When & Where to Speak

"The students are restless," says University of California President Clark Kerr and he would beyond a doubt include Mario Savio. Born in New York city, Savio glided through high school at the top of a class of 1,200, spent two years in local colleges shopping for majors, then moved with his Sicilian-'immigrant parents to California and entered the university at Berkeley Soon was "disenchanted." He "drifted" into the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ("Snick") and last summer joined a Freedom School in McComb, Miss., to teach Negroes poetry history, math and genetics--"a good subject to show how black and white people are the same."

Back at Cal in September, Savio found a cause to his taste when the university forbade on-campus collections for political ends, including Snick. He also found, in himself, an almost Latin American eloquence (he used to stutter), a sense of demagoguery, and a neat flair for martyrdom. Savio dropped his classes and to lead a self-styled Free Speech Movement aimed at battering down the university's limits on out-of-classroom expression. His gifts were nicely matched by the university's habit of vacillating between concessions and crackdowns. By early last week F.S.M. had won most of the freedom a student can use, including political activity and fund raising. The university authorities held out only for the right to add its own punishment to any that courts might take against students for off-campus political demonstrations. To this, angry F.S.M. leaders cried, "Double jeopardy!"

Grandstand Play. At this stage of the dispute, President Kerr assembled the university in its huge open-air Greek Theater to announce that the administration would stand firm. Most students applauded, but to Savio, Kerr's position was "totally inacceptable," and the university was set up for a perfect grandstand play.

Suddenly Savio appeared from nowhere to grab the microphone. Before 13,000 astonished spectators, a campus policeman then grabbed Savio around the throat while another twisted his arm in a hammer lock. They dragged him away fighting, while a reporter thoughtfully held a microphone to his face. Minutes later, Savio was freed and when F.S.M. partisans yelled "We want Mario," he naturally had to be allowed to make his speech. It was really no speech at all, just a masterfully brief and low-keyed announcement of an F.S.M. rally.

Unnerved, the administration passed the hot potato to the faculty. Next day the Academic Senate, composed of all professors and deans, proposed a capitulation to F.S.M. on the double-jeopardy issue, and a policy that "the content of on-campus speech or advocacy should not be restricted by the university. Off-campus student political activity shall not be subject to university regulation" "This is the best birthday present I ever had," chortled Savio, who had just turned 22 and he acknowledged that if the cops had not dragged him away from the mike, "we would have been dead."

This settlement cannot be effective until approved by the university's board of regents; the only clue to their probable attitude is Chairman Edward Carters concerned reference to "extraordinary problems created by recent incidents." But to turn it down now means risking more than further protest from Savio and F.S.M.: the Berkeley faculty which voted 824 to 115 for its proposed solution, cannot lightly be overridden. Moreover, the proposal is not out of line with practice at other U.S. universities which have come a long way greater freedom of expression since day in 1952 when Senator Robert Taft had to stand outside the gates at the University of Illinois to speak to students.

A Spectrum of Freedom. By and large, restrictions are the mark of small, church-affiliated colleges colleges intent on serving in loco parentis, while freedom for students defined roughly as the the rights and curbs of ordinary civil law, is the goal at big, old, and scholastically high-ranking state and private universities.

At Harvard, students choose speakers freely and collect funds on school property for political causes. To avoid excesses, the university relies on a strong tradition that an undergraduate will "conduct himself in a way becoming to a Harvard student," says Dean of Students Robert Watson. Other Ivy League schools have similar attitudes. "If a student gets arrested, that's his problem."says Cornell Dean of Students Stanley W. Davis. Columbia's President Grayson Kirk has the right of veto over campus speakers but never uses it; last year students there chartered a Sexual Freedom Forum.

Yale was deeply embarrassed a year ago when Kingman Brewster, then acting president, persuaded students to cancel a speaking invitation to Alabama's Governor George Wallace; and now "the administration suffers in agonizing silence rather than tamper with free speech and action" says Yale Daily News Chairman Alexander Sharp. When Princeton undergraduates invited Alger Hiss to the campus in 1956, prompting hundreds of irate letters from alumni, then-President Harold Willis Dodds refused to intervene. "We have sought to resolve this problem not in terms of academic freedom, but in the deeper terms of human freedom," he said. "To learn the personal significance of fire, the child must burn himself."

Occasionally a tolerant school will use persuasion to prevent a scorching. During the Cuban missile crisis two years ago, Brandeis University urged students to behave with "good taste" and cancel an invitation to Communist Party Chairman Gus Hall.

Lifting the Lid. Big state universities, under the eyes of legislatures, are often a bit more cautious. The University of Colorado this fall at first prevented a student group from selling the fiercely anti-Lyndon Johnson A Texan Looks at L.B.J., then granted permission after thinking it over. Indiana University refused to discipline three members of the Young Socialist Alliance whose indictments under the state antisubversive law for campus speechmaking, quashed by lower courts, have been appealed by the state to the Indiana Supreme Court. Wayne State lifted a ban against Communist speakers on campus, then retreated and barred two who had been cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions put by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The same pair addressed 300 students at the University of Michigan without incident. "The tighter you put the lid on," says John Gustad, provost of New College, Fla., "the bigger the explosion is likely to be."

Berkeley students have blown off the lid. It now remains for them to follow the traditions of schools that have long allowed a wide range of undergraduate freedom. Mainly, such traditions consist of written and unwritten curbs that preserve the good name of the university, fix orderly procedures (booking halls for speakers, for example), and most important, do not obstruct the basic purpose of the university--providing an education.

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