(2011-11-07) Days Of Cal Berkeley In The60s

Days of Cal: UC Berkeley in the 60s. For these ten years -- from roughly 1964 to 1974 -- Cal captured the imagination of the United States in a way that happens once a lifetime.

Though we, for convenience's sake, group "the 60s" together, it was really two separate ideas and spirits manifesting themselves, related only in time and place.

The first of these sorts of protests, that of 1964, is now known as the "Free Speech Movement.

Mario Savio emerges as the student leader when he jumps on top of the police car, in Sproul Plaza, in which Weinberg is sitting (and the students sitting around the car won't let drive away).

This moment is the most perfect microcosm of the Free Speech movement. After Savio jumped on the police car, the students, almost 10,000 of them, sitting around the car, passed around a collection to pay for the repair of the police car. These Cal students, in other words, wanted to prove above everything that they are good Americans, and fighting for these liberties only as part of their duty as citizens.

A few days later, however, Clark Kerr leads a mass meeting in the Greek Theater, but the scene almost erupts when the police drag away Savio as he attempts to address the audience at the end of the meeting. The following day, the faculty members on the Academic Senate pass overwhelmingly a resolution urging there be no more campus discipline.

By this time, however, the Free Speech Movement had changed character. No longer were young, idealistic citizens fighting for their rights, but the demonstrations turned into parties.

Idealism -- how it all began -- was quickly forgotten when the first cast of characters were graduated. The student protests still had political purposes, of course -- and powerful ones, at that -- but the movement became increasingly radicalized.

We see the first glimpse of this new character in 1965 with the so-called "Filthy Speech Movement," when nine people shouted some dirty words, nearly toppling University's administration. But then, the Vietnam War came to Cal's attention.

With the Vietnam War demonstrations, the character of the protests had changed, just one manifestation of the new spirit of these later protests. The nonviolent, peaceful spirit of student activism of 1964 had given way to violent and confrontational politics.

...crowds which, though increasing in size, include fewer and fewer Cal students and more outsiders attracted to Berkeley looking for a good time. Campus buildings begin to get firebombed over ROTC crisis and soon the Free Huey movement

And then People's Park. The University purchased a plot of land a few blocks to the south of campus, hoping to build student dorms on that site. Cal students et al in effect claim the land for themselves, working together to turn the plot of land into what they called a "People's Park." When the administration decides to go ahead with the construction plans -- 30,000 students (and denizens) march on the "Park" in Mid-May 1969 and confront 2,000 National Guard troops which Governor Ronald Reagan has called in.

this change in character -- the two separate student protests, united only by our common grouping of them into the same decade, each with lives and philosophies of its own -- is a microcosm of the two sides of human nature: both idealistic, but easily gone awry.