BY JOHN K. WILSON Sixty years ago, a revolution in campus free speech began. Unfortunately, it’s an anniversary being celebrated in the midst of extraordinary repression on college campuses against the right to protest. The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and around the country was a direct outgrowth of the Civil Rights Movement and the…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Milo Yiannopoulos’ much-hyped Free Speech Week at Berkeley has disappeared, not with a bang but with a whimper. The whimper came yesterday when Milo made a brief appearance on Sproul Plaza, where he sang the Star-Spangled Banner (without kneeling) and left about 30 minutes later. Berkeley spent an estimated $800,000 on…
This fall will mark a half-century since the Free Speech Movement (FSM) erupted on the University of California, Berkeley campus. “After decades of ambivalence, UC Berkeley is finally embracing this important part of its history,” writes longtime Bay Area newspaper columnist Martin Snapp in the summer issue of California, Berkeley’s alumni magazine. The FSM began…
Investigative reporter Seth Rosenfeld’s 2012 book Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power draws on thirty years of research and three hundred thousand pages of documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to tell the story of the FBI’s covert operations in Berkeley during the 1960s. Focusing on…
Over 600 University of California at Berkeley faculty have signed this letter in protest of the police violence against the Occupy Cal demonstration: November 11, 2011 Open Letter to Chancellor Birgeneau, the UC Berkeley administration, and the UC Regents: We, the undersigned faculty, lecturers, and graduate student assistants—all of whom teach at Berkeley and are…