Strictly speaking, the Free Speech Movement was a coalition of campus organizations at UC Berkeley that campaigned to peacefully display their political wares on campus, something we take for granted today. It became a symbol for dissent at other universities, often concerning issues that had little to do with "free speech."
All universities have had their share of student and off-campus activists seeking recruits to their respective causes. In September 1964 a UC policy "prohibiting the collection of funds and the use of university facilities for the planning and implementing of off-campus political and social action" was invoked when students set up posters, easels and tables at the Bancroft-Telegraph Sather Gate entrance to the UC Berkeley campus. More than 20 organizations from every part of the political spectrum formed a united front, soon to be called the Free Speech Movement, to oppose the ban.
When the university began disciplinary action against eight students for staffing "illegal tables," a sit-in started in Sproul Hall and, on Oct. 1, former mathematics graduate student Jack Weinberg was arrested for manning a Congress of Racial Equality table on the Sproul Hall steps. For more than a day, a crowd of some 3,000 protesters blocked the police car carrying Weinberg, and the FSM was born. Actions and counteractions resulted in more sit-ins, more arrests of students and polarization of the campus.
So far as I can tell, university officials never clearly explained why banning the legal exercises of free speech on campus was so important that it warranted arrest and expulsion of students. The UC Berkeley Academic Senate supported the students' requests, passing resolutions requesting amnesty for the student protesters and calling for regulation only of the "time, place and manner of conducting political activity on campus." But it was too late; a wedge had been driven between the administration, the faculty and the students, and the fragile sense of community so necessary to the life of a university was lost.
"I ask you to consider," said FSM student leader Mario Savio, taking the anger and frustrations many students felt and focusing them at Clark Kerr's vision of a university, "if this is a firm and if the board of regents is the board of directors and if President Kerr is . . . the manager . . . the faculty are a bunch of employees and we are the raw materials . . . raw materials that don't mean to be made into any product . . . we're human beings! There is a time when the operation of the machine . . . makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part, and you got to put your bodies upon the gears, upon the wheels, upon the levers . . . you got to make it stop!"
And stop it did. A series of protests, demonstrations and marches countered by police counteractions, tear gas and arrests punctuated nearly a decade of conflict and violence at the oldest and best known of the UC campuses.
The eruption of violence at Berkeley, the sight of police arresting and beating students, of students throwing rocks and bricks, brought Chancellor Emil Mrak and a core of students, faculty, staff and administrators together to develop ways to head off such conflicts at UC Davis. They built upon the spirit of cooperation for which UC Davis was known to incorporate dissent into the fabric of growth of the campus community, give students more control over their lives and reform the educational process to include more opportunities for individual study and learning.
Some did not agree; they saw student protests as something to be banned, not as an opportunity to bring people together to improve student life and education. Others did not wish to take the risks or waste the time in what they perceived as a thankless task of institutional and educational reform of Clark Kerr's knowledge factory.
"What would you do if this campus went on strike?" I asked one faculty member. "Would you put the university first and your career second?" "I'd leave!" was his prompt reply. "Students," said a psychoanalyst, clinical professor at an East Coast university and former naval officer (my uncle), "should come to the university to sit at the feet of great men to learn . . . student protesters are doing no more than acting out their frustrations, figuratively sucking their thumbs!" "Free speech," said a high-level UC Davis administrator, "should not go beyond what the public will accept from a tax-supported institution." Another highly placed university official warned me that "the university does not tolerate martyrs." (Martyrdom was far from my thoughts; my fondest wish has always been to be no more than a productive scientist and professor.)
Many at UC Davis were shocked by the violence at other universities. They refused to accept the notion that it could happen here, destroying a campus spirit they deeply cherished. UC Davis faculty and students acted as if they were friends, rather than antagonists pitted against each other within a depersonalized education machine.
Most students, faculty, staff and administrators, members of the university community, wished only to study and work without running a gauntlet of posters, protesters and police. Those who became involved in campus protest movements usually did so because they felt strongly on one side or another.
One reason the disruptions that happened at other universities did not happen at UC Davis was because we succeeded in building ways to permit dissent without dissension or loss of the basic missions of the university to teach, to create and to discover. The victories of the students, faculty, staff and administrators at UC Davis were none the less real for being untelevised, none the less important for being silent.
