Berkeley Daily Planet, Hundreds Protest Netanyahu, Judith Scherr and John Geluardi
"The protest was a success,' said Bazian before he headed for home. "Once again, Berkeley leads the way. It did in the Free Speech Movement and in the anti-apartheid movement. It stands up for its ideals.'"
11/13/2000, Daily Californian, Free Speech Movement: A Legacy Echoed by Many, Gretchen Adelson
"A lot of the spirit of the Free Speech Movement came from the fact that people were really committed to the civil rights movement," says Savio, now a librarian. "The passion that was there (in the free speech movement) that was fought for these rights on campus (originated) because people were very passionate about the civil rights movement -- people felt very strongly about it."
11/9/2000, Daily Californian, UC Offers Workers Contract, Erin Hyun
"The two-year contract would retroactively take effect in October 1999 and expire in 2001. As part of the deal, employees receive a 7.8 percent wage increase, said Margie Wilkinson, the union's bargaining representative. Within 150 days of the contract's ratification, the university would provide backpay for all employees, including any employees who were reclassified out of the clerical workers' bargaining unit after June 1, 2000."
10/25/2000, Daily Californian, Two Sides, Two Solutions For End to Mid-East Crisis, Andrea O'Brien
"Students for Justice in Palestine, a coalition of campus groups, rallied with other Palestinian supporters on the Mario Savio Steps to protest what they called "the deliberate Israeli massacre of Palestinians."
10/19/2000, Daily Californian, Savio Memorial Lecture Celebrates Activism, Amanda Crater
Supporters, friends, relatives and admirers of Mario Savio packed Pauley Ballroom in the Martin Luther King Jr.Student Union Tuesday night for the fourth annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture.
Savio's voice reverberated throughout the auditorium as the lights were dimmed and the audience was shown a 1964 video clip of the famous activist speaking to a massive crowd gathered in front of Sproul Hall. Savio, one of the key figures in UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, spent his life fighting for human rights and social justice.
10/3/2000, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Linda Farris: Bad girl image gives her the edge, Regina Hackett
"In 1962, Farris went to the University of California at Berkeley and participated in the free speech movement of 1964, the dawning of radical campus politics. She was occupying the administration building with hundreds of others when her father showed up, telling her if she got arrested she could pay for the rest of her college education."
10/1/2000, Contra Costa Times, Laura X, a Free Speech veteran, turns her focus to women's issues, Tony Hicks
"BERKELEY, Calif. _ One of Laura X's favorite photos of herself _ and one of her favorite moments _ came during Mario Savio's speech at the Free Speech Movement's 30-year-reunion in 1994.
¶
'He was completely pure Mario, and I jumped up and cheered,' says the 60-year-old women's rights activist and veteran of the movement.
¶
'That was my identity. That was a moment of tremendous resonance. It was such a beautiful moment for everyone,' she says, pausing, then apologizing for choking up over Savio, who died two years later. 'It's one of the highlights of my life.'"
9/10/2000, San Francisco Chronicle, Letter: A Tribute To Henry Mayer, Lisa Rubens
"I will miss a good friend and an extraordinary historian. The added tragedy is that he was scheduled to be interviewed regarding his life in the South and at UC Berkeley during the recent anniversary celebration of the free speech movement."
8/25/2000, East Bay Express, Cityside: Students Return to UC's Campuses, but There Are Looming Problems at the Top, Chris Thompson
"Margy Wilkinson, a UC Berkeley employee and bargaining representative for the Coalition of University Employees (CUE), claims that such shenanigans could endanger the only asset that the chronically underpaid university clerical workers have to fall back on. 'Although I know I could get better pay [elsewhere], the pension is one of the reasons why people like me stay, " Wilkinson says. 'But I don't know what would happen if the regents keep messing with it. I'm getting really nervous."
8/8/2000, Daily Californian, Letter to the Editor: Berkeley: The Most Conservative Place on Earth, Asa Whillock
"Students repeatedly face the graceless unlove of those same landlords who watched Mario Savio in awe. Suddenly, the face of all that liberalism has swung to conservatism and worse than that, complacency."
7/22/2000, San Francisco Chronicle, Jerry Brown Taking Off For Cuba/Maybe he'll be lucky and bump into Castro, Chip Johnson
"I'm going to visit military schools," Brown joked, directing his comments at school board President Dan Siegel, who led the move to reject, for now, the mayor's plan to establish a military school in Oakland. "They seem to have a rather structured program.
"Siegel probably supports military schools in Cuba," Brown said, referring to the Free Speech Movement and 1960s anti-war protest leader. "Maybe I can find a reason to get him to support one here."
7/20/2000, Oakland Tribune, Berkeley chamber to honor Pacific School of Religion, William Brand
"The chamber has always had a liberal tilt, [Dennis] Kuby said, but it didn't become progressive until the Free Speech Movement in 1964."
7/16/2000, SF Examiner, Thesis with a vitrolic preface is off shelves, Michelle Locke Associated Press
"'Of all places, the University of California, the place where the Free Speech Movement started 30 years ago (UC-Berkeley, 1964) should not be engaging in this kind of suppression of speech,' said Paul Hoffman, who is representing Brown in a lawsuit seeking to force UC-Santa Barbara to put Brown's paper, offending section and all, in the campus library."
6/11/2000, San Francisco Chronicle, Berkeley Is Ground Zero in '60s History, Lisa Rubens
"A few months ago, the Free Speech Movement Cafe opened at the University of California at Berkeley. Next to the undergraduate library, this tranquil, beautifully designed watering hole seems wholly unconnected to the impassioned politics and troubled times for which it was named. Photomurals show thousands of students gathered in front of the university's administration building, confrontations with police, and include passionate quotes from Mario Savio, the late and beloved leader of the free speech movement. But in the past 35 years, and for many current students, the history of the FSM has been lumped into the mythology of the '60s."
5/7/2000, SF Examiner, UC Berkeley honors its top scholar, William Brand
BERKELEY -- When Fadia Rafeedie arrived at the University of California, Berkeley, as a freshman, she felt lost in the teeming crowd of the large, very urban university. But she hoped that in time she'd make at least a few friends.
'I was wrong,' Rafeedie said. 'I found a whole community. I can't walk anywhere without meeting 30 people I know.'
Berkeley has lived up to everything it stands for, she said. The ideals of the Free Speech Movement that drew her still live.
Rafeedie, at the same time, has lived up to Berleley's high standards. An academic committee has chosen her as this year's University Medalist -- the top graduating senior in the class of 2000."
4/21/2000, Chicago Tribune, Jack Weinberg Still Fights The Good Fight to Keep Environmentalism From Fading Away, Connie Lauerman
"He recently turned 60 and found it "a bit of a gas." As well he should. He was, after all, the young man who was credited with saying: "Don't trust anyone over 30." His off-the-cuff remark to a San Francisco newspaper reporter covering the Berkeley student protest movement was picked up by other journalists and seized by the leaders of the movement once they saw how much it riled their elders."
4/6/2000, Berkeley Daily Planet, Don't trust anyone over 30, unless it's Jack Weinberg, staff
"The man who coined the phrase 'Don't trust anyone over 30' turned 60 years old Tuesday.
Jack Weinberg uttered the phrase -- which became one of the most memorable expressions of the turbulent 1960s era -- during the height of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. The Free Speech Movement was a struggle by students over the right to engage in political speech on campus, which helped to catalyze broader political political activism on campuses around the country over student rights, civil rights and the Vietnam War.
In a news release recently distributed by a Chicago public relations agency -- owned by his wife, it should be noted -- Weinberg says he made the statement primarily to get rid of a reporter who was bothering him. He doesn't even regard the statement as the most important thing he's ever said.
I was being interviewed by a newspaper reporter and he kept asking me who was 'really' behind the actions of the students, implying that we were being directed behind the scenes by the Communists or some other sinister group,' Weinberg recalled.
I told him we had a saying in the movement that we don't trust anybody over 30. It was a way of telling the guy to back off, that nobody was pulling our strings.'
A columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle highlighted the quote and other newspapers across the country picked it up.
It went from journalist to journalist, then leaders in the movement started using it because they saw the extent it shook up the older generation, Weinberg said."
April, 2000, California Monthly, Free speech and pricey lattes,
"'The word 'irony' doesn't begin to describe what's going on here,' said Mario Savio's widow, Lynne Hollander,at a gathering of campus figures in February."
3/21/2000, Daily Californian, UC Board of Regents: A History of Politics, Controversy, Daniel Hernandez
"Later, in a four-point resolution adopted by then-UC President Clark Kerr, the regents reaffirmed their commitment to UC oversight. But eventually, the regents' disapproval and disappointment with the manner in which Kerr handled the Free Speech Movement caused the regents to fire the president -- with the support of the new governor, Ronald Reagan.
"On the negative side, the firing of Clark Kerr in 1967 provides one example of how political agendas have profoundly shaped the university and the actions of the regents," Douglass says."
2/17/2000, San Francisco Chronicle, Personals, Leah Garchik
"California Attorneys for Criminal Justice have named Clarence Darrow Lawyer of the Century, reports California Lawyer. Second place went to Thurgood Marshall, followed by Michael Tigar, Charles Garry, William Kunstler, J. Tony Serra, Gerry Spense, and Stephen Bright."
2/11/2000, Berkeley Voice, Cafe keeps free speech on front burner, David Ferris
"'The word 'irony' doesn't begin to describe what's going on here,' said Lynne Hollander Savio, wife of Mario Savio, the leader of the free-speech movement who died in 1996. 'When did we become respectable?'"
2/9/2000, San Francisco Chronicle, OBIT: Rosemary Woodruff -- LSD guru's ex-wife, Susan Sward
"Kate Coleman, a Berkeley author who wrote a recent profile of Ms. Woodruff, said, "Rosemary was known by the nickname 'Ro.' She was the epitome of hip and beauty. She knew everyone -- Yoko Ono and John Lennon. She kept in touch with Huxley when he was in L.A." "
2/9/2000, Daily Californian, Free Speech: Packaged and Sponsored, Daniel Hernandez
"The truth is, the 1964 Mario Savio-led fight for free speech at Berkeley, the same movement that ignited students' sensibilities for political liberty across the nation, cannot and should not be reduced to a mercantile memoir that serves up double espressos every day. Everyone thinks a cafe in that library is great idea, but connecting it to the FSM was a mistake.
It's a mockery, plainly. A depressing sell-out. It's capitalizing on an image that is not only historical, but some feel sacred. (How many times was 'Berkeley in the Sixties' fed to you during freshman year?) The trouble brews still: free speech has become such a deflated cliche that the activist interruption for organic food was nothing more than a cute spectacle for those in attendance. What I feared most has already happened: a coup of sorts, as the free and liberated at Berkeley have already felt entitled to paste their causes' posters on the cafe's entry post -- those posters have been scratched off."
2/4/2000, San Francisco Chronicle, In the Shadow of Memory,
"The cafe, in the undergraduate library, was dedicated yesterday in honor of the nationwide protest that began on the campus in 1964 and its leader Mario Savio, who died in 1996. Decorated with photos from the Free Speech era, the cafe was built with a $3.5 million gift from Emeryville computer company owner Stephen Silberstein, who graduated from UC a few months before Savio rose to prominence."
2/4/2000, Oakland Tribune, UC cafe has plenty of FSM, Savio fare, William Brand
"Because of the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement, students everywhere can speak out on political issues on campus, Silberstein said. It was an important period and needs to be remembered, he said.
'This university is a much better place because of the Free Speech Movement,' he said.
For years the university had an uneasy relationship with the Free Speech Movement. But the animosity has faded.
The university also dedicated the Sproul Plaza steps to Savio, and there is a free speech ring on Sproul Plaza."
2/4/2000, Berkeley Daily Planet, Café honors legacy of Free Speech Movement, Rob Cunningham
"'The concept of irony doesn't begin to cover what's taking place today,' said FSM activist Lynne Hollander, widow of Mario Savio, the philosophy student who launched the nonviolent movement that redefined the relationship between students and their universities.
'When was the moment when we became respectable?' she only half-jokingly asked a crowd that included a university chancellor and others members of the 'establishment' that was frequently the target of their protests."
12/26/1999, San Francisco Chronicle, Reflections,
photo caption: "Ex-UC student Mario Savio (at microphone) addresses a throng of striking students december 1, 1966, on the UC-Berkeley campus where on Oct. 1, 1964, the Free Speech Movement was formed to protest university regulations on political expression. Some 500 students staged a massive sit-in at Sproul Hall with sleeping bags, guitars and, according to one participant, 'enough food to last an army a week.'"
12/19/1999, San Francisco Chronicle, Top Ten By the Bay, Carl Nolte
"AND HERE ARE THE RUNNERS-UP...
Chronicle readers sent more than 100 names as candidates for the 10 most influential people of the century in the Bay Area. Only 10 were picked -- but there were dozens of others who left their mark on the region. Among them, in no particular order:
...
-- Mario Savio, who stood on the steps of Sproul Hall in Berkeley and called on people to stop the machine and change the world."
11/14/1999, San Francisco Examiner, Red scare files detail lives in S.F. left in ruins, Robert Salladay and Michael Dougan
State Senate President pro tem Bill Lockyer, who closed the committee and sealed its files in 1971, called their release last week "irresponsible ..... It was all kinds of trash, all sorts of allegations, all kinds of garbage."
11/3/1999, Daily Californian, Lawyer Lectures on Social Justice, Daniel Hernandez
"Guinier's speech at the Pauley Ballroom was the third Mario Savio Memorial Lecture since the speech series was begun in 1997.
'I would like to suggest that we not only repopulate (society's) hierarchy, but challenge the notion of hierarchy itself,' Guinier told a crowd that repeatedly erupted in applause and laughter."
10/17/1999, Dallas Morning News, Contrasting backgrounds aside, Craig and Kathryn Hall share Dallas' can-do spirit, Michael Granberry
"Sweetness was the word for the childhood of Kathryn Walt, for whom it only got better in college.
¶
What a sight she must have been at the University of California at Berkeley, which in 1964 - the year she entered - was just warming up for a decade of student unrest. As a freshman, she observed firsthand the beginnings of the Free Speech Movement, led by outspoken radical Mario Savio.
¶
How did she fit in?
¶
She campaigned for Republican Barry Goldwater, who lost the '64 presidential race to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide of epic proportions. Sue Chouteau, her college roommate, remembers her as being as 'un-Berkeley' as anyone could have been."
9/26/1999, Oakland Tribune, Naturalist hates to leave this place, Angela Hill
"For the past three decades, a hike through the hills of Tilden Park with naturalist Tim Gordon has been a walk on the wilderness side, a trek to another world, a trip through the wardrobe.
...
Then he came back to the University of California, berkeley, where he majored in geology. There he got nvolved in 'the free speech stuff,' he says. 'So much of that time is now characterized as sex, drugs and rock and roll,' he says. 'But people were really political. Really believed in creating models for society that would work.'"
9/10/1999, Greenwich Village Gazette, PACIFICA, KPFA, WBAI, Bill Mandel
"When McCarthyism still had the country in thrall, although Tailgunner Joe had already been censured and drunk himself to death, it broadcast in 1960 a HUAC hearing in San Francisco with 5,000 protesting students outside, and the Sixties were born, among whites. For Blacks the decade had begun a few months earlier with the coffee-counter sit-ins in the South. That echoed back in 1964 when white Berkeley students returning from Mississippi to help in the voter-registration drive (three northern kids had been killed, including the son of the then manager of WBAI) found the University of California refusing to allow them to table on campus for support, and the Free Speech Movement was born."
8/17/1999, Oakland Tribune, Clark Kerr transformed higher education through 'master plan', Jack Chang
"Although many still view Clark Kerr as an obstruction to the 1960s' Free Speech Movement, a more lasting legacy of the UC Berkeley president emeritus may be his dedication to higher education and the expansion of the state's university system."
"While Kerr fought to gain control over the protests on campus, the FBI was targeting supporters of the Free Speech Movement for their political views and even lobbied the Board of regents for Kerr's dismissal."
8/16/1999, Oakland Tribune, Free Speech Movement transformed nation's consciousness, Jack Chang
"Three dramatic standoffs memorialized that time. First came the scene around the police car. Two months later, 1,500 students occupied the university's administration building for a full day, leading to 800 arrests.
That was when Savio delivered his most famous speech on the building's steps, urging students 'to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop.' The movement's pivotal moment came five days later. On Dec. 7, 1964, campus police dragged Savio off the stage of the Greek Theater before 16,000 students and faculty as he tried to speak at a special campuswide meeting."
7/29/1999, San Francisco Chronicle, Silenced KPFA Dissidents Put Out the Rallying Cry in Cyberspace, Dan Fost
"If we had had this back in the '60s for the free speech movement, it would have been great,'' said Susan Druding, who runs one of the protest Web sites at www.fsm-a.org. 'It helps when you're being muzzled by the media.'"
07/21/1999, SF Examiner, Baez blasts from past for KPFA, Philip Elwood
"Baez, accompanied by a small string and percussion group, sang until 12:30 a.m. with the same strong, beautiful voice and emotional delivery that she's had since the Berkeley Folk Festival years and the Free Speech Movement days - both events, naturally and dutifully covered by KPFA."
7/21/1999, SF Bay Guardian, Pacifica's endgame?, A. Clay Thompson
"A brief sit-in around the protester-packed police truck evoked the spirit of Mario Savio."
"The difference between Savio's '60s and today is not, as the Chronicle put it, that "everyone's thirty years older." While the white-ponytail types were out in force Tuesday night, the crowd was densely populated with youngsters and people of color."
7/20/1999, Berkeley Daily Planet, 3,500 hear Baez, Judith Scherr
"Free speech was high on the agenda in song and speeches--and Berkeley's place in the Free Speech Movement was not lost on the entertainers.
'In 1963 (sic) there was the free speech fight in Sproul Plaza. In the midst of it was Mario Savio,' recalled folk-singer Utah Phillips.
Joan Baez, who had led the crowds at Sproul Hall sing-alongs in the free Speech Movement of the 1960s as some among them marched off to jail, said she couldn't hear the programming she hears on KPFA anywhere else."
7/17/1999, San Francisco Chronicle, Berkeley Gets Radical Over KPFA Lockout, Michael Taylor
"Now this is Berkeley. Vintage Berkeley. The Berkeley of 'hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?' and tear gas on Telegraph Avenue. The Berkeley of People's Park, the Free Speech Movement, the civil rights movement and, well, the KPFA Movement."
"'I was there and so was my husband,'' said her mother, playwright Deborah Rogin, from her home nearby. 'We were at the big one, the Free Speech Movement demonstrations.'"
6/23/1999, San Jose Mercury News, Fay Aptheker, 94, leftist activist, influenced generations of radicals, Jack Fischer
"In the 1960s, when political activism reached a crescendo on college campuses, the Apthekers supported and counseled their daughter, Bettina, then a student at the University of California-Berkeley, as she became a leader of the campus Free Speech Movement."
06/19/1999, San Jose Mercury News, FAY APTHEKER, 94, LEFTIST ACTIVIST, INFLUENCED GENERATIONS OF RADICALS WITH HUSBAND, MOVED TO SAN JOSE IN '70S, Jack Fischer
"Mrs. Aptheker was the wife of Herbert Aptheker, a noted scholar of African-American history and for decades a leading theorist of the Communist Party U.S.A., and the mother of Bettina Aptheker, a former leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement."
4/15/1999, San Francisco Chronicle, Angus Taylor (obituary),
"In 1964, Professor Taylor was elected chairman of the Academic Senate's Academic Council.
'He was chairman during the controversy over the Free Speech Movement of 1964-65, one of the most turbulent periods in UC history.
'The compromise evolved into policies, still in effect today, establishing that 'students have the right of free expression and advocacy,'' while banning 'disorderly conduct'' and prohibiting disciplinary actions for off-campus political activities.
'At the time of his death, he was completing a manuscript describing the history of the University of California during the Free Speech Movement.'"
3/31/1999, San Francisco Chronicle, Joseph H. Stephens III. (Obituary), J.L. Pimsleur
"In 1964, Mr. Stephens joined other attorneys in providing free representation to the first wave of hundreds of Free Speech Movement student protesters arrested at the University of California at Berkeley.
¶
An opponent of the war in Vietnam, Mr. Stephens served on the local draft board from 1969 to 1973. His son, Michael Stephens, said that Mr. Stephens tried to minimize the number of young men drafted into the Army."
3/1/1999, San Francisco Chronicle, Who's On 4th?, John King
"Like Cody's, Abrams has roots in the old Berkeley as well as Fourth Street's newer, chic setting. His Berkeley ties go back to the '60s; he was active in the Free Speech Movement and later helped design People's Park. He also spent four years working for Christopher Alexander, an influential architect who preaches the virtue of small-scale change that rises from the culture of a community."
January/February 1999, Via Magazine, Weekender Berkeley,
"Children of the '60s may recall the city's radical days--protests in People's Park, the Free Speech Movement, the emergence of the Black Panthers."
01/01/1999, San Francisco Chronicle, Catherine C. Hearst (obituary), J.L. Pimsleur
"Mrs. Hearst, a staunch Republican and devout Catholic, spent 20 years as a regent of the giant university system, one of the most loyal supporters of then- Governor Ronald Reagan during the tumultuous years of the anti-Vietnam War and free-speech movements."
Spring 1999, Bancroftiana, "The Times, They Are a' Changin'" Bancroft Launches Free Speech Movement Archive, Elizabeth Stephens
"We have nearly completed identifying the many collections the University already possesses which touch on the Free Speech Movement; we have established a web site on FSM history (sunsite2.berkeley.edu:28008/dynaweb/oac/freesp); and we have identified and are contacting collections and libraries which have original and/or supplemental materials that bear on the movement, particularly in reference to the Civil Rights Movement and educational reform and similar student protests at other colleges and universities.
We are particularly proud and enthusiastic about the participation of the Free Speech Movement Archives (FSM-A; web site http://www.fsm-a.org) established by FSM veterans, including Lynne Hollander, Mario Savio's widow, and Michael Rossman, long-time keeper of the memory, spirit, and artifacts of the movement. An FSM working committee, composed of FSMA representatives, mutually selected advisors, and Bancroft project staff meets regularly to identify holes or under-represented parts in the history and collections and to review the accuracy and usability of the material collected.
FSM-A has been generous in sharing material from its own collection, casting light on the University's holdings, and steering veterans to the project's oral history component, which has been launched by Lisa Rubens under the auspices of Bancroft's Regional Oral History Office (ROHO)."
11/27/1998, East Bay Express, Thanks, Bill (letter), Bill Mandel
"Was anyone even writing about making sexual harassment a crime before the '60s? Today it is. Marital rape ditto. The student rights won by the Free Speech Movement remain in force at UC and just about everywhere else. Could anyone imagine the disabled tooling around in motorized wheelchairs, with building ramps required and sidewalks notched, culminating in the American Disabilities Act? Those were all victories of the '60s."
11/11/1998, Los Angeles Times, Living Wage Law Could Get Boost, Beth Shuster
"This is a whole new ballgame," said Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, who championed the living wage law. "We want to make sure the original target--the folks at LAX--get covered."
10/24/1998, Los Angeles Times, Conservatives' Meeting on Homosexuality Assailed, Caitlin Liu
"The conference was originally to be held at the Beverly Hilton, but the hotel dropped the event Thursday morning after it received with hundreds of protest calls, including one from Los Angeles Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg."
10/12/1998, Newsweek, Hollywood, the Sequel, Corie Brown and Andrew Murr
"Bickering among merchants, developers and city bureaucrats doomed many earlier redevelopment plans. That changed with the election of Jackie Goldberg to the city council in in 1993. The onetime Berkeley leftie tamed warring neighborhood factions and cajoled merchants to chip in for street sweepers and private security."
10/9/1998, East Bay Express, When Exactly Did We Become a Joke?, Paul Rauber
"In the earlier part of the century, Berkeley had a reputation as an intellectual capital with a modernistic bent--the first city, for example, to make use of the polygraph in criminal investigations, the first city to voluntarily desegregate its schools. This benignly progressive image fell apart with the Free Speech Movement, People's park, and the civic disruption of the 1960s and early '70s. Suddenly Berkeley had the world's attention as a symbol of youthful rebellion."
10/07/1998, San Francisco Chronicle, Stanley P. Golde -- East Bay Judge, Harriet Chiang
"As a lawyer, he worked with Rupert Crittenden, then one of the most prominent criminal defense lawyers in the area. He defended suspected Communists during the McCarthy era in the 1950s as well as protesters during Berkeley's Free Speech Movement in the 1960s."
09/25/1998, Daily Californian, Class of '68 to Examine Student Activism, Hillary Noll
"Being a student activist changed my view of what could be accomplished," Goldberg says. "We were always told to be quiet because of the McCarthy era. We were told we couldn't change things. They were wrong. That cynicism that was part of the '50s is a terrible thing."
9/20/1998, SF Examiner, Cradle of America's Dining Revolution, Marion Cunningham
"Waters attended the University of California during the '60s and was involved with the Free Speech Movement"
8/2/1998, Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Senator From Formosa, Bill Boyarsky
Review of ONE STEP FROM THE WHITE HOUSE, The Rise and Fall of Senator William F. Knowland, by Gayle Montgomery and James W. Johnson, University of California: 362 pp., $29.95.
"In describing Knowland's last years, when the authors were at his side, the book takes on the power and authority the senator deserves. They recount his battles, carried on in the pages of the newspaper, with the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley and the radical political movements of Oakland, including the Black Panthers.
07/26/1998, SF Examiner, No longer on the left of your dial: Bill Mandel, Robert Selna
"KPFA kept him on the air after the committee speech and won the support of UC-Berkeley students organizing the Free Speech Movement in 1964. Mandel was asked to be on the movement's executive committee that same year."
Those who have tracked Mandel's activism over the last several decades say he takes his causes seriously. They're not surprised he is sticking his neck out for Free Radio Berkeley. "He's not a fanatic," says Marshall Windmiller, professor emeritus of international relations at S.F. State, who first heard Mandel in a 1947 debate on U.S.-Soviet relations while an undergraduate at the University of the Pacific. "His whole life has been crusade on a number of issues, and free speech is definitely one of them. I think he's a guy who says, "I have to keep the faith. I have to to put my body where my mouth is. I'm not going to end my life as a wimp; I never have been one, and I won't now.'"
7/16/1998, Berkeley Voice, Martin Snapp Column, Martin Snapp
"Is this any way to run a democracy? It was unworthy of the America of Thomas Jefferson -- or, for that matter, the Berkeley of Mario Savio."
6/5/1998, Herald Times Bloomington, Students are diverse (Letter), William Hansen
"Just as this is the situation today, it was also the situation in the 1960s at the epicenter of student unrest, the University of California at Berkeley. The activists of the Free Speech Movement and the anti-war protests ranked among the top students on campus, as a survey done at the time showed."
5/31/1998, Monterey Co. Herald, Did Barry Goldwater really lose?, George F. Will
"It is commonly siad that the '60s began as a decade of dissent in 1964 with the Free Speech Movement in Sproul Plaza on the Berkeley Campus. Wrong. It began in Chicago in 1960 when Arizona's junior senator strode to the podium of the Republican convention and growled, 'Let's grow up, conservatives. If we want to take this party back, and I think some day we can. Let's get to work.'"
05/16/1998, San Francisco Chronicle, UC Berkeley to Weigh Beer's Effect on Culture, Charles Burress
"It is apt that the gathering will be at UC Berkeley, whose Free Speech Movement is usually credited with giving rise to student activism. Actually, it was beer."
05/08/1998, The Columbian, Cafe, talk will memorialize Free Speech Movement, Michelle, Locke
05/05/1998, Los Angeles Times, Mario Savio (letter), Bill Roddy
" There were many charges against the students. The most serious came when they were accused of breaking in and ransacking the office of Dr. Robert Gordon Sproul, president emeritus and a beloved figure on the campus.
I went to his office and met a woman who was his secretary. The office was a mess; books, boxes, papers, files were all over the floor. It looked bad for the students. I got the secretary's story, typed it up, and ran down the steps. Mario was addressing the usual mass of students. I interrupted him and said, 'Mario, read this word for word.' He did. Then he came to the last line, 'NBC News asked Dr. Sproul's secretary about the charge that the students had ransacked his office. She laughed and said, 'Why, I've worked for Dr. Sproul for 30 years. Our office has always looked like this!''
I will never forget the reaction; the students collapsed in laughter, which continued for minutes. Mario said, 'Thanks, NBC.' It was all on tape and NBC, New York, put it on the national radio news. The students were vindicated."
05/04/1998, Times Standard, Activist gives $3.5 million for Free Speech landmark, Associated Press
04/30/1998, Union Democrat, Protest movement endowed,
04/30/1998, San Jose Mercury News, Cal bows to Savio era, Renee Koury
04/30/1998, San Jose Mercury News, Big gift..., Renee Koury
04/30/1998, San Francisco Chronicle, Cal Finally Embraces Lefties--With Lattes, Steve Rubenstein
"Savio is getting his own cafe in Berkeley, smack in the middle of the campus that was not always so glad to have him around.
Thirty-four years can make a big difference, and so can a $3.5 million donation."
04/30/1998, Sacramento Bee, Berkeley will use gift as shrine to free speech, Kenneth R. Weiss
"Berkeley Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl accepted the gift and unveiled an artist's sketches of the cafe, saying that it was time for university officials to 'reconcile ourselves with history.'"
04/30/1998, Oakland Tribune, A $3.5 million gift to Cal, William Brand
"Berdahl said. 'No one would disagree that the Free Speech Movement had a significant role in placing the American university center stage in the free flow of political ideas, no matter how controversial.'"
4/30/1998, Los Angeles Times, Berkeley Accepts Rebellious Past, $3.5-Million Donation, Kenneth R. Weiss
"It took years for local artists to get permission to install a five-foot circle of granite dedicated to free speech in Sproul Plaza, outside the administration building. And even when the monument was built in 1992, officials insisted that it not include the words 'Free Speech Movement.'
Only after Savio's fatal heart attack in 1996 did the administration show a willingness to honor the most famous protester. Last December, it allowed a small bronze plaque to be embedded in the steps leading to Sproul Hall, with the words, 'Mario Savio Steps, Dedicated 1997.'"
04/30/1998, Daily Californian, Donation to Aid Library, Dan Ostmann
"'I am honored to keep alive the memory of Mario and the Free Speech Movement so that future generations can appreciate the tremendous amount that they accomplished here,' said Silberstein, who was not an active participant in the movement but was in Berkeley to witness it. 'Supporting the University Library, one of the world's truly great libraries, is something I imagine Mario would appreciate, given his love of learning and ideas. Thus it is a double honor to be able to do this.'"
04/30/1998, Contra Costa Times, $3.5 million gift nudges UC's about-face on Savio, Chuck Squatriglia
"'The only way to keep the history from being trivialized,' said Michael Rossman, a Berkeley writer and friend of Savio's, 'is for (the cafe) to be used for more than drinking coffee.'"
04/30/1998, Associated Press, Alumnus Gives UC-Berkeley $3.5M, Associated Press
"Stephen Silberstein, a graduate who went on to co-found a computer software firm, said he made the gift so students today would know their campus' history.
'Mario Savio and the leaders of the Free Speech Movement symbolize the very best of Berkeley, surely just as our top researchers, scholars and athletes,' he said. 'They are inextricably part of Berkeley history and the Berkeley tradition and we are proud of that.'"
4/29/1998, Palo Alto Weekly, Esther Wojcicki: Carrying the torch for free speech, Elizabeth Lorenz
04/18/1998, Los Angeles Times, Tell This Sordid Tale, Editorial
"From 1940 through 1970, the official documents came out every two years or so, bound appropriately in red. The reports of the California Senate fact-finding subcommittee on un-American activities meticulously laid out the supposed activities of Communist Party members, sympathizers, fellow travelers and front organizations. ... The 1965 report listed the names and addresses of all 800 students arrested in the "invasion" of Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley in 1964."
04/16/1998, Humboldt Beacon & Advance, Wolin's World Of Radical Politics, Nancy Brands Ward
"As part of 'The Committee of 200,' which was really only 12 professors, he drafted resolutions and worked to have them approved by campus officials."
03/17/1998, Daily Californian, Mayoral Hopeful Speaks at Sproul Rally, Norman Weiss
"He asked for UC Berkeley students to contribute their tradition of activism to reforming a government he said has failed its people."
03/01/1998, SF Examiner/Chronicle, Campuses bred rebels with a cause, Terry Norton
"The first major campus uprising, in 1964 at Berkeley, proved the Regents' attempt to apply a mute button to the idealism of Cal's young intelligentsia was just asking for trouble. The core of student activists, having just returned from Freedom Rides in the South, were primed for conflict. They demanded their right to free speech - -represented, literally, by a card table at Sather Gate."
Spring 1998, Berkeley Magazine, Steps named for Savio,
2/23/1998, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Sebastopol man the epitome of leadership, Bob Klose
"Sebastopol businessman Bill Haigwood has been the man in the middle for nearly 40 years. He seems to thrive there."
"he's most proud of the recognition he received for his 'town-gown' work in Berkeley during the era of the Free Speech Movement and anti-Vietnam War protests. A UC Berkeley Honor Roll for 1968 shows Haigwoods's name along side Igor Stravinsky, Earl Warren, Clark Kerr, Sergeant Shriver, Gregory Peck, William Randolph Hearst Jr. and others."
February 1998, The Monthly, Letter: More War, Laura X
"Ouch! Joe Kempkes' comments about our gender deferment giving women a romanticized view of war, and his obliterating women's service in Vietnam ['Letters,' January '97], gave me a painful flashback to February 11, 1965. I had organized a Free Speech Movement rally, with noted pacifist Paul Goodman as speaker. As it ended, someone ran up to alert us that our governmant was invading North Vietnam. Three thousand of us organized a march on the draft board. I was in the front--arms linked with Paul's and a male friend of ours. A young man ran up to us and tore me out of their arms, saying, 'You cannot be here. You cannot get drafted.'"
1997, KRON TV, San Francisco in the 1960s [Decades Series], Pam Rorke Levy
"Episode from KRON-TV's Bay Area Decades series made in 1997 and presented by Suzanne Shaw, which uses original news footage and contemporary interviews to reflect on Bay Area history from the 1960s, including issues relating to: the Summer of Love; Civil Rights and the Black Panther Party; the Free Speech Movement and student protests; rock music and the Vietnam War. Also features interviews with Senator Dianne Feinstein; Mayor Willie Brown; Jerry Rubin; Jack Weinberg; Bettina Aptheker; Country Joe McDonald; Carol Doda; Doug Caraway; Rich Bandoni; Bill Graham; Carlos Santana; Peter Coyote; Bobby Seale and Kathleen Cleaver. This program was written and produced by Pam Rorke Levy, narrated by Sydney Walker and edited by Dave Vandergriff. This Emmy Award winning series traced the rich history of San Francisco throughout the Twentieth Century. Opening graphic designed by Carrie Hawks."
http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/BOOKS-A-Heretic-s-Take-on-the-1960s-NPR-s-2787331.php12/29/1997, San Francisco Chronicle, A 'Heretic's' Take on the 1960s, Georgie Dennison
"Tired of hearing from various commentators that the '60s were a 'time of darkness,' Margot Adler, National Public Radio's New York bureau chief, decided to write about her own experiences in the '60s and '70s, a time she describes as 'luminous.'
In 'Heretic's Heart,' a wrenching and honest memoir, Adler takes us on a journey through many of the era's political events as she looks back on her life as a member of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964; a civil rights worker in Mississippi in 1965; a sugar cane cutter in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade in 1968; and a correspondent with a lonely soldier in Vietnam in 1967."
12/08/1997, San Francisco Chronicle, Monument to Liberty (letter), Dennis Kuby
"The plaque proclaiming the Mario Savio Steps at Sproul Plaza takes its rightful place in history as a monument espousing human liberty. It ranks alongside the church door at Wittenberg where in 1517 Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses. It connects to the 1775 site of the Virginia revolutionary convention where Patrick Henry intoned, 'Give me liberty or give me death.'"
12/08/1997, San Francisco Chronicle, Public Target No. 1, Leah Garchik
"Dorritie, a paleontology grad student at UC Davis, has discovered a new species of archaeocyath, a type of sponge that died about 525 million years ago.
Its generic name is Polythalamia; Dorritie provided the species name savioi, for Mario Savio.
The name becomes official when Dorritie's thesis is published. "I never knew Savio, but much admired him," he writes, "for his unassuming nature, basic decency, and eloquence when the time called for it."
12/04/1997, SF Examiner, Mario Savio honored by UC, Associated Press (Michelle Locke)
syndicated
12/04/1997, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Rebel takes steps again,
12/04/1997, San Ramon Valley Times, Sproul Hall steps christened in honor of Savio, Chuck Squatriglia
12/04/1997, San Jose Mercury News, School goes full circle on Savio, Sandy Kleffman
"He was a rebel, a critic, a rabble-rouser. So family members couldn't help but point out the irony when the second-highest-ranking official at the University of California-Berkeley joined in dedicating a plaque on campus Wednesday to honor free speech activist Mario Savio."
12/4/1997, San Diego Union/Tribune, UC honors '60s activist Savio,
"The University of California proved yesterday that the times indeed have changed, dedicating a memorial to one of its most famous agitators, the late Free Speech Movement activist Mario Savio."
12/04/1997, Oakland Tribune, Mario Savio's stairway to freedom of speech, William Brand
color photo: Nadav & grandfather
12/04/1997, Napa Valley Register, Mario Savio's free speech recognized after 33 years, Michelle Locke
12/04/1997, Daily Californian, Ceremony Honors Naming of Savio Steps, Melinda Marks
"Litwack also described the historical significance of the steps as a place well-known for holding rallies and political speakers.
'These steps belong to no single group and no single ideology,' he said. 'If the Savio Steps stand for anything, they stand for the right of others to speak out against injustice, the freedom for the speech we find most distasteful.
'History teaches us that it's not the rebels, the dissidents, the disturbers of the peace that are threatening to society,' he added. 'It's the unthinking, the unquestioning that threaten society.'"
12/03/1997, San Francisco Chronicle, Symbolic Steps, Charles Burress
"Until now no one bothered to give a name to what may well be the most famous platform for free speech in America -- the steps next to Sproul Plaza at the University of California at Berkeley.
But that will change at noon today when the university christens the spot "Mario Savio Steps," and thereby bestows the long-denied crown of hero on one of its most famous outlaws."
12/03/1997, Daily Californian, Sproul Steps Receive New Name To Honor Noted Student Activist, Alana Hoffman
"'There was never any public recognition of the renaming, so the responsibility of honoring Mr. Savio fell to this year's ASUC,' said Divy Ravindranath, an intern at the ASUC Office of the President. 'Because this week marks the 30th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, we decided this would be an appropriate time.'"
11/17/1997, Daily Californian, Savio Memorial Lecture Given, Melinda Marks
"In his speech, entitled 'The Possibility of Hope,' Zinn, a professor emeritus at Boston University, spoke about how the '60s was a turning point for social change."
11/13/1997, Daily Californian, Lecture Series to Honor Noted Activist, Melinda Marks
"'Mario Savio is one of the major speakers of Berkeley's history and a lot of people don't know about him,' [Professor Troy] Duster said. 'Keeping in touch with one's institutional, historical background is very important. It's all part of the legacy.'"
11/10/1997, Contra Costa Times, UC-Berkeley lecture to honor 1964 activist,
"A talk on 'The Possibility of Hope' will inaugurate an annual lecture at UC-Berkeley in honor of Mario Savio. Savio, who died of heart failure in 1996, was the spokesman for the 1964 Free Speech Movement at the university that signaled the start of a historic student movement."
9/28/1997, SF Examiner, A Tigar in the Courtroom, Bruce Tomaso
"DENVER -- He's defended the Chicago Seven and Kay Bailey Hutchison, John Connally and Adam Clayton Powell. He's defended an Air Force major accused of having a lesbian affair, and a retired auto worker accused of being a Nazi butcher.
Once before, in Denver, he defended a political outsider identified by the U.S. government as a terrorist bomber.
Now, Michael Tigar -- Glendale native, UC_Berkeley's Boalt Hall law graduate, University of Texas law professor and lead defense counsel for Oklahoma City bombing suspect Terry Nichols-- faces what many say is the most intriguing challenge of his career.
...
Renowned in the late 1960s as a flamboyant defender of the radical left, Tigar, now 56, has attained preeminence among American trial attorneys."
August 25/September 1, 1997, The Nation, Explorer of the Other Side, Annie Gottlieb
Review of Heretic's Heart by Margot Adler. "...the Movement's core consisted largely of second- and third-generation radicals, who weren't 'rebelling' so much as carrying forward lively family traditions of progresive education, nonconformity and dissent." "...and a new generation could read Heretic's Heart as a primer on the uses of affluence."
8/7/1997, Hills Publications, Letter: Downfall of KPFA no surprise, Bill Mandel
"This is directly contrary to past Pacifica practice. In 1965, when the Free Speech Movement at Cal produced a remarkable crop of articulate youngsters, a meeting of the station's public affairs broadcasters was held. I looked around the room, asked how many present were under 40, and one hand was raised. I pointed out that that was preposterous, in view of the situation in Berkeley, and offered to give up half of my own air time to help make room for youth. Management then was in tune with the tenor of the times, and by the end of the '60s young people were a majority of the broadcasters."
7/30/1997, Manteca Bulletin, Beserkley PC movement may run out of gas, Dennis Wyatt
"The People's Park--the much ballyhooed rallying point for the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s--laid the groundwork for today's politically Berkeley City Council. The University of California was essentially forced by Beserkley to yield control of a portion of the Berkeley campus to a mob. It didn't take many years for People's Park to become a drug-infested haven for stoned crazies to urinate at will and to employ free speech to harass other citizens."
06/17/1997, San Francisco Chronicle, The Search for The Cosmic Wobble, Jon Carroll
"And there was this guy in sandals, this guy talking about the two winters Mario Savio had spent up on the mountain helping to crunch data..."
6/4/1997, Anderson Valley Advertiser, Letter to the Editor, Michael Parenti
"Cockburn says I blame Mario Savio's death on 'the indifference of Academe,' but it had nothing to do with Academe,' he declares. Here again, he misrepresents. It was not 'indifference' but the vicious blacklisting that forced Savio to endure decades of prolonged and severe stress, isolation and low income--contributing greatly to creating his heart condition and premature death, in my opinion."
4/25/1997, Oakland Tribune, Savio honored on hall steps, William Brand
"BERKELEY--In a gesture of respect toward the man who brought the UC Berkeley power structure to its knees and started the 1960s student revolution that still endures, the university has decided to rename the steps of Sproul Hall for Mario Savio."
02/17/1997, Sonoma County Free Press, MARIO SAVIO, Mary Moore
"Because he is so identified with the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964, a lot of people don't realize that his main passion was for the basic justice issues of eliminating racism, sexism and classism. He was a Freedom Rider in the South long before 1964 and the reason that the Free Speech movement began was because the students were attempting to pass out flyers about the civil rights movement."
01/01/1997, the Progressive, Me and Mario Down by the Schoolyard, Barbara Garson
12/29/1996, New York Times Magazine, The Avatar of Free Speech, Reginald E. Zelnik
"Well, I came to know everyone who might have been Mario if Mario hadn't existed, and I know that only Mario could have done what he did."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/01/05/letters/letters.html12/29/1996, New York Times Book Review, Letter, Lynne S. Hollander
"Contrary to what Ms. Lesser says, Mario did indeed deliver his high school valedictory address despite his very severe stammer. As he described this stammer: 'My entire vocalization apparatus would simply freeze, and my head and neck and much of my body would buck in sympathetic spasm, while my eyes often rolled out of sight. The blocks could average one or two per sentence.' In a desperate but futile attempt to overcome this problem, Mario went out of his way to find public-speaking opportunities, even running for student body president at Martin Van Buren High School (and winning)."
12/26/1996, Rolling Stone, Tributes: On Mario Savio, Greil Marcus
"His job was never to betray the history he and others had once made. That was the best way to ensure that it was a story that would hold its shape and continue to be told. Savio's job was never to trade away whatever moral authority had attached itself to him -- not for power, respectability, comfort, or peace of mind."
12/22/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, Seeds From the Free Speech Movement (letter), David Mandel
12/22/1996, Los Angeles Times, LETTER FROM BERKELEY, Leonard Michaels
"Savio didn't say 'the machine' restricts your freedom, only that it is indifferent to it, yet he made people feel they were personally oppressed, sickened, frustrated by an insensate, institutionalized operation and he inspired a need for action. During one protest at UC Berkeley, I heard that there wasn't a single sick student in the university hospital.
12/20/1996, East Bay Express, Public Losses: Troublemakers for the Common Good, Paul Rauber
12/19/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, Mario Savio Fund (Letter), B. Meredith Burke
12/15/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, Gallery,
12/15/1996, New York Times Book Review, Speech With the Weight of Literature, Wendy Lesser
"But if he was not an author in the book sense of the word, Mario Savio was nonetheless a poet. He was the only political figure of my era for whom language truly mattered. He was the last American, perhaps, who believed that civil, expressive, precisely worded, emotionally truthful exhortation could bring about significant change. He was the only person I have ever seen or met who gave political speech the weight and subtlety of literature."
12/12/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, Herb Caen, Herb Caen
"Saab story, or, only in Berserkeley: After the Mario Savio memorial at Cal, David Jansen spotted a bumpersticker reading "I'd Rather Be Smashing Imperialism" -- on a new Saab. Mario would have been mordantly amused ..."
12/12/1996, Berkeley Voice, Martin Snapp Column, Martin Snapp
12/10/1996, Los Angeles Times, A Voice Remembered, Henry Weinstein
"Those words which exemplify Mario Savio's passion and eloquence, became the touchstone for a generation of student activists committed to making the world a better place."
12/09/1996, The West County Times, Friends, associates depict Savio as 'moral touchstone', Tom Lochner
12/09/1996, San Jose Mercury News, 1,500 pay tribute to Savio, Tracy Seipel
12/09/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, Friends Celebrate Savio As Gifted, Courageous, Lori Olszewski
"'He was a brilliant man who suffered physical frailty and crippling attacks of self-doubt,' said Johns. 'But look at all he accomplished. He taught me that no matter how hopeless a situation is, there is always a place for courage.'"
12/09/1996, Oakland Tribune, Savio's memorial of laughter and tears, Victoria Hudson
"Longtime friend Bettina Aptheker said organizers intentionally held the ceremony on what would have been Savio's 54th birthday, and on the 32nd anniversary of the Academic Senate vote that cemented the Free Speech Movement."
12/09/1996, Daily Californian, Memorial Celebrates Savio's Legacy, Laura Schiebelhut
"A fellow activist and close friend of Savio, Anita Levine Medal, spoke of the ideals that sparked the movement. 'All of us were committed to the justice that we felt America stood for,' Medal said. 'With its bans on student activism on campus, the university was in our way.'"
12/08/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, Stirring Up A Generation, Michael Taylor
"'The most obvious thing is his charisma as a speaker,' said Bettina Aptheker, now a 52-year-old associate professor of women's studies at UC Santa Cruz. 'He conveyed tremendous passion and purpose. The other quality he had was that he was not politically affiliated -- he was not connected to the old left, nor was he particularly connected to the new left. He had his own mixture of ideas, partially socialist, partially Thoreau, and he was influenced by King and especially by Gandhi. He came out of his own moral stance and he did what was required for justice to be served. He never swerved from that.'"
12/5/1996, The Riverdale Press, A celebration of a good man's life, Bernard L. Stein
"For so many of us who joined Mario in those days, that passionate insistence that people determine their own destiny through action has remained undimmed. It is at once our heritage and our continuing challenge to ourselves, our neighbors, our children. It is the way--the way Mario helped to light--that we may yet redeem our country's promise."
12/05/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, Where Have All The Marchers Gone, Yumi Wilson
"Things have changed at Berkeley -- the birthplace of the 1960s Free Speech Movement -- and other public university campuses in the state. The fact that Berkeley can't stir up much passion over a 1990s civil rights battle leads many to question wheth- er student activism is dead."
12/04/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, Reluctant Hero (Letter), David Lance Goines
"Eight of us had just been expelled from the University of California at Berkeley. Jack Weinberg had been arrested at noon sharp, and we sat around the police car for 32 hours and that's how it started. Mario spoke at all the rallies, and he said what we all meant. He made a great and stirring speech as we filed into Sproul Hall and 800 of us were taken to jail. We got headlines all over the world. Sixteen thousand students and professors saw policemen drag Mario off the stage of the Greek Theatre. When we finally won, he spoke for each one of us, as he had all along. Mario Savio didn't set out to be the spokesman for the Free Speech Movement, but he was good at it and without meaning to, it just happened."
12/02/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, OBITUARY -- Mario Savio,
12/02/1996, Daily Californian, Reflecting on Savio, Meg O'Hara
"But Mario Savio wasn't just a hothead. He had the strict logic and tight arguments of a philosophy major, and he applied them, with passion, to the Constitution of the United States. He believed that constitutional rights belonged even to such lowly forms of life as UC Berkeley students. As his oratory entered first my young head, and then my heart, and then my character, the Constitution became not some boring eighth-grade assignment, but the "true north" of the compass that has guided my professional life."
December 1996, Wired Magazine, Power to the People, Spencer Reiss
He's been part of the Berkeley scene since 1960, first as a crew-cut swim jock and math major, later on the front lines of the history-making fights for free speech and against the Vietnam War.
12/01/1996, SF Examiner Magazine, Freedom Now,
12/01/1996, SF Examiner, Berkeley memorial set for Mario Savio, Seth Rosenfeld
"In perhaps the most famous of his FSM speeches, Savio, an eloquent and powerful orator who was then a philosophy student from the borough of Queens in New York, crystallized his generation's spirit of rebellion against what many of its members saw as the complacent and impersonal industrial society of the 1950s."
11/25/1996, Time Magazine, Milestones,
"To Berkeley's aging young agitators, it was a dreamlike revival of past hell raising. To Berkeley's recently confident administrators, it was a sickening replay of two-year-old nightmares. Cops swung clubs on campus. Angry students scratched and bit policemen, or defiantly lay prone. The perennial martyr, Non-Student Mario Savio, exhorted cheering students, some perched in trees, to stay out of class. Nearly 2,000 of them did, and Berkeley again seemed close to coming unhinged."
11/20/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, Mario Savio (Letter), William Mandel
"During the celebration of the 30th anniversary of FSM, I reminded Mario of his remark, intending to base a compliment on it. He interrupted before I could, and went into a most saintly apology for having, he thought, hurt my feelings. Someone else then approached him, and I turned to the person on my other side and said that Mario should have become a priest, for he would have made the kind of pope the world badly needs."
11/20/1996, Marin Independent Journal, MARIO SAVIO, I REGRET . . ., Lynn Anderson
11/17/1996, Revolutionary Worker newspaper, On Becoming a Revolutionary, Bob Avakian
"Perhaps the most vivid memory I have of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) is not the many rallies and demonstrations, nor the moving speeches by Mario Savio, nor even the mass arrest of the 800, among whom I have always been proud to count myself. Probably my most vivid memory is the event that was the immediate prod that compelled me to join the FSM in the first place. In the midst of the 'police car incident'--while hundreds of students were blocking the car where police had placed Jack Weinberg, preparing to take him to jail for refusing to fold up political organizing on campus--I attended a reception given by Chancellor Strong for undergraduate honors students. One of the students there asked the Chancellor to explain what was going on with the protest, and his explanation was that the University Administration had been contacted by the management of the Oakland Tribune and asked to do something to stop campus organizing for civil rights demonstrations aimed at the Tribune because of its discriminatory hiring and employment practices. Well, I wondered what the Chancellor was intending to say because, having grown up in Berkeley, I had long seen the Tribune as a particularly forceful and crude voice of dark-ages conservatism--among other things, its principal owner, William F. Knowland, was often called William 'Formosa' Knowland because of his especially rabid opposition to the Chinese revolution led by Mao Tsetung, which had driven American-backed Chiang Kai-Shek off the mainland of China and onto the island of Formosa (Taiwan). Chancellor Strong went on to say that, in response to this urging by the Tribune, the University Administration--which already banned on-campus organizing for 'off-campus political issues'--had looked into the matter and had discovered that an area near the southern entrance to the campus, where political literature tables and organizing were centered, was not City property, as they had previously thought, but was actually University property, and therefore they had moved to put a stop to the civil rights and other political activity that was going on there.
¶
I couldn't believe it--I was shocked! Not just by the content of what Strong was saying but by the fact that he didn't even try to disguise it or dress it up--he didn't see anything wrong, or even controversial, about what he was telling us, and it was clear he didn't expect that we would either--apparently he thought that, being 'model students,' we would be also be 'model citizens': narrow-minded, self-centered 'grade-grubbers' in training to become 'money-grubbers' and loyal upholders of the status quo. As others have pointed out, and as I was to learn more fully as I became active in the movement, the university has always been very political: it plays a major role in the functioning of the military and other institutions of the state, and of finance and industry, as well as playing a decisive part in the shaping of information--in short, it is a key part of the machinery of the ruling class--and the students are expected to play their small, and passive, role within this.
¶
I immediately left the Chancellor's reception, walked over to the sit-in around the police car, got in line to speak and, when my turn came, climbed on the car and told the others there what the Chancellor's 'explanation' had been and that, as a result, I was joining in the protest and donating my $100 honor-student honorarium to the cause. Although I did not yet know it, this was a turning point in my life, as it was for many others. And, while the incident that, in immediate terms, propelled me into the movement had its own peculiarities, there were deeper causes influencing all of us who became part of the movement. As a number of others have also pointed out in reflecting on the experience of the FSM and its larger context, it was not merely about student rights in the abstract or in themselves but about the right--and, yes, the responsibility--to support and take part in the struggle against the glaring injustices in American society as a whole, especially the oppression of Black people. Had this not been the case, the FSM would not have had the great attractive force that it did."
11/16/1996, The Free Lance Star, Poignant political endings, Donald Kaul
11/13/1996, SF Examiner, Mario Savio knew the risks, Jonah Raskin
11/13/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, Mario Savio's Moment of Destiny, Theodore Kornweibel Jr.
"A few days after Berkeley's Free Speech Movement began, its most prominent spokesman, Mario Savio, came to Santa Barbara to explain what was happening at the home campus. He spoke to a hundred or more students that evening, answered questions, and departed. That was the first and last time I saw him. But it was a moment of destiny. A number of us talked and debated into the night, and by morning the Students for Free Political Action was born. I was one of the co-chairmen."
11/12/1996, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, A great light (letter), Jheri Cravens
11/12/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, 'A Moral Beacon' (Letter), Michael Rossman
"Mario became the key leader of the Free Speech Movement because he spoke what was in our hearts, the moral core of our concern, with an indelible clarity and grace. Over the decades since, to most who encountered him as a teacher and in his rare public appearances, he remained a moral beacon of our generation. As a person, he was shy and retiring, dreaded the spotlight, and endured the stress of being treated as a legendary object only when compassion left him unable to refuse the obligation to speak out. Mario gave his heart to justice before the FSM, as a Freedom Rider in Mississippi, working with the young black organizers of SNCC in the vanguard of the civil rights movement."
11/12/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, The Real Mario Savio (Letter), Lynne Hollander Savio
"Mario was an extremely modest and humble man, whom you have portrayed as vain and arrogant. He was the absolute opposite of "actors and politicians." Many of your facts were simply wrong. But I am most deeply hurt and outraged by your portrayal of Mario's character. Was this distortion of the truth deliberate?"
11/12/1996, Los Angeles Times, The Man Who Stopped the Machine, Robert Scheer
"Savio understood well that the times had made him, rather than the other way around. When the Free Speech Movement had run its course, he stepped off the stage of history and led a low-profile life, shunning interviews. He cared for his three children, tutored in math and eventually returned to San Francisco State, where he graduated summa cum laude and earned a master's in physics. In his recent years, he taught remedial math and physics at Sonoma State, where he organized to hold down student fees and against Proposition 187. Savio was working against Proposition 209 to save affirmative action on state campuses when his heart failed at age 53 on the eve of last week's election."
11/11/1996, The Guardian, The ghost in the political machine, Linda Grant
"Savio was famous for only 15 minutes because he refused all interviews and unlike his contemporary Jerry Rubin, neither changed his views nor tried to cash in later on his early notoriety. The legacy he left behind -- a simple one of encapsulating both a moment and a way of thinking about changes, that it required you to do something, not just think or talk about it -- remains to torment those of us who view the coming general election under Tony Blair's leadership of Labour Party with heart-sickened despair."
11/11/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, Goodbye, Mario (Letter), Bob Stone
"Editor -- To say goodbye to Mario Savio, I wanted to share with Chronicle readers a memory of the Freedom Summer of 1964, when we met in McComb, Miss. This was before he returned to Berkeley to help found the Free Speech Movement to assert rights to politically organize on campus -- precisely for such things as the civil rights struggle."
11/10/1996, South Country Journal, Mario Savio helped change attitudes toward authority, Lyle Price
"Savio, who died Wednesday of heart trouble, played a role in shaping the Baby Boomer generation's attitude toward government and authority. His movement's willingness to challenge things -- and to take personal risk to their college and professional futures -- served as an example for young people who later protested the war in Vietnam. Indeed, even today's propensity to agitate openly -- from environmental problems to both sides of the controversy over abortion -- may owe something to the Free Speech Movement's influence."
11/10/1996, SF Examiner, Mario Savio: Memorable crusader, Editorial
"'THOSE WERE the days, my friend; we thought they'd never end . . .' The prophetic little song was first performed by the Limeliters in 1962. That was a year before Mario Savio went to Mississippi. He came back to California to work for civil rights and, as it turned out, the freedom to bring political action and advocacy to UC-Berkeley."
11/09/1996, The Scotsman, Mario Savio,
11/09/1996, The Guardian, Stirring up the students, Barbara Garson
8-10 Nov 1996, HotWired, Rage Against the Machine, Steve Silberman
"As one who raged against inhumanity -- while considerately removing his shoes before climbing onto a police car to address the world -- Savio proved himself a humane warrior in our shared struggle: the defense of the uncensored exchange of ideas, which continues today on the frontier of a most human network of machines."
11/08/1996, The Washington Post, Rebel With a Cause, Karlyn Barker
"Savio had spent the middle of 1964 with Mississippi Freedom Summer, one of many students from Western and Northern campuses who went south to work in the civil rights movement. When he returned to Berkeley that fall, he was intent on raising funds for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. But university administrators sent out letters to the heads of various political and social action groups on campus, telling them that political activities and fund-raising would no longer be allowed."
11/08/1996, The Washington Post, Obituary,
"Thousands of students followed his call, wanting the right to participate in organized political activity on campus. The victory emboldened college students nationwide, paving the way for a firestorm of anti-Vietnam War protests in the mid 1960s."
11/08/1996, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Tilting at injustice, Jonah Raskin
11/8/1996, San Jose Mercury News, Prop. 209's passage fuels outcry, Frances Dinkelspiel
"A day after the death of Mario Savio, the leader of the 1964 Free Speech Movement, angry students carried on his memory at UC-Berkeley by marching through the campus and occupying buildings in protest of the passage of Proposition 209, which bans governments' affirmative action programs."
11/08/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, An Original Voice of Sproul Plaza, Editorial
"IT WAS ONLY fitting that a group of UC Berkeley students was engaged in a spirited protest for civil rights on the day that Mario Savio died. There is little doubt about the power of Savio's legacy."
11/08/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, 23 Arrested at prop. 209 Protest at Cal, Yumi Wilson and Rick DevVecchio
"While some invoked the name of the late Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio..."
"We are able to do what we're doing because of Mario Savio," the dreadlocked 20-year-old student said. "When he died, he passed the torch on to us."
11/08/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, A Long Goodbye to Mario Savio, Jon Carroll
"MAYBE YOU HAD to be there, but I was there. I was surrounding the police car, me and a few thousand others. You can see me in the photographs -- I'm the 56th from the right in the 38th row."
11/08/1996, New York Times, Mario Savio, Protest Leader Who Set a Style, Dies at 53, Eric Pace
"Savio was best known as the leader of 'free speech' demonstrations protesting campus rules at Berkeley in 1964. He was prominent in what became the Free Speech Movement, which is credited with giving birth to the campus 'sit-in' and with being a model for the larger movement to protest the Vietnam War."
11/08/1996, Daily Californian, Remembering a Voice, Betty Park
11/07/1996, SF Examiner, Mario Savio dies; free speech activist, Larry D. Hatfield
"It was a movement that in the short term led to the firing of UC Chancellor Clark Kerr, in the mid term to the political ascension of a B-movie actor named Ronald Reagan, and in the long term to the end of the war in Vietnam."
11/07/1996, San Jose Mercury News, Spirit of free speech movement dies, Raoul V. Mowatt
"So Savio helped spark the free speech movement, which drew support from students throughout the political spectrum. With the catch-phrase 'I ask you to consider,' Savio would coax people to weigh his words, said Greil Marcus, a columnist with Interview Magazine."
11/07/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, Free Speech Leader Savio Dies of Heart Failure in Sebastopol, Steve Rubenstein
"Mario Savio, the eloquent, disheveled philosophy student who climbed atop a police car in 1964 and kicked off the fiery Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley that forever changed campus life in the United States, died yesterday at a Sebastopol hospital, four days after suffering heart failure. He was 53."
11/07/1996, Rocky Mountain News, Mario Savio, Free Speech leader of 1960s, dies at 53, Reuter
11/07/1996, Orange County Register, Mario Savio, Free-Speech Movement leader, dies at 53, Richard Cole, Associated Press
11/07/1996, Oakland Tribune, Mario Savio's voice is silenced, Paul Grabowicz
11/07/1996, Los Angeles Times, Mario Savio; Led Free Speech Movement, Staff
"'In the '60s he was a powerful symbol of how an ordinary person could stand up and make history,' said state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), a onetime fellow radical. 'He symbolized the possibilities in all of us, to resist becoming cogs in somebody's machine.' Savio, who was born and raised in New York City, went to Mississippi in the early 1960s to help register black voters and work for civil rights."
11/07/1996, Houston Chronicle, Free-speech advocate Mario Savio, 53, dies, Richard Cole, Associated Press
11/07/1996, Denver Post, Free Speech leader dies at 53, Associated Press
11/07/1996, Daily Californian, Activist's Death is Mourned By Many, Ryan Tate
"He was in a class by himself," said Jackie Goldberg, a student leader of the Free Speech Movement alongside Savio. "He was a poet, a philosopher, a political analyst but above all a superb orator who could describe, educate and motivate an audience of thousands of people -- including people who did not agree with him."
11/07/1996, Bellevue Journal American, '60s free speech protester dies,
11/06/1996, Woodland Hills Daily News, Free Speech Movement leader on life support after heart fails, Associated Press
11/06/1996, Santa Ana Register, 1960s activist Savio suffers heart failure, Associated Press
11/06/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, Free-Speech Icon Savio in Coma, George Snyder
"'I saw him in an open forum held Friday on the issue,' said Sundberg, 'and he looked fine. The paradox of this whole thing is that he worked for the people, not officials, and it's incredible that someone who has such an immense heart full of sympathy and emotion would have that as both his strength and his weakness.'"
11/06/1996, Marin Independent Journal, Mario Savio suffers heart failure, Associated Press
11/06/1996, Contra Costa Times, '60s activist Mario Savio is critically ill, Richard Cole, Associated Press
11/05/1996, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Free speech hero Savio in hospital, Randi Rossmann
10/20/1996, Laytonville Observer, Letter, Mike Gordon
"In 1964, I listened to a brilliant speech by a young grad student named Mario Savio....On September 15, it was my turn to throw my body into the gears. The machine, of course, is MAXXAM...."
10/11/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, Student Government Under Siege, Grant Harris
"In the 1960s student leaders won the right to speak freely."
08/28/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, Extended 'Family' Celebrates Panisse's 25th Year, Karola Saekel
"That dinner could have been served to Waters' circle of Berkeley left-leaning (Free Speech Movement and other liberal causes) friends a quarter century ago."
08/16/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, Acquittal in Lesbian Sex Case, Associated Press
Michael Tigar
08/05/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, What Lawyers Are Reading, Leah Garchik
"...white-collar crime defense specialist Doron Weinberg can't get enough of 'Minimizing Racism in Jury Trials: The Voir Dire Conducted by Charles R. Garry in People of California v. Huey P. Newton,' edited by Ann Fagan Ginger.
7/22/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, Francis J. McTernan (Obituary), Charles Burress
Francis J. 'Frank' McTernan, a noted labor and civil rights attorney, died Saturday in San Francisco. He was 81 and had been suffering from melanoma.
¶
He was a champion of civil liberties and successfully defended many liberals and radicals. He also represented many labor unions.
¶
During the 1960s, Mr. McTernan represented participants in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California. He also represented members of the Black Panthers Party."
05/26/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, Arbitrary Action (Letter), B. Meredith Burke, Ph.d.
"As a former board member of The Girls Club of San Diego I find it ironic and counterproductive for the funding agency to cease funding programs that strive to broaden the aspirations of girls from poor families, giving them a reason to delay childbearing, in favor of programs to help unwed teen mothers. Perhaps the agency hasn't heard the old adage about the ounce of prevention?"
04/25/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, The Sell-Out of Public Radio, William J. Drummond
"KPFA soon outgrew its artsy beginnings, turning to radical politics, as the Vietnam war, civil rights and the Free Speech Movement polarized the country."
03/24/1996, SF Examiner, Examiner reporter honored yet again, Staff
"...Seth Rosenfeld has been named as recipient of the 1966 Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award.... The honor...was given in recognition of Rosenfeld's 15-year fight to pry loose documents concerning the FBI's secret activities at UC-Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s."
03/12/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, The Internet Gives Kids Global Reach, John Gage
03/09/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, Clinton, Gore in Concord Today for NetDay, Steve Rubenstein
"'NetDay96 is a demonstration of what can happen when people coalesce around a community project,' said John Gage, chief science officer at Sun Microsystems and the co-founder of NetDay 96."
03/03/1996, SF Examiner, Reporter honored by Professional Journalists, staff
"Examiner reporter Seth Rosenfeld has been awarded the James Madison Freedom of Information Award by the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Rosenfeld, 40, was honored for his 15-year fight to pry loose documents concerning the FBI's secret activities at UC-Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s."
02/25/1996, SF Examiner, Cyber-activists take on censorship of the Internet, Sandy Close and Nick Montfort, Pacific News Service
sub title: Telecom, 'decency' reforms spark a new Free Speech Movement. "Thirty years ago a student protest at UC-Berkeley over free speech sparked a worldwide chain reaction of youthful rebellion against authority. Is a new generation of FSM agitators emerging now in cyberspace?"
Many, many references to FSM.
02/12/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, Students Protest With Pens--Not Bullhorns, Peter Fimrite
"[UC Berkeley Student Action President Grant Harris said he and others in the group were inspired by firebrands Mario Savio and Jack Weinberg, who were instrumental in winning the constitutionally guaranteed right of students to speak out on campus and who led anti-Vietnam war protests in the 1960s."
02/09/1996, San Francisco Chronicle, Obituary--Anne Johnson,
"Mrs. Johnson graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1960 and received a master's degree in vocational rehabilitation from San Francisco State University. She worked as a vocational rehabilitation counselor until her retirement in 1979, while participating in civil rights, anti- war and free speech campaigns. Her most recent participation was in Women in Black, an organization committed to peace in the Middle East."
11/19/1995, Contra Costa Times, Berkeley will no longer use redwood or teak products, Ralph Jennings
"'The idea is to raise consciousness,' said Spring. She heard the idea for a ban at a 30-year anniversary of the Free-Speech Movement."
10/29/1995, SF Examiner, Rosenfeld wins AP award for fight to open FBI files, Associated Press
10/9/1995, Albion Monitor, The Making of a Muckraker, Decca Mitford and Bob Treuhaft
"Bob Treuhaft: I was here at home with my wife playing Scrabble around ten o'clock at night. The phone call came and it was [Mario] Savio saying that the Steering Committee wants to meet me. 'They're sitting in there, and there's 700 of us ... we want you to come. They're letting people out but they're not letting anybody in; but they'll let you in.' So I went right over. I told my wife I'll be back in an hour or so... "
08/11/1995, East Bay Express, Low Heels High Ideals, Phyllis Orrick
"The oaths were 'more important than the Free Speech Movement,' in shaking Berkeley out of its stance as a conservative college town."
08/07/1995, San Francisco Chronicle, The Winning Ways of Walden, Peter Sinton
"Berliner, 52, who participated in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the '60s before earning his MBA degree, veered into venture capital after tiring of the old-line San Francisco investment banking firm Sutro & Co."
7/25/1995, The Daily Californian, Diversity Is a Responsibility, Mario Savio
"In its second phase, the Civil Rights Movement turned to opening up opportunities in education and employment. I was arrested for the first time during such an action, right here in San Francisco at the Sheraton Palace Hotel. In those days, to see black people, if at all, it was "in the back" -- washing dishes, scrubbing the floors, making the beds. We compelled -- and I am proud to say we compelled the Hotel Employers Association to hire black people in well-paying, visible jobs. That was 'affirmative action' before the name caught on."
07/21/1995, SF Examiner, Angered by vote, protesters hit streets, April Allison, Ray Delgado and Dexter Waugh
"Mario Savio, firebrand of UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement of the 1960s"
07/21/1995, San Francisco Chronicle, Protesters clog streets after vote, Yumi Wilson and J.L. Pimsleur
"The arrests and the bomb threat were the highlights of a day of protest that could have passed for another place and time -- Sproul Plaza at Berkeley in the 1960s. Once again, there was human rights advocate Mario Savio with microphone in hand. His hair was gray this time, done up in a ponytail, as he spoke to the crowd from the back of a flatbed truck."
07/21/1995, Oakland Tribune, Crowd takes frustration to the streets, Ikimulisa Sockwell
07/21/1995, Daily Californian, Protesters Denounce UC Policy, Erin Allday
"More than 500 demonstrators -- including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and 1960s campus activist Mario Savio -- attended the regents' meeting, staging protests and sit-ins throughout the 12-hour-long deliberations."
07/20/1995, San Jose Mercury News, Nation's eyes rivited on today's crucial vote, Laura Kurzman
"SAN FRANCISCO -- When the curtain goes up today on the University of California regents' meeting the stage will be crowded with politicians past and present.
Along with Pete Wilson, Jesse Jackson, and Willie Brown, the meeting has drawn Mario Savio, whose blazing rhetoric ignited the Free Speech Movement in 1964."
7/1/1995, Frankfurter Rundschau, Als in Berkeley der Berserker los war. 30 Jahre "Free Speech Movement" - die Aktivisten von einst trafen sich zum Jubilaum, Andrea Bindereif
06/13/1995, Oakland Tribune, FBI forced to release info frrom Berkeley Free Speech probe, Staff and wire reports
Summer 1995, The Threepenny Review, Two Anniversary Speeches, Greil Marcus and Mario Savio
05/31/1995, San Francisco Chronicle, Public Interest Is His Interest, Aurelio Rojas
Ralph Abascal and younger brother Manuel Abascal, "now a consumer protection attorney in Berkeley."
04/28/1995, East Bay Express, Hands Together, Christopher Hawthorne
Michael Lerner "cut his political teeth on the Free Speech Movement" and Cornel West
04/17/1995, San Francisco Chronicle, Hallinan Friend Still Reeling From Federal Investigation, Rob Haeseler
"...Clewlow, a veteran of the mass arrests at Sproul Hall during the Free Speech Movement..."
April 1995, College English, Mozart, Hawthorne, and Mario Savio: Aesthetic Power and Political Complicity, T. Walter Herbert
"For me, however, Mario's sentence emerges uniquely from that feverish war of words and retains the magic I'm trying to specify here. Coined on the spot and bearing the imprint of a complex political moment, it survives as a piece of literary found art. The day after I heard it, I discovered I could recite it verbatim; I'm not sure whether it ever appeared in print."
03/09/1995, Santa Cruz Sentinel, Community activism discussed,
"Educator Frank Bardacke will speak on community organizing...." "Bardacke, a community organizer for 30 years, will talk about organizing across class and racial lines...." "A key figure in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the '60s, Bardacke is the author of Good Liberals and Great Blue Herons...."
03/08/1995, SF Bay Guardian, Free Speech in Berkeley?, Steve Stallone
03/02/1995, San Francisco Chronicle, Never Trust Anyone Under Thirty (cartoon), Danziger
03/01/1995, ACLU News, FSM Leader Savio Announces New Coalition, Lisa Maldonado
"Free Speech Movement veteran Mario Savio ended his long silence on American politics in an exhilarating address at the ACLU-NC Sonoma Chapter's Annual Dinner on February 24 in Sebastopol....'I feel in some ways the country is being taken over by barbarians. The people who feel strongly that there must be an alternative vision have to stand up now.'"
02/01/1995, Performing Arts, Who Was That Clown I Saw You With?,
"The Free Speech Movement of Berkeley celebrated its thirtieth anniversary last December with a large conference in the city. Evidently the slogan 'Never trust anyone over thirty' meant 'past the thirtieth anniversary.'"
12/30/1994, San Francisco Chronicle, FSM 'Legacy' (letter), Ernest Montague
12/22/1994, San Francisco Chronicle, In the FSM's Wake...(letter), Ernest Montague
12/19/1994, People Magazine, Radical Creak, Richard Jerome and Laird Harrison
"Throughout, Weinberg sat in the police car with Gandhian resolve, refusing food and even spurning polite police offers to escort him to the Sproul Hall rest room. (He feared the police would drive off if he left the scene.) Instead, he relieved himself in paper drinking cups that friends passed in to him."
12/17/1994, San Francisco Chronicle, The FSM 'War' (letter), R. Anderson
12/16/1994, East Bay Express, Sprowl vs. Sprawl, Christopher Hawthorne
12/15/1994, Redwood Record, Free Speech Movement pioneers in Berkeley for 30-year reunion, Jentri Anders
"'Cynicism ... is when people in power tell people out of power that there is nothing they can do about things. We are here to tell you that you can change it.' Jackie Goldberg ex-Free Speech Leader....'The rich,' he said, 'want us to enter into a coalition with them to make the poor suffer.' Mario Savio Free Speech Activist"
12/11/1994, Los Angeles Times, Free Speech Movement, the Spark for a Decade of Upheaval, Turns 30, Michelle Locke
12/09/1994, SF Jewish Bulletin, 30 years later, Jews relive Free Speech Movement, Joseph Berkofsky
"[Jeff] Kline, 48, is among the dozens of Jews who marched to the center of the Free Speech Movement three decades ago, propelled by varying degrees of Jewish identity but carrying a common torch of American Jewish liberal activism."
12/09/1994, San Francisco Chronicle, FSM Redux (letter), Carol Denny
12/08/1994, San Jose Mercury News, An afternoon of free speech and youthful flashbacks, T. T. Nhu
12/07/1994, SF Bay Guardian, A sweet, dorky Paul Revere, Paul Krassner
12/06/1994, Daily Californian, Thirty Years Later: The Free Speech Movement Returns to Berkeley, Julie Wong and Kevin Zwick
12/5/1994, New York Times, After 30 Years, Return to Berkeley, David Margolick
"Thirty years to the day after they occupied the place, they were back at Sproul Hall. Many had graying pony tails below their bald spots. Some looked like middle-aged professors. Many had guts, though of a different sort than what was on display in 1964, when they risked expulsion and jail for their principles.
¶
They were the aging alumni of the Free Speech Movement, which brought the full range of First Amendment protections to the University of California at Berkeley and changed American campuses everywhere, and as they surveyed Sproul Plaza today, their legacy was striking for just how ordinary it seemed: angry placards, pamphleteers for everything from the Marxist Spartacist League to the Unification Church."
12/04/1994, Fresno Bee, Some say free speech still at risk on campus, Associated Press
12/03/1994, West County Times, Free Speech does encore, Martha Ross
12/03/1994, San Jose Mercury News, UC rally reignites flames of free speech, Renee Koury
"He stepped down from the podium 30 years ago as an angry protester with short hair and a skinny tie. He climbed back up again Friday as a wizened philosopher with a silver ponytail dangling down his neck. His appearance had softened with age, but Mario Savio was as fiery as ever. The former student radical returned to the University of California, Berkeley, where his passionate oratory ignited the Free Speech Movement three decades ago -- but this time he exhorted the new generation..."
12/03/1994, Sacramento Bee, 3 decades later, Free Speech vets return to UC Berkeley, Peter Hecht
Goines, Zelnick, Butler, Anders, Savio, Weinberg, Rossman
12/03/1994, Fairfield Republic, Free speech, Associated Press
photo of Mario Savio
12/03/1994, Contra Costa Times, Free-speechers sound note of hope at anniversary rally, Martha Ross
12/02/1994, San Francisco Chronicle, Echoes of Free Speech Movement Heard 30 Years Later, Elaine Herscher
12/01/1994, San Francisco Chronicle, FSM Celebration (letter), Laura X
11/30/1994, The Guardian, Death: Jerry Rubin,
"Jerry Rubin, who has died aged 56, was, with Abbie Hoffman, the most prominent of the American white radicals who campaigned in the late sixties against the Vietnam War - and the US government.
¶
The son of a Cincinatti truck driver-cum union official, Rubin visited Cuba in 1964 and was active in the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, California. [sic]"
11/30/1994, SF Examiner, Free speech fight at UC shook society, Larry D. Hatfield
11/28/1994, San Jose Mercury News, Free-speech pioneers returning to UC, Renee Koury
"Sproul Plaza at UC-Berkeley may be one of the busiest soap boxes at any college campus -- a place where students debate everything from illegal immigration to a man's right to run around naked. Rows of tables where young activists hawk their causes -- equality for women, unity for Mexican-Americans, rights for animals -- seem to be woven into the very fabric of the plaza as though they'd sprung up with the University of California buildings."
11/28/1994, Marin Independent Journal, Let free speech ring,
11/26/1994, Sioux City Journal, Berkeley activists to hold reunion, Michelle Locke (Associated Press)
11/26/1994, San Jose Mercury News, Berkeley reunion tribute to upheaval, Michelle Locke (Associated Press)
11/26/1994, Press Democrat, Cal's catalyst for change, Michelle Locke (Associated Press)
11/26/1994, Portland Press Herald, Berkeley activists to hold reunion, Michelle Locke (Associated Press)
11/26/1994, Madison Capital Times, Free Speech Movement to hold 30-year reunion, Michelle Locke (Associated Press)
11/26/1994, Long Beach Press Telegram, Berkeley alums revisit free speech battlefield, Michelle Locke (Associated Press)
11/26/1994, Hemet News, Berkeley celebrates activism, Michelle Locke (Associated Press)
11/26/1994, Corvalis Gazette-Times, A reunion in Berkeley, Michelle Locke (Associated Press)
11/25/1994, Marin Independent Journal, Berkeley revolution remembered 30 years later, Michelle Locke (Associated Press)
11/22/1994, Daily Californian, Berkeley Honors the Activism Of the Free Speech Movement, Julie Wong and Kevin Zwick
11/22/1994, Daily Californian, Free Speech Iconoclast Reminisces on the Future, Julie Wong and Kevin Zwick
11/22/1994, Daily Californian, Professor Lives a Lifetime at Berkeley, Julie Wong and Kevin Zwick
11/22/1994, Daily Californian, Activism Breathes Its Last Gasp, Julie Wong and Kevin Zwick
"When Zaeem Baksh decided to come to UC Berkeley last year, one event shaped his decision.
¶
While attending post-graduate school in New Zealand, Baksh saw the documentary 'Berkeley in the Sixties,' and was inspired by its message of student activism and empowerment.
¶
'I always looked up to Berkeley,' Baksh said. 'My ambition was to come to Berkeley because of its tradition of free thinking and antiestablishment.'
¶
The university that Baksh discovered, however, was not what he envisioned.
¶
Instead of a campus filled with 'the boiling and fire of student activism,' Baksh said he found a campus that seemed ignorant of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) and of UC Berkeley's rich activist past."
11/17/1994, Hills Publications, FSM alumni plan 30-year event, Katharina Valencia
11/01/1994, Berkeley Graduate, Free Speech Movement Celebrates 30th Anniversary, Monica Valencia
10/14/1994, East Bay Express, Party of the Year (letter), Jack Radey
10/07/1994, East Bay Express, What If They Threw an FSM Anniversary and Nobody Came?, Karen D. Brown
09/30/1994, East Bay Express, Graphic Evidence The Life & Times of David Lance Goines, Jean Weininger
09/25/1994, SF Examiner, Geezers of the FSM, Gene Marine
"From that episode came a memorable remark by the graduate student in the police car, Jack Weinberg: 'We don't trust anybody over 30.' "Once they cheered the Luddite metaphor about putting their bodies upon the gears and levers and wheels. Today, they include a fax number and an E-mail address."
09/15/1994, Berkeley Voice, Martin Snapp Column, Martin Snapp
"'Where were you on Dec. 2, 1964?' 'Since I couldn't be a part of FSM, I did what to my proto-yuppie mind seemed the next best thing: I went out and bought a sheepskin jacket, just like Mario Savio used to wear.' "I asked a U.C. administrator...'because we don't look on the Free Speech Movement as a positive thing. We see it as a negative thing, because it led to Political Correctness.'" "'Practically nobody knows it,' says Laura X, 'but in 1985 the California legislature passed a resolution declaring Oct. 1 to be Free Speech Day.'"
08/24/1994, San Francisco Chronicle, FSM Reunion (letter), Laura Murra
"Editor--Ruth Rosen, the author of the excellent 'Other Views' piece 'In the Summer of 1964' is probably too modest to tell you that she is one of the best thinkers in the group of talking heads in the film 'Berkeley in the '60s.'" 'Many of us from the Free Speech Movement crowd scenes, and a talking head or two, will be enjoying a mini-reunion at the UC Theater showing in Berkeley today...'"
08/23/1994, Daily Californian, Reunite the Free Speech Movement Veterans (letter), Michael Rossman and Laura X
"As we used to say in the '60s, 'if you don't like the news (or the official version of history), go make some of your own!'"
08/20/1994, San Francisco Chronicle, In the Summer of '64..., Ruth Rosen
"When the summer ended, fall brought an uprising of thousands of students during the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley." "Like other nations, we choose our memories selectively.... Thirty years ago, thousands of Americans made enormous personal sacrifices to stop a war, poverty and racial intolerance. So much simpler...--to celebrate the mythic muddy lovemaking at Woodstock."
08/19/1994, SF Jewish Bulletin, Free Speech redux (letter), Michael Rossman
"...charges that the FSM was a liberal Jewish conspiracy are, of course, completely false."
6/20/1994, Daily Californian, 'The Times They Are A-Changin'', Suzanne Marmion
"Mike Tigar, currently a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, helped South Africa draft its new Constitution.
¶
Jackie Goldberg pioneered the AIDS education program in L.A. schools during her years on the city's school board, and set up counseling programs for gay and lesbian high school students.
¶
Laura X was a leader in the fight to make spousal rape illegal and today runs the National Clearinghouse on Marital and Date Rape."
5/30/1994, The Nation, The Kids Were Alright, Marvin Gettleman
Review of WHEN THE OLD LEFT WAS YOUNG: Student Radicals and America's First Mass Student Movement, 1929-1941.By Robert Cohen. Oxford University.
"When the U.S. student movement of the 1960s erupted few knew that there had been an earlier upsurge of campus radicalism in the 1930s. Robert Cohen effectively refutes the nostalgia for the supposedly placid and benign campus life before radicalism 'spoiled everything.'"
10/5/1993, The Guardian, Education: The hawks war on campus, Gerard De Groot
"IN NOVEMBER 1966 California voters went to the polls to elect a governor. The most controversial issue in the campaign had been student unrest, a problem which had first arisen at Berkeley in 1964 when the Free Speech Movement brought teaching to a halt.
....¶
The plan seemed to ignore the needs of the ordinary student. Similar problems and similar responses occurred in France, Italy and Germany, where, in the 1960s, students reacted violently to the expansion of higher education, which, for them, meant overcrowded lecture halls and rocketing staff-student ratios. Aware of these problems, Charles Hitch, who replaced Kerr, warned his colleagues within the University of California system in 1970 of public and legislative unhappiness arising from the widespread belief that the faculty is increasingly neglecting what the public considers its most important function teaching."
July 1993, Mother Jones Magazine, Up Against The Wall, Michael Rossman
"I remember how the renaissance of the political poster began. The early New Left had been nearly barren of art: in Berkeley we went through the 1964 Free Specch Movement without a single poster. Suddenly the following spring, as the antiwar movement and the rock-dance/hippie scene sprouted together, posters began appearing to announce them, proclaiming a renaissance of political art."
1/26/1993, San Francisco Chronicle, Naked Guy stripped of UC status, T. Christian Miller
"But his antics proved offensive to some students and employees and deeply embarrassing to the university. In November, the campus issued a ban on public nudity. The 6-foot-2 junior persisted in his exploits, however, and was suspended for two weeks in late November, pending a student conduct hearing. The expulsion was the result of that hearing. The junior insisted that going naked was a form of free speech. Some students on campus reacted angrily to the news of the expulsion. "He has the right to express himself however he chooses," said Michelle Murray, a 17-year-old first-year student. 'If people don't like to see him naked, they can just turn their head away.' Murray's friend junior Chanda Griffin agreed, but said: 'There is the seat issue. I wouldn't want to go sit where he had. It's just not sanitary.'"
12/28/1992, Los Angeles Times, Agents of Change, S.J. Diamond
"Jackie Goldberg paid a fine for her participation, probably, she says now, because 'I said, 'I'm broke, please send me to jail.'' When she graduated, a Phi Beta Kappa, she was rejected by graduate schools. The University of Chicago finally admitted her, but then her master's degree was held up while she tried to get a required internship. 'The Chicago public schools said, 'We don't hire people like you.' I thought I'd never be able to teach.'
Back in Los Angeles, she was refused jobs even in a teacher shortage, and waited more than a year for her credentials while 'they lost my fingerprints, then my health records, then my transcripts.' The official ostracism didn't end, she says, until she won election, then reelection to L.A.'s school board, serving from 1983 to 1991, her last two years as president. She's now running for the Los Angeles City Council"
02/07/1990, Oakland Tribune, The delicate art of remembering the Free Speech Movement, Terry Link
"BERKELEY -- The challenge of designing a monument to free speech was illustrated yesterday when the Berkeley Art Project unveiled the semi-finalists in its controversial competition for a Sproul Plaza memorial to the Free Speech Movement of 1964"
While veterans of the Free Speech Movement endorse the idea of a monument to their accomplishment, university Chancellor Ira Michael Heyman and some faculty deride the proposal as a 'gesture of remarkable arrogance.'"
02/07/1990, Daily Californian, The FSM: myth and reality, Max Boot
12/04/1989, Daily Californian, 1964 student leader sees 1989 apathy, Michael Rossman
12/04/1989, Daily Californian, Sproul ban led to semester of rebellion, David Pickell
Kechely photo credited to California Monthly
12/04/1989, Daily Californian, A participant looks back in time, Jackie Goldberg
12/04/1989, Daily Californian, Civil Rights Movement inspired student leaders, Robby Cohen
"In the Sheraton Palace demonstration many Berkeley students, including Mario Savio, got their first lessons in the tactics of civil disobedience -- tactics that they would employ effectively six months later during the Free Speech Movement."
8/27/1989, The New York Times, Style Makers; DAVID LANCE GOINES: POSTER ARTIST, Lawrence M. Fisher
"In 1964, David Lance Goines was expelled from the University of California at Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement and went to work in a small print shop, producing leaflets for the cause. Today he designs and prints posters for purveyors of the California style of life - he is best known for his series for the culinary temple Chez Panisse - and has lately turned his attention to wine labels for three California wineries: Mount Veeder, Neyers and Ravenswood."
02/06/1989, Daily Californian, Students seek Free Speech monument, Jenny Lind
05/09/1986, East Bay Express, Back Light, Tim Reagan
about Mark Kitchell and "Berkeley in the '60s."
5/23/1985, Los Angeles Times, Apartheid Protest Ends at Berkeley as Last 35 Depart, Metro Desk
"[Ray Colvig] said the demonstration, which began in Sproul Plaza on April 10, was the longest continuous event of its kind in the history of the Berkeley campus, birthplace of the Free Speech Movement and center of numerous protests in the 1960s."
4/21/1985, Los Angeles Times, Thousands Protest U.S. Policies in Mass Rallies, David Haldane
"Marching up Market Street, they wound up at the plaza in front of City Hall, where a string of speakers included U.S. Reps. Ronald V. Dellums (D-Berkeley), and Sala Burton (D-San Francisco) and Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement that began the 1960s protest era at UC Berkeley."
4/16/1985, Los Angeles Times, Anti-Apartheid Demonstration Recalls Berkeley Protests of '60s, Saul Rubin
"The demonstrators have gradually attracted more people, and daily rallies have drawn hundreds of supporters. A UC Berkeley public information officer estimated that there were 450 people at Monday's rally, but campus police placed the number at 800. Noon demonstrations also are planned for today and Wednesday. Mario Savio, who led the Free Speech Movement of the '60s, is expected to be Wednesday's principal speaker."
february 1985, Off Our Backs, Women Veterans of the Free Speech Movement Speak Out, Lois West
"When she was at Berkeley for four years during FSM, [Jo] Freeman said she never saw a single woman professor and the very structure of the situation made it impossible for women. But in the South where strong women would be punished in white society, strong women leaders were not punished in Black communities which Freeman said gave her a sense of possibility and an understanding of the historical connection between Blacj and women's rebellion."
12/14/1984, San Francisco Examiner, Nuclear war fears unite former FSM activists, Lynn Ludlow and George Frost
"'My son, sure, I'd like to get him involved in something like the FSM, although I should probably bite my tongue,' said Marvin Tener, 42, a computer consultant in Philadelphia. 'But most activism now is on the right.'"
12/14/1984, San Francisco Examiner, How Berkeley has changed since the FSM, George Frost
"'There was none of this business about 'wait for orders,' ' he [Lee Felsenstein] said. 'What happened was this amorphous mass of students organized itself into community and was able, with that kind of integrity, to battle the administration.
¶
The personal computer revolution, he said, grew out of an effort to recapture 'community' after the turmoil and alienation of the '60s.
¶
Out of the Community Memory Project, he predicted, would come new social institutions.
¶
'All the innovative development came about because the lines of communication were open laterally,' he said. 'It Is nothing but synergy.'"
12/13/1984, San Francisco Examiner, Those who still look for ways to escape, Lynn Ludlow and George Frost
"Berkeley writer Michael Rossman, also arrested in the FSM, has written, 'Those who stand at the edge of chaos are most exposed to dizzmess.'"
12/13/1984, San Francisco Examiner, Some 'got it,' some got Rolfed, but most steered clear of religion, George Frost
12/12/1984, San Francisco Examiner, 'Biggest convulsion in history of education', Lynn Ludlow and George Frost
"Nathan Glazer, a sociologist who left the troubled campus for a job atHarvard, described the Sixties rebellion as 'the biggest convulsion in the history of American higher education.' But the relationship between the university and its angriest students was far too complex to end in divorce. After 20 years:
Of a random sample of FSM veterans interviewed for an Examiner survey, more than one in three (36 percent) is involved today in education--mostly on the college level. One in seven is a university professor."
12/12/1984, San Francisco Examiner, Players and bystanders in the UC revolution, George Frost
"IRA HEYMAN, then a law professor, was named chairman of a special Academic Senate committee that investigated the suspensions of eight UC students after the Oct. 2 police car incident. In what amounted to stinging criticism of the chancellor, his committee said the suspended students were singled out arbitrarily, 'almost as hostages.' Heyman is now the chancellor."
12/11/1984, San Francisco Examiner, Free Speech patrimony scatter to the winds, Lynn Ludlow and George Frost
"The survey produced but one unanimous answer. Every respondent said the FSM experience was worth it."
12/11/1984, San Francisco Examiner, FSM leaders keep the·faith: 'Still agitating' after all these years, George Frost
"Peter Franck, a San Francisco attorney who specializes in entertainment and copyrights, said he relishes his days as a student radical.
¶
With fervor, he said, 'We worked together to change society.'
¶
Franck co-founded the prototype Berkeley student activist group SLATE in 1957. It raised money for Freedom Riders in the South, staged peace marches, protested the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings in 1960, opposed compulsory ROTC, picketed businesses in behalf of equal employment opportunity and worked for changes in campus rules that barred activist politics.
¶
'The FSM was an extension of the political action of 1957 on,' he said. Unlike the FSM, he said, which enjoyed mass student support but had little infrastructure, SLATE members built an organization."
12/10/1984, San Francisco Examiner, Two decades do not dim credos of the UC rebels, Lynn Ludlow and George Frost
"The Sproul Hall sit-in may have been the first major campus protest action, but it wasn't the last. Hundreds of demonstrations broke out against the Vietnam War, the draft, military recruiting and racial discrimination. The New Left was born in 1962, spread out by 1965, mushroomed by 1967 and disintegrated by 1969 into quarrelsome factions. The war continued.
¶
The National Student Association estimated 221 demonstrations by 40,000 students at 101 campuses in the first six months of 1968 alone.
¶
The FSM was significant, said Professor Smelser.
¶
'It was one of those historical incidents that will forever shape the memory, and to a degree, the institutional life of the university.'
¶
At the time, he added, nobody but the FSM leaders appreciated the importance of their victory."
12/9/1984, San Francisco Examiner, The Free Speech revolutionaries, 20 years later, Lynn Ludlow
"Statistics in these reports come from an Examiner survey based on a random sample from 783 names on a list of Free Speech Movement activists arrested on Dec. 2-3, 1964.
¶
Most results are based on questionnaires and in-depth interviews with a final survey group of 49. In some cases, the base number is · larger. The potential sampling error is plus or minus 16 'at the 95 percent confidence level.' This would indicate it is reasonable to draw some basic inferences.
¶
The 'USA' comparison group, sharing similar age, race and education with the FSM sample, is a 'selected subset' of 131 respondents from a 1980 study by the Center for Policy Studies at the University of Michigan.
¶
Professor Richard Deleon, director of the San Francisco State University Public Research Institute, and Ed Emerson, a graduate student, generously helped with consultation and data preparation."
December 1984, California Monthly, From Frankfurt to Berkeley 'I never wanted to play along', Martin Jay
of sociologist Leo Lowenthal, "When he went to Germany following the FSM at Berkeley, radical students there 'hoped I would bring the good news of the renewal of the human condition.'"
Kechely photo credited
December 1984, California Monthly, 1964 The FSM,
"It's no secret, and no surprise, that three words crucial to the recent history of the Berkeley campus still evoke strong feelings: the Free Speech Movement."
11/25/1984, Californina Living/Los Angeles Herald, Radicals Revisited, Michael A. Kroll
"In 1964 the largest student protest in American history to date occurred in Berkeley when nearly 800 students were arrested protesting limitations on student political activity and free expression of it. 'There would have been no Free Speech Movement without SLATE,' says SLATE member Arthur Goldberg, who was among the leaders of the movement."
11/1/1984, The Berkeley Monthley, A Local Aesthetic: David Goines' Posters are as Berkeley as Brown Shingle Houses, Patrick Finley
"The university was to challenge Goines' purposefulness. Active in the Free Speech Movement, Goines protested his way into numerous arrests. After disturbing what was euphemistcally known as the peace, he was expelled from UC in his first year. In need of work, he went to the man who did most of the printing for the Free Speech Movement and asked for a job. Thus began the apprenticeship of Berkeley's best-known printer."
10/15/1984, Time Magazine, A rebellion's Uneven Legacy, Dennis A. Williams with Amy Wallace and Mary Bruno
10/15/1984, Time Magazine, People: Mario Savio,
10/10/1984, Albany Berkeley Times, Savio warns speech rally of Nicaraguan bloodbath, Jean Dickinson
10/07/1984, New York Times, Student Movement of '64 Recalled at Berkeley,
10/06/1984, People's World, FSM leaders urge new student activism, Chuck Idelson
10/05/1984, Daily Californian, Women in the FSM: groping for a consciousness, Ellen Nakashima and Lora Downs
"One lesser-known and paradoxical legacy of the FSM is its contribution to the formation of the women's movement."
"According to women participating in the movement, women in the '60s 'did the shitwork while men got all the glory.'"
10/04/1984, Daily Californian, FSM panel remembers their struggle, Leigh Anne Jones
"Aptheker ('in newspapers, my name was 'Bettina Aptheker, Avowed Communist'") addressed the presence of women in the Free Speech Movement, and she offered a heartfelt apology to other women in the movement.
Because she was the daughter of Herbert Aptheker, a renowned Communist and historian, she said she was accepted by "the revolutionaries as one of the boys." But because she didn't identify with the "traditional" roles that women held in the movement, she ostracized herself from them and, in effect, "contributed to the oppression of women within the movement."
She also shed light on the pre-women's liberation sexism in the movement: "There were women...who found themselves in situations of performing sexual favors for important movement leaders."
10/03/1984, San Francisco Chronicle, Savio Speaks Again at Berkeley, Michael Taylor
"We need to shift our values," he said, "so they are less and less for private profit, less for war and more for the production that meets ordinary human needs. We don't need to become less democratic. We can become more democratic."
10/03/1984, New York Times, Savio Back at Berkeley 20 Years After Big Rally,
"Mario Savio, the ''silver tongued orator'' who helped begin the Free Speech Movement 20 years ago, marked its anniversary today by urging students to ..."
10/3/1984, Los Angeles Times, Class Reunion Mario Savio Returns to Berkeley for Free-Speech Rally, Drew Digby
09/30/1984, SF Examiner, Savio breaks 20-year silence about Free Speech Movement, Lynn Ludlow
09/29/1984, San Francisco Chronicle, The Return of Mario Savio, Michael Taylor
09/29/1984, People's World, Free Speech Movement rally,
09/28/1984, East Bay Express, Present at the Birth: A Free Speech Movement Journal, Robert Hurwitt
"What I didn't know at the time was that the same day I arrived, the new freedom I had found so attractive was already being taken away. That day Katherine Towle, dean of students, had sent letters to the various campus political groups telling them to take down their tables."
09/28/1984, East Bay Express, Twenty Years Later...An FSM Reflection, Michael Rossman
first written in 1974 for the California Monthly.
Re my Express piece in 84: Yes, I do have a copy of the paper; and of the manuscript trimmed down for that. But the piece was actually a truncated composite of _two_ pieces written 10-11 years earlier -- "Looking Back at the FSM," which is already up on our site, and another (on FSM as an altered state of consciousness! my crank piece!) which will go up when there's enough other peoples' stuff up so I can put more of mine up. I don't think we should put up the text of the Express piece, as redundant; if we do, it's surely way down the priority list.
m.
June 1984, KPFA Folio, From Sputnik to the Free Speech Movement, William Mandel
"Despite the supposed slogan, "Don't trust anyone over 30," there were two members of the Executive Committee of the Free Speech Movement who had passed that age. In fact, we were old enough to be the parents of our fellow members. I had a son in college at that time; Hal Draper was an employee of the University."
1/16/1984, San Francisco Chronicle, SLATE, Jon Carroll
"Indirectly or directly, it led to the Free Speech Movement, People's Park, the Port Huron Statement and sundry other moments of sign-carrying and chant-chanting. It made Berkeley the national symbol for left-wing student activism.
¶
It was a whole lot of fun."
4/4/1983, San Francisco Chronicle, Berkeley's Gourmet Mafia, Blake Green
"Waters, a student at UC Berkeley in the '60s during the Free Speech Movement, says that in the counterculture era in which the restaurant opened, 'there was ... a great sense of your own self worth outside the established route. Money didn't seem to matter."
03/13/1983, San Francisco Chronicle, Shades of the '60s at Berkeley: Free speech debate rages anew, Charles Burress
06/07/1982, Daily Californian, Savio returns to discuss Daily Cal's FBI articles, Mandalit del Barco
"'I didn't know the FBI was following me across the country,' Savio said at a press conference in the Daily Californian's offices. 'I didn't know they had reporters planted at press conferences.'"
06/06/1982, Berkeley Gazette, FBI files show 'secret war' against radicals, UPI
"The FBI engages in a systemic "secret war" against radicals, leftists and liberal organizations at the University of California during the turbulent 1960s and early 70s, new documents reveal."
"Seth Rosenfeld, 26, researched and wrote the series in a project funded in part from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
6/5/1982, San Francisco Chronicle, FBI's Harassment Of Berkeley Leftists Detailed, Bill Wallace
06/05/1982, Oakland Tribune, '60s activists warn nuclear protesters of FBI probes, Kathy O'Toole
"Among those who returned Friday were antiwar activists Stewart Albert and his wife, Judy Clavir-Albert, who recently won a $20,000 out-of-court settlement for FBI break-ins and illegal listening devices in their rural New York home three years after the FBI now says it ended all that."
6/4/1982, Daily Californian, Of Spies & Radicals, Seth Rosenfeld
6/4/1982, Daily Californian, FBI--'We are out of that business forever', Seth Rosenfeld
6/2/1982, Daily Californian, FBI supplied governor with info about FSM, Seth Rosenfeld
6/1/1982, Daily Californian, How the feds kept track of the FSM, Seth Rosenfeld
5/28/1982, Daily Californian, The Berkeley Files: 17 years of FBI surveillance in Berkeley, Seth Rosenfeld
3/24/1982, Los Angeles Times, The Aging Revolutionaries, Al Martinez
"'What no one knew, says Steve Weissman from London, 'is that we didn't take the Free Speech Movement as seriously as the media did.
'We had an excellent sense of humor. Even Mario was self-deprecating.'"
2/24/1982, The Harvard Crimson, The Uses of Passion: American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony By Samuel P. Huntington, William E. Mckibben
"His [Samuel P. Huntington's] contention that the 1960s closely resembled the other 'creedal passion periods' in the degree of adherence to traditional American political values is not so much wrong as incomplete. Certainly, adherence to some 'American creed,' especially in the early years, is a current that runs through much of the writing from the New Left. Mario Savio, the leader of the Free Speech Movement on the Berkeley campus in the early 60s, wrote for example that 'the things we are asking for in our civil rights process have a deceptively quaint ring. We are asking for the due process of law ... We are asking that regulation ought to be considered as arrived at legitimately only from the consensus of the governed. These phrases are all pretty old, but they are not being taken seriously in American today.'"
06/04/1980, Daily Californian, FSM and concrete rights, Mia Ousley
last of 3 part interview with Mario Savio
06/03/1980, Daily Californian, U.S. military coup possible, Mia Ousley
2nd of 3 part interview with Mario Savio
06/02/1980, Daily Californian, Savio sees demise of two-party system, Mia Ousley
first of 3 part interview with Mario Savio
5/18/1978, Rolling Stone Magazine, A city takes a historic look at itself, and a writer takes a look at his own - and his city's - ghosts, Greil Marcus
"That night, at a party, I talked with a professor whose course in political theory I'd taken during the wondrously exuberant semester that followed the Free Speech Movement - a time when, with no fakery at all, the ideas of Plato, Rousseau, or whoever else one might be reading were linked with astonishing power to the political choices we considered every day. 'I almost quit after that,' the professor had told me once. 'I knew it could never be that good again.'"
01/27/1978, Berkeley Gazette, Action Man (column),
08/19/1977, Berkeley Gazette, Free speech era leader sued for divorce by wife,
3/10/1976, Chicago Daily News, It's time for the young--again, Eric Hoffer
"I was past middle age when the "Free Speech" movement exploded on the Berkeley campus in 1964. Like most older people, I was outraged by the sight of history made by juvenile delinquents."
1/15/1975, Los Angeles Times, Decade of Activists, Art Seidenbaum
"There was no week of national celebration, but America recently passed the 10th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, that time when Berkeley students started everything with a few foul well-chosen words."
December, 1974, California Monthly, Inside the FSM, Michael Rossman
"As seen through the national media and remembered in the public mind, the Free Speech Movement began in October 1964, when three thousand students held hostage a police car that had arrested a civil rights worker on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, and climaxed three months later when 800 students were arrested in the first campus sit-in, 10,000 more went on strike and shut the campus down, and the faculty voted to ratify the major student demands. During the next five years similar disturbances occurred on a thousand campuses, and the FSM came to be seen naively as the start of the student movement." [link takes reader to a variant of this article]
11/13/1974, The Review of The NEWS, What ever happened to Mario Savio?,
5/7/1973, Los Angeles Times, The Aging Revolutionaries, Al Martinez
04/05/1972, Berkeley Gazette, Mario Savio's Wife Files for a Divorce,
11/15/1971, New York Magazine, An Adult's Guide to New York, Washington, And Other Exotic Places, John Kenneth Galbraith
"Berkeley is, perhaps, the best place for the visitor to reflect on the role of the university in American life. It was there seven years ago that the student eruption, called the Free Speech Movement, occurred which spread around the world. Its meaning is still being debated in a scholarly way but one thing seems certain: it will be difficult to again persuade students in the United States that alcohol, sex, idleness, and intercollegiate athletics are desirable and wholesome academic aberations. An interest in politics seems inevitable."
8/9/1971, U.S. News & World Report, End of the 'Youth Revolt'?, By U.S. News Staff
"In 1964, young Mario Savio, then an undergraduate on the Berkeley campus, burst into national prominence as the fiery agitator of the Free Speech movement that set the pattern for future disruptions on the nation's campuses. He exhorted students to 'put your bodies upon the gears, upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and . . . make the [university] stop.'
¶
After expulsion he studied elsewhere for a time, took various jobs in Berkeley and ran unsuccessfully for State office. Today, a fading figure among a new generation of the young, he stays clear of politics, and is a nonenrolled 'auditor' of courses in organic chemistry with hopes of getting readmitted to seek a graduate degree in biology. With his wife and two children to support, he is also trying to get a steady job."
April 1971, Commentary, Letters: The Free Speech Movement, B. Meredith Burke
"Would Mr. Glazer have those long hours and weeks of quiet negotiations . . . transmuted into a passion for immediate action? "
02/23/1971, Berkeley Gazette, Statement from Savios,
02/17/1971, San Francisco Chronicle, Savios Quit Mayor Race,
01/29/1971, Berkeley Gazette, Savio's Wife Also Runs in Record Field, Mike Culbert and Patrick Murphy
"Former Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio and his wife both filed for mayor yesterday..."
11/4/1970, San Pablo News, Avakian Demurrer is Filed,
"A demurrer is on file in San Pablo Municipal Court in the case of Robert Avakian, 27, arrested on Sept. 25 for soliciting without a permit and a hearing is set for Friday.
Avakian, of 2746 Maricopa Ave., Richmond, one of the organizers and leaders of students who aided striking oil workers here last year, was selling a paper called "People Get Ready" in El Portal Shopping Center."
09/19/1970, Oakland Tribune, Student Protest Leader Savio Back,
"U.C. administrators confirmed yesterday that Savio, 27 and a father, has been admitted as an undergraduate in biological science."
09/19/1970, Berkeley Gazette, Mario Savio Will return To UC Campus This Fall, Lance Gilmore
"Mario Savio, leader of Berkeley's seminal Free Speech Movement in 1964 will return to the campus as a student this fall."
7/12/1970, New York Times Magazine, Where Are the Savios Of Yesteryear?; Most Free Speech members are still radical, still active, Wade Greene
"For if there was one common trait among all the Free Speechers I talked to, it was a deep involvement in the movement itself, fond memories of that involvement and the sense that if the occasion demanded, that experience-its techniques and its emotions-was something to draw upon for renewed activism." [eds note: Persons interviewed: Manuel Glenn Abascal, Bettina Aptheker, Duncan Ellinger, Art Goldberg, Matthew Hallinan, Carl and Myra Riskin, Michael Rossman, Mario Savio, Brian Turner, Jack Weinberg, Steve Weissman]
2/1/1970, Detroit Free Press, The Berkeley rebels five years later, Michael Maidenberg and Philip Meyer
"The young men and women who began the student rebellion five years ago in Berkeley, Cal., are older and wiser now. But for the most part age has not made them feel less radical.
¶
This finding, based on a six-month search for the rank-and-file Berkeley rebels of five years ago, contradicts a hope cherished by much of the older generation. The youth movement is not a passing fling by over-active children. Its effects linger when their childhood is gone."
08/01/1969, Berkeley Gazette, Of Savio, Neo-Communism and Challenge of Leisure Society, Mike Culbert
"It was Savio for whom the terms 'mystique' and 'charisma' were coined in discussing the student rebellion of Berkeley in 1964-65, and it was Savio who was the emotion-engendering surface leader of the Free Speech movement."
7/1/1969, The Daily Californian, Seize the Means of Leisure, Mario Savio
Mario Savio Speech delivered 6/26/1969 at noon rally in People's Park
07/01/1969, Daily Californian, Mario Savio: 'Seize the Means of Leisure',
speech delivered at a noon rally prior Thursday, 06/26/1969, People's Park
06/27/1969, San Francisco Chronicle, New in Berkeley--People's Pad, Bill Moore
"During the noon rally at Sproul Hall steps, more than 4000 heard Mario Savio, the leader of the Free Speech Movement, declare that the reason 'the establishment is afraid of us is that the young are finally challenging the properrty relations of this society.'"
06/27/1969, San Francisco Chronicle, Familiar Voice at UC (photo),
"Mario Savio (right) came out of self-imposed exile to address a huge rally at the University of California yesterday."
06/27/1969, Daily Californian, A Radical Analysis of the Park, Joe Pichirallo
People's Park rally. Speakers included Mario Savio, Frank Bardacke, Tom Hayden, Dan Siegel, and Jim Turner. Savio, presenting a theoretical explanation for People's Park pointed out that the present one is the first generation with 'time on its hands. As children of the post-industrial age we are seizing the tools of leisure."
06/27/1969, Berkeley Gazette, Savio Speaks Out (photo),
06/04/1969, Wall Street Journal, Once a Rebel..., Thomas B. Carter
Leaders of Berkeley's 1964 Student Rebellion Still in Radical Camp A 'New Society' Is Demanded; Art Goldberg Goes to Jail, gets Law Degree, Writes. A Quiet Life for Mario Savio
05/27/1969, Berkeley Gazette, Fresh Issues Helped Obscure Reality of 'People's Park', Mike Culbert
"Another famous FSMer who has been on the scene was none other than Mario Savio, a one-time Peace and Freedom senatorial candidate."
09/23/1968, San Francisco Chronicle, The 'New Party' Leaders Meet, Times-Post Service
Representatives included Mario Savio
5/14/1968, San Francisco Chronicle, Savio OKd as a Speaker,
"The regional office of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development ruled yesterday that Mario Savio is welcome to address some of its employees, even if others object.
¶
Director Robert B. Pitts said Savio, a Peace and Freedom party candidate for Assemblyman, would address HUD's 25 interns as scheduled at 9:30 a.m. tomorrow.
¶
'The interns decide themselves who their speakers should be and I don't think we should interfere,' said Pitts, who acknowledges there had been "a handful" of complaints from some senior staff members.
¶
SESSIONS¶
HUD spokesmen said the interns, who are chosen from universities all over the Nation to train for management positions, hold a once-a-week morning-long bull session on topics of their own choosing.
¶
Savio will speak on 'the disenfranchised elements of American society and and the urban crisis.' He will also discuss the Black Panther party's alliance with the Peace and Freedom party."
05/03/1968, Berkeley Gazette, Mario Proposes Robin Hood Society---'Take From Rich...',
04/24/1968, Thousand Oaks Times, Mario Savio Speaks Thursday,
"He is running on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket for the State Senate seat now held by Nicholas Petris."
04/09/1968, Daily Californian, Savio Condemns Democratic Party as Racist, Val Miner
Mario Savio: "I got out of the draft by having a baby. It's the best way I know to put into practice the slogan 'make love not war.'"
"Actually it is a more serious minded Mario Savia (sic) who is running as Peace and Freedom Party candidate for state Senator from the 11th district.
Savio called for a massive redistribution of the wealth in this country, declaring that the support for ghetto reform will and must come from the upper classes. This in turn can only be done through massive legilation."
04/02/1968, SF Examiner, UC Braces for Cong Rally Reaction, Lynn Ludlow
Speakers were familiar figures on the Berkeley campus.
They included Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense; Mario Savio, now a candidate for the State Senate in the Peace and Freedom Party; Don Duncan, the onetime Green Beret turned war critic; Pete Camejo, who says he is a Trotskyist Communist; John Roemer, UC graduate student and spokesman for the proMaoist Progresive Labor Party, and the former Vietnamese, Nguen Van Luy, a cook now on a speaking tour.
3/28/1968, Sacramento Bee, TenBroek, Blind Legal Scholar, Dies Of Cancer, AP
"SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Canadian-born Prof. Jacobus tenBroek, blind legal scholar and noted civil libertarian, is dead of cancer at the age of 56.
Dr. tenBroek was the author of "Antislavery Origins of the 14th Amendment, " cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1954 landmark decision of desegregation, and "Prejudice, War and the Constitution," a crtitque of the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans.
...
He fought against California's loyalty oath in the 1950 controversy and in the 1964 Free Speech Movement made speeches from Braille notes."
03/25/1968, Berkeley Gazette, Mario in Race as PFPer,
"Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio, now 25, has entered politics officially by filing as a candidate for State senator in the 11th District."
03/11/1968, Berkeley Gazette, Mario Savio Courts PFP Support, Lari Blumenfeld
2/20/1968, KRON-TV, Mario Savio Reflects on the Free Speech Movement,
"KRON-TV News footage from February 20th 1968 featuring brief scenes from an interview with Mario Savio on the street, who is asked by a reporter to reflect on his involvement with the 1964 Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. Holding his infant son Stefan, Savio replies: "Would I do it again ... Absolutely! I think it was one of the most valuable events in American higher education and probably the best thing that ever happened to the University of California." Opening graphic designed by Carrie Hawks."
11/16/1967, Berkeley Gazette, Teach-In Set For Tomorrow, Fred Gardner and Jim Carberry
"A brief on behalf of the 11 University of California students recommended for suspension has been filed with Chancellor Roger W. Hayns by Mario Savio, FSM leader, and Reginald Zelnick, professor of history."
11/03/1967, Berkeley Gazette, Mrs. Savio Fined $110, Associated Press
"PLEASANTON (AP) --Mrs. Suzanne Savio, 28, has been placed on probation and fined $110 after pleading 'no contest' in municipal court to a charge of disturbing the peace while visiting her husband, Mario, in jail last month."
10/27/1967, Sacramento Bee, Savio's Wife Promises To Avoid Demonstrations, AP
"BERKELEY (AP) -- Suzanne Savio, 28, a leader in the Free Speech Movement which shook the University of California three years ago, got out of a 45-day jail term Thursday by promising not to participate in any 'illegal lie-in, walk-in, sit-in or stand-in' for the next two years."
10/26/1967, San Francisco Chronicle, Reagan slams tolerance of dissent, Michael Harris
"It would be naïve, Reagan declared, to rule out the possibility that Communists had a hand in last week's anti-draft demonstration in Oakland. 'You just don't have spontaneous demonstrations.'" [Ed note: As if none but Communists can organize. But that's even scarier.]
10/26/1967, Sacramento Bee, Savio Is Released From Jail Early, AP
"BERKELEY (AP) -- Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement's 1964 sit-in occupation of Sproul Hall on the University of California Berkeley campus, was freed from jail after serving 120 days of a 200-day jail term.
"Mario was a model prisoner and it appears Mario has reformed, " said Municipal Judge Floyd F. Talbott yesterday in suspending the remaining 80 days of Savio's term."
07/26/1967, San Francisco Chronicle, A Penalty Limit For Savio, Rubin,
07/21/1967, San Francisco Chronicle, Jail Impact' Inquiry for Mrs. Savio,
"Berkeley-Albany Municipal Judge George Brunn granted the delay after attorney Stanley Golde explained that the 28-year-old Mrs. Savio needed to be near her 18-month-old son.
...
He added that mrs. Savio could not leave the child because he had suffered 'neurological dammage' at birth."
07/21/1967, Oakland Tribune, Savio's Wife Wins Third Stay of Term,
05/19/1967, Berkeley Gazette, , Mike Culbert
F.S.M. (AP) Dept.:--Yes, believe it or not, it's true. Mario Savio has been chosen as first recipient for something called the Free Speech Movement Scholarship Fund of the First Unitarian Church of Berkeley.
4/7/1967, Time Magazine, Reporting: The Perils of Crowd Counting,
"When rebellious students massed at Berkeley's Sproul Hall Plaza last December, how many were there? Police estimated 7,000 to 10,000, and the newspapers dutifully reported the figure. But one reader was dissatisfied. 'Estimating the size of a crowd may be the last area of fantasy in the newspaper business,' observed Herbert A. Jacobs, 63, a longtime Wisconsin newspaperman who now lectures at the University of California. Jacobs set out to make a more scientific calculation.
¶
First, he bought an enlarged aerial photograph of the mob scene, ruled it off in 1-in. squares, and used a magnifying glass to count heads. After four hours of eye-wracking work, he reached the total: 2,804-less than half of the swollen newspaper estimates. To find a mathematical short cut to more precise estimation, he showed up at other rallies, noted that the plaza was divided into 22-ft. squares. By counting the number of students in several squares and dividing, he was able to compute the average area occupied by an individual. This varied, he deduced, from a minimum of 4 sq. ft. in a tightly packed crowd to a maximum of 9.5 sq. ft. in a loosely knit one.
¶
Then, by doing a little arithmetic, Jacobs arrived at what he calls the 'Jacobs Crowd Formula': pace off the length and breadth of any crowd, add the two figures, multiply by seven for a slack crowd, by ten for a dense one."
4/1/1967, Los Angeles Times, Hoover Assails Filthy Speech, Play 'Macbird!': Says Groups Are Determined to Destroy Acceptable Standards of Sane Behavior, Associated Press
"Hoover fired his broadside in a forward to the FBI's monthly law enforcement bulletin which is distributed free to about 57,000 law enforcement officials.
¶
Small but vocal groups, Hoover said, 'seem bent on eliminating all ethical practices relating to our established order.'
¶
Cites Dangers
He said the nation 'cannot live with lawlessness, unbridled vulgarity, obscenity, blasphemy, perversion and public desecration of every sacred and just symbol.'
¶
In an obvious reference to Barbara Garson's off-Broadway 'Macbird!' Hoover said: 'We should be alarmed when widespread recognition and monetary awards go to a person who writes a 'satirical' piece of trash which maliciously defames the President of our country and insinuates he murdered his predecessor.'"
03/07/1967, Blu-Print (Wheaton College), Wheaton Student Becomes Berkeley Marxist,
A shocking story was revealed in Christianity Today for March 3, 1967, by Edward E. Plowman concerning a young fellow, Steve Hamilton, 22, "who now awaits sentencing for trespassing in last year's University of California student uprising. Hamilton is one of several well-known revolutionaries at UC's Berkeley campus who had planned to become a clergyman. Mario Savio had had his sights set on the jesuit priesthood. Stewart Albert had planned to be a rabbi.
02/22/1967, Oakland Tribune, Savio Withdraws Admission Plea,
"Savio was refused readmission to the current quarter because of a violation of campus rules last November while he was not a student."
2/9/1967, The New York Review of Books, The Berkeley Crisis, Sheldon Wolin & John Schaar
01/14/1967, Berkeley Gazette, M. Savio To Address Sunday Meet,
"Non-student activist Mario Savio will open a series of dialogues on 'crisis-issues' this Sunday at the first Unitarian Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd.
...
The Peace Committee of the Church will hear at 7:30 p.m. from Berkeley's Madeline Duckles, recently returned from Europe, on what the peace groups in Europe are doing. The public is invited."
12/22/1966, La Vanguardia Espanola, NUEVA YORK: Se preven graves disturbios estudiantiles en la Universidad californiana de Berkeley,
"La crítica de la señorita Aptheker es típica entre los estudiantes de Berkeley. Hace dos años, Mario Savio, uno de los cabecillas del 'movimiento pro libertad de expresión', se hizo popular por su critica de la Universidad de Berkeley como una 'multiversidad'. La expresión, en el significado que le daba Savio, quería decir que aquella Universidad se había convertido en una institución tan grande, tan impersonal, tan preocupada por las tareas burocráticas, que era incapaz de desempeñar el 'papei clásico de una Universidad': el diálogo entre profesores y estudiantes."
12/15/1966, The Washington Star Syndicte, Inc., On the Right Berkeley, William F. Buckley Jr.
"At this writing, Chancellor Hayns has electrified the academic world by saying No to Mario Savio, an audacious thing to do..."
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,898487,00.html12/09/1966, Time Magazine, Universities: Sad Scenes at Berkeley,
"Governor-elect Ronald Reagan repeated his campaign call for a Berkeley investigation, said the new disorder was caused by 'middle-aged delinquents.'"
12/6/1966, The Telegraph, A Cheer for Mario Savio, Russell Baker
"HE WAS ALSO BLESSED with a talent for rabble-rousing that marked him as a potential politician of great promise, particularly in the manic electoral air of California. The worrisome question was how the mature Savio would use his assets after leaving the campus.
¶
The opportunities that beckon the young to abuse their talents these days are many. Would Savio put on a necktie and run for Congress? Would he yield to the glamorous lure of becoming a tv panel guest, ready on 30 minutes call to substitute for Zsa Zsa Gabor on the Johnny Carson show or to meet Bill Buckley and Norman Mailer jaw-to-jaw under the management of David Suskind?"
12/6/1966, KRON TV, Mario Savio On Long Term Struggle At UC Berkeley (1966),
"KRON-TV News footage from December 6th 1966 featuring brief scenes of a speech by Mario Savio at UC Berkeley. He declares: "We have a long range struggle. We're gonna be back next term because our demands haven't been met … The Chancellor's gonna have to understand it, the Board of Regents has to understand it, Ronnie Reagan ... They all have to understand that until, until, until we govern ourselves where that is appropriate ... until that happens they're gonna have trouble." Opening graphic designed by Carrie Hawks."
12/4/1966, The New York Times, A Showdown Is Expected in Strike at Berkeley; Most Campus Organizations Are Supporting Boycott, Ben A. Franklin
"One nonstudent on the committee is Mr. Savio, who was the key figure in the Free Speech Movement here in 1964. Tonight, leaders of the strike offered to make Mr. Savio a "silent observer" instead of a spokesman in negotiations."
11/09/1966, San Francisco Chronicle, Savio Is Refused UC Readmission,
October 1966, Harper's, The Uncertain Future of the Multiversity: A Partisan Scrutiny of Berkeley's Muscatine Report, Mario Savio
"The Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the fall of 1964 brought into focus the deepest conflicts dividing American society."
Sept. 1966, Atlantic, The Decline of Freedom at Berkeley, Feuer, Lewis S.
6/3/1966, The Harvard Crimson, SDS-- Harvard's New Left--Feels 'Underprivileged' In Generation Which Prizes Making Own Decisions, Daniel J. Singal
"This very point came into perspective at a recent Leverett House Junior-Senior dinner during a speech by Archibald MacLeish, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, Emeritus. MacLeish pointed to the other senior faculty members at the head table, such as Mark DeWolfe Howe and Howard Manford Jones, and called for a return to the traditional Harvard values. He derided the concept of the University as a vocational school and insisted upon education for its own sake. Many present observed that MacLeish was making the same demands as Mario Savio and the other leaders of the Free Speech Movement. Ironically, senior faculty members must lecture their students against "professionalism" at Harvard, while just the opposite is true at Berkeley."
5/1/1966, ACLU News, Favorable Ruling In Sit-In Case,
4/1/1966, East Bay Labor Journal, Teachers must repent & be saved: Rafferty,
3/31/1966, The Martlet, Student Killed in U.S. Crash, Parents Irate, Lynn Curtis
[FSM Arrestee] "Rolf-Hasso Lutz attended the University of Victoria in 1962-1963.
¶
He came to this university from Germany and studied Chemistry, Physics, Math and Russian. The next year he moved to California and attended the University of California at Berkeley.
¶
On August 10, 1965 he stepped from a small roadside cafe, started his motorcycle and pulled out on U.S. Highway 87 in Texas. Eight minutes later he was killed in a head-on collision with a car that swerved into his path.
¶
The driver of that car was U.S. Army captain and Medical Officer A. W. Anderson, who was then stationed in Fort Houston, Texas. Lutz was not pronounced dead until five days after the accident. No doctor would provide the certification.
¶
His aunt, Mrs. E. V. Schalke of Victoria, went down to Eden, Texas to investigate the accident. Lutz's mother also traveled from Germany to the small Texas town. "A lot of things ame to light when we went down there," Mrs. Schalke said.
¶
Mrs. Schalke feels there are many things which they Texas authorities are trying to cover up.
¶
'They expressed surprise that Hasso Lutz's parents were in a position to come to Texas for arrangements to take their son home to Germany, as they thought Hasso was 'only a poor foreign exchange student.' The manner 'in which the investigation of the accident was handled will remain a lasting blot on the state of Texas and the Concho County,' Mrs. Schalke said."
3/21/1966, Berkeley Daily Gazette, Berkeley Teacher Fights For Credential Renewal,
3/19/1966, San Francisco Examiner, Berkeley Sit-In Teacher in Trouble, Francis Hamilton
3/19/1966, San Francisco Chronicle, Sit-In Teacher's Fight To Keep Her Credential,
3/19/1966, Berkeley Daily Gazette, Teacher Fights Ruling,
3/18/1966, San Francisco Examiner, UC Sit-In Teacher Fights State Ban,
3/18/1966, Daily Californian, Teachers Go on 'Trial',
3/11/1966, Daily Californian, Religion and FSM, Ann Metzelaar
"(Editor's note: this is the fourth in a four-part series on some of the studies being made by the Center for the Study of Higher Education.)"
3/10/1966, Daily Californian, Above-Average Students Joined FSM, Ann Metzelaar
"(Editor's note: this is the third in a three-part series on some of the studies being made by the Center for the Study of Higher Education.)"
February, 1966, ACLU Open Forum, Teaching Credentials Battle Swirls On; Hearings Scheduled, Bill Plosser
1/9/1966, Los Angeles Times, Rafferty Hit in Credential Sit-In Case, Daryl E. Lembke
1/5/1966, San Francisco Chronicle, Rafferty 'Censorship' Hit, Associated Press
1/5/1966, Berkeley Daily Gazette, School Board Echoes To 'Sit-in' Refrain, Mike Culbert
1/3/1966, Sports Illustrated, To The Big Game and To The Barricades, Alfred Wright
"One thing is clear from all this: the Cal student, whoever he may be, bugs his elders. Which is just the way he likes it. If one had the temerity to pick a single point on which most Cal students agree, it would have to be that his elders bug him. Or, to put it another way, his elders represent the Establishment, and the Establishment bugs him. If you want to see him breathe fire and brimstone, get him talking about his obsessions—'Happy TV-land' or 'Big Daddy Johnson' or suburbia with swimming pools. Last year, at the peak of the Free Speech Movement demonstrations that rocked Berkeley for months, there was a rampant cry: 'Never trust anyone over 30.' That would still serve as a good working slogan for the prevailing attitude on this fascinating, enormous and extraordinarily active campus."
1966, KPIX TV, Mario Savio Press Conference on UC Berkeley Hearing, Ben Williams
"KPIX News footage from 1966 featuring a report by Ben Williams on a UC Berkeley hearing, which will determine if student and activist Mario Savio will be re-admitted to classes. Includes a press conference with Savio, who explains in detail what's happening and also reflects on the current situation on campus, in relation to the Free Speech Movement of 1964. Ends with silent views of Savio walking on campus. Opening graphic designed by Carrie Hawks."
12/3/1965, Time Magazine, Universities: Berkeley, One Year Later,
"At Cal, she has repeatedly marched, protested and demonstrated, getting arrested twice. She was a top leader of last year's Free Speech Movement, which, in the memorable words of Student Leader Mario Savio,* forced education at Berkeley to 'grind to a halt.' The movement foundered last spring after some of its members shouted obscenities, insisting that this was free speech. Bettina succeeded to the eleven-member board that runs F.S.M.'s muchdiminished reincarnation, the Free Student Union....*Now in England studying philosophy at Oxford."
December 1965 & January 1966, Liberation Magazine, Generational Revolt in the Free Speech Movement, Gerald Rosenfield
11/21/1965, New York Times, California Coed, 21, Is the American Communist Party's Foremost Ingenue, John Corry
"Bettina Aptheker, who grew up in Flatbush, pestered ballplayers for autographs outside Ebbets Field and visited Prospect Park every Sunday, is, at 21, the foremost ingenue of the Communist party."
October 1965, Ladies Home Journal, Coeds in Rebellion, Betty Hannah Hoffman
"Confronted by the ever-deepening gulf between generations that is made more acute in the face of constantly accelerating social change, these young existentialists look not to their elders but to each other for confirmation of their values, attitudes and morals. They found this sense of communion in the Free Speech Movement. 'It's like having our own little university,' one of Savio's acquaintances said. 'We turn each other on, tune each other in, jog up the old perceptions, communicate with somebody who listens, who feels, who wants to know why, just the way you do yourself.'"
9/27/1965, The Nation, Berkeley Free Speech Movement, 1964, Hunter Thompson
"One of the realities to come out of last semester's action is the new 'anti-outsider law,' designed to keep 'nonstudents' off the campus in any hour of turmoil. It was sponsored by Assemblyman Don Mulford, a Republican from Oakland, who looks and talks quite a bit like the 'old' Richard Nixon. Mr. Mulford is much concerned about 'subversive infiltration' on the Berkeley campus, which lies in his district. He thinks he knows that the outburst last fall was caused by New York Communists, beatnik perverts and other godless elements beyond his ken. The students themselves, he tells himself, would never have caused such a ruckus. Others in Sacramento apparently shared this view: the bill passed the Assembly by a vote of 54 to 11 and the Senate by 27 to 8. Governor Brown signed it on June 2. The Mulford proposal got a good boost, while it was still pending, when J. Edgar Hoover testified in Washington that forty-three Reds of one stripe or another were involved in the Free Speech Movement."
9/18/1965, The New York Times, Youth With a Cause, Without a Purpose, A. H. Raskin
"THE student uprising at the Berkeley campus of the University of California was one of those rare beacons that illuminate a whole sector of American society and disclose massive unrest when we had serenely assumed our institutions were most impregnable."
September 1965, Fortune, On the Campus: A Troubled Reflection of the U.S., Max Ways
"Recent disturbances at centers of higher education may be early warning signals of a deep-seated conflict between present U.S. society and its outdated image of itself. The University of California is where the danger--and the opportunity--have become most vivid."
7/20/1965, San Francisco Examiner, 19 Reject Probation At UC Trial, Fred Allgood
"Judge Crittenden paused in the routine procedure of handing down his sentences when Diane Kepner and her husband Gordon Kepner, a 28-year-old graduate student in biophysics appeared and declined to accept terms of probation.
¶
'I want you to know, Mr. Kepner that your wife is a very fine teacher,' the judge said. 'She taught my two children and I hold her in the greatest respect.'
¶
The Kepners wil1 return next week for sentence."
7/19/1965, Modesto Bee, Judge Gives Demonstrators Fines, No Jail, AP
"In general the judge meted out $150 fines, 10-day suspended jail sentences and one year probabtion to each of the demonstrators. Fifty nine faced sentencing today.
¶
One leader of the former free speech movement, Ronald Anastasi, was fined $200, given a 30 day suspended jail sentence, and placed on two year's probation.
¶
Crittenden dismissed charges of unlawful assembly placed agained all 773."
7/15/1965, SF Examiner, Mario Savio Guilty--'Leave Me Alone',
"Savio refused to pose for photographs when he arrived with his wife, the former Suzanne Goldberg (also a defendant), and rasped, 'Why don't you leave me alone?' when newspapermen approached him.
Since resigning his leadership of the FSM in May and marrying Suzanne, he has worked at UC as a research assistant in physics.
Judge Crittenden completed handing down down judgements on the 773 demonstrators yesterday--all were found guilty--and sentencing begins Monday."
6/19/1965, The New York Times, Reds Are Linked to Strife at Berkeley, Lawrence E. Davies
"'Experienced and disciplined members of the Communist movement' were 'deep in the heart of' a group that guided peace-shattering demonstrations last fall and winter on the University of California's Berkeley campus, a State Senate subcommittee charged today."
June, 1965, San Francisco Magazine, FSM (after they've torn it down), Jann Wenner
"The Berkeley campus, like Vietnam, may never be off the front pages. The semester began peacefully enough, but then students were arrested for using a common four-letter word on campus. The word was so powerful that, as Art Hoppe suggested, the University fell down. The "resignations" of President Clark Kerr and Acting Chancellor Martin Meyerson precipitated a crisis, a crisis differing only in that it was the direct action of the Administration, specifically Clark Kerr. Kerr didn't resign though, he just announced his intention to do so at a highly unusual surprise press conference. Thus the Regents had no actual resignation to accept, and would have had to fire Kerr, something he knew they couldn't do. Because of his crumbling stature within and without the University, Kerr was trying to strengthen his position and have the governor, the public and the statewide faculties and student bodies rally to his cause."
5/24/1965, The New York Times, Head of Coast Students Weds Philosophy Graduate,
"Mario Savio, who led the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, was married today."
5/20/1965, Village Voice, Campus Across the River: Cause Without a Rebel, Jack Newfield
"Although most of the ingredients are present, Brooklyn College's current spasms of student unrest have so far appeared more naive and high-schoolish than the portents of a rebellion on the scale of Berkeley. The B.C. protests have been flabby and polite, despite the presence of a large student body (10,000, day-session) predominantly Jewish and from working-class origins; despite the college's location in the most liberal city in the country; despite the presence of an eager martyr in the professor who deliberately abjured his loyalty oath; and despite an authoritarian administration that has provided a host of potentially explosive issues to the would-be rebels. The only catalysts that seem to be missing are a cadre of graduate students and a creative charismatic leader such as Mario Savio."
5/19/1965, San Francisco Examiner, The Disruptions From the Left, editors
"President Clark Kerr of the University of California was the first to say that Communists were involved in the student rebellion that rocked the Berkeley Campus last autumn.
¶
During the period of greatest unrest, The Examiner published photographs of demonstrators and identified several as members of the Communist Party.
¶
Now it is revelaed that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover told a congressional committee that at least 43 individuals with Communist backgrounds played active roles in the explosive developments at Berkeley"
05/19/1965, Rolla Daily News, Savio on Trial,
"Free speech movement sparkplug Mario Savio has testified that he did not vote in last November's election."
"Savio was described to Congress recently in testimony by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover as 'a student leader and spokesman for the Free Speech Movement FSM," and 'had associated with a member of the Marxist-oriented W. E. B. DuBois Club of Berkeley' and 'had traveled with Bettina Aptheker on a tour of midwestern colleges.'"
5/8/1965, Saturday Evening Post, The Explosive Revival of the Far Left, Richard Armstrong
"Swarms of young people on college campuses and in cities across the nation are joining new radical groups. Some are almost peaceful; others are so militant that even the American Communist Party deplores and disowns them. Their hero is Fidel Castro. Their program is protest. They joy in tangling with the police. not since the depression has America's radical left been so full of noise and fire." [many FSM photos]
5/7/1965, Time Magazine, Students: Bonaparte's Retreat,
"Ever since the student protest movement at the University of California degenerated into a naughty-naughty display of obscene words in March, it has fallen into impotent fragments. Last week Mario Savio, the protest leader who got so much attention that he quit his studies to protest full time, mounted his customary podium on Berkeley's Sproul Hall steps to tell 3,000 students that he was quitting as leader of the Free Speech Movement."
5/4/1965, Miami Herald, 'Free Speech' Leader Looks At Campus Protest, Martha Ingle
"Marilyn [Noble] predicts that the movement is not over yet.
'I thought it was licked in December. The FSM officially disbanded but it was reconstituted in March. After the student body voted that graduate students should have a voice in campus government, the board of regents nullified the election. Now everybody is upset.'"
May-June 1965, The Spartacist, The Student Revolt at Berkeley, Geoffrey White
"The intangible gains have been summed up by Bob Starobin, a teaching assistant in History, a former editor of Root and Branch, and delegate to the FSM Executive Committee from the Graduate Coordinating Committee, in the following eight points:
¶
The myth of liberalism has been completely shattered.
The students have a much better understanding of the bureaucratic mentality and how to deal with it.
They have had an education in political alignments and how political power is distributed. They know better how power is achieved and held.
They have developed serious doubts about the Democratic Party and in many cases overt hostility toward it.
They have had an education in tactics, especially in the uses and limitations of civil disobedience.
They learned about the unreliability of the press. Even the Chronicle lies.
They have received an education on the role and nature of the police.
The faculty felt, correctly, that they had lost the respect of their students."
May 1965, Sing Out!, Songs from Berkeley, Irwin Silber
"No one knows just how many songs were written by U. C. students, their faculty friends, and intellectual Berkeley neighbors. But songs and singing were an integral part of the now historic battle on the California campus spearheaded by the Free Speech Movement (FSM).
¶
It is hardly a coincidence that the most significant demonstration of student unrest on American campuses of the last decade should be characterized by an outburst of topical song. It is a reflection of the sure hold folksinging has on the campus -- and the great flexibility of the topical/ folk song tradition that lends itself to spontaneous expression.
¶
To date, the Free Speech Movement has produced a songbook, two 12-inch LPs, and a 7-inch LP of topical Christmas carols. Leading folksingers (Joan Baez, Barbara Dane, the Freedom Singers, Malvina Reynolds) have lent their voices to the battle - and a whole bevy of writers and song-leaders have played a leading role in the movement."
May, 1965, San Francisco Magazine, FSM: an Undergraduate Viewpoint, Jann Wenner
"After weeks of protest leaflets, petitions, negotiations, picket lines, marches, letter campaigns, an all-night vigil, and the capture of a police car, the Board of Regents on November 20 lifted the interdict on social and political action, but only so long as the action was lawful. Advocacy which might result in illegal action-a sit-in, for instance-remained forbidden, Thus the 'double jeopardy' issue was born, The students argued that only the courts should judge what is legal or illegal, and if illegal, what the punishment should be. They recognized the Regents' right to regulate time, place, and manner of political expression to prevent interference with classes and educational functions, but said giving the administration such powers of adjudication, in addition to the courts, gave the University powers of 'prior restraint and censorship of content.'"
May, 1965, Ramparts, The Psychology of Berkeley, letter to the Editor, Neal Blumenfeld
4/30/1965, The New York Times, COAST STUDENTS FORM NEW GROUP; ' Free Speech Movement' at Berkeley Is Dissolving, Lawrence E. Davies
"The Free Speech Movement at the University of California is dissolving, and a new organization is being formed to replace it."
4/29/1965, Daily Californian, 'Student Union' Urged; FSM to Fade Away, John F. Oppendahl
04/22/1965, Tocsin, The West's Leading Anti-communist Weekly, Savio's Viet Nam Vow,
4/22/1965, Oakland Tribune, Students Teach in Classless Society, Art Buchwald
"The question is why, and I think I've got the answer. The reason the college students are doing so much demonstrating is that there is no one in class to teach them anymore.
¶
Almost every full professor is either writing a book, guest lecturing at another university, or taking a year off to write a report for President Johnson.
¶
Therefore, he has turned over his course to a graduate instructor who is either working on his Ph.D., traveling on a Fulbright scholarship, or picketing in Montgomery, Alabama. So, he in turn has turned the class over to one of the brighter students who is never there because he works on the college newspaper, is a member of the student senate, or is a delegate to his national fraternity."
4/12/1965, New Leader, Pornopolitics and the University, Feuer, Lewis S.
April 9, 1965, Science Magazine, Crisis at Berkeley, Elinor Langer
4/6/1965, Daily Californian, 4800 Vote in 'Freedom' Graduate Poll, Jai Singh
"Approximately 4800 students voted yesterday in the first day of the 'freedom ballot' to 'elect' graduate representatives to the ASUC Senate, according to Skip Richheimer, a member of the Graduate Coordinating Committee."
3/31/1965, Berkeley Daily Gazette, Berkeley Police Inspector R. J. Gorman Looks at his Roomfull of Pictures,
"Each of the more than 700 Sproul Hall sit-in demonstrators Dec. 3 had to be 'mugged.'"
3/29/1965, Daily Californian, Grad Election Halted, Dave Newman
"The Board of Regents Friday [3/26/1965] voted not to allow the graduate students into the ASUC, despite two student elections on the issue."
3/23/1965, The Florida Alligator, 'Obscenity not the major issue at Berkeley', Fran Snider
"The obscenity question is not the major issue on the University of California Berkeley campus, Stephan Weissman, member of the steering committee of the Free Speech Movement (FSM), claimed yesterday
¶
Weissman, in Gainesville to address members of Freedom Forum at their meeting tomorrow night, claimed that members of the FSM were more interested inexercising the rights they had already won."
3/19/1965, Time Magazine, Students: The Berkeley Effect,
"Spring usually generates a mild lunacy in the American college student; this year it is bringing a radical testing of law and the university, all with candid disregard for consequences. To students across the country -- or at least to that bright, neurotic tenth of them who make themselves visible -- the effect of six months of tumult at Berkeley has been to show, as Yale Student Bruce Payne expresses it, that 'students have become somebody in being able to act together.'"
3/19/1965, Time Magazine, Universities: Stiffening the Spine,
"At a time when student unrest on the University of California's Berkeley campus seemed to be simmering down, a handful of cause-hunting students and some off-campus beatniks suddenly began shouting obscene words into a public-address system at Sproul Hall and displaying them on signs. The reaction of Berkeley police against what quickly got dubbed the 'filthy speech movement' was swift: nine demonstrators were arrested (six turned out not to be registered students)."
3/17/1965, San Francisco Chronicle, , Arthur Hoppe
"The President and the Chancellor, who had, of course, immediately resigned, selflessly withdrew their resignations. 'The issue,' they said, 'is not whether Sam should be strung up by the thumbs. We all agree to that. But simple justice requires we should hold the proper hearings before we string him up by the thumbs.'"
3/13/1965, The New Yorker, LETTER FROM BERKELEY, Calvin Trillin
"Still, according to President Kerr, the damage done to the university in respect to fund-raising, appropriations, and the maintenance of good relations with the legislature and the alumni may continue for years."
3/12/1965, Time Magazine, STUDENTS: Savio Goes to Jail,
"Giving jury trials to the 773 students arrested in last December's students' uprising on the Berkeley campus of the University of California would be one massive judicial headache, tying up the court and at least some of the students through next summer. Instead, Berkeley Municipal Court Judge Rupert Crittenden has been permitting the defend ants to file through court and waive their rights to a jury, thus leaving verdicts to him. Periodically he asked them whether they understood that they were giving up a constitutional right."
3/11/1965, The New York Times, Kerr's Resignation at Berkeley Is Laid to Conflicts With Regents, Lawrence E. Davies
"Clark Kerr's decision to resign as president of the University of California was ascribed by knowledgeable sources today to continued interference with administrative details by individual members of the Board of Regents."
3/10/1965, The Nation, The Rise of the New Student Left, Jack Newfield
"Their revolt is not only against capitalism but against the values of middle-class America: hypocrisy called Brotherhood Week, assembly lines called colleges; conformity called status, bad taste called Camp, and quiet desperation called success.
At the climax of the Washington march, arms linked and singing "We Shall Overcome," were the veterans of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, freshmen from small Catholic colleges, clean-shaven intellectuals from Ann Arbor and Cambridge, the fatigued shock troops of SNCC, Iowa farmers, impoverished urban Negroes organized by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), beautiful high school girls without make-up, and adults, many of them faculty members, who journeyed to Washington for a demonstration conceived and organized by students."
3/6/1965, San Francisco Chronicle, A Few Firm Words about UC 'Crusade, Don Wegars
3/2/1965, San Francisco Chronicle, 206 in UC Sit-In Waive Jury Trial,
Mars-Avril, 1965, Socialisme ou Barbarie, La rébellion des étudiants (1a bataille de l'Université de Berkeley), Solidarity, Bob Potter
"Une grande bataille est actuellement engagée par les étudiants de l'Université de Californie, à Berkeley, aux Etats-Unis, Ils défendent leur droit à exercer des activités politiques à l'intérieur de l'université, sans être limités par les rèales arbitraires et les restrictions imposées par les autorités académiques.
¶
L'origine du conflit a été une règle interdisant toute propaganda politique ou sociale, tout recrutement ou collecte d'argent pour des objectifs politiques déplaisant à l'administration de l'Université.
¶
Cette lutte nous paraît intéressante à la fois par son objet qui est la défense des droits politiques et par l'expérience qui y a été faite de nouvelles méthodes d'action directe. Elle souliane certains dilemmes que doit affronter une société riche mais de plus en plus bureaucratique. Elle illustre le genre de crises qu'une telle société a tendance à susciter. Elle peut nous servir d'exemple par ses objectifs et par ses méthodes." ¶
[Ed Note: Translated from British publication Solidarity: http://libcom.org/files/students-revolt.pdf]
March, 1965, Liberation, Ten Letters on Free Speech, Paul Goodman
Spring, 1965, Dissent, Berkeley in February, Paul Goodman
02/26/1965, Life Magazine, The university has become a factory, Jack Fincher
"The thing's turned on its head. Those who should give orders--the faculty and students--take orders, and those who should tend to keeping the sidewalks clean, to seeing that we have enough classrooms--the administrators--give the orders.... As [social critic] Paul Goodman says, students are the exploited class in America, subjected to all the techniques of factory methods: tight scheduling, speedups, rules of conduct they're expected to obey with little or no say-so. At Cal you're little more than an IBM card. For efficiency's sake, education is organized along quantifiable lines. One hundred and 20 units make a bachelor's degree.... The understanding, interest and care required to have a good undergraduate school are completely alien to the spirit of the system...."
2/23/1965, Look Magazine, Behind the Campus Revolt: The California Uprising, John Poppy
"We are trying to bring the human element back into our education," says Michael Rossman, a first-year mathematics graduate student who started as an observer, but quickly became a leader in the revolt. He articulates a suspicion now flourishing among students at Berkeley and elsewhere: that the multiversity is so obedient to the economy and the society that it cannot truly educate undergraduates. "It is producing neatly turned components for the big machine outside, not individual, thinking people."
2/16/1965, Daily Californian, Why FSM? Impersonality, Konstantin Berlandt
The FSM, which organized last semester's demonstrations, was itself run by an executive committee of forty and a steering committee of twelve.
¶
'In the executive committee everyone had an opportunity to say the most irrelevant points; it was a continual filibuster, interminable discussions where all points of view were aired,' FSM Press Secretary Tom Irwin explained.
¶
The steering committee spent 'hundreds of hours of deliberation, went two and three days without stopping, without sleeping,' Irwin said.
¶
Religious leaders were sometimes brought in as mediators."
2/14/1965, New York Times Magazine, The Berkeley Affair: Mr. Kerr vs. Mr. Savio & Co., A. H. Raskin
"'Theirs is a sort of political existentialism,' says Paul Jacobs, a research associate at the university's Center for the Study of Law and Society, who is one of the F.S.M.'s applauders. 'All the old labels are out: if there were any orthodox Communists here, they would be a moderating influence.'
...
The rebels argue that students should have the same right as other citizens to participate in the political and social affairs of the outside community. What is 'unlawful' ought to be determined solely by civil and criminal courts, not by a university administration or faculty. The university's only area of proper regulation over political activity should be the establishment of minimal time-place-manner rules to guarantee that anything the students do on campus does not interfere with classes or the orderly conduct of university business. Such is the current focus of what is left of the 'free speech' issue."
...
'We must now begin the demand of the right to know; to know the realities of the present world-in-revolution, and to have an opportunity to
think clearly in an extended manner about the world,' says the F.S.M. credo. 'It is ours to demand meaning; we must insist upon meaning!'
...
Savio was more succinct: 'We committed the unpardonable sin of being moral and being successful.'"
02/12/1965, SF Examiner, Conservatives Oust Savio,
"The conservatives forced Mario Savio and his Free Speech Movement to move from the steps of Sproul Hall and find another rally point." issue: Free University of California
February 1965, Commentary Magazine, What Happened at Berkeley, Nathan Glazer
February, 1965, California Monthly, A Season of Discontent, Andrew L. Pierovich
"THERE IS no simple explanation for the huge and unparalleled groundswell of protest that disrupted the ordinary life of the Berkeley campus throughout the fall semester. Unquestionably, the causes of the student revolt were many, the results even more ranging, and the interplay of forces set in motion by a bewildering sweep of events a matter that even a careful historian, armed with pertinent documents and writing at a safe distance, would have difficulty interpreting with a high degree of certainty. This said, one may begin sorting out the details of what one writer has called the "most dangerous crisis" in the history of this institution.
¶
For most of the academic community the semester began almost as inconspicuously as any other — with President Clark Kerr in Tokyo dedicating the latest center in the University's Education Abroad Program and Chancellor Edward W. Strong in Berkeley predicting that enrollment on this campus would exceed the maximum figure of 27,500 undergraduates and graduates. It came near this figure. Most students had returned to the campus by September 14, the first day of registration. Several dozen of them had traveled perilous roads into Mississippi to work on civil rights projects. The Republican convention in San Francisco's Cow Palace had drawn the active participation of hundreds of Bay Area students. At Berkeley, card tables sponsored by several student political groups at the Bancroft and Telegraph entrance to campus urged students to participate in candidate demonstrations, protest demonstrations, and a host of other activities at convention hall."
February, 1965, California Monthly, Yesterday's Discord, Max Heirich and Sam Kaplan
"Being more like sociologists than historians, people tend to immerse themselves in their present, habitually ignoring the possibility that the roots of present difficulties might be anchored in the past—or, to bring this into context, that mass student outbursts are nothing new on the Berkeley campus. A review of the last thirty-five years of them shows they have differed greatly in form, purpose, and number of participants. And these differences can be related both to national and international events and to the composition of the student body. But one thing is clear: almost every year, except under unusual circumstances, at least a part of the student body engages in crowd outbursts that make things temporarily uncomfortable for administration, faculty, other students, Berkeley townspeople, and sometimes, the public at large.
¶
If we review the files of the Daily Californian and other Bay Area newspapers, and talk with campus old-timers, we find it convenient to divide these last three and a half decades into four periods of mass student activity. To make it easy, each period can be conventionally named according to the decade in which it flowered; of course, no period coincides precisely with a decade. The most recent period, for instance, seems to have begun in about 1957; when it will end, no one can be sure."
February, 1965, California Monthly, Editorial, Dick Erickson
"THE TRAGIC EVENTS of the past few months here at Berkeley seriously jeopardize the effectiveness of this University as an educational institution. What began as a protest involving less than 200 agitating students and non-students over two long-standing regulations has developed into a virtual civil war without arms."
February, 1965, California Monthly, Appendix: Documents in the Free Speech Controversy,
"Historical and Legal Background;
University of California Policies Relating to Students and Student Organizations;
The Position of the Free Speech Movement on Speech and Political Activity;
Statement by President Clark Kerr;
Report of Faculty Group on Campus Political Activity;
Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Student Conduct;
Statement by President Clark Kerr;
Statement by Professor Henry F. May;
Text of UC Academic Council Report;
Report by the Committee on Academic Freedom to be Presented at the January 5, 1965, meeting of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate;
From the Handbook for Faculty Members"
February, 1965, California Monthly, A Message to Alumni from President Kerr, Clark Kerr
"My first visit to the Berkeley campus was in the fall of 1932 to see some friends at International House. We were peacefully drinking cokes in the coffee shop when a snake-dancing line of students came yelling and shouting through the lobby trying to gain recruits for a demonstration to be held outside Sather Gate against University policies. The placards these students were carrying painted Cal as a fascist state. I asked who was the leader of the group. It was a student who later became a prominent person on the Pacific Coast. His daughter was one of the participants in the sit-in in Sproul Hall on December 2-3, 1964.
¶
The Sather Gate tradition, with its soap-boxes, was moved to Telegraph and Bancroft after the Student Union was built and when the north end of Telegraph Avenue, beyond Bancroft, was dedicated by the City to the University. In September, 1959, I suggested that a twenty-six foot strip be returned to the City of Berkeley. The Regents approved this by a vote of 15 to 2; but the transfer was never formally made, although many of us thought it had been. It was on this twenty-six foot strip that political action became more and more intense until in September, 1964, the Berkeley campus felt it necessary to ban such activity."
February, 1965, California Monthly, A Message from Acting Chancellor Meyerson, Martin Meyerson
"Alumni, taxpayers, parents, present and potential students, legislators, educators, and indeed, all concerned with education in our world today, have been aware of unrest on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Television, radio and newspaper coverage has been extensive. Many articles have been written in popular and scholarly magazines and many more will appear. Undoubtedly books on the subject will be published too. I appreciate this opportunity to add my comment.
¶
I believe we must concentrate on the future of the campus. At the same time, I do not mean to discourage discussion of the past. I agree with George Santayana who wrote that 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'
¶
I believe that though harm has been done, this controversy can strengthen the University. Whenever a great many people become alarmed, it shows that they care, and that they care deeply. I am confident that education at Berkeley will be improved because the faculty, The Regents and the administration are reexamining intensively and in an overall fashion the educational policies and practices of this center of learning. Out of the present ferment should emerge better means to combine quality with quantity in our teaching and research and public service.
¶
I believe that responsible freedom of speech—the airing of grievances or the expression of new ideas in any field—is essential to our nation's democracy and to the education of youth and of those who are no longer young. Moreover, the greatest latitude for free speech and academic freedom exists in those countries where there is the greatest amount of economic freedom. Robert Gunness, a university trustee and executive vice president of Standard Oil of Indiana, wrote recently that 'academic freedom and economic freedom are not merely interrelated but are, in fact, inseparable in our society.'"
1/30/1965, Saturday Review, Escalation in California, N.C.
"To ascribe any significant portion of this activity to Communist manipulation, as some have done, is to look for an easy way out, missing the essential problem--and also opportunity--it poses. It is no doubt true that the extremes of both left and right are attempting to exploit vulnerable stuations, but such situations exist without them and require all the wisdom and restraint of which educated men in a free society are capable."
1/28/1965, The Reporter, How the crisis Developed, Seymour Martin Lipset and Paul Seabury
"Since 1934, political fund raising, activities; the FSM insisted that the question of legality should be determined by campaigning, and the recruitment of volunteers for off-campus activities have been prohibited at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Until last fall, this ban did not apply to a twenty-six-foot strip of brick walk just outside the Sather Gate entrance to the campus, where students have been recruited for a variety of off-campus civil-rights activities, including the picketing on September 4 of William F. Knowland's Oakland Tribune. The revocation on September 14 of this traditional privilege precipitated the following events:"
1/28/1965, The Reporter, The Lesson of Berkeley, Seymour Martin Lipset and Paul Seabury
"IMPROBABLE as it may have seemed to outsiders, events at the Berkeley campus of the University of California during the last three months of 1964 constituted a small-scale but genuine revolution. Through continuous violation of university regulations, sit-ins, almost daily mass demonstrations, and finally a strike by students and teaching assistants, the authority of both the administration and the faculty had become virtually nonexistent at Berkeley by December."
1/22/1965, East Bay Labor Journal, 'Policeman-proof' Union Label tie given FSM leader,
"A 'policeman-proof' clip-on necktie with the Union Label on it was presented to Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California.
It was presented by Hal Draper, husband of Anne Draper, a dlegate to the Central Labor Council. Mrs. Draper is West Coast Union representative for the AFLCIO Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.
When pulled by a policeman, or anyone else, the tie falls off. This leaves the policeman holding the tie, and the wearer free, Mrs. Draper explained."
1/21/1965, Berkeley Daily Gazette, Judge Asked to Quash UC Sit-Inner Charges, Lari Blumenfeld
1/20/1965, San Francisco Chronicle, On the Town: A Way-Outside UC Agitator, Ralph J. Gleason
"And the UC cats keep saying, 'I don't dig the FSM's sound, but the changes were inevitable and we're sorry we didn't do it sooner. I don't know when you cats will elect Ornette to the Hall of Fame, but I am petitioning the University for Honorary Degrees in Educational Reform for the FSM wailers.'"
1/18/1965, New Leader, Rebellion at Berkeley - III, Inevitability and Institutes, Feuer, Lewis S.
1/18/1965, Los Angeles Times, Student Ferments Also Affect Stanford Campus, William Trombley
"Five years ago a Berkeley student rumpus like the Free Speech Movement would not have stirred a blade of grass on the gentle hills that contain the Stanford University campus. Now, with the Free Speech Movement example at hand, some student activists are turning their concerns inward, toward problems within the ... "
1/16/1965, Saturday Review, What Happened at Berkeley, James Cass
1/15/1965, Life Magazine, You Don't Shoot Mice with Elephant Guns, Shana Alexander
"Among its other more obvious firsts, the Free Speech Movement at the University of California and its climactic revolt against the Administration was probably the first full-scale revolutionary action to be carried on radio in its entirety, and I find the tapes make memorable listening. First comes the ringing pledge by FSM leader Mario Savio to bring the massive, 27,500-student university to "a grinding halt." Then the actual occupation of Sproul Hall is launched with some folk singing by Joan Baez, a nonstudent who has been functioning as a kind of house Madonna for the Berkeley rebels. Later you hear the thousand students, sitting staunchly on the floor, singing We Shall Overcome, followed by the harsh Dragnet dialogue of the actual arrests as predawn squads of police charged the students' campus stronghold. Finally there is the bump-bump-a-bump of student spines on marble stairs as the officers dragged each limp, unprotesting demonstrator bodily out of the Halls of Academe."
1/14/1965, The New York Review of Books, Thoughts on Berkeley, Paul Goodman
"At Berkeley, the students griped that the University of California has become a 'factory, disregarding faculty and students,' a factory to process professional licences and apprentices for technological corporations, and to do extra-mural contracted research. The particular bone of contention, the Free Speech ban, seems also to have been extra-murally instigated, by backlash elements, persons like Senator Knowland, etc. The administration certainly acted with panic, under outside pressure and out of touch with its own community."
1/10/1965, The Sunday Bulletin, Free Speech on the Campus--California's Agony, Leonard Larsen
1/10/1965, Los Angeles Times, UC Rebels Say They're Against 'Old Fogy-ism', Daryl E. Lembke
"The Free Speech Movement demonstrators not only categorize us as old fogies and call our integrity into question, they are convinced 'the older generations' are made up of timid sheep who had a chance to right social ills such as race prejudice and failed to act."
1/8/1965, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
1/7/1965, St. Petersberg Times, Rebellion At Berkeley: The Background, William Trombley
[Clar Kerr:] "There is a long tradition of political activity at Berkeley. CCNY, University of Chicago and Berkeley have always been the most politically active campuses in the country. But Berkeley always ran a bad third until the House Un-American Activities Committee trouble at San Francisco City Hall in 1960. That turned Berkeley into the present-day fighting ground for student liberals."
1/6/1965, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
1/5/1965, The Daily Californian, FSM Leaders Scorn New Rules, Ann Lubar and Andy McGall
"When Mario Savio, FSM steering committee member, began his talk he said that he had been warned by certain members of the faculty to refrain from faculty-baiting and administration-baiting.
¶
'So that leaves me only one thing,' Savio told the crowd. 'My speech will be a Regents-baiting speech.'
¶
Referring to the Regents' statement on new University policy, Savio commented: 'On my best estimate of what they have said, they have said nothing.'"
1/5/1965, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
1/4/1965, The New York Times, New Acting Chancellor at Berkeley Pledges 'Utmost Fairness' to Students, Lawrence E. Davies
"A new acting chancellor of the University of California extended an olive branch tonight to rebellious students but declared that further civil disobedience on the controversy-ridden Berkeley campus was unwarranted."
1/4/1965, New Leader, Rebellion at Berkeley - II, A Reply, Feuer, Lewis S.
1/3/1965, New York Times Magazine, Freedom to Learn But Not to Riot, Sidney Hook
"The student "Free Speech Movement" at the University of California had every right to press for a modification of university rules governing campus and off-campus activities. What was shocking, however, was its deliberate boycott and by-passing of the Associated Students, the elected representative organization of the student body. It neither used the existing channels of protest nor sought to avail itself of the remedies open to it.
¶
Even more shocking was the demagogic and odious comparison drawn by some students between the situation at the university, which, despite its restrictions, is still far more liberal than most, and the situation in Mississippi. And worst of all was the resort to tactics of mass civil disobedience which could only be justified in extreme situations in behalf of basic principles of freedom. Except in such situations, changes in the laws of a democratic community must be urged by practices within the law."
c1965, Solidarity, Students in revolt: the Battle of Berkeley campus, Bob Potter
"An inept and high-handed piece of official incompetence triggers off a minority reaction. The struggle gains momentum. Constantly fed by further bureaucratic bungling, it rapidly develops a mass basis. It acquires a militant programme, and a vigorous fortnightly paper of its own--the Free Speech Movement (FSM) Newsletter. It ropes in hundreds and later thousands of students with no previous experience of politics, let alone of direct action politics. It teaches them some basic lessons about the nature of the state. It exposes the relations between university authorities, business interests, local politicians, and the state police, It dissects the whole gigantic enterprise of manipulation and mystification known as "modern education", and shows it to have conformity, docility and the acceptance of authority as its main objectives. Skilfully combining legal and illegal tactics, it constantly widens its support until in the end hundreds of uniformed cops have to be called in. More than 800 students are arrested. Picket lines are thrown up. The Teamsters Union refuses to cross them, to deliver supplies to the University. Clearly this is no ordinary struggle for or abstract debate about academic freedom!"
1965, Ramparts Magazine, Quo Warranto: The "Berkeley Issue", John R. Seeley
"The structure of the sequence of events taken as a whole is classic. It begins with the minor act of a minor official: the tired Negro lady in Montgomery is asked or told to go to the back of the bus; a minor University official, seemingly, attempts to restrict in a minor way the minor use of a minor bit of University property. There is non-compliance with the order issued -- with no lively or clear sense at that moment of the underlying or over-arching moral issues. There is action against the lawbreakers and explanation for the action. But the action, far from intimidating, provokes, and the accompanying explanation heightens the antagonism to the issuing authority because it generalizes and reveals the moral foundations for an act that might otherwise have been written off as error or inadvertence. Action and explanation call forth a wider protest, and in turn meet with a 'response.' The response is now under review, and if it represents duress or deception (or an attempted mixture of both) it is taken as a revelation, an exposure of the real character and animating motives and thought system of the authority in question. And so to some sort of moral climax. From a set of sore feet in Montgomery to the president of this nation reluctantly sendingin his troops to fill the void left by the withering of the august authority of the sovereign State of Alabama. From an ostensible spat over the location of the activity of "advocacy," to the questioning and perhaps the determination by trial of whether a university so constituted and so governed can long survive. The words 'a university' are well advised; for, given the spread of effect due to the mass media and given the conditions at numberless universities, the question is no longer 'this University' (Berkeley) but any university, at least in North America. Hence -- as with the American Revolution and its prodromal struggles -- the bated breath and trembling limb in every capital and cabal. The fear is that like the sound of the shot at Lexington, so the sound of heads, being bumped down the stone stairs of Sproul Hall, may be heard around the world.
For this is what we are come to: the questioning of the legitimacy of a long-standing form of authority. Again, first in a particular, (though by then very broad) matter; and then in utter generality. When Berkeley students denied the authority of the regents and their administration to intervene in any way between them and the Constitutional protections of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, they were in that sphere sweeping away the existence of a university authority altogether. When the students in the heat of that battle began to question the provenance of the regents and the source of their authority to govern a university at all, they had raised the question of legitimacy."
January, 1965, Frontier, Berkeley. The real question behind the student revolt: What is a university supposed to be in our society?, Harold Goldberg
1964, KRON TV, Assignment Four - Free Speech or Anarchy? (Rough Cut), Al Berglund
"Rough cut edit (derived from a 16mm film negative) of a KRON-TV Assignment Four documentary from 1964, which examines issues relating to The Free Speech Movement (FSM) student protest, which took place during the 1964–1965 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. Students insisted that the university administration lift the ban of on-campus political activities and acknowledge their right to free speech and academic freedom. Includes silent/sound views of the March 1964 Sheraton-Palace Hotel protests in San Francisco, large student protests (marching, picketing, dancing, sit-ins), police arrests, the UC Berkeley campus and interviews with: Chancellor Clark Kerr; Art Goldberg; Jack Weinberg; Jackie Goldberg; Mario Savio; Assemblyman Don Mulford; Governor Pat Brown and others. Please note: at one point Bobby Seale appears on-camera, visible to the side and listening as an angry protestor is interviewed in a crowd (18:15-18:45). This film was written and produced by Al Berglund, narrated by Jerry Jensen, edited by Jay Hansell and directed by Vern Louden. To date, we haven't found the finished, 16mm broadcast film print of this Assignment Four episode."
12/29/1964, Fresno Bee, Student Leader Assails Regents, Wanda Coyle
"Mario Savio, the 22 year old student leader of the University of California Free Speech Movement, charged in a speech before the California Federation of Teachers meeting in Fresno today that the university's board of regents 'does not represent the people of this state.'
¶
Savio spoke at an ex officio meeting of the conference in the Fresno Hacienda Motel to an overwhelmingly enthusiastic audience of teachers, which frequently interrupted him with applause and gave him a standing ovation at the end."
12/28/1964, Los Angeles Times, Whole Nation Can Learn from University of California "Revolt", Robert M. Hutchins
12/27/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, An 'Open Letter' to the Public......On Cal's 'Free Speech' Dispute, John Hunter
12/27/1964, Los Angeles Times, UC Turmoil Has Many Sides, Gene Blake
12/25/1964, Time Magazine, UNIVERSITIES: The Climate at Berkeley,
"To mutinous students at the Berkeley campus, the University of California's board of regents last week 'reconfirmed' itself as the "ultimate authority for student discipline," and then moved in the direction of granting the major student demand.
¶
President Clark Kerr opened the meeting in the paneled Regents' Room of the University's Los Angeles campus with a long report on such scholarly research as treatment for fruit canker and survival of the condor. Finally, he brought up the subjects that had summoned Governor Pat Brown from Sacramento and newsmen from all over the state."
12/24/1964, The San Bernardino County Sun,
"Guest speaker will be Steven Becker, son of Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Becker, San Bernardino. He is president of the Hillel Council, University of California at Berkeley and was active in the Free Speech Movement. In his sermon Becker will tell the experiences of a Jewish pected to have available from1 student on a college campus."
12/24/1964, The Modesto Bee, Participating Modestan Sees More UC Unrest,
"'As I [Michael Anker] first was grabbed, my shirt was torn. But it was an old shirt,' he said. 'Another policeman threw me against the stairs and the painful bruise reminded me of the incident for at least a week.
¶
'Students were dragged up the stairs feet and head first. Only one fought back. He grabbed a policeman by the knees and said: 'Dammit, you're supposed to carry me.'
¶
'He was hit by clubs, and so were several others, until the order was issued to carry the demonstrators out rather than drag them.'"
12/21/1964, U.S. News & World Report, When Students Try to Run a University--,
"'Anarchy' on the campus--or simply freedom of speech?
That's the issue that has had the University of California in turmoil. Students have won a skirmish, but the struggle over authority is one that may have lingering repercussions."
12/21/1964, The Nation, The Free Speech Movement,
"Assistant Professor John Leggett, of the department of sociology at Berkeley, believes that in Kerr's writings lie the keys to the FSM and The Day of the Cops.
...
'We on the faculty,' Leggett says, 'have allowed the administration, over the years, to take the university away from us, to turn it into the multiversity. It isn't easy, but we're going to have to try to take it back. The students and the faculty, together, should control the university. The administration should administrate.'"
12/21/1964, The Nation, No Fair! The Student Strike at California, Gene Marine
"Months of civil rights demonstrations have taught metropolitan police officers everywhere to handle 'limp' demonstrators; it requires two officers per demonstrator, and it can be efficient and painless. In Sproul Hall, however, police chose to drag the students, male and female, by twisting their arms into hammer locks, bending their wrists cruelly backward, and hauling them so that the pressure was on their sockets. One girl was pushed into the elevator on her face from several feet away. It should be stressed that there were reporters on the scene-but the police didn't always know it. Downstairs, they were letting no reporters go up.
¶
After about forty arrests had been made, the police saw that the process was taking too long. They withdrew temporarily (the students now call this 'the coffee break'), and when they returned had apparently decided to get rough. The new plan was to bring women down in the elevator, and men by the narrow marble stairs, although a few unfortunate women also made it down the stairs. Some were brought down by arms or shoulders, but reporters present say that most were hauled by their feet. One conscientious reporter counted the marble steps as he followed a girl whose head jarred sickeningly as she was dragged down. There were ninety….
¶
On Thursday afternoon, I watched the end of The Day of the Cops. There was no civilian authority anywhere on the campus. President Kerr was still in Los Angeles. Chancellor Edward Strong, chief Berkeley administrator (Kerr runs all nine university campuses), had disappeared. The University of California was completely in the hands of police. In every window of Sproul Hall a police guard was visible. There were guards on every door. Police patrolled the campus."
12/21/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, On the Town: And a UC Rebel In a Pear Tree, Ralph J. Gleason
"The FSM, which has bureaucratized itself beyong belief, even set up a 'Record Central' to handle the disc and to paste on labels, with shifts of students working like Santa's helpers."
12/21/1964, New Leader, Rebellion at Berkeley, Feuer, Lewis S.
12/20/1964, Los Angeles Times, What Kind of World?, Robert M. Hutchins
"Hence the outraged cries of 'Communism,' 'anarchy,' and 'call the cops' that greet the product when, apparently for no good reason, it jumps off the conveyor belt and starts running around the plant making speeches."
12/19/1964, Chicago Tribune, Cal Faculty Rebuffed by Regents, Seymour Korman
"Won't Yield Authority, Board Says Regents at U. of Cal Reaffirm Authority"
12/18/1964, Time Magazine, STUDENTS: When & Where to Speak,
"'The students are restless,' says University of California President Clark Kerr and he would beyond a doubt include Mario Savio. Born in New York city, Savio glided through high school at the top of a class of 1,200, spent two years in local colleges shopping for majors, then moved with his Sicilian-immigrant parents to California and entered the university at Berkeley Soon was 'disenchanted.' He 'drifted' into the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ('Snick') and last summer joined a Freedom School in McComb, Miss., to teach Negroes poetry history, math and genetics..."
12/18/1964, The Victoria Advocate, Campus Free Speech, editorial
"Last March, the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned Dr. Eric A. Walker, president of Pennsylvania State University, and other college presidents, that there would be an organization attempt "using bogus students and bogus faculty members" to divert the energies of students into channels embarrassing to our universities, in the name of free speech and civil rights."
12/18/1964, Modesto Bee, Faculties Ask Full Free Speech Study, Robert J. Markson
12/18/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
12/18/1964, Daily Californian, Set a Pattern, Henry P. Stapp
"The conflict at Berkeley is only incidentally a matter of University regulations. The central issue is the challenge to the nation's traditional precept of respect for law inevitably posed by the civil disobedience demonstrations in the South."
12/18/1964, Columbia Daily Spectator, Inside Sproul Hall, Joel Pimsleur
"The question might well be asked, why do you need 600 cops to cope with 700 passively resisting kids? This was no prison riot; yet from the police response, you would have thought they were handling convicts, not students.
¶
More important than their number, however, was their attitude. Make no mistake, Ralph, the police weren't simply doing their duty. If they'd merely been the machines, the automatons, the privates in the army of the politicians, they'd have been much better.
¶
But many of them were enjoying their work. They were getting their revenge for the embarrassment of the 33-hour seige of Oct. 1-2 ( the incident of the trapped police car). And the air of vindictiveness was unmistakable."
12/17/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, James Baldwin Joins the Fray,
"'There's nothing under heaven you shouldn't think about. The main principle is that we're able to face each other, maybe love each other, and certainly--at least--live with each other.'
¶
The author of 'The Fire Next Time' and 'Another Country' was here to help raise funds for the legal defense fund of student demonstrators at the University of California."
12/17/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, No Red Probe Of UC Revolt, Charles Randebaugh and Don Wegars
"'The Board of Regents,' he said, 'must decide whether to run the University or turn it over to a group of 'malcontents, silly kids addle-headed teachers egged on by Communist stooges, or do as suggested by one of this group: 'Just keep the sidewalks clean.''
¶
His latter remark was a reference to a statement by Mario Savio, 22-year old leader of the student Free Speech Movement, that the proper function of the University administration is merely to 'keep the sidewalks clean.'"
12/17/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
12/17/1964, Daily Californian, New ASUC Move, Irl Cramer
"The Senate was called into emergency session by President Charlie Powell after a disagreement on the Senate's 'Public Enlightenment' resolution passed Tuesday night.
¶
The resolution allotted $500 for staging forums throughout the country during Christmas.
¶
Mike Adams, men's residence hall representative and co-ordinator of the forum, planned to spend $200 to print a report compiled by eight graduate students in political science.
¶
The 40-page document was an extensive explanation of the entire controversy designed to refute charges of 'outside agitation' and 'communist subversion' in the Free Speech Movement.
¶
At the meeting, Rep-at-Large Art Shartsis proposed that the $500 could be spent only on physical arrangements for the forums and specifically forbidding the use of funds for the printing of the report.
¶
Shartsis, before reading the report, said, "This document is not factual. It presents only one side."
¶
[ed note: Read Entire Article!]
Shartsis is a member of the University Students for Law and Order."
12/16/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
12/16/1964, Daily Californian, CORE Leader Supports FSM, Konstantin Berlandt
"Farmer said there was no separation between the battle for civil rights and the battle for freedom of advocacy.
¶
He added people who say they are for equal rights for Negroes, Puerto Ricans, or Mexicans and are against the 'free speech' movement here are 'liars.'
¶
'Negroes must lend their support to you,' he said. The fight for equal rights for Negroes 'is your fight as well as ours, just as this (the 'free speech') is our fight as much as it is yours.'"
12/15/1964, The Justice, Doctor Savio, I Presume, Jay Livingston
"How much injustice is necessary, one wonders, for a faculty to take such a strong stand against the administration? One faction of students at Brandeis thinks that the faculty has been all too reticent and timid in opposing the administration. Do we need an issue as clear as that of free speech? Or do we need a Mario Savio, who sees himself as the inspirer of a 'decimated faculty with no unity still feeling the effects of the fifties, who finally stood like men.' Or do we need better organization of discontent-discontent of the sort tersely expressed by the California student who said, 'I'm sick and tired of being spat upon?'"
12/15/1964, The Justice, Mario Savio Evokes Enthusiastic Response,
"Only four days after being dramatically carried away from a microphone at the Berkeley Greek Theatre, Mario Savio, leader of the student rebellion at the University of California, was given a microphone at Brandeis' Schwartz Hall Friday evening--and was interrupted only by applause.
¶
According to Saturday's Boston Globe, Savio 'sparked enthusiastic response' from both Harvard and Brandeis audiences. 'The nation's leading college rebel drew cheers from Harvard and Brandeis students, elicited hisseswhen he mentioned the enemies, and spread the protest message before jammed audiences,' the paper reported."
12/15/1964, The Justice, Speech Breech at Berkeley, Larry Spence
"The bail fund for the arrested students was administered and to a large extent raised by members of the faculty. At an emergency meeting of the faculty on December 3, a resolution wall passed calling for an amnesty for the arrested students and negotiation of student grievances. The executive board of the Berkeley chapter of the American Association of University Professors requested the resignation of University Chancellor E. W. Strong. The local chapter of the AFL-CIO teachers' union voted to support the strike along with the Central Labor Councils of Alameda and San Francisco Counties."
12/15/1964, The Harvard Crimson, Mario Savio, Parker Donham
"Mario Savio, the leader of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement whose demonstrations this fall have--as he puts it--brought the University of California 'to a grinding halt,' seems curiously unprepared for the role in which he has been cast. Today this 22-year-old junior is acclaimed by his followers, and acknowledged by his opponents, as a charismatic orator whose public speaking has amassed powerful popular support at the Berkeley campus. Six months ago he was unknown to the students who now risk jail in support of the FSM, and he stuttered so badly that even his private conversation was difficult to listen to. 'Everytime he raised his hand to speak, people in the class sort of shuddered and felt sorry for him,' said a student in Savio's philosophy section."
12/15/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, Nine Professors For the FSM,
12/15/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
12/15/1964, Daily Californian, Letters, Mike Horowitz
"Dear Mario,
¶
For your scrapbook or memoirs we enclose the headline article from our newspaper The Justice which unlike the Daily Californian is run by a bunch of militant student unionists.
¶
We're not completely happy with Gil Harrison's analysis of Berkeley in The New Republic -- he's strong on free speech but all too tolerant of administrations in general.
¶
We're getting Paul Goodman out here in February which ought to help our cause here.
¶
Sincerely,
Mike Horowitz
¶
Committee For An Ideal Campus
c/o Brandeis University
Waltham 54, Mass."
12/14/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, Forget Not, Rebels, The Ties That Bind, Arthur Hoppe
"After months of ideological confusion, I'm glad to see where that running fracas over at Cal has at last boiled down to one clear-cut understandable issue in the public mind. Namely, of course, 'Why doesn't that Mario Savio get a haircut?'"
12/14/1964, Daily Californian, Hot 'Sacrilegious' Record, Aune Van Dyke
"Several weeks ago, Dean of Students Katherine Towle told Dusty Miller of the Free Speech Movement he could not play his Christmas carol record in the Student Union or the Plaza.
Yet last Friday morning the public address system in the Student Union was playing,
'Oski Dolls, pompon girls, UC all the way,
Oh what fun it is to have our minds reduced to clay.'"
12/14/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
12/14/1964, Daily Californian, Academic Publicity Fund,
"It is imperative that full and accurate texts of the resolutions passed on December 8 by an overwhelming majority of the Academic Senate, and statements of the considerations which led to their adoption, be given the widest possible publicity. A fund is being established for this purpose."
12/13/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, The Multiversity in Crisis, James Benet
"Perhaps, some academicians suggest, although the multiversity can do many things well with the aid of its Nobel prize winners and internationally renowned scholars, it can no longer give a college education."
12/12/1964, The New York Times, Berkeley Youth Leader Warns Of Protests at Other Campuses, Thomas Buckley
"The comments were made by Mario Savio, a philosophy student at the university's Berkeley campus, at a news conference at the Overseas Press Club, 54 West 40th Street.
¶
He arrived here Thursday night with three other members of the executive committee of the Free Speech Movement, an organization representing 20 political and civil rights groups at the university, to tape a television interview.
¶
They also hope to obtain financial and moral support for the 814 students arrested in a sit-in strike at the university on Dec. 2. On their way East the four leaders spoke at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
¶
After the news conference, they addressed rallies at Columbia and Queens College."
12/12/1964, The Harvard Crimson, Savio Blasts Kerr's 'Knowledge Factory', Parker Donham
"In a press conference at Sever Hall, just before his speech, Savio responded sharply to questions about Communist infltration in the FSM. 'Of the 50 representatives on our steering committee,' he said, 'four would term themselves 'revolutionary socialists.'
¶
'But I'm sure,' he continued, 'that the Goldwater people and the followers of Ayn Rand, who were with us in Sproul Hall, would resent the assertion that they had been communist infiltrated.'"
12/12/1964, Los Angeles Times, Savio Reveals Socialist Role in UC Protest,
"Mario Savio, leader of a free speech demonstration at the University of California at Berkeley, said Friday there are four 'revolutionary socialists' on the movement's 50-member executive committee."
12/12/1964, Chicago Tribune, SAVIO EVADES QUIZ ABOUT TIE WITH COMMIES,
"The student leader of recent disorders at the University of California at Berkeley said today his Free Speech move..."
12/12/1964, Boston Globe, Rebel With a Cause Speaks Out...Freely, William Fripp
Abstract (Document Summary): The nation's leading college Rebel with a Cause sparked enthusiastic response from youthful audiences Friday as he told how he paralyzed a campus.
12/11/1964, Time Magazine, STUDENTS: To Prison with Love,
"'Have love as you do this thing,' cooed Folk Singer Joan Baez, 'and it will succeed.' It was a battle cry, not a ballad. Marching behind their Joan of Arc, who was wearing a jeweled crucifix, a thousand undergraduates of the University of California at Berkeley stormed four-story Sproul Hall, the school's administration building. For 15 hours they camped in the corridors, whanged guitars, played jacks, watched Charlie Chaplin movies. Stairwells be came 'freedom' classrooms. An alcove was a kitchen where coeds made thousands of sandwiches for the all-night siege...."
12/11/1964, The Harvard Crimson, Mario Savio To Talk Tonight in Lowell Lec, unattributed
"Mario Savio, leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, will speak at 8 p.m. tonight in Lowell lecture Hall. The address is sponsored by the Harvard chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society.
¶
Savio, who has called the settlement proposed by the Berkeley Faculty Senate an 'FSM victory,' will arrive in Boston at 5 p.m. today. He will attend and address a dinner here before his appearance at Lowell Lecture Hall.
¶
Savio will also visit Brandeis University, probably between 9 p.m. and midnight. His trip to the East coast is being paid for by a New York television station." [eds note: Jo Freeman, "At Berkeley in the Sixties," (Indiana University Press, 2004), p223: "Mario, Bettina, Steve and Suzanne went east on a speaking tour of college campuses. The ABC television network paid their fare to New York City so that they could appear on a TV show, and they used the opportunity to talk about the FSM at several campuses. The press generally reported this trip as a flop because only hundreds, not thousands, of students came to hear them speak. But for hundreds to turn out for anything political on most campuses was a lot, especially the last week of classes before the Christmas break, which was also exam week for some. They left the evening of December 9th and spoke at Michigan, Wisconsin, Brandeis, Columbia, and of course Queens College, where Mario had once been a student. All but Steve were from New York."]
12/11/1964, The California Jewish Voice, Our Embattled Students: Courage in Berkeley, Shame in Sacramento, Ruth Maizlish
"At the point of greatest crisis there was one man who came to the aid of the bewildered youth. He is Rabbi Harold Schulweis, spiritual leader of Temple Beth Abraham of Oakland, well known for his courage and liberalism. He invited the students, including some of those out on bail, to attend his services last Friday evening, where he gave a stirring sermon commending their stand. During the ensuing days he met with them, counseled, inspired and encouraged them."
12/11/1964, The California Jewish Voice, Youth Assures a Future for The Bill of Rights, Samuel B. Gach
12/11/1964, Lewiston Morning Tribune, Michigan Students Asked To Back California Group, unsigned
"ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP)--
Some 1200 University of Michigan students heard leaders of the University of Ca1ifornia Free Speech Movement plead Thursday [12/10/1964] for support for a possible student-faculty strike against regents of the Ca1ifornia school.
¶
Steve Weissman, a former Michigan student, called on the rally to march on University President Harlan Hatcher's house here, if necessary, and demand that he support the California protest.
¶
Weissman led a three-day Berkeley campus strike."
12/11/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
12/10/1964, The Harvard Crimson, FSM Ecstatic Over Apparent Victory, unattributed
"The more than 6000 students in the plaza, scene of countless bitter protest rallies, rose to sing happy birthday to FSM leader Mario Savio when he came to the microphone. Tuesday was Savio when he came to the microphone. Tuesday was Savio's birthday, and he called the Academic Senate vote in support of the students 'the best birthday present I've ever had.'"
12/10/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, Savio Off to Spread FSM Gospel,
"Mario Savio, the leader of the University of California revolt, took off on a transcontinental tour early today to spread the gospel of his Free Speech Movement to other American campuses.
¶
Savio, a 22-year-old UC philosophy major, left with three of his followers for the University of Michigan, Columbia University and other institutions of higher learning in the New York area, and last of all to Harvard.
¶
The cost of his air line tickets, Savio told reporters who joined a bearded and sandaled throng of well-wishers at San Francisco International Airport, is being paid by the American Broadcasting Company, although he will appear on the TV shows of other networks in Los Angeles.
¶
Savio said he would be paid for his brief stints as an entertainer, but that any funds he receives would go to the defense coffers of the 781 UC students arrested last week during the Sproul Hall sit-in."
12/10/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
12/10/1964, Berkeley Daily Gazette, Savio Off on Tour,
"Mario Savio and three prominent members of the FSM student leadership, boarded a jet plane this morning bound for Eastern colleges and universities to tell students firsthand about the FSM movement on the local University of California campus.
¶
Hardly pausing for that 'sleep' he talked about Tuesday night after the UC Academic Senate overwhelmingly voted to endorse student demands for freedom to advocate and raise money for off-campus political activities, Savio will speak to students at the University of Michigan, Columbia University and other New York area schools, and Harvard.
¶
Savio has withdrawn from UC for the remainder of the semester.
¶
The other FSM leaders, Suzanne Goldberg, Steven Weissman, and Bettina Aptheker, will speak at the Universities of Chicago and Wisconsin while Savio will complete his whirlwind tour by visiting his family in Glendora in Southern California.
¶
Savio said his costs were being paid by the American Broadcasting Co., and that he was scheduled to appear on several television shows which so far appear to be a tentative bid for the Les Crane Show and a program in Los Angeles.
¶
He also said that he would be paid for his television appearances, and that he was donating the money to the defense fund of the hundreds of students arrested last Thursday in the Sproul Hall sit-in."
12/9/1964, Tri City Herald, Most Of Arrested Cal Students Rank Above Average Scholastically,
"Most of the 784 persons arrested in the sit-in at Sproul Hall on the University of California's Berkeley campus were students who rank well above average scholastically, a graduate student study contends.
¶
More than half of those arrested do not belong to any major political organizations, according to the report issued yesterday by a group of graduate political science students.
¶
THEIR REPORT, A 40-page history and analysis of the student Free Speech Movement at Berkeley also contends that most of the non students arrested Dec. 3 had "some clear identification with the campus community."
¶
Students who made up the report call themselves the fact-finding committee of graduate political scientists. They say their study was compiled from questionnaires, documents of the Free Speech committee and administration, and from personal observation."
12/9/1964, The New York Times, Berkeley Peace Plan Backed by Students; STUDENTS ACCEPT FACULTY PEACE BID, Wallace Turner
"The faculty of the University of California proposed a settlement tonight to the political freedom controversy and it was accepted immediately by the leader of the student Free Speech Movement."
12/9/1964, The New York Times, A Rebel on Campus; Mario Savio,
"BERKELEY, Calif., Dec. 8 -- The leader of the Free Speech Movement on the Berkeley campus of the University of California is a 6-foot-1 student who has taken to wearing neckties lately -- and is flat broke. Mario Savio celebrated his 22d birthday today, looking forward to three more semesters before graduation."
12/9/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, On the Town: The Tragedy at The Greek Theater, Ralph J. Gleason
"'When you go in, go with love in your hearts,' Joan Baez said. Those words, and Mario's eloquent speech, remain the only rhetoric of these ten weeks that history will remember. Literature, poetry and history are not made by a smooth jowl and a blue suit. They are made with sweat and passion and dedication to truth and honor."
12/9/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, Kindly Mr. McAteer, The Students' Friend, Arthur Hoppe
"As you might expect, our kindly Sate legislators are vying with each other in demanding investigations of that student Free Speech Moverment over at Cal. For, as we all know, anyone who demonstrates in favor of free speech these days is undoubtedly a Communist. Because the Communists are dead against free speech. Or maybe vice versa. I get confused."
12/9/1964, Los Angeles Times, The Real Issue at Berkeley, editors
"It should be clear by now to University of California officials that the factious minority heading the so-called Free Speech Movement on the Berkeley campus has absolutely no interest in compromise, fair play or reasonable agreement on the proper uses of the university's traditional function as a forum for ideas."
12/9/1964, Los Angeles Times, UC Free Speech Rebellion Spreads to More Schools,
12/9/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
12/8/1964, The Justice, Berkeley and Brandeis, Editors
"The Berkeley students (some of them Brandeis alumni who have kept in constant touch with us) were protesting as much to maintain their concept of a true university, as to regain the single privilege of distributing political material."
12/8/1964, The Harvard Crimson, SDS to Hold Protest March, Rally In Sympathy for Students at Cal., unattributed
"Barney Frank '62, asst. senior tutor of Winthrop House, will address the marchers inside Lowell Lecture Hall. Leonard K. Nash, professor of Chemistry, will chair the meeting, and Dave Van Ronk, the folksinger, will sing."
12/8/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, Big Student Riot! (So What's New?), Arthur Hoppe
"The Dean: (embracing Miss Sibblesby): Thank Heavens, a panty raid! It is a sure sign our beloved campus is returning to normal."
12/8/1964, New York Times, Berkeley Police Parley Upset as Police Grab Student, Wallace Turner
"Mr. Savio was settling his hands on either side of the podium, taking in a breath before his remarks, when two campus policemen grabbed him. One put his am around Mr. Savio's throat, forcing his head back, the other grabbed him in an arm lock. They forced Mr, Savio away from the microphone and were quickly surrounded by a group of his supporters who had rushed onstage.
¶
The struggling mass moved through a door at the rear of the stage with policemen and students in individual combat. Mr. Savio was taken out across an open terrace and into a dressing room.
¶
Students in the audience could see the beginning of the fight. Thy shouted, booed, and hooted, drowning out almost all the sounds of the strugg1e. Those In higher seats around the rim of the bowl could see behind the partitions separating the stage from the terrace some of the rioting going on there.
¶
Dragged on His Back
¶
By the time Mr. Savio reached the door to the dressing room, he was being dragged on his back, his clothing dirty and wrinkled. Ironically, today was for the first time in weeks he has appeared on campus in white shirt, tie and suit. Usually he wears a fleece-lined herdsman's coat."
12/8/1964, KRON-TV, Mario Savio, Jack Weinberg & Free Speech Movement Victory, Art Brown
"KRON News report from December 8th 1964 by Art Brown outside UC Berkeley's Sproul Hall, featuring speeches by the Free Speech Movement leaders Mario Savio and Jack Weinberg. Also includes views of large crowds singing "Happy Birthday" to Savio and a man presenting him with a gift set of clip-on ties, explaining how these will be useful when confronting police who want to arrest him. Savio had been dragged off the Greek Theater's stage yesterday by police (whilst wearing a tie). It should be noted that UC Berkeley's Academic Senate met earlier on the 8th and voted 824 to 115 for the five-point proposal made by the Committee on Academic Freedom against control of student speech and political advocacy."
12/7/1964, Reading Eagle, Student Leader Hits Peace Plan, UPI
"Berkeley, Calif., Dec. 7 (UPI)--a leader of the University of California rebel student "Free Speech Movement" gave advance notice today that the group looked with disfavor on a peace plan to be presented later today."
12/7/1964, KRON TV, UC Berkeley Greek Theater: Free Speech Movement,
"KRON News footage from December 7th 1964 featuring views of Faculty representative Professor Robert A. Scalapino, Chancellor Clark Kerr and Mario Savio speaking to crowds at UC Berkeley's Greek Theater, about the recent Free Speech Movement protests on campus. Also includes views of people scuffling onstage over the microphone."
12/7/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
12/7/1964, Berkeley Daily Gazette, Kerr Says No UC Discipline for Sit-Ins,
"'New and liberalized political action rules' were promised by University of California President Clark Kerr today to settle the Berkeley campus administration's dispute with students.
¶
Kerr made the offer as he went before a university meeting, for both faculty and students, in the Greek Theater with a five-point compromise designed to settle the dispute.
¶
Kerr announced the proposal after a secret meeting of three to four hours at Hilton Inn at San Francisco International Airport yesterday with Gov. Edmund G. Brown and at least two members of the UC Board of Regents.
¶
The meetting on campus today, a type of session that usually happens once a semester for such things as commencements or visits by U.S. Presidents, was called for 11 a.m. But the university canceled all morning classes. not just those for 11 a.m., in the midst of a strike called both by undergraduates belonging to the Free Speech Movement and graduate students organized as the Graduate Coordinating Committee.
¶
Before calling of the Greek Theater meeting, the graduates had said 900 of their number who are teaching assistants would not conduct classes. The campus has about 1,400 teaching assistants. Both groups sent pickets to the campus this morning."
12/6/1964, The Sacramento Bee, UC Student Senate Seeks Court Test Of Political Curbs, AP and UPI sources
"The senate, a student government body, voted unanimously 13 to 0 for the test. This presumably would involve getting a student arrested for an illegal act organized on campus."
12/6/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, Student Senate UC Non-Rebels Plan Court Test Of Politics Ban, Ron Fimrite and Don Wegars
12/6/1964, Los Angeles Times, Letters: UC Student Denounces Defiance of Lawful Authority by Sit-ins, Linda Andrews
"I am a student at the University of California at Berkeley, and I have been very much distressed at the mass demonstrations, sit-ins, and arrests that have been taking place on this campus."
12/5/1964, The New York Times, Students Picket on Coast Campus, Wallace Turner
"Berkeley Classes Affected as Protest Resumes"
12/4/1964, The Times of London, Student Protests in France,
"About 3,000 students attended a meeting in the Latin quarter of Paris tonight and heard some vigorous attacks on the Government's educational policies. Severe precautions against disorders were taken by the police, and the student leaders urged their members to disperse quietly.
¶
In Lille some 1,200 students, accompanied by a number of lecturers, paraded through the streets. In Bordeaux there were some 600, carrying placards, and in Rennes there was an hour's strike, when students attended meetings."
12/4/1964, The New York Times, 796 Students Arrested as Police Break Up Sit-In at U. of California, Wallace Turner
"BERKELEY, Calif., Dec. 3 -- The police arrested 796 University of California students in 12 hours today, dragging many on their backs down flights of stairs to end a sit-in demonstration. The mass arrests were made in removing demonstrators who took possession of the administration building on the campus last night."
12/4/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, Students Call Police Brutal, Carolyn Anspacher
"Goldberg, whose shirt was torn and pants ripped, said he was dragged face down on -the sidewalk by police.
¶
'I said, 'That hurts,' and the cop said, 'Sure it hurts. I'm glad it hurts. It'll keep on hurting.''
¶
Goldberg said the police modified their behavior when news cameramen appeared on the scene.
¶
'Those cameras saved a lot of us,' he said.
¶
Savio asserted the police 'became more impatient and more brutal' as the long night of arrest wore on. 'They called us pigs and Communists.'"
12/4/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, Judge Reduces the Bail, Charles Raudebaugh and Dean St. Dennis
"Alaneda county officials braced themselves yesterday for a long legal battle over the 801 demonstrators arrested in the University of California's Sproul Hall sit-in.
¶
District Attorney J. Frank Coakley foresaw a series of mass trials such as the civil rights cases that jammed San Francisco's municipal courts this summer.
¶
Defense attorneys for the Sproul Hall demonstrators declined to discuss strategy, other than to announce they were concentrating immediate efforts on getting the arrested students out of jail on bail.
¶
PLEA
A group of University faculty members joined the lawyers in a plea to Berkeley Presiding Municipal Judge Rupert Crittenden to release the students on their own recognizance, or at least to cut the bail to $25 each.
¶
Associate Professor of English Larzar Ziff said the faculty had raised a bail fund of $8500."
12/4/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, Friends Keep Watch Outside Jail,
"Hundreds of University of California students took up a shivering vigil outside the gates of Alameda county's Santa Rita Prison Farm last night.
¶
They were there, hopefully, to drive their classmates back to Berkeley if their class mates should be released from jail.
¶
They were there, actually to demonstrate an identity with and sympathy for the hundred s of students who have been jailed in the Sproul Hall sit-in.
¶
CROWD
The crowd began gathering at dusk and within two hours a line of parked automobiles stretched along Highway 50 for about 21/2 miles.
¶
The occupants of the cars huddled around the main gate, sharing blankets against the chill night air. Some mothers brought their infant children with them.
¶
There was much passing of hats to raise the bail money for someone inside the jail. But as with students everywhere, money is not plentiful. Two men who had received their food allotments for the month pooled them to bail out a friend."
12/4/1964, New York Post, Campus Rebel With a Cause, Bernard Bard
"Mario Savio, the "bright, bright boy" who led the University of California sit-ins, was the highest ranking student ever to graduate from Martin Van Buren HS in Queens, and holder of a full scholarship at Manhattan College.
¶
The transplanted New Yorker, under arrest today in the Santa Rita, Calif, prison farm, is the leader of the Free Speech moveainent at the Berkeley campus. With 500 of his followers he was taken into custody by state, city, campus and Alameda County police.
¶
'My son has always been a peaceful boy, and from the start we knew he had a brilliant mind,' Mrs. Dora Savio, his mother, said today. 'We believe in his cause, and we're proud of him, But sometimes we just prefer he'd lead a simple life. We're afraid that some day people will tear him down.'"
12/4/1964, Le Monde, HUIT CENTS ARRESTATIONS A L'UNIVERSITE DE CALIFORNIE A LA SUITE DE MANIFESTATIONS,
[trans:] "At the request of democratic governor Edmund Brown, the California State Police arrested Wednesday and Thursday more than eight hundred students of the university at Berkeley who were protesting to gain greater political freedoms. The demonstration was organized by the Free Speech Movement and protested disciplinary actions taken against four of its members who participated notably in the demonstrations favoring racial integration.
¶
The president of the university, who opposes free speech, and who also opposes the organization of clubs and groups of a political nature on the campus declared that 40% of the participants were not students of the university, and that among these 40% were certain 'COMMUNIST SYMPATHIZERS'."
12/4/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
12/4/1964, Chicago Tribune, NAB 800 IN COLLEGE SIT-IN, Seymour Korman
"An uneasy quiet lay over the sprawling University of California campus tonight after helmeted officers broke up a huge sit-in siege in the administration center and arrested approximately 800 demonstrators."
12/4/1964, Boston Globe, 800 Students Arrested at California 'Sit-In', Daryl Lembke
"New heights of rebellion, vocal warfare and chaos were reached on the embattled University of California campus Thursday by the arrest and jailing of 801 sit-ins."
12/4/1964, Berkeley Daily Gazette, Demonstrators Out of Jail; Pickets March,
"All 769 demonstrators arrested yesterday were released today and Free Speech Movement leaders called for a massive strike at a noon rally at Student Union Plaza at University of California here.
¶
FSM leaders Mario Savio and Art Goldberg, among the last to be released, addressed the new rally today.
¶
Savio harangued the 12,000 students jamming the plaza and urged a giant march through all campus buildings to urge other students and faculty to strike.
¶
With sympathy for the students who oppose administration restrictions on their political activity spreading to other campuses throughout the state, the San Francisco Art Institute requested 10 FSM leaders to address a rally there at noon.
¶
FSM leaders and sympathizers picketed entrances to the Berkeley UC campus in an effort to effect a complete strike of all classroom acivities.
¶
Effects were not immediately possible to evaluate, said a university spokesman, who, however, had reports of numerous classes that either did not meet or were sparsely attended.
¶
Meanwhile, five of the UC faculty members who criticized the administration yesterday amplified that feeling with new comments today and heaped new criticism on Chancellor Edward Strong, whose ouster was asked at yesterday's meeting of over 1,000 faculty members."
12/4/1964, Berkeley Daily Gazette, EDITORIAL,
"We Will Defend to Death The Great Freedoms -Of Thought, of Worship, Of the Spoken or Written Word
We believe the foregoing is equally true of Governor Edmund G. Brown, President Clark Kerr and Chancellor Edward W. Strong.
No one who has watched with mounting concern the events at the University can fail to see the necessity for yesterday's action by police in clearing 769 demonstrators out of the University of California Administration building. It was best summed up by the words of UC President Clark Kerr who said:
¶
'This nation is devoted to freedom under the law, not to anarchy under willful minority, whether the minority be radical students in the North or white supremacists in the South. The ends of neither group justify the means they employ. Freedom can only exist within a rule of law, and this is as true when the attack is from the radical left as when it is from the Klu Klux Klan.'
¶
President Kerr also gave the arrested student something to ponder when he said that the students 'are now finding that in their effort to escape the gentle discipline of the University they have thrown themselves into the arms of the less understanding discipline of the community at large ... and they are learning that the community is no more sympathetic with anarchy than the University they so violently condemn.'
¶
Those who believe that the action taken by the administration was right should rally to UC Chancellor Edward Strong who has borne the brunt of two month's struggle.
¶
The arrest of the students has ended one chapter in dispute, then end of the book is not yet in sight."
12/3/1964, Toledo Blade, Police Break Up U of C Student Sit-In, UPI
"BERKELEY, Calif. , Dec. 3--Police plowed into some 800 University of California students who staged an all-night sit-in inside the campus administration building today, made arrests, and dragged limp students to waiting busses for a trip to the county prison farm."
12/3/1964, The New York Times, Berkeley Students Stage Sit-In To Protest Curb on Free Speech, Wallace Turner
"Mr. Savio, a philosophy major and a frequent speaker in the several months of demonstrations, rejected the plea of the student body's president, Charles Powell, not to demonstrate further.
¶
Mr. Powell had pleaded with a Crowd of several thousand gathered in the plaza by the modernistic Students Union Building 'do not do this thing!'
¶
Joan Baez, the folk singer, helped draw the crowd, as she has at other demonstrations on the campus.
¶
Civil Rights Songs
¶
She sang various civil rights movement songs, including 'We Shall Overcome,' and urged the students who went into Sproul Hall to 'have love as you do this thing and it will succeed.'"
12/3/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, How the Crisis Developed, Ron Fimrite
"The seeds of the student-administration dispute on campus political activity were sown, appropriately enough, during the Republican National Convention here last June."
12/3/1964, Biddeford Saco Journal, Demonsrating Students Arrested in California, AP
"Hundreds of others were sleeping, cuddled together for warmth under blankets and makeshift covers, on the third and second floors of the large building. At a second-floor window, members of the student body climbed ropes into the hall to join the protest. Two discovered, the influx was greater than the evacuaion."
12/2/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, 300 Students Threaten New Sit-in at UC, Associated Press
"BERKELEY (AP)--New sit-in demonstrations at the University of California were threatened Tuesday as about 300 students gave the university 24 hours to meet new demands.
¶
Students asked that charges be dropped against Mario Savio, Arthur Goldberg and his sister, Jackie, and several organizarions cited for breaking university rules involving political activities.
¶
Other Demands
They also asked that the administration halt further disciplinary action for the present; that no regulations be adopted to restrict students' political rights on campus; that only courts should have authority to regulate political activities on campus; and that power should be given to a faculty-student-administration committee to rule on political expression on campus.
¶
The administration was given until noon today to meet the demands. If not, student leaders said a sit-in would be staged at the university's administration building similar to the one staged in October."
12/1/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
11/27/1964, San Francisco Examiner, UC Free Speech Unrest May Spread, Ed Montgomery
"The Marxist dominated Free Speech Movement which has kept the UC campus at Berkeley in a turmoil for weeks is destined to spread.
¶
The blueprints are drawn. The mechanics of an expansion program have begun.
¶
Already speakers involved in the Berkeley demonstrations have appeared on campus at Santa Barbara and USC within the last 72 hours urging the formation of W. E. B. DuMois Clubs."
11/27/1964, San Francisco Examiner, The Question of Marxism, unattributed sidebar to Ed Montgomery article
"Last night [Evan] Alderson told The Examiner that the questions of Marxist leadership had come from the audience but he denied making the answers attributed to him.
¶
A spokesman for the Berkeley FSM headquarters said another authorized spokesman will be dispatched south to confer with the movements voluble unauthorized spokesman."
11/27/1964, San Francisco Examiner, Statement By Kerr, unattributed sidebar to Ed Montgomery article
"In a letter to newspapers. Kerr said...'On Oct 2 at a press conference held in connection with a meeting of the American Council on Education I said
I am sorry to say that some elements actice in the demonstrations have been impressed with the tactics of Fidel Castro and Mao Tse-tung. There are very few of these, but there are some.'"
11/26/1964, San Francisco Examiner, Behind the Scenes at UC, Ed Montgomery
"Also in the background, and attending demonstrations, are representatives of such non-campus organizations as the National Lawyers Guild, the Socialist Workers Party, and SCOPE, an S.F. State College student group.
¶
In addition, the FSM has drawn support from a smattering of teaching assistants, graduate students, and university employees.
¶
It was claimed at one point that nearly 200 teaching assistants had joined the FSM cause. A subsequent check placed the number at 74."
...¶
"Among university employees participating in the demonstrations is Ann Fagan Ginger Wood. She is a part time worker in law research, and is the wife of James Fenton Wood, guitar strumming member of the Communist Party, according toe sworn testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
¶
Mrs. Wood was photographed atop the stalled police car during the initial disorder advising demonstrators of their legal rights."
11/26/1964, San Francisco Examiner, Dean Reprimands 60 UC Students, unattributed sidebar to Ed Montgomery article
"University of California Dean of Students Katherine A. Towle yesterday sent 60 UC students letters of reprimand for violating political regulations on Nov. 9.
¶
She warned that future violations would lead o more serious penalties.
¶
The students were charged with recruitment for off-campus political action and solicitation of funds, which then was against UC rules.
¶
UC's Student Affairs Committee, made up of faculty and administration, announced yesterday that the student Senate will be given the responsibility for policing the newly designated areas where students will be allowed to plan legal off-camps [sic] activities.
¶
The Student Affairs Committee also announced that a 12-man student made up of seven undergraduates and five graduates will be appointed tp advise Chancellor Edward W. Strong on interpretation of the new rules.
¶
Meanwhile, about 500 students staged another rally on the Sproul Hall steps yesterday. Rebel leader Art Goldberg urged the students to picket the Oakland Tribune Saturday in protest of alleged discriminatory hiring practices."
11/26/1964, San Francisco Examiner, A Guide to UC Free Speechers, unattributed sidebar to Ed Montgomery article
"Member organizations of the self styled Free Speech Movement, which is leading the student rebellion over University of California political regulations, were made public yesterday for the first time.
¶
Each of the 22 organizations in this handy Reader' Guide to the Free Speech Movement has tow [sic] votes on the Executive Committee. Two of the organizations, the Graduate Students Coordinating Committee and the Independent Students, have five extra votes each because of their large size."
11/25/1964, San Francisco Examiner, Tail Wags the Dog Behind UC Rebellion, Ed Montgomery
"Of those students involved, few have direct organizational ties of radical, extremist or even Communist nature.
¶
Many are the dupes, unwittingly or otherwise, of trained agitators, some of whom are not even registered as students."
11/25/1964, San Francisco Examiner, UC Overrules Film On Homosexuality, unattributed sidebar to Ed Montgomery article
"The denial immediately provoked cries of 'censorship' from the campus group SLATE, which wanted to sponsor the showing of existentialist playwright Jean Genet's 1950 film 'Un Chant d'Amour.'"
11/25/1964, San Francisco Examiner, UC Police Bill Stll Unpaid, unattributed sidebar to Ed Montgomery article
"The Alameda County Board of Supervisors was advised yesterday that the University of California Regents can find no legal provision enabling them to pay a $3,628 policing bill run up by the sheriff's department during the recent demonstrations at the university."
11/24/1964, The Daily Californian, To The Campus (Advertisement), E.W. STRONG, Chancellor
"Activities of students in disobedience of the laws of the state and community are punishable in their courts. The university maintains jurisdiction over violations of its rules including those which prohibit use of university facilities for planning and recruiting for actions found to be unlawful by the courts. There will be no prior determination of double jeopardy in matters of political and social activities organized on the campus by students and staff. The demand of the FSM that the University permit the mounting of unlawful action on the campus without penalty by the University cannot and will not be granted."
11/23/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, On the Town: Songs Born of The UC Rebellion, Ralph J. Gleason
"Thus it was no coincidence that Joan Baez, whose conscience is so in touch with truth that she dared speak frankly to the President of the United States, was a leading figure at the incredible rally Friday on the Plaza. Incredible in the sense that the FSM rally was held in conjunction with and in coordination with the Beat Stanford Rally, with 'Beat Stanford cheers' being led by Jack Weinberg and Art Goldberg of the FSM, and 'three cheers for FSM' being led by Jamie Sutton, the Cal cheerleader. And the speakers paused on cue to let the Cal band and the pom pom girls parade. Thus the IBM revolution."
11/23/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
11/20/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
11/19/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
11/19/1964, Daily Californian, To whom it may concern, Walt Herbert
"But I really do believe that there is an area of common concern between the administration and the FSM, and that this present crisis is filled with opportunity as well as danger. It is also filled with ironies, and one of the more terrible of these ironies is that the University may cut itself off from a vitality which could bring a profound refreshment to the spirit of the institution, a humanizing of the intellectual atmosphere, a new freedom from stereotypes, and a sense of caring about what happens here."
11/17/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
11/16/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
11/15/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, On the Town: An Aural Record of The U.C. Struggle, Ralph J. Gleason
"It will be interesting to see if thid student-produced, performed and originated record will be sold on the campus. Free speech on phonograph records and free speech in song. This is a new world. The winds of change are blowing again."
11/15/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, Growing Pains at UC, James Benet
"We have a saying in the movement that you can't trust anybody over 30,' he [Jack Weinberg] remarked."
11/15/1964, New York Times, Berkeley Protest Becomes a Ritual, Wallace Turner
"Meanwhile, a committee headed by Ira M. Heyman, a professor of law, had been studying the question of whether the eight students had rightfully been suspended on the night of Sept. 30.
That Committee reported publically Friday, and found against the university administration. It said the students had violated regulations, but that they were motivated by high principle."
11/12/1964, Oakland Tribune, The Revolt at U.C.--What It's About, Carl Irving
"Student president Charles Powell, the student senate, the interfraternity council, and other student groups have been critical of the tactics employed by the FSM, Savio's group. But all have said at the same time that all they favor an easing of present university regulations restricting political and social action."
11/12/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
11/11/1964, Berkeley Daily Gazette,
" 'no one can deny that Savio is getting experience in his chosen field, moral and ethical philosophy. 'I consider the Free Speech Movement and...[SNCC] are my workshop in applied philosophy,' he says.'"
11/10/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
"Foreign Student Leaders Visit
¶
A group of fourteen foreign student leaders, FSM representatives, Assistant Dean of Students George Murphy, and Charlie Powell discussed the FSM demonstrations last Friday.
¶
The foreign students, who first heard of the demonstrations while they were in New York, had expressed an interest in them because they had faced many of the same problems.
¶
Their reaction to the demonstrations were always tinged with worry the administration's actions might set a precedent.
¶
Abhijay Karlekar, an Indian student, said he was not surprised at all because he has known Americans for a long time. He added that he 'was surprised at the authorities stand because it might become a precedent.'
¶
Alberto Galindo, a student from Chile, said the Administration's actions 'represent dual standards of citizenship.' He said it was so difficult for him to 'understand how this (the demonstrations) could happen at such a prestigious university;' he thought the students were supporting the University in an action against the government.
¶
At one point in the discussion, Murphy said the 'present University regulations, imperfect as they are,' do not infringe upon the student's right to free speech."
11/9/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
11/6/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
11/5/1964, The Daily Californian, Kerr Refutes 'Letter Proof', Ann Lubar
"The reasons behind the Free Speech Movement's apparent rush to force the Campus Committee on Political Activity to vote on the free speech issue were revealed when the Daily Californian received copies of alleged 'documentary proof' that the administration has been drafting laws without waiting for the committee report.
¶
The proof consisted of photostatic copies of two letters, one bearing the name, but not the signature, of University President Clark Kerr.
¶
The second letter bore the type-written name of Thomas Cunningham, General Counsel for the University.
¶
The letters dealt with changes of University rules, and were dated October 13, 1964."
11/5/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
11/4/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
11/3/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
10/30/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
10/28/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
10/27/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
10/26/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
10/23/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
10/22/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
10/21/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
10/20/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
10/19/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
10/16/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
10/15/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
"Over 650 Greeks from 37 houses have signed a petition declaring support of the FSM.
¶
The petition said that freedom of speech is a constitutional right of students and a necessary part of the educational process, and that true freedom of speech requires that students and student organizations be free to promote their causes by peaceful action on or off campus.
¶
'The Free Speech movement is composed of responsible students whose goal is to secure for us all the right to freedom of speech and expression on the Berkeley campus. We support this goal.'
¶
Mike Smith of Zeta Psi who started the petition said the reason for it was that 'we feel the University of California has been slandered and that President Kerr's line about 49 per cent of the demonstrators being Mao-Castroites is untrue. This petition certainly counteracts the eggthrowing image of the fraternities.'"
10/14/1964, The Justice , A Letter From U Cal., Ruth Sonnenblick
"I suppose you've seen, heard, or a t least heard rumors of what happened at Berkeley, this last week, and more specifically in the last three days. We (15 alumni out here) sent a night letter to Brandeis asking for a sympathy demonstration."
10/14/1964, Daily Californian, FSM Represents Many, Ann Lubar
"However, since FSM's formation, many additional groups have been given representatives on the Executive Council. The following political organizations have two representatives each on the Executive Council: California Council of Republicans, Citizens for Independent Political Action, Congress of Racial Equality, Independent Socialist Club, Students for Fair Housing, Students' Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, W.E.B. DuBois Club, Women for Peace, Young Democrats, Young Republicans, and the Young Socialists' Alliance.
In addition, there are seven representatives from the Independent Student Group, an organization of students who do not belong to any political clubs, and three representatives from the Independent Graduate Students, non-affiliated graduate students.
The Inter-Faith Council has three representatives on the Executive Council, supposedly one Protestant, one Jewish, and one Catholic, although the FSM press secretary said he was unclear on this point.
Also on the Executive Council is Jack Weinberg, the only non-student representative on the Council. He was given a vote because he was arrested, according to an FSM spokesman.
Similarly, three of the eight students suspended by the University do not belong to any organizations. Since the other five are representatives of various groups and have votes on the Executive Council, the three were also given votes.
There are also two representatives from Particle, an undergraduate science and math organization.
The Steering Committee, which currently has nine members, was elected by the Executive Council from among the representatives on the Executive Council. It is the Steering Committee which has been negotiating with the administration."
10/14/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
10/13/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
10/13/1964, Daily Californian, FSM's Demands Unmet, Ann Lubar
"New demands by the Free Speech Movement were met with indifference from the administration today. FSM leaders have not yet been able to confer with President Clark Kerr or Chancellor Strong.
¶
A University spokesman speaking for President Kerr yesterday afternoon, said that President Kerr did not have a meeting scheduled with the steering committee of FSM.
¶
FSM spokesmen expressed surprise. They claimed that a Kerr-FSM meeting was scheduled for Tuesday morning."
10/12/1964, Oakland Tribune, Kerr Cites Goals of University, unsigned
"While students still demonstrated on the Berkeley campus, University of California President Clark Kerr today told a San Francisco convention that 'the university has a responsibility to ensure that the search for truth will never be subverted internally. For this precise reason, the University of California has refused to employ persons whose commitment or obligation to the Communist party, or any other organization, prejudice's impartial scholarship and free pursuit of truth,' he declared."
10/12/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
10/9/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
10/8/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
10/7/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
10/6/1964, Los Angeles Times, Editorial: Rules and Responsibilities at UC, editors
"Recent disorders on the University of California Berkeley campus ha e prompted rumblings which hint at efforts to impose stricter legislative controls over student political activity. UC President Clark Kerr's administration, at thge same time, has been accused by one legislator of 'appeasement' for its part in ending the student sit-downs."
10/6/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
10/5/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, On the Town: Boris Makes The UC Scene, Ralph J. Gleason
"'Boris' Law, baby, Boris' Law. It says, you can too fight City Hall and what's more you gotta. It's your first duty as a human being. You may not win, baby, but you can always fight. And that's what those kiddies did. They fought City Hall.'"
10/5/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
10/3/1964, San Francisco Examiner, 'Reds on Campus'--UC's Kerr, Ben Williams
"Kerr told an Examiner reporter that very few university students were actuality involved in the hard core leadership.
¶
'There is an extreme left wing clement there.' he said. 'Forty-nine percent of the hard core group are followers of the Castro-Mao line.
¶
He reviewed his own feelings about what freedoms students should be allowed in a statement to the press after student demonstrators at last abandoned their long vigil in front of Sproul Hall last night.
¶
Kerr said:
¶
'In recent years students have been given an increasing amount of freedom. I have argued with the board of regents and with alumni groups and in other quarters in the past that if we increase the freedom of students their sense of responsibility will increase correspondingly.'"
10/3/1964, San Francisco Examiner, How a Sermon Cooled Rebels, unsigned
"A Catholic priest's sermon from the hood was credited with dispersing rebellious students on the UC campus early yesterday, and helping to prevent a potential clash with a similar opposition group.
¶
The Rev. James Fisher of the campus Newman Hall climbed atop the battered·police car that has served as a student rostrum about 1:30 a. m.
¶
There had been milling and shouting and a vocal battle between the demonstrators·in·residence and a column of 200 fraternity and sorority members who marched in to mock them.
¶
'The right of free speech, great as it is, and the right of authority, as greatly as it should be respected, should not be brought into conflict if human life is to be endangered,' Father Fisher said.
¶
'John F. Kennedy once said: 'Ask not what your country can do for you, ask rather what you can do for your country'' …
¶
'Hatred will beget bloodshed: the kind of cat-calling going on today will get worse as the night goes on. You have presumably come to this university because you are men attempting to perfect your rationality.
¶
'This is not the sort of thing that tends toward that. I have nothing more to say.'
¶
The priest climbed down. There was utter silence in the plaza for fully a half hour. Most students went home to bed, an orderly 200 remained.
¶
The demonstrations were over for the moment."
10/3/1964, New York Times, Concession Ends Three-Day Protest At U. of California, Wallace Turner
"BERKELEY, Calif., Oct 2.--A three-day student demonstration on the University of California campus ended tonight with a minor concession from the university administration.
¶
Clark Kerr, president of the university system, said the school would review the duration of suspensions imposed on eight students. The suspensions had been "'ndefinite.'
¶
It also would not press tresspass charges against the man arrested by the Berkeley police yesterdayand held all night in a police car.
¶
'But the district Attorney may want to prosecute him,' said Mr. Kerr.
¶
The charge was lodged against Jack Weinberg, 24 years old, a Congress of Racial Equality member but not a student. Students were responsible for his being held in a police car on the campus from 11:45 A.M. yesterday until about 8 tonight."
10/2/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
"During the day Mona Hutchins, Vice-President of the University Society of Individualists, a conservative group, issued the following statement:
¶
'The conservative campus groups fully agree with the purpose of the sit-ins in Sproul Hall. Individual members of our organizations have expressed their sympathy by joining in the picketing on the steps of the Hall and will continue to do so.
¶
'However our belief in lawful redress of grievances prevents us from joining the sit-ins. But let no one mistake our intent. The united front still stands'"
¶
Miss Hutchin claimed also to represent the Cal Students for Goldwater and the Young Republicans in this matter."
10/1/1964, San Francisco Chronicle, UC 'Revolt' Over Ban on Politics,
"Eight University of California students were expelled late last night for their part in the sit-in of 400 persons at the Berkeley campus' administration building to protest the university ban on political activity.
¶
Announcing the expulsions--which were termed 'indefinite suspensions'--Chancellor Edward Strong said the measure was necessary because of 'willful misconduct in deliberately vilating the rules od the university.'"
10/1/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
"Williams Refuses Demands; 700 Sleep in Sproul Hall
¶
By Jim Branson
¶
Almost 700 University students ran the risk of explusion yesterday to support violations by several student groups of the University's ban on advocacy of social action on campus.
¶
In what was termed a "spontaneous demonstration," the students sat in the hallway of Sproul Hall's second floor and vowed not to move until their demands had been meet. Many of the groups planned to remain there all night.
¶
DENIED
¶
The incident began at noon when the University friends of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and Campus Congress of Racial Equality set up tables at Sather Gate. They didn't have the permits from the Dean of Students Office which are required for any tables or speakers on campus.
¶
According to Mario Savio, one of the leaders of the Sproul Hall demonstration, the student groups were denied permits because it was suspected that they would attempt to collect funds for off-campus political or social action.
¶
According to Brian Turner, who set up the SNCC table, funds were being collected. This is contrary to the University's recent edict.
¶
When the tables were up two representatives of the administration approached the SNCC table and wrote down Turner's name. When Turner left Donald Hatch, a senior in history major, took his place. His name was also written down. "
9/30/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
"Meanwhile, the ASUC Senate seemed divided over whether to finally accept the University's twice-diluted policy or to keep pressing for a complete removal of the Bancroft-Telegraph ban.
¶
Senior Representative-at-Large Dan Griset stated that 'Our interests as students have been almost completely satisfied.
¶
'I am not at all impressed, said Griset, with the disrespect that many students have shown for the `give and take' process of reaching agreement. Rash and unreasonable action loses more ground than it gains.'
¶
In reply, ASUC First Vice-President Jerry Goldstein insisted that 'We should not stop now, just because a liberalization in the policy has been made.
¶
'As a last resort,' said Goldstein, 'we should buy the Bancroft-Telegraph area and make it into a completely open forum.'"
9/29/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
"Strong Yields to Political Groups
¶
By Pete Benjaminson
¶
Another substantial concession was made by the University yesterday to the political groups protesting the Bancroft-Telegraph ban.
¶
HYDE PARK
¶
Campaign literature advocating 'yes' and 'NO' votes on propositions and candidates, and campaign buttons and bumper strips may now be distributed at Bancroft-Telegraph and at eight other areas on campus.
¶
The earlier concessions made by the University moved the 'Hyde Park' area from the Student Union Plaza to Sproul Hall steps and to allow a restricted number of tables for the distribution of literature at the Bancroft-Telegraph entrance.
¶
This new 'reinterpretation of Regent's policy' was publicly announced by Chancellor Edward Strong at the University meeting held at 11 a.m. yesterday."
9/28/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
9/25/1964, Daily Californian, Free Speech Vigil, Ann Lubar
"They started arriving at the Sproul Hall steps shortly before 9 p.m. Within an hour and a half there were nearly 300 students lounging on the steps. They were from Congress of Racial Equality and Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee and Young Socialist League, Young Democrats and Young Republicans, and most of the other campus political organizations, as well as a number of unaffiliated students.
They read, or talked, or sang. The most popular song was "We Shall Overcome," with new verses proclaiming: 'We shall all speak out... We shall advocate.'
When Art Goldberg of Slate arrived he announced that President Clark Kerr and the Regents were meeting at University House. After fifteen minutes of discussion and a voice vote the group decided to march to the house, singing 'Left and right together, we shall overcome,' walk around for five minutes, and then leave.
In addition, Goldberg and Warren Coats, president of the University Young Republicans, were to represent the group and seek audience with President Kerr and the Regents."
9/25/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
9/23/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
"Senate Asks End of Ban, Circulates Student Petition
¶
By Pete Benjaminson
¶
The ASUC Senate voted 11-5 last night to request the Regents to re-establish the Bancroft-Telegraph area as a bastion of free speech and advocation of off-campus action.
¶
While the request is pending, a Senate sponsored petition will be circulated to rally grass roots support.
¶
And if the request is rejected, the Senate indicated in debate, the ASUC may buy the area and donate it either to the City of Berkeley or a student group as a free-speech area. "
9/22/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
"Bancroft Groups Refuse Conditions
¶
By Pete Benjaminson
...¶
Most of the former 'open forum' area at the intersection of Bancroft and Telegraph is University property. However, for the past few years the University has not enforced the above policies there.
¶
Jackie Goldberg, spokesman for the twenty protesting groups, insisted that the University 'has not gone far enough in allowing us to promote the kind of society we're interested in.
¶
'We're allowed to say why we think something is good or bad, but we're not allowed to distribute any information as to what to do about it.
¶
'Inaction is the rule rather than the exception in our society and on this campus,' Miss Goldberg said. 'And education is and should be more than academics.
¶
FAIR
¶
'We don't want to be armchair intellectuals,' she said. 'For a hundred years people have talked and talked and done nothing. We want to help the students decide where they fit into the political spectrum and what they can do about their beliefs. We want to help build a better society.'"
9/21/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
"Off-Campus Political Groups Prepare for Dean's Response
¶
Picketings, vigils, rallies and a touch of civil disobedience will be the response given the University if it stands firm on the Bancroft politics ban, it was decided last night.
¶
At a 9 p.m. meeting yesterday, representatives of most of the groups that will be affected by the University's new enforcement policy decided on the following program:
an already-scheduled 10:30 a.m. meeting today with Dean of Students Katherine A. Towle. If the University retracts its newly issued enforcement policy, the only further action to be taken by the groups will be to announce this at a press conference scheduled for 11:30 a.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph.
assuming that no satisfaction is obtained from the University by the groups, several of them will at noon set up several tables at the Bancroft-Telegraph area in defiance of the University's new enforcement policy.
soon after the tables are set up, pickets will march in front of Sproul Hall to protest the University's policy.
at 7 p.m., a rally is to be held on the Sproul Hall steps so that the protesting groups can explain their position to the students.
an all-night vigil on the steps of Sproul Hall is scheduled for Wednesday at 10 p.m."
9/18/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
"Political Groups May Defy Dean
¶
By Pete Benjaminson
¶
Civil disobedience may well erupt at noon Monday at the Bancroft-Telegraph campus entrance.
¶
It will be the result of the apparent failure of reconciliation efforts made yesterday by the University and student political groups. The groups feel themselves and their causes to be hurt by the University's new enforcement policy regarding the Bancroft-Telegraph area."
9/17/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
9/16/1964, Daily Californian, Various FSM Articles,
"Slate Supplement Appears, Letter Asks for Rebellion
¶
By Jim Branson
¶
In its Supplement Report yesterday Slate called on University students to 'begin an open, fierce and thoroughgoing rebellion on this campus.'
¶
The report, a letter to undergraduates from former student Brad Cleaveland, said the University "does not deserve a response of loyalty and allegiance from you. There is only one proper response to Berkeley from undergraduates: that you ORGANIZE AND SPLIT THIS CAMPUS WIDE OPEN!'"
8/26/1964, Berkeley Daily Gazette, The Open Forum, Mrs. G. R. Kepner
"As a former (for the past three years) Garfield teacher, I would like to offer my endorsement of the Ramsey Plan and comment on some of the objections raised to it."
3/16/1964, San Francisco Examiner, Who is Running the Rights Sit-Ins: How Many are Radicals? A Look at the Records, Ed Montgomery
The UC Vote Tomorrow--Slate Explains Its Success, Lynn Ludlow
"If you purchase a booklet or get a leaflet from one of UC's activist political clubs, the chances are excellent that it was printed by a Slate subsidiary, the Berkeley Free Press."
|