Free Exercise and free speech movement

I was not there in MS in the summer of 1964 when three Civil Rights Workers were abducted and murdered near Philadelphia, MS. I was not there when Mario Savio jumped on the top of a police car, taking off his shoes lest he damage the car, in Sproul Plaza at the University of California, Berkeley, on October 1, 1964 to protest administrative action to shut down student activist recruitment of volunteers on University property. I only moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the late summer of 1967, when I was 15 years-old, and in those days my thoughts couldn't have been further from those issues percolating 40 miles away in Berkeley. Yet as my historical knowledge deepens, my thoughts and imagination often return to precisely that time when growing unrest in the Civil Rights arena caught fire on University campuses and led to campus protest and discussions on the role of the university in contemporary America. These two essays, therefore, add no "first hand" testimony to the huge mountain of primary and secondary texts from that day (two places to start are David Goines' The Free Speech Movement (1993) and the volume of essays by "participants" in the drama called The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s edited by Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik (2002)), but seek to explore themes that the Free Speech Movement provokes in the mind. So many conflicting emotions collide in me as I "relive" those days in my mind. At times I am hopeful and elated, but mostly, perhaps surprisingly, I am filled with fear. These essays also try to tease out the fear I feel.

Setting the Context

By 1964 UC Berkeley had emerged as one of the top research Universities in America. Originally the only campus in the UC system, by 1964 it was the flagship operation of a multi-campus system which would be growing by leaps and bounds in the next few years. The architects of this growth and of the idea of graded series of institutions of higher education, at least one of which was available to every CA high school graduate, were successive Presidents Robert Sproul (1930-58) and Clark Kerr (1958-67). Kerr was probably the most distinguished name in American higher education in mid-century, and his 1963 book The Uses of the University explained the way that the University was a vital player in providing educated and capable workers for the diverse and modern society of the 1960s. To make a distinction: for several years, the U of CA system had had both chancellors and a president. The former were the heads of individual campuses (Kerr was head of the Berkeley campus before being promoted in 1958, at age 47, to head the entire system) while the president oversaw the whole. Kerr's philosophy of system management was to let the campus chancellors have significant responsibility for managing the individual campuses. He would work with the Regents and make sure the funds flowed from the Legislature--no small task indeed. The Chancellor of the Berkeley campus during the FSM was Edward W. Strong who, by authorizing the famous "letter" of September 14, 1964 committed what Kerr calls one of the worst blunders in the history of the University of California. More about that below.

Kerr really was a very "big" name, and he positioned himself as a sort of genial but hard-fighting liberal in the educational establishment. He rose through the ranks as a labor negotiator in the 1930s and 1940s before settling in to a faculty position at UC Berkeley. Like an older contemporary, US Sen. Wayne Morse (R, then I, then D-OR; born in 1900), Kerr cut his teeth on efforts to conciliate diverse groups in the rough and tumble world of labor/management disputes of the Depression and WWII days. Once he became Chancellor and then President of UC, however, his own values began to emerge, and those values combined a deep respect for the efforts of his predecessor Robert Sproul with a need to get rid of the more repressive effects of Sproul's tenure.

Let's focus on that issue for a second. One of the things Sproul tried to do in his Presidency was to achieve a sort of "contract" with the Legislature, which would pour money on the University as long as Sproul could keep things "under control." This meant that there was the constant fear that someone, somewhere might run to the Legislature if embarrassing things began to happen in Berkeley. And, indeed, before the 1960s, UC Berkeley was the relatively conservative bastion of privilege for Californians who wanted to send their children to a state school. I chuckled to myself as I read the full names of the three UC Presidents since 1923: (1) William Wallace Campbell (1923-30); (2) Robert Gordon Sproul (1930-58); (3) Clark Kerr (1958-67). It sounds like roll call at a Session meeting of First Presbyterian Church, Somewhere USA. Presbyterians had a long and fruitful commitment to secondary and higher education in America, and they were proud to be perceived as centrists along the way. I don't know the religious proclivities of these men, but they were of Scottish descent and fully committed to a sort of comfortable modus operandi with the CA legislature.

Kerr both honored and did away with Sproul's legacy. First, he honored his approach to the Legislature. He knew who buttered the bread for UC and had to make sure the money kept flowing. Thus, he wanted to maintain a distinction, which ultimately proved unconvincing, between "informing" people about various positions and "advocating" for them. The University may be a place where all ideas were discussed, but it was not the place for advocating for them, especially if it meant connecting with the outside world. But, second, he tried to undo various parts of the Sproul legacy--by persuading the Regents to eliminate a mandatory ROTC requirement, by allowing Communist speakers on the campus, by getting rid of a faculty "loyalty oath" which the Regents had approved in Sproul's tenure. Thus, Kerr saw himself as a gradualist who was successfully balancing divergent values with the result that UC Berkeley was now considered one of the premier universities in America.

Conclusion

Kerr, of course, wasn't the only player in all of this. But he was the person who, in my mind, most contributed to the dominant philosophy of the Adminstration at the time. What happened next, in September 1964, however, was what no one could have predicted. The next essay considers this.

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