Berkeley Free Speech Movement Forged an Organizing Blueprint That’s Relevant Now

U.S. universities have always been sites of contestation and political struggle. Today, their governing bodies are dominated by representatives of corporate power. Issues like the student debt crisis and military research are bound up with universities. The right wing, often joined by establishment Democrats, attacks college curricula and scapegoats students to score political points.

Student activists today are challenging university ties to everything from fossil fuels to racist policing — and, of course, to the genocide in Palestine. They demand divestment and stage protests and encampments. In response, government officials and big donors are accelerating the machinery of repression against students and faculty.

This tradition — of student struggle for justice at universities, of the deep politicization of university spaces — is far from new. A key turning point in its birth occurred 60 years ago, with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in late 1964.

On its surface, the Free Speech Movement was a two-and-a-half-month struggle at the University of California Berkeley for free speech rights on campus. But more deeply, it represented a mass emergence of the university as an openly political space and students as political actors. It warmed the chill of 1950s McCarthyism on campus and helped usher in the wave of student protest that came to be associated with the 1960s era (The Sixties).

All this generated a strong backlash from conservatives and business interests. In the 1970s and 1980s, the right began forging billionaire-backed counterinstitutions to reclaim dominance in higher education. Right-wing politicians from Ronald Reagan to J.D. Vance rode to power, in part, by denouncing universities and their students.

Ellen Schrecker, the renowned historian of anti-communism and U.S. universities in the 1960s, says current attacks on higher education may be even worse than the days of McCarthyism. “It’s much more serious today,” Schrecker told Truthout, “because the whole system of higher education has been the target of a massive campaign of political repression that began with a backlash against the student movement of the 1960s.” With an incoming Trump administration floating harsh attacks that range from federal prosecution of campus demonstrators to deporting international student protesters, this repression stands to intensify.

Berkeley and the Cold War University

The United States emerged from World War II as a global hegemon. Postwar universities became a vital arm of U.S. empire during the Cold War, with the ascending military-industrial complex resting, in part, on university weapons research. An inextricable link between universities and militarization was born, a “connection that continues to this day,” says Schrecker.

Billionaire donors, especially from the Koch donor network, constructed a movement to reassert conservative hegemony in higher education.

All this, combined with a booming postwar economy and policies like the GI Bill, drove a vast expansion of higher education in the U.S. The numbers of colleges and universities, and the students and faculty who populated them, skyrocketed in the 1950s and 1960s. Much of this growth was concentrated at huge bureaucratic state universities that were closely interlocked with corporate and military power.

Berkeley, the flagship university of the fastest-growing state in the nation, was a pinnacle example of this. “Berkeley was considered the number one public university in the United States,” said Schrecker, and, as a major site in the development of the atomic bomb, “it was very tied to the military-industrial complex.”

The 1950s Cold War U.S. also saw a wave of McCarthyist repression that stretched into universities, with many professors forced to take loyalty oaths. “What that meant,” said Schrecker, “was that a kind of chill pervaded the campuses.” Amid the political quiescence, pockets of student and faculty dissent existed, but they were few in number. UC Berkeley was no exception. “It was probably the most politically repressive of the nation’s major universities,” said Schrecker, noting that the Bay Area power elite who had influence over the campus were extremely right-wing and anti-communist.

But going into the 1960s, the facade of conformity was starting to crack. More than anything, the civil rights movement broke the political dormancy. In early 1960, Black student activists kicked off a national wave of sit-ins that directly challenged segregation. Young people flocked to groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and its ethos of direct action and bottom-up organizing.

“Everything got absolutely galvanized by the civil rights movement,” Schrecker told Truthout.

There are dire signs that the ongoing repression against college students, particularly for speaking up for Palestine, will increase under Trump.

Berkeley students in the early 1960s cut their teeth protesting anti-communist hearings and organizing to desegregate Bay Area businesses. Key leaders of the Free Speech Movement, including Mario Savio, participated in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer before heading to Berkeley that fall. New groups like Students for a Democratic Society were lambasting bureaucratic universities and casting students as political agents who should live their values and practice participatory democracy.

The “Sixties” were coming, and the stage was being set for the Free Speech Movement.

The 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement

There was a strip of land on the border of the Berkeley campus where students tabled for their causes. In late September 1964, University of California administrators, perhaps anxious over rising civil rights protests, banned political activity there. It was a big mistake.

Students immediately defied the ban and eight of them were suspended. In protest, hundreds of students congregated outside the administration’s office on September 30 demanding they also be charged. A new sense of solidarity and collectively was being born.

On October 1, Berkeley student and civil rights activist Jack Weinberg was arrested for refusing to remove his fundraising table for the Congress of Racial Equality civil rights group. But the police car holding Weinberg was soon surrounded by hundreds, then thousands, of students, demanding his release.

The car didn’t move for 36 hours. Speaker after speaker hopped on its roof. It was a collective political awakening. “That thirty-six-hour siege marked a critical moment in my life,” wrote Bettina Aptheker later. “I had a sense of belonging to something, being on the inside of a community of my own making, on my own terms.”

The Free Speech Movement was born. “Two-and-half months of crisis began,” said Schrecker, marked by marches, meetings and rallies against an intransigent administration. Students were demanding, simply, the right to engage in political activity on campus. The battle at Berkeley dominated headlines around the nation.

“Where do we go from here? The only answer I see is collective action.”

Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr dismissed student demands, feeding a dialectic that only emboldened further protests. The impasse continued until the end of November, when several protest leaders were suspended. On December 2, students marched to Sproul Hall, a key hub of the Berkeley campus, and peacefully occupied it.

It was here that the most iconic moment of the Berkeley Free Movement transpired when Mario Savio, the movement’s leading voice, and who was soon monitored by the FBI, gave his iconic, fiery “Bodies Upon the Gears” speech on the steps of Sproul Hall.

“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!” screamed Savio. “And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop! 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 festive occupation of Sproul Hall stretched into the night, when the administration made the fateful decision to send in hundreds of police. Cops swarmed the building, cracking heads and dragging out students. Nearly 800 people were arrested in just a few hours.

In 1964, this was a shocking spectacle to see at a major U.S. university. It was also the final straw. Graduate students serving as teaching assistants went on strike in response to the repression. Faculty swung to the side of the students. The crisis spread across the entire campus.

Finally, on December 8, 1964, Berkeley faculty voted 824 to 115 in favor of a resolution declaring that “the content of speech or advocacy shall not be restricted by the university,” the core demand of the Free Speech Movement. This was a signal that the administration could not ignore. “At this moment many of us, faculty and students alike, understood that the days of the loyalty oaths and speakers’ bans and anti-Communist witch hunts were finally over,” wrote Aptheker.

“The Only Answer I See Is Collective Action”

By mid-December, the fight at Berkeley was over, with student demands for free speech recognized on campus. But the movement symbolized the beginning of something bigger. “It was a moment in which the ‘1960s movement’ was born,” said Schrecker.

The Free Speech Movement recast college students as political actors and reframed universities as political spaces tied to the larger power structure as well as sites of domination in themselves. It forged a nascent blueprint for campus organizing. In the years to come, thousands of student organizers would draw and build upon the analysis, language and tactics from Berkeley as campus activism against the Vietnam War ripped across the nation.

The Free Speech Movement also laid the ground for a growing critique of the corporate university over the following decade. The student movement soon developed an analysis of higher education as a key pillar of the military-industrial complex and capitalist system. This legacy continues today, as students challenge fossil fuel and war profiteers at their institutions. Campus activism born out of the 1960s also expanded democratic governance at universities and democratized curricula.

But 1960s campus activism also triggered a right-wing backlash that has continued to this day.

Ronald Reagan ascended to the governorship of California in 1967 in part by depicting campuses like Berkeley as sites of chaos and demonizing students as rowdy ingrates. The attack on universities as bastions of liberal elitism became a mainstay in the right-wing playbook in the ensuing decades. Accompanying this, billionaire donors, especially from the Koch donor network, constructed a movement to reassert conservative hegemony in higher education. States like North Carolina and Florida have recently seen particularly repressive attacks on universities and, especially, their most marginalized students.

“This is a very well-funded campaign to change American political culture and undermine the universities as a source of expertise,” said Schrecker. “The right-wing network saw universities as dangerously radical and so they created think tanks and other organizations to supplant them.”

Schrecker says administrators today have joined in the repression of Palestinian solidarity activists on campus. “They are very much caving into pressures, especially from massively well-funded Zionist groups,” she said. “Universities have taken sides and are repressing people who are openly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.”

As a recent report from the American Association of University Professors shows, attempts to “manufacture backlash” against universities are bankrolled by billionaire donors. These efforts largely focus on “critical race theory” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” — covers for attacks on hard-fought gains won at universities by historically oppressed groups.

At the same time, there are signs of hope — and counter-sources of progressive power at universities. Grad workers are unionizing en masse and there are inspiring examples of faculty labor militancy pushing back against austerity on campus and resisting the replacement of full-time professors with low-paid, precarious adjunct faculty. Students are politicized and emboldened around Palestine, and grad unions are often some of the leading voices on this. Free higher education is an incredibly popular demand.

But there are dire signs that the ongoing repression against college students, particularly for speaking up for Palestine, will increase under Trump. This raises the question of how students today, 60 years after the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, should respond.

“Where do we go from here? The only answer I see is collective action,” Schrecker told Truthout. “We need to mobilize students and faculty members and create a counter movement. We have the numbers. We are the only people who can stop the repression.”