Governor Brown was unable to bask for long in the glories of his super state, with its super system of higher education. In the 1960s a national civil rights movement and growing U. S. military involvement in Vietnam engaged the attention of collegians, resulting in escalating turmoil on campuses within and outside the state.
While youth at the University of Michigan were launching the Students for a Democratic Society in 1960, Berkeley and San Francisco State College students in April of that year protested their exclusion from a hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee
Held in San Francisco’s city hall. When students refused to leave the premises, police used fire hoses and clubs to disperse them. These happenings in different regions of America signaled that the “silent generation” of 1950s students, who had pursued higher education for jobs and material gain, was being succeeded by a new wave of more affluent, idealistic, and politically active collegians.
By the 1960s, according to Kerr, “Berkeley. . . had a historical ambiance of a liberal-radical flavor that attracted sympathetic students and faculty.” Also, some outspoken conservative students were part of the campus mix. All of these groups insisted on their right to advocate on university property for political causes.
Amid these developments, Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement arose in the fall of 1964. Mario Savio, valedictorian of his New York City high-school class, and a coterie of fellow students had returned to campus after having volunteered in the South during Freedom Summer. They had been registering blacks to vote. In doing so, these students developed organizing skills and the courage to stand up to Ku Klux Klan and police violence. Trained, toughened, and impassioned, in September they organized “sit-ins” at Bay Area businesses thought to discriminate on the basis of race in hiring, paying, and promoting employees. A “sit-in” was a nonviolent form of protest, such as occupying seats or public buildings and refusing to move until arrested, if then.
That same month university officials declared that a sidewalk at the south end of campus that students had been using to circulate political leaflets was off limits for such activity due to the institution’s policy of remaining free from “political or sectarian influence in the appointment of regents and the administration of its affairs.” The fact that the university prohibited student politicking based on a policy aimed at ensuring the political neutrality of the institution itself made no sense according to Berkeley’s own attorneys. In other words, while the administration was required to perform its duties in a politically neutral fashion, from a legal standpoint the students did not forfeit their right to freedom of speech by enrolling at the university. Backed by the U. S. Supreme Court’s decision in Edwards v. South Carolina (1963) upholding students’ rights to on-campus political speech that did not “constitute a clear and present danger,” Savio and others, including the Young Republicans, continued their forbidden leafleting and speechmaking. To leftist students the ban on campus political activity proved that the university aimed at “turning out corporate drones” rather than encouraging the critical thinking and social responsibility essential to “participatory democracy.”
October 1, 1964, marked a milestone in the development of the Free Speech Movement (FSM). A few minutes before noon, Jack Weinberg, a Berkeley mathematics graduate student, set up a makeshift podium in front of the Sproul Hall administration building in preparation for a rally. Several deans and a lone police officer arrested Weinberg when he refused to dismantle the structure. Meanwhile, students gathered in the plaza, causing the police officer to go for help. When more police arrived, Weinberg, trained in the South to go limp (meaning he would not resist arrest but would have to be carried to be moved), refused to get into the squad car. By the time police placed him in the car, hundreds of peaceful students had surrounded the vehicle and someone had let the air out of at least one tire. The immobilized car then became a rostrum. Student speakers removed their shoes and sequentially addressed the awaiting throng from the roof of the police car. Pro-
Fessors, too, spoke. Savio negotiated a truce with the administration and after 32 hours Weinberg was allowed to leave the car. Governor Brown was relieved but annoyed by the students’ “total disrespect for the law.”
By this point an FSM coalition had formed at Berkeley and Savio was its titular spokesperson. In one of his most celebrated orations, delivered before a throng of listeners on campus in early December, he declared: “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, can’t even tacitly 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.” Jo Freeman, Jackie Goldberg, Bettina Aptheker, and others also took leadership roles in slowing if not stopping the apparatus or operation of the university. In its struggle, the FSM prevailed. The faculty senate, by a large margin, voted to support the students’ demands. At the end of 1964 the administration repealed the ban on campus political activity. Berkeley, by then, was seen as the cockpit of student protests that from the shores of the Pacific began sweeping the nation, and within a few years would erupt at elite universities in Paris, Prague, Rome, Berlin, Warsaw, Tokyo, and Mexico City.
Figure 12.2 Berkeley students marching through Sather Gate en route to the UC Board of Regents' meeting, November 20, 1964. Mario Savio, wearing a coat and tie, is in the front line, second from the right of the banner. Photo: Don Kechely. Courtesy of Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.
As American involvement in Vietnam deepened, student opposition to the war mounted at Berkeley, San Francisco State, and other institutions throughout California and the nation. At Stanford, David Harris, who had participated in the 1964 campaign to register black voters in Mississippi, returned to campus where as student body president two years later he led a movement to empower students, advance civil rights, and oppose the Vietnam War. In 1968, as campus protests throughout America became more destructive of property, Stanford’s ROTC building was destroyed by arson. The following year, UCLA, which ABC correspondent John Davenport described as a model of stability, became newsworthy when black philosophy professor Angela Davis, an avowed communist, was fired by the UC Board of Regents. If students and faculty at UCLA remained relatively quiet, the academic environment at other prominent Southland schools was quieter still, for example at the Claremont Colleges and USC. On the other hand, in mid-May 1969 students and nonstudents at UC Berkeley tried to seize a block of university-owned land for use as a “People’s Park.” They tore down fences and burned signs posted around the property. National Guardsmen called to the scene sprayed the thousands of protesters with shotgun pellets while police fired teargas into the rampaging crowd. In 1970 violence erupted near UC Santa Barbara when students rioted in the off-campus housing neighborhood of Isla Vista and torched the city’s Bank of America. One student was killed in the mayhem. According to UC Berkeley Professor Todd Gitlin, a student movement that had ushered in years of hope in the early 1960s was ending in days of rage.
Pacific Profile: S. I. Hayakawa, San Francisco State College President
Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa (1906-92) was an eminent semanticist, college professor and president, and U. S. Senator. Of Japanese ancestry, he was born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, after which he immigrated to the United States, where he earned his Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Receiving American citizenship in 1954, he was regarded as an authority in his field, particularly on how dictators such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini had used words and symbols in the 1930s as tools of totalitarian propaganda. His textbook Language in Action (1941) was used by colleges and universities throughout the United States.
San Francisco State College hired Hayakawa in 1955. He seemed sympathetic to Berkeley’s FSM initially and favored a broadening of the curriculum at San Francisco State. However, as campus turmoil spread and students became increasingly destructive of property and disruptive of classroom instruction, Hayakawa’s views changed. He became convinced that students in the late 1960s at Berkeley and elsewhere had become
Too radicalized and that administrators needed to assert their authority.
In November 1968 Hayakawa was appointed president of San Francisco State. By then student protests had gone global as rioters and dissenters challenged authorities at the universities of Paris, Mexico, Peking (now Beijing, China), and elsewhere, including a two-month strike at San Francisco State at the very moment that Hayakawa assumed the presidency.
His response to the strike on his campus was dramatic and decisive. “We have a standing obligation to the 17,500 or more students - white, black, yellow, red and brown - who are not on strike and have every right to expect continuation of their education,” he declared. Next he called for 600 San Francisco police officers to come onto campus to maintain order. On December 2, with a megaphone in hand, he mounted a protester’s truck and ripped out the wires to an amplifying system. He then stepped down and waded through the angry crowd of students, returning to his office. A photograph
Of the incident appeared in newspapers across the country. From then on, if not before, Hayakawa became a polarizing figure in America: conservatives praised him; liberals denounced him. In March 1969 the campus strike ended, with the college making some concessions, such as establishing a black studies department.
National politics beckoned. In August 1973, Hay-akawa resigned his presidency and changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. The leadership he had shown on campus and the media attention
That followed made him attractive to Republican strategists. Accordingly, at 70 years of age he ran for the U. S. Senate in 1976 against Democratic incumbent John Tunney and won.
“Sleepin’ Sam,” as he was called because he dozed off in committee meetings, opposed busing to integrate schools, and fought affirmative action to diversify student bodies. He had been a courageous and influential educator but was ineffective in the Senate. Hayakawa did not run for a second term and died in 1992, having brought distinction to Asian Pacific Californians.
World History
