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ROBERT COHEN is Chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning in the Steinhardt School of Education, New York University, and coeditor (with Reginald Zelnik) of The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s. Cohen is writing a political biography of Mario Savio, to be published next year by Oxford University Press.
THIS PAST FALL, VETERANS of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement (FSM) held a week-long series of panels and political rallies to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Berkeley student revolt and to raise awareness of the recent restrictions of civil liberty that have been a product of President George W. Bush's War on Terror. We mark this anniversary by bringing into print for the first time a speech FSM leader Mario Savio (1942-1996) made at Queens College on December 11, 1964.
This speech came only three days after the FSM had won its major victory for campus free speech rights, when the Berkeley faculty -- assembled in its Academic Senate -- finally and overwhelmingly endorsed the FSM demand that the content of speech not be restricted at the university. This victory emerged after a semester of exhausting and exhilarating mobilizations of the student body. It took a nonviolent 32-hour blockade around a police car, a student strike, and the occupation of the administration building (culminating in some 800 arrests) to overcome the University of California administration's resistance to allowing students to continue using the campus as a base for political organizing -- and especially for organizing civil rights protests that involved civil disobedience.
At the time of the Queens College speech, Mario did not know yet whether the FSM's free speech victory would prove enduring or whether the UC Board of Regents would in its mid-December 1964 meeting reverse that victory by overruling the faculty and enforcing the campus regulations restricting the content of political speech on campus. Mario alludes to this concern about the Regents in his speech, a reminder that the battle for free speech seemed by no means over when he came east. A week after Mario's Queens speech, the Board of Regents, though expressing support for UC President Clark Kerr and affirming existing campus regulations, also pledged for the first time that UC rules on speech would not...