December 2, 1964: The Occupation of Sproul Hall and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement

Sixty years ago today, on December 2, 1964, students on the Berkeley campus of the University of California took over Sproul Hall, the university’s main administrative building. This launched a campus-wide movement that forced the university administration, its board of regents, and the governor to give in to their demands to respect their rights to free speech and political activity, both on and off campus. The few months surrounding this day are often considered the beginning of the student free speech movement nationwide and served as a model for generations of student activists moving forward. In light of recent student activism on campuses throughout the United States and the world, it is worthwhile to revisit the Berkeley free speech movement, both for inspiration and to understand how the movement achieved some level of success when it did.

The Conflicts

The conflict between large segments of the student body and the administration at the university began as university administrators attempted to limit numerous forms of political activity by the student body. Skirmishes over free speech and student political activity had actually begun a few years earlier, in 1960. But new regulations issued in September of 1964 included the prohibition on student organizations participating in “off-campus” issues and the disenfranchisement of graduate students from the larger campus student association.  The regulations prohibited campus meetings about a fair housing ordinance in Berkeley and banned Malcolm X from speaking on campus.  Finally, in mid-September, tabling and other political activity was banned on the streets next to the university, where traditionally it had been allowed. The obvious intent of these and other regulations was to stifle supposedly “controversial” political activity. This sparked students to resist.

On September 17, 20 campus organizations brought together more than 200 students in a picket at Sproul Hall. On September 23 more than 300 students picketed the building, with dozens staying overnight and into the morning. On September 28 more than 1,000 students picketed and set up tables at Sather Gate in a direct challenge to the new restrictions. When a handful of students were threatened with suspensions, hundreds said that they too were guilty of violating campus rules and demanded the same punishment. When students met with administrators to try to defend their classmates and reach a compromise agreement with the administration, they were told that the rules were “not negotiable.”

Some of the students, like Mario Savio, had become politicized by their experiences as student organizers in the Civil Rights Movement in the South, and were beginning to connect their lack of rights on campus with the other obvious injustices in the larger society. Many others were simply open-minded, concerned students who felt they had the right to speak and the right to conduct political activity both on campus and off. Many also began to develop their critique of the university as an institution, and began to place it in its role in the larger capitalist political economy. The university, they began to realize, was like a factory producing a product, and the students were the product. They were being produced to meet the needs of the corporations that needed certain highly skilled workers to manage their businesses and help them produce profits. The Board of Regents, which managed the entire state university system, was made up of leaders of many of the nation’s largest corporations: Bank of America, Lockheed Aircraft, Hearst Publications, Signal Oil and Gas, Northrop Corporation, and others. Was it any wonder student needs and voices took a back seat to corporate interests when setting the priorities of the universities?

As they saw the limitations that the administration put in their way and were met with a wall of resistance to even moderate demands, they deepened these critiques and became radicalized and more willing to stand up and fight back.

On October 1, after more student organizations had begun tabling outside Sather Gate and then in front of Sproul Hall in direct violation of the new policies, one former student began a speech, and was arrested a few minutes later. As police put him in a patrol car, hundreds of students sat down around the car and wouldn’t allow it to leave. Students began climbing atop the police car to speak, and more went into Sproul Hall to begin a sit-in that forced a series of negotiations with the administration. There were at least 1,000 students surrounding the car, although one participant estimated the number at closer to 3,000. Again, their requests were met with the response that the rules were “not negotiable.” 

There was, or course, a reaction. Later that evening, a group of a few hundred fraternity boys surrounded them. They yelled insults, calling the seated protesters Jews and communists, and threw things at them and the speakers while making it impossible for speakers to be heard. Although the protesters stood up to them, it was only after the intervention of a campus priest that they finally went away, and the protest continued. The administration and the Governor also red-baited the student protesters, and mobilized large numbers of police from surrounding municipalities to prepare for action on the campus. They also relied on a handful of well-known but conservative professors to try to get the students to further moderate their already moderate demands.

The students had formed what they called a united front of clubs, and issued a set of demands that included reinstatement of suspended students and the dropping of charges against the arrested student, restoration of freedom of speech, and the right to all political activity that didn’t interfere with the normal functioning of the university. These groups also began to refer to themselves as the Free Speech Movement, or FSM.

On October 2, the United Front, or FSM, agreed to a pact with the administration, and the outside police were temporarily withdrawn while the pact would be put into effect. But the administration had no intention of living up to the pact, or of allowing students the rights they demanded. A few days later, Clark Kerr, Berkeley’s chancellor, was quoted in two newspapers as saying that the students were followers of Castro and Mao. A few days after that, he openly told reporters that “up to 40% of the hard-core participants” were from off campus, and that they were “very experienced and professional people…tied in with organizations having Communist influences.”

After one month of being stonewalled on campus and publicly slandered by university and government officials, the students turned again to direct action. There was more tabling, more speeches, and more negotiations. FSM meetings discussed what to do, a sit-in in Sproul Hall was discussed and planned, then aborted. Students openly told administration what they were doing, their names were taken down, then more students did the same, all demanding the same punishments.

Then, after weeks of these tensions and simmering confrontations, over Thanksgiving weekend Mario Savio and three other students, plus a number of clubs, got letters stating that they were up for expulsion and might be banned from operation on campus. In the first days back from break, FSM members still tried to negotiate with the administration to have the threats of expulsion taken back. Despite the clear attempts by the administration to shut down student protests, and despite the clear dishonesty of the administration in how they manipulated and used the negotiations, the students still tried to avoid escalation. When it was clear that the administration would not give in, students again swung into action. The graduate students prepared for a strike to begin on December 4, and the FSM voted for a sit-in at Sproul Hall.

The Sproul Hall Occupation and the Strike

On December 2, a mass rally of about 6,000 took place on Sproul Plaza, where singer and activist Joan Baez sang and Mario Savio gave a now famous speech:

We have an autocracy that runs this university. It’s managed. We were told the following: ‘If President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents…why didn’t he make some public statement to that effect?’ And the answer we received from a well-meaning liberal was the following…”Would you even imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition the his Board of Directors?’…

I beg you to consider: if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then…the faculty are a bunch of employees and we’re the raw material. But we’re a bunch of raw material that don’t mean…to be made into any product, don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the university…We’re human beings.

And that brings me to the second mode of civil disobedience. 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 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. 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. 

Minutes later, after Baez sang Blowin’ in the Wind, the mass of students turned towards Sproul Hall and slowly marched in, singing We Shall Overcome, which by then had become the most used song by activists in the Black liberation struggles. More than 1,000 had taken over the building, and for two days they peacefully maintained their occupation, with songs, political-education classes, Spanish classes, and the entire fourth floor dedicated as a quiet space for studying.

But then the Governor, Edmund “Pat” Brown, under pressure from the big newspapers of the Bay Area (all owned, of course, by the big capitalists of California), ordered a combination of city police, county sheriffs, and state highway patrolmen to arrest the protesters and take back the building.

During nearly twelve hours in which police slowly arrested the nearly 800 students occupying the hall, the planned general strike of students on campus began, with picket lines at strategic locations to block deliveries and routine campus maintenance, custodial and construction work. Students organized pickets, made literature, instructed pickets on goals and behavior, and generally outmaneuvered both administration and police raids. A majority of students stopped attending classes. Approximately three-quarters of the graduate students who were teaching assistants struck, bringing the majority of teaching to a halt. The professors’ union (American Association of University Professors, or AAUP) issued a strong statement of support for the students, and many canceled their classes. Even some local unions working on campus halted their work.

Over the coming week, Mario Savio was forcibly arrested in front of thousands while trying to speak. FSM candidates ran a slate and took over the majority on the student senate. And finally the Academic Senate, the decision-making body of the faculty on campus, voted 824 to 115 to approve resolutions demanding amnesty for the student protesters, an end to the regulation of the content of speech on campus by administration, an end to attempts to regulate student off-campus political activities, and that moving forward the Academic Senate shall set disciplinary policies, not the administration.

The university administration realized that while they could stop the sit-ins through mass arrests, the strike could actually stop the university from functioning. To stop it, said the conservative Oakland Tribune, “demanded nothing less than a back down by the administration of the largest campus of the largest state university in the country.” This is what happened, as the administration grudgingly agreed to the resolutions of the Academic Senate.

As the Fall semester ended and the Spring semester began, a sense of solidarity, both felt and concrete, permeated the student body and the campus. The graduate students had demonstrated both militancy and leadership, and became a driving force in campus politics, including in the formation of a new union for teaching assistants’ readers, and others.  A loose grouping of professors known as “the 200” remained in force as defenders of both student and faculty rights on campus. Even the faculty-library local, with previously only a few dozen members, tripled their membership and became more active and militant during the strike. The FSM as an organization slowly and consciously phased itself out, as it had only been created as a temporary coalition for the defense of students and their free speech and political rights.

Lessons for Today

The first major lesson of the movement was that the university is, at the end of the day, there to serve the capitalists and their government. As in 1964, when students could look at the California Board of Regents and see the corporate power that dominated it, today we can see the influence of capitalist power over universities. Whether billionaires Ken Griffin and Bill Ackman push out the President of Harvard after accusing the university of anti-semitism, or billionaires Daniel Lubetzky and Daniel Loeb privately urge New York City Mayor Eric Adams to use police to end protests at Columbia, or in dozens of other, more subtle ways, the capitalist class exercises enormous influence over all levels of education. Their administrators, if they want to keep their jobs, will generally do what they are told, even if that means hurting the students who they are supposed to protect. They and political leaders will outright fabricate stories that the students are being led astray by outside, professional, hardened agitators, usually in some way associated with socialism or communism. Even as tens of thousands are slaughtered in front of our very eyes, truth is not a consideration. The stability of the system is.

Another major lesson to take away is that while students were disillusioned by many aspects of the corporate university system in which they were schooled, that was not the only reason for their militancy. Their discontent with their treatment on campus was also an extension of and conditioned by their disgust with conditions outside of the campus, most particularly in their revulsion at the oppression of the Black population, and by their participation in the Black liberation movement underway throughout the nation. Larger social conflicts began to shape students’ understanding of their own conditions, and they began to take action accordingly. Similarly, in the past year, students at colleges and universities have been horrified by the genocide and expanding Israeli aggression in and surrounding Palestine. They have recognized that they have an obligation to defend the people of Palestine, and began to take action last year to try to end or at least limit the conflict. Universities, as much as their administrators would often like them to be, are not islands. They are part of their larger society, as are their students, and will be influenced by it consistently. 

A final major lesson of the movement at Berkeley was that people are capable of coming together, organizing together, and taking action together, collectively. As the conflict developed, students of varying perspectives came together, met, debated, and organized around key issues and demands. They organized themselves, without outside interference or guidance, and were flexible in doing so, adapting to the changing circumstances and actions by the administration. They also used their mass power, in collective acts of disobedience, solidarity, and finally a general campus strike, to continue to build their power and to eventually turn the tide against the administration and its powerful allies. It was collective organization and collective action that gave the movement its strength and enabled it to defend itself and eventually win its demands.

Although the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley faded in the spring of 1964, and the massive campus upsurge that it represented died down at the end of the school year, the events on the Berkeley campus became part of a much larger, nationwide student movement that began to combine with other large social movements of the time: the women’s movement, the movement to protect the environment, the Black liberation movement, and of the course the massive upsurge against the war in Vietnam.

Today, December 2, we remember the conscious and committed actions of the thousands of students at the University of California-Berkeley who organized and fought for the right to free speech and political activity in the university setting. Their actions in 1964 presented us with a model that we can use to continue the struggles that they started. If we commit to struggling against the systems that continue to dominate us today, and if we use the lessons that the students of 1964 passed on to us, we can go much further than they were able to.