60 years after the day college students won free speech, their rights are vanishing

Years later, somebody would dub them “the Silent Generation.” But on Oct. 1, 1964 — 60 years ago this Tuesday — a cohort of young people born mostly during World War II, raised in consumer affluence and under the threat of nuclear annihilation, could not keep it bottled up any longer.

The place was the University of California, Berkeley, and the trigger was school administrators telling students that the strip where students passed out political literature — from support for voting rights in Mississippi to backing of right-wing Barry Goldwater for president — was now off limits. What amounted to a campuswide ban on political activity simmered from the start of 1964’s fall semester and finally boiled over on Oct. 1, when police arrived at a demonstration and arrested a recent grad named Jack Weinberg who refused to give them an ID.

The hapless Berkeley city cops seemed to have no idea that the sleepy 1950s of crew cuts and sexist fraternity pranks had passed its expiration date. Instead of scattering, a few hundred students surrounded the police car and, with Weinberg in the back seat, prevented it from going anywhere. Protest leaders not only continued the rally but decided to use the blockaded police car as a stage to address a crowd that kept getting bigger and bigger.

“I went up to the police car, and asked if we could use the car to speak from,” Jackie Goldberg, a leader of what was becoming known as the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, recalled in an oral history. “And the policeman said, ‘Sure, if you take your shoes off.’” Upon hearing that, the fiery activist Mario Savio jumped on the roof of the cop cruiser, addressing the throng in his white socks.

That really captured the moment — a generation raised to respect authority, yet bubbling up with defiance against their elders’ hypocrisy. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement proved to be about much, much more than passing out leaflets on Telegraph Avenue. It was an unavoidable battle between an outdated notion that college students were still wards under the smothering in loco parentis of their universities, and the growing idea that free speech — especially for undergrads — is essential to the academy’s mission of promoting critical thinking.

It took a tumultuous 10 weeks, an iconic speech, and even an appearance by Joan Baez, but the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, or FSM, won. In doing so, the FSM launched what we now recall broadly as “the Sixties,” and created the atmosphere to nurture the other movements — including feminism, environmentalism, and LGBTQ rights, among others — that shape our modern world. But it also triggered a powerful right-wing backlash, which started with Ronald Reagan — elected California governor in 1966 ranting against the Berkeley protesters — and also has not stopped. Indeed, the American conflict that began around that one police car still defines us.

To call this fall’s 60th anniversary bittersweet would be a gross understatement. It coincides with a repressive nationwide clampdown on student protest — both by school administrators and outside forces, citing the chaotic demonstrations over the war in Gaza that broke out last spring — that advocates say threatens to return campus free speech back to where it stood before Berkeley’s FSM. When I emailed Lynne Hollander, a 1964 protester who later married the late FSM leader Savio, about an interview, she replied that — regarding the 2024 climate — “[I] don’t know that I have more to say than Mario would turn over in his grave!”

Barely a month old, the new college semester has brought a bevy of new rules that limit the time or place or manner of protests — not much different from what University of California leaders were doing in 1964 — or add potentially chilling requirements for would-be demonstrators to register. Some have banned outdoor encampments altogether. Some prominent schools have threatened protesters, or even would-be protesters, with harsh punishment.

Risa Lieberwitz, a Cornell labor law professor who’s also general counsel for the American Association of University Professors union, told me that U.S. campuses are seeing a wave of repression unlike anything since the pitched battles of the 1960s. “University administrators seem to be responsive to external pressures to crack down on actions by student and faculty,” she said, “as opposed to university administrators considering the fundamental principles of academic freedom and free speech.”

Lieberwitz is witnessing the new campus zeitgeist firsthand at Cornell, where administrators have threatened to suspend as many as 100 students who disrupted a job fair over the presence of military contractors, including a foreign student from the United Kingdom who would lose his student visa and face the risk of deportation. On the afternoon we spoke, the University of California board of regents, overseeing the sprawling system that includes Berkeley, approved a request from its Los Angeles campus, UCLA, to gear up for the new semester by purchasing three drones, 3,000 rounds of pepper bullets, and eight munitions launchers for its campus police.

No doubt Savio, who died too young in 1996, would be shocked at what has happened in the Golden State, and across America.

It’s easy to blame the current mess on the unique situation that triggered it: Israel’s deadly war in Gaza launched in response to Hamas’ bloody attack on Oct. 7, and the web of political land mines around issues like religion, race, and colonialism that it touched off. Some have spoken of a “Palestinian exception” to campus free speech because of the sensitive accusations that have included both antisemitism and Islamophobia. But experts who focus on academic freedom say problems were brewing well before last Oct. 7, speaking to six decades of radical change in U.S. higher education.

The 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement didn’t happen in a vacuum. At the start of the 1960s, Black college students, later joined by a number of their white peers, protested off campus for civil rights. But back on campus, these young people remained under the thumb of their paternalistic institutions as the “Red Scare” of McCarthyism made university leaders wary of overt politics. Student activists began to recoil against rules that treated them as children, and were revulsed by Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr describing the university as “a knowledge factory.”

“We have an autocracy which runs this university,” Savio declared at a December 1964 protest — a complaint that might sound familiar to today’s students. He added: “If this is a firm, and if President Kerr is the manager, then I’ll tell you something: the faculty are a bunch of employees, and we’re the raw materials!” An offended and exasperated Savio countered, “We’re human beings!”

Seconds later, Savio intoned the words that would inspire a generation 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, upon the wheel, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!” Savio’s speech not only inspired fellow students but won over the Berkeley faculty, which forced Kerr to back down and allow political activity on campus. For all its flaws, the system ultimately worked. Within weeks of the FSM victory, Berkeley emerged as an epicenter of protests against the Vietnam War.

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This California earthquake triggered both the protest culture that incubated many of the principles that still animate liberals six decades later, but also the right-wing backlash that was equally forceful. Reagan’s 1966 campaign for governor — in which he famously said a Berkeley “hippie” is someone “who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah” — launched him on a path toward the presidency. There, he signed off on a 1980s era of college privatization as tuition rose, government support shrank, students became more reliant on loans, and universities became more reliant on billionaire donors and trustees, as well as corporate support for research.

Lieberwitz said that “from the Reagan administration on, neoliberalism became the dominant philosophy” — driving the corporatization of universities under leaders much more sensitive to what she called “market forces” than the notion that higher education is a public good. In particular, wealthy college trustees gained power during these years, often at the expense of the increasingly quaint notion of faculty governance. As many critics have noted, students — especially on the left — took the free speech rights won in the 1960s for granted in favor of aggressive identity politics. Only when protests over the Middle East erupted last year did activists begin to see what had been lost, especially when billionaire donors like the University of Pennsylvania’s Marc Rowan or Harvard’s Bill Ackman weighed in.

The backlash against student protest ran from bloodred Texas, where GOP Gov. Greg Abbott called out state troopers in riot gear to quash a pro-Palestinian protest before it could start, to deep-blue New York City, where doomed Columbia president Minouche Shafik brought in the New York Police Department to bust up a student encampment, leading to hundreds of arrests.

Robert Cohen, a New York University history and social studies professor who authored the definitive biography of Savio and his role in the FSM, crunched the numbers and discovered that the largely peaceful Gaza protesters of 2024 were getting arrested at higher rates than Vietnam protesters at the end of the 1960s — even as those protests had turned violent, including the burning down of dozens of military ROTC offices.

“All this suggests an erosion of free speech as a priority of university leadership,” Cohen wrote in an unpublished essay about the Berkeley anniversary that he shared with me. He wrote that while “college administrations in the Vietnam era used police force as a last resort in the face of major campus disruptions, this past semester administrators used police as a first resort to suppress student protests even when those protesters — encamped outdoors on campus plazas or lawns — did not commit major disruptions of the university and its educational functions.”

That was before students returned to campus late this summer amid a new climate of repression. In Manhattan, the student Columbia Daily Spectator published a bombshell report that aggressive surveillance tactics involving not just ID swipes and closed-circuit TV but the use of private investigators has created a climate of fear and paranoia for campus activists. “I don’t like going on campus,” Layla Saliba, a Palestinian American grad student and activist, told the Spectator. “It kind of feels like you’re in a panopticon, like every time you go on campus, somebody is always watching you to see what you’re doing or see what you’re saying.”

Then there’s Michigan Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel — who’d just electrified the Democratic National Convention in Chicago with her impassioned defense of LGBTQ rights, which had been won after protests that included civil disobedience in the late 1960s. She disappointed some supporters and drew the ire of the American Civil Liberties Union with criminal charges against 11 spring protesters at the University of Michigan.

Hollander, who’s returning to the Berkeley campus in mid-October for a 60th-anniversary forum, said she might not agree with all the tactics employed by today’s Gaza protesters, but she is dismayed at the pushback against the rights she, her late husband, and their fellow protesters won in 1964. “You constantly have to keep fighting for free speech,” she said. “No way can you say, ‘Now we have it,’ and relax. All the time, you have to battle.”

But Lieberwitz noted that repression has a history of backfiring when it goes too far. It happened in 1964, and she thinks it could happen now. She sees the rapid rise of unions supporting adjuncts, grad students, and even undergrad student workers as signs that students were rising up against corporatized college even before the Gaza uproar. “You saw free speech coming out of the 1950s because people finally pushed back,” she noted.

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.

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