Steinhardt Marks 60th Anniversary of Free Speech Movement

NYU Steinhardt will host a range of events to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement—a semester-long student rebellion that erupted at the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall of 1964.

Robert Cohen, NYU Steinhardt professor of social studies education, will organize Free Speech Movement anniversary events at Steinhardt as well as several at UC Berkeley. Cohen is a senior fellow at the University of California’s National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement and a nationally recognized expert on student antiwar protests.

“Free speech is endangered on college campuses, and so my hope is that commemorating the Free Speech Movement’s historic victory for student rights in 1964 will remind not just NYU but all educators and students that universities should respect rather than repress the right of students and faculty to engage in protest activity,” says Cohen.

The cornerstone of the NYU Steinhardt commemoration will be held on Wednesday, October 30, at 6 p.m. ET at Bobst Library in the Chase North Reading Room 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.”

In addition to the October 30 event, Cohen will also run a session with current high school history teachers in New York City to help them learn how to teach about the Free Speech Movement. The workshop will use letters written by student protesters to Judge Rupert Crittenden in 1965 after they were arrested on UC Berkeley’s campus.

“Judge Crittenden asked these 700 students who were arrested and prosecuted for trespassing to explain why they joined the sit-in, expecting them to be apologetic,” says Cohen. “Instead, they defended their use of civil disobedience to battle non-violently for their free speech rights. I want to use some of those letters to show teachers—and their students—why such young people were willing to get arrested for what they believed in.”

Later in the Fall 2024 semester, Cohen will host a panel about the latest free speech controversy: the arrest of more than 3,000 non-violent students across the US who had encamped in college plazas and on campus lawns to dissent against the war in Gaza last semester.