[5 articles]
Free Speech Movement Commemoration Held at UC
http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2009-12-03/article/34192?headline=Free-Speech-Movement-Commemoration-Held-at-UC
By Raymond Barglow, Special to the Planet
Thursday December 03, 2009
A commemoration of the 45th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement
took place at noon Wednesday at Sproul Plaza on the UC campus.
The meeting was originally planned by the Associated Students (ASUC)
and other campus organizations. They sent an e-mail message to FSM
arrestees, said Susan Druding, "inviting us to speak at the event,
[but] we were asked not to say anything about the budget crisis or
current events, only to speak about what happened 45 years ago."
Students who are protesting the budget cuts and fee increases met
with some of the FSM veterans and agreed that the current protests
deserved a hearing at the commemoration. Hasty negotiations just
before the event resulted in a compromise: the protestors would be
heard, followed by the scheduled speakers.
All of the speakers from the FSM days drew comparisons between the
FSM and the current predicament at UC. "We ground out thousands of
newsletters and flyers using mimeograph machines," said Gar Smith.
"If we had had Twitter, we would have won our fight in a week!"
UC Berkeley Physics Professor Richard Muller, who was arrested in the
FSM, spoke to the crowd about his experiences with the police. He
concluded by pointing out that the protest movement itself is
sometimes intolerant and that even someone as conservative as
Condoleezza Rice should be able to speak freely on the Berkeley campus.
Following the noon meeting, protestors marched through the campus,
ending up at the Bear's Lair, where they voiced support for the food
vendors who have been negotiating lease terms with the ASUC.
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Protesters Interrupt Free Speech Celebration
http://www.dailycal.org/article/107716/protesters_interrupt_free_speech_celebration
By Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato
December 3, 2009
About 150 protesters congregated on the steps of Sproul Hall
yesterday to challenge an ASUC-sponsored event celebrating the Free
Speech Movement's 45th anniversary.
The protest started at about noon when a group of students took
control of the event, which aimed to commemorate the symbolic
beginning of the movement marked by Mario Savio's "Operation of the
Machine" speech.
In the speech, Savio had spoken out against what he said was a
university administration that would not allow free discourse for
students at UC Berkeley and limited student input in university
decision-making.
Protesters used the event-attended by about 350 people, according to
UCPD estimates-as a platform for their grievances, comparing their
struggle for reduced layoffs, fee increases and budget transparency,
among other causes, to students' 1964 effort to secure free speech on campus.
But many protesters at the event said further action is needed to
secure students' freedom of speech.
"There are serious issues with the (university) administration
repressing free speech," said Zak Solomon, a senior majoring in
interdisciplinary studies. "They didn't support it years ago, and
they're not supporting it now-that hypocrisy, we don't accept."
ASUC officials were forced to compromise with protesters, who
originally refused to allow President Will Smelko to speak. In the
end, Smelko was able to introduce the event's speakers-veterans of
the movement-while protesters were allowed to address the crowd.
Gar Smith, who was a campus activist in the 1960s, said that despite
a small turnout, the rally was "good work."
"Sometimes it takes a small number of people to start a large
movement," he said. "I am honored to join your generation in this
fight for free speech."
One of the main criticisms of the protest was the alleged
"museum-ification" of the free speech movement.
"Free speech is not a fossil-it is a constant struggle, and that
struggle continues right now on UC campuses through this movement,"
said Praba Pilar, a graduate student of performance studies at UC Davis.
After marching to California Hall and around Doe Library, the
protesters made their way back through Sproul Plaza and briefly held
up traffic near the intersection of Bancroft Way and Telegraph
Avenue. The remaining demonstrators congregated in the Bear's Lair
Food Court, where they held a meeting to discuss how to further organize.
UCPD Lt. Alex Yao said acting on a reliable source, UCPD closed
Sproul Hall and California Hall for the day to deter any protesters
who might attempt to "cause a major disturbance." No citations were
given and no arrests were made in connection with the day's events, he said.
Event coordinator Marcus Caimi, a senior math major and former ASUC
senator, said he thought the event was relatively successful, even
with protester intervention.
"The one thing that I regret about what's going on is I was planning
on playing the actual speech of Mario Savio's words ... but because
we had to compromise with these event organizers here, I wasn't able
to do that," Caimi said. "So if one voice was silenced today it was
Mario Savio's."
--------
UC protesters invoke Free Speech Movement
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/03/BAFV1AU1LF.DTL
Nanette Asimov, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, December 3, 2009
The Free Speech Movement lives on at UC Berkeley - 45 years to the
day after a 21-year-old student named Mario Savio energized thousands
by exhorting them to do all they could to stop the administration's
restrictive policies.
Today the issue is less about freedom of speech than about freedom of
access to a quality education, as thousands of students have
protested rising tuition, employee layoffs and course cutbacks in
recent weeks.
"We're the ones fighting for this to be a public university that
everyone can afford!" Ronald Cruz, a Berkeley activist, told a crowd
of about 100 students who gathered Wednesday on the steps of Sproul
Hall, site of the late Savio's famous speech. "The Free Speech
Movement is alive!"
On Dec. 2, 1964, Savio used the metaphor of a machine to urge student
action- not just against campus policies prohibiting them from even
setting up tables for their causes, but against the rampant civil
rights abuses of the era.
On Wednesday, students repeated Savio's most famous passage en masse:
"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!"
Wheeler Hall takeover
That's what they say they were doing on Nov. 20, when 38 students and
two others seized Wheeler Hall in the middle of campus and occupied
the second floor for 11 hours, disrupting classes, while a couple
thousand others formed a ring around the building and chanted, "Whose
university? Our university!" and "No cuts! No fees!"
Last month, UC's governing Board of Regents approved a 32 percent fee
hike to help address a budget shortfall of more than half a billion
dollars this year. As state support for higher education has
diminished, the 10 UC campuses have also approved deep cuts to operations.
Days later, about 200 police officers and sheriff's deputies in riot
gear faced off against the protesters on the Berkeley campus.
Reminiscent of campus unrest in the 1960s, some were filmed beating
students with batons, and pushing them with metal barricades. Some
demonstrators showed up at hospitals with broken fingers, saying they
had been smashed by police.
On Wednesday, three gray-haired campus activists from the '60s -
Gretchen Lipow, Anita Medal, and Gar Smith - addressed the students,
recalling their own experiences.
"I still remember how an officer held me so another could slap my
face," Smith said to loud boos. "They were white men. I discovered
from YouTube that today's students are being beaten by a fully
integrated police force. That's progress!"
Investigations begun
A campus review board and campus police are separately investigating
allegations of excessive force by officers on the day of the Wheeler
takeover. UC police spokesman Lt. Alex Yao said he didn't know when
they would be finished.
Quietly, however, some campus administrators said policies have
already changed. On Wednesday, for example, student protesters were
greeted by campus police on bicycles rather than by sheriff's
deputies in riot gear.
"I want to express my deepest regret to all members of our community
at the turn of events that escalated into police action," Chancellor
Robert Birgeneau said in a video posted Monday on the campus Web
site. "Violence is never an acceptable response - neither against nor
by the police."
Students also made changes on Wednesday. While they still hoisted
banners opposing the fee hike and faculty furloughs, they disrupted
no classes and pulled no fire alarms as some had done two weeks ago
to the consternation of fellow students.
--
E-mail Nanette Asimov at [email protected].
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Protesters shut down Free Speech Movement tribute
http://www.insidebayarea.com/trivalleyherald/localnews/ci_13911371
By Matt Krupnick
Contra Costa Times
Posted: 12/02/2009
BERKELEY Calling UC Berkeley's 1960s turmoil "a dead movement,"
protesters on Wednesday knocked a tribute to the Free Speech Movement
off the steps of Sproul Hall and voiced their own concerns about
student-fee hikes and other issues.
Exactly 45 years after the face of the movement, Mario Savio, spoke
to thousands on the same steps, a few dozen demonstrators forced
student-government leaders to cancel their commemoration. The same
protesters later read a line from Savio's Dec. 2, 1964, speech in unison.
Organizers of the invading demonstration said it was time to focus on
"a living, breathing movement" rather than a 45-year-old one, but
they allowed some who had come for the Free Speech Movement tribute
to speak to the crowd of about 200.
Among the speakers was physics professor Richard Muller, who was
arrested during the 1964 Sproul Hall sit-in. Ultimately, Muller said,
the Free Speech Movement was a failure because of today's intolerance
on campus.
"We could not invite Condoleezza Rice here, as a prominent black
woman, because of the fear she would be booed down," he said. "We
have less free speech today than on the day I was arrested."
Wednesday's protest, although smaller than others in the same plaza
in recent months, was an indication of the discontent that has marked
student and employee life at UC Berkeley this year.
University of California regents last month raised student fees 32
percent over the next nine months, and layoffs, furloughs and budget
cuts have decimated the UC and California State University systems.
The demonstration also showed continued confusion over the issues.
Signs held by the protesters addressed everything from fee hikes to
minority enrollment, and several aimed anger at UC regents but not
at the Legislature, governor or voters, all of whom have a more
significant say in how much money the university receives.
Some demonstrators argued that change should start within the UC
administration.
"It's not a question of the state budget," said Callie Maidhof, a
first-year student and a protest organizer, noting that construction
projects continue while courses are being cut. "It's a question of priorities."
The protest, during which the group blocked the locked-down entrances
of Sproul Hall with banners, came less than two weeks after dozens
were arrested during an occupation of nearby Wheeler Hall. Chancellor
Robert Birgeneau has since said he regrets the heavy police crackdown
during the Nov. 20 confrontation.
Some Free Speech Movement veterans who watched Wednesday's event said
the current issues have yet to take on a life of their own, as they
did in the 1960s. But many on the Berkeley campus at first ignored
rallies 45 years ago, said Bob Roundy, an analyst in the academic
personnel office who was a UC Berkeley student in the 1960s.
"The broader understanding (of the issues) grew with the Free Speech
Movement," he said. "It wasn't instantaneous."
One former leader of the movement told current students to keep up the fight.
"What you're seeing here today is really a continuation of the fights
we went through," Gretchen Lipow told the group as many protesters
chatted among themselves. "Do your research and stay out there."
--
Matt Krupnick covers higher education. Reach him at 510-208-6488.
--------
Free Speech Participant Compares Protests
http://www.dailycal.org/article/107743/free_speech_participant_compares_protests
By Raymond Barglow
Contributing Writer
Friday, December 4, 2009
I walked onto the UC Berkeley campus Wednesday to attend the noon
rally, in commemoration of the Free Speech Movement. On this day 45
years ago, I also came to the campus, and got arrested along with 800
others because of our occupation of Sproul Hall.
That was the day that Mario Savio gave his famous speech from the
steps of Sproul: "There is 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 ..."
So I was thinking about Mario and wishing he were walking alongside
me this morning. I knew him only as a fellow student in the Cal
philosophy department, not as a friend. We took several courses
together and would talk sometimes about philosophical matters: Is the
mind identical to the body? Can ethical value judgments be rationally
justified?
One of the philosophers whom Mario admired was Immanuel Kant, whose
ethics enjoins us to always respect others as ends in themselves,
never merely as a means to the satisfaction of our own interests.
In his recent biography of Savio, Robert Cohen writes that Mario and
the FSM "embodied a mass movement rooted in moral principle rather
than in political calculation or opportunism, standing up for freedom
despite the odds of succeeding against a powerful university administration."
That sounds right to me. And although I'm mostly an observer these
days, no longer an active participant in campus protest activities, I
recognize in talking with this generation's activists a similar moral
impulse. "No cuts , no fees; education should be free!" they chant.
At issue today is whether everyone has the right to an education. 45
years ago, the issue was students' rights to organize on this campus
on behalf of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements.
The Free Speech Movement didn't win all of its demands, but we made
substantial progress. Students and workers on campus are now
permitted by the UC administration to organize support for political
causes. Can today's campus community win its demands? Can we throw
open the gates to a college education to every qualified high school
graduate who wishes to enter them?
The social forces that we face today tell us that money for higher
education simply is not there. We're up against not only a
self-serving UC Board of Regents and state governor, and overpaid
administrators reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them. We also
face a federal government that starves public schools at the same
time that it provides a banquet to the weapons manufacturers.
And now the President aims to escalate the war in Afghanistan,
costing many more hundreds of billions of dollars and many lives.
Forty-five years ago was, it seems to me, a more hopeful time in our
nation's history. Can today's protest movement on college campuses up
and down the state keep hope alive? I don't know. But I'm encouraged
when I perceive the Kantian community-mindedness that links the
generations. My guess is that Mario would have appreciated that too.
.
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