We Bled For This: The Ongoing Assault on Mexican American and Ethnic Studies by Christopher Carmona, Ph.D. Our Lady of the Lake University May, 2026

Friends, I’m honored to share this powerful guest column by Dr. Christopher Carmona on the history, sacrifice, and continued struggle behind Mexican American and Ethnic Studies in Texas, as well as nationally. —Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

We Bled For This: The Ongoing Assault on Mexican American and Ethnic Studies

by 

Christopher Carmona, Ph.D.

Our Lady of the Lake University

San Antonio

May, 2026

Can you imagine what it was like to stand up for what you believed was right? To be taught that your people were important enough to be taught? Can you imagine men with badges and guns and tear gas ready to hurt you? To be beaten with batons, to starve yourself so that maybe the university will sit down and listen to you? Can you imagine that you fought so hard to be seen in the history of these United States only to have your children and grandchildren stripped of that knowledge?

You are lucky enough to be in this college, don’t rock the boat. Just keep your head down, go to class, and get your degree. It doesn’t matter that your people are being shot down in the streets, too poor to buy new shoes, or too scared to walk on the same sidewalk as a white man. 

Mexican American Studies and Ethnic Studies programs are unique in American higher education in one undeniable way: they are the only academic disciplines whose very existence was extracted through sacrifice. These programs were not invited into the academy. They were demanded into it, and the demanding came at a cost measured in arrests, hunger strikes, and blood.

It is long past time for universities and policymakers to reckon with that history, and with the continuing failure to fund what communities bled to build.

Born of Struggle, Not Invitation

The founding of Centers for Mexican American Studies across the nation is not a footnote in higher education history. It is a chronicle of sustained resistance against institutions that consistently refused to recognize the legitimacy of the discipline until students and communities forced their hand.

It began in 1968. Throughout the country, racial justice and student activism were front and center, leading to a cascade of activism for ethnic studies programs, including Chicano studies, Black studies, Asian American studies, and American Indian studies. Building from this work, Chicana/o/x activists came together at the University of California, Santa Barbara and published El Plan de Santa Barbara, a document that united diverse activists from around the state and laid out a roadmap for Chicana/Chicano studies (Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education, 1969). In response, UCSB created the first Chicano Studies Department in the UC system in 1970. California State University, Los Angeles had established a Mexican American studies program two years earlier, in 1968.

At California State University, Northridge, the price was higher. From 1967 to 1971, Los Angeles police arrested 400 students and faculty members across six major demonstrations. Eventually chaos ensued, fights erupted, and arrests were made, yet this didn’t stop students from being heard. The following morning, 2,000 students gathered in front of the Administration Building, causing the university president to declare a state of emergency. The activism ultimately established the creation of both the Afro-American and Chicano Studies departments (Acuña, 2011).

At UT Austin, Mexican American student activists in the 1960s agitated for the creation of an academic program that reflected their lives, experiences, and ways of knowing. From their efforts, in 1970, UT created the Center for Mexican American Studies, with Américo Paredes named its first director. Yet it would take 44 more years, until 2014, for the university to grant it an independent undergraduate major (University of Texas at Austin, Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, 2024).

Perhaps the most dramatic confrontation came at UCLA. UCLA first established an interdisciplinary Chicano studies program in 1973. But the retrenchment in California’s social and budget policies during the 1980s and the recession of the early 1990s took a toll. By 1989, funding had dwindled significantly, and UCLA suspended new admissions to the program. On April 28, 1993, the chancellor announced the program would not receive departmental status. What followed was a sit-in, mass arrests, and ultimately a hunger strike. 

On May 25, a small group declared a water-only fast. A village of tents sprang up outside Murphy Hall. Four days in, one protestor collapsed requiring medical attention. The group persevered, and on June 7, more than 400 students, faculty, and community supporters celebrated the creation of the César E. Chávez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction in Chicana and Chicano Studies. The strike drew the support of state senators, state representatives, city officials, and the Mothers of East L.A., resulting in one of the largest student and community mobilizations in UCLA’s history. Even then, full departmental status was not granted until 2005 (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 1993; UCLA Newsroom, 2021).

source: UCLA Magazine

In Arizona, a thriving program was simply legislated out of existence. The Tucson school district’s Mexican American studies program grew to 48 course offerings and became the largest ethnic studies program in any school district in the nation, directly increasing graduation rates and grades across all classes (Cabrera et al., 2014). In 2010, state lawmakers passed a law that dismantled the program and banned a range of related books from classes statewide.

The pattern is consistent across decades and geography: communities bleed to establish these programs, and institutions continuously find ways to cut, consolidate, or erase them.

Community Anchors Running on Empty

These Centers are not simply academic units; they are community infrastructure, and they function as such every single day. The Center for Mexican American Studies at UT Austin was intended toconnect students to the Austin community through outreach and public events, building on its legacy of collective action. At UT Arlington, CMAS was established by the Texas Legislature as the university's focal point for interdisciplinary education, research, publication, and public outreach relating to Mexican Americans, and serves as a bridge between UTA and the Latino community in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. 

Before it was shut down, Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, CMAS collaborated with faculty, student affiliates, and community organizations to produce events, training, and programs that promote a deeper understanding of Mexican American culture and supported the K-12 to higher education pipeline and first-generation college student success. The University of Arizona's MAS department works collaboratively with community organizations to address issues and produce knowledge benefiting historically marginalized communities, and engages public policy on criminal justice, immigration, and systemic inequity.

These Centers do more community work per dollar than nearly any other academic unit on campus. Yet they have operated for decades on the edge of survival.

A UT Austin graduate described his undergraduate experience as "frustrating," noting that there "seemed to be such battles for funding for the Center for Mexican American Studies, and that was disillusioning." That battle never ended. In early 2026, UT Austin announced the consolidation of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, along with African and African Diaspora Studies, Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies, into a single new department. "It's important to realize that in joining these communities together, especially by force, you're creating a system in which they have to fight, sometimes with each other, for funding, and that is ridiculous and unfair," said one scholar at the national rally held in protest on UT's own campus. At the University of North Texas, facing a $45 million budget shortfall, the university cut its Mexican American Studies minor, along with Africana Studies, LGBTQ Studies, Asian Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies.

The fallback position of college and university administrations has always been the same: Chicano/a Studies simply isn't needed, and there is simply no funding. It has been a struggle and a test of wills for Chicano/a Studies to survive.

The Students Are There. The Resources Are Not.

What makes this institutional abandonment most indefensible is that student demand is not in question. The data are unambiguous.

Research shows that Ethnic Studies coursework benefits students through better school attendance, higher standardized test scores, higher GPAs, higher graduation rates, and even a reduction in interpersonal prejudice. A peer-reviewed study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that assignment to Ethnic Studies substantially increased high school graduation, attendance, and the probability of enrolling in college (Dee & Penner, 2017). A longitudinal University of Michigan study involving 459 ninth-grade students, the majority Mexican or Mexican American, attending high-poverty schools, found that students enrolled in Ethnic Studies experience significant growth in critical reflection, which is linked to academic success, civic engagement, improved well-being, and support for equity-promoting policies (Cabrera et al., 2014).

In Texas, a 2024 youth-led research project found that students not enrolled in MAS courses wanted to learn more and enroll, but because school districts aren’t required to offer them, students may miss out on all the benefits (Valenzuela, 2023). In El Paso, only five schools across the two largest districts offer MAS, and teachers are sounding alarms that students are being cut off from their own history. Surveys of schools offering the MAS course found that a significant number could not run the class because no teacher could be found to teach it, or because students didn’t enroll due to lack of awareness or scheduling conflicts. Educators piece together curriculum without textbooks, relying on crowdsourced materials and digital resources.

Meanwhile, the majority of Mexican American and Ethnic Studies programs, most established after the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s, are dramatically underfunded and understaffed, with many having one or no core tenure-track faculty. Nationally, only 5% of four-year institutions offer an Ethnic Studies major, figures researchers have called alarming given decades of Latino enrollment growth and demographic change across the Southwest.

A Choice, Not a Coincidence

Centers for Mexican American Studies were built on sacrifice: walkouts, riots, arrests, hunger strikes, and decades of community organizing. They were won fight by fight, campus by campus. Today they serve as the connective tissue between universities and the communities that bled to create them, preserving oral histories, training educators, conducting policy research, mentoring first-generation students, and anchoring cultural identity for millions of Americans.

The question is not whether students want this education. They do, and the research proves it. The question is not whether these Centers serve communities. They do, visibly and measurably. The question is whether the institutions entrusted with public education will finally make the choice to fund what has always been funded last, if at all.

Fifty years of hunger strikes, arrests, and advocacy should be enough to earn more than a footnote in a budget that gets cut the moment the economy tightens. The discipline that required the most sacrifice to establish has received the least institutional investment to sustain.

The Pattern Repeats: What Is Happening at UC Berkeley

The story of Ethnic Studies under siege is not only a Texas story or a historical one. It is unfolding right now on one of the most storied campuses in the country. In September 2025, UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons disclosed the personal information of roughly 160 students, faculty, and staff to the Trump administration as part of a federal investigation into alleged antisemitism on campus, without notifying those affected until weeks after the disclosure had already occurred. Among those named was renowned Jewish feminist scholar Judith Butler, whose family lost members in the Holocaust. As Dr. César A. Cruz, a Cal alum and parent of a first-year student there, has written: the university that birthed the Free Speech Movement chose federal favor over the safety of its own community (Cruz, 2026).

That same year, Berkeley indefinitely closed the Multicultural Community Center, a student-built, student-run hub of multiracial organizing located in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union building, won by students in 1999 after a hunger strike. When the administration eventually announced it would reopen the center, political art reflecting the movements that created it had been stripped from the walls. Administrators justified the erasure by saying they wanted to make the space “more welcoming,” using the same language used to neutralize Ethnic Studies programs across the country. As doctoral student Sarah Halabe noted plainly: “The administration is saying, ‘Oh no, you’re not being inclusive,’ when the Multicultural Community Center was founded to be inclusive of marginalized students” (Cruz, 2026).

Then, in April 2026, Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies department announced it would not renew two lecturer positions for the coming academic year, citing “financial deficits,” eliminating ten percent of courses taught by lecturers in the department. Lecturer Diana Negrín discovered her fall course had been dropped when she checked the course catalog herself; neither the department nor the dean’s office had told her. Lecturer Jesus Barraza, who teaches more than 250 students a year, put it starkly: “The University treats Ethnic Studies as an academic ghetto. From the Department’s inception, the University has looked for ways to starve the Department” (Cruz, 2026). Meanwhile, construction workers building a new beach volleyball complex on campus unearthed the skeletal remains of at least one Native American person, on the ancestral land of the Ohlone people, the Confederated Villages of Lisjan. The university had funding for a five-court sand facility, but not for the lecturers who teach the history of the very communities whose bones were found in the ground beneath it.

Source: Department of Mexican American and 
Latino Studies

Berkeley is not an outlier. It is a mirror. What is happening there: the disclosure of student names to federal investigators, the gutting of a student-won multicultural center, the defunding of Ethnic Studies under cover of budget language. It is the same pattern this op-ed traces across decades of Texas and national history. 

The tactics change; the goal does not. Continuing lecturer Pablo Gonzalez, despite 14 years at Berkeley and a Distinguished Teaching Award, says his “suitcase is always packed” (Cruz, 2026). That sentence could have been spoken by a lecturer at UT Austin, Cal State Northridge, or UCLA in any decade since 1968. When the institutions that claim to champion free inquiry are the first to comply with repression, it is community, not administration, that must hold the line.

That is not a coincidence. It is a policy. And it is one we have the power to change.

Christopher Carmona focuses on government affairs, nonprofit strategy, and education policy. He has consulted on Texas ethnic studies legislation, co-authored official Texas State Board of Education reports on Mexican American Studies implementation and served as Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies and Research at Our Lady of the Lake University. 

References

Cruz, César A. “What Cal Is This? A Year of Repression at UC Berkeley, and the Call to Take It Back.” Medium.com, May 1, 2026. Republished by Angela Valenzuela, Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas, May 5, 2026. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/05/what-cal-is-this-year-of-repression-at.html

Dr. Cruz, a Cal alum and parent of a UC Berkeley first-year student, chronicles a pattern of institutional capitulation at UC Berkeley during the 2025–26 academic year: the university’s disclosure of roughly 160 students, faculty, and staff to federal investigators; the indefinite closure and subsequent depoliticization of the student-built Multicultural Community Center; the nonrenewal of two Ethnic Studies lecturers citing budget deficits; and the discovery of Ohlone ancestral remains beneath a construction site for a new beach volleyball facility. Cruz frames these events as interconnected signs of a university abandoning its legacy of free speech, ethnic studies, public accountability, and resistance to state repression. The essay calls on students, faculty, alumni, and community members to organize collectively in defense of Ethnic Studies and the democratic mission of public higher education. Published on the blog of Dr. Angela Valenzuela, Professor of Education at UT Austin and a leading scholar of Mexican American education and equity policy.

Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education. El Plan de Santa Bárbara: A Chicano Plan for Higher Education. La Causa Publications, 1969.

Dee, Thomas S., and Emily K. Penner. "The causal effects of cultural relevance: Evidence from an ethnic studies curriculum." American Educational Research Journal 54.1 (2017): 127-166 [pdf].

Cabrera, Nolan L., Jeffrey F. Milem, Oiyan Pong, and Ronald W. Marx. “Missing the (Student Achievement) Forest for All the (Political) Trees: Empiricism and the Mexican American Studies Controversy in Tucson.” American Educational Research Journal 51, no. 6 (2014): 1084–1118. (University of Michigan longitudinal study referenced in op-ed.)

Valenzuela, Angela. Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. State University of New York Press, 1999.

Valenzuela, Angela. “Struggles For/With/Through Ethnic Studies in Texas: Third Spaces as Anchors for Collective Action.” Teachers College Record 125, no. 3 (2023). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01614681231181793

Acuña, Rodolfo. The Making of Chicana/o Studies: In the Trenches of Academe. Rutgers University Press, 2011. (Source for CSUN founding history and 1967–1971 campus activism.)

UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. Hunger Strike for Chicano Studies Department Collection, 1993. UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt0b69p9s1

UCLA Newsroom. “Hail to the Hills: Starving for Justice.” UCLA Magazine, March 28, 2021. https://newsroom.ucla.edu/magazine/hunger-strike-chicana-chicano-studies

University of Texas at Austin, Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. “About: History of MALS.” Liberal Arts, UT Austin, 2024. https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/mals/about/

What Cal Is This? A Year of Repression at UC Berkeley, and the Call to Take It Back, by Dr. Cesar A. Cruz

Friends:

In a powerful and deeply personal essay, Dr. César A. Cruz sounds the alarm over what he describes as the accelerating dismantling of the historic mission of University of California, Berkeley. Writing not only as an alum but as the parent of a first-year student, Cruz chronicles what he sees as a devastating pattern of institutional capitulation: the university’s disclosure of student and faculty information to federal investigators, the closure and depoliticization of the Multicultural Community Center, the nonrenewal of Ethnic Studies lecturers amid claims of budget deficits, and the construction of athletic facilities on Ohlone ancestral remains. 

For Dr. Cruz, these are not isolated incidents but interconnected signs of a university abandoning its legacy of free speech, ethnic studies, public accountability, and resistance to state repression. His essay frames these developments as part of a broader political project of neutralizing dissent, defunding critical scholarship, and erasing historically marginalized communities under the language of “inclusion,” “safety,” and administrative “reform.” 

Ultimately, Dr. Cruz calls on students, faculty, alumni, and community members to reject silence and organize collectively to defend Ethnic Studies, public higher education, and the democratic purposes the university once claimed to embody.

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

What Cal Is This?

A Year of Repression at UC Berkeley, and the Call to Take It Back

Illustration by Masha Noar

By Dr. César A. Cruz | May 1, 2026 | Medium.com

Roll on you Bears has a different ring these days.

I am a Cal alum. My wife Jazmin is a Cal alum. And this past fall, we sent our son to UC Berkeley as a first-year student, proud, hopeful, carrying with him everything we believed this university to be, the Free Speech Movement, the Third World Liberation Front, the hunger strikers who built ethnic studies with their bodies, the tradition of a public university that dared to tell the truth about power.

He arrived in August. Within weeks, the chancellor turned in 160 students to the federal government.

That is the welcome Chancellor Rich Lyons extended to my son’s class.

The university that birthed the Free Speech Movement, that has long claimed itself a sanctuary of intellectual courage and public purpose, is finishing a year that should make every alumna, every donor, every student of conscience, every staff person ask the question clearly and out loud: What Cal is this? Who is running it? And who is it running for?

I am not asking as an outsider. I am asking as someone who loved this institution, who sent his family to this institution, who is watching this institution betray everything it claimed to stand for, in real time, in the first year of my son’s education.

I am asking because the evidence is undeniable, the pattern is unmistakable, and the silence of the administration has become its own answer.

Let us go through it, month by month, like a wound that keeps opening.

Fall 2025: The Chancellor Turns In His Own Students

The year began with a betrayal. In September 2025, UC Berkeley provided the personal information of roughly 160 students, faculty, and staff to the Trump administration, complying with a federal investigation into alleged antisemitism on campus. The university’s Office of Legal Affairs sent letters to affected individuals on September 4, notifying them that their names and information had already been disclosed, over two weeks earlier, without their knowledge.

Among those named was Judith Butler, one of the most celebrated Jewish feminist scholars in the world, whose family lost members in the Holocaust, and who has since described the experience as being trapped in “Kafka-land.” As reported in The Guardian, Butler said: “We have a right to know the charges against us, to know who has made the charges and to review them and defend ourselves. But none of that has happened.”

A campus graduate student told the Daily Cal that the disclosure appeared to target anyone who had ever been accused of antisemitism, which, as they put it plainly, “includes a lot of Palestinians.” The same student added that whenever they taught about Palestine, it usually led to an investigation, and they believed those files were what got turned over.

This is not compliance. This is capitulation. This is a chancellor choosing federal favor over the safety of his own students, his own faculty, his own community.

Who is this Cal? Not the one I was taught to revere.

November 2025: The Right Wing Comes to Sproul, and the Administration Rolls Out the Welcome Mat

Two months after Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was killed at a Utah university, his organization concluded its American Comeback Tour at UC Berkeley on November 10. According to CalMatters, administrators would not disclose their security plans but confirmed they were prepared to host the event. Outside, students, most of them far younger than the attendees inside, faced police in riot gear, with physical fights and arrests. One man was taken to the hospital with a head wound.

Inside, speakers told the crowd that the left were not their friends and would mock and dehumanize them. Comedian Rob Schneider told the audience that God said Trump is his guy, and that if you do not assimilate, it is an invasion.

The day after, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon announced a DOJ Civil Rights Division investigation into the event, adding another federal layer of pressure onto a campus administration already on its knees.

The right wing can fund a bus tour to Berkeley, bring riot police, and walk away with a federal press conference. Students of color organizing for Palestinian lives get their names handed to the government. That is the double standard. That is the definition of whose lives this administration is protecting.

Late 2025: The Multicultural Community Center Is Silently Shuttered

Then came the closure, sudden and unexplained, of the Multicultural Community Center, the beloved, student-built, student-run heart of multiracial organizing on campus.

The Daily Californian reported that UC Berkeley indefinitely closed the MCC, a space that offers cross-cultural community building, due to, in administration’s words, “criticism received from a number of campus stakeholders.” The MCC, located in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union building, had been a hub for generations of students of color, a space where LaNada War Jack launched her book, where Alicia Garza spoke, where community was held and futures were imagined.

Interns at the center were initially not even told it was closing. When they found out, they were told the closure was connected to conversations with the chancellor’s office about “operating procedures.” The explicit concerns mentioned by administrators, as the Daily Cal reported, pertained to art and signage on their windows and walls, including anything that related to student activism, international relations, or ethnic studies.

One junior MCC intern, speaking anonymously out of fear of retaliation, connected the closure directly to federal investigations, saying, “We’re caught up in this antisemitism debate that’s going across all university campuses. Because of the signage that was on our walls, they decided to not have the space basically be open for any group.”

A second-year graduate student, Anya Kushwaha, described it as “really devastating, particularly for the student organizing community on campus, but also just for students at large, especially students of color, who’ve been in need of resources.”

Students won this space in 1999, after a hunger strike, after sitting in front of the chancellor’s office with tombstones erected for every class that had disappeared. Now the administration closed it without a word. Not even a phone call.

April 2026: Political Art Stripped from the MCC

After months of community pressure, the university announced it would reopen the MCC, with Chancellor Rich Lyons stating he wanted to make it “more welcoming, not less.” But what reopened was not what the community built.

As reported by Open Campus and Berkeleyside, by April 2026 all political art had been stripped from the center, the same art that reflected the movement from which the MCC was born. The center’s six-point founding mission, student-led, anti-oppression, cross-cultural understanding, sustainability and wellness, popular education, and social justice, has been quietly gutted by administrators who call the erasure “welcoming.”

Doctoral student Sarah Halabe, studying ethnic studies, named the contradiction plainly: “The administration is saying, ‘Oh no, you’re not being inclusive,’ when the Multicultural Community Center was founded to be inclusive of marginalized students.”

At a time, as Open Campus documented, when Trump officials and Congressional Republicans have initiated at least seven separate investigations into UC Berkeley since 2024, and when campuses across the country are banning the teaching of race and gender under federal pressure, what is happening at the MCC is not neutral reform. It is a whitewashing under duress, carried out by an administration that has chosen compliance over covenant.

They stripped the walls. They thought no one would notice. We noticed.

This Month: They Build a Volleyball Court Over Ohlone Remains

And then, last week, this. Construction workers building a new beach volleyball complex at Bancroft Way and Fulton Street unearthed the skeletal remains of at least one Native American person. The remains were found two feet underground, covered by concrete.

As Berkeleyside reported, the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, the Ohlone group with ancestral ties to this land, are now working with the university to care for the remains. Their chair, Corinna Gould, said her community would be involved in determining next steps. California law requires all construction to stop immediately when human remains are found outside a cemetery, and UC Berkeley paused work at the site.

The beach volleyball complex, by the university’s own materials, is a five-court sand facility with berm seating for approximately 500 spectators. It is described by the contractor as a “state-of-the-art home for Cal Athletics beach volleyball” and “a welcoming gateway to the campus park.” Imagine we have money for beach volleyball, but not our collective histories? Chancellor, what priorities do you have? Who do you serve?

A welcoming gateway. Built on Ohlone bones.

This is the same institution that cannot fund the ethnic studies lecturers who teach the history of these very communities. The same institution that stripped the murals from a space named after Martin Luther King Jr. The same institution that handed over the names of 160 people exercising their First Amendment rights to a federal government that has made no secret of its agenda.

They can build a volleyball court. They cannot protect the people who teach us why this land is sacred.

Today: Ethnic Studies Lecturers Are Let Go

And today, April 30th, we learn that UC Berkeley’s ethnic studies department will not renew two lecturer positions for the 2026–27 academic year due to “financial deficits.” The Daily Californian reported that this represents an elimination of ten percent of courses taught by lecturers in the department, and that the affected lecturers, pre-six faculty who have not yet earned continuing status, received no direct communication from the department or the dean’s office.

Lecturer Diana Negrín found out her fall course had been dropped when she checked the course catalog herself. “Neither the Dean’s office nor the department have actually said a thing to us as professors, nor to the students,” she said.

Lecturer Juan Berumen believes he may also be cut. Lecturer Jesus Barraza, who teaches more than 250 students a year, described the university’s relationship to ethnic studies as clear: “The University treats Ethnic Studies as an academic ghetto. From the Department’s inception, the University has looked for ways to starve the Department.”

Continuing lecturer Pablo Gonzalez, despite 14 years at Berkeley and a Distinguished Teaching Award, says his “suitcase is always packed.”

David Skolnick, co-chair of the Bay Area chapter of UC-AFT, said the budget process is “intentionally opaque so that we can’t really hold the administration accountable for these kinds of decisions.”

We have seen this before. In 1999, students put tombstones in front of the chancellor’s office for every ethnic studies class that disappeared. The tombstones are back. The graves are multiplying.

To the Ethnic Studies Department: You Teach This Moment. Now Live It.

I want to speak directly to the faculty, the lecturers, the graduate students, and the staff of the UC Berkeley Department of Ethnic Studies, because this moment requires more than a statement and more than a meeting.

You are the department that was born from a hunger strike. You are the discipline that exists because students in 1969 refused to accept a university that erased them, and because they were willing to put their bodies on the line to say so. Your syllabi include Fanon and Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde and Rodolfo Acuña, James Baldwin and Gloria Anzaldúa. You assign bell hooks on love and Paulo Freire on pedagogy. You teach your students that neutrality in the face of oppression is not neutrality, it is complicity.

And now the institution you have served, many of you for decades, is firing your colleagues without notice. It is building a volleyball court on the bones of the people whose stories you teach. It is stripping the walls of the center your students won through hunger. It is handing the names of students, many of them yours, to a federal government that has declared war on the very communities ethnic studies was created to center.

This is not abstract. This is not a case study. This is your department. This is your moment.

Ethnic studies was never meant to be a safe academic harbor. It was meant to be a site of transformation, a place where the knowledge produced by communities in struggle became power, became praxis, became movement. Lecturer Jesus Barraza already named it: you are in an “academic ghetto,” underfunded and undervalued by design. You have always known this. The question is what you are going to do about it now, when the stakes are highest and the administration is most exposed.

We are calling on the ethnic studies department to hold emergency town halls with students and community. To refuse the opacity of budget decisions made without consultation. To stand publicly and loudly against the firing of Diana Negrín and Juan Berumen. To demand that every retired or departing faculty line be replaced. To partner with the MCC and refuse to let the administration neutralize either institution in isolation. To use your scholarship as testimony, your classrooms as organizing spaces, your collective voice as the instrument it was always meant to be.

You teach Ella Baker, who said the strength of the movement is in the people, not in the charisma of a leader. You teach the Combahee River Collective, who knew that their liberation was bound up with everyone else’s. You teach Larry Itliong and Dolores Huerta, who built power not through permission but through presence and sacrifice.

The administration is counting on your exhaustion. It is counting on the precarity of your lecturers to keep everyone too afraid to speak. It is counting on the siloing of departments, programs, and communities to prevent a unified response.

Prove them wrong.

Your students are watching. Your ancestors are watching. The Ohlone, whose remains were found beneath the ground where the university builds its athletics complex, are watching. History is watching.

You did not choose ethnic studies as a career. You chose it as a calling. Answer it.

The Pattern Is the Message

Let me be clear about what this is. This is not a series of coincidences. This is not budget math. This is not a neutral response to federal pressure.

This is an administration that has, over the course of one academic year, handed students to the federal government, welcomed a right-wing organization with riot police escort, closed and gutted a student-built multicultural center, built a volleyball court on sacred ancestral ground, and fired the professors who teach the history of the people whose bones they found in the dirt.

This is an administration doing the work of those who have always wanted to erase us, bury us, neutralize us, and call it welcoming.

And the funders who bankroll this institution, many of whom profess to care about justice, about equity, about the university’s public mission, need to ask themselves: Is this the institution I am funding? Is this the legacy I am building? Can you write a check to this chancellor and sleep well?

We are calling for the resignation of Chancellor Rich Lyons.

We are calling on the UC Regents to do what they were appointed to do and govern.

We are calling on alumni, and I count myself and my wife Jazmin among you, to withhold donations until this administration demonstrates through action, not press releases, that it serves all of its students and not just those whose politics make the federal government comfortable.

As alumni, we did not give our years and our tuition and our love to this institution so that a chancellor could hand our children’s classmates to the federal government in the first month of school. Jazmin and I sent our son to Cal because we believed in what Cal said it was. We are still here. We are still watching. And we are not writing another check until this administration remembers who built it and who it was built to serve.

We are calling on students to keep organizing, keep documenting, keep showing up to Sproul Plaza the way those who came before you did when they put tombstones outside the chancellor’s office. My son is among you now. You are not alone.

We are calling on ethnic studies faculty, emeriti, allies in every department, to refuse to let the department be starved in silence.

We are calling on the Ohlone community, the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, to be centered in every conversation about this land, because it is their land first, and whatever is built here should honor that truth, not pave over it.

This is Cal. It always has been. And as alumni, as parents, as community, as people who have not forgotten what this place promised, we are taking it back.

Do Not Let Business as Usual Continue. Contact Them. Now.

If you have read this far and you are feeling something, good. Now do something with it. Because the people who came before you did not just feel things. They acted. They fasted. They occupied buildings. They put their bodies and their futures on the line. They did not wait for the right moment or the polite channel or permission from the very institution they were challenging. They moved.

And what are you doing?

If you are an alum writing a check every year and telling yourself that your donation supports students, ask yourself which students it is supporting right now, because it is not the ones who got turned in to the federal government. It is not the ones losing ethnic studies courses. It is not the ones who walked into the MCC and found the walls stripped bare.

If you are a faculty or staff member watching colleagues lose their positions and telling yourself this is not the right time to speak, ask yourself when that time will come, because the people who built this department did not have a right time either. They had a hunger strike.

If you are a student who has been told to keep your head down and focus on your degree, ask yourself what that degree is worth if the institution granting it does not believe your life matters enough to protect.

Stop cowering. That is not what people before you did, and it is not what this moment asks of you.

Contact Chancellor Rich Lyons directly. Tell him you see what he has done. Tell him a chancellor who hands students to a hostile federal government, strips student-won spaces, and defunds ethnic studies does not deserve to lead UC Berkeley.

Chancellor Rich Lyons

Office of the Chancellor, UC Berkeley

200 California Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720

chancellor@berkeley.edu

(510) 642–7464

Contact the UC Regents. They govern this system. They are accountable to the people of California, not to the Trump administration or to donors who want the campus made safe for their politics.

UC Board of Regents

1111 Franklin Street, 12th Floor, Oakland, CA 94607

regents@ucop.edu

(510) 987–9200

Contact the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Department. Let them know you are watching, that you stand with the lecturers being let go, and that you expect the department to fight openly and without apology for its survival and its mission.

Department of Ethnic Studies

506 Barrows Hall, UC Berkeley

ethstd@berkeley.edu

(510) 642–1508

Contact your UC Regents representative. Contact state legislators who fund this university. Contact the UC Office of the President. Write emails, make calls, show up to public meetings, flood their inboxes, and refuse to let any of them pretend this is normal, because it is not normal, and normalizing it is how they win.

The Free Speech Movement was not started by people who sent a politely worded letter and waited. It was started by people who sat down in front of a police car and did not move. You do not have to block a car today (at least not yet). But you do have to do something. Pick up the phone. Send the email. Show up. Bring your friends. Bring your rage. Bring your love for what this place was supposed to be.

The people who hunger-struck for ethnic studies, who occupied Alcatraz, who marched down Telegraph, who built the MCC from nothing, they are not asking you to be perfect. They are asking you to be present. They are asking you to be counted.

Do not let them down. Do not let your silence be mistaken for consent.

Asé. Amen. Así sea. Mexica Tiahui. In Lak’ech. Ubuntu. Ameen.

Dr. César A. Cruz is Co-Founder of Homies Empowerment in East Oakland, a doctoral candidate at Pacific School of Religion and the Graduate Theological Union, and a longtime educator, poet, and organizer rooted in the traditions of liberation. He is a (proud) Cal Alum.

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.

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).