The Free Speech Movement Won, But Free Speech Lost
This fall, the University of California at Berkeley is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, a student-led protest against campus restrictions on political activities that made headlines and inspired imitators at colleges and universities around the country.
I played a small part in the FSM, and some of those returning for the reunion were once my friends, but I won't be joining them this time. Though the movement promised an opening toward greater intellectual and political freedom on campus, the result of its efforts was, in fact, the opposite. The great irony is that just as Berkeley now officially honors the memory of the FSM, it exercises more thought control over students than the hated “multiversity” that we rose up against half a century ago.
We early '60s radicals believed ourselves anointed as a new “tell-it-like-it-is” generation. We promised to transcend the “smelly old orthodoxies” (in Orwell's phrase) of Cold War liberalism and class-based, authoritarian leftism. Leading the students into the university administration building for the first mass protest, Mario Savio, the FSM's brilliant leader, from Queens, N.Y., famously 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 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 Berkeley “machine” now promotes FSM kitsch. The steps in front of Sproul Hall, the central administration building where more than 700 students were arrested on Dec. 2, 1964, have been renamed the Mario Savio Steps. One of the campus dining halls is called the Free Speech Movement Cafe, its walls covered with iconic FSM photographs and other mementos of the glorious semester of struggle. The university also requires entering freshmen to read a fawning biography of Savio.
Official sanctification of the FSM goes hand in hand with an attack on intellectual diversity on campus. Every undergraduate must now take a course on “theoretical or analytical issues relevant to understanding race, culture, and ethnicity in American society,” administered by the university's Division of Equity and Inclusion. The point of the requirement is to enforce ideological uniformity on campus regarding race and gender issues.
How did this Orwellian inversion occur? It happened, in part, because the claim that the FSM was fighting for free speech for all (i.e., the First Amendment) was always a charade.
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. Our movement ignored Orwell's warning that “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful.” We distorted the plain meaning of words to gain political advantage and power. Movement radicals turned on American liberalism (which we renamed “Cold War liberalism”) as the evil empire. Liberalism, unfortunately, retreated.
In writing about the protests for the anti-war magazine Liberation, I insisted — against all evidence — that the FSM was a nonideological, democratic movement that “created an important little wedge against the creeping totalitarianism that threatens all of us” and that “white middle-class students in the North also need a liberation movement, for they feel imprisoned and oppressed by a smiling and genial bureaucracy.”
I was a 27-year-old New Left graduate student at the time and hereby confess to the youthful sin of hyperbole. Savio, who died in 1996, was a 22-year-old sophomore when he led the protests. For all his brilliance, he never acknowledged the damage done to the cause of intellectual freedom by conflating the essentially liberal Berkeley administration with the Bull Connors of the racist South.
Admittedly, Berkeley undergraduates had legitimate complaints against the administration. Students had to deal with uncaring bureaucrats, huge classes and famous professors who cared only about their specialized research and had no interest in teaching.
Yet there was another truth that none of us was willing to admit. Contrary to our complaint about “oppression” on campus, it actually was the best of times for radical graduate students. We had fellowships and teaching assistantships in some of the nation's most prestigious academic departments. I recall Berkeley in the early '60s as a sun-drenched, easy-living, cultural mecca, overlooking beautiful San Francisco Bay — which was why so many of us moved across the country.
Some of us started a magazine called Root and Branch, which became one of the foundational New Left publications. In the inaugural issue, we simultaneously proclaimed opposition to the dominant trends in American society and our independence from the certainties of the old Marxist Left.
Our signature political issues were support for the Cuban Revolution and opposition to the liberal Cold War consensus.
Our magazine carried articles arguing that Fidel Castro was a new breed of revolutionary — more humanist, more open, even more “hip” than the old-style bureaucratic Communists. In fact, we imagined Castro and Che Guevara as fellow New Leftists.
Yet most of us radical students could not have imagined a campus rebellion in 1964. Why revolt against an institution that offered such a pleasant sanctuary for our growing movement? And, truth be told, there might not even have been a movement were it not for an incredibly stupid decision by Berkeley administrators.
At the beginning of the 1964-65 academic year, the administration suddenly announced that student clubs would no longer be allowed to set up tables in front of the Bancroft Avenue entrance to the campus for the purpose of soliciting funds and recruiting new members. The clubs had been using this 40-foot strip of sidewalk for years on the assumption that it was the property of the city of Berkeley and therefore constitutionally protected against speech restrictions. But the university now claimed ownership of the strip to justify the new rules. When some of the radical students refused to comply, the administration compounded its original blunder by resorting to the campus police. Not surprisingly, the students pushed back.
The Free Speech Movement was born on Oct. 1, 1964, when the campus police tried to arrest a recent Berkeley graduate, Jack Weinberg, just back on campus after spending the summer in Mississippi. Weinberg set up a table on the strip and then refused to identify himself to the police. Rather than submitting to arrest, he went limp and had to be carried to a police car. Dozens of students then spontaneously sat down around the vehicle, preventing it from leaving the campus. A 32-hour standoff ensued, with hundreds of students camped around the car.
Not having learned its lesson, the administration again used mass arrests to end the student takeover of Sproul Hall on Dec. 2. Outrage over the arrests of more than 700 protesters then led to a successful student strike and to growing support for the movement from liberal professors. As Savio foresaw, the Berkeley story attracted national, and even international, attention.
On Dec. 8, Berkeley's faculty senate voted overwhelmingly to remove all restrictions on speech and student political activity on campus. By the end of the fall semester, the administration had capitulated, and the FSM had achieved a near-total political victory.
That should have ended the matter. For many of the FSM activists, though, it was just the start of a wider revolutionary crusade against the liberal establishment. The radical students had mastered the new world of political theater. They used the “free speech” victory to turn the university into a base for increasingly disruptive demonstrations in the wider community, starting with massive protests against the Vietnam War.
The radical movement that the FSM spawned eventually imploded into violence and mindless anti-Americanism. After helping to instigate riots in Newark, N.J., New Left stalwart Tom Hayden heard the siren song of the FSM and moved to Berkeley. He settled into one of the city's many radical communes and rallied students to support the Black Panthers and to create “liberated zones” to serve as Panther sanctuaries. He pushed the Berkeley radicals to learn how to use guns because the revolution was surely coming. Hayden and some movement veterans organized trips to North Vietnam and North Korea. The youthful political pilgrims came back singing the praises of Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il Sung. Left untold by most of the friendly narratives about the FSM and the New Left is the story of how a once-idealistic student movement crossed the line to anti-democratic ideologies and undermined the possibility of a decent Left in America.
Though ostensibly in political retirement, Mario Savio surely became aware that the radical students were turning to extremism and had started supporting speech suppression. In defending his generation, Savio has cited the awful condition of the country that the FSM was morally bound to oppose — racism, McCarthyism, the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Since Savio uttered that defense of the FSM, another generation of radical students has moved through the institutions. “Tenured radicals,” in Roger Kimball's phrase, now dominate most professional academic organizations in the humanities and social studies. They have turned many once-distinguished university departments into bastions of anti-Americanism and apologists for socialist and Islamist dictatorships.
New records have been set for speech suppression on America's campuses in this 50th anniversary year of the FSM — including a long list of rescinded commencement addresses by “offensive speakers,” such as the anti-Islamist writer Aayan Hirsi Ali (Brandeis University), former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (Rutgers University) and International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde (Smith College).
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 veterans of FSM 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 — not only for the FSM's anniversary but also for the ideal of an intellectually open university, and for America.
This piece originally appeared in The Dallas Morning News
This piece originally appeared in The Dallas Morning News