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The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s
This is the authoritative and long-awaited volume on Berkeley's celebrated Free Speech Movement (FSM) of 1964. Drawing from the experiences of many movement veterans, this collection of scholarly articles and personal memoirs illuminates in fresh ways one of the most important events in the recent history of American higher education. The contributorswhose perspectives range from that of FSM leader Mario Savio to University of California president Clark Kerr-shed new light on such issues as the origins of the FSM in the civil rights movement, the political tensions within the FSM, the day-to-day dynamics of the protest movement, the role of the Berkeley faculty and its various factions, the 1965 trial of the arrested students, and the virtually unknown "little Free Speech Movement of 1966."
- GenresHistory
672 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
About the author
Robert Cohen
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There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
Robert Cohen is a professor of history and social studies in NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. He is an affiliated member of NYU’s History Department. His historical scholarship focuses on politics, higher education, and social protest in twentieth century America. His social studies work links middle and high school teachers with the recent advances in historical scholarship and develops curriculum aimed at teaching their students to explore history as a critical discipline – and one that is characterized by intense and exciting debate.
Source:NYU.
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
Robert Cohen is a professor of history and social studies in NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. He is an affiliated member of NYU’s History Department. His historical scholarship focuses on politics, higher education, and social protest in twentieth century America. His social studies work links middle and high school teachers with the recent advances in historical scholarship and develops curriculum aimed at teaching their students to explore history as a critical discipline – and one that is characterized by intense and exciting debate.
Source:NYU.
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April 5, 2026
Leon Litwack writes in the preface to the Free Speech Movement anthology that “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.” They challenged the Kerr Principles of political neutrality. Before FSM, controversial speakers were excluded from campus, University rules forbade using the college grounds for partisan political activity , and the Board of Regents insisted on monitoring the loyalty of each faculty member through an oath. Litwack argues that “between 1960 and 1972 at places like Berkeley significant numbers of young people came to believe that direct, personal commitment to social justice was a moral imperative and that social inequities are neither inevitable nor accidental but reflect the assumptions, beliefs, and decisions of certain people who command enormous power.”
Robert Cohen in the introduction to the same describes what happened at Berkeley as “an authentic political invention– a new complex mixture of issues, tactics, emotions, and setting that became the prototype for student protest throughout the decade.” He notes that the nonviolent civil disobedience of the Civil Rights Movement inspired student dissenters to question the authority and challenge the power of campus administrators.” He quotes Todd Gitlin of the SDS who described the mass movement as not simply about free speech and not simply about the right to organize for political action but “about” the necessity of revolt…” The movement, according to Breines, created “communities of equality, direct democracy, and solidarity.’ She argues that “students linked free speech to notions about their own dignity and freedom.”
Cohen rehabilitates Clark Kerr, who comes off as a villain in most FSM narratives. Students were deeply suspicious of Cold War establishment liberals. The “49 percent “ episode where Kerr was thought o have red-baited student activists is explained and contextualized. Cohen also shows sympathy for conservative faculty members such as Feuer, Lipset, Seabury and Glazer who fear the disorder that FSM birthed. These were the voices that influenced the Regents in 1965 when they attempted to codify free speech rules that included restrictions on outside speakers, restraints on student government taking positions on off-campus issues, and recommendations for disciplining students for the content of their speech. Cohen also sheds light on the 1965 trial and te pro bono lawyers’ resistance to student efforts to “use the legal proceedings to further a political agenda.”
Cohen also entertains the claims of FSM’s critics who, like Kerr and Glazer, argued that the movement was guilty of “physical coercion.” Cohen argues that coercion is a continuum. “At the lower end,” he writes, “is the kind of coercion that comes only from highly charged, emotional rhetoric, and at the other end is genuine violence.” Cohen also tackles squarely the role of Communists in the FSM. He takes seriously Edgar J Hoover's quote that “while not Communist originated or controlled, [FSM] had been exploited by a few Communists for their own ends.”
A wide spectrum of Old Left groups such as the Communist-led Du Bois Club and the Independent Socialist Club (IS) and the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL) played a role in the deliberations of the FSM leadership.
Mario Savio’s 1995 talk “Thirty Years Later: Reflections on the FSM” given at a colloquium of the History of Consciousness Department is elucidating. He shares that he grew up a Catholic altar boy in an Italian Catholic family ad that he yearned to be a priest and that two of his aunts were nuns. He shares that he read Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier and much of what the Catholic Left press published in Catholic Worker publications. He grew up in Queens NY primarily around Catholics and Jews . He also identifies as part of the first generation to grow up under the threat of the bomb. He also describes himself as growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust and in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement. He saw in the Civil Rights Movement much of what he learned in catechism: do right and resist evil. He also shares an interesting point about coffeehouse culture : “existentialism had the coffeehouses and analytic philosophy had the lecture halls.” Savio sings the praises of the Bay Area civil rights movement that conducted successful demonstrations and pushed effectively to end discriminatory local hiring practices. He also admits that he went to the demonstrations to impress a girl. He recounts his time in Mississippi where he watched a Black man have to interpret a section of the Mississippi constitution in order to qualify as a registered voter. He returned to Berkeley as the incoming president of University Friends of SNCC and is not allowed to advocate for civil rights on the very strip of land where a year earlier he had received a flyer that sent him to Mississippi. He challenged the new policy by asking whether the restrictions were required by law. Once he learned , they were discretionary, he began to compare the arbitrariness of the university administrators to the caprice of the MS public officials.
Jo Freeman’s essay “From Freedom Now! To Free Speech” begins by offering background on how the FSM students were sensitized to inh=justice by their participation in the Sheraton-Palace hotel demonstration after a visit to Berkeley in spring 1963 by James Baldwin (he lectured to 9,000 students during the May Birmingham AL confrontations). Campus and Berkeley CORE went after the merchants in Telegraph and Shattuck Avenues. Agreements were reached and broken. Race and civil rights were on the front page of the Daily Californian three out of five days in the fall 1963 semester.
Part II of the anthology begins with Jackie Goldberg’s essay “War is Declared!” in which she recalls the moment she received the letter from Dean Towle that restrictions would be placed on campus free speech. She was a proud member of her sorority Delta Pi Epsilon and had worked previously with the dean to introduce nondiscriminatory language in the by-laws on the campus Greek societies. Margot Adler in her essay “My Life in the FSM” describes Berkeley as “a fantasy of the agora in ancient Athens… Much of Berkeley’s life took place outside.. Like a Greek polis.” Both essays provide insight on women of the Movement.Adler notes “the FSM retained, as did all Left movements of the day, its sexist baggage, and few were the women who made names for themselves on their own. Most of the movement’s women leaders were some man’s sister or lover.” She quotes Bettina Aptheker who remarked that “most of the histories of the sixties have been written by men…. The ideas, articulations, and reflections of women have been excluded… the histories have emphasized power and control, whereas the women’s stories might have emphasized the dailyness of struggle, connection, and the long process of meaningful change… women staffed the offices, while men held the press conferences and did the publicity. This reflected the sexual division of labor in the larger society.”
The next essay "Gender Politics and the FSM: A Meditation on Women and Freedom of Speech” by Bettina Aptheker begins with a quote from Frederick Douglass that Aptheker used during the police car incident: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Aptheker connects political power to political” speech with consequences.” She argues that “the advocacy of nonviolent civil disobedience” for civil rights eventually led to the Women’s Liberation Movement three years after FSM. Aptheker describes “women’s freedom of speech as particularly circumscribed when women [sought] to redress grievances against themselves.” She quotes Adrienne Rich who in retrospect distrusts theatrical and performative political speech.
Martin Roysher in his essay “Recollections of the FSM” quotes Savio who distrust establishment liberals “because they do not understand there is evil in the world.” Henry Mayer in “A View from the South” quotes Kerr (who in light of the tradition of Quaker moral witness) who accused radicals “as paying merely lip service to democratic ideals while in actuality serving the cause of anarchy.” Mayer also quotes Chancellor Strong who interpreted student defiance as the first steps toward mob rule “Arbitrary exercise of authority is always to be challenged, but defamation of authority duly exercised undermines respect for high offices and demoralizes a society.” Liberty of conscience expressed as political dissent opens the door to the logic of the crowd and norms violation and incivility foreclose political discourse according to establishment liberals.
David Hollinger in “A View from the Margins” shakes the testimony of rank and file participants Hollinger exercised no leadership in the FSM, was not arrested , and never spoke from the Sproul Hall steps. He shares that the revolt was also over the Tussman plan (an alternative structure for undergraduate liberal arts education along the lines of te intensive, rigorous study of the Great Books). Radicals also embraced “the highly classical, unapologetically canonical, aggressively Socratic approach to education”. He also shares that many Berkeley students in the movement had been under the tutelage of Carl Schorske and had read Mills essays on Bentham and Coleridge ad drawn inspiration for their romanticism. Hollinger seesSavio as heir to Eliot’s Christian prophetic critique (“tongues of flame are enfolded into the crowned knot of fire, and the fire and rose are one.”
Kate Coleman in “Dressing for the revolution” shares that she was a Valley girl from Encino and a neighbor of John Wayne’s. High school non-conformity led her to join SLATE, oppose ROTC recruitment on campus, protest against capital punishment, nuclear testing, and in favor of free birth control on demand. She describes her lefty yearnings as inchoate. This raises the question of how coherent political speech needs to be in order to be protected. She describes being radicalized over her five years at Berkeley.
Michael Rossman in “The Rossman Report: A Memoir of Making History” Rossman transferred from U Chicago because friends’ letters “reported a tantalizing awakening of political concern. He was a picket captain for demonstrations against HUAC and Chessman’s execution. He dropped out, worked on campus, served on the staff of the campus literary magazine, and served as recording secretary for the Bay Area Committee for the Abolition of HUAC. By the fall of 1964 , he was smoking marijuana and experimented with LSD. He describes the sit-ins as a collective impulse of defiance to affirm civic moral agency.
Michael Rossman waxes poetic about the deliberative democracy that radicals embraced in their forums (“open circles of testament and decision, in which all may speak with equal authority”). The radicals became in his words “ a spontaneous polity engaged in the raw act of self-governance, of self-creation, crystallizing through its open dialogue”). He filters his memories of drafting the 145 page, 65,000 word publication “Administrative Pressures and Student Political Activity at the University of California: a Preliminary Report” (with the more well-known 7 page overview essay) What stands out for him is the freeform character of participation (“a collective task freely organized by its participants”) even though he served as chief propagandist for SM writing leaflets and pamphlets in the final five weeks of the confrontation with campus administrators.
Jeff Lustig answers the question “What exactly did the early protesters think they were doing?” in his essay “The FSM and the Vision of a New Left” Lustig believes that it was first and foremost an existential posture with respect to three professed values : free speech, civil rights, and the necessity of education for democratic citizenship. He also names a second feature of Savio’s speech: its emphasis on action (“action as the expression of belief and test of belief, and direct action also as the test of larger institutional realities.” Lustig credits Thoreau with inspiring Savio’s understanding of “action from principle… the performance of right.” The third element of FSM political speech is its dedication to participatory politics. The beloved community was meant to trump interest group liberalism. The radicals rejected “the exclusive reliance on representation” that had defined the Madisonian tradition.
According to Lustig, the activists took “cues from their own subjective convictions rather than from extant “object conditions.” He suggests that the activists were “attracted to Herbert Marcuse’s “global refusal” (an outsider’s politics beyond the insider game”). Robert Cohen in his essay “This Was Their Fight and They Had to Fight It” questions this portrayal of the FSM as “ a revolt against “ the corporate liberalism of the modern university. Cohen thinks this view is incomplete. Cohen examines the statements that FSM activists made after they were found guilty by Judge Crittenden. They were asked individually to explain why they had participated in the sit-ins. None of the defendants were apologetic or embarrassed. Jo Freeman described her involvement as “civil disobedience fir the public good… a public act not for personal gain.”
Clark Kerr in his essay “The Fall of 1964 at Berkeley” insists that the distinction between speech and advocacy was long standing in University policy.” He points to Regulation 5 signed President Sproul in 1935. He notes that the Brandenburg decision was not handed down until 1968 and that free expression was not linked to free speech at the time of the FSM controversy. Kerr believes that the revolt of 1964 “ was basically about dissatisfactions with off-campus conditions involving civil rights and lack of on-campus opportunities to oppose them.” Kerr still describes the civil disobedience practiced by student activist as coercive ( “ the main tactics of the Civil Rights Movement including sit-ins and physical disturbances of University functions and operations.” Kerr still accuses students of indulging in the “anarcho-syndicalism of “participatory democracy” and “direct action” He saw the students as many individuals coming together in an unruly mass with a general inclination to cause trouble and glory in it.” The FSM gained “political advocacy rights on campus” subject to time manner and place restrictions.”
Part III opens with Robert Post’s essay “Constitutionally Interpreting the FSM Controversy”. Post argues that the Kerr-Strong position did not articulate a principled vision of university mission but instead advanced a political judgment about potentially adverse political consequences .” The FSM pressed the administration to recalibrate its assessment of political risks by increasing the cost of maintaining the ban on advocacy of illegal off-campus action. Robert Cole in his essay “December 1964 : Some Reflections and Recollections” notes that “the distinction between illegal and legal off-campus action had not been the issue” when the ban was imposed. Only after the Regents meeting in November 1964, was this distinction made. The clear and present danger standard was the only Constitutional constraint on speech that factored in the administration’s decision . As Cole notes, "everyone was focused on the behavior that was in fact being contested, and everyone understood the “the content of speech and advocacy” to be about the classic questions of regulating political speech.” Cole wrote the Berkeley time place and manner rules for campus political activity. He says that these rules “helped institutionalize free speech at Berkeley.”
Malcolm Burnstein offers a perspective as the lead defense attorney for FSM. Students rejected compromise offers because they saw no”reasonable grounds for allowing the University to provide less than was constitutionally necessary.” The final elegies for Mario Savio are heartbreaking.
Robert Cohen in the introduction to the same describes what happened at Berkeley as “an authentic political invention– a new complex mixture of issues, tactics, emotions, and setting that became the prototype for student protest throughout the decade.” He notes that the nonviolent civil disobedience of the Civil Rights Movement inspired student dissenters to question the authority and challenge the power of campus administrators.” He quotes Todd Gitlin of the SDS who described the mass movement as not simply about free speech and not simply about the right to organize for political action but “about” the necessity of revolt…” The movement, according to Breines, created “communities of equality, direct democracy, and solidarity.’ She argues that “students linked free speech to notions about their own dignity and freedom.”
Cohen rehabilitates Clark Kerr, who comes off as a villain in most FSM narratives. Students were deeply suspicious of Cold War establishment liberals. The “49 percent “ episode where Kerr was thought o have red-baited student activists is explained and contextualized. Cohen also shows sympathy for conservative faculty members such as Feuer, Lipset, Seabury and Glazer who fear the disorder that FSM birthed. These were the voices that influenced the Regents in 1965 when they attempted to codify free speech rules that included restrictions on outside speakers, restraints on student government taking positions on off-campus issues, and recommendations for disciplining students for the content of their speech. Cohen also sheds light on the 1965 trial and te pro bono lawyers’ resistance to student efforts to “use the legal proceedings to further a political agenda.”
Cohen also entertains the claims of FSM’s critics who, like Kerr and Glazer, argued that the movement was guilty of “physical coercion.” Cohen argues that coercion is a continuum. “At the lower end,” he writes, “is the kind of coercion that comes only from highly charged, emotional rhetoric, and at the other end is genuine violence.” Cohen also tackles squarely the role of Communists in the FSM. He takes seriously Edgar J Hoover's quote that “while not Communist originated or controlled, [FSM] had been exploited by a few Communists for their own ends.”
A wide spectrum of Old Left groups such as the Communist-led Du Bois Club and the Independent Socialist Club (IS) and the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL) played a role in the deliberations of the FSM leadership.
Mario Savio’s 1995 talk “Thirty Years Later: Reflections on the FSM” given at a colloquium of the History of Consciousness Department is elucidating. He shares that he grew up a Catholic altar boy in an Italian Catholic family ad that he yearned to be a priest and that two of his aunts were nuns. He shares that he read Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier and much of what the Catholic Left press published in Catholic Worker publications. He grew up in Queens NY primarily around Catholics and Jews . He also identifies as part of the first generation to grow up under the threat of the bomb. He also describes himself as growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust and in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement. He saw in the Civil Rights Movement much of what he learned in catechism: do right and resist evil. He also shares an interesting point about coffeehouse culture : “existentialism had the coffeehouses and analytic philosophy had the lecture halls.” Savio sings the praises of the Bay Area civil rights movement that conducted successful demonstrations and pushed effectively to end discriminatory local hiring practices. He also admits that he went to the demonstrations to impress a girl. He recounts his time in Mississippi where he watched a Black man have to interpret a section of the Mississippi constitution in order to qualify as a registered voter. He returned to Berkeley as the incoming president of University Friends of SNCC and is not allowed to advocate for civil rights on the very strip of land where a year earlier he had received a flyer that sent him to Mississippi. He challenged the new policy by asking whether the restrictions were required by law. Once he learned , they were discretionary, he began to compare the arbitrariness of the university administrators to the caprice of the MS public officials.
Jo Freeman’s essay “From Freedom Now! To Free Speech” begins by offering background on how the FSM students were sensitized to inh=justice by their participation in the Sheraton-Palace hotel demonstration after a visit to Berkeley in spring 1963 by James Baldwin (he lectured to 9,000 students during the May Birmingham AL confrontations). Campus and Berkeley CORE went after the merchants in Telegraph and Shattuck Avenues. Agreements were reached and broken. Race and civil rights were on the front page of the Daily Californian three out of five days in the fall 1963 semester.
Part II of the anthology begins with Jackie Goldberg’s essay “War is Declared!” in which she recalls the moment she received the letter from Dean Towle that restrictions would be placed on campus free speech. She was a proud member of her sorority Delta Pi Epsilon and had worked previously with the dean to introduce nondiscriminatory language in the by-laws on the campus Greek societies. Margot Adler in her essay “My Life in the FSM” describes Berkeley as “a fantasy of the agora in ancient Athens… Much of Berkeley’s life took place outside.. Like a Greek polis.” Both essays provide insight on women of the Movement.Adler notes “the FSM retained, as did all Left movements of the day, its sexist baggage, and few were the women who made names for themselves on their own. Most of the movement’s women leaders were some man’s sister or lover.” She quotes Bettina Aptheker who remarked that “most of the histories of the sixties have been written by men…. The ideas, articulations, and reflections of women have been excluded… the histories have emphasized power and control, whereas the women’s stories might have emphasized the dailyness of struggle, connection, and the long process of meaningful change… women staffed the offices, while men held the press conferences and did the publicity. This reflected the sexual division of labor in the larger society.”
The next essay "Gender Politics and the FSM: A Meditation on Women and Freedom of Speech” by Bettina Aptheker begins with a quote from Frederick Douglass that Aptheker used during the police car incident: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Aptheker connects political power to political” speech with consequences.” She argues that “the advocacy of nonviolent civil disobedience” for civil rights eventually led to the Women’s Liberation Movement three years after FSM. Aptheker describes “women’s freedom of speech as particularly circumscribed when women [sought] to redress grievances against themselves.” She quotes Adrienne Rich who in retrospect distrusts theatrical and performative political speech.
Martin Roysher in his essay “Recollections of the FSM” quotes Savio who distrust establishment liberals “because they do not understand there is evil in the world.” Henry Mayer in “A View from the South” quotes Kerr (who in light of the tradition of Quaker moral witness) who accused radicals “as paying merely lip service to democratic ideals while in actuality serving the cause of anarchy.” Mayer also quotes Chancellor Strong who interpreted student defiance as the first steps toward mob rule “Arbitrary exercise of authority is always to be challenged, but defamation of authority duly exercised undermines respect for high offices and demoralizes a society.” Liberty of conscience expressed as political dissent opens the door to the logic of the crowd and norms violation and incivility foreclose political discourse according to establishment liberals.
David Hollinger in “A View from the Margins” shakes the testimony of rank and file participants Hollinger exercised no leadership in the FSM, was not arrested , and never spoke from the Sproul Hall steps. He shares that the revolt was also over the Tussman plan (an alternative structure for undergraduate liberal arts education along the lines of te intensive, rigorous study of the Great Books). Radicals also embraced “the highly classical, unapologetically canonical, aggressively Socratic approach to education”. He also shares that many Berkeley students in the movement had been under the tutelage of Carl Schorske and had read Mills essays on Bentham and Coleridge ad drawn inspiration for their romanticism. Hollinger seesSavio as heir to Eliot’s Christian prophetic critique (“tongues of flame are enfolded into the crowned knot of fire, and the fire and rose are one.”
Kate Coleman in “Dressing for the revolution” shares that she was a Valley girl from Encino and a neighbor of John Wayne’s. High school non-conformity led her to join SLATE, oppose ROTC recruitment on campus, protest against capital punishment, nuclear testing, and in favor of free birth control on demand. She describes her lefty yearnings as inchoate. This raises the question of how coherent political speech needs to be in order to be protected. She describes being radicalized over her five years at Berkeley.
Michael Rossman in “The Rossman Report: A Memoir of Making History” Rossman transferred from U Chicago because friends’ letters “reported a tantalizing awakening of political concern. He was a picket captain for demonstrations against HUAC and Chessman’s execution. He dropped out, worked on campus, served on the staff of the campus literary magazine, and served as recording secretary for the Bay Area Committee for the Abolition of HUAC. By the fall of 1964 , he was smoking marijuana and experimented with LSD. He describes the sit-ins as a collective impulse of defiance to affirm civic moral agency.
Michael Rossman waxes poetic about the deliberative democracy that radicals embraced in their forums (“open circles of testament and decision, in which all may speak with equal authority”). The radicals became in his words “ a spontaneous polity engaged in the raw act of self-governance, of self-creation, crystallizing through its open dialogue”). He filters his memories of drafting the 145 page, 65,000 word publication “Administrative Pressures and Student Political Activity at the University of California: a Preliminary Report” (with the more well-known 7 page overview essay) What stands out for him is the freeform character of participation (“a collective task freely organized by its participants”) even though he served as chief propagandist for SM writing leaflets and pamphlets in the final five weeks of the confrontation with campus administrators.
Jeff Lustig answers the question “What exactly did the early protesters think they were doing?” in his essay “The FSM and the Vision of a New Left” Lustig believes that it was first and foremost an existential posture with respect to three professed values : free speech, civil rights, and the necessity of education for democratic citizenship. He also names a second feature of Savio’s speech: its emphasis on action (“action as the expression of belief and test of belief, and direct action also as the test of larger institutional realities.” Lustig credits Thoreau with inspiring Savio’s understanding of “action from principle… the performance of right.” The third element of FSM political speech is its dedication to participatory politics. The beloved community was meant to trump interest group liberalism. The radicals rejected “the exclusive reliance on representation” that had defined the Madisonian tradition.
According to Lustig, the activists took “cues from their own subjective convictions rather than from extant “object conditions.” He suggests that the activists were “attracted to Herbert Marcuse’s “global refusal” (an outsider’s politics beyond the insider game”). Robert Cohen in his essay “This Was Their Fight and They Had to Fight It” questions this portrayal of the FSM as “ a revolt against “ the corporate liberalism of the modern university. Cohen thinks this view is incomplete. Cohen examines the statements that FSM activists made after they were found guilty by Judge Crittenden. They were asked individually to explain why they had participated in the sit-ins. None of the defendants were apologetic or embarrassed. Jo Freeman described her involvement as “civil disobedience fir the public good… a public act not for personal gain.”
Clark Kerr in his essay “The Fall of 1964 at Berkeley” insists that the distinction between speech and advocacy was long standing in University policy.” He points to Regulation 5 signed President Sproul in 1935. He notes that the Brandenburg decision was not handed down until 1968 and that free expression was not linked to free speech at the time of the FSM controversy. Kerr believes that the revolt of 1964 “ was basically about dissatisfactions with off-campus conditions involving civil rights and lack of on-campus opportunities to oppose them.” Kerr still describes the civil disobedience practiced by student activist as coercive ( “ the main tactics of the Civil Rights Movement including sit-ins and physical disturbances of University functions and operations.” Kerr still accuses students of indulging in the “anarcho-syndicalism of “participatory democracy” and “direct action” He saw the students as many individuals coming together in an unruly mass with a general inclination to cause trouble and glory in it.” The FSM gained “political advocacy rights on campus” subject to time manner and place restrictions.”
Part III opens with Robert Post’s essay “Constitutionally Interpreting the FSM Controversy”. Post argues that the Kerr-Strong position did not articulate a principled vision of university mission but instead advanced a political judgment about potentially adverse political consequences .” The FSM pressed the administration to recalibrate its assessment of political risks by increasing the cost of maintaining the ban on advocacy of illegal off-campus action. Robert Cole in his essay “December 1964 : Some Reflections and Recollections” notes that “the distinction between illegal and legal off-campus action had not been the issue” when the ban was imposed. Only after the Regents meeting in November 1964, was this distinction made. The clear and present danger standard was the only Constitutional constraint on speech that factored in the administration’s decision . As Cole notes, "everyone was focused on the behavior that was in fact being contested, and everyone understood the “the content of speech and advocacy” to be about the classic questions of regulating political speech.” Cole wrote the Berkeley time place and manner rules for campus political activity. He says that these rules “helped institutionalize free speech at Berkeley.”
Malcolm Burnstein offers a perspective as the lead defense attorney for FSM. Students rejected compromise offers because they saw no”reasonable grounds for allowing the University to provide less than was constitutionally necessary.” The final elegies for Mario Savio are heartbreaking.
March 24, 2021
Excellent collection discusses the FSM from version of FSM veterans to the “villain” Clark Kerr, from the memoirs to scholarship.
The problem is in such a heavy collection the scholar version is not profound enough and had little newness. Maybe it is because there has been too many scholarship on this area, or the editor prefer history told by the witnesses themselves.
Veteran story is exciting however fragmented, I expect that there is at least one in-depth and comprehensive scholar work for each volume. The most impressive academic work in this book maybe the lengthy discussion about the faculty role and Cohen’s introduction. Study of issues like the FSM with Regan backlash politics and FSM relationship with New Left and Civil Right Movement definitely deserve more space in this book.
The problem is in such a heavy collection the scholar version is not profound enough and had little newness. Maybe it is because there has been too many scholarship on this area, or the editor prefer history told by the witnesses themselves.
Veteran story is exciting however fragmented, I expect that there is at least one in-depth and comprehensive scholar work for each volume. The most impressive academic work in this book maybe the lengthy discussion about the faculty role and Cohen’s introduction. Study of issues like the FSM with Regan backlash politics and FSM relationship with New Left and Civil Right Movement definitely deserve more space in this book.
November 12, 2020
Balanced isn't a word that connects with anything about the FSM, but this anthology does a superb job giving voice to the various perspectives that came into contact in fall 1964. Like most writing about the FSM, most of the contributors sympathize with the students, but Clark Kerr's essay is the best thing I've read reconsidering the events and implications from the administration's point of view.
April 25, 2014
Incredibly informative. Such an important part of history comes alive with accounts from actual participants. It really made me realize exactly what was taking place at the University of California in the sixties, rather than just the image or perception I previously had. The struggle for social justice is truly inspiring. The different perspectives in this book show that the rights enjoyed by UC students today did not come easily. Cal is now a place where free expression and social activism is the norm. It is now a proud tradition, thanks to the FSM. GO BEARS!
March 12, 2015
There's some some overlap in the conversation here, although there's some interesting aspects.I's a big book and I'm as finished as I'm going to be here.. I may come back to it and read more in the not too distant future, but I need to move on.
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June 30, 2010The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s by Robert Cohen (2002)
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews