NYU Steinhardt's Center for Practice and Research at the Intersection of Information, Society, and Methodology (PRIISM), the Department of Applied Statistics, Social Science, and Humanities, and the Department of Teaching and Learning are cosponsoring a hybrid event (in-person and online) organized by Robert Cohen, NYU Steinhardt professor of social studies education. 

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The cornerstone of the NYU Steinhardt commemoration will be held on Wednesday, October 30, at 6 p.m. ET at at Pless Hall (82 Washington Square East) and streaming live online. The event will feature five speakers who are key players in the past and present of free speech on college campuses:

• Bettina F. Aptheker, distinguished professor at UC Santa Cruz, who was a leader of the Free Speech Movement
• Waldo E. Martin, Alexander F. & May T. Morrison Professor of American History & Citizenship at UC Berkeley
• Carol T. Christ, former chancellor at UC Berkeley 
• Barbara Garson, American playwright, author, and social activist best known for the 1966 counterculture drama/political parody MacBird!
• Anne-Marie Garcia Jardine, University of Texas alum, speaking on the mass arrest of non-violent antiwar protesters at UT last semester

The event will also feature a performance of Garson’s first theatrical production: a puppet show, Mario and the Magician, that was inspired by a speech delivered by Mario Savio, the Free Speech Movement’s famed orator, for the protest’s first anniversary in 1965. Cohen is an expert on Savio and the Free Speech Movement, having written Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s and edited The Essential Mario Savio: Speeches and Writings that Changed America as well as The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s.

“Mario and the Magician is a sarcastic look at the UC administration’s evasions, fears of student free speech and civil disobedience, and the shell games UC’s president played with student protestors during negotiations that proved fruitless,” says Cohen. “It was originally performed with huge puppets from the San Francisco Mime Troupe; we’ll be using two young actors directed by Keith Huff, an adjunct faculty in Steinhardt’s Educational Theatre program.”