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By Watson M. Laetsch Until a few years ago, that was a common question for Berkeley folks away from home. 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, the sharpness of this divide accentuated by the movement's brief life span. It consumed campus energy during a few frantic weeks in the fall of 1964; by the spring of 1965, it was over. Those frantic weeks began with the banning of political advocacy on the Bancroft Strip, and were followed by the surrounding of the police car, the Sproul Hall sit-in, the fiasco at the Greek Theatre, a student strike, and the grand finale on December 8 with the Academic Senate's vote on time, place, and manner rules for students. I was an assistant professor of botany at the time, and as we marched out of that December 1964 Senate meeting, none of us fully realized that the FSM would spawn new forms of campus governance, new discussions about education, new protest movements, changes in the political landscapes of city and state--and that it would leave in its wake the wrecked administrative careers of the Berkeley chancellor and the University president. The foregoing is why a new book, The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s, edited by Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnick and published by the University of California Press, is of vital interest to Berkeley graduates. For pre-FSM alumni, it will tell them how and why the campus is so different from when they were here. For those on campus in the middle to late 1960s, it will revive memories and inform them about things they may not have known at the time. And, for alumni of more recent times, it will explain many FSM-derived campus practices now taken for granted--filling out course evaluation forms being but one example. The book consists of 33 essays, most of them by leaders and active participants in the Free Speech Movement. It's a big book (618 pages), with dense patches, so it is probably best to select and nibble. Do start, however, with the preface by history professor Leon Litwack '51. His description of life when he was a Cal undergrad is a good reminder of what has changed. "For much of the twentieth century," he writes, "Berkeley, like most campuses, tended to be a white, middle-class enclave, a haven of privilege and conformity. Under these conditions, student activism was not simply inhibited, it was intimidated. One searched with difficulty for a rebel or a reformer, let alone a Marxist, and it became increasingly difficult to find anyone who felt very strongly about anything. Throughout this period, the University performed its traditional role--producing, by and large, the adaptable, conventional, uninteresting kinds of people demanded in a highly organized corporate society." Litwack believes that "the University needs to acknowledge those who struggled through the years to make Berkeley a free, open, and pluralistic campus, a true marketplace of ideas, and a University tolerant of a diversity of views and expressions within its faculty and student bodies." The FSM did stimulate the faculty to think more critically about the curriculum and to become more open to instructional innovations. Strawberry College, the Tussman Program, the Board of Educational Development, and student-initiated courses were all examples of this new open-mindedness. Course evaluations and putting student members on campus, college, and departmental committees were results of the FSM-inspired realization that students should be listened to and involved in campus governance. One of the key figures in the FSM drama was, of course, former Berkeley chancellor and then University President Clark Kerr. His essay, "Confrontation Yields to Reconciliation," is a riveting tale. It begins with Kerr on a Tokyo to San Francisco flight in mid-September 1964, when he "began to think again in an organized way about the University of California." As UC president, he felt it was in great shape, and that his actions had been important to its enormous success. He landed to find that Chancellor Ed Strong had closed the Bancroft Strip as a site for political advocacy, without any consultation and without any warning. Kerr calls this one of the two major administrative blunders of the time and he takes responsibility for the second blunder, which was not "to order Strong to withdraw the order or declare, as an alternative, that as president I would rule the action to be null and void pending the meeting of the Regents the following week." As a result of Strong's order, Kerr "anticipated immediate student protest." He admits to not foreseeing that Strong's order would ultimately result in Reagan's election as governor or his own dismissal. Kerr is explicit in his criticism of Strong's unwillingness to consult and to compromise. But many on campus say Strong felt that Kerr second-guessed and undercut him, and it is sad that Strong was an early victim of this conflict. He was a scholar of renown and, according to many, a fine gentleman; but he was caught between forces he was unprepared to battle. In many ways Strong represented an academic age whose time was past. Kerr was also caught between the FSM, which increasingly demonized him as a reactionary bureaucrat, and a conservative Board of Regents and conservative state politicians, who disliked him for being too liberal. Some faculty members were also critical and, as he observed, gave little "consideration to my record of accomplishment." Kerr had, in fact, instituted policies that removed restrictions on free speech, and he found it ironic that students portrayed him as being against free speech. Kerr had yet another powerful enemy--the FBI. Recently published evidence (see "The FBI at Cal," in the September Monthly) of the FBI campaign to discredit the FSM and to have Kerr fired, adds another dimension to the whole story. It was revealed that Regent Edwin Pauley worked closely with the FBI with the purpose of removing Kerr as well as faculty and students they considered subversive. How much of a difference would it have made back then if all parties had been aware of the sinister forces arrayed against them? The close connection between the FSM and the Civil Rights Movement, and the degree to which the former was created by the latter, is made clear in this book. Some leaders of the FSM had been in Mississippi registering voters the summer of 1964; they returned to campus to organize civil rights protests in the Bay Area, but their recruiting efforts were curtailed by the closure of the Bancroft Strip. Jack Weinberg was arrested while manning a Congress of Racial Equality table in Sproul Plaza. The FSMers had become experienced organizers as a result of their off-campus experience, and their professionally managed protests were too much for a campus disciplinary system accustomed to dealing with disruptions of the panty-raid variety. Another insight this book offers is that the FSM had different meanings for different people. It is apparent from many of the contributions that deep emotional forces drove the movement's politics. In his essay, FSM leader Michael Rossman describes how he felt as part of the group surrounding the police car that held Jack Weinberg: "All I can compare it to 36 years later is a psychedelic experience of a transcendent spiritual state." Other contributors speak of their "religious" experiences and of "a community of the beloved." Here's Mario Savio: "I think there was a religious basis, very clearly, to my political involvement." Savio was a lapsed Catholic, and several of those who knew him well say that he continued to search for a believable replacement for his religion. Along with Kerr, Savio of course was a prime actor in the FSM, and almost every essay pays tribute to his character, talents, and charismatic leadership. While their tributes often flirt with and sometimes succumb to hagiography, they do attest to the complexity of his character. The essay by Doug Rossinow, his colleague at Sonoma State, where Savio taught for six years before his death in 1996, delivers fascinating insights into his teaching and his return to public political action. The essays by Savio's two wives, Suzanne Goldberg and Lynne Hollander Savio, paint contrasting but still compatible portraits of this remarkable man. And Leon Litwack goes so far as to say that Savio "gave as much to this campus as any of its distinguished Nobel Laureates, financial benefactors, or athletic coaches." I did not know Mario Savio personally, but we came together briefly during the spring of 1970, when he was, for some reason, auditing my very large Biology I course. After Cambodia was bombed, there were student protests across the country and many students left for home for the remainder of the term. We devoted a lecture period to a general student discussion and, after a time, Mario stood up, gave his name, and expressed his views. It was obvious that most of the students did not know who Mario Savio was. From what is said about his modesty and lack of interest in public attention, I suspect he appreciated this demonstration of fame's short life. A third major player during the FSM was the group of Cal students who attended the rallies, sat around the police car, took over Sproul Hall, and generally formed the movement for free speech. In his essay "This Was Their Fight and They Had to Fight It," Robert Cohen makes the case that, by and large, these students were not radicals. He analyzes the 515 statements submitted, at the request of the judge, by the students who were arrested at the Sproul Hall sit-in of December 2 and 3. The documents were only recently placed in the Bancroft Library by lawyer Malcolm Burnstein, who represented many of the students. These moving statements put a full stop to any views that the students who risked arrest by sitting-in at Sproul Hall were the wild revolutionaries depicted by the press, politicians, the FBI, some regents, and even some faculty. Most of these students said they were happy with Berkeley, appreciated the quality of their education, and some even thought the administration was not bad in spite of its blunders. Cohen quotes one of the many students ambivalent about the FSM and reluctant to sit in: "From the beginning, I deplored the action of the administration in abridging civil liberties. [I] never before participated in any protest action [and was initially] just a watchful bystander. [It] took me two and a half months of debating with myself. I felt our FSM had to succeed, for if this kind of abridgment of rights could occur in an institution of learning, there was no telling where it could spread." That brief statement, more than any other in this fascinating book, tells why the FSM was successful. Watson M. Laetsch is professor of plant biology and vice chancellor emeritus. He came to Berkeley in 1963, and soon after joined others in establishing exchanges between faculty of Berkeley and black colleges and universities in the South. He has served as director of the Botanical Garden and the Lawrence Hall of Science, and was the campus's first vice chancellor for undergraduate affairs. |
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