The Free Speech Movement at Sixty and Today’s Unfree Universities by Robert Cohen, AAUP

Friends,

This excellent piece by Robert Cohen on the Free Speech Movement (FSM) and its parallels to issues of protest and free speech on our college campuses today is definitely one to chew on over the holidays.

The FSM's 1964 victory set a precedent for student activism and free speech in higher education while highlighting enduring issues in university governance together with tensions between institutional authority and student autonomy.

I like Cohen's comparison of the events of Spring 2024, to those of 1969, commenting that today's "arrest rate is shocking," considering that the campus protests in 1969 were much more militant despite fewer numbers of protesters in 2024 than in 1969—translating into 3,000 students arrested last spring compared to approximately 4,000 in 1969 when a number of college campuses were literally on fire.

During the Vietnam War era, campus protests were significantly more militant and violent than those last spring. In spring 1969, for instance, there were over "eighty bombings, attempted bombings, and acts of arson," yet the total number of campus arrests nationwide that semester was just over 4,000.

Notably, Dr. Carol Christ, the chancellor of UC Berkeley, honored the university's free speech legacy and refused to arrest or evict the protesters. Are you listening university administrators? Why resort to such impunity when student protests could be addressed through dialogue and negotiation? It is deeply troubling that this approach is not the standard practice to begin with at the University of Texas at Austin and at all college campuses everywhere.

As was true then and is now, we can draw on the critique of iconic activist Mario Savio, who condemned the "managed autocracy" — an erosion of administrative support for free speech and a persistent issue of centralized, undemocratic governance. This challenge is further compounded by the efforts of an activist billionaire class bent on suppressing student and faculty activism.

What this class doesn't seem to know or want to know is that students' free speech will benefit them in the long run. Why? Because a virtuous and robust education is not just about acquiring knowledge but about enriching one's life and contributing meaningfully to the community. This is precisely what our youth and faculty are doing when they stand up for free speech.

The disproportionate crackdown on recent demonstrations should alarm us as a society, signaling a troubling shift in university priorities that places order and control above the Constitutional principle of freedom of expression that is a bedrock of any free society.

As faculty, we must clearly continue to not just defend our students, but ally with them. This is what is happening in Texas right now with AAUP, Texas AFT, the Texas Legislative Education Equity Coalition, LULAC, NAACP, the LDF, and Black Brown Dialogues on Policy at the forefront.

Clearly, this struggle demands sustained vigilance, collective solidarity, and an unwavering commitment to the principles of equality and freedom that universities are meant to uphold.

-Angela Valenzuela
The Free Speech Movement at Sixty and Today’s Unfree Universities

Can speech be free when billionaires buy influence on campus?

By Robert Cohen | AAUP | Published as a preview to the winter 2025 issue. The full issue will be published in February 2025.

Just over sixty years ago, Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement (FSM) won a historic victory for student free speech rights after a semester of protest, including the most extensive use of civil disobedience on campus and the largest mass arrest (of more than seven hundred students) to that point in American history. It took a thirty-two-hour nonviolent blockade around a police car, multiple student sit-ins in the campus administration building, a strike by students and teaching assistants, mountains of leaflets, exhausting political organizing, and repeated attempts at negotiations to convince the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, to endorse the principle that the university must stop restricting the content of speech or advocacy—after which freedom of speech on campus finally became official university policy.

The FSM’s legacy on freedom of speech was visible last spring in the response of UC Berkeley’s chancellor, Carol Christ, to the anti–Gaza war encampment on Sproul Plaza, long a hub of student activism on campus. Mindful of Berkeley’s free speech tradition, Christ—who has a photo of Mario Savio, the FSM’s famed orator, on her office wall—refused to use police force to evict or arrest the protesters. Instead, she ended the protest through negotiations, a path that few college presidents took.

It is sobering to reflect on the fact that Berkeley, along with Brown University, Northwestern University, San Francisco State University, and a handful of other campuses, was an outlier in respecting student free speech. Indeed, the eviction of protesters from encampments nationwide brought with it a campus arrest rate comparable to that found on college campuses at the height of the antiwar movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. More than three thousand protesters were arrested in mostly nonviolent anti–Gaza war protests on more than one hundred campuses across the United States in April and May 2024.

This arrest rate is shocking when one considers that, at their peak the Vietnam War era, campus protests were much more militant, disruptive, and violent than the protests last spring. During the spring of 1969, for example, there had been more than eighty bombings, attempted bombings, and acts of arson on college campuses. Yet during the six months of that turbulent semester, the total number of arrests on campus nationally was just over four thousand. In fact, only the most violent month of student protest in American history, May 1970, provoked by the explosion of anger over the Cambodia invasion and the massacres at Kent State University and Jackson State University, saw an arrest rate exceeding that of April and May 2024. But when one considers that more than four million students were involved in protest activity in May 1970, and that the arrest rate on campus peaked at about 3,600 that month, one’s chances of being arrested even at these far more militant protests were much slighter than they were at the encampments last spring, which mobilized thousands, not millions, of students.

All of this suggests an erosion of support for free speech in university leadership. While college administrations in the Vietnam era used police force as a last resort in the face of major campus disruptions, this past spring 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.

Last spring’s free speech crisis on campus shows that no victory for free speech, even one as famed as the FSM’s, can be assumed to have had a permanent national impact. The pressures on university leaders to suppress dissent, especially when it is viewed as radical and unpopular—as is virtually always the case with leftist-led student movements—are often difficult for even the most principled campus leaders to resist. Compounding this problem is a deeper truth about the FSM and the larger student movement of the 1960s that is rarely discussed: Despite all their mass organizing and triumphs on specific demands, such as liberalizing campus regulations, diversifying the curriculum, and ending some connections between the university and the military-industrial complex, student movements have generally lacked the power to restructure and democratize university governance. Thus, to this day, students are largely disenfranchised when it comes to campus decision-making, and it is this lack of a voice or a vote on university policy that forces students to hold demonstrations, to build encampments, and even to engage in civil disobedience if they want to be heard on any major university policy.

This issue is at least as old as the FSM itself. Soon after the free speech dispute erupted at Berkeley at the start of the fall 1964 semester, FSM organizers became concerned about the undemocratic nature of the university and how such important policies as campus rules concerning political advocacy were determined unilaterally by campus administrators, who were influenced not by the university community, its students and faculty, so much as by outside forces, especially wealthy business leaders and powerful politicians. Student activists’ awareness of this reality grew out of experience, as they had seen how criticism of their demonstrations and sit-ins targeting racially discriminatory employers in the Bay Area, especially criticism from conservative business leaders, media, and politicians, contributed to the administration’s decision in September 1964 to close the university’s free speech area at the main campus entrance—the action that ignited the Free Speech Movement.

Managed Autocracy

The most famous speech given by the movement’s eloquent orator, Mario Savio, much like the “I have a dream” segment of Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington speech, is remembered for its most moving lines: “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 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.” These lines from Savio’s speech helped inspire more than a thousand students to join the FSM’s culminating sit-in at the Berkeley administration building on December 2, 1964, and over the years have been quoted in numerous documentaries, feature films, protest songs, and history textbooks.

Less well remembered but equally important and relevant today are the words Savio spoke just before this dramatic call to resistance, where he explained the source of the oppression that he was urging students to resist: a tyrannical university administration and its corporate overlords. “We have,” Savio said, “an autocracy which runs this university. It’s managed!” He likened the university administration to a soulless corporation, whose president, Clark Kerr, was a tool of UC’s reactionary board of regents:

We were told the following: “If President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the regents in his telephone conversation, why didn’t he make some public statement to that effect?” And the answer we received, from a well-meaning liberal, was the following. He said, “Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his board of directors?” That’s the answer! Now, I ask you to consider: if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the board of directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I’ll tell you something: the faculty are a bunch of employees, and we’re the raw materials! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to . . . have any process upon us, don’t mean to be made into any product, don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the university, be they the government, be they industry . . . be they anyone! We’re human beings!’”

Savio punctured the myth of a university as an institution where freedom, political equality, and community prevailed. He urged students to assert their humanity and overcome their powerlessness through protest and solidarity—putting their bodies on the line by joining what would on that December day prove to be the FSM’s most massive and successful sit-in on behalf of free speech.

This was, for Savio, not a new line of criticism of the university. He had offered scathing criticism of the regents and the UC administration’s undemocratic nature from the early stages of the free speech controversy at Cal. During the movement’s first free speech sit-in, back in late September, Savio debated historian Thomas Barnes, an assistant dean, who had sought to justify the closing of Cal’s free speech area on the grounds that it helped preserve the university’s political neutrality. Savio argued that Barnes’s claims about UC’s political neutrality were ludicrous. The “board of regents,” Savio remarked, had “quite a bit of control over the university. . . .

We ought to ask who they are. . . . Who are the board of regents? Well, they are a pretty damned reactionary bunch of people!” The board of regents, far to the right of students and faculty, was unrepresentative of the university community; the board was also, in Savio’s view, unrepresentative of the general population of California. “There are groups in this country, like laborers, for example, like Negroes—laborers usually. . . . These people, see, I don’t think they have a community of interests with the Bank of California,” so they had no representative on the board. “On the board of regents, please note, the only academic representative—and it’s questionable in what sense he’s an academic representative—is President Clark Kerr. The only one. There are no representatives of the faculty.” So, when you consider the conservatism and elitist composition of the board, the claim that it runs a university that is “neutral politically,” Savio concluded, is “obviously false. . . . It’s the most politically unneutral organization that I’ve had personal contact with. It’s really an organization that serves the interests and represents the establishment of the United States.”

In this same debate with Barnes, Savio objected to the privatistic manner in which the university administration asserted its authority, despite the fact that Cal was supposedly a public institution. Savio, like most other activists involved in the free speech battle, noticed and was offended by the plaques embedded in the grounds of the entrances to the Berkeley campus, which read, “Property of the Regents of the University of California. Permission to enter or pass over is revocable at any time.” It was this authority, this regental property right over the university grounds, that gave the board the power to impose even the most arbitrary restrictions on campus speech, such as the requirement that outside speakers wait seventy-two hours before they could be authorized to address a campus audience. Savio in his debate with Barnes cited this rule as being based on “a distinction between students and nonstudents that has no basis except harassment.” Why seventy-two hours for nonstudents? With his recent experience in mind as a volunteer in Mississippi Freedom Summer, Savio explored the meaning of seventy-two hours for that freedom struggle: “Let’s say, for example—and this touches me very deeply—in McComb, Mississippi, some children are killed in the bombing of a church. . . . Let’s say that we have someone that’s come up from Mississippi . . . and he wanted to speak here, and he had to wait seventy-two hours in order to speak. And everybody will have forgotten about those children, because, you know when you’re Black in Mississippi no one gives a damn. Seventy-two hours later and the whole issue would be dead.” And in the nuclear age, having to wait seventy-two hours to hear a speaker criticizing the use of US military force abroad—in places like Vietnam—could, Savio insisted, prove fatal, because “by that time it is all over. You know, we could all be dead.”

For Savio, then, a key part of the problem was that the regents looked upon the university as “a private organization run by a small group,” a rich and powerful elite: “The regents have taken a position that they have virtually unlimited control over the private property which is the University of California.” Savio urged that people “look at the university here not as the private property of [millionaire board of regents chair] Edward Carter. Let’s say instead that we look upon it [democratically] as a little city.” If they did so, the seventy-two-hour rule for nonstudent speakers, the barring of political advocacy on campus, and the closing of the free speech area would be clearly seen by all as unconstitutional outrages. As Savio explained at the first FSM sit-in, using this democratic lens and the city of Berkeley as an example, “Let’s say that the mayor of Berkeley announced that citizens of Berkeley could speak on any issue they wanted to . . . but placed the following restriction upon nonresidents from Berkeley: that they could not do so unless they obtained permission from the city of Berkeley and did so seventy-two hours before they wanted to speak. You know there’d be a huge hue and cry going up: ‘Incredible violation of the First Amendment! Unbelievable violation of the Fourteenth!’ . . . Anybody who wants to say anything on this campus, just like anybody on the city street, should have the right to do so. . . . [enjoying] complete freedom of speech.”

Though the Vietnam War had not escalated yet, and the 1960s mass student movement against the war had yet to emerge to demand an end to university complicity with that war, Savio in this early FSM speech was already criticizing the university’s role in the US war machine. In fact, he cited the University of California’s role in the nuclear arms race as proof that the university was politically both unneutral and undemocratic. As Savio put it, “Now note—extremely important—the University of California is directly involved in making newer and better atom bombs. Whether this is good or bad, don’t you think . . . in the spirit of political neutrality, either they should not be involved or there should be some democratic control of the way they’re being involved?” 

Donor Rebellions

There is nothing outdated about Savio’s critique of the undemocratic nature of university governance and the overweening influence of a rich and powerful elite in that governing structure. His insight that the university is managed like a hierarchical corporation rather than a city of free citizens is as relevant in the present academic year as it was in 1964. It was, after all, the billionaire donor class and super-wealthy university boards of trustees that used their wealth and power to pressure universities to suppress the protest movement against the war in Gaza. Most damaging in this regard was the role of billionaire investor Bill Ackman, a major donor to Harvard University, who soon after the start of the Gaza war expressed outrage that Harvard President Claudine Gay was failing to repress the campus antiwar movement, which he equated with antisemitism and terrorism. Ackman spearheaded a campaign, supported by “a growing list of frustrated Harvard donors,” including billionaire Len Blavatnik, to force Gay from office. When President Gay—along with her counterparts from the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—fared poorly in her December 2023 congressional testimony, her botched defense of free speech was misread as indifference to advocacy of anti-Jewish genocide, and she resigned in January 2024. Prominent Harvard faculty had sought to save Gay, but they lacked the power to do so, since, as Savio would have put it, faculty members are “just a bunch of employees.” As Harvard law professor Ben Adelson noted, “We can’t function as a university if we’re answerable to random rich guys and the mobs they mobilize over Twitter.”

The same fate befell Penn President Liz Magill, whose ouster came even more quickly (four days after her congressional testimony) than Gay’s. Magill’s fall was engineered by a daunting coalition of the rich and powerful. Wall Street CEO Ross Stevens threatened to revoke his $100 million donation to Penn unless Magill resigned. Magill, as The New York Times documented, “faced a rebellion” led by the board of Wharton, Penn’s prestigious business school, and including “a growing coalition of donors, politicians, and business leaders” who demanded that she step down. As at Harvard, the faculty and the student body at Penn proved powerless to save their president.

To say that this plutocratic purge of Ivy League presidents had a chilling effect on free speech nationally is an understatement. The US higher education system is hierarchical, and Harvard is at the top in prestige and wealth. If the president of Harvard could lose her job for being insufficiently repressive of the anti–Gaza war protests, no college or university president could feel safe in tolerating a movement that was so abhorrent to the donor class and their allies in Congress. And so, few did. When the antiwar encampments spread to colleges and universities across the country last spring, administrators were usually quick to suppress them with evictions and arrests, even though most of the encampments were nonviolent and only minimally disruptive.

Leading the way was Columbia University, whose president, Minouche Shafik, was determined not to meet the same fate as her counterparts at Harvard and Penn. She gave congressional testimony in mid-April that was largely dismissive of free speech and academic freedom concerns and took a hard line against the antiwar protesters. The day after her testimony, she authorized the eviction of the encampment on a Columbia campus lawn, resulting in more than one hundred arrests. This action set a precedent followed by many other campus administrations, including mine at New York University, which called in two hundred riot police to evict and arrest more than a hundred nonviolent protesters on the plaza in front of our business school. Even such hard-line policies did not, however, end the pressure. After the mass arrests at Columbia, the right-wing speaker of the US House of Representatives and a congressional delegation came to the Columbia campus to demand that Shafik resign for supposedly not doing enough to quash a protest movement they denounced as hateful and antisemitic. This was followed by billionaire Robert Kraft’s announcement that he would no longer donate funds to Columbia because of its failure to protect Jewish students from the antiwar movement’s alleged antisemitism.

Donors and trustees also used their power and wealth to attack the few college presidents who chose negotiation over repression. For example, after Brown University President Christina Paxson ended the antiwar encampment on her campus by agreeing to have Brown’s trustees consider the protesters’ demand that the university cut its financial ties with Israel, real estate mogul Barry Sternlicht denounced her action. Sternlicht, who had donated $20 million to Brown, said he would no longer support the university financially. From a governance standpoint, Sternlicht’s position attests to how profoundly undemocratic the donor mindset has become. After all, President Paxson had not agreed to divest. She merely agreed to give the students’ divestment arguments a hearing. By Sternlicht’s logic, students not only lack decision-making power but also must be barred even from meeting with university policymakers to present proposals regarding investment policy.

This is not to say that the donors’ concerns about antisemitism were groundless. There were antisemitic incidents on campus, and the protest movement was often insensitive about how its anti-Zionist slogans could offend and upset Jewish students and faculty with deep emotional ties to Israel. The encampments on many campuses tended to be relatively small affairs with a few hundred students, isolated and unable to reach out effectively to the majority of students on their campuses. And the militants on the few campuses that did see some 1960s-style escalations into building occupations tended to do so without the kind of outreach needed to enlist mass student support, leaving the movement weaker and more isolated after the protests ended with arrests.

The FSM, by contrast, had been characterized by mass outreach, concerned itself with building majority student support for demands, adopted slogans that were unifying rather than divisive, and used civil disobedience in ways that mobilized masses of students. This contrast struck me with particular force on my campus, where, soon after the Gaza war started, the NYU administration closed the student union’s enormous marble stairway—formerly a site for political rallies—to all protest events (and to any use at all). This action was very similar to the provocation at Berkeley in 1964, where the closing of the free speech area united students, from the socialists on the left to the Goldwater supporters on the right, who worked together to organize the FSM and win their right to political advocacy on campus. But since anti-Zionist and Zionist students today are engaged in political warfare with each other, they would not dream of uniting on behalf of free speech. And so that stairway at NYU remains closed, and campuses remain too divided to challenge the actions of their repressive administrations. Yet for all its flaws, the antiwar movement did—as President Biden himself noted in his speech at Morehouse College—raise public awareness of the Gaza tragedy and press him to hear the voices of students outraged by the bloodshed.

On the issue of free speech itself, one heard precious little from the donors (or the campus administrators) who were so eager to silence the protesters last spring. They seemed to assume that, based on their wealth and past donations, they ought to be able to play the role of censors on campus. They also seem unaware of how one-sided their viewpoints are. The donors never mentioned Islamophobic incidents on campus or incidents like the violent assault on an antiwar encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles, by self-proclaimed Zionists. Though properly critical of the movement’s failure to acknowledge Hamas’s war crimes, the donors were silent when it came to the massive civilian deaths and suffering inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli bombings. It is easy, but not accurate, to assume that criticism of the war-making of the Jewish state is inherently antisemitic, since in Israel itself such criticism and mass protest have been ongoing—and Jewish students have been prominent in the antiwar movement on American campuses. Whether it comes from the Left or the Right, from Zionists or anti-Zionists, calls to repress political speech as hateful can endanger the free exchange of ideas. As divided as many campuses are over the Gaza war, the university communities themselves are better qualified to promote dialogue and healing, to the extent that it is possible, than are donors with their one-sided political agenda.

Tests for Free Speech

Despite their many differences, the FSM and the anti–Gaza war movement, like virtually all student movements in American history, share at least one thing: unpopularity with the general public. When it comes to generational relations, students can’t catch a break because their elders, bound by an enduring cultural conservatism, expect them to play their prescribed role, doing their academic work, obeying the rules, respecting authority. The public’s response to student activism often amounts to telling students to “shut up and study.” The Free Speech Movement, despite its commitment to the bedrock constitutional value of freedom of speech and to nonviolence, was often depicted as subversive and riotous, and so was opposed by the majority of the California electorate. And the anti–Gaza war movement, though sparked by humanitarian concern about the massive civilian casualties in Gaza and mostly nonviolent, is often depicted as antisemitic and supportive of terrorism. And on several campuses, radicals in the antiwar movement, wedded to Palestinian nationalism and romanticizing resistance to Israeli oppression, further alienated the public by coming across as un-American when they took down the stars and stripes and hoisted in its place the Palestinian flag.

Student movements are thus a kind of canary in the coal mine for the right to freedom of speech, because the true test of free speech rests with our treatment not of popular ideas but of ideas and movements that are unpopular, that raise difficult questions, that challenge the status quo. And whether it is the Berkeley student activists who mounted protests against racially discriminatory employers in 1964, using what much of the conservative American public viewed as frighteningly anarchistic civil disobedience tactics in both that struggle and in their campus crusade for free speech rights, or the anti-Gaza war movement in 2024, such questions and challenges can provoke disdain and repression. Viewed side by side, both the FSM and today’s antiwar movement also reveal that, as Savio pointed out long ago, the undemocratic mode of university governance endures. It is as dysfunctional today as it was in 1964. And it remains set up in such a way that, in the halls of power on campus, money talks, but students do not—which is why in 2024 they were on the march again, out in the campus plazas and on the lawns raising their voices, demonstrating, demanding to be heard.

Postscript

The conditions for free speech and academic freedom have deteriorated further since this essay was written last summer, with sweeping bans on campus encampments put in place; time, place, and manner regulations tightened; and disciplinary actions initiated that effectively suppressed the anti–Gaza war movement on most campuses. In fact, a session the author organized on the campus free speech crises of 1964 and 2024, planned for fall 2024 in commemoration of the FSM’s sixtieth anniversary, was banned from New York University’s Bobst Library by the NYU administration.

Robert Cohen is a professor of social studies and history at New York University, biographer of Mario Savio, and the 2024–25 senior fellow of the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. His most recent book is Confronting Jim Crow: Race, Memory, and the University of Georgia in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2024).