This course explores the civil rights movement roots of Berkeley’s historic student
revolt, the reasons for the Free Speech Movement’s success in attracting student support and changing campus policy, its impact on the history of free speech, and on the rise of both the New Left and the Reaganite Right. This course ends with reflections on the state of free speech on campus in our own century when that freedom is often slighted, dismissed or weaponized by student groups on the left and right and the corporate groups that subsidize them, leaving us with
the question of whether the Free Speech Movement is still relevant to the campus scene today.