"The First Major Campus Revolt of the '60s"

"Like Savio's orations that fall at Berkeley, Reagan's address was an impassioned dissent against what he saw as a complacent, if not morally corrupt, status quo. Like Savio, Reagan attacked bureaucracy, elitism, and the loss of individual freedom. But while Savio's dissent stemmed from civil rights, Reagan's was based on what he saw as government intrusion on the free market."


Inspired by the fiftieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, Seth Rosenfeld in California looks at Mario Savio, Clark Kerr, and Ronald Reagan in the fall of 1964.

"Cut from the Top"

"This relationship between university and community poses a stark contrast to the UCOP in Oakland. As Kerr succinctly put it, 'The university-wide system has no alumni, no students, no faculty, no sports teams, no one to cheer for it.'
"Students, faculty and campus administrators know what the most pressing challenges are. And we are our own best advocates; we know who our students are and what our faculty can accomplish. We have loyal alumni who understand the value of excellent and accessible higher education."

David N. Myers in the Los Angeles Times calls for the downsizing of the University of California Office of the President.

But Peter Taylor objects.

Fiat Nox

"When Clark Kerr was installed as UC's president, he cited the 'immeasurable benefits' the university had derived from the 'long vision and the understanding of the legislators and officers of our state.' As that 'enlightened and friendly environment' has eroded in the decades since, so has the education of successive generations—and the prospects for California's future."

Seth Rosenfeld in the Los Angeles Times identifies Ronald Reagan's governorship as the beginning of the University of California's decline.

"The Best Account I’ve Read of How the FBI Corroded Due Process and Democracy"

"Here Reagan enters the multilayered narrative. The former movie star, who helmed TV’s General Electric Theater, begged the bureau to let him turn 'Communist Target—Youth' into a teleplay. Since the trial resulting from the FBI report had led to an embarrassing acquittal (the student who had supposedly started the riot by leaping a barricade and beating a policeman had been forty feet away when the incident occurred), Hoover shunted Reagan off. The one thing the FBI dreaded more than anything else was embarrassment, though it is typical of Reagan’s cast of mind that he would have been indifferent to such embarrassment. In Reaganland, there only were good guys and bad guys, and anyone who hunted Reds for a living was good. Which was why, long ago, T-10 had become one of the best informers the FBI ever had."

Rick Perlstein in Bookforum reviews Seth Rosenfeld's Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power.

"The Archangel of Student Revolt"

"Freedom's Orator leads us, then, into a historical paradox: the radicalism of the FSM--its disruption of campus decorum through sit-ins and the like, its assertion of students as citizens rather than charges of the university--rested on a liberal foundation that much of the FSM's rhetoric insistently undermined. From one perspective, the FSM was reanimating liberal ideals of participatory democracy--the freedoms of speech and association, exercised with consequence--that established liberals seemed to ignore in practice; it offered a true believer's liberalism. From another, it was joining with the Goldwater campaign to delegitimate postwar liberalism, rallying like the Goldwaterites against state-sponsored bureaucracy and helping to popularize the phrase 'well-meaning liberal' as a term of disrepute."

Scott Saul reviews Robert Cohen's Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s in The Nation.